News — Jim Holloway

First things first, if any of my readers missed my 'Top 10 RPG Artists of the Past 40 Years' over on Black Gate, please have a look here and tell me what you think!  Now, on to this outstanding boxed set. Kata-Tur is certainly an interesting concept, let’s add a bit of non-Euro flavor to the world, and one that came into practice several times with the Forgotten Realms setting. The creation of ‘other lands’ beyond Greenwood’s initial setting can certainly do no harm and gives DMs a great ‘aside’ if they so choose. And for Kara-Tur itself, it was...

Everyone has a ‘First Dragon’, and for me it was Dragon #88. Sure, I didn’t actually own it, as it was in the possession of a boy I didn’t get along with overly well, but he did sit across from me in art class and laid this issue on his desk one afternoon in middle-school. I was both amazed and intrigued by it, and when I actually got to flip through the pages I was blow away by the artwork I found [because of course at this time I had no idea how to actually play D&D] For that reason,...

Today I’m going to take a look at the artwork from TSR’s X2: Castle Amber (Chateau d’Amberville). Now I’ve only played this module once, back in probably 1987 in my little room upstairs at my mom’s house with my old DM Mark and his neighbors Aaron and Jay. Truly, I don’t remember too much about the adventure save that it was one of the first ones where I ever ran one of my most powerful characters of all time, the eventual Hierophant of Cabal, Belmarillian the Watcher.There is a room [spoilers follow] in which characters are beset by mysterious dreams,...

Today I’m taking a look at the 2006 Pied Piper Publishing OD&D module CAS1: Cairn of the Skeleton King.  Now you all know that I love me some OSR goodness, and having Robert J. Kuntz putting out anything dealing with adventures that reflect the crunchy goodness of the early 1980s is too good to be true.  CAS1 truly delivers on all fronts, and as a perfect module for middling characters [4-7] it is high up on my list of great things in the genre. The module contains two challenging scenarios that deal with a rising threat of the undead, and...

I have a love of Gamma World that can be traced back to my Cold War infatuation with nuclear oblivion, so make no mistake that I take a good deal of pride in my collection of post-apocalyptic RPGs, as well as my own creations Future Warrior and my After the Apocalypse card game.That said, I’d have to admit that my favorite edition of Gamma World would be the 3rd Edition, and today I’m going to talk a bit about Kim Eastland’s Alpha Factor.Written in 1986, this module is 38 pages of introductory procedure that sets new characters in the Gamma...