News

In September 2007 Wizards of the Coast pulled the license for both Dragon and Dungeon magazines from Paizo.  This could have been the death knell for the small company, but instead, WotC ended up creating its biggest rival in the RPG industry as Paizo refocused on the D&D 3.5 audience and created its highly successful Pathfinder brand from the ashes of its Dungeon ‘Adventure Path’ line. Still, gamers themselves might have gained a new RPG, but the end of both long-running print magazines still resonates in the market as nothing has been able to come close to taking their place....

Today I’m going to take a look at the Triple Ace Games production of the Hellfrost Player’s Guide.  Released in 2009 for the Savage Worlds setting, this core book comes in at 128 pages, in hardcover, and was written by Paul ‘Wiggy’ Wade-Williams & Snowy [who I assume is his cat]. Now for any of you who read my blog regularly, you know that I’m a huge fan of Savage Worlds.  To me, it is probably the most Gamemaster friendly mechanic I’ve ever experienced, and as my time is more limited the older I get, running in such a setting...

I’m sure several thousand words have been written concerning the D&D Expert Set module X1: The Isle of Dread.  Certainly it’s one of the two most popular adventures ever published simply because of its inclusion in the D&D Expert Boxed Set [much like Keep on the Borderlands for Basic], so I’m sure I don’t have to go into great detail concerning it. Simply put, it was written by David Cook and Tom Moldvay back in 1981 and takes a group of adventures over the waves of the Sea of Dread to a lost island setting adventure.  It’s a classic, but...

Two weeks ago I was fortunate enough to lay hands on a copy of Paizo’s tribute to one of my good friends in the compilation book Visions of WAR: The Art of Wayne Reynolds. Now this art book means something special to me for a couple of reasons, the first of which is that Wayne and I discussed doing his art book together before Paizo came in and offered [which I was thrilled about] and the second is that a piece I commissioned from Wayne for my Art Evolution Project made it into the book. As I opened this impressive...

In 1989 FASA’s Shadowrun was born, and with it, the genre of RP cyberpunk [it beat Gurps ‘Cyberpunk’ to the press by a year for all you haters]. This was a whole new world to explore and FASA turned to the up and coming talent of Jeff Laubenstein to bring it to market. Jeff was a genius of crafting with watercolor. His early works in the mid-1980s on the Battletech line of tabletop and RPG supplements helped enrich that war-torn universe of the inner sphere, but it wasn’t until we saw his concepts of a darker future that we truly...