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Each year, when my high school gaming buddies and I get together for an uninterrupted week of gaming, we always like to schedule in a game of Tour of Darkness.  It has become tradition since the game came into our possession back in 2008. My personal DM, Mark Timm, is a huge fan of war, pretty much any war, but certainly Vietnam holds a special place in his heart.  And, since he’s also an evil DM, and loves Cthulhu, so setting a horror campaign actually IN Vietnam was too much for him to resist. I finally managed to pick up...

When you go back this far, back to September 1982, it is nearly impossible as a lifelong gamer not to review the entire magazine and just stick to the artwork.  In this case, I’m going to have to give some more detail on the issue, because it is absolutely too good to pass up. It begins with an incredible article tag on the front cover called ‘Fantasy Football’!  I kid you not, 1982 and someone at TSR had trademarked the name before it spilled from the lips of every beer swilling NFL fan or bored office staffer in America.  But...

Back in 1975, Gary Gygax’s partner at Tactical Studies Rules was the notorious Brian ‘Buckshot’ Blume, a twenty-five year old gamer who had helped Gygax fund TSR with his father’s money.  Many are the twisted tales of the ‘Brother’s Blume’, Lorraiene Williams, and the fall of TSR, but well before any of that took place, Brian Blume designed a great little boxed set known as Boot Hill. This western inspired game wasn’t exactly an RPG, not in the sense of Dungeons & Dragons, but it did carry over some man-to-man scale warfare in the old west and could be adapted...

I started playing Robotech in 1986/87 and it has been a game that helped define what it was for me to create worlds as a gamemaster.  Typically, science fiction doesn’t hold the draw for role-players like fantasy settings, and I firmly believe that is because of two key components that are absent in science fiction, those being dungeons and treasure hordes. Robotech is no different, it simply being about giant robots fighting alien invaders, but there was something about the game that resonated with both myself and my DM Mark Timm.  Mark and I became infatuated with the game, and...