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Games Related Articles

The End of my Tabletop Era - Today, I boxed up all my RPGs. They're still in plain sight, they're still loved and memories cherished, but the boxing, for me, means the end of my involvement with tabletop gaming. This has literally been a long-time coming: when I first started Gamegrene back in 2000, my orbit was already slowly decaying, and I hoped that dedicating a site to my love would keep things going. read more...

An Interview with Jay Little - Why a 3rd edition to WFRP? Why now? "Based on recent trends in the roleplaying market and numerous discussions between Games Workshop and Fantasy Flight Games, we determined the time was right to develop and introduce a new edition, attracting more fans to the Warhammer Fantasy setting made popular by Game Workshop's tabletop miniatures game." Read all about it in this interview with Jay Little, lead designer on Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd Edi...

WOTC Annual Layoff Extravaganza - No surprise to anyone by now: Wizards of the Coast has started another round of Christmas layoffs. This year, so far, Rob Heinsoo (D&D 4e Lead Designer), Logan Bonner (Adventurer's Vault), Chris Sims (4e Monster Manual and Dungeon Master's Guide) and Stephen Radney-McFarland have been cut. read more...

How Do You Like Your Games Served? - For those of you who are gamers, you realize that there are some groups you prefer gaming with and some you don't. The same is true for MMORPG's (or any large, persistent world) - we find a group with similar goals to hang out with (or adventure with or whatever). And the same is also true of gaming groups whose focus is board games. read more...

A Penny For My Thoughts: An Interview with Paul Tevis - Two women and a man, all dressed in white jumpsuits, sit around a table with a bowl of pennies in its center. Each of them has a small stack of pennies and a printed form. In front of the older woman sits a scrap of paper with the words "a taffy stretching machine" written on it. " and my father looked down at me and said, 'If you don't want to ride the roller coaster, you don't have to. You can wait here in the candy shop while your brother and...

2009 ENnie Award Nominees Announced - The nominees for the 2009 ENnie Awards were announced today; HELLAS: Worlds of Sun & Stone (my game) was nominated twice. Voting begins on July 24 and runs through August 1. Winners will be announced at the 9th Annual ENnie Awards at GenCon on Friday, August 14. Be sure to vote for your favorites! read more...

Evil GM Trick #28: Sure You Can Have That +12 Hackmaster - If there's one immutable law all GMs know, it?s that players love loot. Wizards love that uber wand of disintegration. Fighters want the +12 hackmaster. Street samurai want that move by wire 4. How do you give them what they want without losing game balance? Simple. Present it like an Evil GM. read more...

Vox: Synchronicity, Too - On June 24, 2009 in Columbus, OH, aethereal FORGE will present the official release of the Vox RPG. This is an admittedly small affair in the grander scheme of things, but for me it represents the culmination of nearly three years of effort. Whether or not you are ultimately interested in Vox itself, the process by which Vox was created is -- at least in my opinion -- an interesting one, and filled with interesting coincidences and synchronicitie...

Asymmetry in Roleplay - Part 3 - Encounters - Recent versions of D&D have sought to promote the idea that parties of characters should be presented with a formulaic series of encounters with challenge ratings that are balanced according to their level, plus or minus a little. Here I would like to discuss the value of asymmetric encounters, in which the party are faced with a challenge that is trivially easy for them, or else so difficult they have little or no hope of success. read more...

Violence - Violence and the media are so often seen together they have almost come to be taken as being (and it can be argued have often become) the same thing. And why not? The great majority of the stories we love are violent, sometimes in a cinematic, swashbuckling fashion, and sometimes in a dramatic, traumatic bloodbath. In this article I will be looking at violence in fiction, in art, with a particular focus on violence in roleplaying, but still an...