The second day of my Pathfinder course had a couple of hiccups due to some poor coordination that left the kids half an hour late, meaning that both of my hour-long sessions became 45-minute sessions. Despite the delay, the two groups began to show their separate personalities on day two. Group One was much more violent and more prone to infighting, while Group Two ran like a well-oiled machine.
Continue reading “Pathfinder Fantasy Adventures: Day Two”
Ten years ago this summer, I got to teach a class of middle-schoolers. In my first such endeavor, I thankfully have an experienced teacher, as my wife Sarah helped me out. It also helped that the subject was something I was familiar with: role-playing games. Specifically, Pathfinder.
Continue reading “Pathfinder Fantasy Adventures: Day One”
Abraham Lincoln is one of the greatest presidents in the history of the United States. Without him, the country would likely have split in two during the American Civil War. Also, he was a heck of a wrestler.
Lincoln is, actually and factually, a member of the National Wrestling Hall of Fame, albeit inducted very posthumously in 1992. Now, it’s worth noting that there are very few records of Lincoln’s wrestling “career” and that the catch fighting that the 16th President engaged in doesn’t bear much resemblance to the modern sport. But at 6’4″ in an era when the average American height was 5’7″ and strengthened by a great deal of physical labor in his youth, he had a notable advantage over almost any opponent he faced.
So let’s take a look at the career of Abe Lincoln, frontier wrestler.
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Well, that was certainly unexpected.
Last fall, my players greased up a rowboat and sent it hurtling down a waterslide of doom. They wound up in an entirely different world that used a version of the classic AD&D module Dungeonland, tweaked to fit with Pathfinder 2nd edition. And, well…they found a way out of Dungeonland. And now they have a bigger boat.
Continue reading “Gaming Stories: Pirates of the Astral Sea”
Over the course of several years, I ran Night Below: An Underdark Campaign in a multi-year game that spanned the gap between Dungeons & Dragons 3rd edition and Pathfinder 1st edition. As we entered the endgame, the PCs learned that a group of aboleths had been kidnapping spellcasters in a bid to power a mighty structure that will extend their natural psychic domination abilities across the globe, effectively taking over the world.
Continue reading “Gaming Stories: A Contract with Mind Flayers”
Should I be concerned that my favorite holiday movies all involve somebody stealing Christmas?
Based on a poem Tim Burton wrote while with Disney, The Nightmare Before Christmas acts as a twofer holiday film, providing viewing pleasure for both Halloween and Christmas. It features an amazing score by Danny Elfman and is probably the film that best showcases Burton’s visual style despite being directed by Henry Selick. (By all reports, Burton actually had little to do with the film aside from providing some sketches and the original poem; Selick essentially did an impression of Burton’s style and did it better than Burton ever did in his own films.)
Overall, the movie is charming, creative, and the right combination of macabre and heartwarming. Let’s see what sort of nitpicks I can toss at it from the peanut gallery.
Continue reading “Nitpicking Movies: The Nightmare Before Christmas”
Recurring villains are one of those storytelling elements that just seems next to impossible to translate into a role-playing game. A villain needs to make the players want to hate him, but he also needs to survive contact with the group. It’s easy to do one, but not both; if the players really hate a villain, they’ll often go all out to defeat him, plot be damned. There are only a handful of ways to keep a villain in live in that case: keep him behind a glass wall, illusory projection, or similar device to bestow plot armor, make him powerful enough to take the whole group on and win (in which case you run the risk of the players not knowing when to retreat), or use cheap GM fiat tricks to guarantee his survival…in which case you’re taking the “game” out of “role-playing game.”
I’ve been on both sides of the table on the matter. As a GM, I’ve watched guys I expected to be major villains gunned down, stabbed, or tossed out of windows. As a player, I’ve gone on murderous rampages to take down bad guys, sometimes sacrificing my own characters and sometimes ignoring the positive aspects of a villain’s personality because of my seething hatred of them. (In particular, my friend Nick once ran a game with a very good samurai villain who was not actually a bad guy but rather honor-bound into serving the big villain. He eventually tried joining the group, but I was so sick of getting my ass kicked by him at that point that I was quite hostile in the role-playing interaction, much to the detriment of the game.)
I’ve played RPGs for about twenty years, but I’ve only had a handful of really good villains. One of them is a decade old now and still going strong, much to my delight and the anguish of the players. Hailing from various Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder games, his name is Derrezen, but he is best known in my games as the Red Mage. This is a look at how he got introduced, what worked for him and what didn’t on his rise to villainy, and why he became a character my players loved to hate.
Continue reading “Gaming Stories: Rise and Fall of the Red Mage”
My favorite Christmas movie, without question, is How the Grinch Stole Christmas! The creative team, which included the likes of Chuck Jones, Boris Karloff, and Thurl Ravenscroft, put together an adventure with a gleefully evil villain but still managed to make it one of the most touching Christmas films ever conceived. So, naturally, I’m going to spend some time here picking it apart.
Continue reading “Nitpicking Movies: How the Grinch Stole Christmas!”
The Incredible Hulk is far and away my favorite comic book character. In fact, I’ve posed the argument before that he is one of the greatest literary characters of all time. I could delve into the many reasons that he is compelling not only as a superhero but as a creature of horror and a modern allegory. But, no matter what sort of merits I think the character has, the fact is that I only discovered most of them after I became a fan. So what got me hooked on the Hulk in the first place?
Well, truth be told, it was mostly because he was in the right place at the right time.
Continue reading “Why is the Hulk my Favorite Character?”
The beauty of role-playing games lies in the stupidity of the PCs. Sometimes they will act with tactical precision and annihilate their foes, but often they will come up with the most ridiculous harebrained schemes imaginable. Those moments of glorious foolishness are where RPGs shine the brightest. Such was the case when the players in my Pathfinder game created the SS Stupid and set it off on its maiden voyage.
Continue reading “Gaming Stories: Ride of the SS Stupid”
Babbling Brooks 