19th Level

Yesterday, the day after Thanksgiving I took my youngest daughter, Jasmine, to see "Frozen" in the movie theater. This was actually her second viewing, also seeing it on Wednesday with her mom and older sister (poor dad was working from home). Obviously Jasmine was a fan. Immediately after seeing it with me she asked "Can I see it again?" So it's got the little one's endorsement. What about dad's? I liked it a lot. I'm a fan of well-done animation and this is one of Disney's greatest, ranking up there with "The Lion King" and "Beauty and the Beast" - indeed I'd view it as superior as many of the Pixar efforts. The story is set in one of those fairy tale kingdoms in that nebulous pre-modern fairy tale period. It is a tale of two sisters, the eldest, Elsa (voiced by Idina Menzel) and Anna (Kristen Bell). They are princesses in the kingdom. They are very close but Elsa has a power - the ability to control tempera...

It's pretty clear that this is an out of the ordinary post for this blog. I talk about all sorts of geeky stuff on this blog - Dungeons & Dragons, Stephen King, Call of Cthulhu, etc. This post is a lot more personal. I've a hunch the audience for this posting is very different from the normal audience for my blog - but this is my corner of the internet and this is far too long a posting for Twitter or Facebook. It also explains why I've not been particularly active on this blog of late. When I first began this blog my wife was dealing with partial employment, working as a long-term sub when possible. In fall of 2012 she secured a full time job at Spirit of Knowledge Charter School in Worcester, MA and began her second year there this fall. [Note - this the remainder of this blog posting represents my understanding of a situation. If I have any factual errors I will most certainly acknowledge them and correct them. i.e. no slander or libel is present here. And wh...

I've had a little time to brainstorm a little as we've skipped a session of our ACKS campaign with the start of the school year and the beginning of organized insanity as the kids and my wife go back to school. One thing I've discovered in our ACKS campaign is how over time a non-plotted campaign begins to write itself. Right now our band of adventurers has two dungeons it has visited (and may return to either) as well as a third dungeon they are aware of. They've also developed two bases, one an outpost near the dungeons and the other the capital city of the region with better access to equipment, healers, and the like. Having put things in motion I can honestly say I really don't know where the adventurers will go in our next session. Will they finish cleaning out the kobold lair - with its rumored green dragon? Will they return to the dungeon beneath Skull Hill? Or will they venture to the Tomb of the Goblin King - now having a few magic items and possibly h...

Here we are, Born to be kings, We're the princes of the universe, Here we belong, Fighting to survive, In a world with the darkest powers, "Princes of the Universe" from the Queen album A Kind of Magic Initially I was going to write about the 1986 film Highlander , for which A Kind of Magic is essentially the soundtrack. But my thoughts kept focusing on the music and thus, here we are. One of my musical regrets is I never got to see Queen live in concert. I have some memories of seeing them perform on television from the 1985 Live Aid concert with my uncle. But my young musical tastes at the time shifted to more trendy/pop music, something that shifted when I started college in 1989. The early 1990s had me discovering Queen for myself, sadly months prior to Freddie Mercury's death. Anyways.... A Kind of Magic is an album that just screams fantasy. Epic, ass-kicking fantasy with tracks like "Princes of the Universe" and "Gimme the Prize...

FATE is one of those games in my collection that I really, really want to play some day but haven't had the chance to. FATE is the game engine that powers games like  Spirit of the Century ,  The Dresden Files,  and  Diaspora . Relics like me remember the original FUDGE RPG from the 1990s from which FATE spun off of. Mechanically, FATE isn't too complicated - there is an Accelerated Edition of it which is a rather tiny book. The idea is you role 4DF (FUGE/FATE dice). These are six side dice with 2 pluses, 2 minuses, and 2 blank sides, You add the total together (-4 to 4), add your appropriate skill and other modifiers, and compare to a difficulty number. The other modifiers I mentioned above is where FATE gets interesting. FATE uses a mechanic known as "aspects". Anything can have an aspect - a location, a person, a PC, a scene, a city. They are basically an interesting description that can drive the action. "Last son of Krypton" would make fo...

One thing I've liked about Sine Nomine Publishing is they take the adage that old school RPGs should be all about the "sandbox" (i.e. players go wherever they'd like on the map with no predefined plot) and make games and supplements that actually help you do that. As I've built up a modest collection of 1970s and early 80s RPG products I have seen there were a ton of products designed to help GMs do just that. System-wide,  Stars Without Number  is pretty similar to early D&D incarnations. It has three classes - Expert, Psychic, and Warrior. It has a simple, yet effective, skill system of which, not surprisingly, the Expert is the best at. Where it really shines is a default setting which is really made for adventure. The idea is there were two waves of human expansion. The first of which made use of spike drives which allowed faster than light travel in bursts - basically you had to start it from the edge of a solar system and had to turn it off at...

This is a game I preordered but didn't really look at much as I received the preliminary materials. It's a bit of a hybrid of D&D 3.x and 4th editions as well as taking a lot of elements from more narrative based games. 13th Age  takes a nod from 4e D&D by giving each class its own set of neat powers but it avoids 4e's tendency to make everything balance out perfectly. It also makes the classes more distinctive from one another, evoking much of their feel from 3.x D&D. While it has a nice set of customization options for your characters it avoids the tendency of D&D 3.x to punish those who do not have every detail of their character planned and avoids the need to hyper-optimize your character. It also avoids the dreaded "grind" I experienced when I played 4e, as the game has an "escalation die" which gives bonuses to characters as combats last longer. It also has a number of mechanical tweaks to allow failures to be interes...