Christian's RPG Shelf

I have been looking forward to the upcoming D&D World of Warcraft since it was first announced at GenCon. Its November 17th release is approaching but for anyone wanting an early glimpse, D&D Beyond has a free play-pack available to unlock featuring two encounters set in Dire Maul, a quick play map, and stat block for three monsters. Your party has been hired to rescue an adventurer trapped in the Maul. Can your party push through the night elves' ruined dungeon, past nests of fel imps and a coliseum full of bloodthirsty satyr, and bring her home alive? Inspired by episodes 1 and 2 of  Dungeon Masters: D&D: World of Warcraft , these encounters will give your party a first look at the epic dungeon crawls waiting in D&D: World of Warcraft! Sounds good to me. Claim the WoW play-along pack here .

I play D&D with my friends about once a month. We have been maintaining this schedule for a decade and counting and though some faces have changed it is a true blessing that we can get together and have some fun. We play campaigns that span several years but sometimes drop in a "one shot" game when someone's schedule prevents them from making it to game night.  We found ourselves in just such a situation. One of our friends has some family commitments and is unable to make it to game night for a bit. Slotting in a few one shot adventures felt like the right decision to pass the time rather than continue a campaign with a character missing. I ran the first one of these one shots this past week and crafted an adventure running Daggerheart and set in a Wild West themed world. I had great fun throwing this one together and I used the opportunity to try some new ideas. This is the first "GM Journal" piece I am writing on this blog and I am going to cover how I co...

Polygon has an interview with longtime D&D designers Jeremy Crawford and Christopher Perkins who left Wizard of the Coast to join Darrington Press and work on Daggerheart. This interview doesn't reveal much about Daggerheart that we didn't already know but the theme here is about the game's collaborative storytelling approach.  Further, I like that Darrington Press is looking at Daggerheart as something of a blank slate for the tabletop RPG industry. What is a Daggerheart adventure, exactly? It could be similar to D&D, sure, but it doesn't need to be.  “It’s exciting to think about just what a  Daggerheart  adventure is,” Perkins says. “We literally only have one or two adventures out there in the universe. It's a delightful thought exercise, and one I've never been part of, because D&D adventures are kind of established and codified. Here, we're starting right at the outset with carte blanche, and we are going to take some chances, experiment a...

Exploring the original six Final Fantasy games through the Pixel Remaster versions has been a fun exercise and helped me appreciate the risks this series has taken and its influence on role playing games.  Hot on the heels of completing Final Fantasy II , I began playing, of course, Final Fantasy III. Much like its predecessor, I hadn’t played this one before, though I did recently find Final Fantasy III in my collection of Nintendo DS games. I have no memory of playing it so I must bought it and never got around to it. What a sin. Ah well, I am correcting that now with the Pixel Remaster version.  The first thing I noticed was that Squaresoft took a step back from the classless progression system of Final Fantasy II and made a game that harkens back to the original Final Fantasy. The difference here is that all of the characters are generic fighters until you complete the first quest and unlock several "jobs" that you can assign to the characters. This is the first appearanc...

Dungeons & Dragons is a household name and an undoubtedly popular franchise but the financial numbers suggest otherwise. What is going on? The folks at Answer in Progress tried to answer this and while I don’t completely agree with their assessment I do find this video to be a worthwhile watch for anyone interested in not just D&D but the tabletop RPG industry as a whole. Personally, I feel that imagination is free and while there is a lot of money to be made selling books, dice, minis, etc. to enhance the experience, it is a niche industry. Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast can make a lot of money on the branding, campaign settings, characters, and perhaps crossovers like the upcoming World of Warcraft and Star Wars content, but the core game requires very little to provide a lifetime of storytelling and adventuring. A fellow member of The Arcane Library Discord summed this up perfectly. “The industry needs the hobby. The hobby doesn’t need the industry.” 

Some time ago, I began a journey to complete the first six Final Fantasy games, playing the Pixel Remaster versions. I wrote about this recently . I had already completed Final Fantasy and was well on my way to completing Final Fantasy II when I started this blog. My intention was to provide some thoughts on the game as I progressed. I was so close to the end, however, that I decided to wait until finishing the game to post about it. I am happy to report that I finished Final Fantasy II last night and I do have some thoughts to share about this polarizing, yet important entry in the series.  The biggest change that I noticed between Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy II was the lack of character classes and the progession system. All characters could do anything and how much they used a particular kind of weapon or cast spells improved those abilities. I found myself empowering all of my characters with magic spells and each specializing in a specific kind of weapon. It worked out wel...

I never got into the Wizardry series though I was always aware of it. This Pixel Playback video covers the history of the series and I found it to be quite the education on how this game influenced some of the most important RPGs of all time and has a huge following in Japan. I don't know that we would have had Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy without the influence of Wizardry. This is worth a watch for all fans of RPG video games.  Now I want to play Wizardry.