While I’ve been playing Roleplaying Games for a long time, it’s only been this year that I’ve started to run games at various conventions. I first got my feet wet last weekend at Ratha Con, a new convention in Athens, OH. My next experience will be running a game for Kobold Press at Gen Con. So, with my vast wealth [...]

Quick post: This is about the cutest Star Trek related thing I’ve ever seen. I’m not a huge fan of Audi (mostly because I’ll never be able to afford one), but this is awesome.

I’ve read a lot of comments on various forums in the wake of the latest trailer for Man of Steel, and a lot of them had the same thing to say: “Why are they doing his origin story again!?” At first, I wanted to echo the sentiment. Come on, Superman is arguably the most popular character that was created in [...]

Kotaku posted an article by an anonymous game developer yesterday that explained how video game publishers are killing the game industry. Whether he is right or wrong, I can say that some publishers have made some really bad decisions lately. Luckily, there are some really awesome independent game studios that are putting out some games this year. Here are the [...]

It’s not often that I make my players start at level one in a Pathfinder game. I have a couple of reasons: First level characters never seem to have enough options. They’re so…smooshy. It takes nothing but some unlucky die rolls to take them out. In other words, it’s hard for first level characters to feel truly heroic. But, worse [...]

I love Roleplaying Games. I’m running Midgard Adventures: The Raven’s Call tonight, and I’m pretty excited about it. As I was sorting through my dice (which as you can see pictured above), since they had become a swirling morass of randomness, and trying to figure out what I was going to write today, it kind of hit me that the parts [...]

Mega Man Online was finally put out to pasture this week, canceling the only the Mega Man game that was currently in development by Capcom. This is, of course, after the cancellations of both Mega Man Legends 3 and Mega Man Universe which were done away with in 2011. Mega Man can’t catch a break. Sure we got the fan-developed [...]

I’ve been a fan of fiction set during the Cold War era since reading The Company by Robert Littell during one summer break.  Before that, I’d been a fan of James Bond, but The Company really turned me on to the danger of realistic spycraft. I first learned of the FX show The Americans during what seemed an abnormally large [...]

Videogame publishers and developers have made me pretty angry lately. We’re reaching a point where videogame makers can lie, but gamers will still throw money at them. So, yes, gamers are making me angry, too (Of course, as a guy that used to work at a major videogame retailer, that doesn’t really surprise me.) The recent Aliens: Colonial Marines “scandal” [...]

I’ve been thinking about heroes and heroism a lot recently. Maybe it’s because I’ve finally gotten back into reading more fiction (my day job requires a lot of reading, and reading “for fun” quit being fun for a little while), or maybe it’s because I’m also reading about the American Revolution, but it recently struck me that the virtue of [...]

World building is one of the most fun and complicated parts of the job for the GM or author. God created the Earth in six days, but world designers don’t have the luxury of omnipotence and omniscience. Luckily, we have the essays written by game and fiction industry professionals collected in The Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding. I won my copy of [...]

I’m not much of a scientist, but I do really enjoy science. And there have been plenty of times when I’ve seen something in a film that made me say, “Uh-uh. That would never and could never happen.” Enter Reel Physics, a web show that takes crazy scenes from movies and runs them through all the equations to see if [...]

Gaming often helps me relax when I’m really stressed out. Honestly, after a long day, playing some Halo, Minecraft, or XCOM: Enemy Unknown is a great way to engage my brain in ways that have nothing to do with my day job. However, when I can’t boot up the Xbox because my family is watching a TV show, my iPhone is generally [...]

I’m going to take a brief break from writing about geeky things to reflect for just a moment. If it wasn’t for Dr. King and the civil rights movement, this very website might not exist. Here’s the full text of the speech: I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest [...]

When I first saw ads for TBS’s new reality show King of the Nerds, my first thought was wondering if The Big Bang Theory was giving them high enough ratings to justify having another dork-themed show. Then I started fearing that the show would be akin to Beauty and the Geek, and that it would have some ridiculous message about how [...]

A friend recently gave me the gift of The Walking Dead on Steam. Gabrielle has been playing the game and really likes it. I, however, am getting a little burned out on the whole zombie genre. It’s been done so many different ways in the last several years, and oftentimes done poorly, that I’m not sure what can come out [...]

I’m a fan of both Warhammer universes; though, I’ve never had the money to play the too-expensive-for-my-tastes wargame, I’ve played most of the video games, I own all three editions of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and I received as a gift literally all the Warhammer 40,000: Dark Heresy roleplaying books. So, when I (finally) had a chance to check out the Games [...]

It’s January 1st, and we made resolutions; it’s the cool kid thing to do. Some of these are real. Some of these are fake. Some of these are probably  a mixture of both. Have a good New Year! Julie Bethlenfalvy (Writer): In 2013, I’d like to find someone to invent something to improve my short-term memory. I don’t have one. [...]

It’s New Year’s Eve, and I’m feeling a little bit melancholy. Maybe it’s the fact that I’m on a “working vacation,” or because I haven’t been sleeping well. Maybe I miss playing Minecraft and Halo 4. Maybe it’s because my baby has for over a week refused to do anything but scream when anyone but me or my wife tries [...]

There are some really awesome Christmas songs. And then there are the kind that are really, really awful. And since I like focusing on things that suck, here are my least favorite Christmas songs. 1. The Christmas Shoes – New Song Patton Oswalt has said (NSFW Language) pretty much everything I want to say about The Christmas Shoes. This song [...]