Artificer's Intuition

"This is my story." - Tidus, Final Fantasy X I'm starting to hit that point where I'm having too many adventure/story ideas and not enough time to play them.  My original group has kind of disbanded, and I have a lot of trouble locking onto a third player.  If I could have at least three, I'd feel a lot more comfortable about running a stable game.  I'm not upset about my lack of games, just frustrated because I have plenty of ideas and themes I would like to explore. In my last post, I wrote about the Notebook, a project my friends and I started back when I was in high school.  It was basically diceless DnD, except it had a lot more character interaction and a lot less combat.  Even though it has been a number of years since we've actually had a Notebook, the ideas and adventures we did have really have resonated with me.  I would love to start fleshing them out as adventures to either re-play, or as places to visit sometime in the near future. I w...

"I'm a character.  People are always saying to me, 'You know, you're quite a character'." -George Costanza, Seinfeld My little biography at the end of The Trinket Lord mentions my love of characters and how I've been creating them my entire life.  While that may not be as long as some other people, it's still a pretty good chunk (I think), and it's always my most favorite part of creating new worlds and stories.  As a child, I was always more interested in my lego characters than the buildings and ships I could build.  If I didn't have great characters, what was the point? When I was a freshman in high school, I wanted my own RPG game with my own world and kingdoms.  At the time, I only played the Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Game, and had no concept what Dungeons & Dragons really was about.  I also maybe had some ideas about 3.5 edition, but it seemed to crazy and complex that I opted out of playing it. And so, my good frie...

"Money for Nothin', Get Your Chicks for Free"  - Dire Straits, Money for Nothing With the announcement of D&D Next, many players have been complaining that there is no new material to purchase for Dungeons and Dragons.  I heartily disagree.  There's already a lot of solid 4th Edition books to pick up that will transfer well for a new edition, as well as countless other tools and accessories.  So, if you're sitting on tons of cash and want to know what D&D stuff to pick up, let me offer a few suggestions. Poster maps Miniatures Various roleplaying books Dungeon Tiles Poster maps are some of the most cost effective ways of being able to throw down an encounter location time and time again.  Mike Shea (of SlyFlourish.com) swears by these things, and has written a couple articles about their effectiveness (as well as hosted a nice gallery of all the maps and where to find them).  In my foray to 4E, I managed to snag quite a few, and they a...