I Tell You. You Decide If You Care.

HeroForge has amazing tools for creating custom figures for tabletop gaming.  Basically, you can build your own 1" figure for your D&D games... ...or Savage Rifts ... ...or, fuck it, just lose your damn mind and have fun... These screenshots were chosen to show off some of the tool features available in HeroForge "Cat Angel" there was created by a 7-year-old girl, who was just having fun one day playing around with her dad's account.  That's how easy and fun the interface is. And different potential - like D&D , or Rifts, or Supers (I got introduced to Mighty Protectors , which is multi-genre a toolkit game like GURPS   or Hero System ). All of these were created by a friend of mine. He's been using HeroForge for years, and backed a few of the KickStarters , so has free access to some of the advanced tools.  (He was showing me the tools, so I asked if I could grab some screenshots for my blog.) Note, that my friend hasn't actually bought  any o...

Some vids detailing historical use of slings.  Again, in most version of D&D, this is a Simple Weapon that anyone can use. Halflings usually get some nice bonuses with slings, and some editions of D&D go absolutely bonkers with halfling-only sling feats that produce some damage potential to easily compete with longbows and crossbows.  (I can't find the character sheet, but I had a 4e halfling ranger/rogue who, in natural terrain, take  5 foot step at the start of her turn, then use her sling to cause 5d6+4 damage. That was awesome.)

Here is a pretty cool treatise on longbow arrows. I like his style. Very calm, very well-stated. Useful information and perspective, without a lot of hype, and just a touch of snark. Now, I mean, this is most useful to people who like history, or who play a lot of Dungeons & Dragons .  Or Warhammer FRP , or Talislanta , or want to play Hawkeye in your favorite SHRPG, like, say Mighty Protectors .  :-) Personally, I always loved archers.  I was never particularly enamored of the crossbow in 3e, except maybe as the occassional ranged utility weapon for my low-level clerics.  Then came 5e, when I started monkeying with it. The slow reload rate was always a buzzkill, but the Crossbow Expert Feat provided some definite advantages over the Longbow, so I built a Fighter around the Heavy Crossbow, and actually had a lot of fun.

There are a lot of great artists on social media. One is Karl Stjernberg Karl does a lot of RPG  art.  Mostly maps, but also some character sheets.  This one is apparently a Level 1 Kobold Thief. I love the "mind map" free form creativity Karl shows. ( source ) And, Pink! of course :-) (Helllooooo, I'm a girl.  Yes, it turns out that pink is hardwired into us.  We grow out of it... eventually.  Haha.) ( source ) ( source )

Giant Hogweed  - some crazy big ugly plant On the one hand, an awesome D&D trap. On the other hand, I feel horrible for anyone who contacts it, and ends up scarred for life!

The Ultimate - and I mean ULTIMATE - guide to ritual spellcasting in 5e . The author even used color-coding. This is awesome. For example, it seems so obvious to me that a ritual casting would require the character to stand still, but apparently not. The character can walk and chant at the same time. The color-coding is great, and makes it really clear the only spell list worth ritualizing is the wizard spell list. Well, that is unless or until we get a 5e version of "Relics & Rituals" which expanded the ranger and paladin lists so incredibly much that we actually had someone play a ranger with Scribe Scroll, just so she could use all those cool spells (and wow, did she).

I am unashamed to say that I liked playing summoner-types in 3.x, especially with some of the relaly abusive combinations possible with 3rd-party materials. In my defense, I always brought my monster cards, and own minis, so I was prepared. I always prepared my action list in advance, and was usually one of the fastest turns at the table, depsite sometimes having as many as eight critters and 16 attacks. Heh. Yeah, I love me them minions. Which is probably why Summon Monster has disappeared from the 5e PHB. After all, 5e is intended to streamline play, and be a less-complicated experience. But, whatever. I'm not alone in feeling the gap, and this looks like a pretty fun and creative way to fill the void. http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?358469-Summon-Monster-for-5E

Darrin Drader, author of a crapload of RPG stuff, wrote on the EVP Spire Facebook page Since this group seems to be filling up quick, I'd like to talk a bit about becoming a Patron through our Patreon site, and the benefits you might see of backing us there. First of all, what is our Patreon site? Put simply, Patreon is where you can subscribe to our adventure gaming publication. More specifically, Patreon isn't just a subscription service, it's also a crowd funding service, not entirely unlike Kickstarter. The main different between the two is that while Kickstarter lets you back a project and pay up front. Patreon, on the other hand, only charges you when something new comes out. You pay nothing up front. How much does it cost? Right now, if you were to purchase upcoming issues of The Spire through RPGNow/Drivethru RPG, you would pay $3.50, and you would get the issue. With Patreon, you can get exactly the same thing for $2.50 per issue. Pay $3.50 instead and...

Mark Craddock, blogger and all around interesting person, runs his own store Store http://www.comicbookworld.com Blog http://crossplanes.blogspot.com Mark posts a lot of D&D 5e goodies on his blog. A lot of them are racial types, like the 3e racial templates. Artwork I found on his blog... to lure you into clicking the link... ;-)

I had kind of wondered what happened to my friend Patric Rogers, since he hasn't updated www.patric.net since his daughter was born. Turns out he's writing his "Little Detective Story" (apparently written like a screenplay, and mapped to eight different "scripts," so far, and over 300 pages combined. Yeah, it's both epic and a fucking wonderful read.) He's also teamed up again with gamer legend Darrin Drader. Rememer Dark Portal Games? Yeah, no one does, but Rogers and Drader and Robert Blezard were all part of it, and now they're working together again. Patric posted this to his G+ thread: -- Do me a favor and spread this around? I'm part of this company, and if we get piles of subscribers, i can quit my day job, write full time, and convert 11 years of notbooks into proper gamer goodness. Thanks to Facebook picking and choosing who sees what for us, I have no clue if you've gotten the word yet. I don't wan...