Yet another delay in our launch sequence. Apparently, our GM is an Ole Miss fan, because our Traveller campaign has just been sidelined by the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl and the matchup between Ole Miss and Penn State. Oh well, we'll try again in two weeks. Saving the universe will have to wait.

In January, I started running a monthly Dungeons & Dragons game for some friends on the other side of the state. It's a 2 hour drive, but we run for 5-6 hours and share a meal afterwards, so it turns out to be a full day and makes the hours in the car bearable. I love running the game, building the world, and complicating their story. And they've all been a joy at the table, but getting everyone around the table has been the usual hassle. In 12 months we've missed three sessions and lost one player. Worse, from my point of view, is that outside the game getting input or interaction from them is just an exercise in frustration. To meditate this I started looking for other games to join locally. Meetup has been very helpful for this. In July I joined an ongoing D&D campaign at the game store. In August I joined another at the bookstore. I found two other groups in September. And while the Delta Green game was short lived, I did join a Traveller game afterward. As the ...

  I wanted to share the gaming related gifts I received this Christmas.  In the not quite TTRPG items that are still related to games, gaming, and this amazing hobby of tabletop gaming. I was given a Battlestar Galactica themed deck of playing cards, two expansion packs for the Cards Against Humanity: the Science Pack and the Fantasy Pack. My wife  received the glow-in-the-dark box and the Family Pack for the same game... we have a lot of cards for this very fun game. Sounds Fishy is a game with cards, tokens, and very shiny fish - I know nothing about it, but I'm looking forward to reading the rules and figuring it out. In order to facilitate my crafting and miniature painting I was given a half-dozen simple paint palettes and something you can never have too many of, hot glue sticks. That fidget popper there isn't to keep me busy, but rather, I use them for a small paint palette. Once the paint dries, you just pop the bubble and out comes the dry paint. It's a pretty sl...

From my family to yours We wish you a very MERRY CHRISTMAS And if you celebrate something else, we wish for you to have the Happiest of Holidays and hope you find joy in your celebration during this special time of year!

It is the night before Christmas and all through the house rings the sound of the vacuum cleaner and festive music. Will we get another Amazon delivery? Only Santa knows. While Walton Glaives is ready to get back to the adventure and deal with this Red Wizard of Thay, once and for all, I don't think I could convince my wife that Christmas Eve D&D is a good thing. So while Walton may be in something of a sulk, I'll be doing family things for the holiday. Drinking eggnog, wrapping gifts, eating cookies, cleaning the house, and preparing for the biggest gift giving holiday of the year. Having bought several gifts for myself, I assure you that I have some cool stuff to show you in the very near future. Enjoy your holidays and have yourself a very merry Christmas. Wishing you a Merry Christmas --Ronn

The new adventures of the less powerful Thergale the Verdant are on something of a holiday hiatus. Apparently, no one wants to play D&D on the morning of Christmas Eve. I mean, not that I could pull that off without getting more than a little static from my wife. I get it. It's cool. I kinda suspect that our DM will cancel the New Year's Eve game as well, but only time will tell. At this point it's still on the schedule. I did a thing for the group that I didn't run by the DM. In the spirit of asking forgiveness rather than permission, I created a DnDBeyond campaign for the group and posted a link to it in our Discord. I let everyone know that it'd be helpful for the DMs game prep to have all of our characters in one place and as an added bonus I shared all of my DnDBeyond content with the members of the campaign. At this point there are four characters in the campaign. Hopefully, everyone will take advantage of the tool. But not everyone wants to mix digital to...

The game went on without me and probably without a few others, what with it being this close to Christmas. I've been sick for the last two days and feeling odd for the two days previous. As such, I thought skipping the game and not risk infecting everyone just in time for the holiday. I don't know what they did, who that 'they' consisted of, and probably won't get any info about the game until 2024.

There is no reason for me to buy this thing. I have a perfectly functional dice tray that I don't use. I have a folding dice tray that I carry in my DM kit. I don't need this thing, it's too long, and too expensive. Having said that, please take my money. I present to you the Tray of Rolling, officially licensed Dungeons & Dragons dice tray by Ultra PRO. It'll cost you $20, for a good looking box with no lid. It doesn't even come with a cheap set of dice. This enormous thing has a premium leatherette lining debossed with the D&D ampersand logo on the inside and a red foil logo on black exterior sitting on non-slip pads. It's a whopping 13.5 inches long by 6.5 inches wide with a 1-inch wall height, you're going to be taking ups some serious table space with this accessory, but it will save the table from all those sharp edged metal dice you're throwing around. It is a good looking dice tray, but damn, Ultra PRO has my number. Is it really the perf...

Sad news. No game session today, which is a double bummer because we were adding a member to our crew and starting off on the next leg of our campaign. But the GM sent out word that he couldn't run the game and there's not much I can do to make him run... I mean, really, there's nothing legal I could do. As such, the further adventures of Daryen Gravic are delayed until the end of the month, December 30th is the next scheduled game. Note to self: check messages before driving across town to the game store for your bi-weekly Traveller game.

 Something has occurred that is most disturbing, I have lost much of my power. I don’t mean politically, not the influence of my network, or even that my servants have turned against me. Rather, and more disturbingly, my powers and abilities have atrophied. I have lost access to half my spells and even those I still recall are weaker and less effective. Misty Escape has failed me and both my Eldritch Sight and the Thirsting Blade are out of my reach. I have tested the connection with my patron, the Verdant Mother of the Dawn, Queen of Fairyland,  Lilliane, and found it true and strong. Yet, something has happened for which I can not yet find an explanation. Is it this world? This new beginning? Something more sinister?  The gnome is gone on church business. My agents confirm that he was seen taking a carriage out of the city three days previous. It would be a comfort to learn if he has experienced the same degradation in power or if this is a more personal dilemma. It mat...

  December creates scheduling problems for our group. Gryffon has been informed by his boss that there will be no weekends off in December, so he's out. Doug, Campbell, and Zak all have scheduling issues at different points this month. And I've got family visiting, other games, and a plethora of other demands on my time. We've come to a consensus, there will either be no game in December or we will try to fit something in during the week between Christmas and New Year. Doug has that week off and Campbell is out of school, and while it's possible, that feels like a busy week. We'll see what happens. I'm running behind on the campaign log for The 3-Dragon Problem, but hopefully this break will give me time to get the updates posted for both the Cragmaw Castle and Trinity Lake sessions. Stuff has happened, I just haven't written that stuff up.

A lot of this book deals with aspects of D&D that I don't have much experience with, but it does do a good job of showing all the potential the game has as a social and educational tool. Very upbeat tone and positive look at the game. I don't listen to the Dragon Talk podcast regularly, as it often feels like a corporate shill, but this book avoids much of that. I like the message they're spreading. Check out Welcome to Dragon Talk on hoopla digital. https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/15481374 #hoopladigital

This session was run by the Emily, our usual DM, and the party consists of: Xaerv played by Julian Caverick Strawton played by Jeremy Edgariel Grandsword played by Dighton Carsten Brich played by Ronn We return to the game table on our fourth day of travel through the jungle of Xen'drik. It is some point in the month of Rhaan, but the exact day escapes me. Suffice to say that it is early autumn and none of their is little evidence of the changing seasons in our environs. For three days we followed a swampy branch of The Hydra south-southeast. Day 4: a pack of dinosaurs chase a wild boar into our camp during the night. Noticing us, the dinosaurs break off chasing the boar and focus on us. We spring to our own defense, but the fight is cut short when Edgariel Grandsword ( elf wizard/artificer ) transforms into an even larger dinosaur and chases them off. Day 6: As we travel down river Caverick Strawton ( human druid ) attracts the attention of a constrictor snake looking for ...

I like notebooks. There is something about a nice book full of blank pages that inspires ideas. I also like Dungeons & Dragons. The surge of popularity that D&D has seen with this latest edition has led to a lot of branded products, some of them are even notebooks. I've been collecting the ones that strike a note with me. I haven't actually written in any of these, but maybe one day. I bought the boxed bundle of little Beastiary notebooks without realizing how small they were and I was disappointed when they arrived at my door. They come in a little open box, each one has monster art on the cover, and the pages are either lined, blank, graphed, or dotted. Two of each. I like the box, but the notebooks themselves are less great. The other notebooks are more useable to my thinking.  The Worldbuilder's Journal has writing prompts at the top of each page, which makes it a neat tool for what it is, but maybe less useful as a notebook. The Book of Holding has a cool magne...

  It's been a while, but we were able to get together at The Gamer's Wharf  to play some Traveller and continue the adventures of "Lucky" Daryen Gravic. The game store we were playing at closed, everybody got busy, and as such there hasn't been a game session since I last mentioned it on September 23rd. So you haven't missed anything. We found ourselves down a couple of crewmembers, but the action continued aboard the quarantined and contaminated Deepnight Endeavor . Rounding out the team were Jeff "Mega" Credit, who is both our employer and a Deepnight financier, and "Danger" William Robison, our engineer. We can only hope that the other two members of the team return to the game next time around. We continued to work with the ships engineering crew to clear the ship by exposing the alien fungus to the vacuum of space, battle the zombified crew members infected by the fungus, and work around the trip-falls placed before us by the uncoopera...