Category: From the Editor’s Desk

I like gaming blogs for two reasons:

1. a community of gamers is built
2. and content is added to the hobby

And then there’s The Geek Life Project…

Here’s (a very modest) Chuck:

“I’ve been a geek and gamer pretty much all my life. I stood in line to see Star Wars when it premiered.  I started playing D&D when it came in a little white box.  I was driving back home after attending Linucon 1 in Austin TX when I decided I really wanted to do a full-blown blog about gaming and the geeky stuff that I enjoyed.  The blog has evolved over the years but I’ve tried to make it fun and look at things with a bit of humor. That’s the heart of it… Gaming should be fun.”

Now, let me tell you what Chuck meant to say:

“Now that I’m old and grumpy I don’t mind sharing my opinion. The whole goal of this crazy thing is hopefully to make a few people laugh, a few others think and to just piss off the rest.  And don’t expect late-breaking news or anything that could even pass as journalism.”

 That is the Chuck that I read.

1. Chuck is geek.
2. Chuck is Savage Worlds.
3. Chuck is humor,
4. and Chuck is rant.

But most importantly, Chuck is god-damned fun (and I simply can’t get enough of his Web-Clip Wednesdays).

The Geek Life  Project, our Favorite Site of the Month.

So, we don’t normally plug two different websites as our Favorite site of the Month, but these two sites are run by the same person, and both simply add to gaming in a great way…

I’d like to introduce Jaap de Goede, creator of the Dark Dungeon roleplaying game, as well as the Dark Dungeon Vaults (an aggregator site).  If there’s one thing I like about gamers, it’s their tenacity in creating an entire roleplaying game, and creating a website that pulls together hundreds or thousands of gaming blogs in one area.  Ok, that’s two things.

Here’s Jaap de Goede on how he started the  Dark Dungeon RPG, and his aggregator site for RPG blogs, The Dark Dungeon Vaults…

As a Dutch native, I’ve been a fantasy role player ever since I picked up the Moldvay edition of D&D in 1981, and I still think that’s one of the best role playing games around. So you could peg me as an Old Schooler in that respect. However, I also started to design my own game variants soon after, inspired by Traveller and Runequest. Eventually, this culminated in the first versions of Dark Dungeon. With a best friend, who now also works in Film and Television industry like I do, I wrote up the rules in a confined room in his parent’s wind mill. That was in 1989.

The Dark Dungeon RPG
In the DD system we tried to put everything we liked from other systems. and strip whatever we thought was too cumbersome. Originally, we wrote the rules because we needed a clear system for our expanding group. The group actually grew so large that we decided we had to radically change the way we played, just to give everyone a chance to play. So, we designed a common world (again plundering everything we liked), and made a schedule of who could play when and who should game master the adventure. We wrote up the system, made a beautiful booklet which we printed fifteen times, and named it “Dark Dungeon”. This (of course) referred to Jack Chick’s “Dark Dungeons” booklets, which we didn’t take too seriously at the time. The whole preparation took several hundred man hours, and we laughed that we probably would only play two sessions before our scheme collapsed, so that each session should be priced at a few thousand dollars – if we would have asked money for it.

But it did not collapse. In fact, it was such a success that the game group expanded even further, to about a hundred and fifty in its heyday.
We had a few dozen regular game masters, and played well over two thousand adventures together, all through the 1990s. All in one world, and all in the Dark Dungeon system. Remember that this is a table top RPG, and that this was before there were MMORPGs!

The Blog
Time progressed, and eventually the huge DD group faded. The rules went through a few new incarnations, but as they were fairly stable since 1993, I also decided to put them out on the web. I think that was in 2001. We had several (hopeful) false starts trying to build websites and fora, before thankfully Blogger appeared, and I finally discovered it. Blogger is a wonderful app for tech-lazy writers like myself, and it finally gave me the opportunity to share with others what I had learned over all these years – without the nitty gritty of HTML.

So, with zeal I started to blog and write about everything I considered important and loved about the game. And that’s not just the Dark Dungeon system, which you can download for free from the site (and soon buy in a beautiful illustrated version on Lulu and DriveThru). There’s a lot out there, I figured, which you cannot see if you just go to the game store and buy 4e D&D (or 3e, which was just being launched as I started my first “blog” attempts). Much of the fun in Role Playing you just cannot sell, and you can only learn about it if you share freely. That’s what I wanted to show.

The Dark Dungeon Vaults
Once I had enough blogs, I signed up for the RPG Bloggers Network, which is a great way to share and be visible to many people. But, as they were facing some political issues at the time, they were excruciatingly slow to admit me or anyone else. Fortunately, in retrospect, as it motivated me to build the Dark Dungeon Vaults. Here you now can find well over 2000 RPG blogs on blogrolls, and I add new ones weekly. Actually I keep being surprised and stand in awe how much you bloggers are writing. There’s an amazing lot of good stuff, and some very high-quality coming out of the online community!

Dark Dungeon 2nd Edition in Print
With some luck, you’ll be able to buy the revised and fully illustrated Dark Dungeon starter rules in print this July. It will be out on LuLu and DriveThru, both in print and pdf. I’m very proud of it. Currently I’m working on the next few books, which you could call “Expert Sets”. The first one is planned for October.

Thank you, Jaap, for telling us about your game, your blog dedicated to your game, and your aggregator site.  I absolutley love it that you are doing a great part in bringing gaming sites together, and I look forward to checking out The Dark Dungeon RPG when it comes out…

Hey!  We have our first Favorite Site of the Month since the 2012 SOTY contest wrapped up, and it’s a great one!

I’m a little ashamed to say that I haven’t been reading her blog for very long.  It wasn’t until recently that I found myself absorbing her articles more and more often.  She has this style of writing – well, I’m afraid to describe it for fear of not doing it justice – when I’m reading her posts, I just get the sense that she’s right there talking to me.  Her written words just seem to speak aloud, as if we’re face-to-face.  Not only that, but she says things that I want to hear, whether I agree or not.  It’s just kind of… engaging.

But, that’s not why Tracy Hurley’s Sarah Darkmagic is our Favorite site of the Month; there are quite a few other reasons… Downloadable Delves, Monster Builder Tutorial, RPG Tools… you name it.  However, what I’m impressed most about the site is its overall dedication of providing RPG material to gamers.  Anyone can put up a gaming blog – and there will always be someone who can benefit from that – but with Sarah Darkmagic, gamers can expect the site to go the extra mile.  This is even more obvious when you take notice of her recently (successfully) funded Kickstarter Project: Prismatic Art.

It’s a project aimed at providing a more diverse type of fantasy art, inspired from and depicting different cultures and backgrounds.

 Thanks, Tracy, for putting up a fantastic site.  I know Sarah Darkmagic will continue to flourish, and gamers will continue to visit.

Lots of stuff happening around here, and one of those things is upgrading our Store.  With some new Monster Minis and Exotic Mounts (as well as a super-secret project getting ready to kick off), it was time for an upgrade.  Check out some of the new items below, and then head over to the new Store for the rest.  I’m pretty proud of it, and I hope you find something that will make your game even more fun!

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Don’t forget about those favorites that started it all…

Click here to check out the new store!

Here we are again with another installment of finding a great RPG site!

If you’re like me, then you never get tired of reading a variety of gaming blogs… and what a variety there is.  Our favorite site for March is fun for me because they have stuff I’m familiar with, and some very interesting stuff that I’m not familiar with.  A lot of the fun with this site is comes from – I guess you could say – learning something new.

Here’s Jody and Jim:

Our Focus:
We produce Classic Resources for Pen & Paper Role-Playing Games. Here you will find new monsters, spells, Paper Minis, and other things for use with Labyrinth Lord, Mutant Future, Swords & Wizardry (White Box), and other OSR-related RPGs, as well as Newer and More Modern Indie-Games such as Rogue Space. We’ve been experimenting with Savage Worlds and are looking at a number of other RPGs that might be a good fit for some of our settings or critters. We have a lot of stuff that we developed for D&D 3.0/3.5 that we might try to convert over to Pathfinder/3.75, but we’re also hearing good things about FATE and some other systems that we want to try-out first. There’s also Gumshoe and its derivatives to consider. But no matter what newer systems we do decide to support, we expect to keep doing stuff for one or another edition of D&D and/or the retro-clones.

What We Offer:
Monsters, Spells, Magic Items, Scenario Seeds, Paper Miniatures, Random Tables and more. We feature a number of unique settings of our own creation such as the Kalaramar Drifts, Jalamere, Tsan Yian, Aman Utal, and Wermspittle. We also host Bujilli’s Sojourn, a Play-by-Blog RPG that features a weekly episode every Thursday based upon the input of our readers who get to decide what Bujilli does next via their comments on each episode.

Plans For the Future:
We will be releasing a PDF of the Zilgor’s Repose Adventure, which is the first in a series of adventures that take place within the Kalaramar Drifts and points beyond.

Rogue Space has been a lot of fun to build things for, and we are in the process of getting a bunch of new materials ready for the new Rogue Space Quarterly.

We’re putting a lot of work into the on-going development of our Wermspittle setting. We’ll be exploring Wermspittle a bit more in-depth in April as part of the 2012 A-to-Z Challenge. The Red Bestiary is coming together nicely, as is the Grimoire and the Player’s Guide to Wermspittle.

We’re assembling a few compilation PDFs that collect all of the posts regarding certain past projects (Roofcrawling, Low-End Loot Tables, Worldboats, Terminal Grimoire, Ain-4, etc.), each of which will also have some new stuff added-in to make them more useful. There’s a collection of Paper Minis coming together, another set of geomorphs, and some other surprises!

I just keep looking forward to reading more and more of Hereticwerks.  Check em’ out!