Category: From the Editor’s Desk

There’s a brand new print magazine for fans of tabletop gaming!

The Call to Assembly is the latest project from the Gamer Assembly, gathering material from their blog and abroad into a quality print magazine! You can get your own copy printed on demand from Lulu for 7.99 plus shipping. You can also get the PDF version at no charge at all from Drive Thru RPG! It’s perfect for your tablet browsing, and features the same high-quality formatting.

Issue 1 focuses on Cherished Gamer Memories as well as the new (system neutral) setting of 3 Generations After the End. Be sure to look out for some bonus articles as well, including one from StufferShack.com!

The Gamer Assembly is a collection of artists, writers and gaming enthusiasts who have come together in friendship and support of each other on the web. For more regular content check out the wiki page, the IRC Chat or our blog.

There are so many gaming blogs out there – it seems like once a day I discover a blog that I’ve never seen before.  To be honest, when I came across The Free RPG Blog, I immediately sat up in my chair and started clicking through the posts.  I mean, for fun I’ve been working on my own role-playing games for years, and here was a blog dedicated to free RPGs!

Here’s Rob:

“The Free RPG Blog champions free roleplaying game materials by reviewing free games, running competitions and offering advice in the form of practical how-to guides. It began because its author, Rob Lang, felt that the world of free RPGs needed a voice and their authors needed support and a pat on the back. The most active free RPG community is 1000 Monkeys, 1000 Typewriters (1KM1KT) where Rob is an Admin (the curator is the mysterious “GLORIOUS BENEFACTOR” Keeton Harrington). The atmosphere of 1KM1KT is friendly and no idea is too stupid.

The blog has just finished a series of How to write a free RPG, which covers everything from inspiration to getting it out there. 2012 will see a backlog of game reviews published and probably another 24 hour RPG competition with Amazon vouchers as a prize. If your game is unfinished, then the best place to go is 1KM1KT. If your game is finished and is online for free, let Rob know – he’d love to have a look.”

Thanks Rob.  Let me dust off my old Nighthaven and completely revamp it all over again!

The Free RPG Blog – check it out!

The Quirky DM has been a guilty pleasure of mine for awhile now (the site, not Quirky).  I simply dig the site’s tone and content.  So, of course it’s only fitting that they’re our favorite site of the month!

Here’s Quirky:

When Tourq told me that he wanted to choose Quirky DM as the site of the month, it was a dream come true. My original scheme was to wait for SOPA to come online and then wait until my blog was the only website available on the internet. Actually being chosen for legitimate reasons was a “Plan B” approach that I never expected to come to fruition. But here I am, which goes to show that Tourq is not only a great blogger who has given me an enormous amount of inspiration, but he’s also totally not above bribes of any kind.

The Quirky DM started up in the summer because my brain was in desperate need of a creative outlet. Our normal gaming group was playing board games for a temporary break. At work, I got stuck on a never ending project in a support role. I had nothing to keep my brain engaged. After watching The Shining and thinking, “Man, that Johnny has got his $&!# together. I need to get myself a typewriter,” I realized it was time to find another way to keep busy.

I had been reading D&D blogs for quite a while and I had my mind blown countless times as ideas came pouring in. Aspects and playing with fate. Three stage bosses. 5×5 adventure plot. The 3 clue mystery. And after a while, I even started coming up with my own ideas. So I wrote them down.

I wrote and I wrote and my gaming group begged me to let them in on what I was doing. (they never asked for anything) After emailing them my ideas, they were extremely supportive. (they never read a word) This was the kind of genius they assured me could not be contained. (I’m now on all of their email spam filters)

And so Quirky DM came to life. All those other bloggers seemed to have such a fun time writing their blogs, I wanted to see what it was like. Whether I had an audience or not was irrelevant. I just needed to flesh out my own ideas and solidify it in my own mind. It would be a great bonus if there was anyone who wanted to read it and give me any feedback. According to many of the emails I received so far, I have a supportive fanbase of Russian women who would love to be my wife and companies that want to sell me, er, enlargement devices.

So what am I writing about? It’s more or less your kitchen sink of D&D blogging. Some of it’s about speeding up combat, because no one has ever talked about that before. Other times, I’m talking about how to run the game better to increase tension, tell better stories or just avoid the situations that really bug me. Some of it is how to house rule the crap out of your game to make it play the way you want, an art that has largely been lost since D&D went to public play. None of it is new ground, but I try to deal with it in new ways. Quirky ways. Ways that at least I’ve never seen done before.

This is an extreme honor for me. I am not only a huge fan of Stuffer Shack, but the other Sites of the Month have been top notch choices; I’m thrilled to be included in their numbers and I have further inspiration in the coming year to push the Quirky DM even farther. Thank you to Tourq for choosing Quirky DM for the Site of the Month for January, and a happy 2012 to everyone out
there.

Thanks bud – keep up the good work!

Daily Encounter started as a useful site, presenting easy to incorporate encounters, often complete with maps and stat blocks. It has blossomed into and incredible resource over the last few months as John Pope has added a number of new designers to his list of authors (a few of which have also been highlighted by KoboldQuarterly.com). Each week they present new and flavorful elements to add to your game, including new themes, feats and terrain elements. Its a must-read for any 4e player or DM.

Here’s a summary from the site founder, John Pope:

Daily Encounter is a site that offers a group of 4E DnD enthusiasts an opportunity to share their ideas for the game. Paul (@paulbaalham), Adam (@blindgeekuk), Micheal (@digitaldraco) and myself (@obsidiancrane) all contribute to the site; from DM advice and campaign craft articles to home brew rules (including themes) and Adam’s Kickstarter roundups.

I’m excited to tell you about our favorite site for November because it’s one of those gaming sites that I go to often. I don’t go there because I like the owner, because the site is pretty and shiny, or because they are an authority on a specific gaming topic. I go there because the site has concrete, useful gaming information that directly improves my game.

What is Chaotic Shiny, exactly? In the words of Swordgleam (Hannah)…

I enjoy the results of the generators, because they put in overtime. What I mean is, I clicked on the “Law” generator to give me a random law for a region in my game…

1. “The penalty for a member of a lower class offending a nobleman is execution.”
2. Another law came up as, “The penalty for a free woman smuggling artifacts is whipping.”

How cool is that? Not only did it give two different laws, but I can also make up entire adventures or encounters based off of these laws.

And that’s only one generator out of what must be a hundred. Here is the result for a single merchant, using the Merchant generator:

Seriously, I could design an entire world with this stuff. Scratch that… I’m sure the Chaotic Shiny generators would do all of that for me. Prophesies, Poisons, Taverns, Adventures, Names, Insignias… you name it, it’s there.

This is the type of stuff that I like. I like getting all kinds of role-playing game material, either to use directly, or to draw inspiration from.

Thanks Hannah!

Incidentally, Hannah will be posting a Steal this Adventure article here at the Shack on Thursday. Make sure you come back and check it out!

I’m sitting here at my work desk, trying to come up with something witty to say. I’ve deleted paragraph after paragraph because they kept making me sound like a complete tool. Maybe that’s the case anyway, but at least at this very moment I’m just typing whatever comes to me.

Quick sidenote: Pour Some Sugar On Me is on the radio right now, and it’s totally pumping me up, putting me in a better, more aggressive, less defeated mood. And if you don’t know the song of which I speak, well then, you’re not as cool as me. You’re probably younger, but not as cool.

I’m not going to get into a huge post about why I started Stuffer Shack (not again, anyway), but I will give you the 50-word rundown: Two things: (1) I had a bunch of gaming ideas piling up in my head, and (2) I had made some gaming accessories that I thought I could sell. Was that 50 words? Probably not.

Writing character backgrounds, adventure ideas, enemies, and so on has been really fun. I’m not the best writer, but I’m not the worst, either. Then why do it? Because I’m a creative kind of person, and I like it. Am I the most creative? Nope – Not by a long shot, but I still enjoy it. Does such a type of article get many comments? Nope. Does that bother me? Yep. I see all these other blogs with all their comments and I realize that I want that. I want people commenting about the things I write. I want people coming to the site when they need ideas for an encounter, or a cool enemy for their adventure. Heck, I want people coming here for ideas of starting that adventure. It took a little while, but I realized that people just don’t leave a lot of comments for that type of post. Heck, it makes me wonder if people even read them, to be honest.

And what about our Next Level Gaming column? Why did I start that? Well, I guess it’s because I had some opinions. I’ve been gaming for two and a half decades, so I should be some sort of expert, right? Besides, Editorials, Reviews and Advice articles get more comments, right?

And what about those accessories we sell? I’m not going to lie… I like selling them. I like seeing that email: Notification of Payment. I like seeing my Paypal balance increase by $20, $30, or $40+ every few days or weeks. I aint gonna lie, I like making that money. Sure, my wife takes it from me, but it’s cool just the same. Should I be talking about making money from the website? I don’t know, but since this is an apology post, I might as well.

Our Store has been part of my problem, though. The Shack makes a good amount of money (for a gaming blog). I’m not going to lie: that excites me – not because I feel I’m “winning,” but because it makes me feel I’ve accomplished something. I’m not the go-getter type, not the popular guy, not the guy voted Most Likely to Succeed. I’m just not that guy. I am the guy who says, “Hey look, I created a little corner of the gaming verse, and it’s at least mildly successful.” So being at least partially successful with our Store makes me feel good. I got lucky, and that is all. Sure, it took a good chunk of work to make our counters and mounts sellable, but it was still luck to begin with.

To be completely honest, though, I REALLY like hearing from customers about how much they like the products. Mini Counters and Horse Minis have been very helpful in our games, so I knew they would be very helpful in other peoples’ games. I go out of my way to make sure customers get good service and a great product. It makes me feel good.

So what’s my problem, then?

Well, I keep wanting more. I keep wanting the site to get bigger and better. I keep finding myself wanting more – more articles, more writers, more products, more customers, more comments, more page rank, and more visitors.

Am I really apologizing for that? No. I’m apologizing for losing focus.

I keep biting off more than I can chew. Instead of focusing on the simple aspect of gaming – blogging about gaming, I’m trying to make Stuffer Shack this great big gaming website. That crap is either going to get there or it isn’t – I need to stop dreaming and start doing. One of my big problems is that I keep tweaking things to make the site “better,” when the only real way to make the site better is to have good, more consistent content. We have some great articles and some great writers, so I need to just let that take center stage.

What I need to stop doing is F’ing with the damn website. I’m always tinkering with this or that to make it look or function better. The Shack blew up a few months ago because I started “upgrading” the theme to make us bigger and more professional. Yeah, that fiasco was my fault. So then we went to our current theme, the second premium theme I had to shell out several Andrew Jacksons for.

You like our current theme? It looks cool, right? Well, it’s a piece of shit. It doesn’t really function like the demo, and is missing several components of a normal blog, some of which I’ve had to pay to have modified in. I’m telling you, it’s so frustrating to buy a premium theme, then find out later it doesn’t have all of the regular features of a free theme. Having those regular features modified in also makes it a bitch to update the theme. But, I made peace with it all because the site had other features not common among free website themes. Which brings me to the whole point of this apology…

I have run into yet another roadblock with this damn theme, this premium theme. I’m not going to get into what the problem is, but just know that it’s not a “I don’t know what I’m doing” issue; it’s a “I’m not going to the support forum to fix another bug yet again” issue. Seriously, I don’t know what’s more lame, this website theme, or me for trying to make it work. I’m done fighting with it. If I didn’t love blogging so much, I’d almost consider hanging up my hat entirely.

So, here’s my apology: I apologize for losing focus. I apologize for biting off more than I can chew. I apologize for thinking bigger and wanting more, instead of focusing on what we have and what we do. I’ve decided to go back to our previous free theme, and focus on the things and people that have made this site great.

I hate having to say this, but we’ll be going through some changes over the next couple of weeks, taking us back to where we were several months ago. Nothing fancy, just clean and functional. I very sincerely apologize for the oncoming mess, especially to those of you who suffered through our first implosion. Hopefully, a back-to-basics trek will help me feel better, instead of defeated, and get this site back on track.

Thank you for reading.

*Edit* We’re back to our old theme now, and it’s working very well.

Hey my fellow gamers, I thought I’d take this opportunity to say a few things about what’s going on around here. We hit a couple of milestones, have a few things coming up, and have a thank you or two to throw out there…

This is My Game is our current Favorite Site of the Month, and our post about it received the most number of hits (compared to other posts about our site of the month feature). So, clearly a great many gamers agree with us on that one.

This brings us to the point of our new Favorite Site of the Month Badge. This is My Game was the first to receive it, and I apologize that we didn’t have one sooner. Jonathan Baldwin is responsible for its design and creation, and I think he did a fantastic job working his digital magic (that’s our mascot there, The Red Knight – courtesy of Greywulf). If your site is one of our past favorites, go ahead and post it if you like!

This also brings up another new graphic, our RPG Site of the Year Shield (Soty). Adam Bragg (Spiralbound) is responsible for this image, and I gotta say that I feel blessed to have Adam as part of our triple-threat of graphic wizards (and he’s a great writer, too).

For 2011, Critical Hits won our Soty award (and $225+ in prizes), and our next one is fast approaching. Who will take the Soty Shield for 2012?

This past weekend we received 100 Spam Comments in a single day. Ha! I don’t know if that’s good or if it’s bad, but it’s a milestone of some sort. So thanks(?) dirtbags! (not you, the spammers).

Also, we just topped 200,000 hits, but I’m looking forward to getting that every month. Is that a stretch? Maybe. Can I do a better job at applying more effort and implementing more SEO strategy? For sure. My goal is not a challenge; it’s merely a matter of time…

John Lewis is firing up Forsaken Destiny, a site dedicated to the Warhammer 40k RPGs. John is a talented writer and has a nice set of followers here at the Shack (and from RoleplayingPro). I know Forsaken Destiny will be top-notch, and I’m looking forward to reading it (as I’m gearing up for playing in the 40K universe).

I’ve never played it, but I often hear that the Mass Effect video game is the shiznit. Wouldn’t it be cool if someone would make a tabletop RPG out of it, or at least post a conversion using a popular d20 system? I’d be totally into that special project…

Stay tuned as we continue to update writer portfolios and profiles. We have a lot of crew members and guest writers, and we’re making it easier for aspiring writers to set up their own gaming column. So thanks for reading, and stick around, ’cause the Shack is only going to get better!

Sometimes I wish I could split myself in two, just so that I would have more time to visit and read up on all of the various gaming blogs. Well, until I gain that superpower, I’ll just have to find other ways to find the time (like no more napping?).

Seriously, imagine my happy surprise when I revisited This is My Game and found all of the cool stuff they have there. Thadeous runs the site, and I have to say that the articles there are just as much fun as his attitude. Another site in my favorites… check √ !

Here’s Thadeous:

This is My Game rides on the back of giants! Any success the site has had is almost completely due to the ever expanding list of contributors. Featuring downloadable game aids, product reviews, Killer editorials, and some amazing ideas by some great people. Without such a great team it wouldn’t even be an 8th of what it is now.

I started This is My Game a year and a half ago as a place to share my thoughts and experiences from my home games. It soon grew into design, theory, product reviews and on and on. But it wasn’t until amazing people like Geek Ken, Randall Walker (Dead Orcs), Jerry Leneave (Dread Gazebo), Dean Gilbert (Arcane Springboard), Mathew Cicci, and so many more joined forces that the site really became what it is today (pure win). If the site didn’t have such an amazing staff the site would be nothing more than me taking pictures of Orcus eating Raisin Bran.

The future of This is My Game is what we make of it, and I’m pretty sure that is nothing but pure awesome!

Thadeous S. Cooper

Thanks to Thadeous for This is My Game. Keep up the good work!