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Mike Carr played the first cleric in the history of fantasy tabletop role playing games. Like, the very first. Ever. In the decades since, the character class has earned a spot at the core of the hobby, so when Carr casually mentioned in an email that he played the first one in a now-legendary...

Central Iowa gamers, cosplayers and fans took a trip down the rabbit hole last weekend for DemiCon 29. The annual science fiction, fantasy and gaming convention held at a Holiday Inn in Des Moines, Iowa, provided an impressive variety of options for entertainment, from art and music to...

I grew up in a tiny town in northeast Iowa where you won't find a single stoplight or public library, let alone a game store. With fewer than 600 souls, it's probably the last place you'd expect to be immortalized in the pages of one of the most influential Dungeons & Dragons adventure modules...

Most role-playing game adventures depend on the player characters going out into the world seeking adventure. They leave their homes or bases of operation and travel to a dungeon, a wizard's tower or a newly discovered planet. But sometimes an adventure designer wants to take the story to the...

H.P. Lovecraft, the giant of horror fiction who created the Cthulhu mythos, scared his readers in all kinds of ways, filling his works with nightmarish elder gods and a sense of humanity's insignificance in the cosmos. But many of his works relied on the same handful of universally frightening...

Let's talk about a valuable lesson game masters can take from The Force Awakens and 2009's Star Trek, both directed by J.J. Abrams. Maybe you've heard of them. Those movies often polarize fans of the respective franchises, but game masters can take some lessons from how Abrams mixes...

Gamers have gotten pretty comfortable over the years with the triumvirate of books that form the core of Dungeons & Dragons. In fact, I suspect many gamers allow their familiarity with the three-book format to keep them from closely reading the entirety of those texts. Those gamers, myself...

One of my favorite Ferengi Rules of Acquisition says, "Dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack." In the realm of rpg design, I might modify that to say, "A good adventure idea and an empty sack is worth the sack." In this case, I'm talking about grand, imaginative, thrilling adventure ideas...

One of the first rules they teach you in those pesky freshman-year composition courses is "know your audience." Before you sit down to write a text, consider who's going to be reading it and plan accordingly. When it comes to tabletop role-playing games, I've always considered the game master to...