Recent content by Lord_Blacksteel

  1. Lord_Blacksteel

    D&D 5E (2024) Is There A New Sheriff in Town?

    An exciting time much like the late 70's when Runequest and Chivalry and Sorcery and Tunnels and Trolls all made a splash ... and the 80's where the mighty Avalon Hill released Powers & Perils, plus GURPS was new and Fantasy Hero was new ... and the 90's where FASA - FASA! - put out an actual...
  2. Lord_Blacksteel

    Rant: The WORST way to encourage people to try other games than D&D

    She has a separate channel called Dungeons & Discourse focused on RPGs with a similar tone and approach.
  3. Lord_Blacksteel

    How is you Tales of the Valiant game going?

    Session 29 is tomorrow for our old school Temple of Elemental Evil campaign. It's been a lot of fun going back to Greyhawk, Hommlet, Nulb, Verbobonc ... old-school adventures using brand-new rules was part of how I presented it to the players and it has worked out really well. With up to 8...
  4. Lord_Blacksteel

    Best toolbox RPG to start with?

    There are generic systems meant to be used with any genre and any setting - Hero, GURPS, FATE, Cortex, Savage Worlds, Genesys and probably others I am forgetting. Each of those still has a very different feel to it even though it is generic. There are toolbox games aimed at a particular genre...
  5. Lord_Blacksteel

    Do All of Your RPG Maps Now Belong To Judges Guild? ... and more?

    Icosahedral maps were used before Traveller came along - in the world, not RPGs - so I think we're all safe there. I believe Marc Miller holds all the Traveller rights these days and licenses them out to Mongoose among others and still occasionally puts out his own material for T5. As for...
  6. Lord_Blacksteel

    What does it take for an RPG to die?

    I definitely agree with the idea of multiple levels of "dead" - out of print is one, lack of online discussion community is another, etc. In the early days of the internet it seemed like every obscure game had some dedicated fan that set up a GeoCities page for it and posted up their house rules...
  7. Lord_Blacksteel

    Has Wizards of the Coast Given Up on Sigil?

    I think your second point is the big one. At a corporate level "digital" is still a buzzword in many places and look at the timing here: BG3 comes out, gets a ton of attention, and makes a lot of money Upper management at WOTC, if not Hasbro too, sees and wants to use this momentum so we get...
  8. Lord_Blacksteel

    Has Wizards of the Coast Given Up on Sigil?

    This is a story that has been going around, particularly on YouTube, but the focus was not on the VTT - it's on Beyond. DDB is where the books would be replaced, not Sigil. The VTT was just one more element to try and make the subscription model more appealing. With that gone it may weaken the...
  9. Lord_Blacksteel

    Are Orcs in the Monster Manual? No and Yes.

    Having more unique statblocks in the Monster Manual is better, not worse. Orcs might be the most-used monster in the history of published D&D adventures. They should have more statblocks - mechanically distinct statblocks - than most opponents because they show up a lot. Not "zero". Orc Warrior...
  10. Lord_Blacksteel

    Are Orcs in the Monster Manual? No and Yes.

    Errr ... what? Plenty of us were "moaning" about it in 1989. We knew why they were pulled but we still didn't like it and saw it as regrettable caving in to outside forces. Besides Giants and Dragons, Demons and Devils were big time enemies for medium to high level characters. Taking them out of...
  11. Lord_Blacksteel

    D&D General Ray Winninger on 5e’s success, product cadence, the OGL, and more.

    GW releases a new version of one of their rulesets every year - 2023 was 40K 10th edition, 2024 was Age of Sigmar 4th edition, this summer is supposed to be a new version of Horus Heresy ... if you play multiple games you're buying a new set of rules every 1-2-3 years, depending. It would be...
  12. Lord_Blacksteel

    ToV Sell Me on Tales of the Valiant

    I'm running ToV now and have been for several months. We are 16 sessions in and I have 8 players. All of us have extensive experience with 5E - and most of us have played a wide range of other RPG's over the decades as well. I'm using the Goodman Games 5E version of Temple of Elemental Evil as...
  13. Lord_Blacksteel

    D&D General Does WotC use its own DMG rules?

    If there was an "encounter guru/czar" at WOTC whose job was to check all encounters headed for publishing and validate them against the DMG guidelines we might have some real consistency. I am pretty sure this is not any one person's job though so in addition to different people working on...
  14. Lord_Blacksteel

    Mörk Borg Is Getting a Video Game

    So will the game just randomly end at some point regardless of your actions? That would be true to the RPG at least.
  15. Lord_Blacksteel

    Pathfinder: The Dragon's Demand Reveals New Trailer, Kickstarter Launching Soon

    "a CRPG-style game that uses a tabletop miniatures-style and the Pathfinder 2E ruleset." - so this is an actual computer game, right? Because watching that trailer it looks like "digital miniatures" means "we aren't going to animate the pcs/npcs/monsters in this thing" which is a pretty dramatic...
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