Recent content by Stik

Interesting stuff. There's very much an R. Crumb feel to it.

A group I used to play with had a chain of taverns, with a franchise in every major city, called "The Vomiting Dragon" I've also used: The Broken Drum (a Terry Pratchett reference) The Mended Drum (the same pub, rebuilt after the fire) The Dew Drop Inn (another really bad pun name) Some of...

"Funeral for a Friend" (Elton John) is covered by Dream Theater on the A Change of Seasons album, and they do a better version than the original. They also cover several other classic rock songs on that album, including Achilles Last Stand, The Song Remains the Same, Bohemian Rhapsody, and...

Making the zipper is the easy part. INVENTING the zipper is the hard part.

No gamer's trip to NYC is complete without a trip to The Compleat Strategist (11 E 33rd St, between 5th Ave and Madison Ave, 212-685-3880). It's a tiny little store with more gaming materials than you will ever need. Check store hours before planning your trip. While there, go a block west...

The SCA, a medieval recreation group (www.sca.org) encourages its members to adopt a more medieval style of speaking at events, to create a more "period" atmosphere. In an article entitled "Speaking Forsoothly", they offer the following advice on "thee" and "thou":

My friends and I started in Middle School, and sort of taught each other. Through college and afterwards I played in other campaigns and learned whatever I could from every DM I gamed with. There's always something to be learned from any DM you meet, although sometimes it's what NOT to do.

Contrary to popular opinion, and despite the numerous elements taken from LOTR, Tolkien did not inspire EVERYTHING in D&D. The cleric class was inspired by the orders of fighting priests which proliferated in Europe during and after the Crusades, such as the Knights Templar. If you look at...

We had a very strange occurrence at our gaming table one night. We had a new player join the group and the DM had gotten together with her one night about a week before her first session and they rolled up her character, a cleric by the name of F'Lora. During the week after they created her...

One important thing that many people forget about dragons, especially old dragons, is that they are DRAGONS. A dragon is pretty much a living billboard for a huge treasure hoard: you see a dragon, there is gold nearby. So a dragon must stay on his toes if he is going to reach Old age. He must...

Most of the time, the players will never notice if you change the name of a town or an NPC, unless there was something important about it. They are too focused on staying alive and accomplishing their goals than in how many children the Lord Mayor of Lerxtwood has. By the same token, however...

Sometimes all it takes to make a town memorable is an interesting event or NPC. Barring that, throw some unusual law or condition at the players, something that makes them have to think out of the box. My players are in a major city right now, where local laws forbid wearing armor or carrying...

I started with issue 62, and have not missed an issue since. I can still picture the cover- an armored man on horseback fighting two or three orcs with a forest and a mountain peak behind.

TSR put out a book for Second Edition AD&D called Aurora's Whole Realms Catalog which had some interesting equipment in it. Of course, a good modern tool and hardware catalog can be a big help for DMs...

I am active in the SCA, so I have all the garb I would ever need to dress up for a D&D game. But I don't. D&D is not about dress-up. It's about imagination. Leave the dress-up for the fantasy LARPers. The closest I ever came to dressing up for a game was when I DMed the Ravenloft module...