Monthly Archives: August 2015
10 Tabletop Games Teachers Can Use in Their Classroom
If you don’t know already, I am an educator. I love teaching. If you take away the assessments, the paperwork, and all the red tape that exists in the school system, teaching is a pretty remarkable profession.
Also if you know me, I love tabletop gaming.
So if there are ways to incorporate gaming into the classroom, I will make those strides to do so. Of course, I implement gaming strategically. You can’t just be going into school and saying to your students, “Let’s play this game”, without ensuring that the game incorporates some element of curriculum (unless you’re just taking a break from curriculum, in which case go nuts). You also have to consider that it will engage the majority of your student classroom and if the game sparks many conversations in the curriculum that you’re trying to teach.
Having said this, in no particular order, here are my…
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Snippet : Mad Monks of Kwantoom permanently reduced to $5
A quick snippet of information that should be of interest to all solo gamers, fans of Oriental Adventures or anyone who likes awesome sourcebooks and campaign ideas. Kabuki Kaiser has announced on G+ that he’s permanently reducing the price of Mad Monks of Kwantoom, his 228 page solo play, monster manual, campaign guide & DM aid all in one, to $5.
This really is a no-brainer to go and download right now, if you don’t already have it. There’s something in here for every single OSR fan, player or DM.
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INDIE SPOTLIGHT: Exoplanet: First Contact
Exoplanet:First Contact is a balanced Action/RPG mix focused on exploring and interaction with the game’s world.
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Never tell me the odds…of my defective dice
So, as much as it pains me to do it, it looks like I owe the D20 system an apology. For years (well, decades now- eek!) I have disliked the D20 family of RPGs. Having cut my fangs on Shadowrun and GURPS the idea of classes and levels never set well with me. I never liked hitpoints. I downright hate rolling a single die at a time (regardless of the type) and the D20 rolls like a beach ball
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Mess With Your Players
No plot survive contact with the enemy– I mean players. They mess up your perfectly planned adventures, missing vital clues, and killing vital NPCs by stabbing them in their vital organs. What’s a GM to do? Mess with them right back! Symmetry is a grand thing, is it not? Here’s a few evil ways to mess with your players:
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Wargaming revealed new Global Map
Wargaming announced that the revamped Global Map is now live in Europe, North America, Asia and Korea .
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Open World Prototype: City Streaming Technique and Source Code
I created an 8×8 city, meaning a total of 64 blocks. I created the buildings in Unity using cubes and textures. The main feature for this requirement was the streaming of the city, which meant that when the player was at a certain block in the city only the blocks that were necessary to be present for gameplay should be spawn, and the rest should be deleted. There are three scripts that take care of this process: TriggerVolume, BlockStreamScript and StreamManager
Trigger Volumes
I began by creating a script that creates a trigger volume for each block. I used all colliders in the block in order to obtain the bounds of the collider. I made sure to include a rate variable so that I could play around with the size of the collider that is created because sometimes it ended up being 2x bigger than the city block.
Setting Each City…
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Combination Geocache Tube Codex
A lockable cache for geocaching or private storage.
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The Future of LARP: What will LARP look like in 15 years?
15 years ago theater LARPs were dominated by weekend-long one-shot games and build-your-own-character campaign games, and NERO dominated boffer games. What are the long-term trends in LARP plotting, writing and structure? How could technology impact LARP? Let’s peer into our crystal ball, and see what LARP will look like in 15 years.
A discussion from NELCO 2014 about design trends, social trends and technology trends in LARP looking out to 2029 (and looking back at the last 15 years).
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This is part 7 of 10 for the NELCO 2014 Panels & Presentations series.
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To Switch or Not To Switch? Part 2: Learning New Rules
This is Part 2 in a series called “To Switch or Not To Switch” about whether or not my gaming group should switch to Dungeons and Dragons, 5th Edition, or stay with Pathfinder.
Our gaming group has a varied background when it comes to RPGs. We even enjoy it for different reasons – some are more calculating/mechanics-focused, some are driven more by story/character, and a couple of folks mostly like the social aspect of nerds gathering around a table, no matter what game gets played. This doesn’t bother me, but it does create some situations where one might lose the perspective of a fellow adventurer.
In particular this comes up over rules. Many gamers online have praised 5th ed for its ease of keeping the game going, but I’ve never found the Pathfinder rules to be cumbersome. I find us getting each others way to be cumbersome, because we all…
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Can You Guess?
Hello there!
I have one photo to show you. The playing pieces fo the Map Game, but there are no kangaroo or cockatoo on those. Look closely and tell me if you can guess what this means?
This is a very exciting news and more photos will come next month!
You can also follow Paris-Bourke on Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest.
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The Man from Gotham – Bill Finger Returns in Documentary that Proves Everything You Know About Batman is Wrong
If there is one documentary that I am looking forward more than other in the near future, it is Marc Tyler Nobleman’s Bill Finger documentary The Cape Creator: A Tribute to Bat-Maker Bill Finger.
Bill Finger is the co-creator of everyone’s favourite Dark Knight Detective – Batman.
Unofficially he created around 90% of what we know to be Batman – the cape and cowl, Batcave, majority of the classic villains, the “Dark Knight” nickname, origin story, and a whole heap of other stuff that will be the subject of a more in depth post here soon enough where I promise to do my best not to refer to Bob Kane as the ultimate comic book villain, but don’t keep your fingers crossed.
If you really need to know the full details now of what Bill Finger created, then read Dial B for Blog’s article – which is the single most…
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The Mary Sue: Being in an All-Girls DnD Group
I noticed over on The Mary Sue an interesting post about a woman who got into a Dungeons and Dragons group for the long term, but only when playing with other women after bad experiences. While reading the post, I was immediately struck by some of the things I’ve mentioned in the past on this blog as being barriers or issues to women in Dungeons and Dragons (roleplaying in general). Most notably, the author of this piece at the Mary Sue was very dismissive of getting into Dungeons and Dragons on three primary points:
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The Art of Story Telling. Part 1.
As a Dungeon Master you will wear several hats. You are the referee, adjudicator, administrator and creator, as well as playing the part of a host of Non Player Characters and monsters. One of the most important however is that of the storyteller. In fact some Role Playing Games even refer to the Games Master position as the storyteller! Being a great story teller has little to do with knowing the rules of the game . It is about understanding how to create and deliver content to your players and bringing your world and each scene to life. In this multi part series we will look at ways to improve your ability to deliver content, and make you a better story teller.
If you have played more than a few games of Dungeons & Dragons with several different groups, then undoubtedly at some point you will have played with that…
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Escaping Escapism: Using Game Design For The Real World
Games are everything I’m not. Video games make me feel powerful, they give me a purpose and I am well rewarded in games. In Monopoly we become rich; in World of Warcraft we save the world; in poker we are devilishly strategic. People can often use games to escape the negatives and the anxieties that reality provides. In some cases it’s just a bit of fun, in other cases it can be unhealthy.
I deal with anxiety on a daily basis. I can sometimes be in a constant state of anxiousness for reason beyond my control. In some cases it feels as if I’m floating in air watching me do things with no feeling of what these things are doing for me; there can often be a lack of emotion and in some cases a lack of identity. When you’re in a constant state of negative emotion it can be…
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Problems Generated By Successful Actions
I used to think that game development was this glamorous, fun, coding, experience that was intense but just a blast. I know better now. The truth behind game development is that it is a lot of work. It still is fun, but there is no glamour.
What do I mean? Well Let me tell you my story. I used to do this as a hobby. I loved to make cool things render to the screen. I would play around with it for a few hours a week. Then it turned into a few hours a day. From there I gathered people, they wanted to make games. So it turned into 20 hours a week. At that point I mostly coded, still seemed like my vision of what I though game development was was true.
I then started to think, if we get a game to the finish line, how do…
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Investiture of Water (5e)
Investiture of Water
6th Level Transmutation
- Casting Time: 1 Action
- Range: Self
- Components: VS
- Duration: Concentration, up to 10 Minutes
Until the spell ends, water drips from the caster’s body and they stand in a small pool of water. The casters gains the following benefits:
- They are Resistant to Fire and Acid
- The caster may breath underwater and may Swim their normal Movement speed.
- The caster may use their Action to raise a mist that creates Light or Heavy Obscurement as the caster choose (Reaction to change).
- The caster may use their Action to transform themselves into water, fluid and amorphous. They have a Speed of 20, and are Immune to Melee or Missile damage in this form. They may not cast spells in this form.
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Steampunk
“Steampunk Clock”
Painting by Luis Cruz
From art.ekstrax.com
the automaton
sleeps in a leather valise
aboard coal fired
wagon-lits exiting
Paris for Zurich
where Boole
surreptitiously waits
in the garish
pooled gaslight
that puddles his
well disguised lab
grown impatient
with checking
rechecking
his bold philosophical
specs for the final
adjustments
the strokes
that will transform
intelligent worlds with
a lifelike machine-driven
self-thinking man
as the nearing train
mounts chugging groaning
steep Swiss elevations
he opens his pocket-fobbed
quantum clock geared
for the measure of logic
and smiles with a
mathematic knowledge
that soon will arrive
his inchoate invention
prepared to receive
its mechanical mind
what the future will hold
will be told
by new means
of computing
the physics and abstracts
that ever have challenged
organic gray brains
told by gleaming gold
ratchets and pistons
of new jewelried genius
the clatter of horsecarts
on cobblestoned lanes
makes his waiting
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Tome and Tomb 