Ravingspire Kickstarter Launches!

Its finally here! Ravingspire: Assault on the Tower of Madness Kickstarter has launched!

Its a deck-building boardgame with a rotating gameboard and a card-saving battle mat that emulates equipping weapons and magic items as you adventure in the haunted tower. We've been working very hard on it and I'm excited the rest of the world will finally get to see it! Check out the old-school D&D commercial we made for it below:

2e AD&D Funfest - Revengeance of the Chronostone: Escape from Fireball Island!

I run an annual RPG game for my old high school and college buddies at a mini convention I put on, called ScanCon. The game is usually some kind of one-shot mashup rpg I've come up with that I'm thinking about running at a convention or two the following year. Often they involve nostalgic 80's themes, like He-Man, Tron, or Johnny Mnemonic. I run these games using 3.5e or 5e D&D rulesets, because they're so pick-up game-friendly.

Not this time, though. This year I decided to not only have the players re-create the first D&D character they ever played, I also wanted to run the game in the first D&D edition we ever experienced: the dreaded 2nd edition AD&D!

Curse of Strahd on Fantasy Grounds

So I've just learned that Fantasy Grounds has made the whole Curse of Strahd module available and all ready-to-go! This is fantastic news.

I used to use Fantasy Grounds to run a campaign of 3.5e D&D with a bunch of far-flung buddies. I ran them through Expedition to Castle Ravenloft. Even posted a bunch of update threads on the old blog, and the screenshots I took of our games ended up on the Fantasy Grounds website (Valhallan). But for Expedition to Castle Ravenloft I had to transcribe everything by hand into Fantasy Grounds. Back then (2008) you couldn't even cut and paste from an outside document to inside, so every word, action button, clickable response, die modifier, had to be written directly into the FG program, which didn't have as smooth a typing interface as, say a Word document. It was almost a 3:1 ratio of Prep:Gameplay in those days. I would gladly pay someone else to do all that transcription for me.

 
Now you can just buy everything pre-packaged and ready to go? Kids these days don't know how good they have it. And I've been reading Curse of Strahd and I have to admit, its a really good remake of the original Castle Ravenloft. A lot more fleshed out, and even features [SPOILER ALERT] Rudolph Van Richten! I'll give a more indepth review of the book once I finish it, but for now I'm just excited that if I decide to play it remotely I won't have to write everything myself for Fantasy Grounds. Anything that results in more gaming and less prepping is aces in my book!

Game on!

I both dread and kinda hope for this...

Monsters from the depths below

Had my buddy Shadowgolem over the other day to help me out with some product shots of our upcoming Ravingspire game, and while he was here he was kind enough to do some glamour shots of some of my painted miniatures as well. The guy's skills with mixing different flash colors using variable exposure times is out of this world.

Thought I'd post up a couple of my heavy hitters that he took shots of, freshly arisen from the depths below!

Cthulhu Ftaghn! He-Man and Skeletor are in trouble now!

I didn't think there was any way to make the Dracolich more frightening, but clearly there was!