WotC’s Future VTT – A Few Thoughts
The more I read about WotC’s plans for their upcoming virtual tabletop software, the more I understand what the whole OGL 1.1 was all about. I am also pretty sure that people in...
April 20, 2023
Stargazer
Michael Wolf is a German games designer and enthusiast best known for his English language role-playing games blog, Stargazer's World, and for creating the free rules-light medieval fantasy adventure game Warrior, Rogue & Mage. He has also worked as an English translator on the German-language Dungeonslayers role-playing game and was part of its editorial team.
In addition to his work on Warrior, Rogue & Mage and Dungeonslayers, he has created several self-published games and also performed layout services and published other independent role-playing games such as A Wanderer's Romance, Badass, and the Wyrm System derivative Resolute, Adventurer & Genius, all released through his imprint Stargazer Games.
Professionally, he works as a video technician and information technologies specialist. Stargazer's World was started by Michael in August 2008.
ChatGPT and Game Design
Using AI to create art or texts is all the rage right now. But it’s also a highly controversial topic. These AI models are trained using existing art which more often than not...
February 9, 2023
The Lost Ultima Tabletop Roleplaying Game
Even before I knew what pen & paper roleplaying games were, I was a fan of computer RPGs. Among the first titles I ever played from the genre were The Bard’s Tale and...
February 2, 2023
They lost! We won! Or did we? (And some musings on the upcoming D&D movie)
Wizards of the Coast managed to do something extraordinary. In just a few days they managed to alienate a large portion of third-party publishers and some of their former business partners and alienated...
February 1, 2023
More Alternatives to D&D 5th Edition
About a week ago I wrote a post about several tabletop RPGs you could check out if you want to turn your backs on D&D. This post proved quite popular, so here are...
January 22, 2023
One Game to Rule Them All …
For quite some time now, Dungeons & Dragons (especially in its 5th Edition) has been THE roleplaying game. There have been times when D&D was basically to roleplaying games what Xerox was to...
January 15, 2023
Let’s talk about alternatives to D&D 5E
A lot of people are pretty unhappy with Wizards of the Coast at this point and are looking for other games to explore. Instead of pointing at some obvious choices like switching to...
January 14, 2023
My thoughts on the OGL scandal
If you haven’t been living under a rock these past few days, you surely have heard about the scandal surrounding the leak of Wizards of the Coast’s OGL 1.1. The Open Game License...
January 12, 2023
Why GURPS?
In my last post I revealed my renewed interest in GURPS aka the Generic Universal Roleplaying System by Steve Jackson Games. Back in the 1990s when I first got into roleplaying games I...
January 5, 2023
A Look Back on 2022 (and plans for the future)
Oh boy, where to start? When it comes to this blog, 2022 has probably been one of my most unproductive years so far. Luckily things weren’t that bad when it actually came to...
December 30, 2022
A story of D&D 5th Edition, vicious circles and mistakes made
The last time I wrote a post on this blog I was preparing a D&D one-shot for a group of dear friends. I had prepared a very simple dungeon adventure designed by Matt...
December 1, 2022
Preparing a D&D one-shot
In the last couple of years I had to cope with mental health issues, a world-wide pandemic, and other life events that seriously messed with my ability to run roleplaying games. At this...
June 8, 2022
What’s New With The Stargazer?
It has been a while since I wrote a proper blog post and even though there’s no reason to feel bad about not posting anything, I actually do feel a bit bad about...
June 2, 2022
Fresh Take on d20 Modern in the works
Evil Genius Productions‘ Dave Scott recently let me know that they are working on “Everyday Heroes”, which is basically a new take on WotC’s d20 Modern using 5E-compatible rules. They even managed to...
February 10, 2022
Excited about “Monster of the Week”
A couple of years back I had the chance to playtest tremulus by Sean Preston. Tremulus is a lovecraftian horror RPG using rules inspired by Apocalypse World. To this day this has been...
February 9, 2022
The Alt-Right in Tabletop Gaming
I highly recommend anyone watching the latest video from YouTuber John Battle in which he looks closer at some of the more toxic elements in our hobby. If you watch only one YouTube...
January 28, 2022
World in Progress (Part 2)
About two weeks ago I posted my first attempt at a map created in Wonderdraft on Twitter. To my surprise this post created a lot of interest and I got a ton of...
January 27, 2022