The Mercer Effect
Without a doubt, Matthew Mercer and the rest of the Critical Role team has had a huge impact on how many people perceive roleplaying games in general and Dungeons & Dragons in particular....
January 15, 2019
Random musings
Happy New Year–Plans for 2019 and A Look Back
After taking an extensive break over the holidays I am back at work. This is also a good opportunity to give you an update what I have been up to lately. Without further...
January 7, 2019
CYOA – My Plans and My Dead Ends
So I said in my post back on December 22nrd (Terrible Habits) that I wanted to write a Fighting Fantasy style book. In truth I wanted to write multiple fighting fantasy style books...
December 29, 2018
Finishing A Project, Looking Back
Back in September I wrote a couple of posts about long running reviews. Well it is now 28th of December and I have just finished my series on HARP, High Adventure Role Playing....
December 28, 2018
Terrible Habits
Amongst other things I am an indie game developer and a hobbiest programmer. This means that I often find that if I cannot find just the right game or just the right gaming...
December 22, 2018
Strongholds, Towers, and Hideouts
I am currently reading through the D&D Rules Cyclopedia from 1991 and I’m constantly discovering game aspects that the later editions lack or which have been severely limited in scope. One of these...
November 28, 2018
No OSR for me!
I have never really paid much attention to the OSR movement. Firstly, I didn’t really understand if it was Old School Revival or Old School Renaissance. Then I didn’t know what counted as...
November 25, 2018
Blast from the Past: D&D Rules Cyclopedia from 1991
Over the past few years, when I was looking more closely into old-school D&D, the OSR, the various retro-clones etc. numerous people recommended the Rules Cyclopedia to me. It’s basically a compilation of...
November 20, 2018
Stargazer’s thoughts on the OSR
What is the OSR? If you ask several gamers you’ll likely get different answers. The acronym usually stands for old-school revolution or old-school renaissance. For some people the OSR is celebrating games and...
November 20, 2018
A Message From White Wolf
Three days ago the interim manager at White Wolf Publishing posted the following on their official website: Hello everyone, My name is Shams Jorjani, VP of Business Development at Paradox Interactive and interim...
November 19, 2018
Confessions of a terrible GM
Ok, I am probably not that bad, but sometimes I feel that way. I’ve run games that were terribly boring, extremely formulaic, and I made every mistake at least twice. I remember game...
October 25, 2018
I’ve got Genesys on my mind
After I decided to cancel my D&D game, one of the players immediately offered to run a “Realms of Terrinoth” game for us. “Realms of Terrinoth” is the first in the line of...
October 22, 2018
Looking at FUDGE again
So this week I read the rules for Hack-n-Slash and they are pretty close to what I have been looking for. The deficiency is in the skills system primarily and the setting. The...
October 19, 2018
Organizing my tabletop RPG library
I have a huge collection of roleplaying games. Aside from a lot of books which are scattered all over my house (we even have a bookshelf with roleplaying games in the bathroom next...
October 18, 2018
Getting Back Into The Game
Everything is not rainbows and butterflies when it comes to roleplaying games in the house of the Stargazer – far from it. If you’ve followed my blog over the years you know about...
October 15, 2018
The Great Google+ to Mewe Migration of 2018
A couple of days ago Google announced that they will shutdown Google+ in 2019. This was a shock especially to many tabletop RPG fans which have used the platform basically from day one...
October 11, 2018
A Missed Opportunity
A while ago I read about the new Endless Quest books by Candlewick Press. They have been written by Matt Forbeck, are set into the Forgotten Realms, and in each book you can...
September 26, 2018