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 it. Sigh. So I decided to give you...
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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 point I am...
View ArticleA 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 enjoying the roleplaying...
View ArticleWhy 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 quickly...
View ArticleMy 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 1.0a allowed fans and...
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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 one of the...
View ArticleOne 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...
View ArticleThey 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...
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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 Ultima VI. While I enjoyed...
View ArticleChatGPT 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 is copyrighted and was...
View ArticleWotC’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 charge don’t know what...
View ArticleMy all-time favorite roleplaying game
Over the years I have played quite a few tabletop roleplaying games and I’ve read many more, but there’s one game or rather a series of games which have become my all-time favorite roleplaying games....
View ArticleBooks, PDFs and Online Services
Back in the early days of the hobby tabletop roleplaying games came in the form of books or small booklets, sometimes as part of a boxed set. With the advent of the internet there came another way of...
View ArticleDungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves
D&D: Honor Among Thieves is the latest movie based on the fan-favorite tabletop roleplaying games. While the older movies were in the so-bad-its-good category of B-movies, Honor Among Thieves is...
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The Stargazer’s Legacy
A while back I decided not to talk about unfinished tabletop RPG projects any more since they more often than not went up in flames shortly thereafter. But this time I am so excited, I need to write...
View ArticleThe best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry
Happy New Year everyone! While looking through my posts from the last two years or so I noticed a disturbing trend: I make a lot of plans but they often if not most of the time don’t work out as...
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Some thoughts on The Fantasy Trip
Back in 2022 I bought the “The Fantasy Trip” bundle on Bundle of Holding. Before that I have been aware of the system and read the clone of TFT released by Dark City Games. For some reason the clone...
View ArticleWe need more good player advice
A lot if not the vast majority of articles, blog posts, videos about roleplaying games are focused on giving advice to game masters. From my experience and observations, most people writing or...
View ArticleTencent to buy D&D?
Just a few minutes ago I noticed a couple of posts on social media about a news article on the site Pandaily (which I have never heard before). I did some googling and found a handful of other sources...
View ArticleOf Harassment In The Dungeons & Dragons Community And Other Unpleasant Things
Today I stumbled upon an article by Jeff Rients in which he writes about a rather lengthy Medium post by Dr. Clio Belle Weisman, a psychotherapist and social research scientist. She did a long study...
View ArticleAsk The Readers: Option Paralysis
For years I have been dealing with a rather severe case of option or rather decision paralysis. As you probably know I own way too many roleplaying games. I love reading new games and checking out the...
View ArticleNew Player Advice: Curb Your Expectations!
So you have watched a season of Critical Role (or another high profile Actual Play series by professional actors/voice actors) and now your are interested in joining a tabletop roleplaying game?...
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What’s holding Open Legend back?
A while back I bought a used hardcover copy of Open Legend. According to its subtitle it’s an open-source RPG which is right up my alley. I basically bought it on a whim. The cover looked nice and...
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TV Series Which Could Make Great TTRPG Campaigns
Turning existing movie, book or TV show franchises into tabletop roleplaying campaigns isn’t always a great idea. In many cases the world depicted in these kinds of media exist only to facilitate one...
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Kickstarter: Dimday Red TTRPG – Nodus Zine 02
A couple of days ago Spiros Drakatos reached out to me and let me know about Dimday Red, his post-apocalyptical TTRPG and the Kickstarter he’s currently running to finance a zine to expand the...
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