The Gaming Den

Has anyone given Netflix's The Witcher a shot? I've made it all the way through, but, as with most of Netflix's original content, it feels like something I'll have completely forgotten about in a month. As context, I've played the first two games but not read any of the books. I don't have any real ...

Going to play Gloomhaven for the first time, what should I know about the game mechanics? General thoughts on the game? There's an app you can get that takes care of most of the initiative and enemy HP bookkeeping, although it requires you to have a big screen near your table, taking up even more s...

I liked the John Carter movie. Out of interest, do they mention the original novels, or just the adaptations? Yeah, from ERB, the Barsoom, Tarzan, Venus, and Pellucidar stories are all recommended. I've never read any of his work, it might be the biggest gap in my knowledge of pre-Tolkien fantasy a...

You'd think that the default assumption would be some kind of "Noble Council" where the different player characters get one title that gives them a domain super power like they were players in Junta or Skeksis or something. You and Emerald raise good suggestions. I believe that ACKS took ...

EDIT: I guess since I touched on it a bit, what games have the best morale mechanics? Is rolling 2d6 when shit goes down and looking at a monster's Morale stat the ideal way to go? I find old D&D style 2d6 rolls to work reasonably well in most cases. They often require a reasonable amount of DM...

How exactly do y’all envision dungeoneering adventurer PC’s interacting with domains at the table, do PC’s do this when the session is over, does the DM just keep track for them, or is it active table time and if so how do PC’s Omanis interact with each other For ACKS, I think it's common to resolv...

If anyone is curious, this is a reasonably in-depth discussion of ACKS and AER. SineNomine made AER, and Tavis was one of the main ACKS people, although he has since left Autarch.

How many game have explicit retreat mechanics? PCs have a hard time knowing when to call it quits, especially in non-ancient D&D games and their spinoffs. I figure that if there's an express mechanic for fleeing combat in the rules, then players might feel more comfortable running away since th...

How much of the book is there left to review? Not much. This post, and one more about a “Secrets” chapter. This is kind of emblematic of how ACKS is better researched than most games of this genre and also nowhere near as well researched as it thinks it is. I mean, if you look up the "wiki-fac...

Is there any lingering benefit to starting as a lower social class? Like, did official adventures establish a precedent where being a prisoner would give you helpful contacts in certain circles?

I’m not clear on how eldritch magic is cast vs singing and ceremonial. Is eldritch spontaneous vancian? Sorry, I must have been unclear. Trying to list all the pertinent points: Eldritch spellcasters, spellsingers, and ceremonialists all draw off of the same spell list. Eldritch spellcasters, spell...

Heroic Magic This is another long, poorly organized chapter. (It also has an impressively ill-fitting name, as much of the magic it covers is pretty villainous.) By this point, the reader can deduce by context that this book overwrites most of how D&D does magic. They’ve seen terms like “ceremo...

Random question: does anyone remember details about WotC's Setting Search back in 2002, or knows about a blog or something about it? Since Eberron has been officially announced as a 5E release, I'd love to get some background on that setting, but I haven't found anything beyond the most vague of de...

Sorry, the product's actual name is Blade of the Iron Throne. It's been a while. It is a spiritual successor, Norwood was the sole (credited) author of RoS and is only listed as an 'inspiration' in BotIT. BotIT is a saner work than RoS, but only by a certain degree. There's another one as well, cal...

ACKS’ Auran Empire implicit setting has turned out to be mostly dissatisfying. Its ancient history is pretty neat: you have the swingy tragicomic nature of low-level D&D explained as the gods of chaos breaking the setting’s “tablets of destiny” and keeping the gods of law from ensuring that good...

Was wondering, how much time does a published setting need to describe things clearly based on well known things? I mean, if you are doing the real world + vampires, you'd probably want to concentrate on the "+ vampires" bit, if you are sticking dinosaurs into your fantasy game you probab...

My preferred justification is "any money made off of ACKS is fucking pennies; this is a game that quite possibly fewer than a thousand people have ever played". I fully acknowledge that this is a self-serving excuse: it allows me to casually peruse ACKS products without considering the awf...

Chapter 2: Heroes aka New classes http://autarch.co/sites/autarch.co/files/pc_classes.jpg The ACKS art is generally really good This is about fifty or fifty-five of Chapter 2’s seventy pages. By the standards of any D&D-clone, ACKS has a lot of classes. The core book has twelve, the Player’s Co...

ACKS: Heroic Fantasy Handbook https://www.drivethrurpg.com/images/4277/233226.jpg Not totally sure what’s going on with her torso, but it looks painful What is Adventurer Conqueror King System (ACKS)? It’s a D&D “retroclone” based on the basic / “red box” ruleset from the early 80s. Its key sel...

Mordheim or Bloodbowl video games any good? I got the mordheim game for free from a friend, have tried to play it a few times, and have never gotten hooked. (For reference, I really like the firaxis nu-xcom games, have no investment in the mordheim tabletop game, and have minimal investment in warh...

There it is. The exclamation mark is in the actual book title. No one knows why.

I would say that pirates are just an inherently exciting concept, and people knew this even back in 1987: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier%27s_Pirates!

The only times I've seen purely digital character sheets used have been in online roll20 games. Even then, everyone just had a communal google sheets file that didn't have any macros built into it or anything. As a player and mister cavern, I find that incentives for players to be looking at their p...

Has anyone compiled a list of spells that appear in multiple editions of D&D and how they changed over time? TheAlexandrian has a post on create water and create food : https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/7632/roleplaying-games/the-subtle-shifts-in-play Delta, a blogger who mostly looks and OD...

I'm curious about all those little islands in the medditerranean, do some of t them stand out for historic significance? Fantasy mythological too like witches and cyclops If you read Herodotus, a lot of the smaller islands between Greece and Asia Minor get mentioned a fair amount -- Delos, Samos, C...