Match Made in (Gamer) Heaven?

WizKids is partnering with Games Workshop. Does this mean that I'll be able to get pre-painted 40k miniatures?! Pleasepleaseplease...

Book Breakin'

Our copy of the Monster Manual gets a ton of use and is now falling apart at the spine.

Meanwhile, my entire collection of  Fourth Edition D&D books is sitting on the bookshelf in pristine shape...

TfC: ToA

It's as tortuously titled as Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, and, ultimately, just as frustrating. As with the aforementioned flick, I really wanted to love Tales from Candlekeep: Tomb of Annihilation. After all, I'm a huge fan of turn-based D&D video games. This one, though, is perhaps too faithful in its adaptation of the D&D Adventure System family of board games, where players work cooperatively to complete quests in a randomly-created dungeon. For me, the primary drawback to TfC: ToA and its tabletop cousins is the 'Encounter' -- a game mechanic that causes nasty stuff to happen if (for whatever reason) you don't uncover a new map tile on your turn. The game hits you with so many traps, curses, and other hindrances that exploration quickly becomes tedious. In TfC: ToA, for example, you routinely get pelted by meteors falling from the sky. What more can I say?

D&D&D (The Extra "D" is for "Data")

There's an article about D&D on FiveThirtyEight!

Tales from Candlekeep: Tomb of Annihilation

This one kind of snuck (#pseudohistoricalablaut) up on me, but it seems that a new D&D video game is now available on Steam. Check out Tales from Candlekeep: Tomb of Annihilation (wow, that's a mouthful!) for some turn-based D&D action. Let's just hope it's better than the last D&D video game, Idle Champions...

BAM!

The venerable Cyberwars campaign and its many sequels and spin-offs has been a staple of the Front Porch multiverse since 1991. About five years ago, we started up a Cyberwars storyline in a post-apocalyptic setting and used the most recent Gamma World rules for game play. The event that led to the wacky mutations that are characteristic of Gamma World was a reality-rending cataclysm known as the Baryon Asymmetry Modification -- or BAM! The idea for the BAM came from the problem that the Big Bang Theory (the actual theory, not the TV show) predicts far more matter in the universe than we can actually detect. What, then, became of this missing matter? In the campaign, all that matter came back with a vengeance. In real life, it seems, the story of the missing matter is not quite so explosive...

First Gaming Action!

One of the best features of our new house is a big upstairs playroom that's perfect for anything from D&D to wargaming to action figures. Although I was fired up to resume our Shattered Realm campaign, the boys wanted to do some skirmish games, so first we set up an X-Wing scenario that took us all morning to play through. Here's a look at one of the initial engagements...

Note the red TIE Interceptor that came barreling in so fast that he overshot the Rebel fighters! He didn't fare much better in the later stages of the game, when an Imperial traffic jam allowed my Rebels to carry the day...

Next up, we shifted gears for some Tanks action. The battle has yet to be concluded, but this Panther appears to be in trouble...