Author Archives: gamedetective
Animal Crossing and the Wonder of an Aimless Gaming Experience
Earlier this year, near the beginning of the Covid-19 lockdown, Nintendo released Animal Crossing: New Horizons and it got me thinking about how wonderful gaming can be when you’re not necessarily focused on a specific goal. After all, if we’re escaping into a fantasy world then maybe in addition to the monster slaying and the […]
Reviewing Art & Arcana: A Visual History
I didn’t know what to expect when I got my copy of Art & Arcana. I guess I expected an art book, which A&A technically qualifies as, but it’s also a lot more than that. I want to call it a history book but even that, while technically accurate, doesn’t feel right. Art and Arcana […]
Kickstarter Spotlight: Spectacular Settlements
I talk quite a bit about world building and the importance of a living, breathing world in your tabletop RPGs. Spectacular Settlements is a comprehensive tool for building settlements in a way that will let the DM build fully realized settlements that can definitively answer not only common questions like “Who is in charge” and […]
Kickstarter Spotlight: Dungeon Dreams
Dungeon Dreams is an indy game that blends the JRPG, Roguelike, Dating Sim genres and you can find it on Kickstarter now! All of those genres may sound like a lot to throw into one game and sounds exceptionally ambitious for an indy project, but having played the demo I can tell you that the […]
Turning the Gears: Party Reputation and NPC Reactions
An important part of good DMing is creating reasonable and realistic consequences for player’s actions. Not just in the sense of heroes getting experience and loot for killing the bad guys, but also in the reactions of the NPCs around them. Instinctively, we want to keep track of it in our heads, and let things […]
Tabletop Tales: A Sad, Sad Exalted Game
One of the best parts about RPGs is that you get to feel like a badass and some games, like Exalted, let you be a badass on a world-shaking scale. For those who don’t know, Exalted is a game by White Wolf where you play as literal demigods having adventuress in an extremely high fantasy […]
Breaking Down the Monstrous Water Races in D&D
The original idea for this article was to examine the different evil races, which I will probably still do, but I noticed that the Monster Manual has quite a few water-dwelling evil humanoids. A lot of them sort of blur together for me so I wanted to do a breakdown of each evil fishperson and […]
Five of D&D’s Most Bizarre Creatures (And How to Use Them)
When a game has as wide a range of monsters as Dungeons and Dragons, it’s inevitable that some enter common usage, and some are forgotten. In the weird in-between area, though, there are the weird ones that are remembered and recognized for their strangeness but either go unused or get thrown in for giggles without […]
Five Awesome Creatures in the D&D Monster Manual and How to Use Them
The world’s oldest roleplaying game has had no shortage of amazing creatures throughout its history, from the terrifying Tarrasque to bizarre but brutal Behir. Nonetheless, in any population there are those that stand above the rest and monsters are no exception, so let’s look at the coolest monsters in the Dungeons and Dragons 5e Monster […]
Five Awesome RPGs for When You Need Something New
Dungeons and Dragons is pretty much the standard whenever you’re trying to form a new group. It makes sense, D&D is the original and it’s still the biggest brand in the industry even after 33 years. Today, though, we’re going to look at some RPGs to break out when you’re played out on raiding dungeons […]
The Game Detective 