]]> Last year, my daughter Zeta gave me a great gift for Father’s Day. She wrote and drew a book about something dear old dad taught her… how to play Dungeons & Dragons. Well technically we were playing Labyrinth Lord, but same difference. Zeta and her sister Nita picked some minis from my collection to represent themselves. Tip for kid’s game designers: Pets are a big hit. Add them to your game. Both girls bought attack dogs and sicked them on everything they could. Zeta’s book is really cute. I scanned it into PDF format (download).

                          

]]> PAX Prime 2011 launched today. After briefly walking the floor, I marched to the Games on Demand gaming room (Room 306) to get my game on. Another gamer filled me in on the GM-Less Gaming Workshop led by Ben Robbins that was going on a few rooms down. I figured I go check out the talk.

You may already know Ben Robbins as the debonaire heir to the Baskin-Robbins family fortune. Between parties with the jet set on the Riviera and counting piles of money while sitting at a desk constructed entirely from piles of money, Ben finds the time to design games. He is the author of Microscope, a popular GM-less game.

In his talk, Ben goes over the role of the game master, defines GM-less games and goes over several examples including Fiasco, Polaris and Shock. The discussion was excellent and I came away learning something new.

I apologize for the crappy audio. I wasn’t planning on recording and just slapped my phone on the table to record the session.

Download PAX GM-Less Gaming Workshop with Ben Robbins

                          

]]> Starting February 9th, I’ll be running D&D Encounters, Season 4: March of the Phantom Brigade at The Curious Child on Bainbridge Island. I slapped together a quick render and posted this flyer around town. I hope there are enough RPG and Dungeons & Dragons fans around to get a few tables going.

                          

]]> So I’m finally buying my first home! It’s on Bainbridge Island in the great state of Washington. We are in a great location, the schools are amazing and everything is so green. It’s a short 35 minute ferry ride to Seattle. Unfortunately, it’s a pretty small town and there are no game stores. I know there has to be some tabletop gamers out here. I made a flyer tonight that I’m going to post around town tomorrow.

I have a few leads. There is a new educational store in town called The Curious Child. Interestingly enough, they have a huge Warhammer sign in the window. I chatted with the owner a bit. Her son is into Warhammer so she decided they would sell it in the store. They had a couple Citadel books near the counter right by the pre-school blocks and Candyland. The owner was a very nice woman and I saw a bulletin board. I’m sure she’ll let me post a flyer.

There’s also a Calico Cat in town. It’s a toy store divided into two spaces. The second space is dedicated to games. While casually looking for a birthday gift for my daughter, I discovered a treasure trove in the back – shelves of euro boardgames, Magic the Gathering decks and other boardgame geekery. I didn’t see any roleplaying games, but maybe I can post a sign there too.

My last targets are the two large bulletin boards on Winslow Way, the main drag downtown. The one by Blackbird Bakery gets a boatload of traffic every day. I used the image from the front of the 4th Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide. That’s a pretty recognizable image. Even if I saw that image from across the street, I’d know what it was and move in for a closer look.

Finally, there is the internet and the reason for posting this at all. When I first arrived here, I searched for “bainbridge island” and “RPG” or “D&D” or “Dungeons & Dragons”, but I didn’t get anything useful. Hopefully, Google will index this page and the next person looking for local gamers finds this page.

Here’s my flyer by the way. Wish me luck!

                          

]]> I have to apologize to all the people I missed at the PAX Prime 2010 DM Challenge. Literally, one minute before I walked out the door I was attacked by a raging owlbear also known to some as my wife. I had my laptop and projector packed in my backpack. All my minis were picked out. I had printed out the stats for my cast of characters. The statblocks for all my monsters including my award-winning horakh monster with custom-built miniatures. My stacks of foamcore maps. Everything. It was all in the car. Then, I heard the screech just as I was pulling the car out of the driveway.

I ran back into the house and into a full frontal assault by my wife who shall henceforth only be referred to as the Owlbear. After being torn limb for limb and left bleeding on the floor, I was accused of being an absentee father and making my owlbear into a D&D widow.

To be fair, it might have had something to do with my oldest daughter getting stung by bees twice an hour earlier and her left hand swelling up to the size of a catcher’s mitt, the five year old crying for her missing blankey while the two year old was emptying out the contents of her sippy cup onto the new bedsheets. What does she have to even complain about? She’s a stay-at-home owlbear. I’m a work-from-home dad who can watch the baby while she runs errands. This is her job as she so often reminds me. Do your job. Let me go!

I guess I do spend quite a bit of time obsessing over D&D and role-playing games. Last year, she told me I needed a makeover so I went out and bought all new T-shirts. All my old punk rock t-shirt were full of holes and starting to pinch my ever-growing frame uncomfortably. So I got an all-new RPG inspired wardrobe.  D&D conventions t-shirt reprints, shirts splashed with d20s and my favorite, my “I (heart) Dungeons” t-shirt. I also spend an inordinate amount of time reading RPG blogs and working on different projects. But the alternative is to sit and watch T.V. with her all night. The owlbear follows two shows a night including 48 Hours, Big Brother and the Real Housewives of INSERT A CITY I DON’T WANT TO LIVE IN. In other words, brainmelting horseshit that I can’t handle for ten minutes. I certainly do abandon my family for five hours every week when I ride my bike to the city to run D&D Encounters. Maybe she has a point.

There was nothing to do, but stay. Even though I had made plans with her a month in advance. Even though she had witnessed me spending every night (after I bathed and put the kids to bed) gluing and cutting maps, printing documents and crafting minis. Even after I ended up missing my ferry the night before the DM Challenge, spent all night stranded in Seattle, got home at 7:00AM and caught an hour nap only to get up and feed the kids while she slept. Even though I told her this happens once a year and it was important to me. Deep breath.

The owlbear actually has a blog that a few of you posted comments on when she blogged about D&D. She calls me “Big Daddy.” I didn’t claim her at the time because we had a “no follow each other rule” on Twitter, but that went out the window. I don’t know. How do you handle your significant owlbears?

I refuse to let the time I spent on my DM Challenge entry be a waste of time. I’ll be posting pictures of my maps, traps and encounters this week starting tomorrow. I spent a great deal of time to bring some new ideas to the game table. I hope you all like it.

                          

]]> As many of you know, I was picked as a finalist in Kobold Quarterly’s King of Monsters 2 competition for my entry, the Horakh. The final phase of the competition relies on public voting. I’ve already gotten alot of support from my friends, family, fellow bloggers and my tweeps, but I still need more votes to cinch the title.

The number one complaint I have heard is voting is difficult. If you follow the steps in this short guide, you can vote for me in less than a minute.

1.) Follow the link below to the registration page:

http://www.koboldquarterly.com/kqforums/profile.php?mode=register

Skip down to the “Login Details” section. You only need to fill out a few pieces of information here.

Email address: Use any email address you have.

UserID: Make up a unique user name.

Password and Conform Password: Type a password here.

State/Province: Your state.

Date of Birth: Birthday in the format MM/DD/YYYY so Jan 1, 1970 would be 01/01/1970

Click Submit.

2.) Follow the next link once you have successfully submitted your registration.

http://www.koboldquarterly.com/kqforums/viewtopic.php?p=13701#13701

You should how see a voting screen. Click the circle to the left of ”Horakh by Jobe Bittman’ and submit your vote!

It’s that easy an takes less than a minute.

Thanks in advance for your vote.

                          

]]> It’s official. My monster, the horakh, was picked as a finalist in the King of Monsters 2 contest. In case you haven’t heard of the contest before, here’s the low down. Kobold Quarterly periodically runs a monster building competition open to all. Designers can submit their monster’s statblock in Pathfinder/3rd Edition or 4th Edition D&D formats complete with flavor text, but no longer than 800 words. A panel of RPG celebrity judges picks 10 finalists, then the public votes on the winner. Public voting opens next Monday, August 30th. You have to register on the koboldquarterly.com forums to vote. I hope I can count on your vote.

The statblock on KQ is limited to RTF format only. You can find a more 4th Edition-friendly statblock below. You can also download my .monster file here. You can import this XML file directly into Adventure Tools to tweak the monster for your group’s level. The statblocks are posted for information purposes only and are owned by Kobold Quarterly.

                          

]]> On the last day of Gencon, I was finally able to snap some pictures of the new Lords of Madness set. The display was well hidden. It was the bottom shelf of the glass counters in the Wizards booth… right on the floor. The exhibit hall was wall to wall geeks. The only way to see it would be to be right in front of counter and look at your feet. Luckily, I caught a tweet from bensrpgpile that helped me find it and even then I circled the booth twice. I apologize for the picture quality. I was squatting down on the ground trying to get pictures while oblivious gamers were stomping on me trying to buy Magic the Gathering cards. Some of the pictures are badly out of focus. I did get good shots of the monster cards though. Enjoy!

                          

]]> I attended Luke Crane’s “Self Publishing Crash Course” today. It’s was chock full of great information for anyone who has ever wanted to publish their own game. Luke Crane, author of Burning Wheel and the Mouseguard RPG as well as other successful titles, graciously shared the knowledge and experience he has gained over the years.

Topics covered include:

- The pitfalls of working with a printing company

- Tips for getting your art/layout/etc done cheap

- Setting a price for your game or book

The talk is humorous and very informative.

Self Publishing Crash Course

                          

]]> If you are heading to GenconIndy, Vectorform and the Microsoft Surface team have a big surprise for you. Settlers of Catan on Microsoft Surface is heading to GenconIndy this week. A new video of game play was posted today and it looks amazing. Surface is shaping into the holy grail of tabletop gaming.

The most interesting revelation in the video is the use of physical dice on the virtual game surface. I’ve closely followed the D&D on Surface project, but I find its reliance on virtual dice a weak point. I hope the D&D Surface project gets released at some point and benefits from the phyical dice technology.

[Note: I misspelled the company name of the developer earlier. The company name is Vectorform. Many apologies.