News from Around the Net: 11-MAR-2011

It’s Friday and that means it’s time for some links!

• Writer Ethan Gilsdorf from Salon magazine takes the plunge back into roleplaying games and writes about his experiences reintegrating into our corner of the geek universe in How ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ changed my life.
• 

  Image via Wikipedia

  Over at plagmada.org (the Play Generated Map and Document Archive) aims to collect documents from the “shared imaginative space.” Basically consider all of the doodles from your early days of D&D – maps, drawings, notes – and archive them for posterity. Perusing the archive, it’s impossible not to bring back memories and hopefully find some inspiration!

• Meanwhile, Chris Brann has put together a Warrior, Rogue & Mage spinoff game set during the crazy days of the 14th century. If you’re looking for some great ideas for a medieval campaign set during the CrusadesHundred years war and the wars around it between the various European kings definitely check it out here. He did some serious research for the historical backdrop the game is set in!
• Mark over at Dicemonkey has posted a great review of Open Design’s latest book Soldiers of Fortune here. Between epic skill challenges, how races ready for war, strategies, and themes, it sounds like those darn kobolds have put together another awesome book!
• Speaking of the kobolds, Richard Pett over at Kobold Quarterly has come up with an entertaining list of 100 pointless objects to obsess over in a game. You can find it here. The cool part is that this could serve as a template for similar lists in other campaigns. GMs can randomly place these items in strategic places throughout a campaign to keep players guessing, to inspire fear, or simply provide food for thought!
• The 5×5 Compendium pulls together a huge volume of articles about the 5×5 grid method of defining quests (and many other things) at Critical Hits. I’ll be reading these until the cows come home and somehow I sense that there will be more to come…
• And lastly… in case you need to break someone out of (or into) an insane asylum, here are a few
  plans. These are interesting from multiple perspectives. They could come in handy during a Call of Cthulhu campaign or parts of each building could be taken and used in other settings… But is it odd that if you removed the labels from a few of these, they’d look just like dungeon designs done on graph paper? Creepy!

Do you have something to contribute to the links list? Feel free to drop me a note at fitz (at) gameknightreviews (dot) com!

Have a great weekend!

Related articles

• Your Zobeck Handbook from Reviews from R’lyeh (rlyehreviews.blogspot.com)
• [Review] Kobold Quarterly 16 (tenletter.wordpress.com)
• EN World Review – Kobold Quarterly #16 (Winter 2011) from NEUROGLYPH Games (neuroglyphgames.com)
• Sweet Kobold 16 from Reviews from R’lyeh (rlyehreviews.blogspot.com)
• Soldiers of Fortune Now In Print from Kobold Quarterly (koboldquarterly.com)