Rended Press

Anybody got some jumper cables? The Trouble with Troglodytes needs a jump start! Come by and key a room and help get this sucker off the shoulder and back into blog traffic.

If you haven't heard of Gnome Stew , it's a kick-ass website with lots of tips and tricks for DMs. While they focus on current-edition gaming, a lot what they post and discuss can be adapted toward any edition or scenario. It's one of the best all-around sites for tabletop RPG tips & tricks (the other is Johnn Four's Roleplaying Tips ). Gnome Stew was holding a newsletter sign-up drive the past three weeks, and they were giving away over $200 worth of prizes to lure people into subscribing. The Grand Prize was a $75 gift certificate to DriveThruRPG.com and PDFs of two of their own publications. Since I follow Gnome Stew via RSS using Google Reader, I didn't feel the need to subscribe to the newsletter. But then I thought about it some more. I follow roughly 250 blogs via RSS and I'm constantly missing cool stuff and playing catch-up (not all of those are RPG-related). So, I thought I'd subscribe to the newsletter, too, just to see if they were going

Hey folks, the first community project I'm sponsoring, The Trouble with Troglodytes , still has plenty of empty rooms! Come on by and help fill this sucker out!

Back in January, Daddy Grognard hosted a community project to stat up a new gonzo magic item, the Cloak of Elviskind. I've pulled the descriptions together into a PDF and threw it in my Dropbox for you to download. Enjoy! Daddy Grognard's Cloak of Elviskind Also, be sure to check out my own community project, The Trouble with Troglodytes , and fill out a room!

[EDIT #2: IT IS DONE! Well, almost. It still needs a wandering monsters/random encounters table. I'll pull that together for the final PDF.] [EDIT: A big fat "HELLO LADIES!" to those of you link-jumping from YDIS . Please feel free to follow pixie whistlebritches's lead and add your own distorted/gonzo/potty-humored room to the mix.] How about a community project? You guys fill this thing out, and I'll compile it into a PDF when it's done. Note #1: I reserve the right to edit entries. Note #2: I'm thinking we need to call this the Marc Pavone Project if the rest of you bastards don't step up soon. Some guidelines: The theme is Troglodytes . Make of this what you will. Use whatever retro-clone stat block you like for monsters & spells & magic items: Swords & Wizardry, Labyrinth Lord, or OSRIC. Everything you post is considered to be Open Game Content, freely offered and free to be reused or remixed once the whole shebang is co

So, there are a lot of blog posts about introducing kids to our esteemed hobby. Like this one posted today over at Heroes Against the Dark . And this one over here at Blue Boxer Rebellion . And a really great one here by austinjimm at The Contemptible Cube of Quazar that was eventually included in Encounter #4 last year. Allow me to introduce you to another one, courtesy of Michael Tresca . Tresca, best known for his book The Evolution of Fantasy Role-Playing Games ( amazon link ) and numerous d20 settings, modules, and splatbooks , is also a columnist for Examiner.com . I'm not a fan of Examiner.com (wikipedia link) in and of itself  because it is a content mill, using freelance-written content to drive traffic to a heavily ad-supported site—and that content is often vapid beyond belief (think of it is a poor man's, small town Huffington Post ). But Tresca's coverage of RPG issues is quite excellent although it predominately covers current games in production--it is