Find Familiar

Hoo boy. It's been a bit, hasn't it? I've had the flu. I don't mean I caught a cold and called it "the flu," I mean I had full-on achy-shaky feverish flu for like a week. Finally starting to feel a little better, so I'm trying to check off some stale to-do list items, which includes this blog. Today, we'll get you caught up on the Newbieville campaign. There was no game this past Sunday (due to the aforementioned flu) but we did have a session the weekend prior. If you recall from the previous session report , we've only managed to get two players started (others ghosted me), so we had a party of two PCs: a dragonborn hermit sorcerer named Belwarum and an elf outlander rogue named Tika. This time around, after a bit of effort to replace the AWOL players, we added a couple of newer newbies, who produced a gnome outlander bard named Zaaz and a human noble monk named Lady Elka Atlas. Unfortunately, Tika's player wasn't able to make this ...

I know a lot of the content on this blog so far has been heavily skewed toward D&D , but that's far from the only game I play, or even work on. This past weekend I participated in a "game jam," in which designers are given a fairly specific prompt and must design and publish a game within specified parameters before a very short deadline. Given that this was the first game jam I've ever participated in, I think laying out my process and experience might make for an interesting blog post. (And if not, let me know in the comments, and I can avoid doing this type of post in the future.) So, as I said, this was my first jam. Certainly not my first game design, but my I've never done a "jam" before. The jam in question was called the Emotional Mecha Jam, which I learned about when Dungeon Commander  tweeted about having created a game called plot ARMOR . I took a quick look and saw that the basic idea of #SadMechJam was to create a game in the "mec...

After two false starts, yesterday was going to be the first session of my Newbieville D&D  campaign, in which I gather some folks who haven't had a chance to try D&D  yet and introduce them to the game with a carefully-crafted homebrew adventure. Although not everyone showed, we did manage to have some actual gameplay, so that means it's officially time to start telling the story of Newbieville here on Find Familiar ! Last week (the second false start) exactly one person showed up, so I told her how the game worked and led her through making a character. Yesterday was a slight improvement, adding a second player to the list of "folks who have actually showed up so far." I explained the game, and helped her make a character as well. Thus, we currently have a two-member party: Belwarum  is a blue dragonborn. She's also a sorcerer, powered by the bloodline of a brass dragon. Prior to becoming an adventurer, she was a hermit. Tika  is a wood elf. She...