Posted on by Alexander Case

Dragonlance: Shadows of the Dragon Queen: Pt 1 – Funeral For A Friend

Here we have the beginning of my Actual Play for the D&D 5e campaign, Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen, my first time running a game in several years, my first time running for people I wasn’t related to, and my first time running 5e. As I mentioned earlier, I’m running the game using Foundry VTT because my players are fairly geographically widespread.

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Posted on by Alexander Case

Documentary Review: The Dreams in Gary’s Basement

A couple years ago I reviewed Secrets of Blackmoor – a documentary about Dave Arneson, and the development of the Blackmoor campaign leading up to the development of the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Kickstarting around the same time was Dreams in Gary’s Basement, a documentary focusing on the life of Gary Gygax. I’ve covered a couple of biographies of Gygax’s life in the past – Empire of the Imagination and Rise of the Dungeon Master. When Dreams in Gary’s Basement went up for Kickstarter, I felt that this was an appropriate documentary to back as well. Well, now I’ve received my physical copy and I’ve watched it – so now it’s time for my thoughts.

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Posted on by Alexander Case

Dragons of Winter Night: Book Review

Dragons of Winter Night, as a novel, runs into the problem of adapting what was we think of it into just a trilogy of books – a bunch of material has to be skipped over. We start off after the retrieval of the Hammer of Karass and the re-unification of Dwarven society (which would later be covered in Dragons of the Dwarven Depths), with that kind of setting the tone somewhat for how the show comes out.

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Posted on by Alexander Case

Quag Keep: Book Review

If I was going to describe the modern “Isekai” genre in brief, I’d describe it as “Game-based another world fantasy.” It’s not just fantasy where a protagonist is whisked to another fantastic world from ours like with the John Carter of Mars novels, or on the anime front with El-Hazard and Magic Knight Rayearth. This is fantasy where the characters are explicitly in a world that draws inspiration to games from gaming – sometimes by drawing the characters or their psyches into an actual game (ala Sword Art Online or Log Horizon), or a world which uses the language of RPGs like with Konosuba or Grimgar: Ash and Illusions. I would argue that if not the first of these, then one of the first of this particular genre – and was done in the ’70s by a woman.

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