Matthew Rossi

Blame Jil, it’s not my fault.

The upcoming D&D adventure anthology Quests from the Infinite Staircase does something I absolutely love: it adapts old school Dungeons and Dragons adventures into the current edition of the game, letting players experience these classics for themselves.

Krypto.

Superman would give the dog his cape in a heartbeat, and no amount of editing the images can change that. Superman and the mythos that surrounds him are among my favorite things, and of that entire complicated corpus of story, there is no element I love more than Krypto. Sure, a Kryptonian dog seems ridiculous, but at the end of the day, it’s all ridiculous, and there’s something beautiful about a person who always tries to do the right thing and help people being rewarded with a special friend who can understand him like no one else.

This is the Queue. Blame Red for all the Krypto pictures you’re about to see.

Phil made a passionate defense of Humans in fantasy yesterday, and it’s a good read.

 

I'm mostly asking this question of people who don't play TTRPGs at all, but even if you do play Dungeons and Dragons, there are other games you may not have tried (or even heard of).

I won't say I played a bit of Torchlight over the years because that would be like saying I occasionally like to talk about dinosaurs -- it's true but a bit of an understatement.

Some people come back to Skyrim or Oblivion over and over again, but for my money, the best computer RPG to return to is Kingdoms of Amalur. The Re-Reckoning version released by THQNordic, complete with the Fatesworn DLC, has been my game of choice lately after I finished a pretty fraught playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3. Partially because of the balancing changes and partly because I wanted to actually get to see Fatesworn, I was interested in getting to play it again.

Anyway, I think it still holds up pretty well. It’s my favorite fantasy RPG and the conceit of playing a character who can change the fates of others because their own fate was removed reminds me a bit of the old David Eddings books I like, the Sparhawk series.

This one's a pretty wide potential discussion since the term genre means a lot of different things when referring to games, because games contain so many other elements.

In case you were unaware that I am as ancient and hoary as a sinister black sword that drinks souls, let me introduce y’all to White Plume Mountain, the module that contains throwaway references to stuff that ended up becoming iconic Dungeons and Dragons villains and items. I mean, it’s heavily implied by the art in this module that Elric’s famous black sword Stormbringer ended up in this mountain under the name Blackrazor.

When I was a wee sprog of around 10, my fighter got his hands on that thing, and let me tell you, it was as bad an idea to let me have a sentient evil soul devouring greatsword as it would be for, say, the Prince of Lordaeron. But man, I can still remember the chant we all came up with for places we wanted to go after we were done inside the volcano of weird giant crabs and evil Efreets. Dragotha Dragotha Dragotha.

This is the Queue. We never actually did get to fight Dragotha.

No, you’re working on your own tabletop RPG with crazy time travelers going back in time and catching prehistoric animals and releasing them in, say, Greece in BCE 1200 just because they think it’s funny.

Tabletop RPG design is wild and I’m winging it, guys.

Anyway, it’s the Queue. Let’s goooooooooooooooo.