Going through our archives we realised that we had a significant lack of articles about Steampunk awesomeness. In a effort to make up for this travesty we would like to highlight the most excellent webcomic FreakAngels written by Warren Ellis and illustrated by Paul Duffield. Set in England in a post-apocalyptic future, the story follows twelve children (now mostly grown up) as the reasons for the apocalypse and their role in it are revealed.

Continue reading FreakAngels – A Free Online Steampunk Comic

Back in April this year, Wizards of the Coast (WotC) filed three copyright infringement cases against eight individuals for sharing a copy of the Player’s Handbook II on document sharing site Scribd. Yesterday the judge accepted a settlement with the second of the eight defendants. WotC are still seeking a default judgement against a third. The amount settled was $125,000 (in the previous case they had settled for $100,000). The other cases involve individuals in the Philippines and Poland.

Continue reading Wizards of the Coast settle copyright infringement case

For those of you who love horror fiction and roleplaying, yet also don’t mind a bit of academic/philosophical speculation, let me introduce a wonderful resourse: Collapse volume IV. This is a special edition of an academic journal on philosophy, this time specialising in horror fiction. Those of you who have a particular weakness for Lovecraftian fiction (such as myself) may be interested in Graham Harman’s article, “On the Horror of Phenomenology: Lovecraft and Husserl”, which starts on page 333.

Continue reading The Philosophy of Horror

Remember those choose your own adventure books from your childhood? Well imagine that gameplay with some RPG character development, an inventory system, dice-based skill checks and an entire world to explore and quest throughout — awesome! Well I’ve just described Fabled Lands, an excellent gamebook series, that provides as good a solo adventure as I’ve found in a book.

Continue reading Fabled Lands: a great solo roleplaying adventure

If you thought you had a big book collection (and I thought I did with some 1800 volumes..) then you are probably in for a soul crushing experience… In yet another example of a beautiful and highly enviable library, Shelfari have had the extraordinary honour of getting to peer through Neil Gaiman’s library, but also take a series of photos of it. Many of you would know of Neil Gaiman’s work. He is the man who has given us the comic series ‘The Sandman’, the books ‘American Gods’, ‘Stardust’, ‘Coraline’ and my personal favourite ‘The Graveyard Book’, and he also wrote the screenplay for ‘Beowulf’.

Continue reading Take a peek into Neil Gaiman’s Library [Updated]

With the release of the D&D 4E Players Handbook II the number of character classes has doubled to 16. Now that all the classes are spread over two books, we thought that it might be easier to see what is available if it were included in a table view showing you power source, character role and reference page in the respective manual. Once content gets spread over two books, it is often a lot harder to get a real picture of what is available and hopefully this table will help.

Continue reading Table of All D&D 4E Character Classes [Updated]

(Read our review of the Monster Manual II here…)

And about time, too.

This is a review of the 4E PHBII. For a review of the 3.5 PHBII: it’s arguably the best 3.5 book in existence. Anyway, on to the point.

4^th edition leads itself nicely into splat books, because the Power system limits what abilities are available. On the flip side, the core 4E books are balanced a lot better than the 3.5 ones. Either way, the PHBII is, mostly, pretty much in line with the core books, and shouldn’t endanger a campaign with some broken ability or some such.

One very nice side note about the PHBII: the back of the book has the revised Stealth rules, which were errata’d.

Continue reading D&D 4E Players Handbook 2 In Depth Review

I wandered into the ABC shop on the weekend to pick myself up a sonic screwdriver and was amazed by the range of Timelord merchandise available. The two things which appealed to me most was a packet of Dr Who Top Trumps and the Dr Who Annual.

For those of you not exposed to these UK imports, Top trumps is a card game where each card in the deck has various statistical ratings, and you want to win hands by trumping the others on a given stat value. For example, with my Marvel Comic Heroes pack, the stats are Height, Intelligence, Strength, Speed, Agility, and Fighting Skills.

Continue reading Top Trumps and Comic Book Annuals