So I'm on record as never having been a huge fan of the old Star Wars Expanded Universe. I also dearly love the new canon of films. That being said, there are a lot of things about the EU that are certainly worthwhile and worth bringing back. Thrawn was not among them. But I digress. I have always loved the Dark Horse Star Wars: Legacy comics, which are set 138 years after Return of the Jedi and deal with the descendents of Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and Han Solo, as well as the rise of a benevolent offshoot of Palpatine's empire under the Fel Dynasty, as well as the rise of the New Sith Order. It's a complex setting that just feels Star Wars to its core, and offers some great expansion to the mythos--in particular, the Imperial Knights; light side Force Users who take a more martial approach to the Force than do the Jedi. If you aren't familiar with Legacy, I highly recommend checking it out. Marvel has, I believe, re-printed the enitre line. With the new ca...

So for many years, the Arduin books have been on the periphery of my awareness. I knew they were out there, knew they comprised significant expansion and modification to the OD&D rules, knew they eventually became their own system of sorts, and knew that there was some controversy regarding Dave Hargrave, but that was about it. I've seen more and more discussion about them recently, so finally I decided that I would take the plunge. I acquired copies of the "Trilogy" on eBay. My copy of The Arduin Grimoire Volume 1 is a 4th printing; the Volume 2 and Volume 3 books are first printings. Replica box I made to store the trilogy in.   So I guess I'll start a running commentary here as I work through. Again, bear with me as I don't read fast to begin with, and combined with the piles of writing work on my desk and the fact that I can only read a few pages of this tiny text without getting a splitting headache and, well...it's going to take awhile...

If you happened to miss the Kickstarter and are wondering what Night Shift is all about, pre-orders are open! You can now put in an order for your hardcover copy, or go for a bundle of a hardcover and PDF, and get your PDF right away. The shipping date for the hardcovers from the Printer is June 10, and I will then be sending out the Kickstarters. After that, I will fulfill all pre-orders. You can find all the information you want at  http://www.elflair.com/nightshift.html , including a link to our free Quick Start rules on DriveThruRPG! Meanwhile, check out Tim Brannan's blog at  The Other Side , where he's released a new monster for Night Shift: The Hodag! Finally, don't forget to follow the Elf Lair Games blog !

If you happened to miss the Kickstarter and are wondering what Night Shift is all about, pre-orders are open! You can now put in an order for your hardcover copy, or go for a bundle of a hardcover and PDF, and get your PDF right away. The shipping date for the hardcovers from the Printer is June 10, and I will then be sending out the Kickstarters. After that, I will fulfill all pre-orders. You can find all the information you want at http://www.elflair.com/nightshift.html , including a link to our free Quick Start rules on DriveThruRPG! Meanwhile, check out Tim Brannan's blog at The Other Side , where he's released a new monster for Night Shift: The Hodag!

Well, it's official: Night Shift: Veterans of the Supernatural Wars  is at press. Our tentative completion date for it is June 10, and after the boxes arrive at my home office, they will begin shipping to backers. I need to work out how to take direct orders from my website (setting up a PayPal button is easy; coming up with a workable fulfillment process for myself is trickier). But I do plan to open up pre-orders for the game soon, which will enable people to get an early look at the PDF. We are printing right here in the U.S. and our printer is open for business, so there shouldn't be any pandemic-related delays in fulfillment. So What's Next? I have a number of things planned for the future, which I hope will really take Elf Lair Games to the next level as a legitimate game publisher. Unlike most companies, we will have not a single house system, but THREE. That's right--THREE house systems, each of which scratches a slightly different play style itch. These...

Note: Sorry for the way-too-long delay on this. It quite simply got lost in the shuffle! Herein lies the final section of my thought experiment of reading D&D as though I did not have the 40 years of experience with gaming I do, or that as a reader, I didn't have the benefit of an entire generation of gaming scholarship or the Internet to look to for guidance. This is a look into what a brand new player of D&D may have thought upon attempting to run their first game way back in 1975. To that end, some of the observations and assumptions I'm making herein have been roundly disproven in the decades of scholarship and play that have followed. So why do this? Well, I've covered that in the first two sections, but in brief, it's to take a fresh look at the game and its rules. It's to see things through an innocent set of eyes, and maybe challenge some of the assumptions we have, or at very least come up with some ideas about different ways to try and int...

The OSR, or Old School Renaissance (or Revolution, or Revival, or whatever your "R" word of choice may be) was once a movement created by aficionados of the original versions of D&D to recreate the experience of that game through new publications. It's arguable where it started--some cite OSRIC, while others cite Castles & Crusades as the beginning of it. Still others have their own ideas. In the end, there was never a really organzied movement. OSR became sort of an identity, a shared language shortcut for "what this game offers." Unfortunately, that shared identity became diluted over the years, and has even had its share of controversy--largely a case of a few bad apples ruining it for the whole class, because people on the outside seem to have a problem with the idea that one guy doesn't represent the majority. In any case, the question often arises with companies like Elf Lair, who produce games that use mechanics which are distinctly infl...