Tomb of Athganazar at SpaceCityCon 2013
We will be reprising our running of Tomb of Athganazar atSpaceCityCon 2013 on the west side of Houston. The con runs from Aug 2-4 and our games start at 1pm on Aug 3rd in the Rose Garden Room of the Marriott. Come find us there or at the Dungeonstone booth on the vendor’s floor, which I believe will be in the same hotel.
Anyone entering the Tomb of Athganazar will receive $20 coupons that can be redeemed at the Dungeonstone booth for incredible 3D terrain. The two sessions will feature pregen Pathfinder 10th level characters and run 4 hours.
And check back here for links to the adventure when it is published in August.
Posted in announcement, convention and tagged The Tomb of Athganazar by Stephen Hilderbrand with no comments yet.
The Lich – a Hip-Hopera of Extraordinary Magnitude
The Lich is an epic tale of one wizard’s shot at immortality. Mayhem ensues. Give it a listen and get your copy over at Damp Heat’s bandcamp site:
http://dampheat.bandcamp.com/album/lich
Credits
released 30 March 2013
Story, Lyrics, Beats, Art, Engineering, and Mixing (what’s mastering?) by Daniel P. Smith
Lyrical tweaks and fixes by W. Ryan Willingham and Christopher Terry Leone
Clarinet on Forest by Adam A. Thompson
Guitars on Copy of a Map by Dan Lavoie
Guitars on Guild by Joe Madden
Dot Smith – Narrator
Emily Summerfield – Narrator, Farm Girl
Cee Monstah – Immir, a Wizard; Positive Energy Elemental; and the Butler
Dirty Dub – Corsair, a Warrior; and Dock Worker
Damp Heat – Paul, a Woodsman; Mage Guildsman; Tavern patron
Bad Barry – a Manticore
Stormshadow – another Manticore
Emcee Eats – Vampire Lord
Jomo – Master of the Mage’s GuildChorus (Tavern patrons, Vampire Spawn, Corpse Golem, Other Dock Workers, Guild Members):
Adam A. Thompson
Frank J. Kim
Cindie Jones
John Wayne Akin
Ethan Schrupp
Ryan Gardner
Posted in announcement by Adam A. Thompson with no comments yet.
ChupacabraCon starting up in Austin
Lamenting the lack of gaming cons in Austin? Find MillenniumCon too devoted to historical minis? It will be interesting to see what the next ten months brings in the run up to ChupacabraCon, which is scheduled for Jan 17-19 at the Hilton Austin Airport!
We are hoping they have a slew of board games and rpgs on the schedule, and a few of us will be signing up to run some of our classic and novel adventures.
Follow the developments at the ChupacabraCon website.
And stay tuned for more info around this year’s UniCon.
Posted in announcement, convention by Adam A. Thompson with no comments yet.
Christmas in July Sale
Starting July 23rd, all of Unicorn Rampant’s titles will be %25 off the listed price! If you’ve had an item sitting in your wish list, now is a great opportunity to pick it up with a significant discount. All titles are included in this limited time promotion, even the newly released 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons adventure The Ruins of Old Soguer and our brand new original board game Vampyre Women of Venus.
Posted in announcement by Adam A. Thompson with no comments yet.
One Page Dungeon Contest 2012
Campaignwiki is holding a comp
etition (one they seem to have held for a few years now) to generate a one-page dungeon. I am about to submit one to the contest (post to come later this month), and thought I’d make sure you were aware of the opportunity to enter you work into this friendly competition. Here are some examples to inspire you as you put your together:
- Catacombs beneath a manor where a thieves’ guild has taken up residence.
- A Dragon’s den protected by various minions and assorted pitfalls.
- A cave complex originally inhabited by an ancient civilization.
More examples are available on the campaignwiki site. Hurry though; entries are due by April 30th!
Posted in announcement by Adam A. Thompson with no comments yet.
The Art of the Session Recap
We are pleased to announce the release of The Art of the Session Recap, 28 pages of creative roleplaying session summaries, featuring selected submissions by Don Hupp, Panzer Leader, Oneinchsquare, Matt Harris, Lt. Col Colin Callahan, and 3 entries around a race of sci-fi beings known as the Watchers from S.D. Hilderbrand, Tom Walton, and Frank J. Kim.. Get it here for free!
Introduction
Many of today’s gamers, especially those with young families, can’t make every session of a weekly, multi-year roleplaying campaign. I find it much easier to keep up with and interested in a campaign if a fellow player or the DM posts a recap on a wiki, a bulletin board, or even sends out a summary via email. In addition to keeping players in the loop, these recaps provide players with a chance to digest the session’s material and to prepare for the upcoming session. Furthermore, session recaps provide a more in-depth description of events, allowing the players to add the richness of the story, either in character or taking their turn as the narrator.
I find these journals, logs, and correspondences to be great time capsules of the campaign and memory logs when remembering adventures with friends. These annals provide additional flavor to the campaign world, and add perspective. After all, no fun roleplaying world is purely the thought of one individual.
Unfortunately, in most campaigns, not every session is logged, transcribed, or otherwise captured by the DM or players. DMs are often swamped making sense of dice rolls and character actions, while planning the next moves of the challengers in a given encounter.
Here are a few methods and ideas for inspiring players and DMs that you game with to keep an ongoing log of the adventure.
- Set up a blog, wiki, or bulletin board (or all three!) and make sure your players have accounts and tutorials.
- Take turns acting in the role of scribe of the session, ensuring that the key moments are covered. Different players will cover the events differently, and this is fun to see play out. Players may even challenge one-another to come up with increasingly creative and interesting session recaps. Offer XP, perhaps even on a per-word or per-ten-words basis, to dispel the curse of writer’s block.
- Players playing characters who are bards, historians, politicians, or others of the “literate class” of the campaign world have a natural stake in ensuring that the story is correctly told. These players make natural scribes, allowing their characters to use these opportunities to feed back into the history of the world and potentially affect change by increasing the popularity of the party, or by casting the ruler of a land as a tyrant, etc. This provides another avenue of agency.
My favorite session recaps are those written in character, or with the constraints, openness, and information dissemination methods of the campaign world in mind.
Thanks to all who entered or contest, and congratulations to those selected to appear in the collection.
Posted in announcement and tagged release by Adam A. Thompson with no comments yet.
Happy New Year with New CCB Merchandise
Happy new year to you and yours! We hope your 2010 has been as filled with greatness as ours, and that 2011 is even more prosperous and peaceful (but full of lots of fantasy and sci-fi battles acted out with plastic and metal minis on cardboard tiles and wet-erase battlemats!).
For those of you looking for a New Years or orthodox Xmas present for your gamer loved ones, head over to ourCafePress store and make a few purchases. You’ll help support this magazine, blog, and our travel to cons to run adventures. Here’s what the t-shirt looks like:
While you’re at it, visit Unicorn Rampant’s CafePress store to pick up some regal gear.
For those of you on the con circuit, we will see you at OwlCon, GenCon, and MilenniumCon over the next year!
May Avandra see you roll many cinematically-appropriate crits over the next year.
Posted in announcement by Adam A. Thompson with no comments yet.
Follow Us on Twitter
We have set up our blog to send out a tweet every time we post a new entry. Follow us on Twitter @clawclawbite, or by clicking on the Twitter logo at the right.
Other means to follow us include RSS, Facebook (again, follow links on the right), and visiting our site on a regular basis. See you around!
Note: This also serves as a test of our Twitter-WordPress connection.
Posted in announcement by Adam A. Thompson with no comments yet.
New blog site!
Hey, everyone!
We’ve been busy setting up some new infrastructure and typesetting material for release on rpgnow.com.
As today is Memorial Day in the U.S., we’d like to further celebrate by laying to rest our old site. Be advised that the URL you should be using to access this blog is clawclawbite.com.
We’ve moved to our own self-hosted WordPress installation, leaving the Google-hosted Blogger home we’ve been using for the last 4 years. This will give us more flexibility and control over our IP as we move forward as a collaboration between Unicorn Rampant Publishing and Inverspace Press.
Thanks, Blogger, for helping to get us off the ground. And thanks, dear readers, for your support these past four years.
Onward and upward!
Posted in announcement, news by Stephen Hilderbrand with 4 comments.
Tailslap issue #1 Released!
Tailslap is a new 4th edition magazine of articles detailing new characters, creatures, magic items, encounters, spells, powers, rituals, plot hooks, adventure seeds, playable classes, races, campaign settings and area descriptions for use in your games. We also like to mix in cool little details and intriguing features that will enrich your game world.
These features are intended to be ready for you, be you player or gamemaster, to drop into your games as you see fit. In addition, many of these articles will combine to form complete adventures and campaigns that you can play. We work hard to make this material as easy to use as it is fantastic, and we hope that you enjoy using it in your games. To this end Tailslap is formatted in landscape for easy online reading.
The inaugural issue of Tailslap contains the following articles:
- Vault of the Clay Medusa – a trap-filled encounter by Save Versus Death’s Scott A Murray
- Player’s Corner – new feats and races for players
- Wizard Paths and Powers – two new paragon paths for arcane casters
- The Lair of Jurgen the Learned – an encounter where solving puzzles leads to a sage
- The Lands of Soralia – geography and history of a region for use in your campaigns
- People of Soralia – NPCs with stats, backgrounds and suggestions for use in your games
- Leviathans & Other Aquatic Terrors – new aquatic monsters for players to conquer
- All That Glitters – powerful magical treasure for your hordes
- Mundane Equipment – new equipment for your players to wield against their foes
So don’t delay: get your copy of Tailslap now!
Posted in announcement by Adam A. Thompson with no comments yet.