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You are here: Home / Archives for Newest Critical Hits / Columns / Musings of the Chatty DM

Primal/Within Chronicles: City of the Overmind, Part 2

September 8, 2009 by The Chatty DM

See part 1 here. Burning Dungeon & Wheel Dragons As Wednesday night was ticking by, a dangerous new idea about the way to run a D&D adventure came up… You see, like many gamers unused to indie RPG designs, I read Mouse Guard with voracity but finished it with the  feeling that while I had […]

Filed Under: Campaign Logs, Game Hacks & Content, Musings of the Chatty DM Tagged With: 4e, Burning Wheel, Chatty's 2009-2010 Campaign, Mouse Guard, Primal/Within, Tropes

Primal/Within Chronicles: City of the Overmind, Part 1

September 8, 2009 by The Chatty DM

Previously in our game… After a few months of rest our heroes are called to save citizens of the City Within from the monstrous tentacles of a clutch of aberrant creatures. Following clues left behind by the monsters and the ever elusive ‘Master’, the party prepares to use thier recently acquired teleportation lore to follow […]

Filed Under: Campaign Logs, Game Hacks & Content, Musings of the Chatty DM, Roleplaying Games Tagged With: 4e, Burning Wheel, Chatty's 2009-2010 Campaign, Mouse Guard, Primal/Within

Touched with Fire, the 700th post.

September 7, 2009 by The Chatty DM

This post will get intensely personal, while overall positive, it will dwell on some of my personal issues of the last year. Feel free to skip Way back in November, I wrote a somewhat somber post celebrating my 500th post. At the time, I didn’t realize that I was diving full speed into severe depression, […]

Filed Under: blogging, Freelance Writing, Musings of the Chatty DM Tagged With: Bipolar Disorder, Milestone

Old School Geekout: The Order of the Grappling Hook, Part 4

September 5, 2009 by The Chatty DM

This series has been a play by play report of my first Sword and Wizardry (A retroclone of the 1st, 1974 version of D&D) game.  I used  Chgowiz’s Quick Start rules and starting adventure that you can find here. You can find part 3 here. You Dum Dum! Me Stony! Hired by the cowardly goblin […]

Filed Under: Campaign Logs, Musings of the Chatty DM, Roleplaying Games Tagged With: Sword and Wizardry

Old School Geekout: The Order of the Grappling Hook, Part 3

September 4, 2009 by The Chatty DM

This is part 3 of my retelling of last weekend’s Sword and Wizardry Quick-Start game we played at our monthly Geekout.  Part 2 can be found here. Skellies! After jamming open the portcullis in the room to the north, the PCs advanced to another room filled with 6 animated (and armed) skeletons!  As soon as […]

Filed Under: Campaign Logs, Musings of the Chatty DM, Roleplaying Games Tagged With: Sword and Wizardry

Old School Geekout: The Order of the Grappling Hook, Part 2

September 2, 2009 by The Chatty DM

This is a retelling of my recent Sword & Wizardry during a day of gaming with my friends. See part 1 here. Descent into the Depths of Level 1 As we set up for the game, we took a bunch of Hero Clix minis to act as our miniatures to represent marching order and determine […]

Filed Under: Campaign Logs, Musings of the Chatty DM, Roleplaying Games Tagged With: Sword and Wizardry

The Inner Half-Orc versus The Retro-Clone

September 1, 2009 by guest

(PM is a good friend of mine and while our interest in gaming and movies intersect, we have not roleplayed all that often together.  Here’s one of his rare, and always very entertaining posts about his experience as a closet RPG geek -ChattyDM) Where is it? I’m sure it was around here somewhere… I hear […]

Filed Under: Musings of the Chatty DM, Player Psychology, Roleplaying Games Tagged With: S&W, The Closet Half Orc

Old School Geekout: The Order of the Grappling Hook, Part 1

August 31, 2009 by The Chatty DM

I started playing D&D with the 1st edition of AD&D way back in the first half of the 80s. I didn’t read English very well (and neither did my friends), so we ended up doing what pretty much everyone else were doing with the game: use the rules we understood and ignored/made up the rest. […]

Filed Under: Campaign Logs, Musings of the Chatty DM, Roleplaying Games Tagged With: S&W

Friday Chat: The Issue(s) of Combat length in D&D 4e

August 28, 2009 by The Chatty DM

This post is inspired bu a Twitter discussions I had last week. As my player level up right into paragon level,  I noticed that the length of combat in D&D 4e kept increasing.  We often break the 90 minutes point  for ‘normal’ encounters and massive boss-level fights will easily eat up most of our 3 […]

Filed Under: Musings of the Chatty DM, Player Psychology, Roleplaying Games Tagged With: 4e, advice, combat, Friday Chat

Notebook Campaing: Super Nico vs the 3 Hungry Goblins

August 26, 2009 by The Chatty DM

Earlier this year, I went to the movie theater with my son and we ended up playing a little of D&D with made up rules.  You can see the game here, including the now legendary Troll who can’t build a bridge encounter. When I came back from Gen Con a few days ago, I told […]

Filed Under: Campaign Logs, Musings of the Chatty DM, Roleplaying Games Tagged With: gaming with children, Gaming with Kids

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About the Author

  • The Chatty DM

    The Chatty DM is the "nom de plume" of gamer geek Philippe-Antoine Menard. He has been a GM for over 40 years. An award-winning RPG blogger, game designer, and scriptwriter at Ubisoft. He squats a corner of Critical Hits he affectionately calls "Musings of the Chatty DM." (Email Phil or follow him on Twitter.)

    Email: chattydm@critical-hits.comWeb: https://critical-hits.com//category/chattydm/

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