Gaming Night in Canada #6: No Hockey? WTF! Baseball? Can’t Wait!

Gaming Night in Canada #6:  No Hockey? WTF! Table top sports games – baseball, hockey.

By @ToddSecord

I’m going to assume that the world outside of the True North is completely unaware of the fact that Canada has been living without its most cherished thing in the whole wide world right now. That is, we are presently without the NHL, or to the uninitiated, the National Hockey League, and to the severely uninitiated what that means is no hockey. In Canada. No hockey in Canada.

Perspective: No morning sex; no shopping for shoes; no gaming with friends; no milk with your cookies; no salt or pepper; no shots with beer; no mustard with your hotdog; no hotdogs; no baseball in the summer; no anything good, etc. and so forth.

I’m fully aware that this list is completely 1st world savvy and does not reflect the whole of a glass being half full. Nor is it particular in what makes one happy. Just know that in Canada, this is one massively disappointing start to a period of our yearly calendar where we are reminded why it’s awesome to be Canadian. And without the comfort of hockey for us to rally around, supply us with the default plan on a Saturday night, and bolster all the business and industry that benefits from the passion of our most beloved sport, and that fcuking apocalyptic Mayan calendar thing might as well be real. This sucks.

The comparison is a little too scary…

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Posted in BLOGS, NEWS, Todd Man Out

Gaming Night in Canada #5: Bringing Back Dorky – Dice Towers

Gaming Night in Canada #5:  Bringing Back Dorky – Dice Towers; Game Review “Conquest of Nerath”

By @ToddSecord

Where to begin, where to begin…

Don’t worry, it’ll make sense in a sec…

To start, I think that it’s fair to say that the hobby of table top gaming needs new blood.  Not that it doesn’t have new players getting interested at a decent rate already, but it could always use more, and we at Fiery Dragon do our best to influence those around us to either start table top gaming, or game even more. “Our influence” in so far as that we, as The Crew, exude a level of coolness that is so overwhelming that those that wish to be like us have a tough time deciding whether it’s us that make the games we play cool, or, and more likely, that we are cool because of the games we play.

Shiny!

The rest of this blog will likely do little, if anything, to improve that thought.

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Posted in BLOGS, Todd Man Out

Top 10 Illustrations of 1st Edition Dungeons & Dragons

Top 10 Illustrations of 1st Edition Dungeons & Dragons

By @ToddSecord

#10: Erol Otus’ Basic D&D Box Set Cover

There was a time when two different editions of the same game were out at the same time. In the beginning, Basic D&D was not basic at all, but plenty advanced to those of us embracing this new and strangely addictive pen-and-paper “role-playing” game. A short time later the three core rule books were published, and suddenly, the version we had been playing with the last year or two was basic. While my friends and I were quickly mastering the advanced game, TSR re-packaged and re-published a much more organized version of Basic D&D. This edition — the red box with the now classic Erol Otus cover — was the set that hundreds of thousands found themselves playing for the first time.

Those were simpler times (video games were just emerging), and Erol’s style, although reminiscent of the old pulp adventure comics, carried an exciting and almost modern take on a subject that was supposed to evoke a medieval flavour. Even though I had my old set and was combining the rules of the advanced game as they were available, I just had to have this newer version fueled by the power of the cover illustration. It does a great job of combining dragon, dungeon, and adventure — with a little sex to boot. However, the real strength of this painting is its dramatic colour scheme.

#9: D.C. Sutherland’s “A Paladin In Hell”

Flipping through the original Player’s Handbook, you couldn’t help but stop and stare at this full page illustration of a paladin — on the brink — fighting valiantly with his holy avenger against this party of devils. There are many different stories one could attach to this image, but I always figured that he was a on a suicidal crusade attempting to vanquish as much evil as possible before he himself met his maker. Notice his aura of protection from evil and the comparable scale of each of the devils.

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Posted in BLOGS, Todd Man Out

Gaming Night in Canada: Halloween Game Night!

Gaming Night in Canada:  Halloween Game Night!

By Todd Secord

So, on my birthday in September, after a few bevies, apparently I suggested that we should do a Halloween themed game night.  Y’know, like when we were plenty younger and doing that kind of thing was way cooler than, let’s say, being at Halloween parties with girls.  As it would work out, we always reserved Halloween night for a game night.  If it wasn’t a horror filled theme of D&D, than we would let our buddy Lee take us through some Call of Cthulhu.  Sitting around his family’s dining room table, in a house built specifically to play Cthulhu in, with fully stocked bookshelves all around us (his father was a professor) and lit candles adding to the creepy atmosphere, we did our best not to go insane, which, other than death, is the game’s primary no-no. On the radio in the background was CFNY’s Chris Sheppard’s Club 102, hitting up the likes of Skinny Puppy’s “Smothered Hope”, Ministry’s “Every Day is Halloween”, and of course, the Halloween classic of all Halloween classics, the Bauhaus tune “Bela Lugosi’s Dead”.

Snapping out of that trip down memory lane, and a group e-mail later, and James agreed to run D&D this Halloween.  As the e-mails shot back and forth, the ante began to up as the idea of having a costume party was thrown in, and then my nephew called me up and finally gave the word that he wanted to learn to play D&D.

The plans had been set.  Bring on the hunt for Halloween costumes…

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Posted in BLOGS, NEWS, Todd Man Out