Rants & Raves

F:AT looks back at the state of fantasy, adventure games (this article was originally published March 9, 2009). Fantasy role-playing games have an irresistible, almost fatal attraction for me. It stems from my childhood exposure to Tolkien, I have no doubt and fantasy role-playing was where I started my exposure to hobby games in general, and remained the focus of my hobby time for many years. I delight in the mythic quality of the settings, the feeling of magic and mystery that pervades (as contrasted to cold, mechanical science fiction), the evocation of a world...

Every community, no matter how big or how small, has its founding myths, a filter through which it comes partly to define itself. For what is, after all, a relatively small community, The Fortress seems to have rather a lot of them. I’m not sure quite why this should be the case, but after having had a user suggest it might be of interest to some of our newer members to go over how this site came to be, and not being one to pass up an excuse to bang my own drum, I figured to might be a...

The continuing nightmare saga that started with my son lighting my house on fire is coming to a close, and has allowed me to come up with a few tips for potential disaster victims that I would like to share. Hopefully most of you will never have any need of these little tips, because hopefully none of you will have something terrible happen to your house that forces you to live in a crappy rent house owned by an Armenian immigrant who thinks 'slumlord' is a term of endearment.

Neverr again...in RL, at least. On the Table I actually don’t have anything to review this week. The tide has waned, at last. I’m not running on empty- I got a package from the fine folks at Stronghold containing their very awesome-looking Revolver and the very Citadels-looking Lost Temple. Both should be reviewed shortly- maybe even next week since they’re smaller titles and I can probably get in a bunch of plays between Hellfire Club and some home sessions. Destined Hero is coming up too.

Regular readers will by now be familiar with my personal tale of the woe which, as a nascent board game hobbyist, arose out of the difference in what I’d been lead to believe Eurogames represented, and what they actually are. I’ll wager that many users on this site could tell you a similar story of disappointment so I won’t go over it again in its entirety. But one of the key things I took away from learning about early Eurogames is that, potentially, they were family games that most people could learn, play, and enjoy. ...