Dungeons & Dragons for Kids

Wizards of the Coast has developed a Dungeons & Dragons game specifically for kids 6 and up. The whole thing is available for free here. It looks like a pretty good way to introduce children to the hobby, which can get very complex and seem daunting to even adult beginners.

10 Best Alignment Charts

Geekosystem has compiled ten pop culture alignment charts using the Dungeons & Dragons' system. The depiction of 3.5 as Lawful Evil is spot-on.

via Popped Culture

Previously on the Zeray Gazette:
Pop Culture Alignment

The Primitive Artwork of Early Dungeons & Dragons

When Dungeons & Dragons was first published in 1974, Gygax and Arneson didn't have any money to spend on hiring professional artists to illustrate it. Something Awful has a gallery of the artwork from these early days.

via BoingBoing

Amazing Personal Gaming Room

burntwire brothers, a user of The Acaeum message board, built a simply AMAZING gaming room -- yes, a room created solely for the purpose of playing role-playing games -- which he calls the "D&D Room". Many, many astounding pictures of this detailed room at the link:

I have been working on and off for about 2 years building our "D&D ROOM" to hold most of our collection and give us a cool place to play. I did 99.9% of the work myself with just a bit of help in the attic from my brother Shawn. All lighting is controlled by the DM via a dimmer/control box mounted under the table. When you walk in the lights automatically come on via a contactor mounted in the closet. There is also hidden strobe and fog machine for effects. I also mounted speakers in the beams and have a sound system in the closet. Here are a few photos...

via reddit

Dungeons & Dragons Not to Blame for Mass Shooting: Gamers Tell Their Stories

This past week, Amy Bishop, a professor at the University of Alabama - Huntsville went on a shooting rampage and killed three people. As she was an avid Dungeons & Dragons player, some folks are trying to blame the game for her actions. In order to counteract this unwarranted bad publicity, Matt Staggs at Suvudu asked prominent fiction writers to describe their formative experiences with the game. Novelist Jay Lake responded:

"The alternate worlds and wild imagination of D&D gave me and my fellow misfits an outlet, and we had dozens upon dozens of hours per week to spend on it. Where else were we going to go? We lived in our high school. Think about that for a minute. Six or eight ferociously bright kids-Choate is one of the most academically competitive schools in the nation-with nothing to do but make things up to amuse one another, and D&D providing the framework."

Although those years have since passed, Lake still credited the game with providing a foundation he has built upon as a successful writer.

"Those three years playing D&D at boarding school did more to ground me in storytelling, plot construction, and sheer, raw imaginative throughput than any other single activity of my life. Today I'm a successful fantasy and science fiction novelist with ten novels and over two hundred short stories in print or on the way. I might have gotten to this point by a different path, but it would not have been the same journey,"

This was something akin to my experience. Role-playing games, perhaps the most intrinsically social of all hobbies, provided human contact in its otherwise near-total absence. And it gave me a creative outlet to engage in storytelling in collaborative context.

I remember more than a decade ago joining an informal community of Watership Down role-players. We had no fixed starting rules and pretty much just spontaneously created a game with a rich and elaborate storyline. With minimal editing, one story arc that lasted over two years could have easily been turned into a novel.

Obvious copyright issues prevented us from proceeding. But ordinary people, in a community of people who never met face-to-face, were able to create something quite extraordinary. And that game is, by the way, still going on.

I haven't played with them in many years, but sometimes I visit and just look at the front page. In the midst of all of the things that have been chaotic and shifting in my life in the past decade, I never would have though that an Internet message board would stand the test of time. But it has. And that it has done so gives me a sense of comfort in its stability.

That's my story. What's yours?

via Make

UPDATE: James Rummel adds his thoughts, reminiscing that the argument against gaming dates back to the 80s. Here you can read Michael Stackpole's elegant and researched takedown of that movement.

If You Merged Chess and Dungeons & Dragons

It would look like this.

via reddit

Prison Inmate Sues for Right to Play Dungeons & Dragons; Loses When Game Determined to Promote Gang Activity

Kevin T. Singer filed a lawsuit against officials at Wisconsin's Waupun prison after a policy was initiated in 2004 to eradicate all Dungeons and Dragons game materials among concerns that playing it promotes gang-related activity.

The 33-year-old Singer is a devoted player of the fantasy role-playing game that involves recruiting others to play as a group. He argued that his First Amendment rights were being violated and demanded that Dungeons and Dragons material confiscated from his cell be returned.

Link via reddit

Better Than Being Able to Go Back in Time and Watch the Constitutional Convention

You can listen to a podcast of Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins of Penny Arcade, the great Wil Weaton, and other geek celebrities play Dungeons & Dragons.

And the most amazing thing is that it doesn't cost a penny.

How cool is that?

Link via Wandering Goblin

Dungeons & Dragons for Microsoft Surface is Mind-Blowingly Awesome

I'm not sure how to describe Microsoft Surface, but here's my attempt: it's a multi-user touch-sensitive computer tool that is interactive in so many ways. And students at Carnegie-Mellon University have developed a prototype Dungeons & Dragons program that works with it.

The advantages of computer gaming are immediate calculation and excellent graphics. The advantage of old-fashioned tabletop gaming is complete flexibility of storyline. This program appears to synthesize the two in an amazing way.

Link via CrunchGear