Most evenings when I drive home I enjoy listening to RPG podcasts. 3.5 Private Sanctuary has 2 fun podcasts (Know Direction and Private Sanctuary) that discuss Pathfinder in detail. These are real Pathfinder enthusiasts and I enjoy listening to them.

One of my favorite parts in most of their podcasts is when they discuss skinning options – essentially you take an existing class/item/skill and describe it in a different way. For example, instead of an alchemist taking a potion to Hulk out into beast form, he normally takes potions to suppress his beast form and lets the potions effects slip when he needs to Hulk out. Same mechanics, very different flavor.

They have a lot of product reviews as well. As enthusiasts, most of their reviews are very positive but they do point out flaws and potential issues. They highlight upcoming releases and other news. There are regular interviews with RPG people – writers, designers, artists, and so on. The hosts do a skillful job of interviewing them to highlight interesting ideas.

Obviously it’s mostly Pathfinder (and D&D 3.5) specific, but a fair amount of the ideas and flavor would transfer easily to D&D 4e and other fantasy RPGs.

I’d recommend this podcast to anyone who is interested in Pathfinder.

If you don’t have time to read classic poetry, this is a quick wat to get through some famous poems: Famous Poems Rewritten as Limericks.

This is awfully cute: What if Darth Vader was a good father ? 12 illustrations from Darth Vader and Son.

This video makes me smile: A TED speaker's worst nightmare | Video on TED.com.

The biggest challenge in playing games these days is waiting for updates to complete and for load screens to pass. It takes a lot of the fun out of games when I have to wait 10-30 minutes to play.

This amuses me: Tea with the Squash God Annotated Fairy Tale #3 The Prince and the Tortoise. It never ceases to amaze me how easy it is to just accept things that with a little bit of thought turn out to be completely ridiculous.

I enjoyed this article: Wombat's Gaming Den of Iniquity: Why Is D&D the 800 Pound Gorilla of RPGs?. A number of the things wombat describes are reasons why I keep coming back to RPGs in general.

Leaving the somewhat cleaned up shrine behind them, Lia led the way toward the tombs to the north. As the party approached the tombs, ghostly eladrin emerged from the tombs to repel the intruders. Lia tried to address them but was told “Back off you hick elf!” as the ghosts attacked. Combat barely started when Callie managed to talk the ghost’s leader, Thiran down.

When Thiran calmed down, he agreed that the party was not tainted with the stench of the undead that tore through the area. By way of apology for his attack, he offered directions to a bow he had hidden away while he was alive. Shadowbane was disgusted that the group let the ghosts continue in their undeath.

The party made their way through the Feywild to a cave entrance looking for Thiran’s bow. Trolls had moved into the cave so the party attacked. A pet basilisk tried to attack TheBeast with poison, but he shook it it off. Whyd’s Sleep spell disabled a number of trolls and the party moved further in.

This combination of NirCmd and AutoHotkey looks useful: Perform Nearly Any Windows Task with One Keystroke. I’ve recently started using AutohotKey for automating some tasks and it’s been helpful so something like this that will push it further bears looking into.

After acquiring the powerful undead-killing sword, Shadowbane, the party decided to go do something about the incursion of undead into the Feywild. It didn’t take them long to find a rift from the natural world into the Feywild. As they approached it a gigantic elk emerged and headed directly east at a steady pace, not stopping for anything.

As they entered the rift, they encountered a green troll that used the anomaly as a hunting grounds. The party quickly proved too tough for it, despite having it fight it in an odd environment. They emerged into the Feywild proper and saw the elk’s tracks, a cluster of tombs, and a small structure.

The structure was a small shrine with runes recently carved onto its walls. Whyd and Callie determined that the runes were twisting the energies of the Feywild into a channel for undead power. Lia heard whimpering coming from inside the structure. Upon investigation, they found a young eladrin woman chained to the wall inside. jd4 rushed in to heal her while Callie and Lia tried to talk with her. As soon as they were close enough she whipped off her chains and attacked. They fought the false prisoner and her scarab swarms for a while before she dissolved into a pile of bugs and skittered away. Unfortunately they were unable to disrupt the runes and will have to venture further into the Feywild.