[RPG Newswire] Lights Out!

For those of you not in New England, we had 10 inches of heavy, wet snow this past Saturday (29 Oct 2011). Since the leaves are still on the trees they caught more snow than usual and fell all over the place, and it feels like most of the area lost power. At one point 600,000 homes were without power in Massachusetts alone. The cleanup is still ongoing - my mother's whole neighborhood is still dark and nobody has dealt with the downed trees blocking two key intersections in the past 3 days.

My house was without power for about 36 hours. I got the generator running, but I need to figure out how to hook the well pump and fridge in before the next power outage. Unfortunately, the server hosting my DNS records went dark also, and is still dark as far as I know. Which means this blog went dark. And if you tried to email me between Sunday and yesterday, chances are good I didn't get it. We're back up now, which is why you're reading this post at all, and I've moved to a different DNS service that will hopefully provide more resistance to failure.

Here's your gaming thought for the week: What natural disasters could befall your PCs in your game world that would change the playing field for them? What systems do they rely on and how would they deal with a disruption to those systems?

And while I'm thinking about recent topics of interest, here are a few things that may interest you:

• A Night in the Lonesome October is an RPG Blog Carnival run by Jeff, a fellow gamer and fellow father. If you're looking for horror-themed RPG content, go take a look. I hope to finish my Phobias for 4e article soon. I know it's incredibly late, but the power outage threw my schedule off completely.
• The At-Will Blog is all done. If you're looking for great D&D 4e content, inspiring skill challenges, and solid optional rules, go there. Quinn and his team put together something great with over 400 posts, but circumstances have changed and it no longer makes sense for him to run. Ryven put together a more technical epitaph for the site which explains some of the reasoning behind calling it quits.
• Sarah Darkmagic wrote up a review of the Pathfinder Boxed Set. It does some great things to teach novice GMs, so check that out. Also stay tuned for more very cool things coming from that particular corner of the web.
• Monte Cook continues to give the online D&D community chat fodder with the Legends & Lore series of articles. At this point it's clear D&D 5e is in the works, and it's interesting to see some of the thought processes and decisions going into the next edition. This week's article is about how RPG rules need to straddle the middle ground between concise but dry rules, inspiring fiction, and idea toolkit. That's a tall order for any book, let alone one being judged by a diverse and vocal fan base.

The WiFi connection on the train is getting flaky on me, so I'll go with this. Do you find an article full of nothing but links useful or annoying. Please comment below or cast your official vote by adding a comment on your PayPal donation email.

Keep an eye out for Phobias and Irrational Hatred, coming soon to a Gaming Den of Iniquity near you.