Month in Review – August 2017

Hello, everyone! It’s been quite the hectic month on my end, which explains the erratic update schedule – another semester of classes has begun, and I spent a surprising amount of time at the beginning of the month on the road, both rails and highway.

As I mentioned last week, my scheduled updates not only failed to get posted but were somehow deleted, forcing me to rewrite articles in addition to writing new ones. Thankfully, I’m almost caught up against this scheduling hiccup, and once I post the article featuring Zyagi, the Armored Tyrant, we’ll return to a more conventional update schedule like that of July.

While we haven’t received any further pledges via Patreon, I have noticed a steady increase in website traffic, so I feel I should extend a fond hello to the new readers and my sincere wishes that you’ll find content which you enjoy.

Since it’s the end of the month again, I’ve been keeping a close eye out for new reader questions to answer. If you’ve got a question to which you’d like to see my answer, please go ahead and submit it through the Ask Christopher page.

What sort of house rules do you run at your game table?

My favorite house rule currently is to roll a d6 instead of a d20 for initiative. This rule makes a character or monster’s Dexterity more impactful on initiative order and (in my experience) makes the math faster to process mentally.

What’s your favorite class to play?

My favorite class to play is probably a Sorcerer. When I was first starting to play Dungeons & Dragons, one of the earliest games in which I played was a Dark Sun mini-campaign at D&D Encounters, in which I played a pre-generated Cosmic Sorcerer, Barcan. One of my strongest memories of the campaign was when cannibalistic halflings incapacitated my fellow party members, and Barcan was surrounded. Because of the close quarters, Barcan couldn’t cast any spells without running the risk of taking attacks of opportunity, and I was forced to attempt to fight one of these halflings in melee.

I was surprised to discover that Barcan had an exceptional Strength score, defying the stereotypes of weak, squishy wizards, and remember commenting, “Wow, this Sorcerer can do just about anything!”

Are you going to review the new Wizards of the Coast books later this year?

Yes, at least Xanathar’s Guide to Everything. I don’t know if I plan to pick up Tomb of Annihilation currently, but if I do, I’ll post my review to the website after reading it.

I like the content I read on TBM Games but don’t have the money to commit to the Patreon. How can I help the website? (Okay, this question is totally a plant!)

While the Patreon is the most straightforward way to support TBM Games as it covers the costs of maintaining the website, there are several ways to help me keep TBM Games going! For starters, if you find any of the Kobold Press books I review interesting, consider getting them through this referral link so that you can buy them straight from the publisher. If you haven’t already, you can like TBM Games on Facebook. Additionally, you can comment on posts you’re interested in; your feedback helps me to figure out which posts people enjoy most and write even better content. Most importantly, though, you can share the site with your friends, family, hobby store – anyone who’ll listen that you think would like the content I write. My goal is to share quality tabletop gaming content with as many people as possible!

So what’s in store for September? We’ve got quite a few new articles in the pipeline – as I hinted earlier, we have another Primordial in Profile coming: Xil, the Swarm of Horrors. September will also see an article about the Emperor Cicada and what can happen when they’re influenced by Primordial magic, a review of Nord Games’ Ultimate Bestiary – Revenge of the Horde, and more! Finally, this coming month, Patrons backing at the Playtester level will also see a revised version of the character class from the playtest article last month, with some features rewritten for clarity. To gain access to this experimental game content, all you have to do is back the TBM Games Patreon at the $5 level.

Thank you, everyone, for supporting another exciting month of tabletop gaming articles, and I hope that you’ll enjoy what’s yet to come.

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