The Adari or the power of Cosmos

I started playing D&D in the mid 90’s, with the AD&D 2E ruleset. It was—of course—a blast, like it did for most of us who started playing as teenagers. In those days also, the Saint Seiya cartoon was running in my country for the first time, and we were all—as good teens—crazy about it. So, my DM created this overpowered rules he called Cosmo, of course inspired from the cartoon. D&D plus Saint Seiya, what could possibly go wrong? Needless to say, the game went into crazy town, but it was epic and funny as hell.

Nowadays, as I’m trying to do serious game design and my players wanted to play epic levels, I revisited my friend’s idea and give it a more balanced and modern form with the 5th edition rules, trying to keep the original spirit. First thing of course was to rename the power, and thus the Cosmo became the Adari.

The Adari is fit into my own campaign setting, with its own cosmology and gods, not set into the classic D&D multiverse. However, is a concept that can easily be imported into any Epic D&D campaign, with little or no changes needed.

Stranger Things, and back again

New Netflix series Stranger Things is all over our social media circles right now. And when I say "our" I mean us, the role-playing gamers. So here I am, returning from a really long hiatus, writing again about this strangers things we love!

I knew nothing about the show until I opened my Netflix account the day it premiered and saw it there on the home page. I sometimes put series on while working on my computer—I have two monitors set up—so I clicked it with no expectations and thinking of using it just as background noise while I worked.

What a big surprise!

The first couple of minutes I saw this typical lab scene where something has gone terribly wrong and poor "Scientist Number 1" dies a horrible dead. OK—I thought—seen it before. So I kept working while watching. But next, there are these kids playing D&D in a basement and, obviously, that instantly caught my attention! I stopped what I was doing to focus on the scene, and I cracked open with laughter!