I consider myself to be somewhat educated. I have a college degree. Sure it’s in visual arts, but I still had to sit through boring lectures, stay up late reading textbooks, and writing pointless papers. To be fair, only a third of adults in the United States receive a bachelor’s degree. So I can say I have been educated. Also, since I work in education and public service, I realize I’m better educated than many other people. A lot of what makes me educated has to do with fortunate circumstances. One of these fortunate circumstances is that I got involved in role-playing games at a young age.

With an eye to the music in my play list I’m sitting down to hammer out a few reviews. Normally I find this task odious when I have a lot of positive things to say about a game—and I haven’t had so much positive to say about a game system since I read and reviewed Heroquest. With that in mind I’m going to attempt to find enough nits to pick to give you a fair and accurate review of Burning Wheel.

Recently, I’ve found myself running role-playing games with a number of couples. Apparently, there are men out there who can convince their wives to roll-dice and pretend to be a half-orc barbarian for a few hours. Even more unusual is that these women keep doing this week after week.

Every Dungeons and Dragons player has one great need: monsters to kill. Wizards of the Coast understands this and thus continues to provide its gamers with more and more monsters. This has lead to the continued publishing of Monster Manuals for D&D players to spend their cash on. More recently, Monster Manual IV has been published to entice gamers out of their basements and into gloom of their local game stores.

In the world of role-playing games there is a certain group of people who have some notoriety. Often these are people who have consistently produced popular games and modules. One of these people is Ed Stark, a writer and designer for Westend Games, TSR, and currently working for Wizards of the Coast. Ed Stark has a managed to stay in the business for a long time and has produced quite the list of well-known titles.