The Griffin’s Crier is the online home of the Blackrazor Guild, a game group based in Lehigh Valley, Pennsylvania. Our group has been gaming almost every week since 1996, and is still going strong despite marriage, kids, divorce, re-marriage, jobs lost and found, and all the rest of the craziness of modern life.
Role-Playing Games
Our group began with our World of Greyhawk campaign. It was a Dungeons & Dragons game set in our home-grown city of Obsidian Bay on the Pomarj peninsula, and was a successor of sorts to GM Ken Newquist’s college campaign at Lock Haven University. We got a good 12-year run out of that campaign, playing through 2nd Edition, 3rd Edition and 3.5 before retiring it with the advent of D&D 4th Edition. Learn more about it by visiting the GriffCrier Wiki.
While our group playtested D&D 4E, we decided it wasn’t for us, and decided to move to Star Wars: Saga Edition, which addresses many of the problems we encountered in D&D 3.x (iterative attacks, save vs. do nothing, power creep) while retaining the things we liked (diverse skill system, flexible character creation, the core d20 mechanic). Our Shadows of the Force campaign, set during the Knights of the Old Republic era, began in 2008 and ran until 2011. Learn more by visiting the Shadows of the Force campaign blog or checking out the Holocron of Zend wiki.
After Star Wars, we ran an abbreviated version of Paizo’s Second Darkness adventure path using their Pathfinder RPG rules that lasted for another two years before reaching its epic conclusion.
With that campaign’s end we launched into a Savage Worlds-powered Weird Pulp campaign. In it, we play The Wardens Against the Twilight of Humanity, a loosely-knit secret society with offices in Bombay, Cairo, New York, London, San Francisco, and Hong Kong. It is an organization comprised of men and women of action — troubleshooters, adventurers, and mystics — who have sworn an oath to protect the innocent from threats both mundane and magical.
In November 2014 we began contemplating a return to Dungeons & Dragons in the form of D&D 5th Edition. We have two campaigns lined up:
- Obsidian Frontier: This campaign takes place two years after the founding of Obsidian Bay, and decades before our original Greyhawk Campaign
- Heart of Darkness: A one-session, one-level playtest campaign for trying out D&D 5e. It also takes place in Greyhawk, but this time several decades in the future.
Board & Card Games
Many in our group are avid board and card games, and we try to squeeze in a day of board games every month or two. We favor European-style board games (Settlers of Catan, Carcassone, Ticket to Ride) as well as American uber-games (Arkham Horror, Risk 2210). Card games are another favorite, with Munchkin and Illuminati at the top of that list.
The group’s been heavily into miniatures games in the past. Favorites include HeroClix, Pirates of the Spanish Main, Battletech, and A Call to Arms: Noble Armada.
Joining the Group
We periodically have openings at our table. If you’re able to game at least twice a month and are interested in joining the group, email us at scribe@griffcrier.com.