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 is still going strong. Learn more by visiting the Shadows of the Force campaign blog or checking out the Holocron of Zend wiki.

We’ve also played (and occasionally still play) a number of other RPGs, including Fading Suns, Mutants & Masterminds, Spycraft, Serenity, Battlestar Galactica, and Savage Worlds.

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 pile.

The group’s been heavily into miniatures games in the past, namely HeroClix and Pirates of the Spanish Main, but we’ve since moved on; Battletech is now our table-top miniatures game of choice.