So, what the news at WotC? What the community suspected for quite some time now, is actually true: WotC is already working on a new edition of D&D.  If it will be called D&D 5th Edition or something else is still unclear, but Mike Mearls obviously likes the idea of just calling it “Dungeons & Dragons” and drop the edition number altogether.

This time they want to do it right and bring back the highly fragmented D&D community. This also more or less proves that D&D 4th Edition wasn’t as successful as the decision makers at WotC and Hasbro hoped for. I suspect the success of Paizo’s Pathfinder and probably even the Old-School Revolution are responsible for that.

While their goals are laudable I fear they are doomed to fail. They plan to create a new edition of D&D that shall please both fans of the recent D&D 4E but also bring back the OSR crowd. They intend to manage this by creating a modular ruleset and community involvement during the design and playtest phases. I have to admit that a highly modular D&D game could be quite interesting. The Unearthed Arcana book for D&D 3.5 was one of my favorite books back when I still played D&D. Being able to pick and choose the rules options you like in your D&D game might be pretty nifty, but in my opinion it’s very hard to pull off.

Community involvement in the design phase may also be pretty problematic. Only a small portion of gamers does participate in online communities or attend gaming convention. How do you make sure that the game appeals to this silent majority and not only to the quite vocal minority that actively participates in the design process?

I have to admit that I’m not that invested in that topic as I was a couple of years back. I wish WotC all the best and if the next iteration of D&D is a roleplaying game that sounds fun to play, I might give it a try. But if it’s not my cup of tea I’ll just play something else. There are so many interesting games out there, so that I am not dependent on Dungeons & Dragons.

Before I let the team speak their thoughts, let me share you some interesting links for you to check out later:

• Charting the Course of D&D (Mike Mearls, Official D&D site)
• Players Roll the Dice for Dungeons & Dragons Remake (NY Times)
• Wizards of the Coasts announces new edition of ‘Dungeons and Dragons’(CNN)
• Gamers React To New Dungeons And Dragons (Forbes)

So, what are my fellow team members’ thoughts on that topic? How do you feel about WotC’s announcement?

Roberto:

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I was a D&D fan boy for the longest time! Now with full disclosure out of the way let me summarise how I feel about D&D next, or 5th edition, or however they decide to brand it. Forecast: Positively optimistic!

I’ve written about it before, after playing D&D for most of my gaming life, from Basic to 3rd edition, I was in the 4th edition bandwagon. I can’t fault a company for wanting to make a profit, or attempt to improve their game, and for the longest time I believed the success of the brand was important for the continued existence of the hobby. I tried to play 4th edition, ran a 7+ month campaign and realized this iteration of the game was not for me. I embraced Pathfinder and have not looked back.

While I always played other games, I kept going back to D&D at the end of the day. And you may make the argument that Pathfinder is not far from D&D, but by cutting the D&D umbilical cord I ended up playing and discovering many games I might not have if my gaming money was tied up to the latest WotC release.

I know I am not the only one who’s made this comparison but its worth mentioning again, deciding to give up D&D was like a break up. That’s how invested I was in the game. They’ve put together a great design team, I want to see what they come up with. Their stated goal behind the new edition is laudable, bringing together the community seems like the way to go, and learning from the fiasco of not supporting the OGL I believe is important.

I even applied for the playtest… Looking back I realize it was a spur of the moment decision, my gaming time is precious as is and I don’t see myself giving up my current or future campaign to playtest the new D&D. I want to keep abreast of the process and may just do some special sessions to try out the rules with my peeps from Puerto Rico Role Players, so we’ll see.

On the flip side, I wonder if its too little too late. I believe there is the possibility of life in the hobby beyond D&D, and It would have to be a truly great game to get me to play D&D again. I’ve healed the wounds from the break up and I’m not completely convinced I want to get back together.

I think community participation, with its inevitable pitfalls, it still a great idea. So I believe this is a step in the right direction. I don’t want an MMO like board game, but I’d love for them to integrate the DDI tools into a game I like, I liked the DDI when I was subscribed, not the game it supported. I’d love to see PDFs priced right, online support, the building of a true community. Let’s see if WotC can manage that!

Again, I’m optimistic and will follow what they do, hopefully participate in the discussion. Realistically I will most than likely get the book (books?) when they come out and read them, whether I end up playing it is another matter. Here is me wishing the best to the design team, they’ll need it. To misquote Bette Davis in All About Eve, “Fasten your seat belts, its going to be a bumpy ride!”

Michael Garcia:

I’m not sure what to think of this announcement. As a lover of the OSR I like the fact that they are taking opinions from the community. I’m fairly positive that the alpha and beta of Pathfinder from Paizo has a lot to do with this.

My fear is that they will be taking the opinions of the gamers that are vocal. My experiences show that most gamers are not. Not every gamer is a member of the Wizards Community, they don’t all have blogs, and we all know how forums go. Sigh, I’m afraid that the input is only going to be by whiny 14 year old 4e loving twitter folks. Long story short, I opted for the playtesting, which I have a feeling is only going to be Encounters, which I do not participate in. I’ll read it over, may play it, but I’m happy with my retro clones. I doubt they win me back, but I’m hopeful as D&D was what got me into the hobby in the first place. I would love to be proven wrong.

My hopes:

• Pencil, paper, dice only. I don’t want inclusion of electronics by any means.
• I don’t want to have to buy minis from a company that doesn’t even sell minis anymore.
• No subscriptions.
• The OGL to come back in one form or another.
• My wish, 1e with better art and layout.

Youseph:

I woke up Monday morning to a hopeful sounding Wizards of the Coast (WotC) post announcing the plans for the new version of Dungeons & Dragons.

Dungeons & Dragons is the granddaddy of all role playing games (RPG). Anyone who thinks of role playing games, weather they have played any or not, thinks of Dungeons & Dragons. There is a lot of power behind the name and the brand. I cut my teeth on RPGs with Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition and it has proved to be a gateway drug of sorts for me by opening doors to many other RPGs that I have enjoyed and invested in. But the grand daddy has been and will always be Dungeons & Dragons. I would love the chance to come back to it again at some point.

After reading the WotC announcement I immediately started searching twitter for any other posts regarding the new edition of the beloved game and found a couple of really good ones, including posts at CNN, The New York Times, and Forbes. each one of them seemed to have a little bit more info to add to the announcement than the last.

The biggest positive thing I have seen since the announcement of the new Dungeons & Dragons game is that WotC has been way more active with the community on Twitter (and I assume Facebook). It’s like someone with in the company read a copy of Gary Vaynerchuk’s ‘The Thank You Economy’ and realized the people they are selling Dungeons & Dragons to are people with feelings and opinions and need to be heard if they wish to keep making money.

As for the stacks of 4E books I have bought? Well you know. I find that all these books from all these other RPGs I have invested in prove to be a great resource of ideas and adventures when I am planning out a game. I think they will prove themselves useful for years to come.

Jay:

D&D Next is an interesting direction in which to take the D&D brand, given that Pathfinder has managed to make an abandoned ruleset successful.  Perhaps this is just a case of WotC trying to emulate a successful model, but ultimately I think that if done with sufficient care, this approach might result in a good product.

While it 4e wasn’t the success that Hasbro wanted it to be, I still felt that it was a valid game.  In fact, it introduced new ways of playing the game that were genuinely interesting, and I still hold the opinion that if it had been marketed as a different RPG instead of having the D&D name on it, it would not have experienced the severe backlash that it did from the fans of older editions.

I await the results of D&D Next with cautious optimism.  On one hand, they started on the right foot.  They found a way to make their announcement across multiple channels, and supported it with a strong social media presence.  They seem dedicated to keep those who were intrigued interested in the material by starting off with something as early as this month.  The talk about listening to the players is very encouraging, though it will take a strong design hand to stick to what works, after listening to what are possibly the most passionate (and outspoken) fans in the industry.

WotC is taking the right steps with promotion, and I’m hoping that the results of their design work will continue to show promise.  If this is Hasbro’s last attempt to make a commercially viable D&D, then they’re certainly going about it the right way.

Related posts:

1. My thoughts on the new D&D “red box”
2. My thoughts on the D&D Essentials Starter aka “Red Box”
3. My thoughts on OGL, GSL and beyond

But that doesn’t mean I have given up. So my first gaming related resolution for 2012 is the same as last year: play more. We actually scheduled our first game for the second weekend in January where I want to wrap up the Call of Cthulhu game from New Year’s Eve.

But aside from that I want to run a campaign from start to finish in 2012. It doesn’t need to be long, but a story arc that covers at least a dozen sessions would be a nice change. I have a couple of ideas what I would love to run in the new year, but before making any plans I should consult my players. More than once I’ve made plans for a game that I never ran because I couldn’t interest my players in it.

One of the things I would love to do is running a sandbox campaign with Lamentations of the Flame Princess. I recently got my print copy of Carcosa and I utterly love that book. The setting is extremely weird, has a lot of Lovecraft influences and looks and reads great. I’ll also have to think of a way on how to make use of Vornheim, too, since it’s another book I would like to use someday. I am not sure if my players are into old-school D&D, but it might be worth a try.

When it comes to game design I still have a couple of unfinished projects on my harddrive that need some more work. So another goal for 2012 is to at least finish one of those projects. Heck, perhaps I should resurrect the Gearbox project or finally finish that game I’ve been working on in secret for way too long…

So what are your gaming resolutions for 2012? Please share your thoughts in the comments below!

No related posts.

There seems to be some controversy around this product. I have to admit I haven’t bothered to look deeper into this, but I believe one reason is that Carcosa is not what you would consider family friendly. Like LotFP it doesn’t hide the fact that it is for adults only. Among Carcosa’s inspirations the author lists the works of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E.Howard, Lin Carter and Michael Moorcock. And a setting inspired by the writings of these people can’t be all bad. And trust me, it isn’t.

While the cover is nothing special, the interior artwork of the 143-paged book is pretty awesome. Even though it’s black & white artwork only, the style used fits the setting perfectly. The image below is a perfect example.

The layout, fonts and artwork really make you want to leaf through the book all day. Some drawings are so detailed you can spend quite a few minutes discovering new stuff. But let’s now have a look at the content itself.

Carcosa is a planet about 150 light years away from Earth and home to thirteen races of men. There’s no common fantasy magic, but characters may have psionic powers and Sorcerers may use rituals to summon entities right out of H.P. Lovecraft’s nightmares.

The setting was designed for use with Lamentations of the Flame Princess or some other D&D retro clone in mind, but you could easily use it for other games or just as an inspiration for your own campaign. The setting is not as detailed as for example the Forgotten Realms or some other classic D&D settings, but there’s enough material to run a game set in the world without being bogged down by the minutiae.

What I realized pretty quickly is that Carcosa was not designed as something you can play out of the box. A lot of descriptions are kept rather vague to make it easier for the GM to mold the setting to his or her wishes. But since it’s meant for fans of old-school gaming this should be no big issue.

But the building blocks you’re provided with are just awesome: Space Alien Technology, Artifacts of the Great Race (yes, the one from Lovecraft’s stories), Psionics, Sorcerous Rituals, really cool and unique monsters and more. The book also contains a hex map of a portion of the planet with descriptions of every single hex on that map. That’s an instant sandbox right there.

In my opinion Carcosa is a very interesting product, well worth it’s price. If you are into old-school gaming in general and weird science-fantasy settings in particular, you’ll definitely enjoy using Carcosa even if it’s just for cannibalizing ideas.

You can get the PDF Edition from RPGNow for $21.25 or directly from the publisher for €13. There’s also a print and PDF deal for the hardcover book and the PDF which sets you back about €32. For 5€ extra you get a poster and a map, too. I have to admit I am very tempted to get that bundle as soon as I got my next paycheck!

Related posts:

1. Review: Cthulhu Rising
2. Diaspora
3. Iron Kingdoms RPG source books now available in PDF

Last year a group called “Boolean Union” created an animated film based on said Chick tract. That may actually be old news to some of you. I don’t actually know what reminded me of the existence of said movie, I think someone mentioned it on Twitter or Google+ the other day. Alas I can’t remember who it was. Nevertheless, the animated film based on the Chick tract is fun to watch even though the animation looks very old school. But hey, it fits the source material.

Enjoy!

Related posts:

1. Dungeons & Dragons Online goes free to play
2. Under the Dark Sun
3. Lazy Friday Video Post: The Dungeons and the Dragons

• Savage Worlds Fantasy Companion [Pinnacle Entertainment]
• Realms of Cthulhu [Reality Blurs]
• Karma Roleplaying System Core [Bards and Sages]
• Fantasy Craft [Crafty Games]
• Fat Dragon’s Dragonshire Deluxe [Fat Dragon Games]
• Ninja Burger RPG (2nd Edition) [aetherial FORGE]
• Heavy Gear Blitz! Locked & Loaded [Dream Pod 9]
• Hero’s Handbook: Dragonborn [Goodman Games]
• Splicers RPG [Palladium Books]
• Caladon Falls [Savage Mojo]
• Legend of the Five Rings (4th Edition) [AEG]
• Fuzzy Heroes (2nd Edition) [Inner City Games]
• Ave Molech (2nd Edition) [Morbidgames]
• Book of Alignment (OGL/Pathfinder) [Emerald Press]
• Horrific Universe: 12 Months of Horror [Bailey Records]
• Directors Cut Survival Horror [Crispy Zombie Productions]
• Friar’s Almanac (Complete) [Dark Spire]
• Distant Vistas [Draken Games]
• Stories in the Ether, Issue 1 (Bundle) [Nevermet Press]
• d-Infinity Volume #3: Children of the Night (Gen Con Special Edition) [Skirmisher Publishing]

In order to benefit from the discount you need to enter the coupon code DiceInTheFall during checkout! There’s definitely a lot of good stuff on this list.

Related posts:

1. Get 20% off of selected titles at DriveThruRPG until July 10th
2. Get 20% off until September 20 on selected DriveThruRPG titles
3. Get 20% off of selected titles at DriveThruRPG this month

“Into the Odd” is basically a highly streamlined and simplified version of D&D that did away with classes, three of the attributes and includes a totally new magic system. In this game magic is not fully understood and based on artifacts left behind by some race that supposedly came from the stars. While it’s a fantasy games it brings a lot of horror and SF themes to the table. The focus of the game is exploration and in our game we explored the “Iron Coral”.

I don’t want to spoil things here, because you might want to join Chris one day or eventually your local GM will pick the game up when it’s done and run it for you. But rest assured there was a lot of exploration to be done and it was very exciting and weird. I loved it. I can’t wait to join the guys for the next session sometime next week.

What I also enjoyed very much is that the “Into the Odd” rules usually only call for dice rolls when you are in trouble. You can do pretty much everything without rolling, but when the GM asks you to roll it’s usually because you need to evade damage or during combat. “Into the Odd” feels quite deadly and we were extremely cautious. In the end the whole party safely escaped from the Iron Coral but one player was down to just 1 hp. Ouch!

If you want to learn more about “Into the Odd” check out Chris’ blog and his playtest document.

Now let’s focus on Google+ Hangout. Google+ is the new social network by Google. Think of Facebook with a better UI, better privacy options, and a freakingly awesome video conferencing feature called Hangout. Recently Google added a few extras to Hangout that are almost perfectly suited for online gaming. Basic Hangout allows you to see each other (if everyone has a webcam) and to use voice chat. In addition to that there’s a text chat and you can watch YouTube videos together.

If you decide to use “Hangout with Extras” you don’t get the YouTube feature BUT you can share your desktop, Google Docs documents or a Sketchpad with each other. The latter is great for drawing maps and we always had a document open with our character stats. Very handy indeed!

We had some minor audio issues, but overall the experience was great. After a few minutes you almost forgot that you were sitting in front of your PC with the other players scattered across the globe. For me it felt almost like sitting with friends around the table.

By the way, one of the other players, David Reichgeld posted about his experience on Google+. His post is public, so you should be able to check it out here.

Related posts:

1. More Google+ Hangout musings
2. Google Friend Connect
3. Google Friend Connect integration

Sometimes I think about what would I have done if I was in charge of the development of D&D. Luckily I am not in that position so I can freely think about what I would like to design and play instead of worrying about what the fans would like to see. Because – you can trust me on this – I love to slaughter sacred cows.

Let me start by a disclaimer: I haven’t been a fan of D&D before third edition and while OD&D in form of the retro clones has a certain charm for me, there are many other games I prefer.

So while I would probably base my “Stargazer Edition” of D&D on OD&D, I would include a lot of the changes from D&D 3rd Edition. Or let me rephrase that. I think I would take D&D 3rd Edition and remove all the meat from the bones so that something as light as OD&D or perhaps Microlite20 remains.

At first I would remove the feats and streamline the skill list. The D&D 3.5 skill list was already a great improvement about the one in it’s predecessor. When I think about it, the way the skill system works in D&D 4th Edition is not so bad. Your skill rank is always half your level plus 5 if it’s one of your “trained” skills.

As the next step I would get rid of attributes but keep the attribute bonuses. In my opinion the attributes in D&D 3.0, 3.5 and 4.0 have just been kept for nostalgia’s sake. It worked great in games like Mutants & Masterminds and True20, so why not in my “Stargazer Edition”.

The three Saves and the Base Attack bonuses actually worked well enough, so I’ll keep them around. See, it wasn’t so bad, it almost didn’t hurt.

Ok, let’s start slaughtering some sacred cows now, let’s change the way armor works. I always didn’t like the idea that armor makes you harder to hit instead of reducing the damage your character takes. So let’s fix that. This is actually done quite easily. Each character gets a Defense value which is 10 plus your Dexterity (remember, we replaced the attributes by their bonuses). This is what your opponent needs to roll to actually hit you. Armor worn reduces damage and heavy armor may even reduce your Defense making you easier to hit.

The next sacred cow to be killed are classes. Instead of classes I would prefer the players to be able to pick and choose from various background options. These can grant you access to certain abilities, magic etc. – they are basically your build-your-own-class toolbox. This allows for much more organic characters.

Magic is another touchy subject. I never was a friend of Vancian magic and I didn’t like the way D&D 4th Edition made use of Powers either. I would probably try to design a spell-point based system or follow an even more radical approach.

Back when I was still in school I read many of the Dragonlance novels by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. In these novels casting magic always drained sometimes even hurt the caster. So why not design a system in which spellcasters use their hitpoints to power spells? Of course this limits the power of magic and might feel out of place in high fantasy settings but I like the idea a lot.

My edition of D&D would probably use feet and yards instead of squares and move away from tactical miniature combat. And instead of including rules for every situation I would prefer to keep things light and encourage GMs to come up with their own solutions.

Last but not least I am actually not sure if levels are even needed. But I might actually keep them around just for nostalgia sake. Yes, even I can be nostalgic.

The result of this thought experiment, the so-called Stargazer Edition of D&D would probably almost be unrecognizable for some, but I believe it would still retain a lot from D&D. I haven’t actually started working on something like that, but it’s one of those ideas that crop up from time to time again.

So what do you think about my ideas. Am I sacrificing too many sacred cows? Am I totally nuts or do you believe I am on the right track?

Disclaimer: No cows (sacred or otherwise) have been harmed during the production of this post.

Related posts:

1. Edition Wars in levels
2. D&D 4th Edition – is it D&D?
3. And I thought D&D 4th Edition cosmology was less complicated than this…

Vampire Hunter$: Modern OGL Compatible	SAWS+ Character Sheet for Pathfinder	Field Guide to Superheroes Vol. 3 (ICONS)
Plastic Ships and Fuzzy Men	The Genius Guide to Another 110 Spell Variants	Iron Dynasty: Way of the Ronin

The coupon code you need to use at checkout to get the 20% discount is AfterGenConGlow2011.

By the way, if you haven’t checked out Iron Dynasty yet, you definitely should do so. It’s an awesome and very original setting for Savage Worlds that combines elements from feudal Japan with steampunk. You can read my review of this game here.

Related posts:

1. Get 20% off of selected titles at DriveThruRPG until July 10th
2. Get 20% off of selected titles at DriveThruRPG this month
3. Get 20% off of selected titles at DriveThruRPG

So, what do you think? Is he right or does he totally miss the point? Discuss!

Related posts:

1. WHFRP 3rd Edition Seminar by Jay Little
2. DMs Should Join Other Games
3. Lazy Friday Video Post: PAX East 2010 Keynote

1. Tomb of the Overfiend
   Weird West is definitely one of coolest old-school games ever conceived. It’s extremely rules-light, but contains a lot of weird west goodness. Recently Stuart Robertson, creator of that fine game, released a free one-page adventure based on an excellent map by Matt Jackson. And even if you’re not into Weird West you can easily use it for other old-school games as well.
2. Ashen Stars Theme Music
   James Semple who has done several soundtracks for Gumshoe games in the past, has composed a theme music for Robin D. Laws latest game, Ashen Stars. I really hope this is the first sign of a full Ashen Stars soundtrack to come. You can listen to the rather short theme tune here.
3. Barbarians of the Future
   You probably might already have heard about Barbarians of Lemuria, Simon Washbourne’s Sword & Sorcery RPG. While I haven’t tried the game yet, it’s among the games I have to give a try at least once. Some people actually call it one of the best RPGs of the genre. Obviously the system used in BoL can also be easily be used in other genres. There’s Jabberwocky Productions’ post-apocalyptic setting-expansion Barbarians of the Aftermath for example.
   A while back rpg.net forum member Maxwell Luther created a free PDF supplement for BoA that allows players and the GM to experience adventures in the grim-dark future of the Warhammer 40,000 universe (with the serial numbers filed off). If you are interested in both BoA and the WH40K universe, you should definitely give it a look. You can download the 42-paged PDF here.
4. Expedition RPG
   Fellow RPG blogger Dennis N. Santana has recently released an early playtest edition of his Expedition RPG. I haven’t had time to give it a closer look, but according to Shaun Welch’s playtest reports (part one & part two), he and his players not only had fun with the fast character creation system that allows truly unique character concepts, but also very much enjoyed the combat rules. From what I’ve seen Expedition contains a lot of interesting ideas that set the game apart from the majority of fantasy games. If you’re looking for something new, why don’t you give it a try. It’s free and obviously pretty polished for a game still in its alpha stage.

Related posts:

1. Weird West Roleplaying Game
2. “You are all travelling in a Stagecoach…” Weird West pre-gens
3. History of West End Games

First I got home to a work week of unforeseen dimensions, then the con-crud hit! The combination kept me down for two days. Then last night when I finally sat down to write my laptop crashed, and apparently my smart phone followed in a sign of support. I had about half of my pictures and a smattering of videos on the smart phone. I restored the laptop and solved that problem, the smart phone proved another matter. I lost pictures and videos, never to be recovered. So if I took your picture at Gen Con and you never see it, I apologize.

But you didn’t come here for the sob stories; you came here to read about games, specifically role-playing games which are the main topic of this blog. You’ve probably read about some  of the big news which I’ll link to in case you only read this gaming blog (and we can’t fault you for your impeccable taste!). Margaret Weiss Productions announced their deal to produce a Marvel superheroes RPG. Sounds like a well planned project, and while I am not currently on the market for a new supers game (more on this later) I will take a look.

Fantasy Flight Games actually announced they have the Star Wars license for board games, card games and role-playing games just before Gen Con. They were running demos of their card game and X-Wing games at Gen Con both seemed interesting and I spent some time looking at people play. However I am mainly a role-player, while I dabble in the occasional board game, I would rather spend my time role playing. Will I buy a new Star Wars game? My knee jerk reaction is no, I have D6, and Saga, but the Warhammer 40K RPGs have tempted me, I’m just not that big of a 40K fan. Star Wars is another matter. I just might…

Wizards of the Coast had their Neverwinter campaign, D&D Encounters and a contest both at Gen Con and for those playing in encounters. The promo video looks really cool, and some of my friend interested in D&D 4^th edition seem stoked about it. Since I don’t play 4^th edition and I never played any of the Neverwinter computer games I was not terribly interested. I feel little bad that I can’t bring you more news about this but there is plenty of reports out there and while I was covering the convention for the blog I did want to focus in things that would be of interest to me. I hope there is some commonality with our reader. So what did I go for?

There were a few things I knew I was getting. Savage Worlds Deluxe was big on my list! I posted about the book and the pre-order, which I took advantage of and picked up at Gen Con, along with the Action and Adventure Decks. I had downloaded the PDF version that came with the bundle and printed it out, so I had “seen” the book before actually getting it, but even that did not take away from the sheer joy of holding the book in my hands. It is a beautiful thing, gorgeous to look at and sturdy. I ended up getting the official bennies as well as I am decided to run this game.

As I try to learn to better run Savage Worlds that was one of the games I wanted to play during Gen Con and thanks to my good friend David I did. I mentioned it on my previous Gen Con post, we played what was supposed to be a short game for over four hours and I got to experience firsthand how the game flows. I have a debt with David for showing me the way, thank you sir!

I got some other Savage Worlds books while in Indianapolis. From what I read of Suzerain it is a supplement to play deity-like characters using the Savage Worlds system. It gave me and Amber (the books, not the game) vibe and I couldn’t resist. Another book I was not looking for but discovered at Gen Con was The Day After Ragnarok. I had read about it but was not interested until someone talked to me about it, I held the book in my hands and I could not put it down. It’s a delicious blend of pulp and post apocalyptic goodness in the middle of the 20^th century that fired my imagination.

I also got another book by Ragnarok’s author Kenneth Hite, Cthulhu 101. While not strictly a role-playing game, who can say no to Cthulhu? Certainly not me! I got both books while on my way to the Green Ronin booth, as it seemed they were sharing the space. I was there to get some Mutants & Mastermind goodness. The system powers my weekly game and I wanted a copy of the 3^rd edition rules of the game, the new DC Adventures Heroes & Villains Vol. 1 book and the GM Kit. Getting to meet Steve Kenson (who I interviewed for the blog when ICONS came out) and having him sign the book was just the cherry on the sundae. I just love this system; it has become my favorite superhero game and the reason why I said earlier I am not really looking for a new game of this genre.

My other must get book was Ultimate Combat by Paizo. It is a terrific book, with a new class that uses the firearms rules in the book, the Samurai and Ninja as well as options for all combat classes, a truckload of feats and even some spells. The book continues the tradition of great books for Pathfinder and it fuels the fire of my desire to go back to playing Pathfinder. Getting the PDF copy of the book for just $5 was just a bonus. I think the PDF copies at $10 are priced just right point and being able to pick it up for half the price was a big win.

Pelgrane Press had Ashen Stars and the Esoterrorists, both using the Gumshoe system. Michael had told me so much about Ashen Star that I snatched it up and have not been disappointed. It is a beautiful book and the system is so elegant. The big surprise was Esoterrorist, I had read about it and was intrigued but I like it so much I have put down Ashen Star and I’m currently devouring this dark modern game, I highly recommend it! To me it’s not so much about the conceit behind Gumshoe and making investigation adventures easy, but simply such an entertaining read.

The Cubicle 7 booth was busy, busy, busy! They had The One Ring, and I got to meet Gareth Michael Skarka there. He is a terrific guy and I’m sorry I did not get to spend more time talking to him. They had a lot of the Adamant books there, I got what I want form them already, the already have my money, and I am glad they do.

I got some other goodies for my games, like the products of Dark Platypus Studios, including their magna maps, effect markers, pillars, clings, initiative tracker… Well let’s just say my biggest purchase at the con was from them! I got another customizable GM screen from another vendor, I already own two, but they had magnetic receptive inserts and I can do so much with them, not necessarily use them in the traditional screen function. The last thing I got was Gaming Paper’s Mega Dungeon and accompanying adventure. Amidst all the post con reading I have NOT gotten to the adventure but the map is MASSIVE and it just tickled my geek fancy!

There were plenty of other things I saw, demoed and almost purchased, but as it was I returned with over 50 pounds (about 23kg to you metric folk) in extra weight in my luggage (which I suspect made the airline very happy) so I could not get everything. So let me tell you about the other games. Amaranthine by Machine Age Productions seemed intriguing, a game of immortals and social interaction, right up my alley. As far as my players go, well not so much… Still the production quality was terrific and it was hard for me to put it down.

The idea of Dungeon Decks, sets of cards to create old school type adventures intrigued me. They are a cool way to generate ideas and get your creative juices flowing. WEGS Old Skool seemed like a tribute to old school gaming but integrating elements like cards into the game to make it more accessible for newer games. It looked simple and fun and I almost got it. This is one I am sorry I did not go back to the booth to get. I may yet order this.

The booth for tiltfactor was play testing a zombies in the office game which seemed promising if a little rough around the edges. Their Pox board game caught my eye specifically because they have lessons plans to use it in the classroom. But these are not strictly role-playing games and I am going off topic here. I hope to tackle other types of games and other goodies I found at Gen con on my next post…

See you then!

Related posts:

1. Gen Con 2011, a retrospective… Part 2: Other games and minis too!
2. Time to Speak Out with my Geek Out… Role-Playing Games in my case!
3. Five Great Blogs About Role-Playing Games @ GeekDad

I figured I had a pretty diverse set of miniatures from these two games. True the Battle Masters minis had unit bases with various miniatures grouped together, but I solved this by getting some foam board, cutting out bases and inserting the miniature on the base. I packed them on some craft supplies boxes and I was set. I told myself I needed no more minis.

See, I had friends who owned a LOT of minis. I had played some Battletech and Epic but always with their miniatures, and I had seen the obsession with these little then lead, and later pewter, figurines. I had flirted with the idea of painting them, actually ordering a set of dwarves and skavens and trying my hand at painting them… Let’s just say the results were less than flattering. Unpainted miniatures looked so, unattractive that I was uninterested in them, so I figured that with no natural talent I was immune to the lure of miniatures.

So for the first couple of months I was happy with my box of HeroQuest minis and the game proceeded along nicely. It took me a while to get used to the miniatures at the table but I came to embrace them. Then WizKids started making the pre-painted Mage Knight miniatures and I told myself “I can get a couple of those sets and supplement my minis collection”. And so I started down a slippery slope…

Then Wizards of the Coast put out the D&D miniatures, little plastic pre-painted representations of the heroes and monsters of my favorite game. I tried to be casual about it, told myself “I am only getting a box to see them and that’s that”. Back home I stared at them in awe, they had removed my main obstacle for collecting miniatures, I did not have to paint them. I could take them out of the box and use them. I was hooked.

For some timer I would buy cases of every set they put out, and get all the special miniatures they put out, and then came the Star Wars minis game, and the Star Wars Starship Battles.  You get the idea, I was addicted. I had been bitten by the Plastic Crack bug. My friend José was the first one who told me about the term and it was true. I craved these plastic miniatures; I had to have them all!

Eventually I realized I had enough, and not enough place to store them, so I became more selective, getting only the occasional booster and some individual minis in the secondary market. I still got the dragons, the AT-AT, the recent Beholders set and of course, Orcus! But slowly, little by little, I got away from my addiction and for a very long time I kept away from plastic crack.

And then I recently fell off the wagon. José, the very same friend who introduced me to the plastic crack term, got back into Warhammer 40K and started telling me about some great deals on Rackham miniatures on eBay. I had always like the miniatures, and they had made some nice plastic pre-painted one, I just had to look. Soon after I was buying a set and watching a couple more, I was off the wagon and craving my plastic miniatures!

So imagine my rejoicing when I heard about the upcoming Pathfinder miniatures by WizKids. I’m really looking forward to this set. It feels like I’m coming full circle. I want to get me some of those miniatures, and there is a couple of other Rackham sets I’m keeping my eyes on.

What’s your experience with minis? Do you use them? Do you paint them?

PS – And just in case you don’t get the reference in the title, here is the video where it comes from:

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytJpZguSy2U

PS2 – (Shameless plug) If you live in Puerto Rico, or will be here soon, on June 4^th the Puerto Rico Role Players group will be hosting a miniature painting day where we will share tips and ideas on how to get the most of your minis. We’d love to see you there!

Related posts:

1. Free Stuff Friday: One Monk Miniatures
2. D&D 4th Edition without miniatures
3. My Orcus & Me!

When I first got into gaming the first place I remember seeing RPG related books and boxed sets was a small quirky book store in Old San Juan, The Book Store. The owner sat behind the cashier and knew almost all his clients, they had a small sci-fi section in the back and under the shelves holding these books were some baskets holding the aforementioned books and boxed sets along with several assorted war games.

When my mom brought me the red box Basic Set I got it at this place. I remember it being dimly lit and musty smelling, which added to the mystique of getting the game. Later I learned that a local hobby shop which mostly carried models had a shelf with RPG modules and books piles together haphazardly in the back. Likewise the local K-Bee Toy Store had a bunch of books there hidden among the board games. I was soon rifling through these stacks to get my grubby little hands on them. And then I discovered the gaming sections in B. Dalton Booksellers and Bell, Book and Candle (a local book store) with their organized well stocked gaming sections. I was in nerdvana!

And for the longest time these were my main sources of games. I went there every month to get my Dragon magazine, and in the back of that fine publication were ads for game catalogs. They promised access to games I had never seen, so I sent out for the catalogs. A couple came in and I devoured them, and then came the granddaddy of them all. Printed in newsprint it read like the classified ads peppered with the black and white small image of a cover or miniature. The Wargames West (click on that link to see I’m not the only one who remembers them fondly, and see some nice pictures of the catalog itself)  catalog changed my life. It was there that I read about the Robotech RPG for the first time, or Mega Traveller, and where I got the games I could not get in the local book stores.

Every time the Wargames West catalog would come in I would sit down and examine it. I would circle every game and miniature I wanted and then add it up, realizing my allowance would never cover the hundreds of dollars I wanted I would be forced to trim down. I remember sending in my orders and waiting with bated breath for the package. It was then that I discovered the hellish nuances of shipping, especially if it came via UPS. My relationship with UPS has improved and now they are greatly efficient, but back then it would be impossible to get the package delivered properly.

So went my life for the longest time, until comic store and game stores began to pop up in Puerto Rico. Soon I was ordering my games at the same place where I got my comics. I loved comics so much that I was soon working at a comic and games store. These were dark times for my income. I was the perfect employee, the kind who would get his paycheck and give it right back buying stuff. It was a wolf watching the sheep situation, but I was the sheep!

Back then I got most of my games at the store I worked, and even after I quit working there I was a faithful client. All through this time whenever I would travel to the United States one of the first things I would do was look for the yellow pages and search for game stores, make a list and try to see how many I could visit. I would use these opportunities to get games I could not get back home.

Somehow that happened less and less often. Distribution got better, I could get most games locally, and after the arrivals of big chain book stores games were even more accessible. As this was happening I was also becoming more and more comfortable with online purchases and embracing the idea of digital books. That last step was totally embraced when carrying the books around became viable, first with laptops and now with readers and smart phones. I had gone from the thrill of searching for the unknown in small mysterious book stores, to embracing the idea that getting a book in PDF is almost just as good as getting the real thing. It’s been a fun ride; I wonder where we’ll go next?

These days I get lots of books in digital format, get most of my RPG related books via online stores or retailers, and buy miniatures from specialist sites or even e-bay. Sometimes if I have a coupon and they have the book I want I may get it at a large chain bookstore. Occasionally I get game books at my friendly local gaming store, I still believe in supporting them, but mostly big releases from major brands. They seldom carry the independent or small press stuff and I understand why.  There is a proliferation of smaller local stores catering to the CCG crowd, but branching out into games. I feel the desire to support them and help the local market grow so I’ll be visiting them soon to try to put some of my money where my mouth is and hell the local gaming scene grow. I’ll let you know how it goes…

So now it’s my term to ask, how do you get your games? How did you use to? Has your experience been similar to mine? I look forward to your comments…

Related posts:

1. Games I was sad to see go away…
2. Gen Con 2011, a retrospective… Part 1: Role Playing Games
3. Time to Speak Out with my Geek Out… Role-Playing Games in my case!

A way to introduce your setting to you players, giving them an idea of what the game they are about to embark upon is about. Shinobicow lists the ideas of handing out print copies, what he calls the drive-in method (jumping right in) and the elevator speech. Good stuff, go and read it. I have been pondering about this topic since reading the original post.

First about how to go about it… I used to create my campaigns by myself. Come up with concepts and ideas and then share that with players. Over the years I’ve become convinced that the more you involve your players in the process the more they are invested in the game. Not every player wants to create a campaign, that’s why YOU are the GM, but they may want to contribute depending on their interests. Some may want to create a city, a planet or an NPC; others may want to contribute some rules. Even something as simple as a campaign questionnaire can help you in this process.

Find your comfort level on how much you are willing to let go and invite them in. Parcel out the work and then as a god chef it’s up to you to use all the ingredients into a succulent campaign. But regardless of how much or how little the players contribute eventually you must put it all together. You must make sense of all the work and present it in a coherent way to your players…

I have tried different ways to introduce campaigns to my players through the years. From simply telling them about it, to introducing it piecemeal as we play; my first real attempt at creating a proper primer was during the AD&D 2^nd edition phase of my homebrewed campaign. I sat down and collected all the data on history, races, kingdoms, and printed out an illustrated Players Guide to my campaign. My players back then appreciate it, and I know one who keeps it to this day (Pierre thanks for all the years playing), but looking it over now it seemed like a rather large and unwieldy hodge podge of information. Let’s see 50 pages, with cartography, a one page introduction to each kingdom, a random piece on coins.  Too much, too soon!

Then when we switched over to D&D 3^rd edition I wrote a lengthy piece on the history of the world. Again too much detail too early on; since then I have tried to distill data, to find a way to share the most important information that conveys the basics of the campaign, captures the player’s interest and gets their creativity going. There is one lesson I learned from my very first Players Guide, the one page idea. Off all the parts of that document I think the part the players referred to the most was the one page descriptions of kingdoms and regions. In one page I described, through words and pictures, the very basics of the region.

For my current campaign I’ve tried to work within the one page limit. The goal is to distill the description of the campaign to one page. And the any additional information you need to hand out to players I try to keep to one page. Have I been successful? Not completely, some topics like religion have gone for two pages, and the full blown history of the campaign is much longer that 50 pages, but that additional information is optional, there for the player who is interested and wants to read it. All they need to play SHOULD be on the one page format.

And let’s break with the idea that all hands out need to be printed out. On this day and age we have so many new ways to engage our players. I have been using Power Point to great effect as introduction to campaigns, actual play aides and for adventure design. I first began using it to introduce a D20 Modern game and then prepared Power Point presentations for each session outlining adventures, including NPC images and even maps a la Indiana Jones with the plane traversing the map. I also used this strategy to introduce my Star Wars Saga System prequel Infinities campaign, opening scroll and all. When I used it as a game aide some slides would not get used, but they helped me visualize the game.

So consider Power Point as a tool for creating that campaign primer. Another new powerful tool is social media, not just to share information but actually to create content. Pages and groups can be created to share information, integrating images, music and video. Even creating profiles for groups or NPCs in your campaign can make them seem real to your players in ways a description on a handout cannot. Explore the possibilities they are exciting!

I have some other ideas on this matter, but I think this is enough for now. I’ll be back for part two soon.

Again thanks for Shinobicow for the inspiration for this post.

Related posts:

1. Campaign Primer Ideas! Part 2
2. World Building Part 8 – Kicking Off Your Homebrew Setting Campaign
3. World Building Part 4 – Campaign Setting Genre

I have not posted about it but, recently I’ve been getting more and more Pathfinder RPG books that are Golarion specific (that’s the name of the campaign world for the uninitiated). While I am a confessed Pathfinder RPG fan I have stayed away from the Golarion specific books. I did get some of the original Adventure Paths but as part of my “more is less”/spend less in games philosophy I stayed away from a lot of fluffy books and stuck to the rules.

So that means I missed both previous incarnations of the Golarion campaign setting. I had heard excellent things, and the bits and pieces hinted at in the core rule book and other supplements, really enticed me. I have seen the promos and when my friend and fellow player called me to let me know the Inner Sea World Guide had arrived at the FLGS I gave in and said “hold it for me!”

I tweeted my very first impressions after leafing through the book and later after spending about half an hour looking it over, but I could not put it away and this led to this post. Mind you this is still VERY preliminary, I have only read bits and pieces, but I’ll share my first impression.

I am very impressed. Very happy I got this book. The price tag is by no means small, $49.99, and while I could have gotten this at a discount online I am trying to support my FLGS now that they are carrying more Pathfinder products.  But you know what? This is a beautiful book, full color, with the quality art I’ve come to expect from Paizo and its simply HUGE, 318 pages! (A friend of mine complains about reused art in Paizo books, of course he gets ALL the Adventure Paths so that may be the case, I really have NO idea, for me this is all mostly new art, your experience may be different.) So I am not sorry I spent the money!

And, what about the content of the book you say? Well let’s dig in… The first part are races, all the traditional fantasy races are there, as well as specific human cultures. Each gets their one page description with common names, appearances, and mostly rules free, the one exception being a very powerful human culture with inordinate bonuses which can only be used with GM approval, which seemed to me a poor choice in an otherwise fine chapter. There are brief discussion of other races that can be player characters and references to where you can find the rules to play them.

If you are not a fan of the type of campaign worlds with lots of fantasy races the plethora of races may turn you off. But I believe lots of fantasy fans like this hodgepodge that gives them many options to choose from, it may offend your sense of verisimilitude, but you can downplay certain races in your campaign. This is one thing I get from the book, this is a large catalog of options and ideas, which work together as a whole, but put in your hands to shape as you see fit. I appreciated that each human “race” or ethnicity is given their own page. Oftentimes in other campaign settings you’ll get discussions on elves and dwarves and their myriad sub-races, and humans get lumped together as a whole. Here I got a very different feeling. True dwarves, elves, gnomes and such get their own one page write up, but each major human culture gets a separate description. You know who’s emphasized here!

The next chapter is an overview of the Inner Sea region, its history and a four page write up of each country or region. I have only read a couple, but I love the combination of details and broad strokes. The write ups open with a short phrase that summarizes what the region is and specific details (alignment of the region, population, language, a crest or symbol of the region), and an image evocative of the place. I love the page layout; the opening page has a small detail on the header that includes a small version of the map of the region, with a proper map later in the write up. It covers history, government, and a gazetteer.

What did I mean when I said “details and broad strokes” on the previous paragraph? Well when I read a description of a kingdom I get enough details to feel what makes the place unique and to plan a game there, but room to tell my own stories. I am sure that if you have played the Adventure Paths you’ll know more about the regions, but this is a great primer for the uninitiated.

I don’t have a proper grasp of how all the culture come together, haven’t read enough, but there seems to be something for everybody here. There are pirate islands, Middle Eastern themed kingdoms, more traditional European themed fantasy kingdoms and their inevitable variants, unexplored jungles, something for everybody.

The wide spectrum of diverse cultures may not be for everybody, it reminds me of Mystara in some ways (And I’m a Mystara fan, so this is a plus in my book!) but it seems there was more thought put into why each culture is where, not simply a new culture across each mountain range that seems to have been the case with Mystara.

I love the hints and details on what’s beyond the Inner Sea and the discussion of planar cosmology. There is even a discussion on the solar system. It immediately made me want to run a Spelljammer campaign in Golarion.

Then there is a chapter on religion, including major deities, minor ones, even cults. Then one chapter on life on the Inner Sea, calendars, flora, fauna, and then comes a chapter on faction of the Inner Sea. I have really not much to say on this since I have not read much, but it seems a great source of possible groups the players can join, or antagonists, depends on how you play it.

The 6^th section is called Adventuring and there is a lot for me here. Rules I can pillage for my campaign: prestige classes, feats, magic items, spells, and equipment, including the firearm rules recently presented in the Gunslinger playtest in the Paizo website. The firearm rules are interesting; I need to use them to see how they work. I had adapted Monte Cooks technology rules to my game and I’m not convinced I should switch to this new ones.

The feat list even has a feat that mimics the D&D 4^th edition healing surge, Godless Healing, available only to characters without a patron deity. I like the idea and the implementation, but the similarity to D&D 4^th edition threw me off at first. The book closes out with a short monster section, just a few but I liked them. In case you are wondering, yes there is an index, another big plus for me.

I’m sure I missed a lot of details on this preliminary reading, but I like what I see and I want to read more. Golarion seems to be the spiritual inheritor of settings of old likes Greyhawk and Faerun. Yes, yes, I know the Forgotten Realms is still in print, but when I read the Inner Sea World Guide I get the same excitement I got when reading the original Forgotten Realms gray box.

Will I play in Golarion? Probably not… But I want to read more about this world. So I may just get a couple of more Pathfinder books. There goes my saving on RPG games resolution! If they are as good as this one, well, then it will not be a bad thing.

Related posts:

1. First Impressions: Caladon Falls
2. First Impressions: DC Adventures
3. First impressions: Abney Park’s Airship Pirates

Actually, my love for fonts can be traced back to my early gaming days. Perhaps many of you first discovered the idea of fantasy script with Tolkien, but while I fondly remember reading the novels I can’t say I was particularly taken by the funny looking script. The first time I made the connection that a made believe fantasy language could have a script corresponding to our own alphabet was reading the old Forgotten Realms grey box, in the book there were illustrations of the scripts of Faerun with the equivalent letters in the Latin alphabet and the Arabic numbers (that’s how I remember it and I’m not searching for the book at this our so do not thread over my memories!).

Something clicked right there and the concept of fantasy and science fiction alphabets were unleashed on my young and impressionable mind. That very same day I fired up a greeting card making software (yes we had such things back then in the olden days before the internet) and used the Cyrillic alphabet for a little greeting card for a sci-fi setting I was beginning to develop. That little card eventually became a full-fledged campaign, but I digress, that’s a post for another day. From that day on I began collecting fonts. At first I would by the font collections and install them on my archaic computer. Eventually Al Gore gave us the Internet and fonts were free to travel the Interwebz and into my gaming handouts.

Using a particular font can spruce up a hand out, set the mood and add whole new elements to even the most boring or writings. Well maybe not that last one but you get my point! I have selected fonts to represent each script used in my homebrewed fantasy world (which according to my players has TOO MANY languages and dialects… about 70!) and actually prepared a handout which illustrates the corresponding letters in the fantasy script to our modern alphabet. This was done with the intention that I could actually write messages in the fantasy script and hand them to players so they could translate them. Then I got to thinking, these languages would probably have different grammatical rules and I started tinkering with that… But I am no linguist and certainly no Tolkien so that’s a project that remains unfinished.

That however has not deterred me form continuing to download fonts. What are my favorite sources? Well glad you asked:

• Fantasy Fonts has an excellent collections of movie and fantasy inspired fonts, including some excellent symbol fonts
• Legola’s RPG Fonts Repository, who knew the elf hero retired and became a font maker? I have not counted them but the webpage says there are over 200 fonts there, and if it says so in the internet it must be true!
• dafont.com has a large collection of free fonts, not all fantasy related but well worth perusing
• Then there are Star Trek, Star Wars and a whole slew of other series, movies or even electronic games.
• There is even a page which tells you the types of fonts used in old TSR D&D products. You won’t find a link to all the actual fonts, but I find this reference intriguing, especially when planning a retro/nostalgia game!

This list is FAR from exhaustive! There are a lot more sources of free fonts out there, and many fine commercially produced fronts out there. Be sure to search for fonts that meet your needs. I invite you to share your sources of fonts, and tell us how you use them for your games. I hope this post reminds you is not just what you write, it’s how it looks!

Related posts:

1. Free Stuff Friday: Tolkien Fonts
2. Fire & Ice
3. The HPLHS Props & Fonts CD

But recently I read about another new old-school game which seems to take things in a different direction. Crypts & Things, will be a swords & sorcery game based on a heavily modified version of the Swords & Wizardry rules.

Here’s a list of the changes from the core rules quoted from the games’ announcement:

Characters

• Fighter has optional fighting styles, to add more fun and to differentiate between fighter characters.
• Adds the Barbarian character class based off the version of the class originally published in White Dwarf 2 in 1977.
• Adds the Thief class.  This is a more martially inclined version of the Thief, inspired by the Grey Mouser from Fritz Leiber’s Lankamar stories.
• Adds the Magician class, which combines the spell lists of the Magic-User and Cleric, and then separates them into White/Grey and Black magic spell lists.
• Removes the Cleric and Magic-user Class
• No Elves, Dwarfs or Halflings, Orcs, Goblins etc. Its all Serpent Men, Giant Apes, Primatives, creepy eldrich horrors all the way!
• No Turning the Undead either as a class ability or spell.
• Life events. This takes the form of  a simple table where characters roll a single D20 three times for starting characters to learn some of the events that occurred before they started adventuring and the benefits that they caused.

Rules systems

• A simple skill system based off the Saving Throw number. Used for class skills (such as the thieves skills and barbarians abilities) and other skills that the character may have picked up along the way.
• Sanity rules. Wisdom is used as a measure of mental stability. This system is used for both taking mental damage for witnessing horror and for magicians casting Black Magic
• Altered damage rules. Hit points become a measure of exhaustion and fatigue – and are lost as a Magician casts spells. Constitution used as a measure of physical damage, and is lost once Hit points have been exhausted.

The setting will be based on the works of Clark Ashton Smith, Fritz Leiber and Robert E. Howard and aside from being inspired by aforementioned authors will be original. Both setting and the expanded S&W rules make me particularly interested in this game and I will definitely pick it up once it has been released.

Related posts:

1. Five things I’ve learned about RPGs from “Mazes & Monsters”
2. Five good things I learned playing D&D 4th edition (or… How I learned not to care about diagonal movement!)
3. Signs of things to come

“Dear d20 System, we’ve had a good run you and me… No, no relax, this is NOT that conversation. I am not breaking up with you! I just think we should see other people. You have your legions of adoring fans, and that shiny new 4^th edition, you can see whoever you want, I have met some new systems, Indies mostly, and I want to explore my options. You can understand right? And we’ll always have Pathfinder…”

All kidding aside, I am not giving up on the d20 system, heck at least 70% of my gaming collection is d20 or earlier iterations. My currently on hiatus fantasy game uses the Pathfinder RPG rules and the current supers game is Mutants & Masterminds. I am happy with both systems, and probably will continue using them for these specific genres. Looking back over the last 6 years, all my long lasting campaigns have used a variation of the rule set: D&D 3^rd ed., then Star Wars Saga System, D&D 4^th ed., Pathfinder and now M&M. There have been intermittent one shot games using other system, Savage Worlds, Don’t Rest Your Head, Lady Blackbird and others, but my gaming group is firmly entrenched on their ways.

I recently began mentioning possible rules for a future sci-fi game. I threw around Alternity, Savage Worlds and Stars Without Number and got a less than enthusiastic reaction. They in turn suggested d20 Future, Star Wars Saga system or even adapting Pathfinder.  Mind you, I did not speak with all my players and I know one player will be up to trying new systems and another is more interested in the story than the rules, but do you see what their suggestions have in common? If you said they are all d20 you are correct.

I was in the d20 bandwagon when it began. The idea of having one system for all games seemed like a great idea at the time, but in implementation, the rules that work for a fantasy game are not always a good fit for other genres. I think Mutants & Masterminds is a stellar example of adapting the basic mechanics into another genre effectively. I can’t say I am impressed with the sci-fi adaptations out there!

Now that I have expanded my gaming horizons and tried out so many new games I want to play with another rule set. I can’t put all the blame on my players, I have been a big influence on the games we play, after all I am the Game Master full time for the group and I have preeminently chosen d20 over all systems. Also we are a pretty crunch intensive group. My players like complex rule systems that allow creating detailed character, so rule light or too far out there indie games are not their cup of tea.

And I’m not proposing a great departure, Alternity was almost a preview of what was to come for D&D 3^rd edition with a really unique dice mechanic and Stars Without Number is definitely inspired by old games and there is a lot of the old school gaming goodness in it. Savage Worlds is perhaps the greatest departure, but it retains things like tactical combat and detailed characters, both things they like.

So I find myself in the conundrum, should I go the d20 route and try to adapt what I have to the campaign I want to develop, like filling off the numbers of Star Wars Saga system to make it a generic sci-fi game, or using the Infinite Futures (sci-fi rules based off the Pathfinder System) I recently purchased?

Again, I don’t want to stop playing with the d20 system, I just want to expand my horizons. I know many of you have gone through similar situations. What did you do? Do you play any d20 sci-fi game you think I should explore? I don’t want to simply say “this is my game and you’ll play what I want”, but I also want to run a game that challenges me as a GM. What was your experience, any advice?

PS – To my players, if you read this, this is not a slam on you. I want to hear your opinion and ultimately this is a decision we’ll make together as a group. I just want to hear what others have gone through. Thanks for playing the game week after week, you are the best!

Related posts:

1. Breaking News: Roleplaying finally possible in D&D 4th Edition
2. Ask the readers: Filing off the serial numbers
3. Gen Con 2011, a retrospective… Part 1: Role Playing Games

But I don’t want to talk about piracy today. Recently there were several posts about WotC’s SF roleplaying game Alternity here on Stargazer’s World. The comments on these two articles show that people still hold this game in high regard and quite a few people regret not having picked it up while it was still in print. If it were available as PDF on sites like DriveThruRPG, I am pretty sure WotC could still make some money off of it. But the way it is now, only second-hand book sellers make the profits now.

It would be so much easier if I could go over to DriveThruRPG and get a PDF copy of Alternity, one of the old D&D books or whatever suits my fancy there. With the new POD service even books which have been out of print for decades could find their way back into the hands of today’s gamers.

The way  I see it, it would a win-win situation. Wizards could make some money off some of their older products with minimal effort and we gamers could easily get our hands on legal copies of out-of-print products. If Alternity for example was available as a legal PDF I would definitely buy it even though I already own it in print. In this day and age with tablet computers and smartphones in almost every home, PDFs are getting more and more popular. Why WotC ignores this whole market is beyond me.

The costs and effort involved in bringing old products back into the hands are minimal. In most cases they should still have the PDFs, in other cases they could scan the originals and use some OCR software to create proper PDFs. I am sure a lot of fans would even offer to help with this for free. If WotC doesn’t want to run its own download store, they can easily go back to OneBookShelf’s sites.

If anyone from Wizards of the Coast reads this, please talk with the people responsible and try to convince them to bring the PDFs back. And if it’s at all possible make Alternity available as well.

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2. Hey Wizards of the Coast! Where Are My Apps?
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“Rick Gassko is settling down… But before he walks down the aisle with Debbie he’s having on last fling. Accompanied by his friends, some dice, the Necronomicon and his favorite game designer and wild party animal Ed “The Beard” Greenwood, Rick will have an adventure he will never forget. Literally… Bachelor Party RPG!”

No, I’m sorry to disappoint, this post is NOT about a role playing game based on the “classic” Tom Hanks movie Bachelor Party. This post is about something much more personal. On a recent post where I reminisced about Alternity, talked about gaming and how what we play becomes intertwined with what we are doing in real life and, at least for me, are part of the memories.’

When I got married I decided I wanted to do something special for my gaming group. After a botched “traditional” bachelor’s party, the day before the wedding I gathered up all of my friends and we drove out to the small local hotel up in the mountains where the wedding would be held. While family and friends got busy prepping for the next day’s celebration we took out our gaming books and die and sat around a table to role-play.

(Hey don’t look at me like that, it was my wedding… I was entitled to relax, have fun, and not work before the wedding!)

We were in the midst of the second campaign of my long-running fantasy campaign; back them still using the AD&D 2^nd edition rule set. This was a generational campaign; some of the characters were direct descendants or related to the characters from the previous campaign. We played a side-trek adventure where the group discovered some ruins visited by the previous campaign’s characters.

There they discovered a secret hidden away by their old characters, and learned about the friendship and camaraderie that allowed them to overcome those obstacles. In turn their current characters had to come together and strengthen the bonds that brought them together. During that adventure the characters became closer friends and explored they were working together for common goal.

I wanted to highlight the importance of friendship as a not so subtle message to my friends that their friendship was important. We gamed into the night and afterwards spent a good deal of time talking about the game and about the wedding and about the changes it would bring to my life. And it did bring change, and despite the distractions, the happy times and the less happy one (of which there were not many!), I kept gaming.

We share a lot around the table and friendships are forged in the game. So if you can I encourage you to plan a special game, on special occasion, share a game. It’s one of those things you will not forget!

I am no longer married, the why’s and how’s are not important, but some of those players that gamed with me that night are still sitting at my table every week, and the ones who are not remain friends. So I’d like to dedicate this post to Pierre, José, Luis, Emilio and Guaro who sat that night to play in my Bachelor Party RPG. To my current players, be aware, when I tie the knot again I’m repeating the experience!

Have any of you done something similar? Celebrated a real life occasion in a game? I’d sure like to know…

And you know what, that game I made up at the beginning of the post; it might not be so bad after all… On second thought, no it would be horrible!

PS – If you have not seen the movie that inspired the post’s title, don’t worry you are not missing much. Still if your curiosity has been piqued and you will not heed my warning, here is the trailer:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJhzlV3X5so

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1. Improve Your Game: Character creation as a team effort
2. Bridging the Gap part II
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As I have said before, I am a compulsive home brewer so it should be no surprise I had been tinkering with a sci-fi setting since high school. Many aliens looked like the aliens from Marvel Comics or DC’s Legion of Super Heroes (I had no artistic talent to draw them and back then I had no access to the Internet… Yes there was such a time!), but I had come up with this idea where the human race had begun a Diaspora to the stars and arrived in a galaxy populated by many diverse alien races. I had done some freeform role playing in the setting, tried adapting it to Star Frontiers, but to no avail.

Then along came Alternity! After what seemed like forever the book finally came out. I had already played a brief (and not terribly successful) session using the Fast Play Rules so I dove right in. I loved the book and soon was writing up the statistics for new alien races, the story of the setting and rudimentary star map.

The year Alternity came out was special for many reasons and Alternity is inexorably linked with many wonderful memories. Alternity came out the year I got married and I as reading the books and writing for the game all through the preparations. My campaign featured biogenetically enhanced knights thematically organized around the mythologies of Earth’s ancient past, each order possessing powers based on the mutations chapter. The Tangents books had not come out yet. Puerto Rico was hit by a terrible hurricane that year and we were without power for about a week, I remember sitting by candlelight and flashlight writing up the stats for the different orders. To say the Alternity RPG engrossed me is an understatement.

I did not play the game until about a year later and we had a blast. The game lasted between twelve or sixteen sessions and sadly it petered out. The group consisted of six players, one of which despised the rules (he never “got it” but now admits he never tried and did not want to really play the game back them) and another a power gamer who created a robot character and exploited the rules (you are a dear friend but you know who you are!). I did not master the rules enough to spot these game breaking combinations early enough to stop them until the game was underway.

Despite those two factors the game was a lot of fun to play. The toolbox approach fit my style of gaming perfectly, it allowed me to construct the campaign I wanted and once characters were written up all the information they needed was there on their character sheet. There was minimal rules look up, with the exception of the psychic powers. The dice mechanic was intuitive and easy to adjudicate from a Game Master’s perspective. The way characters took damage was sometimes confusing for the players, but you have to understand we played AD&D almost exclusively for years (with the occasional RIFTS, Heroes Unlimited or World of Darkness game, don’t judge us it was the 90s) so it was only a matter of getting used to the new system.

Alternity was a fun game to play and the supplements were also top notch. However, unlike most fans I was NOT enamored by the Star*Drive campaign. The setting struck me as needlessly complex and a case of “throw in everything AND the kitchens sink” design philosophy! And then there was the art… I cannot recall a single piece of art that I liked from that book; it made me cringe as I leafed through it. Some of the supplements for the setting were useful. Dark-Matter was another matter (pun intended)! Here was an engrossing and well developed modern conspiracy game that showed the potential of the game system.

But by the time the book came out we had stopped playing Alternity. I think it was a mix of some players’ unwillingness to learn a new system and the siren call of a long running fantasy campaign everyone wanted to get back to.  I never got the Alternity version of Gamma World so I can’t really say anything about it.

The campaign lived on and we played it again using the dX system by Guardians of Order. I hope to someday revisit it; this campaign is almost as important to me as my fantasy campaign. Heck, I even got a tattoo of the symbol of the political alliance that gave the campaign its name.

Now looking back and rereading the rules they seem so simple and straightforward. Not long after Alternity was cancelled we switched to D&D 3^rd edition, and we had some pretty rough growing pains adapting to that system. But we stuck to it and eventually came to love it, I’m sure that is we had stuck to Alternity we would have mastered it as well.

Now as I ponder my possibilities for a future sci-fi game I have considered using Savage Worlds, Cortex, Stars Without Number, but after reading HyenaSpotz post Alternity has suddenly become a contender. I have to print out some Fast Play Rules and hand them to my players to see what they think. Will this be the year of Alternity? I’ll let you know…

Thanks again to HyenaSpots for his inspiration and bringing back so many wonderful memories!

PS- If you liked the Player’s Fast Play Rules linked on the first paragraph, here is the link to the Game Master Fast Play Rules, enjoy!

Related posts:

1. A word on our Alternity April Fool’s post
2. Exciting Alternity news!
3. Review: Alternity

Click here to view larger version.

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Stars Without Number is a surprisingly well-made SF roleplaying game “influenced by the Old School Renaissance and partially inspired by the great fantasy role-playing game editions written by Tom Moldvay and Frank Mentzer”. Perhaps it was that mention of the OSR that put me off a bit initially.

Don’t get me wrong, I very much enjoyed Swords & Wizardry and I recently picked up Lamentations Of The Flame Princess but aside from that my interest in the old-school movement waned. It actually bothers me that people waste their time and creativity to recreate the 1970s’ fantasy RPG over and over again. But that’s the subject for another post…

Luckily Stars Without Number is different. While the system it uses has some resemblance to old-school D&D, it can pretty much stand on its own feet. SWN features three pretty broad character classes (Warrior, Expert, and Psychic), a sizeable number of Background Packages (from Adventurer to Worker) and a point-based psi system. Since the basic system is still pretty close to the d20 System, D&D veterans of all editions should get into SWN pretty fast.

Aside from the fact that it’s basic system is inspired by old-school D&D, Stars Without Numbers feels like a modern game, both in presentation and rules. Although the layout isn’t as fancy as some other games I’ve seen lately, it’s clean and has a good readability. The artwork is of a mixed quality (probably because it’s stock art – I recognize a few pieces I bought myself), but it usually fits the genre well.

Aside from the rules needed to create characters and run the game, the GM gets quite a lot of tools for his own games. There are rules for World, Faction, Adventure and Alien Creation, a Xenobestiary and a fully fledged out sector for you to play in. The author didn’t forget simple but effective Starship design rules either.

The 210-paged PDF version of Stars Without Numbers is free and can be downloaded from DriveThruRPG. You can also get this fine game as a softcover or hardcover book through DriveThruRPG’s POD service, if you prefer the hardcopy over the digital download. The printed books set you back $19.99 or $24.99 respectively.

SWN is definitely worth a look if you are into science fiction RPGs. The game supports various sub genres and gaming styles, so it should be pretty easy to adapt it to almost any campaign.

Related posts:

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Ok, enough with the melodrama, let’s get to the good part. Just like last year, you can download a free copy of Kobold Quarterly as a PDF, specifically issue #11, until February 9^th.  Michael has reviewed issues before, and I recently reviewed issue #16. This issue from the fall of 2009 is up to par with their usual quality, excellent layout, a great diversity of articles, and a format reminiscent of the bygone magazines of old. If you are a fan of D&D 4^th edition there is a good spread of articles for you here covering insanity, wishes, and paragon paths for monstrous creatures. For D&D 3.5 fans, and I know there are many of you out there, you’ll find some gems like an alternate dwarf, playing were-creatures, and (my favorite article in the issue), the Ecology of the Vampire. There is little material for Pathfinder as this was back when the game was still coming out, but most of the material for D&D 3.5 are perfectly usable for Pathfinder fans.

What they DO have for Pathfinder is the spell-less Ranger. This seems to be something fans always want, a ranger that casts no spells, like a certain ranger from a popular fantasy series… This was the selling point for me and the reason I got this issue on the first place when it came out. This has been part of the available classes for my Pathfinder game ever since I decided to switch my homebrew to that system. Besides what I just mentioned there are advice columns from some of the biggest names in game design, book reviews, and a city write up, with accompanying map.

If you are unsure whether to buy Kobold Quarterly, here is your chance to try it out for free. Download it, read it, I bet you’ll like it. Navigate your way to the KQ Store and use the coupon code KQ11Gift to download it. Once you read it, be sure to come back and let me know what you think. I’d like to know if my opinion matches those of our readers.

PS – I went through a few possible titles for this post before finally writing it down. The one that actually became the title and the caption accompanying the post are just two of them. Some of the other titles were:

Have Kobold, will download!

The good, the digital and the Kobold…

Wrestling History in the making… Kobold Mania #11

Kobold Evolution…

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One of the biggest problems in most games has to be how the party got together and how they know one another. One solution that I have used many times is actually from an Old-School blogger, It’s a file called 100 Reasons and can be found here:
http://bxblackrazor.blogspot.com/2010/08/give-me-reasonor-hundred.html

But I would like to talk about an alternative that a lot of people actually seem to enjoy. Group character creation. I’m not talking about everyone making there characters at the same time and making sure the party is well rounded.  I’m talking more about creating a little background story along with character creation.  I don’t always riff off of FATE games but they do have a lot to teach.  This time I want to take a look at the 5 phases of Spirit of the Century and how
you might use this to make characters in D&D or any other game for that matter a little more organic.

A word of caution though, this probably isn’t a very good idea in Old-School play as characters tend to die very often. For that I would recommend the 100 Reasons mentioned above.

Lets look at the phases and how they might be used for a normal game of D&D or Pathfinder. Of course in FATE games they want you to choose aspects and skills that are appropriate for the phase in question. You could use this to justify why you have ranks in a certain skill or perhaps why you chose a particular feat.

Phase 1: Background
This one is simple enough, where did you grow up, where you poor, are you an orphan (ahem). What did you do during your childhood up until your teens.

Phase 2: War
Spirit of the Century takes place after World War I. A lot of campaigns include a war of some sort. Ebberon for example. This doesn’t have to be world changing and could easily be something else.
Sample questions to answer are, what did you do during the war, which side were you on. Did you go awol. If there isn’t a war in your game it should be simple enough to replace this with some major event. Perhaps a small peasant uprising took place before the campaign.

Phase 3: Novel
This is where it gets interesting and a bit fun. Write a one line sentence of an adventure your character has done recently. Make it reasonable as you are 1st level, but you are above the 0th level people so you have a bit of leeway. Examples from a previous game of mine: “Saved a girl from a circus lion”. Another one was: “Courted a beautiful noble woman”.

Phase 4: Guest Star
Spirit of the Century ask now to write the previous “novel” down and shuffle them and pass them around. Write a brief sentence explaining how you took part in the other persons novel. Get creative this explains how you became friends or at least acquaintances with the other person. Examples from my game. The ranger drew the fighters novel about the circus lion. They decided that the lion escaped and cornered a small child in the market and they beat it into unconsciousness with whatever they had at hand. Not really anything to use as a plot seed but definitely something to raise a pint to. The other example was the rouge drew the bards novel of courting the noble lady. They decided that they were courting the same woman along with a third person. This person was a weasel and a con and ended up winning the girl over. They put aside the fact they were after the same woman and put all their hatred upon this third person. Now I had some type of villain to use. My first instinct was they were going to be summoned to court for an adventure and it would be this person giving the quest, since he is a noble now. They hated this, and I mean this
in the best way possible.

Phase 5: Guest Star
This phase is exactly the same as the phase above. It is just used to create a more tangled web of friendship. Some cases it is probably not necessary, as I didn’t use it in the game I am speaking of.

Hopefully this will give you some ideas to use besides “You are all in a tavern, you’ve been friends for as long as you can remember.” or the infamous “You seem trustworthy.”

As last time, anyone use anything similar before? Have any tips or improvements you would like to share? One last thing, what game should I mine for gold next? I would really appreciate any suggestions and nothing is off limits!

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1. Bridging the Gap
2. Campaign Primer Ideas! Part 1
3. Eclipse Phase – A Study in Philanthropy