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Inner Sea World Guide: First impressions …
3April 4, 2011
This past Saturday I went down to my FLGS and got my hands on the new Pathfinder RPG campaign setting, the Inner Sea World Guide. Any casual reader of my posts will know I am a homebrewer at heart and that I rarely run pre-published campaigns, but I am not below getting campaigns settings and mining them for ideas, rules or even the occasional renamed NPC. A prime example is the regional feat concepts in the D&D 3rd edition Forgotten Realms campaign setting. Those were quickly nabbed and adapted to my campaign back them.
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.
A font by any other name…
0March 31, 2011
I don’t know about you, but I love collecting them. Ever since I got my first word processor I cherished the possibility of changing the font depending on the purpose of the document I was writing. For a big period in my gaming life one of the things I enjoyed the most was creating character sheets for the games I was playing, (this was in that bygone age before high speed internet connections and great collections of pre-made character sheets like the Mad Irishman, kudos!) and selecting the right font from that seemingly endless collection of fonts displayed against the monochrome background of my monitor was a key part of that process!
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!). (more…)
Crypts and Things
5March 23, 2011
When it comes to the Old-School Renaissance I have some mixed feelings. On the one hand I enjoy the simple old-school charm of games like Swords & Wizardry or X-Plorers, but on the other hand I am unhappy with the lack of innovation and creativity in this part of our hobby. Games like the aforementioned X-Plorers, Stars without Number, and Lamentations of the Flame Princess are the laudable exceptions here.
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.
Breaking the d20 Paradigm
10March 22, 2011
“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 4th 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 3rd ed., then Star Wars Saga System, D&D 4th 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.
Wizards of the Coast, please reconsider your PDF policy!
23March 17, 2011
In April 2009 Wizards of the Coast stopped all sales of PDFs. The reasons are still not 100% clear but there was always some talk about piracy. Almost two years later there are still no legal PDF products you can buy from WotC. I doubt I have to point out that piracy is still strong.
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. 
Bachelor Party RPG!
2March 14, 2011
“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!)
Alternity memories…
7March 10, 2011
The recent post by HyenaSpotz about the Alternity RPG really struck home! I was a big fan of the game when it came out and his terrific review of the game brought back some great memories. When Alternity was announced I was immediately interested; the fact that it would be a “generic” sci-fi system I could use to create my own campaigns was right up my alley. I was an AD&D 2nd ed. fan and was sure this game would do for sci-fi what AD&D did for fantasy. I snatched up the Fast Play Rules and was planning my campaign even before the core books came out.
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. (more…)
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