I have known this for some time now, but I wanted to wait with this announcement, to give Jonathan Jacobs the chance to post it first: Several of my articles written for Stargazer’s World and one guest post I wrote for Philippe Ménard’s “Musings of the ChattyDM” (now part of Critical Hits) have been selected for the upcoming Open Game Table Vol. 2! I want to sincerly thank my readers, the peer reviewers and editorial board for considering my works as interesting and relevant enough to be included into the Open Game Table. And I can’t wait to get my hands on the final book.

For more information on the first volume of OGT and the upcoming Vol. 2, check out Jonathan’s blog “The Core Mechanic”. There’s also a complete list of all participating blogs. Congratulations to all bloggers who made it into that list. It’s an honor to be among such formidable folks!

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I guess we all have done that at least once:

There is a new supplement for my favorite RPG, but I am kind of lukewarm about it. I guess, that I will not really need it. But still…I have bought everything else that has come out for that particular RPG. So – come on! I will always know, that my collection is incomplete without it. The place between the books that came before and after will be a gaping void, mocking me for my stinginess. It is my favorite RPG after all, right? Even if I will not really use it, just having it will be good and reading through it will be fun. So I place the order. And the book arrives. And it is worse than I imagined. To be brutaly honest, it is next to useless and a waste of perfectly good paper!

By Sigmar! Why did I buy this turd of a supplement??

My personal “worst buy” was the Character Pack for the 2^nd Edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay by Black Industries. I have always been a HUGE fan of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, with the 1^st Edition being my very first RPG back in the day. So when Black Industries came out with the new edition in the mid-naughties, I religiously picked up every single publication. And I really loved what they did. Great stuff – except for the Character Pack.

What did I get in that thin supplement?

I got 50 copies of the same bland Character Sheets, that I could easily have photocopied from the rulebook! I really expected them to be a improved, more beautiful version. Nope – the same stuff as in the rulebook
But there also is a 16-page booklet – there has to be some good stuff in there! Actually…no. Inside you’ll find:

• Name generators that put thousands of Dwarf, Elf, Halfling, and Imperial Human names at your fingertips.

These were already in the rulebook! Ok, they are slightly expanded here…

• Spell summaries of the most common Arcane and Divine Lores.

I needed those like a fish needs a bicycle.

• A Spell Grimoire sheet for Priests and Wizards.

Ok, somehwat useful – if you have handwriting, that fits in lines for 6pt fonts…

• A recap of Character Creation, including all essential tables.

Great! So I get a second copy of the Character Creation Chapter form the rulebook! Woohoo!

• A Combat Action Summary, with both Basic and Advanced Actions ready for instance reference during play.

Yay! Now I have three copies of this: In the rulebook, on the GM-screen and in this booklet!

• A series of inspirational Character Portraits by Dave Gallagher.”

The big joke, to round it all off: The Character pack was packed in a double-sided, flimsy sheet of paper. On the inside there is a selection of drawings, that I would classify as drafts.

As you can guess, I was not really happy with my purchase.

So, what purchases do you regret? If you could travel back in time to keep yourself from buying one RPG supplement – what would it be?

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Welcome back to another boardgame review at Stargazer’s World!
For my second article I have chosen my newest acquisition: Tales of the Arabian Nights by Eric Goldberg, published by Z-Man-Games.

Tales of the Arabian Nights - Box

I have to digress a bit first:
Many of you will propably remember the Adventure Gamebooks from the eighties, like the Lone Wolf- or Fighting Fantasy-series. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, here’s how those books work:
They are written from the point of view of the player character and every so often, the reader will be asked to make a decision. Each option has a chapter  number next to it, that tells you where your story continues. So a simple chapter might be “The path divides in front of you. If you want to go left, read on at 245. If you want to go right, read on at 431″. These books  often have simple rulesets with skills and combat rules. All you need for your solitaire-adventures is one of those paperbacks, a pencil and maybe a die.
For me these were actually my very first contact with the concept of fantasy roleplaying and I still treasure my copies of the Lone Wolf-books. I really loved to spend my time in the magic worlds these books created – and unlike other books they let me interact with the world and make my own choices. These books were the door to a whole new world of gaming and fantasy!
So, why am I telling you about this? Quite simple: Tales of the Arabian Nights basicaly is a very ambitious Chose-your-own-adventure-book with a board, a LOT of encounters and playable with up to six players.

Tales of the Arabian Nights with two players

Tales of the Arabian Nights (TotAN for short) places the players in the middle of adventures from One Thousand and One Nights. You will be experiencing stories of adventure and wonder like those of Sindbad and Ali Baba (which are acutally playable characters).
During the game the players create random adventures from encounters and, by interconnecting these, weave legendary stories in their imagination. It can be heroic, whacky, funny and, I’ll admit it, sometimes stupid.
While TotAN is not quite unique, there definitly are very few boardgames that use a book with numbered paragraphs to tell a story. One that comes to mind is Barbarian Prince from Heritage USA (1981).
Some of you may already know TotAN from it’s ealier edition: It was originaly released by West End Games in 1985, though there have been significant changes between the two editions.

How does it work?

TotAN is not a very complicated game, but it requires a bit of work to run. The rulebook weighs in at 18 pages but that includes table of contents, designer’s notes, background info and lots of illustrations. If you understand the game it can be explained in fifteen minutes.

All characters start in Baghdad, with three Skills each. Skills come in many different forms (“Luck”, “Courtly Graces” or “Seamanship” for example) and give you advantages in encounters that refer to these skills.  You can gain and lose skills through encounters and it is obviously a rather good thing to have lots of skills.
Before the actual game begins players decide on their Victory Formula – which determines their goal in the game. While the game itself is very rich in theme, this goal is very unthematic and bland: Each player secretly distributes 20 points between Story Points and Destiny Points. These can be gained and lost throughout the game and if you reached your goal (for example 14 Story Points and 6 Destiny Points) and are back in Baghdad, you have won the game. There isn’t even some ingame explanation given or any description, what Story and Destiny Points represent. Meh!
So here’s my take on it: A few bored lads and lasses from ancient Baghdad had a rather wild night out on the town and after a few arabic coffees come up with a wager. They are to travel the world and whoever comes back with the biggest name and the wildest stories to tell is declared the winner. You know, just the typical stuff people did before television and the internet.

Some components - encounter card, dice, playing piece, encounter tables

During the game players take turns travelling the world and having encounters in the space they end their movement in. These Encounters are the heart of the game and while the process is relatively simple in practice, it is very hard to describe in just a few words. I’ll try to give you a brief overview of how it works without going into all the details.

The encounters are determined and resolved by reading from the Book of Tales – a massive, spiral-bound 300-page book with 2600 different encounters! Let me give that to you in words: two-thousand-six-hundred encounters. That’s quite a few adventure hooks – I can assure you that.
The player to your left always has the Book of Tales on your turn and is called the Reader. So, when you have finished your move, the Reader determines from  the encounter card you have drawn,  which encounter table he must use this turn and asks you to roll a die. He then determines what you will encounter this turn (the picture “Some components”  (above) gives you an idea what this can look like).

Reaction Matrix & Encounter from Book of Tales - Studying the Egg of a Roc

The player on your right is called the Matrix Reader, as he now consults the Reaction Matrices and tells you, what your possible reactions to this encounter are. The Reaction Matrices are three pages of tables that allow you to determine, which kind of reactions you can chose in certain encounters and tell the Reader which paragraph to read. You can see an example of a reaction matrix and encounters from the book of tales in the picture on the left.  After you have decided how to react to the encounter, the Reader goes to the paragraph determined by the reaction matrix (in the case on the picture on the left, it was to Study the Egg of a Roc – so we go to paragraph number 943). He then reads you the first paragraph and checks if you have any applicable skills. You get the choice of which skill you use (if any) but of course you will not know what the results will be before you make your choice.

After resolving your encounter, the Book of Tales and the Reaction Matrices are passed on and it is the next players turn.
I have to stress that the encounter system is really, really cleverly done. It is quite seldom that you get bogus encounters that doesn’t easily fit the characters location and the system ensures that you can’t encounter a lion in a forest or at sea for example.

Is it any good?

Obviously a game like this is not really about winning or strategy – if you are looking for a game that challenges your ability to outhink your opponents and to secure victory against the best laid plans of other players, this game is not it.

TotAN is a bit of a borderline case between roleplaying games and boardgames. Of course it obviously has a board and the actions of the players are limited by the rules and the game engine. But on the other hand there is very little strategy, winning is secondary and the focus of the game is the telling of stories – all things, that we don’t normaly associate with boardgames but with roleplaying games. The game is quite random, there is little player interaction and you have to accept, that you don’t have total control over what is going on. This are propably the reasons, why the game fails for many hardcore boardgamers – in many ways it’s really not what we expect a boardgame to be.
Talking about the games limitations, I should also mention, that looking up the encounters and flipping back and forth in the Book of Tales can be a bit tiresome. I’d also suggest, not to play the game with more than four people, as the downtime get’s too much and you also really can not follow the developing stories of the characters. Three players is propably ideal, as every player is somehow involved on each turn – one is reader, one active player and one matrix reader.

But if you can accept the game for what it is and enjoy the weaving of a story from random encounters and appreciate the sheer endless variety of it all  – and I assume that many roleplayers can – it is a great game. It’s a whole world to explore and the sheer ammount of encounters in the Book of Tales ensures that you will discover something new with every play.
What I have written about the game really just scratches the surface – your character can become a Sultan or a Slave, he (or she) can get married and have children, gain legendary treasures and find hidden Places of Power like the Valley of Diamonds or the Lake of Colors! The character can even become sex changed – yeah, there’s strange stuff going on in acient arabia! It is really a big world of fantastic tales.

So the next time your GM is completely burned out or a few players just don’t show up for your RPG-session but you still want to experience some marvelous adventures – why don’t you visit ancient arabia of legend with Tales of the Arabian Nights?

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I just read about this on Simon Rogers’ LiveJournal blog:

All of our GUMSHOE PDF products are on sale over at rpgnow.com at a 15% discount until 19th March. Our average rating over 22 reviews is over 4 out of 5. So that’s Trail of Cthulhu, Mutant City Blues, Esoterrorists and Fear Itself. Get them while you can!

I just LOVE the GUMSHOE System, and so I took the opportunity to get the Esoterror Fact Book for just $12.71! If you haven’t done so, you should at least consider getting the core rulebooks for Esoterrorists, Trail of Cthulhu and Mutant City Blues. They are definitely worth it!

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On March 12th, Robin Stacey (aka Greywulf) announced that he had sold the rights to Microlite20, including microlite20.net, to Seth Drebitko. I quickly asked Robin to get me in touch with Seth, which he did, and Seth was gracious enough to answer some questions about the sale and the future of Microlite20. Here’s what Seth had to say. Continue Reading

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Some of you might have gotten the idea from a previous post that I don’t like Dungeons & Dragons 4^th edition. Nothing could be further from the truth. I played the game for the better part of a year and had fun with it. Ultimately my players and I sat down to talk about it and decided to play something else, in this case Pathfinder. But I think 4^th edition had many things to teach, lessons I’m applying to my current Pathfinder campaign, and will benefit others systems I play in the future. Let’s look at them…

1. The biggest lesson was to let go of my fear of “breaking” the game and get creative. When D&D 3^rd edition came about the system codified so many different elements, everything was so closely interconnected that sometimes I feared eliminating a certain part of the system without worrying about the cascading effect it would have on the game. Thought years of playing I felt pretty comfortable with winging things, but making sweeping changes to the rules was something I was reluctant to do! D&D 4^th edition’s simplicity meant I felt free to create modify and wing just about anything I could imagine.  This gave me the confidence to look back at 3^rd edition, and now at Pathfinder, and shake off the false sense of strict adherence to the rules and feel freer to create, modify and learn from my mistakes. I now approach games with a more experimental outlook!

2. Reskinning, just taking the math and abilities of one creature and making up a new one from the foundations of that other creature, the whole idea is so simple I am amazed it took me so long to consciously do it. I owned tons of monsters book, a creature for every purpose. Now I can do so much with just one book just by describing a monster differently. I had fiddled with the details of monsters before, but now I just redress them and describe the effect differently, adding an ability here or feat there.

3. Making characters just a little bit tougher… Here is something I have tried to do for a long time, make those first levels more survivable and taking some cues form 4^th edition I now make characters a little bit harder to kill allowing them to survive longer and face tougher challenges.

4. Making terrain an integral part of combat! I’ve always drawn detailed maps, and even had an adventure where the party fought in floating pillars above an underground lake, but these instances were the exception not the rule. After playing D&D 4^th edition I now plan my combats and challenges with an eye for how terrain can be integral to the situation, hindering or helping combatants as they interact with the terrain. I think this has been the change that has caused the biggest shock to some of my players. It adds another wrinkle to the tactical element of combat that some who are more interested in just getting their character close to the monster and beating it down resent. Still I think it creates a much richer and diverse combat experience.

5. Diagonal movement… Here is something I embraced when they changed the rules from D&D 3.0 to 3.5 but added unnecessary complexity to the game. If I’m willing to forego things like facing or other “realistic” elements why insist on this? Now calculating effects and movement is quicker, true it changes the rules, but hey it’s my game, I learned that lesson!

Theses are just five examples, but there were many little things I learned form playing D&D 4^th edition. I still read reviews and rules for the system and talk with friends that play the game so I may learn more and keep growing as a gamer and a Game Master.

What have you learned for playing this or other games? Let us know…

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