Archive for the ‘role-playing games’ Category.

Houses of the Blooded Cheap


Houses of the Blooded Logo

No product that advertises itself as an anti-dungeons&dragons game should be overlooked.

Especially when the PDF version is available for five dollars.

Expect comments later, once the book’s been digested.

[via /var/log/orava. ]

Astrópía, 4.5 stars

Astropia PosterAstrópía was the first truly good movie of the festival. Pretty much par for the course, I didn’t worry too much about the uneven progress thus far.

The first thing apparent from Astrópía is its origin. The characters spout icelandic, and never let go.
The occasional english phrases folded in are there just for contrast.

The movie is a beautifully realized Beauty and the Geek. A model-class blonde is forced to seek out employment in a gameshop upon a sudden turn of events. After the expected clashes with the people threatened by the presence of a misfit (in their circles), the movie turns even better. Occasional injections of scenes from an ongoing role-playing campaign - definitely played at a table, the film disrespects the live action players quite fiercely - and the reality and fantasy mix very well at the hands of the creative team.

Definitely a movie I intend to seek out in dvd form. If only to inflict on gamer and non-gamer friends alike. And with partial finnish funding, such a release is not too outlandish a concept to consider.

Tiny adventures for semi-social adventurers

Wizards of the Coast has launched Dungeons & Dragons Tiny Adventures, an extremely simple role-playing game in Facebook.

The servers seem to be down a lot, but intermittently the application offers glimpses into it.

As a role-playing game it fails utterly.

There’s really no game at all, just a story that is parcelled out one paragraph per ten minutes. Beyond reading the individual chapters there’s no interaction at all, the game plays itself (so this is pretty much just ProgressQuest with a prettier interface).

It doesn’t allow any role-playing at all beyond the selection of equipment - at least in the first adventures there are no choices to be made, just a linear, yet slow-paced blunder through random encounters.

The social aspect of the game is pretty much an afterthought. With the exception of providing healing or temporary “buffs” to your friends, it’s an entirely solitary affair.

While at least the user interface of the application is competently put together, the very limited interaction and especially the nosediving backend detract from the experience.

Eyes Only

Got the long-awaited Delta Green: Eyes Only book the other day.

The book had a print run of 1000 copies, and the store seems to have run out very recently.

Eyes Only collects the three Delta Green chapbooks published late last millennium, and expands the content with two new scenarios. Which bodes well for the more conspiracy-ridden sessions of the Wednesday Emperors.

There’s been no indication whether this book ends up on the web as a free pdf (like the recent ransom-method publications by the main culprit, Dennis Detwiller) or starts turning up on eBay priced sky high like the original trio of booklets.

Remixed Gothiana

Monte Cook, one of the most well-known figures among the role-playing game designers has gone and remixed White Wolf’s World of Darkness setting.

And done it all with his traditional system of choice: d20.

The resulting book clocks in at a meaty 385 pages, and if previous output is any indication, will be good and balanced fun for gaming groups across the world. Our Wednesday Emperors-troupe never touched the originals (of either generation), and likely shall steer clear of this one as well.

Fourth time’s the charm, and evocation, and some abjuration

Dungeons & Dragons, the original role-playing game has begun evolving towards its next incarnation.

The game page on the publisher’s site was replaced by a mysterious 4adventure-timer, and the new edition was revealed on schedule in Gencon, currently organized in Indianapolis.

The game indeed looks to be moving forwards. And quite a few of the steps it takes are rather bold: the use of a brand-new gamer-centered social network and a monthly subscription to vast tracts of extra material are something that hasn’t been tried before.

The first book, unsurprisingly the player’s handbook, debuts in may, with the other mandatory tomes following in the subsequent months. And doubtless a conversion guide (at least from the third/3.5th editions) will be provided at the same time to ensure that no hard feelings surface on account of supplementary materials going stale.

The information provided thus far is pretty thin on the ground, but the Wizards of the Coast marketing machine will move into overdrive mode soon.

Me? Not nearly as excited as back in 2000 when the third edition pretty much revolutionized the industry, and gave a nice little kickstart to the Wednesday Emperors. These days there’s plenty of other fish in the sea, but the new edition needs to be checked out - that’s for sure.

Ropecon

Paid an annual visit to Ropecon, the (by far) biggest finnish roleplaying event.

Spent a good chunk of the evening there, listening to a couple of presentations, running into friends and admiring some of the dresses visitors had gone to great lengths to prepare.

Jaakko Stenros (whose blog hasn’t really been updated lately) and Markus Montola gave a presentation on Ethics of pervasive games, a topic I head no real clue about beforehand. The session turned out to be a good one - and the games in question not too tied to being larps, always a bonus in my book. Pervasive games were indeed a completely new genre to me, and the games, played out in public, seemed interesting. Ethics come into question as the game breaches several usually inviolate aspects of a game (space and time are used extensively, and there’s never definite knowledge whether a randomly encountered guy is part of the game or just a talkative passerby). The ethics were discussed using a couple of case studies. The first, Prosopopeia: Momentum succeeded well, whereas the Vem Gråter ended after the authorities got involved. The slides were snappily done, and probably will be available somewhere on the web (the immediately googlable ones are different from the ones shown in Ropecon).

An SCA fight at the 2007 RopeconSkipped the first guest of honor-presentation by Emily Care Boss (author of Breaking the Ice), and ventured into the open air to watch some combat. Wasn’t disappointed. The finnish chapter of Society for Creative Anachronism put up a good show on how to whack fully armored people over the head with pretty realistic rattan weapons. Which, considering the heat, was quite a display of martial prowess. The combatants ranged from users of the almighty two-handed sword to a more traditional sword and shield combination (both shown in the photo).

After the well-presented and quite safe-looking SCA session a finnish troupe called Harmaasudet showed that it is feasible to use real edged steel weapons in mock combat - which didn’t seem like a really good idea, especially when the combatants were not decked out in full plate armour.

Robin Laws, the second guest of honor, gave a good two hour presentation/interview/workshop. The discussion (with lots of questions from the audience) ranged from his past, present and future games. Heroquest in all its guises got the most bandwidth, and the weird world of Mad Lands popped up several times in the discussion as well. The third (forthcoming) Gumshoe game: Mutant City Blues sounded like a sure thing. A police procedural set in a world of superheroes (like Alan Moore’s mighty Top 10) is as close as sold to me as things can be. Best Friends got a heavy dose of props on a new twist on character generation (used effectively outside the high school setting in a thinly veiled Iraq-analogy), and Robin’s commentary on character death (it’s really painful on the GM) was spot on. Definitely a very good and worthwhile presentation, not on par with last year’s masterpiece from Ken Hite, but I wasn’t really expecting anything to supersede that.

Obligatory linkage: Robin Laws’ livejournal, See Page XX: a semi regular column, Issaries: publisher of HeroQuest.

Merry and Pippin roaming the scene at the 2007 RopeconAs expected, a lot of people had dressed up. A lot of them in very impressive suits. Though it may be possible to tire of blood-spattered girls in school uniforms, that didn’t happen yet. The most impressive individuals were not 1:1 replicas of some World of Warcraft or Anime characters, but two small boys dressed up as hobbits. Merry and Pippin, as they claimed loud when asked. Me? The traditional baggy black cargo shorts and a non-band-logo t-shirt (definitely in a minority, especially Iron Maiden was prominently shown on dozens of chests).

Called it a day early. The auditorium got increasingly mobbed up during the tail end of Robin Laws’ presentation. Mobbed up with people whose idea of decent behaviour didn’t exactly agree to letting others listen to the man with the microphone. Figured that the next session might have been a disaster of epic proportions (like the last year’s reality television-larp), and slunk towards the exit. A door-to-door service with 550 is just too convenient to ignore.

Delta Green, back in the green

Delta Green is back after a long long hiatus.

Back as a properly published game. Dennis Detwiller has worked wonders with the ransom model during the last year, and now the game is back with a one-two punch.

The original book is finally reprinted, though sadly the content has not been updated since the original printing (apart from adding d20-based mechanics), the conspiracy-riddled world contains no details of a post-911 scheme. (This is based on a very brief and cursory look in Compleat Strategist in New York, so the new and improved data might be there, just carefully camouflaged).

The main event of this spring, however, is the long-awaited release of the three Eyes Only books in a much-expanded edition. The trio of books was originally available directly from Pagan Publishing only - and in the days of pretty much nonexistent web stores, really hard to obtain outside the united states. Got the last two books from a friend who visited Gencon back in the day, and have been looking for the first on eBay. Though, with prices regularly crossing the $100 mark, haven’t been sorely tempted. Now, with a reworked edition, with doubled page count from the originals. There’s simply no excuse not to buy this book. Even with the horrible shipping costs. The initial printing is limited to 1000 copies, half of which have now been sold in ten days.

Rather strong a show for conspiracy/cthulhu mix-up, which was judged to be dead in the water years ago.

Ludo-linkage

Recently sighted game-related links:

  • The third part of the history of computer role-playing games is out. This one concentrates on the decade starting from 1994 - and covers many of the classics of the genre such as Planescape:Torment and the Baldur’s Gate saga.
  • Unsurprisingly, a videogame on Lost has been announced. No statement on which seasons this will cover - if it’s up to the third, the spoiler-averse in the audience (including me, obviously) will avoid this until the third season is available on dvd - expectedly in september.
  • Bethesda Softworks has bought the Fallout IP. If the resulting game combines the storylines of the previous Fallout installments with the graphics of Oblivion, its arrival will be a happy day indeed.
  • Keyboard pad for xbox 360 - how long before the first Z-machine (and Zork, naturally) makes it into the Live Arcade…
  • World Without Oil, an alternate reality game launched on mayday eve. Haven’t played with it at all yet - seems US-centered on a first blink.
  • Publishing a game based on George R.R. Martin’s still-to-be-completed septalogy a Song of Fire and Ice suddenly bankrupted Guardians of Order. The sad history of the franchise doesn’t deter Green Ronin from trying out the very same move.

Ludare necesse est

Purely game-related links, avoid like plague if you think gaming is not a dignified pursuit past the tender age of tweleve.

Game-link goodness

Some recent gaming-related links and products that look worthy of a click or even a purchase.

  • China Miéville’s New Crobuzon will get turned into a game setting in Dragon#352 in january.
  • The third expansion for Arkham Horror will be King in Yellow (though it hasn’t yet been officially announced by the publisher).
  • Munchkin Cthulhu has been delayed till spring 2007.
  • Age of Decadence looks like an immersive and text-rich role-playing game. Without a set release date.
  • Changing Times is the first new Transhuman Space product in ages.
  • Jenova Chen’s Flow is nothing short of hypnotic.
  • Tarot of Cthulhu, Ken Hite’s followup to his wildly successful Dubious Shards has been out for a while.
  • And while continuing in the unremitting horror-genre, the brand new Esoterrorists looks like a game with a worthy subject and an even worthier author.

Conspiracy Consultancy

Utterly forgot some quality links in the previous entry. Centered on the latter speaker:

  • Out of the box: newest article and archives.
  • Blog. Written in the style of his speech, and discussing other things than gaming as well. Will end up on the blogroll on the left column.
  • Dubious Shards, a collection of essays on Lovecraft-initiated Cthulhu mythios. The booklet has a formidably ugly cover, but I have very high hopes for the quality of the contents.

Ropecon

Visited Ropecon, the annual finnish gaming convention, for the first time in four or so years. I’m guessing at the interval, it sure has been a while - and previous few years’ cons have been missed due to being abroad or lazy.

First impression upon arrival in Dipoli was of disbelief: “what am I actually doing among these kids”. Kids that have either dressed up, dressed down, ingested far too much sugar or are lethargic to the point of catatonia. A brief trip on the very shallow sales floor didn’t really much improve matters (though the first sighting of Ptolus confirmed that it is indeed a humongous tome). Figured that following the official program would be a better bet than roaming the halls.

The first of the guests of honor to speak was Bruno Faidutti, a french boardgame designer. The topic was the distinction of theme and mechanics in the games. A good talk, peppered with references to well-known games as well as to Faidutti’s own output (which is pretty much a blank slate for me, have played only Warrior Knights). The boardgame industry seems to be in decent shape, and the publishers have slightly retreated from the “all games must be easy”-stance - and true gamers’ games (such as Twilight Imperium) occasionally show up. The american (theme first) and german (mechanics optimized) schools are mixing up - and the market is bristling with interesting offerings. Mr. Faidutti didn’t much like online (”for me gaming is a social event”) or co-operative games (”they are so hard to balance, since the players do not play each other”). A long interactive session followed the presentation, and I think I have to take a serious look at his Mystery of the Abbey, a dedcuction game in the style of Name of the Rose.

Kenneth Hite was the guest of honor I chose the friday to show up in the con. A prolific author who has written more ideas about alternate history and conspiracies than pretty much anyone. He first gave a “state of the industry”-style speech (like his annual Out of the Box-post about the topic). And the state is bleak, very bleak - substandard books and a needlessly complex three (or even four) tier system are sapping the profits. And most companies are clueless to see the writing on the wall, and especially to react to it. Massmarket sales in bookstores are one way to increase the volumes - but only very few companies attempt to gain a foothold in, say, Borders. The future lies in two directions: PDF and small press. PDF because the sales can be controlled, without any inventory out in the field, and because the middlemen are eliminated from the equation. Small presses fill niches, and fill them in a way in which they know their customers and play to them as the customers want, and do not attempt to court the wider market.

Favorite games were discussed at length. Call of Cthulhu’s position at the very pinnacle is not threatened by anyone - and an appropriate comparison to old western movies was spot on. The #2 spot is held by Unknown Armies and Over the Edge, both games that have simple rules and a complex milieu in which to act. Lots of other games (and individual supplements) were named to be of rabidly good quality - both from massmarket publishers as well as some of the independents. My poor AMEX is going to scream soon, the tips will be put to good use.

Mr. Hite was quite simply one of the best speakers I’ve had the pleasure to listen to in ages. Precision-aimed sentences at the hobby were a good beginning, but when the delivery was drily witty and completely deadpan, I was sold. And the skill of deprecating himself and the audience was impressive. After all, in most circumstances repeated statements to the fact that the people on the other side of the stage were “basement-dwelling bozos” wouldn’t have gone down so well. But Hite, having been one of them just made himself more available to the audience. And availability was indeed made good use of, in another lengthy Q&A-session. The two statements (heavily paraphrased) that crystallize the event: “the industry may be dying commercially, but the hobby itself if flourishing” - to cap the state of the union-part, “do not be disturbing weirdos” - on how to attract more players (especially women).

Hite’s questions-n’-answers was curtailed by the arrival of the next speakers. The session turned out to be a game, not a description of the jeepform. A massivish LARP-ish game whose topic was a dating show on stage. Watched for fifteen minutes and decided that I wasn’t really into it (being a card-carrying member of reality-tv haters club) and sneaked out.

Links or Parkland? Links!

Despite the sunshine, some interesting destinations have accumulated:

  • DRM is bad, mmmkay? And it’s always good to know the enemy.
  • Wanted to check out whose song Radar Love originally was, and was broadsided by this information blast. Never guessed that it was this popular.
  • Ptolus looks like it’ll be the biggest game-related publication ever. And most expensive. Though the idea of having lots and lots of unprinted material available on an attached cd is a very good idea.
  • It’s been a week since the world jump day, and at least I’m oblivious to any axial wobble the six hundred million participants have caused.
  • Finland’s selection of insects (and related animals) is far narrower than that of the US. And especially that of any big/poisonous enough to be hazardous to health is very small. But a bug-identification site like or would still be good.
  • Now this is getting seriously funky and impressively twisted! Doom 1 is playable on a monitor screen in Doom 3.
  • Amit Singh’s book on the internals of Apple’s OS X looks very interesting. And the web-only bonus content is an excellent addition - the latest extra chapter is a 140 page history of all the operating systems put out by Apple, since the seventies.
  • And hopefully Singh’s book is still valid after the fifth release of OS X (codenamed Leopard). The content’s been kept under wraps solidly, and the best guesses as to what’s going to be in can be found in the keynote bingo for the Worldwide Developer Conference on the first week on august.
  • Now this registers high on the nift-o-meter: gotapi.com is an interactive syntax guide for those awkward moments when, say, the attribute names of tag prove elusive.

Dive, dive! We got links incoming!

Some of the recent things that got saved to del.icio.us or just bookmarked.

Patronization actually works, part deux

Greg Stolze’s Executive Decision is out, and the 1000 bucks have been delivered to the red cross.

And Dennis Detwiller collected enough for the first part of the gigantic Future/Perfect (his blog does not seem to have easy access to individual entries).

Hooray. I’ll be showing up for more.

Patronization works!

Otherwise I wouldn’t be holding brand-spanking new Delta Green material right now.

A quad of gaming links

The constantly improving Escapist-magazine has not one but two extremely interesting articles in its newest issue. One on the current state of interactive fiction, the other on Planescape: Torment, still one of the best-written games there ever has been.

Slashdot (from which the previous was nabbed as well) provides a review of this year’s GenCon. However, it’s very shallow on content, and a lot of the named games have already been released. The ever-reliable GamingReview provides much better coverage.

Gamespot has a nice, albeit short, review of easter eggs in gaming. Ranging from classic to obscure, via the ego-stroking variant, it’s an interesting read. But the attendant forum just fails to work.

Dennis Detwiller’s ransomed Insylum is out. And the fund for the next one is open, and progressing towards the goal. The surprising success of the model has evoked a largish thread on the rpg.net fora. To a mixed response: the actual ratio between freeloaders and interested patrons is thus far unresolved. And yeah, I’m a card-carrying pledged member of the latter caste.

Advent of the Ransom Model

While the age of micropayments has not yet arrived, interesting payment models continue to surface.

A recent concept is the use of ransom model. In it a sum is named by the author (around the expected costs to generate the product), and contributions are calculated (with money kept in escrow) until the sum is reached. At that point the product is released for free (under an appropriate license, of course). If the target is not reached within a specified period, the funds contributed thus far are returned.

So what this really means is that the model is actually patronage in a distributed form. Where the distributed part effectively removes “you’ve got to be this wealthy to take this ride”-requirement, now anyone can contribute.

Meatbot Massacre by Greg Stolze was the first ransomed product that I know of. Was aware, wasn’t interested (it’s a “tactical miniatures game”), haven’t even looked at the final product.

However, with the arrival of Greg’s second ransomed game: …in spaaace!, the model saw a lot of discussion in the rpg.net fora, and Dennis Detwiller jumped into the game. Indeed, Dennis Detwiller, apparently the sole remaining Pagan Publishing guy. And he promptly kicked off not one, but two projects - both related to Delta Green, still one of my favorite shared halluc^W^W game universes. So from my perspective this looks to be a very interesting development indeed.

fundable.org seems to be the biggest player of the game, but by no means very big at all yet.

And for added value, NPR interviewed Greg Stolze (though there’s not much more exposure in the interview).

And gaming isn’t the only niche for ransom-model, as it’s used by at least one novelist as well. And there’s been funds and drives in the software industry. Probably the most famous was held for blender in 2002 to raise no less than 100000 euros.

There’s no wikipedia article on the topic yet. And in my quite sleep-deprived current state, I’m definitely not going to start one now.

notes, an unrelated bunch of

Figured it’d be good sport to buy a firefox t-shirt. Got dissuaded quickly, as the Mozilla Store, is nothing but expensive when it comes to shipping stuff out. The freight charge for a single shirt is a staggering 54 dollars. Luckily, the organization is opening an European location this year. I’ll be keeping my money until then.

Seems that Christopher Walken’s bid for 2008 presidency is sadly false. Too bad. Compared to the other actors-turned-politicians Walken seems to be head and shoulders above them intellectually. Probably just the reason to be avoiding the DC circuit…

Even more SVG brouhaha. Looks interesting - and with Mozilla browsers moving to include support by default, now’s an appropriate time to get familiar with the technology. Proceedings not out for this year’s conference, but bound to appear.

New blog on the roll (mine, definitely not quick on the uptake): Life with Alacrity. Quality over quantity.

Greg Costikyan has released Violence under Creative Commons-license. A gag game that applied the “kick in the door and slay the inhabitants”-style with fully automatic weapons and dropped the characters into a housing project. Well-written and laid out, provocative to the extreme, and bound to throw anyone with a conservative mindset into dramatic convulsions. And sure, the Wednesday Emperors will try this out. Once.