**********
Big Ups To The Columbus Chamber Of Commerce
Or whoever’s responsible for making this convention center suck so much less. Last year’s site for cheap chinese food and expensive sodas is now a nice Internet cafe from which I can not only post to OgreCave but, since I forgot my cell phone charger again, actually communicate with the outside world. And there is much to tell from here at Origins 2001 already, including but not limited to a multi-level late-night Giant Icehouse game that gave new meaning to the term “throwdown.” But anyway:
Avalanche Press Brings First of 3 Viking Sourcebooks for D20
The one that’s actually here on the show floor is Greenland Saga: The Lost Norse Colony, and the one that might be out for Gen Con is Ragnarok: Tales of the Norse Gods. A third sourcebook (all three of these, by the by, are thinnish guys like AP’s earlier Last Days of Constantinople, one of the more interesting d20 books so far in my opinion) will be out, um, sometime, and then maybe a bound collection of the trilogy? (That last is speculation on my part.)
Why Did I Not Even Notice This?
White Wolf has a huge new game out on the floor, and this time, it looks like it might actually not suck. At all. It’s called Exalted, for those of you who are like me and are blind to the apparently massive amounts of hype WW did for this game… in the backs of their own books, that is. Its lead designer Greg Grabowski, a personable man who thinks monkeys are always funny and therefore clearly has his finger on the pulse of the American psyche, describes it as “fantasy for people who hate fantasy … no dwarves or elves or throwing the ring in the mountain again, or any of that crap.” It’s all about epic ancient myths of the anime-influenced kickass variety, rather than the namby-pamby Joseph Campbell-esque stuff that’s swept the Western world. The surprising number of you who voted “Mayan-Incan” in our old neglected-RPG-genres poll would do well to look at this one.
(Note from Sven: The Exalted website has posted new fiction today from the game’s prologue. And Mike, you didn’t notice Exalted because you rarely role-play, buddy. 🙂
Early Candidates For Scariest New CCG
Upper Deck Entertainment, the fine folks who brought us the Survivor CCG (*shudder*), have teamed up with Lego on a property that was already plenty weird enough, but whatever – Bionicle: Quest For The Masks has a bunch of stat numbers that are all multiples of 100 for no apparent reason, and robots that are trying to collect masks, um, so that they will have something to stick to their heads. I don’t know. Those Lego people are Danish or something, and therefore inscrutable. I admit I haven’t looked at my free sample booster (which feels like it has about 6 cards in it), so maybe it’s decent. It’s just sad to be reminded of how the mighty Lego has fallen…
More later… I’m paying 15 cents a minute here…