Catching Up With Origins 2001

First, a correction: it’s Risk 2210 A.D., not 2101 A.D. But what’s 109 years between friends, eh? Still no page about this one on the AH web site.

Deadlands D20 Surfaces
Yes, it’s printed, it was at the show. The cover doesn’t look like your conventional Deadlands stuff – it’s brown, it has a portrait of a boy gunslinger and a girl huckster, and the huckster’s cards look like they’re stuck together with bubblegum (magic, I imagine). I didn’t inspect this one closely, but looks like it should be in stores soon, with the very intriguing occult-meets-WWII Weird Wars D20 sourcebook debuting at Gen Con.

Just Tell Mom You’re Collecting Books Now
The good folks at Anoch Game Systems came out of nowhere at last year’s Origins with Mystick: Domination, a fine card game with Tarot-inspired mechanics and beautiful artwork culled from actual classic paintings of the Rennaissance and after. Back then, they said they were working on a Mystick RPG built around competition. This year, they showed prototypes of the “trading book game” that evolved out of that concept. It’s called Avatar: The Chosen (their website is still calling it the Mystick Pocket RPG as of now), and it will ship next April or something, according to Anoch’s booth reps. It’s a combat game in which your character is a stack of books, each book representing an aspect of your character, and when you get smacked, you turn the page. If the base book for your character class closes, you’re dead. They said they’re taking lots of inspiration from computer and console RPGs, which are of course very different from the paper variety. It sounds to me like they’re crossing it with Lost Worlds or something. This will be one to check out, as is the current Mystick Companion standalone expansion set for Mystick. (By the way, they say they will still eventually do a conventional RPG on the Mystick theme.)

Later, I’ll give you my first impressions of the SnarfQuest Card Game, a playtest report on Lemmings: The Migration, and some more rambling. Cheerio!