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Tuesday, June 29, 2004
Aberrations details surfacing from the depths
My gaming group knows the pain of facing hordes of scaled races - lizardfolk, yuan-ti, draconians, and the like - in our D&D campaign. It would seem the next D&D Miniatures expansion, Aberrations, will bolster the ranks of my reptilian army.
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I, Robot. You, meat sack.
Steampower Publishing has posted a free download, Roleplaying Game Designate: Robots. Despite an earlier problem, the free electronic product is now of the printable variety, always a good thing. Go experience the machines for yourself, and let the lovely carnage begin.
Monday, June 28, 2004
Greg Costikyan on Origins 04
The Paranoia XP creator delivers an incisive travelogue/rant about Origins 2004 on his weblog. The awards ceremony definitely had problems (although the Hall of Fame parade actually preceded the asinine LukeSki, contrary to Greg’s recounting) - for instance, when you tell the crowd to hold their applause between nominees and the winners to please keep it brief, you’d do well to shave a sentence or two off of the four-sentence bios you’re reading off for each of 50 or so Hall-of-Famers. And to axe the musical guest. To do otherwise smacks of a certain disrespect of the currently-working professionals who are your bread and butter, even if it is to benefit and promote a spectacular and honorable history. But I digress, and Costikyan’s complaints and suggestions are probably more salient than mine.
Grey Star Goes Beyond the Nightmare Gate
Project Aon has just announced the release of the third World of Lone Wolf gamebook as a free online adventure. In Beyond the Nightmare Gate, you get to explore the dangerous Daziarn Plane in search of a magical item called the Moonstone. If you haven’t played the first two adventures in the series, they remain available and have just had some revisions and corrections made. If you’re a gamebook fan or if you just want to explore the world of Magnamund in preparation for trying out the new Lone Wolf RPG, it’s definitely worth taking a trip to Project Aon’s site.
Spiel Des Jahres winner: Ticket To Ride
Brett & Board has the news (BoardGameGeek likely has it too, but seems overwhelmed with traffic right now) that Alan Moon’s popular Ticket To Ride has taken taken top honors in Germany’s annual Spiel Des Jahres competition. Tongue-in-cheek horror game Dicke Luft in der Gruft, Reiner Knizia’s placement game Einfach Genial, Raja (published here as Maharaja), and St. Petersburg (just out in English from Rio Grande) were also shortlisted.
Origins 2004: playing catch-up till the day I die
Steve Jackson Games and Atlas were sharing a booth, and SJG was making noise about GURPS Fourth Edition, hitting at or near Gen Con. GURPS Dragons, new at the show, featured conversion rules for 4th Ed., billed as a sneak preview. Also new at the show was Transhuman Space: Toxic Memes, a book all about information and info warfare. Soon will come the day when a sci-fi setting in any medium won’t be able to get away with not having this kind of material. Finally there was the first sight (my first sight, anyway) of Chez Goth, which is, blessedly, exactly what you expect.
What did Atlas have, you ask? The only thing that caught my eye was the much more detailed look at Beer Money, much of which came from T-shirt vendors and such at other booths. That kid’s having an interesting life, isn’t she.
Also in the booth was a flyer for Pegasus Press’ upcoming Cthulhu material. Worlds of Cthulhu will be a twice-yearly journal that’ll follow in the footsteps of The Unspeakable Oath, even featuring a column from Pagan’s Scott Glancy; first issue hits at Gen Con.
Sunday, June 27, 2004
Origins 2004: WEG rides again
You have of course read our review of D6 Adventure. It and D6 Space are here at the show. West End Games’ latest owners Purgatory Publishing have a great deal planned, including a revised edition of Torg to be released both as a PDF and a small print run of books. They’re also setting new terms for licensing the D6 system commercially - the publishers of the quirky superheroes-as-deities game Godsend: Agenda have apparently taken them up on this. And, as always, a whole lot more coming. While Torg has some problems, we at the Cave have always been big fans, so it’ll be interesting to see what becomes of it.
Origins 2004: best in show
I am giving it to Pirates of the Spanish Main at this point. It’s simple, it’s got some exception-based stuff in it but there’s plenty of core gameplay for it to interact with, it’s cheap, and it’s ragingly fun. Even when you buy multiple packs per player, you are still in for less money than your average CCG (and I think you do want two packs per player - ships are much more effective when they travel in pairs, and while you get two ships in a pack, you want to be doing multiple things at once). Messrs. Ernest and Selinker have something they can be proud of here, and WK appears not to have blown it really. Fine stuff.
Saturday, June 26, 2004
Origins 2004: CCG attack
Played GI JOE. They’re only running a kind of abbreviated game here - character cards only, with no way to bring new ones out - but that’s enough to get a taste of combat. You trade off hand-to-hand attacks, using the Boost values on the bottom of a couple of cards pulled from the deck - then you pull more cards off the deck to use the Bullet values on their sides to do the firefight. Not too many of these people who are close enough to one another to fight hand-to-hand die in the firefights, which fits nicely with the series, wherein nobody seemed able to hit the broad side of a barn with their weapons. (Sadly, I lack any information on air units, but hopefully the rules specifically state that the pilot parachutes out automatically when the plane blows up.) So this game feels almost like the old 40K CCG, and not so much like any other Wizards game. I enjoyed it.
Played Call of Cthulhu at long last, and it’s really strong. Fans of A Game of Thrones will see things they recognize, but this game definitely feels like its own thing. It’s also over a lot faster than I thought, so the four-stage resolution of conflicts over the central Story cards doesn’t get as convoluted as I feared. You’ll probably only have to deal with battles over one or two of the four icons the Story specifies, and it goes quite quickly. Check the icons, check special rules, somebody goes insane, and boom! You’re done. This should be big fun - I love the flavor, especially of the evil folks’ cards - and it should be at Gen Con.
Origins 2004: back to the corners
Well, I guess not the corners exactly. Social Games, having recently launched one of the only new CCGs that’s at all gamer-y, is pretty findable. They have a whole new card set, Cyberpunk 2020, and were kind enough to give me some boosters. We’ve played a fair amound of the 2013 set, and it’s good and solid, although, as I think I’ve said, awfully 1993 in theme.
I’m seeing some new starship combat games, which is nice. These guys have a game called Arclight which looks nice and simple and comes with the whole game on CD, so you can print out whatever you need without the demoralizing trip to Kinko’s. The guys doing Battlestations are indeed here, but it turns out not to really be a roleplaying game even halfway - it’s more of a mission-based tactical board game with XP. Or something.
Mongoose’s presence here seems unusually small, and minis-oriented. They have a nice little B5 starship that’s exclusive to this show and Gen Con, and they have Mighty Armies - a fantasy miniatures game that’s atypical for being 15mm scale instead of the 28mm you and I and that guy over there are used to. One $25 box comes with a pretty decent-sized squad of barbarians and/or orcs. It’ll be interesting to see how this one fares in the increasingly-crowded field of skirmish minis.
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