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Thursday, September 30, 2004
The Glorious Sound of Cheapass
If you thought their forays into video games were unexpected, sit down now. Thanks to the band Beatnik Turtle there is now an official album of songs devoted to the wonders of Cheapass Games. Hey! Don’t just sit there. Listen to sound samples!
More Rio Grande News
While it seems like it hasn’t been long since the last one, Rio Grande Games has produced yet another newsletter. Most of the game descriptions have been seen in past announcements, but they have revealed more details on their forthcoming Carcassonne releases. The new expansion will be called The Count while the new stand-alone game will be called The City. If you’re a fan of the tile-laying game and can’t wait to find out more, there are more details available at BoardGameGeek here and here.
A Good Day for Arrowflight
Deep7 has just announced the release of a new issue of their King’s Dispatch newsletter for the Arrowflight RPG. It’s available, as always, in their free member’s area. They’re also offering a special sale on the game, so if you’ve been thinking of trying it, now is the time. In other news from the company, a PDF supplement on Casablanca is available for Mean Streets and a second Red Dwarf supplement is on the way!
Also, this game is not about psychic little kids in Disney movies
I held off on posting this earlier because the link to the game itself was broken, but 20×20 Room has some very interesting comments about a new one-shot PDF RPG called The Mountain Witch. What caught my eye about this at first was that there’s an actual stat for Trust - you assign points to it at certain junctures in the story and can use them later - just because of the whole systems-for-things-other-than-hitting-things, um, thing. But this isn’t necessarily a Paranoia-esque betrayal-fest, oh no - the folks quoted in this post say they’d trust the other players more after playing this. You don’t see recommendations like that every day. Besides the underexplored possibility space of what can be turned into a stat besides strength, maybe “mainstream” RPGs could stand to explore the kinds of psychological effects that arise from “role-playing” in other contexts - even therapeutic ones.
ARG: another acronym to embrace before it destroys you
Many of you likely know all about I Love Bees, the mysterious site the URL for which was flashed briefly at the end of an online trailer for Microsoft’s upcoming first-person shooter Halo 2. You may also remember the promotional online puzzle games that tied in with Steven Spielberg’s A.I., which games came to be known collectively as “The Beast” and whose community of players called themselves the Cloudmakers. Rich with game-world detail, convincing characters and sometimes-fiendish puzzles, these alternate reality games, or ARGs, are… well… basically just LARPs. I Love Bees recently took another step closer to LARPhood when it not only challenged players to find and answer pay phones being called by an in-game AI, but anointed the answerers of certain calls with membership in the “crew” of the AI’s lost spaceship.
One player is not happy. Eric Burns laments that the collaboration with strangers in real time that made his experience in the Cloudmakers so compelling will be weakened and eventually destroyed by this singling out of a few lucky players. But collective-detection to unlock a story is basically How to Host a Murder - you can keep fiddling with the puzzles and the means of revelation, but you can’t disguise the fact that, after all the fire and motion, you are still just waiting for the next piece of story to consume. A story is not a game. ARGs are now making the leap from that model to the model of Mind’s Eye Theater - by adding actual gameplay. So far, it’s just the game of Prisoner’s Dilemma; do you, the individual, stick with the group, or do you defect? Other games are possible in ARGs, and we will no doubt see more than a few of those possibilities soon. The question is whether going from the How to Host a Murder model to the model of today’s LARPs will come with the same loss of accessibility - and popularity.
Wednesday, September 29, 2004
Rage addiction is apparently still a serious problem
Fans of the old Rage CCG have produced an entire expansion, complete with art, called Gauntlet. (”Red– Werewolf– is about to die!!”) White Wolf appears pretty proud of this - they’ve even designated the new set tournament-legal. At first I thought this was another CCG Workshop deal, like for
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
Egyptian Adventures preview at Green Ronin
Looks like a preview is up on the Green Ronin site for Egyptian Adventures: Hamunaptra. An uber-setting in the Mythic Vistas d20 line, Hamunaptra is coming to you in full effect: a boxed, three book set. The press release has more details, or you can just jump directly to the downloadable goodies and get a closer look.
Read More…
Monday, September 27, 2004
MSN’s Catan page looks like something all of a sudden
Those who are interested in the challenges of transitioning the most popular board game of the last ten years to the screen (not that screen - stop being difficult) might want to have a look at the updates on the official Catan Online site. You can read a developer diary post, see a screenshot at one degree of separation, or even “Learn about the Klaus Teuber.” More fun than a barrel of insert-resource-card-name-here.
Friday, September 24, 2004
The Fine Art of Ronin
There’s been a veritable flood of releases from Ronin Arts in the past week, for all d20 occasions. Athenaeum Arcane: A Score of Malevolent Special Abilities, written by former Mongoose employee Patric Younts, presents twenty special abilities magic items can have, from saw tooth to corpse eater. In Athenaeum Arcane: Spells of the Vampire, Andrew Hind brings a dozen spells for the blood-sucking beasts into the light. James Maliszewski’s Modern: Occult Heroes details five occult races, a great compliment to Cthulhu-esque campaigns. As if that weren’t enough, three more releases became available for download this week, including a Modern: Character Dossier designed by Michael Hammes. Who knows when the Ronin Arts development machine will overflow with more d20 goodness? Soon, I’m sure.
Tuesday, September 21, 2004
All the joke titles I thought of for this post were too depressing
Election USA’s marketing text begins with the following: “Why not run for President in this first boardgame from Mongoose Publishing? Remember, though, you have to be a Republican!” Yes, it’s a bit of political satire from the other side of the pond (where maybe it’s a little safer, commercially speaking). I’m always surprised that there aren’t more satirical games, given that game systems can caricature economic realities the same way cartoons can caricature appearances. People seem to have figured this out in the video gaming arena, but there still isn’t a lot happening of note, even there. Guess we’re still too busy drawing babes with swords.
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