March, 2005
That’ll be my last TLA joke for a while, I think. Anyway, not sure how I missed this one: Dragonshard is a real-time strategy game set in Eberron, with three playable factions and a story written by Keith Baker himself. I’ve never been able to warm up to RTS myself – it’s too much like work for me to enjoy it as play – but it’s good to get Eberron out there in more media, methinks. Release set for June.
The adventure-gaming wing of Human Head Studios has announced (here’s a more permanent link, for those of you living in the future) a PDF-only expansion for its GOTHIKA board game line, called GOTHIKA: Invisible Man. Yup. The obvious jokes here would be funnier if WizKids hadn’t preempted them with the Sue Storm/Invisible Girl “figure” they did as a promo for HeroClix. But I try, dear reader, I try. For those of you who hate links that are styled just like regular text as much as I do, here’s the download link.
Today marks the release of the latest D&D Miniatures expansion, Deathknell. Chock full of unholy walking dead (as seen in the numerous preview articles on the WotC site), the boosters for this set changed the rarity distribution of the figures. Now in each new salvo of minis gamers buy, there’s one less uncommon figure, replaced by a common. Time will tell if players get annoyed by the change, or if they appreciate the larger horde of For those who want to drool before purchasing, be sure to stop by the Deathknell gallery WotC put up.
Besides being a stellar example of what real professionalism looks like, this discussion at Privateer Press about the new products they announced last week calls out a serious problem in the game industry – and it’s even worse in RPGs.
Unfortunately, this has not traditionally been an industry that was willing to pay for quality – a message driven home every time we hear a gasp at the price of a book. Go to a Barnes & Nobles and find a book that took a year to make, is printed in full color, and caters to a specialty niche (in other words, they’re not printing hundreds of thousands of them), and you’ll see a much higher price point than anything the game industry currently supports. Basically, the consumers in our industry have dictated a pricing structure that they are willing to spend within. But printing works like this: the more you print, the better price you get and the less you can charge for a book to make it worth the while. However, in the game industry, we make products for tens of thousands rather than hundreds of thousands, so the pricing is not as good.
Steve Long of Hero Games made this same observation at DunDraCon about niche-press books… to the general derision of the room. But I think he’s right, and I hope he breaks rank and experiments with the pricing on some of his books. Meantime, ask yourself: how much are you willing to pay for quality? Did you howl at the price of the Farscape book? Because that’s what it costs, people. You want to halt the decline of the indie RPG market? You might have to pony up. Are you ready?
I suspect sometimes that the average consumer of PDF gaming material is more technically savvy than the average producer of same. Confirming my suspicion is Ginger Stampley’s post against Digital Rights Management in PDFs. It’s not the most scathing, detailed, fiery condemnation of DRM available online or anything, but PDF publishers should notice: your consumers have strong tastes, so strong that they border on moral codes, and they will not put up with your product if it bosses them around. I think that attitude goes with being comfortable on a computer and knowing what you can do. As for less savvy users, well, they aren’t the ones who go online and post all about how great – or frustrating, or sucky – your product is. So be careful out there.
The Internet is a great source of freebies for gamers, and two reliable producers of cost-free goodness have both struck again at nearly the same time. First, Project Aon went and released another free Lone Wolf adventure, The Legacy of Vashna. Soon thereafter, Invisible City did their thing, providing two free creations, the all-new family card game I Want Candy, and a revision of their Easter candy-themed Peep War. Whether you prefer to adventure in Magnamund, relax with the kids or command legions of marshmallow fluff, you should be able to find something entertaining to do today without spending a penny!
So here’s some more Hecatombage for ya, including lots of card art and a number of actual cards, some of which are stacked in such a way as to give one vague ideas about the rules. The art’s well done, and now that it’s been explained to me that the idea is to “take black from M:tG and make it the whole game,” I am less bothered by the theming. The “ooh, scary” stuff is not to my taste, but then, I’m not 15. I’m a little let down that the transparency of the cards isn’t being used in a very wide-ranging way, but I guess there’s no other way to do a tournament-ready game. The kids, they like their nice consistent card backs.
In case you can’t tell, I’m warming up to Hecatomb pretty quickly. I hope they explore some of the possibilities of the other Magic colors, and what would happen to them if they were exploded out into games of their own. I’d be interested to see a hardcore strategic battle of arcane knowledge and control based on blue, or a slam-bang flamefest based on red. Good old red. Nothing beats red.
Those who fret that hobby gaming companies’ only mainstreaming option will soon be Walmart have new reason to worry: the Toys ‘R’ Us chain has been sold for $6 billion to a consortium that includes major real estate investors. “[A]nalysts estimated that TRU’s real estate value is five times greater than the value of its toy business.” D’oh. Sorry, Eagle/Uberplay and Days of Wonder – looks like those inroads you made at TRU in the last couple years are about to be writeoffs. WotC and WizKids already have relationships with Walmart and the like, but such large deals have been known to leave smaller companies as smoldering husks on the business landscape. All the more reason to support your local hobby-gaming retailer (and, um, support their efforts to draw in new customers).
Has Toronto become a major gaming mecca without my noticing? Or maybe it always has been, and I’m clueless? Either way, I’ve just received word of good ‘ole Mr G himself, Gary Gygax, making an appearance at the Canadian National Gaming Expo on August 26-28. If you can get there late August, a week after Gen Con Indy, it might make a good show to add to your yearly route. See the press release below.
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Our sources continue to be many and varied, as OgreCave staff member Justin Mohareb has sent in a few GTS ’05 tidbits after visiting the show. Here’s what Justin wanted to mention:
It’s loads of fun, with a few dozen disparate characters (and plans for more) and it works for all skill levels of players; there are even cards to benefit weaker players and handicap stronger ones. Due for release in October, once art is completed. Great family game produced by Patrick & Ben Christenson, two brothers from Texas.
When a miniatures game company has no regular release schedule of “codexes” or other such expensive modular books, the resulting buildup of fiction and photographs (what minis fans call “fluff”) can toxify and explode, resulting in a dangerous calamity of molten lead and resin. To avoid such an outcome, Privateer Press has announced
That’s right, Doritos and Pepsi shipped to your door every month. No. No, that’s not what they’re doing at all. The GameMastery line “offers GameMasters everything they need to run a complete short encounter – including unique high-quality metal miniatures, four double-sided map cards that join together to form a gridded encounter map, and a complete encounter utilizing the Open Gaming License – all in one package.” I happen to think this is a pretty good idea, and man, Paizo’s sure working hard to repurpose Dungeon content (I don’t know for sure that that’s what the GameMastery adventures are, but it seems reasonable).
Whatever, I’ve lost track of what they think their process is. Here they are.
If only it were true. I mean, if I knew I only had seven days to live, you can be damn sure I’d give ol’ Rumsfeld a little sump’in sump’in when I saw him. But, um, my actual point: I typed in www.wizards.com/hecatomb/ on a whim, and look what I got. Adorable. Every spooky graphic design cliche of the last ten years in one convenient bookmark.
You know, a lot about this game looks dumb so far, but show attendees are actually saying this could be what Wizards needs right now – namely, a fantasy-themed card game that people interested in Magic can get into on the ground floor, without having to study obsessively and/or draft for twelve months before they catch on. So, I’m willing to believe it might be okay. But damn, I’m not optimistic about the graphics so far.
Fantasy Flight is showing boatloads of stuff, including an English edition of Reiner Knizia’s excellent abstract Einfach Genial (under the new title Ingenious), a World of WarCraft boardgame in a mammoth Twilight Imperium-sized box (multiple win conditions: sell gold on eBay without getting caught and banned by Blizzard, or actually find something to do after you hit 45th level), and evidence of their highly questionable decision to work with Marvel Comics. Plenty of original titles too. Oddly, no Arkham Horror box.
Brace yourselves for some actual reporting: a random source at GAMA tells us WotC will be doing a CCG in the second half of the year to tie in with the Chronicles of Narnia movies. According to the same source, this brings WotC’s total for new CCGs coming out this year to a staggering six. This right after WotC told retailers that, out of 157 CCGs made in the history of the hobby, only twelve have lasted longer than four years. (Way to toss more bodies on the pile, Wizards!)
Since we haven’t got a correspondent at GAMA this year, our coverage comes to you live from the OgreCave.com Worldwide Network GTS-CENTERPLEX Coverage Center (which looks suspiciously like the cubicles at our day jobs), where we tap into every GTS news source available to our high technology (which looks suspiciously like reading the same news sites you do) and bring you the highlights. To wit:
Eden enters the crowded supers market, but with the considerable force of this license behind them, might they actually prevail? Find out next issue! (Okay, Eden, after a joke that lame on my part, nobody else will be reading the rest of this post, so here: start putting your press releases out as HTML, not PDF. Seriously. PDF is for products, not news that you want people to read and make use of. HTML’s been around a long time and it won’t bite you. Just use it next time and I promise not to tell anyone that you’re calling your CoH core book the Registration Manual, okay? Oh, my bad.)
Press release text, and we mean text, is below.
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It looks as though City of Heroes has an excellent chance of emerging from Marvel’s copyright infringement lawsuit unscathed, due to today’s announcement of several charges against NCSoft and Cryptic Studios being dismissed. Agreeing with the defendants’ assertion that many of Marvel’s exhibits were “false and sham,” the judge pulled the plug on more than half of Marvel’s claims. NCSoft and Cryptic have ten days to respond to the rest of the case’s claims, and file any counterclaims. Not quite a resounding “Bad Spidey! No biscuit!” But the comic book giant may soon see the rest of its frivolous case go down in flames.
The uberdungeon of the ’90s, TSR’s Ruins of Undermountain, is getting the floors redone and a new coat of paint in a series of web articles on the WotC site. Now this is the way to bring a mind-numbingly large, sprawling dungeon to the the gamer masses: in bite-sized chunks, for free. Don’t go for the world record and cram every single beast with an experience point value into a boxed set or kobold-crushing tome. AEG’s already tried that, and spent too much time on shoehorning the SRD’s beasts into the World’s Largest Dungeon, while not spending enough time editing.
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It is once again Rio Grande Games newsletter time. Most of the featured games this issue were already shown last time around, but there is one new entry — Wolfgang Kramer and Michael Kiesling’s Australia, a board game giving players control of the continent’s destiny starting in the twenties, a time of simultaneous industrial growth and environmental conservation. The land down under isn’t the subject of nearly as many games as, say, Europe, so this should at least fill a little gap in the hobby….
Dan Davis, co-creator of the visually luscious free online campaign book Agyris, has started blogging over at Monster Machine. Those interested in blingin’ illustrations and the future of online RPG distribution might want to add it to their inventory. If you need some room, chuck out that old dagger +1. Seriously, dude, you’re a magic user; you’re not gonna convince any chicks that you fight close-range in taverns. And that beard is just tacky.
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