This year’s ENnie Award nominees have been announced for 2005. As always, the winners will be revealed at Gen Con Indy. You can swing by and vote now, if you like. In case traffic gets heavy, nominees are copied below.
Category: D20
Industry pros on RuneQuest, Mongoose, D20 and more
You think I sound like a grump about the RPG business? Listen to some folks who are actually in the industry. This is on the weblog of D&D stalwart Mike Mearls, whose leadoff post is a bit annoyingly vague. But check out Ryan Dancey’s followup; for all his faults the
Steal this developer’s journal: details on Thieves’ World
Right, so… Thieves’ World. Green Ronin is doing it for D20. There’s a dev journal with one article up so far. I keep waiting for some company or another to embrace the weblog a little more fully; I just feel like that’s the form this kind of article belongs in
D&D RTS for PCs, OMG WTF
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
Paizo readies meals in a box for GMs
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
It’s not the size, it’s how you delve it
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,
DragonMech: Second Age preview online
Giant mechs of dwarven design will continue to dent and blast the mechs of other races, in DragonMech: Second Age of Walkers. Fresh today, Goodman Games has a 15-page preview download on the autocratic Stenian Confederacy, providing the first detailed look at the DragonMech world. Though I haven’t taken the
WotC senior designer on why books are not great sometimes
You don’t see this getting talked about in public much. And, well, it’s possible we weren’t supposed to see it in public at all. But more likely it came out of a forum or something. This (specifically, the curtailing of the scope and selection of Forgotten Realms sourcebooks) is what
Necromancer goes with Kenzer, stays with Sword & Sorcery
The march toward separation of development and publishing continues. Necro is apparently quite happy with S&S, but will be moving several of what look to be single adventures through Kenzer & Company beginning in June. I hope the industry fosters more of this kind of in-(or at least inter-)dependence.
From the “whittling away at RPGers’ mule-like resistance to online play” desk
So, another tool for tabletop roleplaying via the Internet. This one looks fairly comprehensive and really gorgeous – I like the attention to details like GM control of screen tinting for ambience (sweeeet), and support for pressure-sensitive tablets, which a GM with a real yen for paper’s flexibility will want
Amazon.com: your source for WotC product info
As EN World reported, several WotC products were added to Amazon’s catalog. Among the items listed was the July ’05 release of an Angelfire Booster Pack for D&D Miniatures, confirming our earlier suspicions, as well as the Legends Huge Pack, which has already been denied by WotC staff as incorrect
A distant deathknell heard
A news update on the WotC website reveals that production samples of the next D&D Miniatures expansion, Deathknell, have reached the WotC offices. According to the story, “ettins, gold dragons, and a host of undead” are heaped on someone’s desk, as well as a mention of juggling big beholders (I’d
OgreCave review: Dungeons of Doom
The latest map set from Green Ronin is in Matthew’s hot little hands, and he’s given us his impressions of it. See whether Dungeons of Doom scored well with him, or if he’d rather shelve it in someone else’s bookcase.
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
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: