Geek Culture
Atlas Games is 20 years old this month, and founder John Nephew has put out the word that they’re celebrating. If you’re lucky, you may still have time to get a free birthday gift box of Atlas Games stuff – the first 250 folks to order it and pay for their own shipping will get a semi-random assortment of games or game related items from the company. Even if you miss out on the birthday goodies, stop by the website and wish the Atlas crew a happy 20th, with many more to come.
As Day 3 of the “Best Four Days in Gaming” winds down, we’ve got your show notes for the Saturday 5 pm TJI show. Guests Adam Jury and E Foley (aka @geeksdreamgirl) join hosts Ryan and Kevin for the Saturday evening show.
One show left, midday Sunday – pardon me, “Day 4”. Check back tomorrow!
The annual Gen Con EN World RPG Awards (otherwise known as the “ENnie” awards) took place earlier this evening at Gen Con, and the internet is buzzing with celebratory blog posts and tweets. Paizo Publishing dominated this year, with Pathfinder taking home gold for Best Game, Product of the Year, Best Production Values, and several others. Here’s the winner list (the full nominee list can be found here):
2010 ENnie Award results:
Best Cover Art
Silver: Eclipse Phase
Gold: Pathfinder BestiaryBest Interior Art
Silver: Shadowrun 20th
Gold: Pathfinder Core RulebookBest Cartography
Silver: Aces & Eights: Judas Crossing
Gold: Pathfinder City Map FolioBest Writing
Silver: Victoriana
Gold: Eclipse PhaseBest Production Values
Silver: Shadowrun
Gold: PathfinderBest Rules
Silver: Hero 6th Edition
Gold: DiasporaBest Adventure
Silver: Trail of Cthulhu: Armitage Files
Gold: Pathfinder #31: Stolen LandBest Monster or Adversary
Silver: Pathfinder: Classic Horrors Revisited
Gold: Pathfinder BestiaryBest Setting
Silver: Rome: Life and Death of the Republic
Gold: Day After RagnarokBest Supplement
Silver: Players Handbook 3
Gold: Mysteries of the Hollow EarthBest Aid or Accessory
Silver: Gaming Paper
Gold: Pathfinder GM ScreenBest Miniatures Product
Silver: Gaming Paper
Gold: D&D MinisBest Regalia
Silver: Battletech
Gold: Cthulhu 101Best Electronic Book
Silver: The Devil We Know
Gold: The Great City Player’s GuideBest Free Product
Silver: Lady Blackbird
Gold: Advanced Players Guide PlaytestBest Website
Silver: d20PFSRD.com
Gold: Obsidian PortalBest Podcast
Silver: All Games Considered
Gold: Atomic ArrayBest Blog
Silver: Gnome Stew
Gold: Kobold QuarterlyBest Game
Silver: Shadowrun
Gold: PathfinderProduct of the Year
Silver: Eclipse Phase
Gold: PathfinderFan Award for Best Publisher
Silver: Fantasy Flight Games
Gold: Paizo PublishingJudges’ Spotlight Awards
Fiasco
Trailblazer
Chronica Feudalis
Ancient Odyssey: Treasure Awaits
Mindjammer
A hearty congratulations to all of this year’s nominees and winners!
Catching up after the one-two punch of delayed-then-released shows – here’s show notes for the Friday 5 pm show. Guests Steve Kenson and Ken Hite sit in on the Friday evening show.
The crew ends the show thinking forward to the evening’s ENnie Awards ceremony, which has happened by now – click here to see the 2010 winners list.
It seems the technical difficulties have been resolved, and shows are flowing again, so now we have show notes for the Friday 11 am show. Guests Darren Watts and Jennifer Brozek lend a hand for the Friday morning show.
I’ll have the next batch of notes up in a bit.
Sorry, I was in the bathroom. Here we go!
Can I just say how great it is to not hear Ryan Macklin again after so long? Nah, I’m just kidding. See you tomorrow!
I love contexts where you can just say “It’s Thursday, 11AM, 2010,” and everyone knows when you mean. So yeah, it’s on once again: This Just In From Gen Con is in live-from-the-show mode, and we’re doing notes. If you’re new here, shame on you! welcome! Here goes:
Subscribe to our feed if you haven’t, because we’ll be on top of the TJI notes for the whole show, plus any other tidbits we turn up.
Though the news trickled out in other ways, the 2010 Origins Award winners have finally been announced. Among the highlights: the rerelease of Space Hulk beat out Small World for Best Board Game; Looney Labs continues its streak with a Best Party Game win for Are You the Traitor?; the return of WizKids and HeroClix gets a nod for Best Miniatures Line; and Eclipse Phase wins for Best RPG. (Click through to read the full list.)
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It’s that time of year again, and we’ve learned Germany’s game of the year award for 2010 (better known as the Spiel des Jahres, but you knew that) is Dixit by Jean-Louis Roubira (Libellud/Asmodee). The storytelling-meets-Apples to Apples game is back in stock according to Asmodee, so if you want to grab a copy, it should be available.
I posted what I know of the nominees a few weeks ago, but here’s the list again, in case you want to test drive a couple selections for yourself:
Congratulations again to all the nominees, and to Dixit for winning this year’s award.
If you missed our interview from KublaCon, you didn’t hear Aldo Ghiozzi of Impressions talk about today – that is, Free RPG Day ’10. Yes, it’s today. Hopefully, you’re at a participating store right now, or you soon will be. If not, listen to our interview, try not to weep over the fun and freebies you’re missing, and if we hear of any other free goodies today you can take advantage of, we’ll post ‘em here.
Hollywood’s been shopping for games again, and now DreamWorks may be courting Tim Burton to direct a feature film based on the Monsterpocalypse property. DreamWorks picked up the movie rights to Privateer Press’ collectible miniatures game last month, and is working on forming the right team to make big screen kaiju magic. My question: will fans be thrilled or worried by the idea of their city-stomping aliens and monsters potentially getting the Nightmare Before Christmas animation treatment?
Though I doubt it will be the final frontier for the game, WizKids/NECA announced today that it will make a Clix game using the Star Trek license. More specifically, the company will create “HeroClix branded miniature games to be sold both physically and digitally, set in the Star Trek universe, including all of the Star Trek television shows and Star Trek feature films.” The interesting bit (other than a new collectible Star Trek game) is the word “digitally” – could this mean a Star Trek Clix iPhone app, maybe? Time will tell. Gamers will get their first opportunity to boldly go where no Clix have gone before this December 2010. I say, tribbles versus borg, aaannnd… fight!
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We’ve returned from our annual pilgrimage to KublaCon (well, it was a week ago, but you get the idea), and we have a Gaming News Update interview to share from the event. Take a few minutes to check out our talk with Aldo Ghiozzi of Impressions on Free RPG Day ’10. He gives us the rundown of what to watch for at this year’s event (at a store near you on June 19th), and we discuss Free RPG Day’s success so far, the state of the roleplaying hobby, and sweet dice towers.
Planning to hit your local Free RPG Day this month? Willing to write a couple paragraphs on how it turns out at your store, and maybe send a photo or two? Drop me an email at sven (at) ogrecave (DOT) com with the subject of “Free RPG Day recruit” to help us cover the fourth annual dice-rolling free-for-all. You could see your name up in lights on the Cave wall. Actually, it’s kinda dark in here…
What’s amazing is how much difference some room makes. I’ve grown accustomed to reading games on digest-sized pages or not much bigger; a full-sized book gives rules text and (crucially) examples the opportunity to be next to each other. It’s a small thing, but it really makes a text easier to get into your head. (It’s a bit unfair, this thing of reviewing the layout and the reading experience. Some days I’m just in a thick mood and I’m not going to be able to comprehend anything. I have the impression that the text in DFRPG v1: Your Story is just the right balance of getting-to-the-point and spicing-things-up to get through my thick old skull, but maybe I just got lucky. To make matters worse I read most of it on my new iPod, so this is hardly objective data: maybe I was just mesmerized by the shiny.)
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Let’s start this week around the Cave with an interview – specifically, an interview with Gareth Hanrahan about The Laundry RPG, due to hit stores this July. No, you won’t find stain removal tips in the details Gareth reveals. Instead, we present a far more useful briefing on what rookie agents can expect in this Delta Green-like system based on Charles Stross’ Laundry Files novels. Covert ops meets bureaucratic red tape all wrapped in a candy shell of Cthulhu Mythos – sound interesting? Then read on.
Once again, sad news has surfaced regarding an early champion of the roleplaying hobby – Cyclopeatron reports that J. Eric Holmes, author of the first D&D “blue box” set, has passed away at 80 years old. A former associate professor of neurology at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, Holmes was also a fantasy and science fiction author who was well known to fans of Edgar Rice Burroughs. In the early days of RPGs, Holmes had several articles in The Dragon (or Dragon Magazine to you and me), and wrote the book Fantasy Role Playing Games – Dungeons, Dragons and Adventures in Fantasy Gaming (see his Wikipedia page for the list).
The staff of OgreCave wishes the best to the Holmes family.
Catching up with some news:
Green Ronin announces DC Adventures RPG on the Mutants and Masterminds engine. Great for GR, but I’m trying to imagine DC-owned characters I’d want to play with, and the only one coming to mind is the Spirit, which I don’t think really counts. Not feeling drawn to Watchmen, even, unless it had an awesome pirate minigame. Tiny Titans would be fun though.
Looney Labs announces Back to the Future: the Card Game. I’ve played Chrononauts variants that focus on a small set of fictional events, and they’re great – the game can really be a platform for interesting things, in the same way that Fluxx can. Of course, we don’t know yet whether this will be that, exactly.
Some of the LEGO Games line is on Amazon now. I’ve got Lava Dragon and Minotaurus.
That’s right, bring Papa some Roman action. (Link is less dirty than I just made it sound.) As Purple Pawn noted, Arcane Legions has a foot in two worlds but isn’t really finding its footing in either. Pro tip for Wells Expeditions: that booster bundle is pretty pricey. If I could get its contents piecemeal, though, I’d probably have given you that $80 by now. And no, I don’t have a way to give it to you piecemeal.
In other news I’m reading the Dresden Files RPG and it’s hot. If it’s gonna be in Borders (and it is), then it’s mainstream, and this is most of the last ten years of indie innovations in traditionally-structured gaming, brought to the mainstream. Don’t let anyone tell you it’s “indie in mainstream clothing:” as of this book, this stuff is mainstream, simple as that. If I understand correctly, you can now buy the PDF separately from the print preorder, so if an urban-fantasy game is up your street, hit that up.
The first half of 2010 seems to herald the oncoming zombie plague. Flying Frog Productions has released three expansions for their popular Last Night on Earth game as well as reprinting their base game. Lock ‘n Load has fought past a variety of production problems to release All Things Zombie: The Boardgame, a tactical boardgame based on the popular ATZ wargame. Zombie State Games will soon release Zombie State: Diplomacy of the Dead, a strategic-level area control game where world leaders try to protect their populations against the zombie apocalypse. Steve Jackson Games is coming out with Zombie Dice, a nice “press your luck” dice game filler. Twilight Creations is releasing Zombies!!! 9: Ashes to Ashes, an expansion for their popular zombie game allowing you to investigate a cemetery. Even the popular PopCap PC game Plants vs. Zombies has seen iPhone and iPod Touch releases of that game this year.
Can gamers just not get enough zombies? Or are there too many zombie games for our own good?
In case you aren’t in the know just yet, OgreCave’s voice is echoing in more directions than ever before. For those who have joined the massive Facebook nation, you can become our fan at OgreCave’s Facebook page, facebook.com/OgreCave, and find bonus goodies there like our Oddness Observed by Ogres gallery. Also, most everything posted there and here on the main site gets announced on our Twitter feed, at twitter.com/OgreCave, so if you’re inclined to be as connected as possible, we’ve established a side cavern to the Cave there. We’ll have these linked in the sidebar for future reference shortly, and if we set up shop anywhere else, you’ll be the first to know.
One month from tomorrow, on March 26, PAX East, the second location for the Penny Arcade Expo, will hit Boston, MA full force. The new show, a spinoff of the original PAX in Seattle (dubbed “PAX Prime” by many), had already sold out of full-show passes over three weeks ago, and with only a few hundred single day passes currently left for Friday and Sunday – well, if you were on the fence about going, you’d better commit or forget. This inaugural show’s official schedule just went up yesterday, adding to the considerable excitement that resulted two weeks ago when Wil Wheaton was announced as PAX East’s keynote speaker. If you can’t make it out to Boston, OgreCave will have a representative at the show in the form of Lee Valentine, frequent Cave dweller and one of our staff writers. Actually, he’ll be there whether you attend or not, so… yeah.
A couple weeks back, and for the first time in over two decades, I joined in a superhero RPG session. This was big for me – I got burned out on comics long, long ago when Peter Parker was revealed as a cheap knock-off clone of the “real” Spiderman, or was revealed to eat babies in his spare time, or some nonsense. Sure, I dabbled from time to time thereafter, reading an issue or two of whatever my friends recommended, but for all intents and purposes, I had stopped pursuing comics as a hobby.
Anyway, in this case, it was BASH! Ultimate Edition by Basic Action Games that drew me back in – the invite was hard to pass up when it came from Chris Rutkowsky, the game’s creator. (My one-session impression: a clean, quick system with decent flexibility. We’ll have a full review soon-ish.) In all, I enjoyed myself quite a bit, and was surprised to continually flash back to memories of the old Marvel Super Heroes RPG, circa oh-god-I’m-getting-old (’84).
All of this is my round-about way of saying that, apparently, I’m not the only one reminiscing about the RPG of True Believers these days: earlier today, co-designer Jeff Grubb posted a nostalgic timeline-like list on the Marvel Super Heroes RPG that provides a glimpse into the secret wars world of designing not merely a spandex-clad roleplaying experience, but dealing with licensing issues (always a fun time). If you ever gamed in TSR’s version of the Marvel Universe, or wish you had, this is a must-read.
By the way, Basic Action Games just announced a print plus PDF bundle through IPR, so if you picked up a copy of the original edition from your Gamers Help Haiti downloads, and want to see more, this is your chance.
Make no mistake – we applaud Steve Jackson‘s victorious rank of #1 on this list of 30 Great Gaming Geeks. But, wow, look at who Geekosystem placed him ahead of: Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins (the Penny Arcade guys) are at #12, Richard Garfield is way back at #16 – hell, he even beat Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Mario, Donkey Kong, and many other iconic gaming characters. Even Evil Stevie himself is shocked by the outcome. Still, congrats, Mr Jackson, just the same.
From the moment it started, it was clear the Gamers Help Haiti charity fundraiser at DriveThruRPG would pull in big numbers. Indeed, convenience and reward made for a very successful charity drive – to the tune of $178,900, far beyond similar game industry charity events. For you slackers that didn’t contribute yet, you can always go directly to Doctors Without Borders or the Red Cross and donate yourselves silly.
Gamers have shown again and again how they can rally to the aid of those in need, and right now there’s no one in greater need than the earthquake-stricken citizens of Haiti. DriveThruRPG is running one of the most successful gaming charities in a while, Gamers Help Haiti. The DriveThruRPG vendor community has banded together to contribute a staggeringly long list of donated product downloads to the fundraiser – valued at over $1,400 – which can all be yours for a small $20 donation benefitting Doctors Without Borders. Those who can only afford a $5 or $10 donation will be gratified to hear that DriveThruRPG has pledged to match their contributions. However, those who can afford twenty bucks and chip in during January will receive the gigantic list of downloadable products within a few days. As this is being posted, Gamers Help Haiti has already raised $82,650 since launching Wednesday. Convenient and rewarding in more ways than one, this is how to rack up big charity drive numbers – have you helped out yet?
[EDIT: The results are in. Click through for the details.]
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Another weekend of holiday shopping is here, and you’ve probably formed some ideas of the larger-cost items you’ll be picking up (or requesting from others). In case your mind’s not quite made up yet, the OgreCave Christmas Gift Guide 2009 continues with its second section, Twelve Days of Roleplaying. This list of gift suggestions is entirely RPG related, and the Cave dwellers have chosen a range of roleplaying goodies that would make great gifts.
Our board game list will be up shortly (work and sickness have caused delays), followed by our traditionally last-minute downloadable product list. So listen closely each night – those bells might be a jolly Ogre… or more likely, an Ogre stepping some other jolly critter.
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