This Week In Tabletop Gaming

Some pretty big stuff went down this week in this hobby of ours. The most noteworthy is probably the fact that many people got their copies of Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition early--and, as we've learned from the music industry time and time again, when one person gets an advance copy of something, everyone gets an advance copy of something. VelvetDiceBag does not promote piracy, however (unless it's of the Freeport or Stormwrack or 7th Sea varieties) --if you did indulge yourself and downloaded a copy and enjoyed it, we urge you to buy the real thing when it comes out. Pretty please?

On the Chaosium and Cthulhu side of things, I previously reported the first unlimited edition of the gorgeous Call of Cthulhu dice. Also of note is Chaosium's agreement with Sixtystone Press to create Call of Cthulhu supplements (a good move, considering they're focusing on their BRP-system line lately) , and the folks at Yog-Sothoth.com just released the new Yog Radio podcast, featuring an interview with S.T. Joshi. That made me really, really excited--my final English paper in Grade 12 was on the works of Lovecraft, and as anyone who's done academic research of Lovecraft will tell you, basically everything, every academic treatise and biography of Lovecraft, was written by S.T. Joshi and it's all excellent. Do yourself a favour, check out the interview, and read some of the ample works of Joshi online.

At Magicthegathering.com, it was Evil Twin week. There are a bunch of excellent articles up, my favourites being How to Sneak Overpowered Cards Past Development and The Evil That Designers Do.

Not much from White Wolf except for two (admittedly intriguing) previews of the new freehold-focused Changeling book, Lords of Summer, and a revelatory look-ahead at Hunter: the Vigil, a game that looks quite good but whose cover is marred by a sunglasses-at-night-wearing douche smack in the middle of it.

The Escapist had a really cool article about the nature of the roleplaying game as a modern phenomenon, called Dungeons & Dragons Owns the Future.

The new Palladium press release has details on T-Shirts, a new Rifts anthology, and their release plans for the summer. Mayfair games announced its plans for GenCon. (I'm not even going and I'm still excited!) A new RPG company debuted, Myth Merchant Press. The much-awaited documentary, The Gamers: Dorkness Rising, found a distributor in Anthem Pictures.

That's it for now! Hopefully next week we'll be back to a more regular posting schedule. Thanks for your patience!