Articles by Mad Pawn
Greetings! I am currently a bit down because I wasn't at DragonCon (apparently the steampunk contingent stole the show--darn it I should have been there!), but that leaves me no excuse not to fill you in on the interesting things that happened this last week in our hobby!
• Chaosium released a sneak peek of its new product, Pulp Cthulhu, detailing one of its new occupations--the Reanimator.
• Wizards unveiled the Shards of Alara Orb of Insight for their new Magic: the Gathering set--write anything in the box and see how many times it will appear in the new cards!
• A new collectible miniatures game, Mutant Chronicles, is shipping now from Fantasy Flight Games.
• Games Workshop has a whole bunch of new Warhammer and Warhammer 40k stuff, including a new Dark Elf Battalion and bad-ass War Hydra, and a new 40k boxset that has everything you need to start playing the game--plus a new line of paints, Citadel Washes, that promise to make shading easier than ever before.
• Palladium's press release announced new products for the fall, including the Macross sourcebook for the Robotech RPG, and a new Zombie Apocalypse RPG called Dead Reign.
• A legendary Call of Cthulhu podcast has reached its end--YogSothoth.com's Bradford Players have completed Horror on the Orient Express!
More to come, of course, as the week progresses!
Yes, Gen Con was a while ago, and no, I didn't go to Gen Con, sadly, being a student stranded in the Great White North. But I do love vicariously living through people's Gen Con experiences by their (sometimes extensive) play-by-play recaps, longing for the day that I get to go myself!
Experience Gen Con through the viewpoint of:
• "One Cool Thing I Saw At GenCon"--a video of huge variety of people giving their answers to exactly that.
• Paul Tevis and Ryan Macklin, giving their perspectives in the This Just In From Gen Con podcasts.
• Palladium
• Magic: the Gathering (long and excellent)
• Fantasy Flight Games (both pictures and video!)
• Pinnacle Entertainment
• Mayfair Games
And of course, if you missed them, here are the winners of the 2008 ENnie awards.
There are a few days left to vote in White Wolf's Hunter: The Vigil trailer-making contest.
The four finalists can be found here, here, here and here.
They're really very good--obviously a lot of love went into these. My personal favourite is the third, since it depicts all the different ways Hunters can approach their callings. And it's very White Wolf, melodramatic but pretty.
Cast your vote at the White Wolf livejournal here!
"Reckless Adventures in the 1930s!" is its oh-so-intriguing subtitle. For those who want to bring in the autumn with a bit of two-fisted cosmic-horrors-can-eat-lead action--and who doesn't?--Pulp Cthulhu has been officially announced by Chaosium for a fall release! You can adjust the level of pulp to meet your gaming group's needs, of course, and "insane scientists, reanimators, mentalists, gadgeteers, professor-sorcerers, supernatural detectives" are said to abound in the setting. Well done!
In other Chaosium news, The Klarkash-Ton Cycle is currently shipping--a collection of Mythos tales by Clark Ashton Smith, these freaky-but-slightly-goofy tales will certainly put you in the mood for your upcoming Pulp Cthulhu campaign.
It is August! That month of hopefully-lovely weather, people slowly gearing up to get back to school, etc. etc. Hopefully you've got some good game on this summer so far, but if not, you have a whole summer month left to atone!
Here's some stuff that's going on (and I promise that this is one of the last big round-up posts in lieu of actual posting, because there's just two weeks to go in my job)!
• Five days left to vote in the ENnie awards! Go go go!
• Three days left in the BRP Adventure-writing Contest. Five to seven thousand words, every genre except Lovecraftian, possible publishing!
• Two weeks before Hunter: the Vigil!
• FFG's reprint of Dark Heresy in stores now, and the launch of the website for Red November, the game of gnomish submarine adventure (awesome)!
• Humans!!!, the companion board game to Zombies!!! in which you actually play the zombies (and yes, you can play the two together) is out this month from Twilight Creations!
Keep your eyes peeled--it might have been a slow couple of weeks in terms of product releases, but the end of August is going to get mighty busy indeed (much to the chagrin of people like me who have school to go back to).
VelvetDiceBag, as you may have noticed, has been kind of non-existent lately. Faerie Dragon already went over the reasons why he hasn't been here as frequently in the past couple of months, and on my part I was slewn first by an exam period and then a soul-sucking 4 a.m.-shift job that drained all energy I might have had.
But now that I'm getting used to said job, I'll do my best to post regularly on this, my far better job!
Let's take a look at what's been happening in Tabletop Gaming in the last few days.
• ENnie Award voting will begin shortly, after they resolve their technical difficulties. Keep checking back here for when the polls open, and check out the nominees here!
• Wizards announced the 4th Edition Forgotten Realms Player's Guide for September. Of most interest is the introduction of two new races, the Drow (oh no) and the Genasi (elemental humanoids--I've had a soft spot for them ever since I played a custom Steam Genasi in Planescape).
• Chaosium announced a 1920s Call of Cthulhu sourcebook for August, Secrets of Morocco. The Secrets series is always top-notch quality and jam-packed with useful information, so I'm looking forward to this.
• The new Magic: the Gathering set, Eventide, came out recently. An excellent article was posted on the set's journey through art, rules, design and development.
• Three weeks remain until the release of Hunter: the Vigil, and previews are still in full force on White Wolf's website.
• Fantasy Flight Games is gearing up to release their A Game of Thrones CCG Core Set, with daily previews.
More to come, day by day!
One of my favourite internet people, Lore Sjöberg--you may know him from The Brunching Shuttlecocks, The Book of Ratings or even the Björk Song--just posted an opinion piece on Wired and damn is it funny.
Killjoy Cooking With the Dungeons & Dragons Crowd thinks about what it might be like if people treated new cookbooks the same way they treated new RPG books. Totally brightened my day.
Posted: 12:15 a.m. by LordOrcus I'm so mad that there's a new edition of The Better Joy Cookbook out. Thanks for making my old copy obsolete, you greedy hacks! For five years now, my friends have been coming over for my eggplant Parmesan, and now I'm never going to be able serve it again unless I shell out 35 bucks for the latest version.
Posted: 12:42 a.m. by KathraxisHey, I have a question! When you preheat the oven, can you start it before you measure out the ingredients, or do you have to do it afterward? Please answer quickly, my friends and I have been arguing about it for four hours and we're getting pretty hungry.
The newest R'lyeh Report contains a whole bunch of Chaosium news. Some highlights:
• A fiction book, The Strange Cases of Rudolph Pearson: Horripilating Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos, is in stores now and is advertised as being a good introduction to the Mythos for people who want their friends & loved ones to witness the horror of the universe.
• The Basic Roleplaying RPG is expected to be in stores in the last week of the month.
• Secrets of Morocco--this is a new Call of Cthulhu sourcebook expected in July, 20s and 30s era, and the Secrets series are usually top-notch.
• Pulp Cthulhu--the sourcebook for "reckless adventures in the 1930's" is nearly done and expected in August (and at Gen Con)!
• Of course there will be tons of Call of Cthulhu events at Origins, and a Chaosium booth at Gen Con!
Christie's, apparently, in 2003 sold a beautiful Ancient Roman green glass d20 (what, you thought we invented them?) , with a distinct and different symbol on each face. Scholars don't know what game it was used for, but we do.
Of course, it's XVMMCMXXV (17925) dollars, but this is the ulimate gamer bling and I'm sure there's at least one gamer who's filthy rich out there who snatched it up.
...Right? It had to be a gamer. Or else I might cry.
[Via: BoingBoing]
Gamasutra has just posted a really interesting 7-page article which takes the oft-complained about idea of D&D 4E borrowing from video games (MMORPGs in particular) and turns it around by considering what video games in the future could learn from the new edition of Dungeons & Dragons.
As mentioned, video games have been taking ideas from tabletop RPGs for years--there's no reason why that idea flow should stop. Yet any sign of a backwash seems to be seen as universally disgusting as its namesake. Some have pointed out that every edition of D&D takes the best mechanics of the games around them in that generation and makes them better (2E and the crazy-tables-flavour that was so popular in the 80s, for example)--is it only natural that D&D 4E seems to be partly inspired by MMORPGs, the most popular version of RPG right now (and, for that matter, ever)?
Today, June 7th, is the Worldwide Dungeons & Dragons Game Day! Hundreds of Friendly Local Gaming Stores all over the world (and even locations set up in Iraq and Afghanistan for serving military personnel) have a big action-packed day to celebrate the release of Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, so if you have a chance to drop by you'll probably have a blast.
I'm certainly picking up my own copy of the game sometime this weekend, and I'm still very optimistic. In not too long, we'll have a big VelvetDiceBag weigh-in post where we air out our opinions and you post yours!
In the past eight months or so (can you believe it's been that long?), I hope I've showcased a big variety of RPGs, showing that there was more to the hobby than D&D--tons and tons of games by small presses, medium-sized presses and even no presses at all that are well worth your attention and maybe even perfectly suited to your group. Nevertheless, D&D has a special place in my heart as my first RPG and I'm very excited--I hope some of that excitement rubs off on you guys!
*rub rub*
Hunter: The Reckoning wasn't... a well-liked game, let's say. It's certainly the black sheep of the old World of Darkness family (more so even than Changeling: the Dreaming, I'd argue, because Changeling had the advantage of being, well, really good).
With the announcement of Hunter: the Vigil, many are intrigued to see whether White Wolf can make up for the previous incarnation of the game. Yet my group was a bit iconoclastic from the beginning, since we really enjoyed Hunter: the Reckoning and probably played it more than any other old World of Darkness game since it allowed us to, better than any other, recreate the feel of some of our favourite movies and video games. This is why it pleases me that White Wolf has just published an article detailing the inspirations from all kinds of media for their new Hunter game, and another article concerning the themes and moods they're trying to aim for--much more mystery-focused than before, which again I'm happy with because by far the best Hunter session I ever had was at 3:00 a.m. in my friends house, trying to decipher a bizarre coded note left in-game by a suspected vampire in the basement of a seemingly abandoned church. Good stuff.
The inspirations in question? They range from books like the Mothman Prophecies and It to comics like Hellblazer and The Walking Dead to films like Frailty, National Treasure and Children of Men to TV shows like Torchwood and Supernatural to video games like Alone in the Dark, Silent Hill, Half Life 1&2, Jericho and Undying. I'd say they're off to a pretty good start!
And girls who like girls who like breastplates!
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