Dave Arneson, who along with Gary Gygax was co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, has died of cancer. He was 61.
While Gygax, who passed away last year, is popularly known as the father of D&D, Arneson was D&D's co-creator and was largely responsible for role playing as we know it. According to the mournful splash page up at Wizards.com (amended by a more reliable proper statement), Arneson's original "Blackmoor" RPG campaign was the first ever role-playing campaign and the model for all that followed, including some of the basics of RPG gameplay: "that each player controls just one hero, that heroes gain power through adventures, and that personality is as important as combat prowess."
But with as big a debt as the gaming world owes Arneson, it's the words of his daughter, Malia Weinhagen, that mean the most:
"The biggest thing about my dad's world is he wanted people to have fun in life. . . . I think we get distracted by the everyday things you have to do in life and we forget to enjoy life and have fun"
So in honor of the man jointly responsible for gaming culture and the invention of the modern RPG, have a wonderfully fun weekend enjoying life.
Once again we've been blessed by the PR sorceresses at Wizards of the Coast and have received a spoiler card for the next Magic: The Gathering expansion, Conflux. The venerable trading card game's newest expansion drops on February 6th and follows on the heels of Shards of Alara, including mythic rare cards in one out of every eight packs and more prismatic cards.
Alara introduced us to the five shards of a shattered world segregated by the absence of different colors of magic: Jund, Esper, Grixis, Naya and Bant. In the aptly-named Conflux, something is drawing theses shards together in a ring, forcing contact between the shards and causing natural disasters as the disparate shards find themselves growing increasingly and uncomfortably close together.
Our exclusive spoiler card is the Beacon Behemoth, who hails from the jungles of Naya, and we've got four more pooled cards after the jump for you M:TG fans!
With Magic: The Gathering set to expand its universe with the fivefold worlds of Shards of Alara this October, GayGamer and Velvet DiceBag are proud to host this exclusive spoiler card, Skeletonize, a flaming harbinger of death and eventual resurrection - in the enemy's hand. We're also sharing five other spoiler cards - after the jump - that each reflect the nature of one of Alara's sundered worlds.
What was long ago a single plane brimming with mana is now a sundered world of five realms, each divided along the lines of mana and with access to only three of the five colors of magic essence. Bant, Grixis, Jund, Esper and Naya represent five lands separated by magical alignment, each boasting an environment specialized to its mana color.
Make the jump to learn more about the Shards of Alara!
We here at the GayGamer castle were lucky enough to get some exclusive spoiler cards from the upcoming Shadowmoor expansion to Magic: The Gathering! Well, technically only the Furystoke Giant is exclusive - we share the wicked-looking Wound Reflection card with another, as-yet-unknown site.
As exciting as our pal the Furystoke is, he's just a taste of the Shadowmoor experience, in which the Aurora has changed Lorwyn into the inky Shadowmoor, a plane of eternal night filled with warped and twisted denizens - expect to see familiar races from Lorwyn, but with seriously altered allegiances and all kinds of new powers.
Even the game itself has gotten a bit twisted: over a third of Shadowmoor's 301 cards will sport hybrid mana costs (back again), and -1/-1 counters get a kick in the ass from Wither and Persist effects. When Shadowmoor launches, Magic fans will be able to travel to Shadowmoor via booster, tournament and fat packs as well as theme decks.
I've got to admit, when I first heard about Gleemax way back at Digital Life, I was skeptical. Partially this was because I'd just stumbled off the plane from Tokyo and was, frankly, no longer familiar with the direction formerly known as "up." Also, I underestimated both Wizards of the Coast and the momentum generated by their three-pronged approach to modernizing tabletop gaming, gaming reference resources, and social networking.
But their showing at GDC stepped up their game big time. From their position as platinum sponsor of the IGF awards, and the dead-awesome awards they had manufactured (a brain in a green sphere gripped by some kind of awesome bronze steampunk business), it became obvious that Wizards is taking Gleemax all the way. While an alpha of the site is open now, don't expect the full features to be rolled out until later in the year when D&D 4.0 arrives - and when the site does go fully live, a certain subset of gamers will be psyched to explore the community portal. More will follow, because WotC is giving Gleemax something for everyone.
Pikachu recently made an appearance as a float for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, officially opening up the world of formerly-geeky trading games to the masses. Beowulf is now a horrible-but-popular film. Harry Potter. Even Superman. Cool ain't what it used to be - so it's "cool" to see Wizards of the Coast pair up with the New York Anime Festival to school the world on the new cool.
The Magic: The Gathering World Championships will be held in NYC's Javits Center from December 6-9, 2007, and should be a fantastic meeting point for all things geeky trendy - anime, trading card games, d&d - you name it.
Make the jump for more info and see you there!
[By Pirate Prince:]
All my life I've been a fan of board games. The only problem is that it seems there are very few people who are also fans. People tend to see board games as tedious, a lot of set up and usually hours of gameplay that they would rather not deal with. That's what I love about them--when you sit down with your game piece in hand (and what's not to love about a little game piece avatar??) you know exactly what you'll be doing for the next several hours and exactly what to expect. The pieces will always be the same, it is only the players that change. And winning is one of the best experiences of one's life, hands down, even if the joy only lasts for a few minutes.
So say you don't want to play Big Brain Academy on your Wii, say it's become tiresome, and you want to play with a group of people who actually, miraculously, are into board games. Then you're amazingly in luck, because University Games has made a "Big Brain Academy Board Game." I'm not really sure how it will work and still be a "Big Brain" style game, but you can be sure there will be trivia questions and some mind-benders involved. And hey, even if you can't get anyone to play it , you can set it all up and stare at it and silently weep, not that I would know anything about that.
