Year End Review?

Last year I did a "Best" and "Worst" of the year.

This year I have seen so much more that it is hard to quantify and qualify it all.
So here are some random highlights of the year.

D&D Essentials

D&D Essentials became basically what 4e should have been.  I think if WotC had waited and not done D&D4 like they did and came out with Essentials....well people still would have bitched and moaned cause that is how gamers are.

God we suck.

D&D Essentials boiled down D&D 4 to its, well, Essentials.  Presented in a format that certainly owes something to the old-school vibe (note I don't say Renaissance or movement here), Essentials does an end run around edition wars by focusing on being fun.
Interestingly enough WotC seems to be acknowledging the old-schoolers out there with the release of the Red Box Starter set and the revamp to their website.

DriveThruRPG Reviewer
I became a featured reviewer at DriveThruRPG this year.  My plan to have more reviews up next year.  At least a couple a week.

Blogs
Lots of great blogs out.  Just look down the side of my blog here.  Many of them have very interesting things to say.

Stats
I am a stats junkie.  I love seeing what people are reading here, what pages people go back too the most and which ones are the most popular.
While this will skew my data,  here are my most popular pages of the last year.

• Xena and Gabrielle, this one is due to some of the images on the page.
• Erzsébet Báthory
• The Hex Girls made it three times in the top ten, Unisystem/Witch Girls, Cartoon Action Hour, and Cortex.
• People also seem to like Succubi, as the hits on Sympathy For the Succubus Part 1 and Part 2 show.
• And Every Angel is Terrifying

My top referring sites were:

• RPG Bloggers
• The Underdark Gazette
• Eden Discussion Boards
• Destination Unknown
• RPGNet forums
• Asshat Paladins
• Daddy Grognard
• Risus Monkey
• Swords Against the Outer Dark
• Gothridge Manor

Games

A lot of really fun games came out this past year as well.  I have not had a chance to catch up on last years even yet though!  Pathfinder was a big hit this year in addition to all the new D&D 4 and OSR games I scored.

For me though the highlight was the release of B/X Companion.  A really well done book and a lot of fun too. Best release of the all the OSR games this year.
B/X Companion as well as some nice buys at this years's game auction at Games Plus, has gotten me really interested in Basic Era D&D again.  It is very much nostalgia, no two ways about it, but it is still very fun.





The Bad
Still no Ghosts of Albion in print format.

I guess the Worst part of the year, gaming wise, was getting hit by another driver coming back from Gen Con this year.  I on the plus side, everyone was fine and now the van is back to running fine too.

What will 2011 bring?

How much Fantasy in your FRPGs?

I am still thinking about world building in my game and I was thinking about Oerth, the Greyhawk world.  In Greyhawk the sun goes around the world, as it did in some dark ages beliefs.

Now here is the thing.  Or two rather.  First, in today's age we tend to think of ourselves as very progressive and smart and forget that a lot of the things we know now, people also knew then.  Sure there are some "fantasy" style beliefs.  After all the Greeks knew a lot about Astronomy and even knew the size of the Earth (and the fact that it was round) as far back as the 4th century BC.  Sure today some people still think the world is flat or created by magic, but for the most part people are and were smart.
Secondly I like my universe to make some sort of sense.  Afterall I still would like to play a Greyhawk 3000 game someday and that might be harder if  my sun is really just a burning mountain going around a flat earth.

So yeah, I like magic, vampires and ghosts in my games, but draw the line at Earth-centered cosmologies.
Maybe I can have parallel cosmologies.  If one goes to the sun via magic, they find the realm of Pelor there, but if you launch a probe, it is just a ball of nuclear fusion.

What do you all do in your FRPGs?  Do you even bother?   What is your cosmos like?

Sometimes Wikipedia really irritates me

I have a love/hate relationship with Wikipedia.
As an academic I like it because it is a nice starting point for any topic, but hate it for anything close to "real" research.   As a  teacher I would never accept Wikipedia as a source unless there were plenty of other sources to back that up.

As a gamer I like it since it usually gives me what I need fairly quickly. 

I also like the "every one works together" aspect.  But that also gets on my nerves.

Today though the wikipedia community is getting on my nerves.  Long story short, some articles I worked on are up for deletion.  Not only that, the editor that put nominated them for deletion chose to do it over Christmas where it is likely that he will get them deleted since no one can help me "save" them.

I used to be a very active editor on wikipedia.  I even donated money.  But it seems more and more that there are some people there with personal agendas to have articles they don't like deleted.  I just spent a a couple years waiting for one such person to get banned, and now others want to take up his crusade.

Maybe I'll just post stuff here instead.  The audience is smaller, but at least I get the feeling that it would be better received.   Though some of the stuff I work on wouldn't fit even the broad range of topics I cover here.

Merry Undead Christmas!

So Christmas has come to the Brannan house.  Electronics were had by all.  But I wanted to talk about what I got RPG related this year.

Castle Ravenloft Board Game
I got this as my "big" RPG gift.  It looks like a lot of fun and we are going to play it later today I am sure.  I grabbed my Strahd mini that I got a while back and put it into the box to replace the weak looking vampire it came with (he is fine for the "young vampire" they also have you use him for).  Tons of skeletons, ghosts and other things were included.  Got a dracolich and a zombie dragon too.

"Orcus" Modules
I got the last titles in the P and E series I needed.  E2 and E3 and P2.  I now have all nine of the "Shadowfell/Orcus" modules.
I know the reviews of these are mixed, but I wanted them all.

Beholder Gift Set
I also got the D&D Beholder Gift set, which comes with 4 beholders.  A regular one, an shadow beholder, a ghost and a frost beholder.  They are very cool and I can't wait to use them somewhere.

Now on to the other gifts!

Forgot to mention!  I also got a new book, "Vampyre Kisses" and a bunch of "Tarot Witch of the Black Rose" comics.

Merry Christmas!!!

Happy Hanuka, Merry Yule, Joyous Solstice, Happy Festivus, Happy Kwanza and any other number of holidays I have forgotten.

And Happy New Year!!

Played some AD&D 2nd Ed today.

Got home from half-day at work today and sat down and played some old-school AD&D 2nd Ed today.  My oldest wanted to try it out (I bought him a 2nd ed Monstrous Manual years ago so he wouldn't mess up mine).

Odd how it happened really, we were going to play D&D 4e Red Box, then it was going to be D&D Basic Red Box.  Finally landed on 2nd Ed.  Spent some time, though not as much as I thought, looking up some rules.  Spent more time just figuring out where I put the XP table for my witch.

It was a fun quick little dungeon crawl, no plot, no backstory, just kicking in doors and killing monsters.  Used some 4e minis and the map from the Dungeons & Dragons' Black Box.

All in all a good bit of fun. Doubt we will continue with 2nd Ed, but it was nice to give is a another try.

Jenny Everywhere

I was reading Old School Heretic's post on Jenny Everywhere the other day and thought it was a great concept.

Jenny Everywhere is a shifter, that is she can shift between the realities and interact with who knows who.  Whether there is one Jenny Everywhere that is very mobile or multiple Jenny's that have a vague awareness of each other is left to the individual authors.

Jenny Everywhere is also a public domain character.  Meaning anyone can use her in what ever project they have. You just need to include her license, as below:

"The character of Jenny Everywhere is available for use by anyone, with only one condition. This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Everywhere, in order that others may use this property as they wish. All rights reversed."

It is such a cool concept, not just the open source of it (that is cool also) but a character that exists in every-single reality there is and can shift between them.

Regular readers should by now know of my love for the multi-verse.  It is a very cool concept I enjoy on principle but also how it has been employed in various sci-fi and fantasy publications.  My favorite might be the great Micheal Moorcock stories of Elric, Corum and the other Incarnations of the Eternal Champion.  Jenny would be a bit different I think.  While the Eternal Champion feels the combined weight of all his incarnations as it were, Jenny is freed by hers.  Reality is hers to roam because that is what it is there for.  In one of the comics I saw she fights against a force known as Chaos, but I don't think that makes her an agent of Law as we would have seen in say the Corum books.   Jenny is more like the Doctor really.
I have done something like this before. I have a witch character that is aware of all of her own past lives and future ones.  All within the same reality, but it gives her some insight to what is going on around her.

Of course the openness of Jenny is very appealing.  Something everyone can use and share and just a promise not to break her.

Here are a bunch of links I have been collecting to help explain who Jenny is.

http://jennyeverywhere.net/
http://www.jennyeverywhereday.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Everywhere
http://www.barbelith.com/topic/14484/from/35
http://www.barbelith.com/topic.php?id=15206
http://www.bjccreations.com/jenny/  The Jenny Everywhere Chronicles webcomic
http://exclaim.ca/Features/Comics/jennys_everywhere-hero_for_people_no_strings
http://theshifterarchive.com/ART/DianaNock.htm

What does all this mean for you the gamer?  LOTS!
Jenny, by definition is perfect in every game.  Jenny, by definition, is already in every game, she just needs to be stated out and given a plot.

For Ghosts of Albion I would imagine her as an american girl of possible Japanese lineage living in London.  She would be some sort of Steampunkish tech wiz (must be the goggles) and constantly speaking anachronistically.  So for example, even though she is not a time traveler per se I'd have her say things like "it sucks we have to wait 170 years for descent cell phone signal here." and then totally not explain why she says such things either in-game or out.  For her I'd use the super-science quality from the Magic Box, but limit it to steam-punk style tech.

Her "shifter-ness" comes form her ability to remember/know of her other incarnations and her ability to create high tech gadgets out of steam-age materials.

Jenny Everywhere

Attributes
Strength: 2
Dexterity: 3
Constitution: 4
Intelligence: 5
Perception: 4
Willpower: 4

Life Points: 40

Qualities
Attractive 1
Hard to Kill 2
Superscience (Steampunk tech, from the Magic Box book) 3
Nerves of Steel

Drawbacks
Honorable 1
Minority (woman, Asian looks (it is the 19th century after-all))
Mental Problem (Mild Recklessness)
Out of Time (like Archaic, but in reverse)

Skills
Armed Mayhem 2, Art 2, Athletics 3, Engineering 6, Fisticuffs 1, Knowledge 7*, Languages 3 (English, French, Japanese), Marksmanship 1,  Notice 2, Occultism 1, Physician 1, Science 6

The create a steam punk item Jenny rolls her Intelligence + Engineering or Science  + Superscience or 5 + 6 + 3 = 14.
A success means she has made something, the SLs tell us how well she has done it and if it does what she wants it too.