May DriveThruRPG May Sale

Here are the DriveThruRPG sales for May.
You can purchase any or all of these products for 20% off.
Please use the following code: DriveThruApril (yes, "April")

Savage Worlds Fantasy Companion [Pinnacle Entertainment]
Realms of Cthulhu [Reality Blurs]
Karma Roleplaying System Core [Bards and Sages]
FantasyCraft [Crafty Games]
Fat Dragon's Dragonshire Deluxe [Fat Dragon Games]
Paths of Power (Pathfinder System) [4 Winds Fantasy]
Spycraft: Real American H.E.R.O.es [Crafty Games]
Fellowship of the White Star Campaign Book [Thenodrin Presents]
Ninja Burger RPG (2nd Edition) [aetherial FORGE]
Heavy Gear Blitz! Locked & Loaded [Dream Pod 9]
Hero's Handbook: Dragonborn [Goodman Games]
Splicers RPG [Palladium Books]
Noir Knights (Savage Worlds) [Savage Mojo]

The winner of my contest this month was picked before I even got a chance to announce it.

In honor of my Mystic Locale Halfway, I wanted to pick the follower that is Halfway to Hell, follower #333.
That is Andrea from The Enchanted Writer.  She gets a $10 gift code for DriveThruRPG!

Enjoy!

First Loves Blogfest

http://alexjcavanaugh.blogspot.com/2012/04/friendly-to-z-challenge-and-next.html

Here are my first loves

First Album I loved: Thomas Dolby "The Golden Age of Wireless"

First Movie: Star Wars (I have no idea what "A New Hope" is...;) )

First Book: The Hobbit

First Person: Harder, I mean after all the first people you love are your family. So let's go with first person outside of your family. And that can only be...

BATGIRL!

Specifically, Yvonne Craig's Batgirl from the Adam West Batman TV series.
What's not to love?  She is smart and kicks ass.  Plus she rode a purple motor cycle before Prince was even born (ok, I might need to re-check that date but you get what I am trying to say  ETA: ok, Prince was only about 8-9 at the time.)

Zatannurday: Sindella

Last Mother's Day weekend I mentioned a bit about Zatanna's often absent mother Sindella.

I wanted to dive a little deeper into that character this year and looks at some the lineage she and Zee share.

We know very little about the witch named Sindella.  We know she is a member of the DC universe's Homo Magi race.  We know she can claim Atlantean Lord Arion as an ancestor (as can most of the Homo Magi).  In some continuities then this makes her a somewhat distant relative to Power Girl.  She even has some similar tastes in clothes.

We know that at some point she meets Giovanni "John" Zatara in Turkey and she returns to America with him.  A year later Zatanna is born.  She later fakes her own death so the other Homi Magic don't go looking for her or Zatanna.   This could also be an "in universe" explanation for why Zee's first name sounds so much like her last name.  Sindella didn't want her daughter found through the power of her name.

Sindella and Zatanna both have a "Medulla Jewel" in their brains.  This seems to be a focus of their magical power.  Sindella is shown using magic and not needing to speak it backwards, it is assumed that Zee can do the same. One thing is known that they can use it to communicate telepathically.  So I guess Zee would know if she were still alive.

The interesting notion here is that Sindella is an Atlantean, either by birth (she could be immortal like Arion; she doesn't look old enough to have a daughter that is 30+) or by birthright.  In game then she could (if still alive) be a walking treasure trove of occult knowledge.  Maybe even enough to rival Dr. Fate.

There is precious little out there on this character. We know next to nothing about her and Zatara meet, what she was doing prior to that and, well, basically everything else about her.

I am afraid that if we see here at all in JL Dark it will be as something to torture Zee.

Are We Done with Retro Clones?

Mind you this is not a rant.

But are we done with Retro Clones?
Not playing them, but making them.

I enjoy the hell out Labyrinth Lord and Basic Fantasy.  Spellcraft & Swordplay is still a fave and there are others I want to try out more like ACKS, LL-Advanced and who knows what else.

But there is such a thing as market saturation and soon (if we are not already there or past it) we will have more games than our small market will allow.

So do we really need anyone making more clones?
Do we really need Version X of someone's house rules?

I suppose the only important answer is "yes, as long as there are people willing to pay for them."

There is no Hell in the Blogosphere, part 2

Another has been taken.

"Angry Black Dragon Appears", http://ohsnapblackdragon.blogspot.com/
is now "Healthy Living".

Feel like I need to pour out a little bit of Mt. Dew in respectful remembrance.

There is no Hell in the Blogosphere

but there is an afterlife...

First off. Dammit. I hate the word Blogoshpere!

Secondly.  No blog is meant to last forever.  We come, we go, we leave a little bit of ourselves behind.

I am here to make a humble request of my fellow RPG bloggers out there.

When you decide to leave, first please know that you will be missed.
Secondly, for the love of all that is sane, please either leave you blog in place and turned off or at least do something about your URL.

I was very excited to see that Bree Yark! was back today. http://breeyark.blogspot.com/
Until I actually began to read the posts.  Nope.  Looks like one of the blogs that people use to either age links of make money.  It might be a real person there with real thoughts, but damn it reads like computer generated text.

To quote Frank Zappa:
When you pay the bill, kindly leave a little tip 
And help the next poor sucker on this one way trip.

When you leave your blog, leave a little behind for the rest of us.
Like Chgowiz did.

White Dwarf Wednesday #15

White Dwarf Issue #15, October/November 1979.

White Dwarf #15 is an interesting one for me to do today.  First off, it is one of the first WDs I remember ever seeing in the stores (and to this day I can't look at the cover and not hear Ozzy's "Bark at the Moon").
It is also one of the issues I am missing pages of.  Page 6/7 and 26/27 have been torn out.  Honestly I didn't recall them being missing till I picked it back up to read the Editorial.

Let's jump right in shall we?
Well my issue starts with some ads and then gets into the stalwart of early game zines, an article on HP!
Roger Musson gives us what might be the first "Wounds" system based on Con.  It is certainly playable since I have seen dozens of iterations of the same idea over the last few years AND it is as current as posts in my Google Reader today.  As good as it is, I am still a "HP as abstraction" kinda guy.

Andy Slack has Part 3 of his Expanding Traveller Universe article. This one is more interesting than last weeks. Lots of cool tables on planets and alien life.  Weird, trippy, 70s sci-fi always appeals to me and Traveller encapsulates that.

In the main feature of the magazine is a new board game/mini game called Barbarian from Ian Livingstone.  The purpose of this two player game is regain a magical sword and shield of the "Old Fathers".  The game is simple (it even says so).  There is a two page board, counters and charts.  All that is missing are players and dice.  One player plays Vaarn the Barbarian, the other plays the creatures trying to stop him.  The combat advantage is given to Vaarn, but there are more than one monster to play.

Don Turnbull has an EXCELLENT article on running the "New" D series of modules.  Honestly, if I ever run these again I am going to copy this page and stick inside the modules.

Open Box has some new reviews up.  Metagaming Microgames has two offerings this month Ice War (5/10) and Black Hole (9/10). Don Turnbull felt that Ice War should have been a bigger game, but Black Hole was a near perfect mini-game.  King Arthur's Knights from The Chaosium is not as it turns out a prequel to Pendragon, but one can't help think it influenced it somehow.  This is a 16-page mini game  that received a 7/10 review from Jacek Gabrielczyk.  We are treated to a bunch of Traveller books including 3 from Judges Guild. A mixed bag of Traveller Screen 7/10, Traveller Logbook 9/10 and Starships,and Spacecraft 5/10.  We also get Animal Encounters from Game Designers' Workshop 9/10.
It was certainly a great time to be a Traveller fan in late 1979.

Treasure Chest gives us a very cool height and weight based on race and strength table.   So good in fact that I did Xerox this one!  We also get an alternate undead draining table that drains Abilities.  It is different than the one I have done, but the idea is the same.

Fiend Factory is back with an acknowledgement of all the letters it has been bringing in of late.  Don Turnbull mentions that he is keeping a eye on the quality and hopes that the feature continues to give us good monsters. Some monsters have Monster Marks, others do not.  What do we get this issue? Well...we get a metal sphere that spits fire in the form of the Heat Monster. The Dragon Dog (related to dragons and the Hell Hound) and the Tacharnid (which has no stats). Next is the weird Russian Doll monster. This thing starts as an Ogre till you do 10 points of damage to it, then the skin peels off and it's now a Bugbear, 9 points later a Gnoll, 8 points later an Orc...you get the idea till we end up with a kobold of 4 hp AND then till we get to the very end, to discover it was a Leprechaun operating the monster from the inside.  They went ahead and calculated it's Monster Mark and it comes out to be as much of a challenge as a Stone Giant (OD&D).   We round up the lot with a Time Freezer, a monster that can freeze time, to at least one creature.  And the Pebble Gnome, a gnome completely immune to magic of all sorts.
This marks the 10th issue of Fiend Factory.  Coming up is the top 10 as voted on by readers.

And finally. Ads.

Next up, end of the 70s, beginning of the 80s and when yours truly discovers this cool/odd little game.