To all my American readers, Happy Thanksgiving!
And to the rest of the world, Happy Thursday!
Thursday, November 22, 2012
Wednesday, November 21, 2012
White Dwarf Wednesday #40
Around Issue 40 is where I really began to get into White Dwarf. At this point, I was the only one in my gaming circle reading it regularly and I felt it gave me an edge on those "just reading Dragon". Of course I had not experienced Imagine yet (though this issue had a big ad for Issue #1) and it would still be a couple more years before I got my hands on Dungeoneer mag.
Let's get into Issue 40, April 1983. First off I consider this one of the more iconic covers of WD. These odd aliens screamed SciFi/Fantasy Book Club to me, but I was 100% cool with that. Still am. I have no idea who these guys are, but my next SciFi game will have them as a race. The cover artist is listed as "Emmanuel".
Ian Livingstone's Editorial discusses a very good question. Why are Fantasy and Sci-Fi lumped together? This is a question that a younger, 12-year-old, Otherworlds Card-carrying self would have asked. Ian mentions he prefers SciFi films over fantasy, but fantasy games over Sci-fi ones. That fitted me to a tee. I loved Star Trek, Star Wars, and Doctor Who (83 was a HUGE year for me and the good Doctor) and I played AD&D far more than Traveller or Star Frontiers.
Dave Morris is up first with Zen and the Art of Gaming for RuneQuest. It is some setting material for a feudal Japan-like country for RuneQuest. Anything Japanese was all the rage in time period 82 to 85 or so. I recall reading this and thinking how cool it would be to try this out in AD&D, but never got around to it.
Alan E. Paul has an article on large scale massive battles for D&D, "Dungeon Master General". It is three pages long and I never read it back in the day. I never did massive battles till about 1987 and even then we used the "BattleSystem" rules. These rules seem easy to use, but still more complicated than I like. I would be a terrible Wargamer.
Critical Mass reviews some interesting books. First we have everyone knows about, White Gold Wielder by Stephen Donaldson. I am one of those people that put down the Thomas Covenant book after the rape scene. I saw no point to reading the rest. Only occasionally I regret that, but reading this review sets me more at easy. I am a fan of Lovecraft and of Moorcock so I like dark fantasy. That rape scene frankly left a bad taste in my mouth for the entire series. There is another book, Chekhov's Journey which is sci-fi but not about the Star Trek character. No this book is really best described as an early cyberpunk book. I will check it out based on that alone. They also cover Robert Lynn Asprin's Myth Directions, which I loved and they didn't.
Open Box is up with some more classics from TSR. Jim Bambra reviews C1, C2, S2, and I1. Giving them 8/10, 8/10. 8/10 and 5/10 respectively. He says that I1, Dwellers of the Forbidden City is rather mundane, though his own scores on the module should really put it more in the 6/10 or 7/10 region. Phil Masters reviews Steve Jackson Game's classic Illuminati. He praises the skill needed and the tone of the game. He says in the same breathe that the game "lacks elegance" and "Should do well in America". I will try not to take that personally. ;) It gets 7/10. We also get reviews for Starstone: A Mediaeval FRP Campaign by Northern Sages (9/10) and Soloquest 2: Scorpion Hall for RuneQuest by Chaosium (8/10). I am completely unfamiliar with those two.
Letters covers some Traveller, D&D and RuneQuest issues. No fighting this time. Some light critism on the Moria article a few issues back.
Marcus Rowland is back with an AD&D adventure for 1st to 3rd level characters, The Eagle Hunt. At 6-pages it is one of the larger of the adventures that WD has published to date.
RuneRites deals with Trading as a skill in RuneQuest.
Andy Slack has a new Explorer class scout ship for Traveller.
Fiend Factory is up and Phil Masters has more Inhuman Gods. We get the gods of the Firenewts, Flymen, Flinds (sorta) and Frogfolk. Also mentioned are Dire Raiders and Dire Corbies.
In what was always pure gold for me back then was Microview. This time we have a BASIC program for RuneQuest. Despite the fact I never played RuneQuest I typed this up. I made some tweaks to it and then would later write my own AD&D program for characters.
Treasure Chest is looking more and more "professional" The layout is sharp and clean and the magic items are also really good. The items are, Arrow of the Inner Planes, Druid's Flask, Cloth of the Wind Horse, Shaft of the Spider, Wand of Locking, and Wizard's Wand. I never used any of these to my knowledge.
We end with the Classifieds and some ads.
While there is nothing in this issue that stands out as stellar to me, the whole issue has the feel of more professionalism than previous issues. For me this is when White Dwarf came into it's own. The next 50-60 issues were great times.
Ian Livingstone's Editorial discusses a very good question. Why are Fantasy and Sci-Fi lumped together? This is a question that a younger, 12-year-old, Otherworlds Card-carrying self would have asked. Ian mentions he prefers SciFi films over fantasy, but fantasy games over Sci-fi ones. That fitted me to a tee. I loved Star Trek, Star Wars, and Doctor Who (83 was a HUGE year for me and the good Doctor) and I played AD&D far more than Traveller or Star Frontiers.
Dave Morris is up first with Zen and the Art of Gaming for RuneQuest. It is some setting material for a feudal Japan-like country for RuneQuest. Anything Japanese was all the rage in time period 82 to 85 or so. I recall reading this and thinking how cool it would be to try this out in AD&D, but never got around to it.
Alan E. Paul has an article on large scale massive battles for D&D, "Dungeon Master General". It is three pages long and I never read it back in the day. I never did massive battles till about 1987 and even then we used the "BattleSystem" rules. These rules seem easy to use, but still more complicated than I like. I would be a terrible Wargamer.
Critical Mass reviews some interesting books. First we have everyone knows about, White Gold Wielder by Stephen Donaldson. I am one of those people that put down the Thomas Covenant book after the rape scene. I saw no point to reading the rest. Only occasionally I regret that, but reading this review sets me more at easy. I am a fan of Lovecraft and of Moorcock so I like dark fantasy. That rape scene frankly left a bad taste in my mouth for the entire series. There is another book, Chekhov's Journey which is sci-fi but not about the Star Trek character. No this book is really best described as an early cyberpunk book. I will check it out based on that alone. They also cover Robert Lynn Asprin's Myth Directions, which I loved and they didn't.
Open Box is up with some more classics from TSR. Jim Bambra reviews C1, C2, S2, and I1. Giving them 8/10, 8/10. 8/10 and 5/10 respectively. He says that I1, Dwellers of the Forbidden City is rather mundane, though his own scores on the module should really put it more in the 6/10 or 7/10 region. Phil Masters reviews Steve Jackson Game's classic Illuminati. He praises the skill needed and the tone of the game. He says in the same breathe that the game "lacks elegance" and "Should do well in America". I will try not to take that personally. ;) It gets 7/10. We also get reviews for Starstone: A Mediaeval FRP Campaign by Northern Sages (9/10) and Soloquest 2: Scorpion Hall for RuneQuest by Chaosium (8/10). I am completely unfamiliar with those two.
Letters covers some Traveller, D&D and RuneQuest issues. No fighting this time. Some light critism on the Moria article a few issues back.
Marcus Rowland is back with an AD&D adventure for 1st to 3rd level characters, The Eagle Hunt. At 6-pages it is one of the larger of the adventures that WD has published to date.
RuneRites deals with Trading as a skill in RuneQuest.
Andy Slack has a new Explorer class scout ship for Traveller.
Fiend Factory is up and Phil Masters has more Inhuman Gods. We get the gods of the Firenewts, Flymen, Flinds (sorta) and Frogfolk. Also mentioned are Dire Raiders and Dire Corbies.
In what was always pure gold for me back then was Microview. This time we have a BASIC program for RuneQuest. Despite the fact I never played RuneQuest I typed this up. I made some tweaks to it and then would later write my own AD&D program for characters.
Treasure Chest is looking more and more "professional" The layout is sharp and clean and the magic items are also really good. The items are, Arrow of the Inner Planes, Druid's Flask, Cloth of the Wind Horse, Shaft of the Spider, Wand of Locking, and Wizard's Wand. I never used any of these to my knowledge.
We end with the Classifieds and some ads.
While there is nothing in this issue that stands out as stellar to me, the whole issue has the feel of more professionalism than previous issues. For me this is when White Dwarf came into it's own. The next 50-60 issues were great times.
Tuesday, November 20, 2012
This is the story of how we died.
When Gary and Dave sat down and designed Dungeons & Dragons they certainly had one thing in mind. That it should be a social game. It should be a time when friends got together and talked and had a good time. Then after the game they could talk about the game they had or share in other games. The cirlces were small back then in the Dawn Age; everyone knew everyone or were at least separated only by a person or two.
My degree of separation between me and Gygax is 1. The cousin of my regular DM ran us through an OD&D game one summer in 87. He (whose name was also Gary) had played some games with Gary Gygax back in the day. He told us we were playing "just like Gary did". Outside of some email communication with Gary Gygax in the late 90s and meeting him once at what would be his last Gen Con, that is the closest I ever got.
I am a member of what I like to call the Second Generation of Gamers. I began in 1979 but did not really get into it until 1980-81. I didn't learn at the feet of Masters. I learned mostly on my own and with other kids who had done the same. We may have known someone that knew someone that had gamed with Gygax or Arneson, but none of us had.
For argument sake I call the First Generation those that were the Masters or learned directly from them. The first gen gets fuzzy when dealing with people that learned from people that learned from the Masters. These are not static categories in my mind.
Presently I am commenting of one of James' latest posts on learning to DM/GM from the pre-made modules. (for the record I give James the benefit of the doubt of being First Gen even if he is the same age as me, started about the same time and is by his own admission more of my Second Generation ). He dislikes (maybe too strong of a word) the older modules as DM/GM tools. I love them.
I love my home-brew adventures as much as the next guy/gal loves his/her own. Though there is one thing that was never discussed back then that is fairly evident now. Running or playing those old adventures has given us all shared community. My readers/players or you and your player or people I run into at Cons more than likely did not play at my game table back in 83. But we can all talk about heading to the Cave of Chaos or the Barrier Peaks. We can all share stories of how we died in the Tomb of Horrors or the Forgotten Temples or Cities or even Realms. Is has been those shared experiences that have helped shape the culture of the game we all play.
It is an extension of the social circle that guys named Gary or Dave probably never thought of.
We can all share common stories thanks to these old modules. Share what we did, how we did it. How the characters achieved greatness and how they died. When I mention the Owlbear in the cave at the Caves of Chaos in B2 I could get dozens of stories from you all. I can ask did anyone ever shout "Bree Yark!" at the goblins? I can ask did you ever defeat Strahd.
When I was at Gen Con this past August I ran my boys through Module B1 using a mix (of course!) of D&D Basic and AD&D rules. We played for about 4 hours each night. I would say only about 2.5 hours were actual play time. The other 1.5 was devoted to people walking by to tell my kids how much fun they were going to have and how awesome the adventure was. I didn't mind. Quite the opposite in fact, I loved it. They loved it. They had the feeling they were about to experience something special, something that others had gone through when they were kids. I even joked with them in the adventure that the place had looked like it had seen hundreds of people go through the corridors over the last 30 years.
One day, maybe very soon, they will be at Gen Con or Gary Con or something else and they will say "You know I almost died in the Caves of Chaos" and someone, of same age between 100 and 10 will say "yeah! Me too!".
Monday, November 19, 2012
Adventures Dark & Deep Kickstarter
Adventures Dark & Deep is a new RPG that attempts to take the World's First and Biggest Fantasy RPG back to its early days. It takes the bones of the 1st edition game and imagines what it would have been like if Gary Gygax had stayed with TSR and released the 2nd edition of the game.
You can read more about it here:
http://greyhawkgrognard.blogspot.com/2012/11/adventures-dark-and-deep-players-manual.html and here:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/623939691/adventures-dark-and-deep-players-manual
You can see some of this in Joseph Bloch's other products that are part of the Adventures Dark & Deep line.
A Curious Volume of Forgotten Lore
Darker Paths 1: The Necromancer
Darker Paths 2: The Witch
I had mentioned a while back that 2nd Ed might be the next wave of the OSR. Looks like we are finally seeing some of that.
Go to the Kickstarter page and watch the video. Joe looks like what a I always thought Mordenkainen looked like, so that is worth a pledge from me for that alone!
The levels are good and well priced in my mind.
Good art and professional editing is not cheap. So I am thinking his goal is reasonable.
I don't need another retro-clone, near-clone or even alternate-reality clone (that is what I consider this and Spellcraft and Swrodplay). BUT I do like to support my fellow gamers.
So I putting in for a hard cover edition.
You can read more about it here:
http://greyhawkgrognard.blogspot.com/2012/11/adventures-dark-and-deep-players-manual.html and here:
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/623939691/adventures-dark-and-deep-players-manual
You can see some of this in Joseph Bloch's other products that are part of the Adventures Dark & Deep line.
A Curious Volume of Forgotten Lore
Darker Paths 1: The Necromancer
Darker Paths 2: The Witch
I had mentioned a while back that 2nd Ed might be the next wave of the OSR. Looks like we are finally seeing some of that.
Go to the Kickstarter page and watch the video. Joe looks like what a I always thought Mordenkainen looked like, so that is worth a pledge from me for that alone!
The levels are good and well priced in my mind.
Good art and professional editing is not cheap. So I am thinking his goal is reasonable.
I don't need another retro-clone, near-clone or even alternate-reality clone (that is what I consider this and Spellcraft and Swrodplay). BUT I do like to support my fellow gamers.
So I putting in for a hard cover edition.
Return to the Dungeon!
So last month I picked up the newest version of the classic Dungeon! broad game. Now like many of the gamers my age I also had one of the earlier versions of Dungeon. The one I had is not depicted below.
How does the new one measure up?
Well quite well to be honest. The older character "classes" of Elf, Hero, Super Hero and Wizard are now gone. Replaced with Rogue, Cleric, Fighter and Wizard.
The rules really have not changed. So any house rules or mods you did back then will still work today.
The board really has changed much. It is smaller than the "1st Edition" or "3rd Edition" versions depicted above. This puts it closer to the overall feel of the "2nd Edition" version (that I originally owned, but don't have anymore) with the "RIP" cards.
So in this version you don't lay the cards on the map, you instead keep them in a stack and when a room is empty you put a little RIP marker on it.
In the older versions you could use your D&D minis on them. The newer board is slightly smaller so it makes using the D&D minis harder. There are no plastic pawns or small monochrome plastic minis, this version has heavy card stock.
It's not any closer to D&D than it ever was. The board is the same. The rules are the same and we still had a blast.
If you never played Dungeon! then you can still play it now. If you have a younger child in your family or extended family then this is a great game. And maybe just maybe it is also a good introduction to D&D.
How does the new one measure up?
Well quite well to be honest. The older character "classes" of Elf, Hero, Super Hero and Wizard are now gone. Replaced with Rogue, Cleric, Fighter and Wizard.
The rules really have not changed. So any house rules or mods you did back then will still work today.
The board really has changed much. It is smaller than the "1st Edition" or "3rd Edition" versions depicted above. This puts it closer to the overall feel of the "2nd Edition" version (that I originally owned, but don't have anymore) with the "RIP" cards.
So in this version you don't lay the cards on the map, you instead keep them in a stack and when a room is empty you put a little RIP marker on it.
In the older versions you could use your D&D minis on them. The newer board is slightly smaller so it makes using the D&D minis harder. There are no plastic pawns or small monochrome plastic minis, this version has heavy card stock.
It's not any closer to D&D than it ever was. The board is the same. The rules are the same and we still had a blast.
If you never played Dungeon! then you can still play it now. If you have a younger child in your family or extended family then this is a great game. And maybe just maybe it is also a good introduction to D&D.
Sunday, November 18, 2012
Another Review for the Witch!
Stelios over at d20 Dark Ages has a very good review up for my latest book The Witch!
http://d20darkages.blogspot.com/2012/11/review-witch-by-timothy-brannan_16.html
He gives it 4.5 out of 5 stars, so that is great!
He did mention that a bibliography would have been nice and I agree. Part of my "d20 upbringing" was being very active on the old OGL and OGF email lists and there was much discussion on whether or not a bib could be part of an OGL product. Well eventually I think it came down on the said of yes it was ok, but I err on the side of caution when it comes to these things.
That all being said I think I will post a quasi-annotated bibliography. I'll just need to put it all together.
So thank you Stelios! I am very please you liked my book.
I talked to the publisher today and the files for the print version have been sent in so we should know once the proofs come back.
http://d20darkages.blogspot.com/2012/11/review-witch-by-timothy-brannan_16.html
He gives it 4.5 out of 5 stars, so that is great!
He did mention that a bibliography would have been nice and I agree. Part of my "d20 upbringing" was being very active on the old OGL and OGF email lists and there was much discussion on whether or not a bib could be part of an OGL product. Well eventually I think it came down on the said of yes it was ok, but I err on the side of caution when it comes to these things.
That all being said I think I will post a quasi-annotated bibliography. I'll just need to put it all together.
So thank you Stelios! I am very please you liked my book.
I talked to the publisher today and the files for the print version have been sent in so we should know once the proofs come back.
Saturday, November 17, 2012
Zatannurday: For the Cosplayers!
I consider myself fairly knowledgeble and yet something still pops up that I either didn't know about or leaves me scratching my head.
This one though just irritates me.
Here are some links, you can read them. Long story short comic book illustrator Tony Harris doesn't like cosplayers.
http://www.buzzfeed.com/donnad/comic-book-illustrator-tony-harris-hates-women-co
http://dcwomenkickingass.tumblr.com/post/35644420254/tonyharris
and one from Other Side favorite Strikes Twice, http://strikes-twice.deviantart.com/#/d5l04ol
I am not going to have this conversation. Again. If there is someone in fandom and you don't like them or think they don't belong there then the trouble might be with you, and not them.
Today has been declared as Cosplay Appreciation Day!
http://sourcefednews.com/nerd-porn-google-tvs-and-sexist-geeks/
So I am going to celebrate the cosplayer today.
Thank you. To all the cosplayers out there that take the time, the money and the interest to share our fandom. Whether you are dressing up as a comic book character, game character or someone from a movie you have helped improve the total social standing of geeks and nerds (of which I am a proud member) everywhere.
Completed Zatanna by ~Strawberry-Photo on deviantART
Zatanna by ~Lola-Gainsborough on deviantART
Lady Z by ~Lola-Gainsborough on deviantART
Zatanna by ~Riddle1 on deviantART
My Zatanna Zatara Cosplay by *MissLola-art on deviantART
Zatanna Zatara by *MissLola-art on deviantART
Steampunk Zatanna by ~sphingosine on deviantART
Steampunk Zatanna Cosplay by Sphingosine by ~SNTP on deviantART
Zatanna Cosplay 5 by ~Refugeewolf on deviantART
Zatanna Zatara (YJ) by ~TrineMeincke on deviantART
Zatanna Zatara - Otakon 2012 by ~mariegreycosplay on deviantART
Zatanna Zatara - Otakon 2012 by ~mariegreycosplay on deviantART
Zatanna Zatara teaser 2 by *ParLitphotography on deviantART
Zatanna Zatara Is Here To Stay by ~AmeZaRain on deviantART
Zatanna Zatara Cosplay by *MissLola-art on deviantART
Zatanna Zatara Cosplay by *MissLola-art on deviantART
annataZ by ~Cujo-Escariot on deviantART
They all look fantastic!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)