Merry Christmas and Happy BOXing Day

We are celebrating Boxing day a day early here at the Other Side.

I am opening up Box.com functionality for all my free downloads.





So please expect some more content here as I am working on gathering up material and getting it out to you all.

So Happy Boxing Day!!

Year 2012 in reveiw

It is just about that time to get reflective on the year we have past and look forward to the new year.

Kickstarter
2012 might well go down as the Year of the Kickstarter.  Sure we had Kickstarters in 2011, but this was the year that everyone seemed to be getting on board.
We saw the introduction of the RPG Kickstarter Group on Facebook and I'd wager we will get something similar on Google Plus Community soon.    One of the more useful sites though has been Tenkar's Tavern and his round up of late Kickstarters.

Movies
I mentioned the Hobbit already, but 2012 was a great year for movies.  All sorts of Superhero action, with the Dark Knight Rises as my favorite super hero movie of the year.  I also enjoyed Brave quite a bit.

Games
Not much came out this year that I had to have. My Witch book came out and I was quite pleased with that.
In terms of running games, well it has been a busy year.
I am still running the D&D 3.x with my two sons, the Dragonslayers.  We had hoped to finish up this year but various things got in the way.  I started a new 4e game with my sons and some of their friends.  That one is more intermittent, but still enjoyable.   At Gen Con we also started a new 1st Ed game, designed as a "Next Generation" of our 3.x game.  I introduced my oldest son to Ghosts of Albion and he enjoyed it.  I want to introduce Doctor Who to them both since I think my youngest would like it as well.

The Edition Wars seemed to end, more or less.  WotC is working on 5e and printing 1st Ed material.  The OSR and Pathfinder is still chugging along.

Blog Traffic
So far this year I am sitting at 540 or so posts compared to 511 for last year.
My total traffic is down 109,747 visits (as of this writing  this year compared to 121,509 visits last year.  This is a general trend I think most bloggers are seeing.  While this is all down there is not a huge change in the patterns of traffic, just less of it.  One thing I have yet to figure out is why Google Analytics gives me different numbers than the Google Blogger stats.  For example if I just look at Blogger stats I got  over 300,000 hits this last year.
Regardless of the amount, the trends are about the same.

Here are my Top Ten Referers for 2012:

1. rpgbloggers.com
2. dreamsofmythicfantasy.blogspot.com
3. rpgba.org
4. tenkarstavern.com
5. facebook.com
6. networkedblogs.com
7. hillcantons.blogspot.com
8. dreamsinthelichhouse.blogspot.com
9. matt-landofnod.blogspot.com
10. theoreticalgm.blogspot.com

Google+
A lot of what is going on with Blogger and Bloggers is Google Plus. A lot of bloggers have been spending more time on talking and posting Google Plus.

Reviews
By the end of last year I had written a little over 200 reviews for DriveThruRPG.  This year I reached my goal of 500 and hit 531.  Not sure what my goal should be for 2013.

2013
Not sure what the new year will bring to the Other Side yet.  I want to continue White Dwarf Wednesday and Zatannurday.  More games and reviews to be sure.  I have a few WiPs I can alos talk about more next year.

Zatannurday: Merry Christmas

More Christmas messages from the Other Side's Magician in Residence, Zatanna Zatara!

Happy Hanukkah, Happy Solstice, Merry Christmas,  and Happy New Year.

It's the end of the world as...

well. you get the idea.

So the end of the world. Again. No pole shift. No, whatever it was the Mayans said was going to happen.  Of course, if I am wrong we will all be dead by the time you read this so I am safe in calling bullshit once again.

Ok lets get on to some better stuff.  Like end of the world in games!  I could spend a lot time discussing all sorts of great Post-Apoc games but really I only want to talk about one.

Gamma World.

A while back I mentioned that despite by ridiculous fondness for Mutant Future, I never owned a copy of Gamma World. Ever.  Well Justin Davis over at the great A Field Guide to Doomsday heard my tale of woe and he sent me one of his extra copies!

It's only the book, and it has some water damage and shelf wear. Plus there is a 50 cent garage sale sticker on it...and it is absolutely PERFECT!

I have read Gamma World before.  Friends have had copies and I have always meant to go out to get one but never did.

I am surprised how much I enjoyed reading this.  This really was like finding some long lost artifact of a different age.
A couple of things I noted right away.
- This really made me appreciate Mutant Future so much more.  So Justin, if your goal was to get me interested in MF more, then you succeeded!
- I can't help but think that the table of Random Mutations is perfect for a random demon generator for the OSR crowd.

So I want to thank Justin for my early Christmas gift! 

I always feel a bit awkward when I get stuff.  I appreciate it and love the books, esp. if it is something I have been searching for for years.  But I also don't want to come over as begging for stuff.
So I think I'll pay it forward.  I have some extras of books laying around, next time I see someone in our little group here saying they need one of them they might just get a package in the mail!

#7RPGS

Over at Google+ #7RPGs  there is new meme making the rounds and Gnome Stew has picked up.
The idea is to post your 7 RPGs you have most played or GMed.

So lets give it a go!

1. Dungeons & Dragons (all editions) I am combining these all into one category since my games have a 30+ year continuity.  This is the one I started with and continue to play to this day.  It is also number one on my running list. I have played and run all editions of D&D.  Well...I have never run OD&D, only played it.

2. Buffy/Angel/Army of Darkness/Ghosts of Albion.
We began playtesting Buffy in 2002.  I played it pretty much from the second the rules hit the playtesters. I wrote for all the books as well, so it should be no surprise that this one is so high.  When I started on Ghosts of Albion I moved the campaign wholesale to that. I still get to run this quite a bit, but not play as much as I would like.

http://timbrannan.blogspot.com/search/label/ghosts%20of%20albion

3. WitchCraft (along with AFMBE & Armageddon).  From 1999 to 2002 WitchCraft was my only game. I had given up on D&D at this point and Buffy and Ghosts had not been written yet.  It was (and is still really) everything I wanted in a game. It's perfect in my mind. When I pitched the idea of Ghosts of Albion to Eden I wanted it to use WitchCraft as it's base.  Thankfully I was talked out of that in favor of the same system for Buffy.  While OD&D and 4e have less in common than WitchCraft and Buffy, I separate WitchCraft from Buffy because of how they are played.

http://timbrannan.blogspot.com/search/label/unisystem

4. BESM. I played this quite a bit in the early part of the 2000s with my son, trying to find a game he would enjoy.  I grabbed this because I was looking for something to work as a more powerful version of Buffy with some super hero and some anime influences. It was a fun game and I wish that it had done better in the market.

http://timbrannan.blogspot.com/search/label/BESM

5. Mutants & Masterminds. I enjoy supers games and have tried a number of them over the years, but M&M is my favorite.  I love pretty much everything about it. I enjoy the background, the rules, even how the rules were created and what they meant to the OGL. I am also happy that M&M 3 is the same system being used for DC Adventures.  I have run this a few times and played it a few but would like to do it more.

 

http://timbrannan.blogspot.com/search/label/mutants%20masterminds

6. Call of Cthulhu.  While I have mentioned my fondness for Chill, many, many times I never got a chance to play it or run it very much.  On the other hand I have played Call  of Cthulhu a few times int he 80s.  I was going to run it in the 2000s, but Ghosts of Albion and Buffy distracted me. Still this is the pinacle of horror games and I have always enjoyed it.

http://timbrannan.blogspot.com/search?q=cthulhu

7. World of Darkness (oWod).  World of Darkness changed everything.  To think otherwise is to ignore all the facts. I loved what Vampire did for all horror games  and games in general, though I will be honest that I didn't see it at the time.  My game was Mage.I thought it was fantastic and so near perfect.  It turned out I would later find the perfect game (WitchCraft) but I still really enjoyed this game. I picked up all the New World of Darkness games but they seemed to lack something of the original games had even if the new rules were better.

http://timbrannan.blogspot.com/search/label/world%20of%20darkness

Links to others
http://towerofzenopus.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-7-games-youve-played-most.html
http://derekas.blogspot.com/2012/12/7rpgs-as-player.html
http://derekas.blogspot.com/2012/12/7rpgs.html
http://www.gnomestew.com/crock-pot/the-7-rpgs-youve-gmed-the-most-and-the-7-rpgs-youve-played-the-most/
http://rathergamey.blogspot.com/2012/12/top-games.html

I am running a risk here

of sounding like a broken record, but the Witch is out in print.  I just got my copies of the softcover version today.

If anything it looks even better than the hardcover copy I had made for myself.

I love how it came out, it looks really fantastic and I am very, very pleased that you all can get a copy too.

White Dwarf Wednesday #44

White Dwarf #44 was one of my favorite issues.  I am not sure why that is exactly.  Maybe something to do with the cover.  Needless to say I love her totally 80's hair. And I am not sure that her armor is actually doing much.   This cover is like a combination of Tolkien and Heavy Metal Magazine.  Tolkien that is if this some alternate 80's reality version of Middle Earth.
I would though like a better copy of this art for my game room.  I have to admit I am a bit confused.  I am unsure if this cover was done by Alan Craddock (as I assumed) or Jim Burns (who is listed as the cover artist).  Like a lot of art from this time it seems to pop up in other places.

Cheesecake aside there are a lot of things in this magazine I used; so page for page this was the most useful issue for me.  This was  the height of White Dwarf's golden age for me.

This is also the issue that almost got me back into Traveller with it's nice big full color ad.
Let's jump in and see what August 1983 has in store for us.

In the editorial Ian Livingstone talks about the changes that will conclude come issue #45.  Among other things we are getting the first comic of Thrud the Barbarian.

Marcus Rowland has a new idea for moving the plot along in Traveller with ICE, the Interstellar Charter Enterprises.  Nice idea for some independent operators in Traveller that beats the stand by "You all met in an inn a spaceport when...."

Open Box gives us some classics.  First up is the The Shadows of Yog Sothoth. Which gets a rare, but in my mind deserved, score of 10/10 from Ian Bailey.   Steve Jackson continues the mini-game line with a company defining game. Not GURPS, but Illuminati.  Phil Masters only gives the first two sets a 6/10 each, disliking some of the rules and complexity.  Marcus Rowland steps away from Traveller to review two Endless Quest books and is not impressed. Reviewed are Revolt of the Dwarves and Revenge of the Rainbow Dragons, each only getting a 5/10. Finally Jim Bambra reviews what is destined to be some of the last of the "Golden Age" of the TSR modules.  He gives high marks to S4 (9/10) and WG4 (9/10) which I agree with.  He also likes N1 and U2 (8/10 each).

Critical Mass has a bunch of new books to review, or at least mention.  This was the great age of 80s Sci-Fi and the OtherWorlds club.  I remember then not begin able to read enough.  Oddly enough the article bemoans the lack of good Sci-Fi and fantasy, or at least the lack of attention on new good books.  I know that at age 14 I did not have a very advanced or sophisticated palette but I don't recall it like this.

Lew Pulsipher is up next with an article I have read and reread hundreds of times.  True Sight is all about realism in your games.  In the time following this I was all about realism.  I wanted to know where the arrows hit, what the GDP of a country was in GP  and how did adventurers factor into that.  All that.  I have since given all that up and now just enjoy the moment of the play.  But this is still a great article. Not on realism, but what realism means to you and your game.

Charles Vasey is next with the bi-monthly Board Games column, Counterpoint.  This one cover the Sanctuary Board game based on the then uber-popular Thieves World books.  I loved Thieves World and gladly grabbed anything I could. But this gem never made to my stores (which were still just book stores).  Vasey also covers the Consulting Detective game.  Interestingly enough at the time that had no interest for me.  Today it is the other way around.

Dave Morris has Dealing With Demons in RuneQuest.  I cannibalized this article for all sorts of ideas for D&D.  There have been better articles on the subject since, but none grabbed my attention quite like this one.  Yeah at 14 in the middle of the Satanic Panic in the Midwest I was devouring articles about summoning demons in D&D.   The article is long and only the first part, but I used every bit of it.

Microview has more software for us.  A Zx81 BASIC program for AD&D or T&T combat.  At only a couple score lines it doesn't really do much.  Still though I loved it.

Irilian is back with part 3.  Only 3 more to go for the complete town.

RuneRites has some new monsters for RuneQuest, a first really.  Only two, a Kirin and a Golem. But since they had analogs with monsters in D&D it gave me my first taste at converting some monsters from one system into D&D.  Since I didn't have any other monsters these both became a demon type for me to use with the Dealing with Demons article.

Fiend Factory is back with Tribal monsters.  We have an odd dragon/centaur like race call Wodennians.  Never used them because I thought they looked silly.  We have a race of "Evil Halflings of the Underworld" called, of all things, Blacklings.  I liked the idea but HATED the name.  Even then it struck me as stupid.  I used them, but I made them pale like what you would expect a race that lived underground to be like.  Some of those ideas later were worked into my ideas for Drow.  Intitally I hated the next creature, the Wohk, because they seemed dumb and I didn't like their spontaneous regeneration.  But over the years I have come to like them as something so odd it could only work in D&D.  Yelgs are like Green Orcs and some of my first orcs of my world were green.

It may surprise some but my first character was a cleric and I enjoyed the hell out of playing him.  So when I got a copy of Graeme Davis' Seeing the Light article I went about trying to convert everyone to my cleric's religion and gaining XP for it.  I did it so much in fact that if you read my witch books now you will notice that one of the things about witches is they DON'T try to convert you.

More ads and classifieds.  Another Gobbledigook strip.

Again, it is not understating it that I milked this issue for everything it had back then.

I mentioned above that this particular bit of cover art had been reused.  Here are a couple of examples that appeared after this cover came out.

Here is one for an Irish 80s Metal Band Blackwych..  Which of course begs the question "Why have I not heard of these guys before??"

And the cover for "Fires of Azeroth" by C. J. Cherryh. No. It has nothing to do with WoW.

I have no problem admitting that I created a character solely based on this cover. Ok I gave her better armor.  Also she was a character that most everyone else hated in my games, but changed the course of not only my 80s D&D game, but also my 2000s Buffy/Willow & Tara games.  Yeah, that image was the source of my inspiration for Morgan Ebonflame, the Hunter of the Dead and the Daughter of Death.  She was a PC in games I played and an NPC in games I ran in my group's shared world.  
I find it interesting that the C.J. Cherryh's book was part of the "Morgaine" series and my character was named "Morgan".  That is one of those weird happenstances, but I don't rule out that I had seen this cover sometime in the mid-80s.  I would have rolled up Morgan around 1985 or so.