Supernatural & Smallville

One of the BEST games I have ever played at Gen Con was a Supernatural/Buffy/Charmed mash up.  Characters were characters from the various shows and the system was the Buffy Unisystem game.  There was another version of it that was run the night before using the Supernatural version of Cortex.

It was a lot of fun.

So it is kinda sad to note that Margaret Weis Productions is closing shop on two of their popular game lines, Supernatural & Smallville.

It's not a surprise really, licenses like this come and go all the time.  But you only have to the end of this month to get books from either system.

I spent a lot of time with Cortex over the last few years.  You can follow those insights (and baseless opinions) here, http://timbrannan.blogspot.com/search/label/cortex

Supernatural is closer to the original cortex rules and more similar to Unisystem.  So close in fact it is pretty easy to use ideas from one game in the other. Willow and Tara (and Vampire Tara) converted rather nicely I thought.

Smallville is the first of the "Cortex Plus" games.  The conversions here are more concept based than actually crunching numbers.

In both cases these are fun games and if you haven't picked them up this is your last chance.

Family Game Night

Not playing a game tonight, fighting off a migraine at the moment.

But I was curious  about how many of you out there on this cold Sunday (in Chicago at least) are spending your time.  Or more to point, how many of you all have a family game night?
If you do what do you play?

Around here the old Dungeon! board game is a fave.  But we also play a lot of Scrabble and Monopoly.
I have gotten my wife into a few games of D&D before, but it's really not her thing.
I never gotten her to play Ghosts of Albion despite all the time I spent on it. ;)

Speaking of family games.  Just decided that we are not going to Gen Con this year.  Might go to Gary Con, but don't really know yet.  I am hoping some con opens up locally that I can take my boys to.

Zatannurday: Happy Valentine's Day

Some pics of Zatanna and her loves this Valentines Day.

Here is one from the Young Justice comic. Too bad the series is getting canceled.

With Blue Devil.

With Bats.

John and Zee.  The longest relationship she has had.  Though not always the healthiest (for either).

But not all is drama in Zee's love life.  She is also willing to help others.

http://agnesgarbowska.tumblr.com/post/3296746076/happy-valentines-day-zatanna-is-making-sure

Happy Valentine's Day!

It's Not An Olympic Medal, But I'll Take it!

I was on DriveThruRPG today to get a copy of my Witch book sent out to my brother when I noticed something really cool.

The Witch is a Copper Best Seller!

Not sure what the sales threshold is for that, but I'll take it!

Ghosts of Albion is doing well too.

It's not gold or platinum, but I am not complaining.
I am still pleased that there are people out there that like my stuff and are willing to buy it!

April Blogging A to Z

Good Morning!
We are half-way through February now and I wanted to talk to all bloggers in our little corner of the internet about April.

The April A to Z challenge is coming up and I would like to encourage you all to join.

http://www.a-to-zchallenge.com

But join with a purpose.  Last year I did a review of RPG games A to Z in an attempt to attract more people to our hobby.  This year I am working on a new idea for a monster book.  So all my posts will eventually be put together and published.  Either for free or for sale depending on the amount of art I have to buy for it.

Presently there are over 700 participants and it is expected there could be as many as four times that amount by April 1.  This is a great way to get exposure to you, your blog and our hobby.

The sign-up page is here: http://www.a-to-zchallenge.com/p/2012-to-z-challenge-sign-up-list.html

I am joining a team of ambassadors to help others with the challenge and basically be a cheerleader.
http://tossingitout.blogspot.com/2013/02/ive-got-team-arlees-atozchallenge.html

http://tossingitout.blogspot.com/2013/02/ive-got-team-arlees-atozchallenge.html

I also want to be your, or more accurately, OUR cheerleader and ambassador too.  I think we have a fantastic hobby here and one that should be shared.  Between the free games and the material offered by all of us on our blogs there are thousands of nights and weekends that people could fill for the price of dice.  Since I am not a high school kid anymore playing in friend's basement,  I focus more on "family game nights", but what ever your group looks like we can pass that on to others.

So please. Consider joining up and share with this this very eclectic group of people our love for this little hobby of ours.

Vampire Blog Hop

Little bit of history here.  Long before I was known as "The witch guy" I was "the Vampire guy".
So it is with a sense of homecoming that I participate in the Precious Monsters Vampire Bloghop.


I still tend to write a lot about vampires here.

My earliest memory of watching a movie had to be Bella Lugosi and Christopher Lee as Dracula.  I can clearly recall being no more than 3 or 4 and thinking anything with red eyes was a "dracula".  This extended as I got older (5) when the Count became my favorite character on Sesame Street.  I am pretty sure I have seen every film adaptation of Dracula there is and I have read the original book a dozen times.

So yeah. I like Vampires.  What made me "stop" liking them?  Vampire: The Masquerade.
Well, that is not fair.  It wasn't the game itself, it was the over exposure of the game and I'll admit, some of the players.  But I have gotten over that.  In fact I really enjoy the 20th Anniversary edition and the translation guide  The truth is that Vampire really changed a lot things in gaming. In recent years I have come back to Vampire (and to vampires in general) and find I am enjoying it so much more.
So let's have a look at some the Vampire games I have enjoyed the most over the years.  This is not all of them, but it is a nice sample of new and old.

Vampire: The Masquerade - Revised Edition
This is it, the original. Well, not the original, original, but the revised version. This game is the go to game for playing an angsty, tortured monster.  Nearly everything known about vampires in myth or fiction is in here somewhere.  Re-reading it today if you had no knowledge of this game you might be tempted to say that this game is full of cliches. But in truth this is the origin of a lot of things that we take for granted.
Truthfully this is a great book to get even if you never plan to play the game.  There are plenty of ideas for Role-playing as well as integrating it with LARPing. There is also a lot of ideas for vampires here.
If you like Anne Rice's vampires, then this is the game for you.
Play if you like: Anne Rice

Victorian Age Vampire
The Victorian Age is best time for vampires in my mind. This the age of Dracula, of Varney the Vampire and tons of great Gothic Literature.  Also it is a time of science vs. religion, the city vs. the rural, the traditional vs. the modern.  This is a perfect mix for a Vampire game. The Vampire game mechanics are well served by this mix; the human vs. monster. In many respects this game is actually superior to it's parent game V:tM.
All the same vampire clans from The Masquerade are here, but changed.  Not as much as the Dark Ages version, but the alterations fit the times well. The vampires here seem to be so much more than their modern counterparts.
Play if you like: Dracula or Varney the Vampire

Vampire: The Requiem
A while back White Wolf rebooted everything.  They redid all their game lines, edited the rules and gave us a new World of Darkness.  On the plus side Vampire the Requiem has much more cleaned up rules.  They were similar to the old rules, but just better in most respects.  The meta-rules or how the vampires are played though felt worse. Not worse really, but off to me.
Basically you can play the same kind of game you did in V:tM, though if you had a favorite clan in the old game it might not be here, or be changed in subtle ways. Still though this is a great game with less overhead than old World of Darkness. If you are choosing between this game and Vampire: The Masquerade then this might be the easier choice, even if it is less "classic" choice.
Play if you like: Modern supernatural

Vampire Translation Guide
So say you like both Vampire games, or you prefer one but like elements from the other.  Well White Wolf came up with this great guide that lets you translate between the two games. At least in a mechanical way you can translate clans from one to the other. I like this product on concept alone. While this book is not the Rosetta Stone between the games, it is a good translation guide. If you are fan of one of the game then this book gives you the chance to double your stuff. For fans of both games this is a good way to open up your world of darkness a bit more. It is lacking on some crunch, but I think I can be OK with that.
I also like this product for what it means. White Wolf is basically saying something new now, the world is yours do with it as you please. No more meta-plot no more rigid distinctions that always come in 5's.
I like the converted characters, but would have also liked to have seen the same character in both systems.

Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition
The 20th Anniversary Edition combines the best of the best of the old Vampire the Masquerade game and strives for completion.  All the clans, all the powers and most of the iconic characters. It is more expensive that any of the other White Wolf Vampire games, but it is also the largest and everything you need for years of playing is right here.  Or more the point, everything from years of playing is right here.  It is easy to pick this up and feel like it is 1990 again.
I think this book is really aimed more at people that played V:TM back in the day and now have a desire to go back to those nights where monsters roamed the city.  There is a lot here for new players though too.  If you have never played a Vampire game then this has everything you need.

Chill Vampires
I have gone on about this book before.  Chill Vampires is the standard to which all vampire related supplements to a horror game must be measured. Any game can produce a bunch of stats, some bad fiction and link them together, Chill: Vampires is a Master's Thesis on combating the undead. Not just notes for the would be vampire slayer (and game masters) but also detailed accounts of the most brazen of the undead. Complete with stats, history, motivations and the notes of previous investigators and SAVE agents.
This book is fantastic for any game but essential for a good Chill game. I would recommend it on the basis of the Dracula and Bathory write-ups alone, but there are more and even stranger and deadlier vampires in these pages.
Play if you like: Supernatural or The Night Stalker

James Mishler is an old name if you been doing this for a while.
He has a personal blog and his game company blog.  He also has a really awesome vampire book that I won a few weeks back.

Vampires of the Olden Lands
The Olden Lands is James' in house campaign the Chronicles of Mhoriedh.  All the books in this series are dual stated with Labyrinth Lord and Castles & Crusades stats.  This appeals to me on a number of levels.  I like that he went through the effort to do this and the nice effect is that between these two sets of stats you can play this under any old school version of D&D you like.   There is also plenty in this book that work with any other game as well.
We start out with some common protections against vampires.  We follow with 8 very different sorts of vampires including living, dead and spirit.  All dual stated.  There is a new race to play, The Dhamphir.  I have seen a lot of "Dhampirs" over the years, but this one is one of the best so far just in terms of simplicity.
All in all a really nice take and these vampires are not like the Dracula-Lestat-Edward clones that can populate so many other games.

Fang & Fury: A Guidebook to Vampires
This is an older book for 3.0 (not 3.5) D&D but there is still a lot of great things here.  This is certainly written from the D&D-fantasy world vampire; so feeding off of dragons and the like, what happens to certain  classes.  There are feats, prestige classes, monsters and gods. There are plenty of spells, magic items, weapons and artifacts.  There is really a lot of good stuff here and if you have vampires in your game then you need this.  If you have any vampire big-bads in your game then this is also a great buy.  Some of the material needs to be updated to 3.5 or Pathfinder, but nothing that is a show stopper that I could see.

Out for Blood

If there was anything you ever wanted to know about vampires or those that hunt them then this is your book. In the 200+ pages there are 18 new prestige classes, new uses for skills, feats, and of course tons of vampires. There are a handful of new spells and campaign ideas for using or hunting vampires in your game.
What I liked best about this book though was the Fist of Light Prestige Class. It was exactly what I was looking for in one of my games and I was happy to see someone else had done all the work for me.
The layout is very clean and clear and easy enough to read onscreen. The art varies, but most it is rather good.

There are a lot more including all the Ravenloft stuff.

And an honorable mention, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Roleplaying Game.  Someone has to kill all those vamps. Or date them. Whatever.

EDITED TO ADD: Forgot my own Vampire Basic Class

Want to know about Vampires?  Check out all the other members of this blog hop!

White Dwarf Wednesday #52

White Dwarf #52 is a big issue. Not just in terms of size; it's now 56 pages, or price; it's now 85p, but there are color pages now inside.  Not all are full color, but we are getting there.

Let's start with the cover.  Pretty cool stuff, alien spaceship lands in front of a couple of barbarians. That's everything you need to know about gaming in April of 1984.
We start out with more ads with the editorial starting on page 11.
Ian Livingstone talks about the new changes, welcoming old and new readers. He discusses one of the new features, The Name of the Game, and some of the regular content.

The aforementioned Name of the The Game is a Beginner's Guide to Role-Playing Games by Marcus Rowland.  There are the basic basics. These are dice, this is what you do.  Then he covers "The Big One" D&D.  Reading him cover how AC works though makes me wonder why we didn't see the 3e way of doing things sooner.  This article also features one on the new, nifty full color pages. Looking forward to future installments of this one.

Speaking of 3e an predecessor of the Clerical Domain spells appears next.  Out of the Blue covers specific spell lists for various types of gods.  It is Clerical Domains is all but name really.

Open Box gets the full color treatment too.  Good place of it really.  Reviewed this issue are Talisman (a game I always wanted to try out) and Battlecars, both by Games Workshop.  Alan E. Paull only gives Talisman a 6/10  noting that it would be better if it were shorter. Ian Waddelow gives Battle Cars an 8/10.
Dragon Riders of Pern from Mayfair  gets a dismal 4/10 (Enjoyment 2/10!) from Nic Grecas siting rotten art work, unclear rules and complex and unwieldy game mechanics.  Ian Waddelow is back with the Lost Worlds books from Nova Games.  He gives them 6/10.  I liked the idea of a character book with all the rules you needed to play.  I later adopted the idea after getting 1 (and only 1) Lost Worlds book and realizing I couldn't play it but really liking the concept.

Machines and Magic is the subject of this issue's Critical Mass.  One book covered is Vonda McIntyre's Superluminal.  I read this book about this time and I enjoyed it, but it left me feeling like there should have been more.  The article also mentions something I was certainly feeling in 1984.  The Xanth joke had gone on long enough.

Thurd is up next with the beginning of a cycle of adventures.

Fiend Factory has some low level monsters for D&D.  The Spider Dragon looks neat, the rest I am not thrilled about.  FF seems to have lost some of it's spark if you ask me.

Microview gets expanded.  Now it also reviews software ala Open Box and still has some BASIC code for you to enter.  Software is rated on terms of Graphics, Instructions, Long-Term Interest, Playabilty, and Value for money.

Andy Slack discusses living forever in Traveller.  So make your own 40K Emperor now.  The long article also includes some methods of staying alive beyond your years and some associated scenarios.

Castle of Lost Souls is the first part of a Choose Your Adventure.  You have a basic character sheet and plenty of scripted options. You just need a single d6.   There are 104 entries, not sure how many combinations.

Liz Fletcher gives us The Serpent's Venom for 1st to 3rd level AD&D characters. Three pages and some better than average art work.

Letters covers some the style changes of WD, with most happy with the changes.  In a nice touch that would have amused me then as much as it does now, the letter image has a Dalek stamp.

RuneRites covers Magic Rings. Most are adaptable back to D&D.

Travellers is next.  I wasn't into it then, can't get into it now I am afraid. I hate to say it, but when it comes to comics Dragon was the superior magazine here.

Treasure Chest has a bunch of random magic items. The amusing one is "Troll Dust" which is basically an instant troll, just add water.

The News section is now  "The Midgardian". Of interest is coverage of Mayfair releasing the Role-Aids line.

Tabletop Heroes covers fighter figures. Some nice full color images to go with it.  Certainly a shade of things to come.

We follow with a number of ads and classifieds.

This was a big issue.  8 more pages and full color ones at that.  I felt there were some more ads (maybe four pages) and four pages of new content, but I have not counted to be sure.  I never owned this issue back in the day.  It was one of the ones I picked up much later. Again also at this time my purchase of White Dwarf was waning in favor of Dragon.  I also hate to admit it, but I am kinda on a "death watch" now.  How much longer with Livingstone stay on as editor? When do the comics disappear? What happens to Fiend Factory? When is the last of the D&D, RuneQuest and Traveller content? These will be answered soon I feel.