Best of / Worst of 2014

We are getting to the end of the year.  Lots of things still going on of course, but everyone is now turning their attention to the end of 2014 and the start of 2015.

So let's get going and in no particular order.

Best of 2014

1. Gen Con 2014.  Gen Con had another record breaking year.  Some of that was fueled by D&D's 40th anniversary but most of it was due to growth every year for the last few years.  Gen Con is still no where near the size of Comic Con, and that is fine by me, but I do like seeing the growth.

2. D&D and D&D5.  Dungeons & Dragons had a banner year this year.  We started out the year with 40th anniversary news and more items on the cultural impact D&D has made in it's 40 years.  This summer D&D 5 was big news in the same way and the good will kept on going.  This was all helped by the fact that D&D 5 was actually a really good game.  Fans young and old could embrace this game as their own.  It could be stated even that 2014 was the year the Edition Wars ended.

3. Small Publishers hit it big.  A number of smaller publishers had huge hits this year.  The evidence can be seen in the best sellers over at DriveThru and winners at the Ennies.  While it may have been D&D's year in the spotlight, smaller companies took the awards.


Worst of 2014

1. Gamer Gate.  Pretty much anything and anyone involved in the entire mess.  Were there some important issues?  Who knows really.  The vitriol thrown around by both sides completely drowned out whatever the message was supposed to be.  This extended too...

2. Consultant Gate.  Some people got paid to consult on D&D and other people didn't like that.  Boo freaking whoo.  Someone is always going to get paid for something. Sometimes people you like will pay people you don't like for something you do like.  That's not unfair. That's life.    Again if there was a message here it was lost on all sides being so nasty to each other that I wanted to divorce myself from the lot of them.

3. War on Cosplay.  No one has come out and said this specifically but there was a lot of anti-cosplay sentiment in 2014.  Old comic book professionals telling cosplayers to get off their lawn, to actual assaults and claims of being "fake" (what ever the fuck THAT is?).   Here is my take.  Cosplayers spend 100s of hours and sometimes 100s of dollars on making a costume. How does that make them fake or not a real fan?


Ugh.

I don't want to end on a sour note, so here is something to ponder.
What are YOU looking forward to the most for 2015?  Let me know here.

Merry Christmas Everybody!

Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, Joyus Solstice, Happy Festivus and Happy Hanukkah everyone!

Whoa. Didn't see that one coming...

I just just over a bout of the stomach flu (on the plus side I lost 11 pounds) only to get hit with a one two punch of a bad cold on top of asthma.  

Needless to say I have not really done a lot, any "free" time has been spent working on the magic items for Strange Brew.

Normally this time of year I start working on my "Best of" and "Worst of" lists.  But I only have a couple things in mind.

So let me turn it over to you all.

What were your "Best of's" for 2014?  What were your "Worst of's"

I will have a post up later this week with mine.  Currently I only have one of each, but that is a enough to talk about.

Zatannurday: March Movie Covers

The March covers for DC are out now.

Here is the Beetlejuice inspired one for Justice League Dark.
I rather like it.

Makes me wish that we could get some Plastic Man in the comics for some levity every so often.
Aquaman with a shark on his leg was a nice Easter Egg too.

Gamer Christmas 2014

Soon the fat man in the red suit will come to you house, eat your cookies and maybe leave something behind.  I am not talking about your weird uncle, I mean Santa Claus!

So what RPG item are you all hoping to get this year?

I am somewhat at a loss myself.  I really got into the new D&D 5 system this year, so I am just hoping to get some gaming in.  But nothing really on my Christmas list.

I did pick up an early Christmas/late Halloween present for myself, the old WEG d6 DC Universe Game.

My family are all bigger fans of DC than Marvel so this should be fun to try out.  My youngest wants to play an Arrow-like character (not "Green Arrow" but something closer to the Stephen Amell version).  I am going to suggest something like a DC-TVU version of Connor Hawke.
My oldest want to play a Green or Blue Lantern.

This is my first big dip into d6.  I had Ghostbusters and the Xena game, but I am planning on doing a bit more with this.

I am still a HUGE fan of the Green Ronin's DC Adventures game, so I am going to use their Universe book along with it.

Hopefully I will have more to say in the New Year.

Review: A Red & Pleasant Land

Notice: I am not taking down this post because I feel it is more important to leave it up, but also update everyone on what is happeing now as February 11, 2019. Please see this newer post first. http://theotherside.timsbrannan.com/2019/02/i-am-going-to-talk-about-zak-today-and.html

I picked up a copy of +Zak Smith's "A Red & Pleasant Land" on PDF recently.  I like enough to also pick it up in dead tree version as a post-Christmas present for myself (35.75€ or about $45).

I want to say off the bat that when I heard Zak was doing an Alice in Wonderland-ish sort of adventure my expectations were high, but guarded.  I have seen Alice done a number of bad ways; mostly ones that relied on a one to one translation between story to game.  That is all well and good, but ends up robbing the story of what makes it good and ends up short-changing the player's experience in the game.  To be blunt, it's not a D&D adventure.  I had reasonable assurances that this would not happen here, I didn't know what sort of thing we would end up with.

Also, and I have admitted this many times, I am not a fan of Lamentations of the Flame Princess.  But I can say that LotFP and James Raggi do have an amazing art vision and the budget to match and it seems (to me any way) that James leaves people the hell alone and lets them create.  You saw that in Zak's last work Vornheim, you can see it Rafel Chandler's "No Salvation for Witches", and you can see it this book as well.  While the LotFP rules are in mind when this was made, you can either run it with all the free rules that James gives away for free (another credit to him) or use whatever rules you want.  This is important to me and I will talk about it more later on.

So what *is* A Red & Pleasant Land?
Overtly it is an adventure, in the broadest sense.  It can also be a campaign guide to a strange new land (or world).  Breaking it down to it's atomic elements it is Vampiric court intrigue with the cast of Dracula, Elizabeth Bathory and Alice.  But that is like saying that putting salt on your meal is the same as putting Sodium and Chloride on your steak and trying to eat it.

Let me instead start on the outside and work my way in.  This book is gorgeous. It really is.  If you have Vornheim or spent anytime on Zak's blog then you have an idea of what you will be looking at, but that is not quite it either.  The art comes just this side of reality short of being phantasmagorical. Just slightly out of sync with what you should be seeing.  This is intentional since that is also the feeling of the adventure/text itself.  (I am going to keep calling this an adventure since that is the easiest translation).  Honestly, get this bound in red with gold trim and it would be a book better suited for a coffee table rather than a gaming table.  I don't mean that derisively, I mean that in open honesty.
If the art is fantastic then the maps are amazing. I love all sorts of old-school maps and I love a lot of different styles. But these again are very evocative of the setting.

 The other thing is this adventure is big.  While the form factor is small, the book has 197 pages.  There is a lot here.  Zak  suggests that you can use parts of this book or the whole. I will add that if you opt for the parts alternative then there is absolutely something in this book you can use.

Working in, the adventure and background are all woven together in such a way that it is all familiar and yet new at the same time.  It's like returning to a place you have been years and years later. Except when you were at the place back then you were on LSD the entire time. You memories of it have not faded per se but are warped.  This is like that but now your memories are perfect and the reality is warped.

This actually touches on the first issue I have with running this adventure. Now by "I" I mean just that. Me. Not extrapolating it to anywhere else.  I don't think I could run this as a D&D adventure for my group.  To be blunt about it my kids (which is my group) don't yet know enough about Dracula, Alice or any of the other elements in this to make it worthwhile.   This is an adventure for older, wiser and maybe even a little bit jaded players.  This adventure needs to be played by people that have tried to play Dungeonland and found it lacking.

You are going to need the right group for this adventure. The book it totally worth getting just to look at, read or steal ideas from, but if you are going to run it then you need to take stock of your own group and make sure it works for them.  If your group is more of the "kick in the door, kill the monster, get the gold, move to next door" type then this will only have some utility for you.  That is fine there are plenty of fun adventures for those groups.   I suppose that if you have read "A Midsummer's Night Dream" and thought to yourself that it would make a great adventure of intrigue then this one might work for you.   As point of reference, duels are covered as being something that can be deadly. And so are Banquets.  Again some people will scratch their heads on this but I can think of at least three players off the top of my head right now that would totally run with this idea.
It is a prime example of Zak making things he wants to play and if you like it you can come along too.

Back on track.  The Alice.  This is a neat idea, but for me one of the weaker links. I totally get what Zak is doing here and maybe even a little of why. But Alice comes off as an ersatz, but weaker, Slayer, ala Buffy or maybe even the Schmuck quality from Army of Darkness. Though to be 100% this quote from the book is very awesome:

"Alices forever find themselves falling into cursed rabbit holes, accidentally killing witches, having their halfbrothers stolen by goblin kings, being willed magic rings, finding demons inserted in their chests or having armored knights ride through their homes at bedtime. Obscure gods, however, sympathize with them (they are often born to powerful families), and an Alice is a boon to any adventuring party. Some Alices wear striped stockings, some Alistairs wear pointed shoes."  - AR&PL, p. 30.

I love that image. In my games I have called these types of characters Dorothies.  The Exasperation Table really makes this character shine and makes it something unique.

The land itself, Voivodja, is in the truest sense of the word a nightmarescape.  It's not that it is just horrific, there is more. The best nightmares lull you into a false sense of hope or familiarity. You think you know what this is all about, but you don't.  The land is big, densely packed and old. Very old.  The main feature (well, to me anyway) is the intrigue between the Vampire Courts and the potential of what you can do with those.  Think about it really. Ancient, decedent vampire royalty fighting protracted war.  Sure. We did all that in the 90s with Vampire the Masquerade; but this is yet another new take on that.

The monster/NPC section is great. So many ideas.  If you are going to smorgasbord this book then start here.  There are unique vampire nobles and strange animals, so really enough to keep characters of any level busy. That's misleading...I personally think the vampire nobles in this book work better as non-combatants.  Their job is not to be sullied with the likes of mere adventurers.  But engaging them in courtly battles. That's where they shine.  Really, this is one of the first adventures where a battle of wits to the death (!) is not only likely, but likely to happen before breakfast.

We end this book with more random tables that you could (or should maybe) ever use.  30 pages worth.

So there are a lot of reasons to buy this book.  The only one that matters though is do you have the right kind of group for it? If any of these ideas appeal to you then get it. If you are unsure, well I am sure there is something here to make it worth your time and money.

Personally I want to give it a go under Ghosts of Albion.

In any case I think it is a solid hit.

Owl & Weasel Wednesday #22 January 1977

There is no page 13

1977 was a big year. It started out really cold but it also gave us two of the biggest genre movies and two of the biggest directors to ever be tangentially associated with RPG and D&D in particular.  Steven Spielberg with Close Encounters of the Third Kind and George Lucas with Star Wars.

Owl & Weasel though starts off 1977 with what must have been the two favorite topics of conversation around the GW editorial room; topless women and baseball.  Now to be fair it was the late 70s. Look at other magazine covers at the time and this is hardly risque.

This issue though is solidly a "D&D" issue.

The editorial mentions this new focus. There are fewer total articles, but the ones they do have are long.

Don Turnbull is up first.  A name that will be very associated with White Dwarf soon presents the first version of what will become the Monstermark rating system of D&D monsters.
The math is very interesting and very representative of what was popular at the time; lots of calculations to arrive at an esoteric number.  Granted, this is not much different than how we use CR today.  In fact CR is pretty much the spiritual successor to the "Monster Level" as presented here. Though I do suppose that the Monster Level/Monstermark tells you how many 1st level fighters a monster can kill before being killed himself.  Other metrics can be used, but this one was one of the first and it deserves attention for that alone.  Heck this article was one of the reason I sought out Owl & Weasel in the first place after hearing about it in the early pages of White Dwarf.
The article gets a respectable 3 pages of print.

On page 6 there is some coverage of Computer Games.  While these are basic in nature (and maybe even BASIC in coding) they are a few of the classics from the time. Moon Landing (spent hours on this one myself), Wumpus ("I smell a wumpus!") and Hammurabi.  Also, interestingly enough, I was introduced to all of these games by people I was playing D&D with at the time.  Only one page for these.

Page seven covers a review of North Sea Oil, an oil baron simulation game played in 8 turns. Professionally I remember putting together something similar for a macro-economics course some years back. It was fun and I why games like this are popular.

The D&D Society gets two and half pages of text. The other half is dedicated to overflow articles.
The D&D Society is still less "organized play" and more "hey I am a DM, come join my game!".  But it is growing and growing to the point where soon it will be too big for Ian and Steve to handle on their own.

The highlight of this issue is the introduction of the Monstermark/Monster Level system.  It would be worthy to look into this deeper and develop something that would have more present day utility, but we have that now in CR.  Anything outside of that would be a purely academic exercise. While I am happy to do that, it isn't quite enough to make want to take that extra half-step to do it.