White Dwarf Wednesday #49

White Dwarf #49 opens up 1984 for us.  A big year in gaming for me personally.  Let's see what this issue has in store for us.  A sci-fi inspired one, no doubt for the multi-system adventure later on.

Ian Livingstone comments on the Orwellian overtones, or lack thereof, of today's gaming.  Honestly it seemed like a weak linking to me.  It's 1984 and you need to say something about 1984.  Interestingly enough I read 1984 just the year prior.  Never really thought there was much for RPGs in it.  Computer gaming yes, but not TTRPGs.

Up first is Shuttle Scuttle by Thomas M Price. This is the mentioned multi-system adventure.  This one supports Traveller (natch), Space Opera and Laserburn.  I'll admit, I have never heard of Laserburn and I am sure it is not one I forgot.  Now as a general rule I love multi-system products.  I like them for their own value but also for the insight they give on conversions. The adventure is 4 pages, so not a bad deal really.

Open Box has reviews.  Up first is the Monster Manual II for AD&D by TSR.  Megan C. Evans gives it a 7/10 stating that there too many high level monsters and no "good" aligned monsters.  Up next Marcus Rowland reviews a couple of  solitaire adventure books by Puffin Books/Steve Jackson, Starship Traveller and City of Thieves.  They get 9/10 and 8/10 respectively.  We get some Traveller expansions by GDW,
Supplement 12 - Forms and Charts, Supplement 13 - Veterans and Adventure 9 - Nomads of the World Ocean.  Again Andy Slack is on Traveller duty, but he gives the first two a rare 2/10 and 3/10 claiming that most of this is available elsewhere.  Adventure 9 gets a more respectable 9/10.  Jon Sutherland takes on the classic Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes.  Though he doesn't seem to think so giving it and it's adventure, The Jade Jaguar, a 4/10 and 3/10.

Critical Mass has a bit on the book The Neverending Story.  The upcoming movie is mentioned, but honestly could anything prepare us for Limahl?

Chris Felton has Clay to Marble: Construction in AD&D. A neat little article with guidelines for constructions times. I seem to recall reading this years ago since some of this sounds very familiar.

Thurd the Barbarian goes up against the evil Necromancer.  Not sure if this is the Necromancer from #35 or not. ;)

Dave Morris has some variant rules for RuneQuest in Runes in the Dungeon.  Skills groups and other rules to help build D&D-like characters.  In particular I like the "witch" rules.  I would expand it into a 120 page book, but that is just me.   RuneRites is up next with various questions and answers.

StarBase has more fleets for your Traveller game.
Letters covers mostly praise for Irillan and the new look of WD.


The Key of Tirandor Part 1 is a new campaign for levels 6-9 by Mike Polling.  This part is five pages and includes 6 PCs.  It looks quite interesting to be honest.

There is more of The Goblin Cult of Kernu for RuneQuest, but like I mentioned before it is interesting enough and flexible enough to use in D&D.

Travellers is next trying to fit in any and every sci-fi in joke and reference it can.  I am not sure I can even find the story here to be honest.  There is though an 2000 AD comic feel to this one. 

Super Mole is back as an RPG "gossip" column.  Normally I like these sorts of things. Much for the same reasons I like previews in the movie theaters, I like to know what is coming up.  Reviewing a 30 year old gossip column though is odd to say the least. What is interesting is not what was going to come out, but what didn't.  Though there are some bits that are interesting.  Such as Rose Estes leaving TSR. There is a bit about Mayfair vs. TSR and the eventual fate of what will become the loved BECMI sets.  Mole does not predict I at all.

Fiend Factory features Insect World this month with the Skullcatcher, Giant Praying Mantis, Giant Moth and the Golden Beetle.  Serviceable, but nothing special.  

Treasure Chest covers Illusions and Illusionists. I can't help but feel a lot of work was being put in to making the Illusionist interesting and cool and having it all sort of fall flat.  I did have an Illusionist character back in the day.  As much as I liked the guy I still felt and feel that he was really nothing more than a weak Wizard.  Obviously I thought the Witch was a better choice as a class.  I think I was even getting all my materials together at this point for my very first witch class.

The survey results from #45 are in. Long story short, most people like most things about WD.  There are not a lot of surprises here really. Microview and Counterpoint were the lowest rated articles.   Of the recent features, The Dungeon Architect was #1, followed by Irilian, the Town Planner, Dealing with Demons and The Necromancer.  Lew get's his revenge.

Issue 44 had the best art work proving once again that near-nudity sells.  Dragon and Imagine are the two other magazines most often read/bought in addition to WD. AD&D, RuneQuest and Traveller are the top 3 games played. Followed by D&D, T&T and Call of Cthulhu. Home computer ownership is about 50/50 and most of the ones that do own them do play games on it.  98% of the readership is Male and the median age is (was) 15.  Yeah. That was me.  

Gobbledigook gets deep. And we end with the normal small ads/classifieds and ads. 

A good issue. Not an inspired one to be sure, but solidly good.  

We are going into the 50s now where my memories of them are less solid.  I was not reading WD much into and past 1984.  I was solidly into Dragon at this point, but I still enjoyed WD and picked it up again in 1987 or so with some of the back issues going back to the 60s.  

Happy Hallows Day!

Today is the day that Ever After by Kim Harrison is released.

I really enjoy these books. Rachel is growing not only as a witch, but a character.  She is not making the same dumb mistakes she was making in "Dead Witch Walking".  Though this time she has to solve a problem she made for herself.  And damn. Is that not the coolest looking cover?

I don't do Pinterest, but there is a collection of all the cool Hollows covers from Kim Harrison's site.  It's kind of cool to see so many different versions of Rachel and Ivy. 

Maybe I mentioned this or not, but I alternate between reading a Hallows book and a Dresden Files one.  I just finished the very awesome Cold Days and now Ever After is up.  Yeah me!

Of course this causes interesting thoughts in my head.  What would it be like if Harry and Rachel ever had to take on a case together?  Totally different worlds yeah, but maybe that is part of the problem.  Their realities are bleeding into each other.  How would they react to each other? Violence seems to be the likely answer.  What would Ivy think of Thomas? Jenks of Toot-toot? Trent of Mab or Marcone?  The possibilities of mayhem are almost too delicious to ignore!

Given that all the Hallows books' titles are plays on Clint Eastwood movie titles it is tempting to use something like "Le Streghe" aka "The Witches".   The movie was made of five different stories, so I could do five different games where Rachel and Ivy find themselves.  Hmm.

Ok. Here we go.  Rachel and Ivy are on a run.  They fight some bad guy and get some weird artifact. The artifact jumps them to different realities where they have to encounter different witches.

I could use some stats I have already put together for some of the games.

So I have Unisystem for their crossover to Willow & Tara's universe. The start of Cortext Plus for Smallville Crossover to meet up with Zatanna and OVA for some other crossover, maybe Witch Hunter Robin.  I would HAVE to do the Dresden Files RPG for that one and then one more game.
I'd do Harry Potter but Hermione is already involved in her own crossover.

Could be a lot of fun with the right people.

Damn You WotC for giving me what I want!, Part 2

And one of the other rumors I mentioned the other day is now to be revealed.

As many have already guessed the D&D pdfs are back at DriveThruRPG.
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/index.php?manufacturers_id=44&affiliate_id=10748

As of this writing they have 85+ PDFs up for various versions of D&D, Basic through 4e.

There is even a new sub-site called D&D Classics, that has "Red Box" trade dress and all the pdfs.
You can even get a copy of module B1: In Search of the Unknown for free!

I don't see any POD yet, and no idea if that will happen, but the ability to finish off my collection with pdfs is still really nice.

All the reviews from when the pdfs were originally on DTRPG are still there.  So nothing has been lost.

I think this is a good move for WotC to be honest.  I am hoping to see much more.

Going to Class

Not much to report today.

Staying away from computer to be honest.  It's a day off for me and I don't want to even be remotely tempted to take a peek at any work related material.

Though one thing I am doing for work is taking an online course through Coursera.
What I am taking is called a MOOC, or Massive Online Open Course.
I am taking the one on Science and Super-Heroes.
https://www.coursera.org/course/scientificthinking

It starts today and it should be fun.

Rarely do I get to find something that marries my professional education interests and my hobbies.

Damn You WotC for giving me what I want!

People are going to find it much harder to complain about WotC in the future.

They released the Premium 1st Ed AD&D Hardcovers last year and soon Unearthed Arcana will join those ranks.
And we have the 2nd Ed Premium Edition reprint on the horizon. (Thanks to Tenkar's Tavern for the WotC links)

• Player's Handbook (wotc)(amazon)
• Dungeon Master's Guide (wotc)(amazon)
• Monstrous Manual (wotc)(amazon)

There are other rumors about other things WotC may be doing in the near future.  Including rumors about product support for older editions.

Plus D&D 5/Next is shaping up to be very, very old school inspired.

Wizards of the Coast are making it very hard to cast them as the Evil Empire anymore.

Zatannurday: Alouette Cosplay, Part 2

A while back I posted some pictures of a great Cosplayer, Alouette.
I talked to her a bit on Facebook and she is really sweet and great.

And look what I got!

'To Tim: "Thank you for Saturday!" Alouette'

How cool is that!  This is going up in my game room!

She has some more prints for sale on her Facebook, DeviantArt and Storenvy pages:
http://www.facebook.com/AlouetteCosplayPage
http://alouettecosplay.deviantart.com/
http://alouettecosplay.storenvy.com/

I love her Catwoman and Batwoman costumes. But of course Zatanna is my favorite!
(Her Catwoman is really, really close though...)

I am now thinking that I need a wall of these. You know like you see in restaurants where celebs sign pictures of themselves when they have been there.  I could do all the superheroes that have appeared in my games and get them from cosplayers.  My game gets decorated and I help support their costuming!

Cause remember. Cosplayers make cons more enjoyable for everyone.  I drag my wife to cons and she looks forward to seeing all the costumes.  She acted like a total fangirl when she saw "Rose" from Doctor Who.

Thanks Alouette!

OH and LIKE her Facebook page too!

Ohmigod! It's Totally 80s Friday!

At the beginning of the week I was talking about the OSR of Computers where I was interested in going back to buy a computer I had owned back in the day for nothing but nostalgia.  I instead just went out an got an emulator.  Now I just need to transfer the ROM from the machine in my parent's basement (I guess I still have some stuff there).

This train of thought kept going all week, and now I have come full circle.  Looking for games not from the 80s, but set in the 80s.  Not as many as I wanted to be honest.  Here are the ones I got and enjoyed the most.  It's not all of them, and not even all the ones I would potentially like, but the ones I bought.

D20 Decade: The 1980s

It is difficult not to compare this to Damnation Decade or Solid! in terms of capturing the feel of a decade.
For starters this is for the d20 Modern RPG, which I am not even sure is still being supported by anyone.  That all being said, there is a lot of great stuff in this book.   There are some pages spent on modifying the d20M skills, in particular how Computers worked then. That and the new Perform (Break Dance) and Perform (Free Style Rap).  No Perform (Gymkata!) though.  Of particular use to any 80s-based game is the list of common items we take for granted today that just wasn't there then.  Easy stuff like Smartphones, but other not so obvious things like Caller ID. Sure there were cellphones, but they were huge and the batter life was only a couple hours.  Chapter 1 covers the 80s. At 20% of the book content is really worth the price of the book.  It is a great overview of 80s tech, culture and pop psychology.  Its not a history book, but it shouldn't be either.  Even at 30+ pages somethings are going to be missing; but this is the 80s writ large, not Master's Thesis.
Chapter 2 covers the "Imaginary 80s", an 80s that never was.  Among the new races there is also a list of other games you can look into to help you out.  With the OGL they could have simply included what they wanted from many of those games, but I thought it was kind of neat to include them.  Speaking of the new races, they are really new.  Some are twists on familiar concepts, but others are new and all fit the 80s to a tee. My favorite might be the Arcadians (Video game fey) or the Spetsnazski, the Russian Super Soldiers. Cause the only thing more fun than Nazi Weird Science is Russian Weird Science.  The Crow Folk and High Solstice Sidhe could work just as well in a Pathfinder game.  There are also about 16 new occupations for your 80s character.  There are also, surprisingly, 144 new feats! Going past those for a bit there are also 5 new Advanced classes.  If you were wondering when the Miami Vice influences would appear then take heart with the Blue Equalizer, which let you play any sort of 80s "Super Cop".  Perfect foil for the Drug Lord Advanced Class.  These are followed by a few new spells.
The last part, Confetti, has a few bits for the GM for adding 80s flavor to their game.  These are also useful for any 80s game.
There is fairly good list of resources both non-fiction and fiction, and a good list of movies, TV shows and graphic novels.
Final the OGL where everything is released as Open Gaming Content.  Very nice.
Ok, so this is a really cool idea and a lot of work went into these 164 pages.
They did a great job with this, but I am not without some quibbles.
I am not going to mention anything missing from the 80s.  Trying to squeeze an entire decade into a game book is hard and something is going to get left out. If it's not there and you remember it add it on your own.  Though missing *something* about a Valley Girl seems a bit like a huge omission to me.
The art is all over the place. Most is fair, but none of it is great.
The layout has a number of issues.  The background on the pages is not great.  In most cases it is only just there, in others the "page number block" obscures some text.  It's the 80s, where are the pastels?
I have mixed feelings about even mentioning it since I have seen newer products of theirs and they look great.  This one is an early effort.
Going back to my totally unfair comparison to Damnation Decade, I think it would be interesting to see this updated to something like True 20 (which is at the time of this writing just as dead as d20 Modern) with better layout.
Despite all that I can't help but really, really like this product. At 6 bucks it is a great buy.
4 out of 5 stars.

Cartoon Action Hour
Cartoon Action Hour: Season 2
I reviewed CAH in depth before and if you spend anytime here at all you will know my fondness for this game.  This not an 80s emulation game, but an 80s cartoon emulation.
The biggest news though I have heard is that Season 3 is on the way.  Looking forward to that!
5 out of 5 stars.

World of Darkness: New Wave Requiem

It's Totally Vampires! Playing in the 80's never looked so good. While I don't follow many of the new WoD titles, this supplement is great. It brings back all sorts of memories and it is nice to see a shift in mentality from the paranoid 90's (birthplace of V:tM) and the weird 2000s. Nice to get back to a time when greed was good, sex was not safe and drugs were everywhere. We can't go back to the 80's but we can pretend to. The art, like all the art in WW's books, is fantastic.
I want a print of that Erik Jones book cover for my game room.
This is one of my favorites really. Not just about the 80s but from the new WoD.  Put on some Bauhaus and give this one a go.
5 out of 5 stars.


So anyone know of other good 80s games?