Card Games
First of all, my apologies... I not only had no internet access all weekend, but I also lost my camera the first day of the con, so I got a not great picture of the larger than life serra angel sculpture and not much else.
I'll do some in depth discussion of some items later in the week, but the highlights went something like this:
Wednesday: Planes have never had much leg room, but the cigar tube planes I ended up stuck on the journey to GenCon had me cursing my great height. To add insult to injury, despite great reductions in fuel costs overall, I still paid more for my flight than last year. By a fortuitous coincidence, I ended up on the final leg of the flight with half of Paizo, who I'm sure were just thrilled to deal with fans before they even reached the con (I'm joking, they really were on my flight, but beyond saying hi, I tried to leave the poor guys alone). That evening I got to see more of the Paizo crew and even caught an advance look at a full color proof of the Pathfinder Bestiary, which Erik Mona had brought with him to the con and was sharing with a group of contributors and Pathfinder Society volunteers. The art director deserves some serious credit, the artwork is stunning and I'm looking forward to picking up a copy of the book when it becomes available.
Thursday: Let it be known, attend your RPGA meetings! I skipped the immediate entry into the exhibit hall, remembering the complete the insanity all too well from last year. Instead I attended a midmorning RPGA seminar... in which Chris Tulach handed out one of the coveted treasures of the delve: an RPGA Player reward card. Okay, so the wooden boxes were much cooler prizes than cards, but to get the card all I had to do was show up! Chris shared some great info about the RPGA scenarios and upcoming events. Weekend in the Realms sounds like it will be a killer event, and the upcoming Worldwide D&D Day that coincides with the release of Dungeon Masters Guide 2 sounds like it will be a really different and innovative event. I am also intrigued with the release of the mini-campaign adventures for Living Forgotten Realms. I wasn't signed up for the premier mini-campaign adventure, so I can't say how it went, but it sounded very cool.
Friday: Two highlights here... first off, 4e D&D Extravaganza... I took notes, but the big revelation was the announcement of the next setting for 2010. As I expected, it will be Dark Sun. I'm really looking forward to it, as Dark Sun is a big step into something different and I'm fascinated to see how they put it together. Second the ENnies... congratulations to Wizards of the Coast who took gold in Best Publisher (Paizo took silver in this category). A special congratulations also to relative newcomer Kobold Quarterly, which took an ENnie for Best Writing.
Saturday: Did I mention that I went to GenCon to game too? And on Saturday that's exactly what I did. I spent the afternoon in an RPGA session playing the LFR adventure Ghosts of the Past. The adventure was sickeningly hard, but we did survive and even managed to get the most crucial of the story rewards. My message: ongoing damage SUCKS at low levels. For the evening I was hosted by the fabulous WereCabbages for their open gaming night. This isn't an official GenCon event, but is a highlight for me, because it means an opportunity to game with some incredibly creative folks. One of the cabbages brought the designer of Venus Needs Men! to the event and I spent the evening learning the game (more on that later).
Sunday: Dungeon Delves are a rather unique experience, but also great fun. I got an opportunity to play an artificer in the Delve - not a class I've looked at much, and managed to accumulate enough tokens to get a second RPGA Player Reward Card - this time Kenku Explorer, which permits the card holder to create a kenku character for Living Forgotten Realms play. After that it was time to wrap up with a too quick lunch, a final pass in the hall, and a sickeningly inconvenient series of flights back home.
Once again we've been blessed by the PR sorceresses at Wizards of the Coast and have received a spoiler card for the next Magic: The Gathering expansion, Conflux. The venerable trading card game's newest expansion drops on February 6th and follows on the heels of Shards of Alara, including mythic rare cards in one out of every eight packs and more prismatic cards.
Alara introduced us to the five shards of a shattered world segregated by the absence of different colors of magic: Jund, Esper, Grixis, Naya and Bant. In the aptly-named Conflux, something is drawing theses shards together in a ring, forcing contact between the shards and causing natural disasters as the disparate shards find themselves growing increasingly and uncomfortably close together.
Our exclusive spoiler card is the Beacon Behemoth, who hails from the jungles of Naya, and we've got four more pooled cards after the jump for you M:TG fans!
So, the gift giving season is here... and I'm just as flustered with it as I am excited. I mean, I love getting gifts, but whenever anyone asks, I am at a loss to say what I might want. I mean, a man is the obvious choice for me... but I have one, and asking for two... well that would just be greedy!
Favorite things I'd like to see?
A subscription to Kobold Quarterly is high on my list... I mean, I have one, of course, but it can always be extended, right?
One of the new 4e Dungeons & Dragons books... I am still torn on the new edition, enough so that I haven't been buying everything that comes out. Also, the new books are expensive, so I am reluctant to shell out the big bucks for them. On the other hand, unlike many of my fellow grognards, I like the game, so the new Manual of the Planes or Draconomicon I: Chromatic Dragons might be nice...
On the Paizo side of things, the new Pathfinder system is gaining steam. In addition to their Adventure Paths (they are finishing up their third, so now is the time to get on board for the fourth, Legacy of Fire!), they have a dizzying array of products. One of the ones I haven't picked up yet and holds, frankly, a lot of attraction, is their Planet Stories line of books... yes, plain old non-rpg books. One of their best products is also currently free: the Beta playtest rules for the Pathfinder RPG, also sometimes referred to as 3.75 or 3.P - a Paizo spin on the OGL rules.
As for card games, I will stick with my very favorite... I still need to get my hands on a couple different decks for Killer Bunnies from Playroom entertainment.
For board games? I am still looking to get my hands on the new edition of Talisman.
What sort of gifts are you looking for? Have I missed a gem? Tell me soon... my man is demanding a list, or I will go without swag this year!
Greetings! I am happy to say my medical crap is now (finally) behind me so that I can start posting again. I want to start with a return to Game Of The Week, which lately has been more of a game of the month. My apologies. So on to it!
This week's Game of the Week is Wizard's Gambit. I discovered this game at GenCon Indy thanks to a good friend who recommended that I stop by the Gryphon Forge booth. I hadn't heard of this company before, frankly, and I had my doubts, but I found that the game play was pretty cool. Also, I'm all for some good non-collectible card games, since not all of us can afford to pump the regular funds into a game like that (yeah, I'm a recovering Magic: The Gathering addict).
Check behind the break for some more information on the game from the Gryphon Forge website.
With Magic: The Gathering set to expand its universe with the fivefold worlds of Shards of Alara this October, GayGamer and Velvet DiceBag are proud to host this exclusive spoiler card, Skeletonize, a flaming harbinger of death and eventual resurrection - in the enemy's hand. We're also sharing five other spoiler cards - after the jump - that each reflect the nature of one of Alara's sundered worlds.
What was long ago a single plane brimming with mana is now a sundered world of five realms, each divided along the lines of mana and with access to only three of the five colors of magic essence. Bant, Grixis, Jund, Esper and Naya represent five lands separated by magical alignment, each boasting an environment specialized to its mana color.
Make the jump to learn more about the Shards of Alara!
Greetings! I am currently a bit down because I wasn't at DragonCon (apparently the steampunk contingent stole the show--darn it I should have been there!), but that leaves me no excuse not to fill you in on the interesting things that happened this last week in our hobby!
• Chaosium released a sneak peek of its new product, Pulp Cthulhu, detailing one of its new occupations--the Reanimator.
• Wizards unveiled the Shards of Alara Orb of Insight for their new Magic: the Gathering set--write anything in the box and see how many times it will appear in the new cards!
• A new collectible miniatures game, Mutant Chronicles, is shipping now from Fantasy Flight Games.
• Games Workshop has a whole bunch of new Warhammer and Warhammer 40k stuff, including a new Dark Elf Battalion and bad-ass War Hydra, and a new 40k boxset that has everything you need to start playing the game--plus a new line of paints, Citadel Washes, that promise to make shading easier than ever before.
• Palladium's press release announced new products for the fall, including the Macross sourcebook for the Robotech RPG, and a new Zombie Apocalypse RPG called Dead Reign.
• A legendary Call of Cthulhu podcast has reached its end--YogSothoth.com's Bradford Players have completed Horror on the Orient Express!
More to come, of course, as the week progresses!
First of all, my apologies. I've had a number of medical issues over the past couple months that have made these game of the week posts sporadic at best. Now that the doctors are finally working on figuring out what's wrong, posts should start to be more frequent and cover something besides strictly 4th edition of Dungeons & Dragons... starting with this week's Game of the Week - a modern classic, Are You A Werewolf?
Okay, so it's a not particularly original take on the classic card game Mafia, which is played with a standard deck of playing cards. That doesn't make it any less fun. A few things: the game is short and sweet, skill counts (especially the ability to bluff), and you can play with a whole ton of people (the game maxes out at 15 players).
This isn't a game to play with a very small group as you need a certain critical mass - eight players is really just about as small as you can get, but its relatively short playtime and ability to accomodate large numbers of players makes it an ideal quick party game.
Sure, play Mafia instead if you want, but for a fantasy twist, check out Are You A Werewolf? from Looney Labs.
With the new Magic: the Gathering block beginning with Shards of Alara on October 3rd, 2008, the folks at Wizards have announced a few changes that will be a comin'.
• After a "tremendous amount of feedback," they have decided that they are releasing too many cards each year and card sets will be smaller. Shards of Alara will have 249 cards, and each of the next two sets in the block will have 145.
• The concept of rarity is also changing with the institution of the new level of rarity--the mythic rare, with not a gold expansion symbol but kind of a fiery red-orange expansion symbol. Intense indeed, these babies will replace the rare in about 1 out of 8 booster packs. Shards of Alara will have 15 mythic rares, 53 rares, 60 uncommons, 101 commons and 20 basic lands. The next two sets will have 10 mythic rares, 35 rares, 40 uncommons and 60 commons. The way foils work will stay the same, with foil mythic rares actually being more frequent than usual.
• Boosters will have 1 common card replaced with a basic land. Boosters will therefore consist of 1 rare (or mythic rare), 3 uncommons, 10 commons, 1 basic land, and 1 tip card or token.
• A new product is being introduced, the intro pack, acting as an experienced player's introduction to the new set's mechanics and setting (as opposed to, like, the internet), and will be the "best tool for introducing new players into the game." It'll include a 41-card precon deck with 1 premium foil rare and 1 non-foil rare, a booster pack of the current set, an insert with the new set's mechanics and info on the precon deck, and an insert to teach newbies how to play the game. There'll be 5 intro packs with each set, and SRP is $12.29. Theme decks, however, will be discontinued.
• Coming up in the fall is the Planeswalker's Guide, an extensive book about the new set--this one in particular is called The Planeswalker's Guide to Alara, coming out September 2nd, 2008. In the winter will be a new Planeswalker novel series, in the Spring the new block will get its own set, and the Fat Packs are getting a redesign with 6 instead of 8 boosters and a current novel instead of a set-based novel (boo! Boo!).
The week's articles at Magicthegathering.com will be dedicated to those changes. The first article is The Year of Living Changerously, in which Mark Rosewater begins to explain what went through WotC's heads. (Myself, I think most of the changes are pretty cool, besides the reduced set sizes. I mean, 330 cards in Mirage meant that there were that many more cards to love!)
Some pretty big stuff went down this week in this hobby of ours. The most noteworthy is probably the fact that many people got their copies of Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition early--and, as we've learned from the music industry time and time again, when one person gets an advance copy of something, everyone gets an advance copy of something. VelvetDiceBag does not promote piracy, however (unless it's of the Freeport or Stormwrack or 7th Sea varieties) --if you did indulge yourself and downloaded a copy and enjoyed it, we urge you to buy the real thing when it comes out. Pretty please?
On the Chaosium and Cthulhu side of things, I previously reported the first unlimited edition of the gorgeous Call of Cthulhu dice. Also of note is Chaosium's agreement with Sixtystone Press to create Call of Cthulhu supplements (a good move, considering they're focusing on their BRP-system line lately) , and the folks at Yog-Sothoth.com just released the new Yog Radio podcast, featuring an interview with S.T. Joshi. That made me really, really excited--my final English paper in Grade 12 was on the works of Lovecraft, and as anyone who's done academic research of Lovecraft will tell you, basically everything, every academic treatise and biography of Lovecraft, was written by S.T. Joshi and it's all excellent. Do yourself a favour, check out the interview, and read some of the ample works of Joshi online.
At Magicthegathering.com, it was Evil Twin week. There are a bunch of excellent articles up, my favourites being How to Sneak Overpowered Cards Past Development and The Evil That Designers Do.
Not much from White Wolf except for two (admittedly intriguing) previews of the new freehold-focused Changeling book, Lords of Summer, and a revelatory look-ahead at Hunter: the Vigil, a game that looks quite good but whose cover is marred by a sunglasses-at-night-wearing douche smack in the middle of it.
The Escapist had a really cool article about the nature of the roleplaying game as a modern phenomenon, called Dungeons & Dragons Owns the Future.
The new Palladium press release has details on T-Shirts, a new Rifts anthology, and their release plans for the summer. Mayfair games announced its plans for GenCon. (I'm not even going and I'm still excited!) A new RPG company debuted, Myth Merchant Press. The much-awaited documentary, The Gamers: Dorkness Rising, found a distributor in Anthem Pictures.
That's it for now! Hopefully next week we'll be back to a more regular posting schedule. Thanks for your patience!
Steve Jackson games has just announced the September release for their new Munchkin card game, Munchkin Booty. That's right--Pirates! Rumour has it that horrible accents (British, Spanish, Dutch or French) are a significant part of the game, a fact that by itself will probably warrant a buy from me. It will certainly go well with my copy of Munchkin Cthulhu.
So you've got the news about the Munchkin behind (sorry)... on the Munchkin front, there is some more good news, because the Munchkin board game, Munchkin Quest, is currently at printers, and it's a tile-growing dungeon-crawling good time for all.
And speaking of Munchkin Cthulhu, Steve Jackson Games has just released their first plush toy, the adorable-yet-horrifying Chibithulhu, a toy that even contains a special rule that'll help out in the aforementioned card game. If you can get over the eyelashes. Oh god, the eyelashes.
The foul past time of exam studying has become my only past time these days, so I have neglected to update you on what's going on in the tabletop gaming world this week. Sorry! To make it up for you, here's a mega-post of sorts with goings-on from a wide array of companies over the last few days.
• Chaosium, last week, announced that they have issued the Call of Cthulhu license to Super Genius Games, an interesting development since the latter company seems well poised to fulfill the gaps in the game by focusing on supplements that can be bought one afternoon and used that same night. On their part, Chaosium's website is now under construction, soon to become a full blown Basic Roleplaying System website since the corebook has just been released.
• At Wizards of the Coast, Magic: the Gathering has seen a lot of things happen to it. Preleases are in full force, which means that the whole Shadowmoor set has been spoiled to the public--a sortable card list and, for the first time, a complete visual spoiler. This is excellent, because the art is awesome. (Also a new devlopment in Shadowmoor: the UNtap symbol. It freaks me out. You can find videos thoroughly explaining the new mechanics--hybried, wither, persist, conspire and untap--here.)
• White Wolf announces a new World of Darkness game, Hunter: The Vigil. This makes me very happy because, unlike most, I really enjoyed Hunter: The Reckoning. The full-colour logo, in a lovely teal colour-scheme, can be seen here. Also, las week White Wolf expanded their foray into alternative publishing by means of their partnership with Lulu, raising the number of print-on-demand titles to include Mind's Eye Theatre: The Awakening, World of Darkness: Innocents, The Manual of Exalted Power: Abyssals, The Mandate of Heaven and The Imperfect Lotus. These can be bought here.
• Upper Deck Entertainment announced a Call of Duty Real-Time Card Game, where gameplay is fast-paced and players "simultaneously fire, take cover and move around the battlefield."
• In honour of the 25th anniversary of Warhammer (wow), Games Workshop has a limited edition Harry the Hammer miniature that can only be purchased this weekend, and they've also posted online the Warhammer Legendary Battle Rules that support armies of 5000 points or more.
As always, I'm gonna accompany this post with some Shadowmoor card art. Enjoy!
We here at the GayGamer castle were lucky enough to get some exclusive spoiler cards from the upcoming Shadowmoor expansion to Magic: The Gathering! Well, technically only the Furystoke Giant is exclusive - we share the wicked-looking Wound Reflection card with another, as-yet-unknown site.
As exciting as our pal the Furystoke is, he's just a taste of the Shadowmoor experience, in which the Aurora has changed Lorwyn into the inky Shadowmoor, a plane of eternal night filled with warped and twisted denizens - expect to see familiar races from Lorwyn, but with seriously altered allegiances and all kinds of new powers.
Even the game itself has gotten a bit twisted: over a third of Shadowmoor's 301 cards will sport hybrid mana costs (back again), and -1/-1 counters get a kick in the ass from Wither and Persist effects. When Shadowmoor launches, Magic fans will be able to travel to Shadowmoor via booster, tournament and fat packs as well as theme decks.
And girls who like girls who like breastplates!
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