Hot Stuff
Christie's, apparently, in 2003 sold a beautiful Ancient Roman green glass d20 (what, you thought we invented them?) , with a distinct and different symbol on each face. Scholars don't know what game it was used for, but we do.
Of course, it's XVMMCMXXV (17925) dollars, but this is the ulimate gamer bling and I'm sure there's at least one gamer who's filthy rich out there who snatched it up.
...Right? It had to be a gamer. Or else I might cry.
[Via: BoingBoing]
Whether grognards like myself like or hate the new edition (and there seems to be quite the mix), the fact remains that Wizards of the Coast is the big fish in the small pond of the role playing game industry. The flagship rpg product, the one everyone knows and everyone recognizes, is Dungeons & Dragons. As I mentioned in my last entry, I tried the game this past weekend with the introductory adventure and quickstart rules, having only the Players Handbook in hand. I'll discuss that experience later and in some detail because I think there are probably a lot of gaymers who are still in the process of making a decision on 4e.
Today I surrendered and bought the books - cancelling my online order (it was delayed in shipping until at least July 10th) - and buying the books from my friendly local gaming store (which, as I've said before, is not all that friendly, though at least the cashier is a hot little number). They kindly gave me a substantial discount as a longtime customer, for which I'm grateful, since the cost of the books is hurdle to starting in the new system. For what it's worth, while I always support my local gaming stores when I can, you can probably already find cheap copies on Ebay. Why? Because while I rather like a lot of aspects of the new edition... most particularly that I think my players have more fun playing it than 3.5... many others who had high hopes have not.
So if so many people hated it, why am I making it the game of the week? Because there must be some balance. For every person who has told me they hate 4e, I've also had someone tell me why they love it. It's not perfect, and thanks to Paizo, it doesn't need to be. Those who want to continue with the 3.5 system and rules that flow from that system can continue with Paizo's Pathfinder system, or just use 3.5 as is or with Monte Cook's book of his own house rules (which I featured here some time ago). For those who need the official system, who must have only what is endorsed by Wizards of the Coast - congratulations. I pronounce the system somewhat sound, playable, and fun. It may not be perfect, substituting streamlining of effects for flexibility in places, but it has its own qualities to recommend it, which I'll discuss in depth in the coming weeks in a new feature that will replace Scrying the 4e Crystal Ball.
This game will not be D&D for everyone. It slays sacred cows (magic missile can miss, and yes that just feels wrong to me, too), and it changes many aspects of the game. Wizards seem more playable at low levels than they were, fighters seem more playable at high levels than they were. Much of the game is now about the team rather than the character, and you'll have to work at making your character unique, because the rules will not do it for you. But I think, despite great early trepidation, that the game is a good one. Try it out if you can. If 3.5 is definitely your choice... think about trying Pathfinder. I'm still reading the alpha release of their rules, but they look like they're doing something interesting over at Paizo too.
With 4th edition of the new D&D game out, I felt a need this weekend to take the new rules for a spin, and not just because of World D&D Game Day on Saturday. Unfortunately, despite its participation in the day on an official level, no 4e gaming was going on at the nearest FLGS and the better one (which is slightly further away, hey gimme a break, gas is $4 a gallon) was full by the time I cornered the manager of the nearby game store to find out that indeed no 4e gaming was going to take place.
Fortunately, my regular gaming group meets on Sundays and agreed to do a test. I purchased Keep on Shadowfell just after its release and my gaming group (sans one player) gave it go. That gave us a group of five players, which is conveniently what the rules recommend (and also the number of pre-gens available). Saved from trying to figure out character creation over the weekend, I focused on learning the rules. Many of the changes came as no surprise, I have, after all, been reporting what little we've been able to learn for the past six months. I have a controversial opinion, I know, but frankly, while I love 3e and 3.5e, I think this game (so far) plays better for my group.
I'll give a full review tomorrow, but I think it's safe to say that 4e is D&D, but not necessarily the flavor of D&D that is right for everyone. I'll explain those sentiments tomorrow.
Today, June 7th, is the Worldwide Dungeons & Dragons Game Day! Hundreds of Friendly Local Gaming Stores all over the world (and even locations set up in Iraq and Afghanistan for serving military personnel) have a big action-packed day to celebrate the release of Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, so if you have a chance to drop by you'll probably have a blast.
I'm certainly picking up my own copy of the game sometime this weekend, and I'm still very optimistic. In not too long, we'll have a big VelvetDiceBag weigh-in post where we air out our opinions and you post yours!
In the past eight months or so (can you believe it's been that long?), I hope I've showcased a big variety of RPGs, showing that there was more to the hobby than D&D--tons and tons of games by small presses, medium-sized presses and even no presses at all that are well worth your attention and maybe even perfectly suited to your group. Nevertheless, D&D has a special place in my heart as my first RPG and I'm very excited--I hope some of that excitement rubs off on you guys!
*rub rub*
In a glorious return to Way-Out Wednesday, I'm going to be looking at a game I like so much that I can't help but grin like a madman when I hold it in my hands--Unknown Armies. See?
Atlas Games' Unknown Armies isn't as indie as most of the games featured in this space before (it's made by Atlas Games, after all), but it's so off-the-wall and in the indie spirit that it certainly warrants being here. The work of the inimitable Greg Stolze and John Tynes, Unknown Armies has a big following and praises are sung universally--it is the fourth highest-rated game of all time on the Rpg.net Game Index--again, completely warranted. It's really something special.
It's a horror game, at its core. A modern-day occult horror game where just about everything is sinister, bizarre, and just... neat. The two main kinds of characters are Adepts, magick-users who belong to bizarre modern-day schools of thought, and Avatars, people who align their entire lives to a universal archetype, thus gaining powers associated with that archetype.
The kinds of Adepts include Dipsomancers (who gain power by drinking and can only use magick while drunk, and can take the idea of the drunk getting away with anything and thereby cheat the rules of reality itself), Videomancers (who gain power by watching specific TV shows, lose it when they miss their shows, and bring TV program tropes into existence), Cliomancers (who harvest energy from famous locations and affect history and memory), Epideromancers (who gain power from hurting themselves and can then control the flesh of other people), Bibliomancers (who gain power by collecting books and play around with information and knowledge), Mechanomancers (who give up their memories to fuel their clockwork creations)--the list goes on, and on, each more intriguing than the last. (I haven't even mentioned the Pornomancers.)
Avatar archetypes include The Mother, The Savage, The MVP, The True King, The Messenger, The Mystic Hermaphrodite, The Woman That Everybody Can Have (Everybody But You), and just about anything else you can think of.
What's more, there are hundreds of fan-made Adept schools and Avatar Paths at the fantastic Unknown-Armies.com.
Even without going into the bizarre ways to do magic outside of schools, the multi-faceted setting with metaplot characters who are actually interesting, the fantastic passion and obsession-focused character creation, the cabal of magick-users working at McDonalds who infect their customers' food with magic that manifests to them later, the nifty dice mechanics, the Madness Meters that are known to be the best sanity/insanity system in the world of RPGs (outdoing even Call of Cthulhu), and the mind-blowingly good in-game fiction that can find its peer only in Nobilis--even without going into all of that, Unknown Armies seems pretty cool, right?
If you like modern-day settings, horror, off-the-wallness (to the extent that seeing the new car commercial with the sumo wrestlers washing a car in slow motion prompted my friend to say "this is SO Unknown Armies"), game fiction good enough to read for pleasure before bedtime, and maybe even a game that will change the way you see the world forever after you read it like all good art should, Unknown Armies is your game.
P.S. Hot gay action on page 23, accompanied by overnight body-changing and a god who looks like a seahorse.
P.P.S. PDF preview of the first 40 or so pages available here.
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!
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're bringing you a special edition of Scrying the 4e Crystal Ball today.
Discussions are raging across the various rpg boards concerning the news that there is a mutual exclusivity clause in the GSL. Now, no one has actually seen the GSL yet to say just how tight this little piece of writing is, but word from Clark Peterson of Necromancer Games, who has been in contact with Wizards of the Coast about the provision, is that it may be very tight indeed.
That said, we do know some things for sure from Linae and Scott, who gave up part of their weekends to post some responses to everyones' concerns:
- The new GSL will not permit a dual statted book.
- The new GSL will not allow a publisher to print both a 4e and a 3.5 edition of a product.
- The GSL will allow an update of existing OGL material to the GSL (though there may be a provision requiring the OGL version no longer be sold)
- The publishers who were given early access to the GSL were respected PRINT publishers. This was done, according to Scott, to allow for the greater lead time required for a print publisher to get something into the market place.
- The new starting date for the GSL precludes any non-wizards D&D system material for 4e this GenCon.
- The new GSL has some wording allowing use of the D&D branding itself... it's likely that it will be actual D&D branding with some sort of alternate logo that is only used by third party publishers.
In addition, Clark made one very important assertion that went unchallenged by the wizards folks, even though they responded directly to a lot of other misinterpretations:
- Printing something using the GSL requires a company wide switch to the GSL. It's a company by company choice (as Clark put it), not a publication by publication choice. This suggests that there is a clause in the GSL that causes the automatic revokation of the license if you subsequently print something using OGL.
I've read a lot of posts on a lot of messageboards to condense this all, but the bulk is from this forum thread at ENWorld.
GSL, for those who don't know, is a reference to the Game System License... a license that some in the industry, even die hard supporters of WotC, were beginning to feel was never going to be released.
Here's the relevant text from Dungeons & Dragons Insider:
Wizards of the Coast is pleased to announce that third-party publishers will be allowed to publish products compatible with the Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition game system under the new Dungeons & Dragons 4E Game System License (D&D 4E GSL). This royalty-free license will replace the former d20 System Trademark License (STL), and will have a System Reference Document (SRD) available for referencing permissible content.
The D&D 4E GSL will allow third-party publishers to create roleplaying game products in fantasy settings with the D&D 4th Edition rules, and publishers who register with WotC will be granted the right to use a version of the D&D logo that denotes the product as compatible with the D&D 4th Edition Roleplaying Game, in accordance with WotC's terms and conditions. The effective start date for sales of D&D 4E GSL publications will be October 1, 2008.
The license associated SRD will be available on June 6, 2008, at no cost. A small group of publishers received advanced notice and will receive these documents prior to June 6, at no cost, in order to prepare for publication of compatible materials by the effective start date. If you haven't already been contacted by WotC, you will be able to access the documents on the Wizards website beginning on June 6, 2008.
Wizards is also working on the details of a second royalty-free license, the d20 Game System License (d20 GSL). This license will allow third-party publishers to create roleplaying game products in non-fantasy settings with the 4E rules. The exact details for the d20 GSL will be released as they become available.
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.
The previews for Shadowmoor have been flowing fast at magicthegathering.com--here's a summary of what's been revealed thus far:
First of all, there's a Shadowmoor minisite.
Magic Arcana has had a bunch of art and release previews, including booster packaging, the Fat Pack, theme decks, a wallpaper, Tokens, another wallpaper, and a Fat Pack wallpaper.
In terms of articles, there's an introduction to the dark fairytale of a setting that is Shadowmoor, the first card previews, an article about a very angry troll (that can gain +20/+20 when circumstances are right), an article on the tribes-but-not-tribal nature of the set, an article about a card that combines aggro and disruption, an article about monocolor hybrid costs in which a card can cost (2/B)(2/B)(2/B)--anywhere from three to six mana, more previews, an article about how Shadowmoor twists ideas previously seen in Lorwyn, an article about the new keyword "Conspire," and an article about a card that will really help out late-game Black/Red aggro.
Of course, the most important things are the card previews themselves--here's a site with all of them so far. There's a scary card that instantly brings all copies of itself back into play, there's the aforementioned huge-getting troll, there's tons of cards centred around -1/-1 counters, a buncha muncha cruncha scarecrows, a creature that makes every other creature a 1/1, a two-mana two-card-drawing card that has the expense of a -1/-1 counter on one of your creatures, and more. Interesting set, certainly. Keep checking the site everyday if you want more!
And girls who like girls who like breastplates!
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Are you the werewolf?
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