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Author: Andrew Zimmerman Jones

Andrew Zimmerman Jones is the Physics Guide at About.com and author of String Theory for Dummies. His work, which includes fiction as well as non-fiction, has appeared in Black Gate, Pink Floyd and Philosophy, Heroes and Philosophy, Abyss and Apex, and various other publications.
Modular: Boldly Go … with Star Trek Adventures RPG Playtest

Modular: Boldly Go … with Star Trek Adventures RPG Playtest

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A Starfleet away team encounters some complications in Star Trek Adventures RPG.

A Starfleet Away Team encounters some complications in the Star Trek Adventures RPG

Though Star Trek is one of the most popular franchises in science fiction and fantasy, it’s been over a decade since there has been a tabletop roleplaying game in production set in the Star Trek universe. That’s about to change in 2017 with the release of Star Trek Adventures from Modiphius Games.

The game is currently in development, but if you’re interested in checking it out, you don’t have to wait until 2017. Modiphius has just begun an open alpha playtest, allowing people across the world to begin playing games set in the world, test out the rules system, and provide feedback in time for the final design of the game.

Last Friday, I was able to get together a group to do a trial run of the first open playtest adventure. Though there’s no telling exactly which mechanics will stay the same through the playtest process, what is clear at this very early stage is that Modiphius is putting together a game that captures the feel of Star Trek in a tabletop roleplaying game.

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Tabletop Terror: The Dread House Kickstarter

Tabletop Terror: The Dread House Kickstarter

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The Dread HouseI have previously discussed the great horror-themed supplements that Paizo is putting out for the Pathfinder RPG, but they aren’t alone in this. With the advent of digital publishing and crowdfunding sources like Kickstarter, there’s an array of new, independent publishers who are finding under-served niches in the gaming industry and creating projects to serve them.

One of these current Kickstarters, The Dread House by Hammerdog Games, is currently fully funded and building toward its initial stretch goals. It has some really unique features:

  • A 128-page hardcover (or digital) adventure/setting book of a haunted house, containing adventures for the Dungeons & Dragons (5e), Pathfinder, and Call of Cthulhu roleplaying games, including multiple possible time periods within these games.
  • Rules for powerful new creatures, including the Dread Ghost.
  • Optional Fear, Sanity, and Soul Point rules.
  • Fictional “ghost stories” written by Kevin Andrew Murphy and Richard Lee Byers.
  • A set of haunted house tiles, matching the maps within the adventure book.
  • Sets of room decoration miniatures, including furniture pieces such as beds, bookcases, bathtubs, and, yes, even a couple of privies!
  • Additions of more adventures, miniatures, and tiles as stretch goals are reached.

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Tabletop Terror: Betrayal at the House on the Hill

Tabletop Terror: Betrayal at the House on the Hill

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Betrayal at House on the HillI was the only gamer geek in my family growing up. We played Monopoly, Clue, Risk, and so on, the staple games of the twentieth-century American experience, brought to you by Milton-Bradley, but my mother wasn’t a fan. She and my grandmother both tended more toward word games like Scrabble and card games, particularly Rummy variants. I became an avid Solitaire player early on. And we had an Atari, of course, then a Nintendo. So I was a gamer from an early age, but not a board gamer.

From high school and through college, I pretty much abandoned board games in favor of roleplaying games. Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (2nd edition) at first, but eventually I became engrossed in the World of Darkness system from White Wolf Games (now published by Onyx Path Publishing).

Board games had completely fallen off my radar by the time I got out of college and began actively adulting. Board games, after all, were for kids, right? In the age of roleplaying games and video games, including an array of online roleplaying games, surely there was no way a board game could be nearly as engaging, nearly worth the time commitment to play it.

It was Betrayal at House on the Hill (Amazon) that dispelled that illusion, showing me what board gaming had become while I hadn’t been paying attention.

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Tabletop Terror: Pathfinder Edition

Tabletop Terror: Pathfinder Edition

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Pathfinder Occult AdventuresHumans hate to be frightened … except when we love it. There’s a small, sinister part of our brains that love terror and menace, not in real life so much as in our entertainment. This shows up regularly in our fiction and films, of course, as shelves are stocked with horror and thriller novels, as well as slasher flicks and suspenseful films and television series (some of which, I hear, even feature zombies).

Over this month leading up to Halloween, I’ll be focusing on how this horror element manifests itself in some great tabletop games which, among other things, can add immense fun to the Halloween holiday seas. (Am I the only one who celebrates all month long?)

To begin, I’d like to focus on some recent releases from one of my favorite RPG systems: Pathfinder RPG. While there has never been a shortage of monsters in the Pathfinder world of Golarion, over the last year they have had two major releases that really up the ante on the terror quotient, by introducing dynamic new game mechanics related to exploring these horrors. These manuals, together with their current Lovecraftian-themed horror Adventure Path series Strange Aeons [Paizo, Amazon], means that if you want to dive directly into a world full of terror and occult mysteries, you’ve got everything at your disposal to do so.

Occult Adventures

Released in August of 2015, Occult Adventures [Paizo, Amazon] formally introduces a psychic-based magical system into the Pathfinder RPG. These powers draw from the internal mental powers of the individual (or other individuals), rather than from the sources that fuel arcane or divine magic, and they provide a wealth of new approaches to magic to mix things up for people who have been playing wizards and clerics for several decades. In addition to six new psionics-based occult classes, and a variety of archetypes to offer psionic variations on existing classes, it introduces psychic magic, various new occult rules and mechanics, and occult-related equipment and magical items.

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I Am Not a Serial Killer Film Drops (Someplaces) Tomorrow

I Am Not a Serial Killer Film Drops (Someplaces) Tomorrow

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i-am-not-a-serial-killer-poster-2I am not particularly active on Twitter lately, but today I had a bit of time and hopped on, only to see the following headline shared by Dan Wells:

Retro-horror mashup ‘I Am Not a Serial Killer’ has an unexpectedly warm and fuzzy side

The tweet included a link to an LA Times review of the film I Am Not a Serial Killer which, according to IMDB, is set to release tomorrow, on August 26. Another review, over at the A.V. Club, proclaims “Psychopaths are people too.”

Despite being fond of Wells’ horror novel of the same name, I had no idea this film was on the horizon, and am definitely pleased to see it getting initial praise. If you want to really get a taste for what to expect, I suggest the fantastic trailer for it. (If you want to see the movie, check the bottom of this article for links, which I’ll update if I find more online availability after it is released. Feel free to skip there, if you have seen enough and want to avoid spoilers.)

The movie is based on the novel of the same name, which has gone on to spark a number of sequels featuring the main character, teenage John Cleaver, who is also a diagnosed psychopath. John’s fear is that his psychopathic urges will get the better of him, and that he will lose control of himself. To prevent this, he studies serial killers intently and has developed a series of rules that are designed to maintain his veneer of normalcy. One of the rules shown in the trailer, for example, is that when he feels an urge to kill someone, he instead compliments them. (A tip that is also helpful when maneuvering social media.)

John works in his family’s mortuary, which gives him some release for his interest in death. But he gets more than he bargains for when a series of murders in his quiet down prove to be the work of an actual serial killer. John’s expertise in this area leads him to discover who the serial killer is, and it turns out the police are not equipped to deal with the menace. In attempting to deal with things the “right” way, John finds events slowly becoming worse. He is forced to step up, breaking his own rules, and slowly getting in touch with his own darkness in order to combat the killer that threatens his community.

And that’s when things start getting really bad.

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GenCon: The Pathfinder Post (featuring Starfinder)

GenCon: The Pathfinder Post (featuring Starfinder)

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StarFinderFor years, the publisher Paizo has been one of the major presences at GenCon. I still remember years ago (2009, I believe) coming upon their booth and seeing a pile of hardcover books for their new (at the time) Pathfinder RPG Core Rulebook (now available in paperback, as well). I didn’t realize at the time that it was transforming the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons into a completely new and improved system of mechanics, and how many hours I would spend in the years to come pouring over their manuals, supplements, and novels.

Though they had some new releases this year, I was really interested in getting more information about their big 2017 release, the science fantasy game Starfinder RPG. We covered this when it was originally announced back in May, but a lot of questions were left open.

I sat down with James Sutter, the Creative Director of Starfinder, and author of two Pathfinder Tales novels, Death’s Heretic and The Redemption Engine. He is also continuing his work as the editor of the Pathfinder Tales line of books. Together with the work as the new Creative Director of Starfinder, this means it may be hard to fit in the writing of a third novel, but as a fan I’ll keep my fingers crossed. For now, he’s definitely got his hands full in bringing Starfinder RPG into the world.

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GenCon Update: Day 1, Part 2 – Gaming Sequels and Expansions

GenCon Update: Day 1, Part 2 – Gaming Sequels and Expansions

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ImplodingKittensThe Best Four Days of Gaming have passed. I began my 2016 GenCon coverage with an earlier discussion of a handful of new and upcoming games. There will be more of those to come, as there was no shortage of new games worthy of attention, but a lot of great games at GenCon this year weren’t entirely new, they were either expansions to existing games, or sequels or variants.

Not all of these games are quite available to the public yet. For example, the wildly popular card game Exploding Kittens (Amazon) had copies of its first expansion, Imploding Kittens, available. The expansion featured only 20 new cards to the game, including several new game mechanics and allowing for a 5-player game. The size of the expansion package is because it also included a human-sized “cone of shame,” to be used on the first person who forgets that the “Reverse” card has been played. It is unclear whether this highly-amusing feature will be part of the public release of the expansion.

And yes, some potty-humor aside, this expansion falls in the “Safe for Work” category. (The core game of Exploding Kittens has a NSFW edition.)

So I’ll cover a mix of games and, when possible, link you to information on how to acquire those that are available.

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GenCon Update: Day 1, Part 1 – New Games

GenCon Update: Day 1, Part 1 – New Games

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Pikachu shows up at GenCon 2016
Pikachu shows up at GenCon 2016

The Best Four Days in Gaming has come to Indianapolis, and again I’ve made my way into the dragon’s den to seek out new and interesting games. The scope of GenCon has definitely expanded over the decade or so that I have been attending and covering it, largely swallowing up downtown Indianapolis. This year, the Lucas Oil Stadium used by the Indianapolis Pacers has become the newest participant, becoming home to the popular “True Dungeon” live dungeon crawl adventure (which, one of these years, I will actually participate in). Even the types of games have expanded. Though in the past, Pokemon has had an incredibly sparse presence at GenCon, two giant inflatable Pikachu’s dangling from the ceiling have indicated a change in that trend.

In addition to the convention expanding in size, the number of games has become truly dizzying. The game company iEllo, best known for their breakaway hit, the monster-ravages-city game King of Tokyo (and its sequel King of New York), hosted a party on Thursday evening that I was fortunate enough to be invited to, and I ended up sitting next to Eric Summerer of The Dice Tower podcast. He discussed just the sheer difficulty generated by the volume of games being produced, and how it affects not just individual game consumers, but also those of us who spend some portion of our time trying to make sense of which games to discuss. What is the best way to present information about quality games, when the general quality across the industry has become so high and there are so many publishers seeking to get the word out on their new products?

One overwhelming trend in the gaming industry is expansions and sequel games, and that’s going to be the focus of my “part 2” review. For now, I’m going to focus on brand new games, as I think they deserve a bit more attention. And by “new games” I mean brand new games. There are some fantastic new games in the Legendary series from Upper Deck, for example, but since they largely apply an existing game mechanic, I’m counting them among the sequels. Definitely watch for that.

Now, on to some of the new and upcoming games …

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Pathfinder Goes to the Stars (and Other Announcements)

Pathfinder Goes to the Stars (and Other Announcements)

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starfinderThe dividing line between fantasy and science fiction can be difficult to define. I’ve been on convention panels on the subject a few times, at both ConFusion in Detroit and Windycon in Chicago, and have been in the audience of even more of them, but never once have I seen a group of people fully agree on where that diving line is, or even that such a definition exists. The genre is so fluid, including settings with science so fantastic and magical systems so dogmatic that the dividing line seems impossible to lay out. Many of us are fans of both and always have been, though perhaps we appreciate science fiction and fantasy for different reasons, regardless of how we define them.

This weekend, at PaizoCon, the creators of the Pathfinder RPG announced that they would be happily dancing along this boundary with the new Starfinder RPG. With the Starfinder RPG Core Rulebook slated for an August 2017 release date, it looks like this will create whole spacefaring options set in the distant future of the Pathfinder setting, as described in the announcement blog post:

Starfinder is set in Golarion’s solar system, but far in a possible future—one in which the gods have mysteriously spirited Golarion away to an unknown location, and refuse to answer questions about it. In its place, the cultures of that world have evolved and spread throughout the solar system, especially to a vast space platform called Absalom Station. Gifted access to a hyperspace dimension by an ascended AI deity, the residents of the system suddenly find themselves with the ability to travel faster than light, and the race is on to explore and colonize potentially millions of worlds. But there are horrors out there in the darkness…

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Thieves Can: A review of the A Tale of the Kin series

Thieves Can: A review of the A Tale of the Kin series

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AmongThievesFantasy has a wide range of heroic archetypes, from the classic sword-wielding warrior to the wand-waving wizard, but I’ve always been fond of the characters that have at least a touch of the rogue in them. I’m pretty sure that over my decades of roleplaying, the number of characters I’ve played who could pick a lock probably outweighed those who could kick down the door by a factor of about two. From Aladdin to Bilbo, heroes that rely on skill, cleverness, and deftness over brute force have always appealed to me.

Despite that, though, I’ve rarely been drawn to stories explicitly about the criminal underworld, whether it be in fantasy or real-world fiction like The Godfather or The Sopranos. Fights over which particular thief or murderer can get the upper hand over his rival thieves and murderers have never captivated me that strongly.

That’s part of the reason why I was so surprised with how much I loved Among Thieves (Amazon), the first book in the A Tale of the Kin series of fantasy by Douglas Hulick.

“The Kin” from the series title is the underground criminal society of Hulick’s world, and it’s this rich and vibrant society that he has built that drew me in as much as anything else about the story. This isn’t a story about just some criminals having adventures, but about a people who, as a society, are as thoroughly developed as most cultures that an author has developed for their fantasy series. And, of course, as a criminal underworld, there’s also a larger society in which they exist and operate, and that society is itself fully realized.

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