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The blog posts of Black Gate Managing Editor Howard Andrew Jones and Editor John O’Neill

Kobold Quarterly Magazine Goes Down Fighting

Kobold Quarterly Magazine Goes Down Fighting

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kobold-quarterly-fall-2012-smallThe terrific gaming magazine Kobold Quarterly — which we featured here just two weeks ago — has ceased publication. The final issue is #23, Fall 2012.

Publisher and editor Wolfgang Baur posted this announcement on Friday:

It’s a fact that in every fantasy roleplaying game… a kobold’s life is short. They’re wily and quick, but they have few hit points. Sooner or later they go down — fighting. That day has come for Kobold Quarterly magazine. After five years of publication, Shelly and I are closing the doors on the little fanzine that could.

I always hoped that Kobold Quarterly would someday be my full-time gig, but it was not to be. My sincere thanks go out to everyone who contributed to the magazine, starting with our stalwart subscribers, advertisers, authors, and artists. Thanks also to those who bought only an issue or two; for us, every sale was crucial…

And now, as adventurers do, we will gather in the tavern to hoist mugs of ale and talk about the monsters we slew and the treasures we won. And then we will begin planning and scheming for the next adventure. Kobolds might be easy to knock down individually, you see, but they always come in big numbers. The kobold crew will keep serving you with free articles, the free Courier newsletter, Kobold Press adventures and sourcebooks, and other projects.

Subscribers are being offered the option of a 150% refund in Kobold Store credit, or a 100% refund via PayPal or paper check. Contributors are being assured that even though the magazine is folding, Kobold Press is still going strong, and articles scheduled to appear in future issues may be picked up for other Kobold Press publications such as the Pathfinder New Paths line, Midgard Adventures, and other new releases.

Kobold Press will continue to publish the free Kobold Courier e-newsletter, as well as big commercial releases such as the The New Paths PDFs, Player’s Guides for Midgard, and two top-secret projects in the works for 2013. Read more about the excellent Midgard in Wolfgang’s recent Black Gate post.

While we know that the only constant in the gaming industry is change, the loss of Kobold Quarterly is a real blow to the field. It was an excellent magazine that captured the spirit and excitement of the best of the early gaming magazines, and it will be missed.

Vintage Bits: In Search of the Lost Black Crypt

Vintage Bits: In Search of the Lost Black Crypt

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black-crypt-smallSome 20 years ago, shortly after I graduated from the University of Illinois, I bought my first home computer. It was an Amiga 2000, essentially the same as the entry-level Amiga 500 but with a hard drive. The hobby computing industry — which is now dead — was booming in the early 90s, and there were thousands of fun things the dedicated hobbyist could do with a decent home computer. Video editing, BASIC programming, ray trace imaging, indexing Chicken Cacciatore recipes… and if you were cutting edge enough to buy a modem, you could even log into BITNET and post on those electronic bulletin boards everyone was talking about. Crazy.

All of that was very interesting. But I shelled out my $1,500 bucks for one reason, and one reason only: to play games. And that’s exactly what I did.

I played the role playing games I’d been aching to try out in my last year of grad school, while feverishly finishing my Ph.D. thesis: Pool of Radiance, Bard’s Tale, Dragon Wars, many others. I played late into the night, before dragging my weary butt into work at Amoco Oil the next morning. It was an exhausting and emotionally draining lifestyle but, let’s face it, those dungeons weren’t going to clean themselves out. Countless terrified townspeople in tiny electronic villages were counting on me, and I wasn’t going to let them down.

About a year after I bought my Amiga, in March 1992, Electronic Arts published one of the most acclaimed role playing games ever made for that platform: Black Crypt, the first release from Raven Software, future makers of the popular Hexen, Soldier of Fortune, Quake 4, and Call of Duty: Modern Warware 3. Inspired by the legendary game Dungeon Master, another famous Amiga title, Black Crypt was nothing less than a vast trap-filled dungeon crammed with monsters, secret passages, hidden switches, and magical loot. The graphics were gorgeous, and the wonderful sound effects — the distant clanking of trapdoors, odd footsteps, and telltale sounds of the teleporters — immersed players like never before, and made you want to play with the sound cranked up and the lights turned down low.

I played the first few levels and was mesmerized. Then, in November 1992, I got married and moved to Belgium, leaving my beloved Amiga behind. I thought about the game many times in the intervening years, as I returned to the States, got a job at a tiny software company, worked on Internet Explorer 1.0, and was at ground zero of the Internet revolution that transformed the entire country. Some time during those turbulent years, my Amiga was moved to the basement, where it quietly sits today, collecting dust.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been on a quest to find and complete Black Crypt. It’s a quest filled with exactly the kind of twists and turns you’d expect for a man determined to find a long-lost crypt, spoken of only in half-forgotten legend. While critics raved, Black Crypt was released when the Amiga was already in decline, and was never successful enough to be ported to any other platform. It vanished quickly, both from store shelves and collective memory. As I search for the right magical tools that will allow me to open the crypt, I’m well aware that it’s not going to be easy.

But that’s okay. After twenty years, one of the things I’ve learned is that true joy isn’t always in the destination. It’s in the journey.

Our most recent Vintage Bits articles were Sword of Aragon, Lordlings of Yore, and Battletech: The Crescent Hawk’s Inception.

The Top 40 Black Gate Posts in September

The Top 40 Black Gate Posts in September

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robotechThey told us you can’t fill up the Internet, but in September, we thought we’d give it a shot. And so Scott Taylor wrote about his lifetime love of giant robots, Mark Rigney examined the genre ghetto, and Bradley Beaulieu told us about his surprise date with Amber Benson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Pat Rothfuss, and Terry Brooks.

Howard Andrew Jones commented on the World Science Fiction convention and Death and the Book Deal, Sarah Avery told us how to use our proud geek heritage to survive The Scarlet Letter, and Jason Thummel invited you to Self-Publishing 101. And that’s just the top seven articles.

Here the complete list of the Top 40 September blog entries at Black Gate according to you, our readers.

  1. Art of the Genre: The art of Robotech and a lifelong affair with Giant Robots
  2. Genre 2012: The Ghetto Remains the Same
  3. My surprise date with Amber Benson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Pat Rothfuss, and Terry Brooks
  4. Worldcon Wrap-up
  5. Teaching and fantasy literature: How to use your Proud Geek Heritage to Survive the Scarlet Letter
  6. Death and the book deal
  7. Self-publishing 101
  8. Boxed set of the year: American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s
  9. Dredd Movie Review
  10. John Myers Myers Silverlock and the Commonwealth of Letters
  11. Teaching and Fantasy Literature: Meeting them Halfway
  12. Dave Sim Announces He’s Ending Glamourpuss and Leaving Comics
  13. Genevieve Valentine Comments on Readercon Harassment in Things you Should Know About the Fallout
  14. Teaching and Fantasy Literature
  15. Black Gate to Publish Online Fiction Starting Sunday September 28

    16. …

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2012 World Fantasy Award Winners Announced

2012 World Fantasy Award Winners Announced

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osama-lavie-tidharThe winners of the 2012 World Fantasy Awards have been announced at the World Fantasy Convention in Toronto, Ontario.

This is the first World Fantasy Convention I’ve missed since 2009 and I don’t like to think about how much fun I missed. So let’s just get this over with.

Novel

  • Osama, Lavie Tidhar (PS Publishing)

Novella

  • “A Small Price to Pay for Birdsong,” K.J. Parker (Subterranean, Winter 2011)

Short Story

  • “The Paper Menagerie,” Ken Liu (F&SF, March-April 2011)

Anthology

  • The Weird,  edited by  Ann & Jeff VanderMeer (Tor)

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Adventure in the Spaceways with Perry Rhodan: The Cosmic League

Adventure in the Spaceways with Perry Rhodan: The Cosmic League

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perry-rhodan-the-cosmic-leagueI’m willing to bet most of you have no idea who Perry Rhodan is.

Believe it or not, Perry Rhodan is the most ambitious future history ever written. Since its creation in 1961, over 3,000 Perry Rhodan novels have been published; the series has been translated into half a dozen languages and spawned at least one movie and a popular computer game, The Immortals of Terra.

Why haven’t you heard of him? Probably because the last English-language Perry Rhodan novel, #118 The Shadows Attack, was published by Ace Books in 1977. The English-language version was the brainchild of Forrest J. Ackerman, who hired his wife Wendy to do most of the translations. The series has continued in its native Germany, where it is published weekly.

I bring all this up because A) Perry Rhodan practically introduced me to science fiction, at the tender age of eleven, and B) I recently purchased Perry Rhodan: The Cosmic League, a two-player card game from Z-Man games that makes use of the Perry Rhodan license in a fast-paced game of interstellar trading and politics:

A newly colonized star system, populated by different peoples… Mysterious remains of age-old technology… Orbital stations to organize the trade between the worlds… and you and your spaceship right in the middle of it all…

Discover the Ambourella system with all its opportunities. Fight the adversities of gravity and do business with the planets. Your are the captain of a spaceship transporting goods and passengers. Invest your earnings early in valuable technologies and thus strive to become the most wealthy merchant of the Cosmic League.

Perry Rhodan doesn’t actually appear in the game, but it does draw on the rich backdrop of the Cosmic League. It comes with 60 technology and interventions cards, 6 planet tokens, 30 different cargo cards, and 2 spaceships. The average playing time is under half an hour. It’s a fairly simple game at heart, and the tie-in with Perry Rhodan is fairly light, but nonetheless it brought back a lot of great memories of 1970s pulp science fiction.

Perry Rhodan: The Cosmic League was published by Z-Man Games in 2007. It retails for $24.99, but I bought my copy new online for around 10 bucks.

Keep up on Fantasy Gaming with Kobold Quarterly

Keep up on Fantasy Gaming with Kobold Quarterly

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kobold-quarterly-fall-2012-smallIn the early days of the adventure gaming hobby, the field was pretty diverse, with a healthy assortment of successful RPGs and board games. Much like today, as a matter of fact.

One major difference, however, was that each of the major titles was supported with its own magazine: Dragon (for D&D and other TSR games), Different Worlds (Runequest, Call of Cthulhu), Sorcerer’s Apprentice (Tunnels and Trolls), White Dwarf (Warhammer), Space Gamer (The Fantasy Trip), The Journal of the Traveller’s Aid Society (Traveller), and many others. Board gamers, too, weren’t overlooked on the magazine rack, with Nexus (Star Fleet Battles), Ares (SPI’s sci-fi games), The General (Avalon Hill), and others.

With the exception of White Dwarf, all those magazines are dead today.

And I miss them. Many were good, and a handful — including The Space Gamer and Different Worlds — were excellent. They kept us up-to-date on rapid market changes, talked-up overlooked games, and generally kept the level of excitement high around the whole industry.

I never expected the era of the specialized gaming magazine to return. For one thing, I know what it takes to keep a magazine alive these days (a series of miracles).

But Wolfgang Baur’s Kobold Quarterly has changed my mind.

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The Force is With Disney

The Force is With Disney

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star-wars-poster-small1By now, most of you have heard that Disney has purchased Lucasfilm — the studio that produced Star Wars, Indiana Jones, and many other SF and fantasy properties — for over $4 billion. The deal was very similar to Disney’s acquisition of Marvel three years ago.

Prominent among the headlines was the news that Disney and Lucasfilm are already hard at work on Star Wars VII, aiming for a 2015 release, and that they also plan to produce Episodes VIII and IX. Walt Disney chairman Bob Iger announced that they expect to “release a new Star Wars feature film every two to three years.” If this is all news to you, Entertainment Weekly has a lengthy article here, including a 5-minute video in which you can hear George Lucas detail his current work on future films with unnamed writers.

“We could go on making Star Wars for the next 100 years,” Lucas says.

Okay. While part of me is appalled to see Lucasfilm, perhaps the most successful and creative independent studio of the last century, get swallowed up by an all-devouring entertainment conglomerate, that part has been roundly shouted down by my inner twelve-year-old, who desperately wants more Star Wars movies.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Do I want Star Wars movies if they’re ground out on a schedule by a soulless corporation interested only in profit?

You know, I kinda do.

I’ve got nothing against corporations. Disney’s done pretty well by Marvel, far as I can see — and Pixar, now that I think about it (Disney bought Pixar from Steve Jobs in 2006). As for profit, the neat thing about profitable franchises is that they can attract talent. Look at Batman, Iron Man, and The Avengers.

And finally, I’m a fan of serial fiction. I know that properties can pass out of the hands of their creator, and land safely — especially pulp properties. That’s the process that brought us Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, Star Trek IV, and the tenth regeneration of Dr. Who.

So while I expect to see a lot of debate in the fan press, I don’t expect to be part of it. Instead, I’ll be in line early in 2015, anxious to see the new Star Wars film. Even if it’s terrible, I won’t be too worried. Disney will keep trying. When you pay $4 billion for something, you tend to treat it right.

Robots versus Musketeers: The Last Musketeer by Jason

Robots versus Musketeers: The Last Musketeer by Jason

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the-last-musketeer-smallI haven’t read anything by the Norwegian cartoonist Jason before, but I’ve been intrigued for a while. So last week I ordered a copy of Isle of 100,000 Graves from Amazon.com. For a while I had The Last Musketeer in my cart as well — I didn’t know anything about it, but the cover looked cool.

Now pay attention, because this is one of the dangers of online shopping that no one talks about. I’ve never wandered by the counter at Barnes & Noble and accidentally purchased something, for example. But apparently, I forgot to take The Last Musketeer out of my cart, ’cause it showed up with the rest of my order. Whoops.

Now, Amazon has a very forgiving return policy. But to take advantage of it, you have to do stuff. Not the least of which is actually return the item in question. That’s a lot harder to do when it has both a Musketeer and a robot on the cover. You try it.

Anyway, now I have a copy of The Last Musketeer. I read it today, and quite enjoyed it.

Athos, one of the original members of Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, is living a wasted existence as a drunk and a bum in modern Paris, when the city is attacked by ‘laser blasts” originating from the planet Mars. In fine pulp fashion, Athos tracks down a pair of ray-gun toting invaders wandering the city, defeats them with his trusty rapier, and forces the surviving Martian to take him to his rocket ship, where they blast off for the alien planet (one of the running gags in the strip is that Athos has no clue what planet he’s on).

It goes without saying that the comic celebrates all the conventions of 1930s-era pulp science fiction, right down to the goofy alien costumes, stubby rockets, and giant cast-iron video screens. There’s no explanation for how an 1840s-era French Musketeer is still alive in modern Paris, and none is needed. This comic has one audience: those who want to see Athos the Musketeer battle robots on the sands of Mars. If that’s not you, don’t put it in your Amazon cart (even by accident).

But if it is you, I think you’ll have a good time. My one criticism is that the dialog seemed oddly wooden; I put the blame for that mostly on Kim Thompson’s translation. Perhaps I’ve just gotten spoiled by the elegant and frequently hilarious translations in modern manga, especially Fairy Tail and the brilliant Fullmetal Alchemist. But it seemed the crisp and subtle artwork demanded crisp and subtle dialog, and that wasn’t always the case.

The Last Musketeer was published by Fantagraphics in January, 2008. It is 48 pages in full color, and priced at $12.95.

Discover the Secret History of World War Two in Achtung! Cthulhu

Discover the Secret History of World War Two in Achtung! Cthulhu

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achtung-cthulhu-smallOn Tuesday, I talked about the latest crop of exciting fantasy games I’ve discovered, with the help of The Paris Fashion Week of Fantasy Games. They included recent supplements for CthulhuTech, the game of Cthulhu versus giant robots, and Incursion, an intriguing mash-up of BattleTech and Squad Leader.

Cthulhu, zombies, Nazi super-science, occult experiments… you’d think these two games alone would keep me completely content for the next decade. And they might have, too, if I hadn’t just discovered Modiphius Entertainment’s Achtung! Cthulhu.

Before you accuse me of having the attention span of a three-year-old, I’d like to point out that Achtung! Cthulhu combines all that stuff in one game.

Did you ever want to see what would happen if Sgt. Rock went toe-toe-toe with the minions of Nyarlathotep in Nazi Germany? If Indiana Jones stumbled on a nest of shuggoths in Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest at Berchtesgaden?

These are rhetorical questions; of course you did.

Achtung! Cthulhu is a tabletop roleplaying campaign that pits elite Allied soldiers against Chthonians, Deep Ones, Dimensional Shamblers, the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath, and other creatures from H.P. Lovercraft’s Cthulhu mythos. It is fully compatible with Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu, and versions are in the works for Realms of Cthulhu (for Savage Worlds), Pelgrane Press’s Trail of Cthulhu, and the PDQ Core Rules from Atomic Sock Monkey.

The first series of adventures is called “Zero Point,” and so far two chapters have been published: Three Kings and Heroes of the Sea, both written by Black Gate‘s own Sarah Newton. The overall series is under the direction of Chris Birch.

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Arnold Schwarzenegger Signs on to Return as Conan in The Legend Of Conan

Arnold Schwarzenegger Signs on to Return as Conan in The Legend Of Conan

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schwarzenegger-conanWell, this is a day I never thought I’d see.

Deadline is reporting that ex-Governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has signed on to appear in a fourth Conan film, set for release Summer 2014 from Universal Pictures. It will be produced by Fredrik Malmberg, CEO of Paradox Entertainment (which controls the Conan property), and writer and producer Chris Morgan (The Fast And The Furious, Wanted). Morgan is credited with the screen story and may write the script; Deadline describes this as a “dream project” for the producer.

Schwarzenegger released this comment to the press yesterday:

I always loved the Conan character and I’m honored to be asked to step into the role once again. I can’t wait to work with Universal and the great team of Fredrik Malmberg and Chris Morgan to develop the next step of this truly epic story.

Schwarzenegger appeared in Conan the Barbarian (1982) and the truly terrible Conan the Destroyer (1984). Games of Thrones star Jason Momoa took a turn as Robert E. Howard’s barbarian in last year’s Conan the Barbarian, one of the biggest bombs of the year.

Few details about the new version have been released, but one imagines the 65-year old Schwarzenegger will approach this one a little differently.

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