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Heroscape Wave 11

Heroscape Wave 11

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Heroscape’s 11th wave arrived the other day and some valiant play testers stepped up to try out the new pieces with me.

wave-11Some of you might have missed the battle recap of an epic Heroscape battle posted at Eric Knight’s blog; these play tests weren’t nearly as involved, but they were a lot of fun.

As you might remember from my last Heroscape review, a wave is a new issue of figures in four packages. This one is titled Champions of the Forgotten Realms, in reference to the Dungeons and Dragons Forgotten Realms campaign world, which ties into the most recent Heroscape expansion set.

Of the four packages of the new wave, the easiest one to get the hang of was The Warriors of Ghostlight Fen. Its hydra and phantom warriors were pretty easy to figure out how to deploy on the battlefield. One of the great things about Heroscape is that the best way to use the figures isn’t always obvious – it requires experimentation, which is nice, because if the battle outcomes were obvious the game simply wouldn’t be as much fun.

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Starblazer and Mindjammer

Starblazer and Mindjammer

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spiritOne of the most promising new game systems I reviewed in Black Gate 14 was used for the pulp role-playing game Spirit of the Century from Evil Hat Productions. FATE is a streamlined set of rules based more on adjectives and descriptions than complicated and time consuming point allocations. Not only does the system make task resolution fast, it encourages players and game masters alike to storytell more than die roll.

I was unabashedly excited about Spirit of the Century and couldn’t help wondering how the mechanics designed for pulp 1930s role-play would work in another setting.

An English game company named Cubicle Seven must have been wondering the same thing, because they took up the system and retooled it for science fiction role-playing.

Starblazer Adventures is a beautiful, thick hardback of 629 pages, stuffed full of art taken from a popular British space opera comic from the 1970s and ’80s. Nearly every page is decorated with exciting action pics evocative of high octane adventure.

But more than 600 pages, I can see you asking, isn’t that… needlessly long? Is it crammed with charts that you must consult?

No. What it is crammed with is all the information that a game master could need to run a thrill-packed space campaign, and then some.

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Gary Con II Report

Gary Con II Report

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gary_con2-logo1On Saturday I drove to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, for the second annual Gary Con, a friendly gathering in honor of Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons and the father of role-playing games.

You can read the Tribute to Gary Gygax, written by the staff at Black Gate magazine and Paizo publisher Erik Mona after Gary’s death in 2008, if you’re not familiar with his work.

Chainmail re-enactment of T1: The Village of Hommlet at Garycon II
Chainmail re-enactment of T1: The Village of Hommlet at Garycon II. Click for bigger version.

Lake Geneva is the birthplace of D&D and, consequently, the entire RPG industry. It was here that TSR, the company Gary co-founded in 1973, was headquartered for over two decades, and where many of the creative minds who helped it grow from a fledgling hobby company to the most influential game publisher of the last 30 years still live today – people like Tim Kask, founding editor of Dragon magazine, Gamma World author James Ward, RPGA founder Frank Mentzer, Snit’s Revenge creator Tom Wham, and many others.

The stated goal of the con is to “harken back to the early days of gaming conventions where role-playing was in its infancy and the players shared a strong sense of camaraderie,” and in that respect Gary Con was an unqualified success.

Players gathered around dozens of tables enjoying highlights from TSR’s early catalog, including first edition AD&D, Metamorphosis Alpha, Dawn Patrol, Boot Hill, Dungeon, Chainmail, and more modern games that strive to capture that sense of old-school adventure, such as Hackmaster, Castles and Crusades, and even Gygax’s fondly remembered post-TSR effort, Dangerous Journeys.

Best of all, I saw many renowned game designers and early TSR employees mingling with the crowd, or acting as dungeon masters for classic Gygax modules such as Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, The Temple of Hommlet, and Castle Greyhawk.

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Heroscape Wave 10: Valkrill’s Gambit

Heroscape Wave 10: Valkrill’s Gambit

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heroscape-wave-101One of the things I most enjoy about Heroscape is the great variety of figures in the expansions. Because I was introduced to the game years after it first debuted, I’ve missed out on a number of the earlier sets. I’ve been trying out all of the recent expansion sets, though. What I didn’t know when Wave 10 arrived was that half of it was a reprint from Wave 5t — now very hard to find — that another quarter of it reprinted some hard-to-find special release figures, and that the final quarter recast earlier molds with different colors and rules. I don’t mean that to sound like a complaint, because 3/4 of those figures are nearly impossible to lay hands on and the other quarter, those recasts, are now among my favorite squads.

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A review of the Cortex System Role Playing Game

A review of the Cortex System Role Playing Game

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Cortex System Role Playing Game
By Jamie Chambers
Margaret Weis Productions ( 160 pp, $29.99, April 2009)

cortext-systemThere are a lot of things to commend this book to an experienced gamer. The rules are fairly simple yet cover a lot of ground. I like how the abilities are not really tied into specific stats that are sometimes hard to justify -­ this system is much more fluid. It also is not conducive to rules lawyering ­ and if there is one thing I hate, it is rules-lawyering, so this is a positive for me. I can see where the OCD crowd who wants a rule for everything could be irritated with it, but I game by the principle that story precedes rules, and this rule set is made for that mindset.

Basically, after two or three hours of reading, a game master will feel comfortable enough to run the system. Layout is simple but functional ­ black-and-white and an easy to read font. It’s fairly thin for being the core rules of a game system, but I liked that. It made the book less intimidating than a lot of other systems I have looked at.

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Risus: Rules-Lite to the Min

Risus: Rules-Lite to the Min

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rlogoRisus: The Anything RPG
By S. John Ross

I seem to have gotten into a Rules-Lite RPG series here at Black Gate. Not sure how that happened. I didn’t plan it, I know that for certain…

A few weeks ago, I reviewed one of the classics of “beer-and-pretzels” role-playing games, Kobolds Ate My Baby! Although a great game, KAMB! uses a specific (comically specific) setting with rigid character types. If you want to unleash a beer-and-pretzels RPG night without any limitations, you will want to turn to Risus, a generic system perfect for the slam-bang quick gag game.

Risus takes the term “rules-lite” and goes to the minimum with it: the whole system fits comfortably onto six PDF pages you can download here. I have to take caution with this review, because I might risk writing one that’s longer than the review subject. But those six pages provide only a blueprint for endless parody-RPG weirdness; I’m reviewing the experience you might get from putting Risus into practice.

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Kobolds Ate My Baby! Super Deluxx Edition

Kobolds Ate My Baby! Super Deluxx Edition

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Kobolds Ate My Baby! Super Deluxx Edition
By Chris O’Neill and Dan Landis. Illustrated by John Kovalic. (Dork Storm Press, 2005; $14.99)

I’ve previously mentioned in a comment thread that when it comes to tabletop role-playing games, I lean toward the rules-lite side of the equation. I’d rather have a system that allows flexible play, with minimal die-rolls and looking up charts, and greater focus on the “role-playing” instead of the “game.” Given a good Game Master, rules-lite games can feel as close to realistic as any of the more simulationist systems. My favorite RPG of all time, Fudge, has managed to adapt and handle any other game system, setting, or style I’ve thrown at it. In fact, it’s almost the only system I use. Any RPG that comes out I translate into Fudge…

…with the exception of “Beer and Pretzels” RPGs, in which sheer simplicity and ludicrousness are the norm.

Most rules-lite systems are geared toward the Beer and Pretzels genre: RPGs that are played for comedy and speed and with minimum planning and plenty of bad bad bad beer. Risus is the Beer and Pretzels equivalent of Fudge, a complete generic system (six pages long!) usable for quick ‘n’ silly RPGs late at night. I might discuss Risus in another post—it’s interesting both as a rules-lite system and as a purposeful parody of all other early RPGs. Fudge also deserves a long review, because it’s so wonderful that it’s a shame it isn’t spread like a beautiful pandemic to every corner of the hobby.

But today I bring you the most popular setting-specific Beer and Pretzels game, a funny and witty spoof on the concept of “cannon fodder” in Dungeons & Dragons: Dork Storm Press’ Kobolds Ate My Baby! Super Deluxx Edition, written by Chris O’Neil and Dan Landis—and hereafter abbreviated KAMB! (The manual loves exclamation marks! With a passion! See!)

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Memories of Ultima IV

Memories of Ultima IV

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If a single positive resulted from the work of that woefully misinformed but correctly acronymed organization BADD (Bothered about Dungeons & Dragons), a group that waged a crusade to stop children from jumping into the Bags of Holding that they learned to construct from an $11.99 hardcover rulebook purchased at a hobby store, it was the computer RPG Ultima IV: The Quest of the Avatar. To this day, it’s only video RPG I’ve ever loved. And I’m not the only one who got sucked into this fantasy computer game when it was first published by Origin Systems in 1985 for a variety of platforms. (This was also the year of The Bard’s Tale from Electronic Arts; a major time for computer RPGs.)

By the middle of the decade, Richard Garriott, who programs under the pseudonym “Lord British,” had completed the first three of the Ultima games, featuring standard RPG plots where heroes had to vanquish a series of Dark Lords and their descendants. He had received complaints from parents about the demonic nature of these games—and the cover of Ultima III: Exodus in particular—and certainly knew about BADD’s anti-fantasy game campaign. But Garriott did something interesting instead of shrugging off the complaints. He used them to see if he could devise a new challenge for a computer game that wouldn’t use the standard “defeat the Big Bad Guy” of fantasy RPGs. What if the players had to actually live up to the extraordinary standards of acting as great, chivalric heroes? In fact, what if that was the whole point of the game: achieve the highest level of moral heroism so the players turned into ethical cynosures for the whole world? What was called, in game terms, an “Avatar”?

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Mazes and Minotaurs

Mazes and Minotaurs

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“Beginning with you, Phoebus, I will recount the famous deeds of men of old, who, at the behest of King Pelias, down through the mouth of Pontus and between the Cyanean rocks, sped well-benched Argo in quest of the Golden Fleece.” —Apollonius of Rhodes: Argonautika, Book I.

Thus begins the epic tale of Jason and his intrepid Argonauts. I would bet most of us have never read Apollonius’ version (I’ve not read it in its entirety), but we neverthesless know the story thanks, in no small part, to Ray Harryhausen’s excellent 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts*. We know about the Fleece, and Medea, and poor Hylas, and the Clashing Rocks. The tale has become part of our cultural heritage, in a manner of speaking.

Imagine, then, what the world would be like today if back in the late 60’s and early 70’s Gary Gygax had allowed himself to be influenced more by ancient Greek myth and Harryhausen’s celluloid epic than by Tolkien and Medieval Europe . . . rather than Dungeons and Dragons we might be playing Mazes and Minotaurs. That would be cool, huh? Well, as they say: ask and ye shall receive . . .

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Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition Review

Dungeons and Dragons Fourth Edition Review

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dungeons-and-dragons-players-handbookFourth Edition Dungeons and Dragons has been with us for about a year now; long enough for the gaming community to get a pretty good taste of it. I’ve been hearing various reports from gamer friends about the system, and opinions of it have fallen across a roughly tripartite spectrum, from favorable to neutral to negative. Among these views, though, there is agreement that this isn’t the same old Dungeons and Dragons. Fans of Fourth Edition sometimes call it a “transformation,” or point out, “This time around they didn’t have any sacred cows. They were ready to change anything.” Critics have generally agreed that “It might be a game some people like, but it’s no longer D&D.”

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