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Take Command of Mighty Warriors and Beasts in Hordes: High Command, Using Cards or Whatever

Take Command of Mighty Warriors and Beasts in Hordes: High Command, Using Cards or Whatever

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Hordes High Command-smallSo I’m sitting in the front row at the Games Plus Spring Auction on Sunday, minding my own business, when the auctioneer holds up a brand new, still-in-the-shrinkwrap, copy of Hordes: High Command and starts the bidding at a dollar.

Now, I have no idea what Hordes: High Command is all about, but the box looks pretty neat, with giant monsters and what-not. Plus, a buck. I’m sitting close enough to read the tag line at the bottom: The Game of Strategic Deck-Building Conquest in the Iron Kingdoms, and I know that promises a lot of, uh, deck-building fun… okay, to be brutally honest, I’m not 100% sure what a “deck building” game is. But you learn the art of the quick decision at auction and my card was in the air pretty much the moment I saw the beautiful babe and the monster on the cover.

Well, I won it. Whatever it is, exactly. It’s apparently a stand-alone game that can be played with just the contents of the box or combined with other Hordes High Command products for a customizable experience. Okay, I copied that sentence from the back of the box. But I think it sounds pretty good. I looked up Hordes on Wikipedia, and it’s a “30mm tabletop miniature wargame produced by Privateer Press… [and] designed as a companion to Warmachine.” Cards and collectible miniatures… we’re moving into a terrifying area for me. Thank God the woman on the cover doesn’t look threatening too or I might wrap this in brown paper and hide it in the basement.

Still, I’ve been mightily impressed by Privateer Press over the last decade, especially their Iron Kingdoms stuff, and Wikipedia assures me the game shares the same setting as the Iron Kingdoms — and also that Hordes won the 2006 Origins Award for Miniatures Game of the Year, which is reassuring. There are plenty of intriguing things about the game (like, how come a miniatures game doesn’t come with any miniatures? What’s up with that?)

I think I might delve deeper into the mystery this week. Hordes: High Command was published by Privateer Press on October 09, 2013. The game includes a set of rules and 386 cards and is priced at $44.99. I won my copy at auction for $12, due to mad auction skillz. Learn more at the website.

To Hear the Lamentations of Their Women (at the Auction)

To Hear the Lamentations of Their Women (at the Auction)

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Starship Merchants-smallWell, I survived the Spring Auction at Games Plus.

Not just survived, but triumphed. I brought home a fabulous assortment of treasures old and new, including classic titles from Task Force Games, Metagaming, Avalon Hill, FASA, and dozens of others. Overall, I carted home four boxes of games.

Not a bad haul, I happily told Alice. She wasn’t quite as happy as I was. Not only did I go a bit over budget (say, by about three boxes), but I have nowhere to put them. So much negativity and just when I finished crushing my enemies and driving them before me.

Well, I’ll worry about all that later. Right now, I’m enjoying my sweet gaming loot. In the boxes somewhere are copies of Talisman (3rd Edition), TSR’s Top Secret, several Earthdawn supplements, assorted expansions for Fantasy Flight’s Descent, Smallworld,  Cutthroat Caverns, and lots more. I even found a reasonably priced copy of Earth Reborn — how lucky was that?

Always a delight to find some items on my want list. But at the moment I’m most intrigued with the surprises — the games I didn’t even know existed until they showed up on the auction block. They include a gorgeous pair of deck building games from Privateer Press, both called High Command for some reason (Hordes: High Command and Warmachine: High Command. Why? Who knows), and the oddity at left: Starship Merchants. One copy came up for auction, and that cover art spoke to me. It said, Take me home. And I said, Yes sir. Ten bucks later, it was mine. Looks like a neato game, too.

Did you know about this game? I didn’t. According to Board Game Geek, Starship Merchants was designed by Joe Huber and Thomas Lehmann, and published by Toy Vault in 2012. New copies retail for $34.99; I bought a slightly used copy in beautiful shape for 10 bucks.

When I have a few minutes, I’ll arrange some of the more interesting titles I brought home in a big pile and take some pics for posterity  (like I did last year, the year before, and Spring 2012). But first, I’ll report here on the best surprises. Stay tuned.

New Treasures: Jalizar, City of Thieves by Umberto Pignatelli

New Treasures: Jalizar, City of Thieves by Umberto Pignatelli

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Jalizar City of Thieves-smallAbout a month ago, I wrote an enthusiastic review of Haven — The Free City, a complete fantasy city designed and published by now-defunct Gamelords way back in 1984. One of the things I mentioned is that detailed, usable, interesting city settings are relatively rare.

I thought I’d test that theory by hunting around for a more modern urban setting and taking it for a spin. Sure enough, they were a little sparse — a lot harder to find than another megadungeon, for sure. But there were a few. And the first to catch my eye was Jalizar, City of Thieves, a Savage Worlds setting very different from the player sanctuary of Haven. Jalizar promises danger and intrigue in spades, inviting players to don the cloak of thieves waging a righteous battle for profit and glory against a corrupt establishment.

Jalizar, City of Thieves, the Rotten Flower of the North, is revealed to your eyes in this book!

In its pages, you’ll learn the seedy ways of the Thieves’ Guild. You’ll smuggle goods into the city, fooling the Copper Helms, the corrupt city watch of Jalizar, vie for power with the Merchant Houses or, if you are really bold, venture into the dark Sewers of Jalizar where an age-old evil lurks undisturbed.

Twenty new Edges, new trappings and tweaks for the arcane backgrounds, an additional list of gear, and much more await you in this book! So sharpen your dagger, put on your black cloak, and step outside into the dark alleys of the City of Thieves!!

That’s a lot of exclamation points. Also, I’m not familiar with Savage Worlds and I don’t know what the heck “Twenty new Edges” means. Still, I like what I see. My copy arrived this week, and first impressions are excellent. The book is beautifully designed and the interior artwork is plentiful and top-notch. We’ll see if it holds up to a closer reading.

Jalizar, City of Thieves was written by Umberto Pignatelli and published by Gramel on October 1, 2013. It is a Sword and Sorcery Savage Worlds sourcebook for Beasts & Barbarians, whatever that means (but it sounds good). It is 199 pages, priced at $24.99 in paperback. It’s also available as a watermarked PDF at RPGNow for $10.54 (or $7.36, if you buy before March 16).

The Games Plus 2013 Spring Auction

The Games Plus 2013 Spring Auction

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Some of the loot I brought home from the Spring 2013 Games Plus auction
  Some of the loot I brought home from the Spring Games Plus auction last year (click for bigger version)

Tomorrow is one of the highlights of my year — the Spring Auction at Games Plus in Mount Prospect, Illinois, one of the finest game stores in the Midwest, about an hour’s drive from my house.

I’ve written about the Spring and Fall 2012 auctions (in “Spring in Illinois brings… Auction Fever” and The Paris Fashion Week of Fantasy Games, respectively) and I’ve been looking forward to returning this year.

The Games Plus auctions are just about the friendliest I’ve ever attended. The store is run by a group of dedicated and professional gamers who know their stuff and they keep the proceedings running with an experienced hand — and a quick wit. Even if I were unable to bid, I think I’d enjoy sitting in the audience, just for the entertainment value.

Of course, it’s a lot more fun to be able to bid.

As I mentioned in the previous articles, it’s important to have a budget for these things, and to conserve funds for those items you really want.

Ha, ha. A budget! Excuse me while I regain control of my writing limbs.  A budget — that’s a good one.

Let me put it another way: It’s important to keep a running total of your purchases and always to be aware of how much money you’ve spent. Why? All that constant arithmetic will distract you from non-stop bidding. Eventually, you’ll crumble up the sheet and abandon it as futile, but for a while it will help you keep a lid on things.

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Software Review (kind of): Fantasy Map Making with Hexographer

Software Review (kind of): Fantasy Map Making with Hexographer

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greyhawk-297x300
…began as a tool for creating Mystara-style maps and cheerfully emulates the World of Greyhawk feel.

I dare say that we Black Gate types love maps and charts of imaginary lands.

As kids, we pored over the maps in CS Lewis’s Narnia books or Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Most of us have had posters of Middle Earth or the Hyperborian Age on our walls and almost all of us have scratched out maps of imaginary places, either for the joy of it or as a DM/GM or Fantasy writer.

It’s great fun to draw a map using pencil and paper. However, there are practical limitations. It’s hard to make changes neatly, difficult to produce different versions of the same map, a fiddle to create small scale local maps, and ultimately a chore to curate all the bits of paper.

For most of us, digital is our friend, which is why I am reviewing Hexographer, a relatively inexpensive Fantasy map making tool.

Hexographer very much has its roots in old-school roleplaying.

It began as a tool for creating Mystara-style maps and cheerfully emulates the World of Greyhawk feel. However, with a range of symbol sets to choose from, it’s grown into a flexible Fantasy cartography tool. What makes it distinct is that it explicitly treats maps as collections of hexagons (though you can place items freehand as well), which makes it almost perfect for writers and gamers.

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Mindjammer RPG: Transhuman Sci-Fi Adventure in the Second Age of Space

Mindjammer RPG: Transhuman Sci-Fi Adventure in the Second Age of Space

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Several years ago, I published my first ever roleplaying game supplement, a 200-page softback for the Starblazer Adventures RPG, using the Fate 3rd edition rules. Black Gate‘s very own Howard Andrew Jones reviewed it here, and a few short months later we were delighted when it won a Judges Spotlight Award at the ENnies in GenCon. We decided to produce a second edition…

… And here it is! A lot has happened in the meantime, not least the release of a brand new edition of Fate, the Fate Core System, from Evil Hat Productions, which won Best RPG in the Golden Geek Awards only last week. The publication of an elegant and sophisticated new edition of Fate meant that I had a golden opportunity to update Mindjammer and publish it as a full roleplaying game, taking full advantages of the Fate Core System‘s cutting edge innovations. Last month, we launched Mindjammer – The Roleplaying Game for pre-orders, providing customers with an immediate download of a “Thoughtcast Edition” pre-release PDF of the game, and this week we’re going to print and updating the PDF to the final production version.

So what’s Mindjammer? Put simply, it’s a game and a setting. As a game, it’s been called the “lovechild of Traveller and Eclipse Phase” – a full-featured science-fiction roleplaying game for the 21st century, featuring all the elements of “modern” science-fiction: transhumanism, hyperadvanced technologies, culture conflicts, rules for organisations, worlds, star systems, ecosystems, and alien life forms all drawing on the latest discoveries in xenoscience and astrophysics, wrapped up in an expansive and action-packed game which lets you play in any modern science-fiction genre.

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Art of the Genre: The Halflings of Jeff Dee

Art of the Genre: The Halflings of Jeff Dee

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Does this Halfling have a cape or a shield on his back? I always wanted it to be a shield.
Does this Halfling have a cape or a shield on his back? I always wanted it to be a shield.

I was playing Keep on the Borderlands this past week, certainly one of my all-time favorite modules, and as I flipped through it I came across a Jeff Dee illustration that had a Halfling in the background.  As two weeks ago I’d done a piece here on BG called ‘The Top 40 RPG Artists of the Past 40 Years’ AND had left Jeff off that list, I couldn’t help but stare at the image and wonder why I had done so.

Certainly people in the OSR had raised a big fuss about Jeff’s lack of ‘love’ on my part, and for good reason.  He could have arguably made the list, depending on how you viewed the industry as a whole.  Add such a view to the fact that Jeff has been a tireless game designer, player, and advocate for the industry of RPGs since I was in grade school, then he could almost be grandfathered in just for trying so hard.  I guess it would be like a Lifetime Achievement Oscar or something.

Whatever the case, I sat there looking at this great little Halfling and couldn’t shake the feeling that of all the artists to ever do these little guys, Jeff was hands-down the best in my opinion, and here are the reasons why.

One: Jeff is a gamer, and as such, he has an inherent connection to how gamers see themselves, and with that, how gamers see their characters.  Certainly, the thought of a Halfling is appealing because of Tolkien, but not necessarily the thought of Bilbo Baggins.  Sure, we all love Bilbo, but do we love the Rankin/Bass version as a representation of our player characters?  I doubt it.

Two: Jeff drew from a comic book style and therefore his lean lines for humans and elves spilled over directly to Halflings.  Gone were the pot-bellied and cheery pipe-smokers, who were in turn replaced by ‘little men’ with ripped chests, chiseled faces, and weapons and armor that looked incredibly formidable.

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Leigh Brackett, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

Leigh Brackett, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

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The Galactic Breed-smallAnd so we come to the end of our extended journey through Gygax’s Appendix N, at the hands of our intrepid guides Tim Callahan and Mordicai Knode at Tor.com.

We haven’t always agreed with the opinions of Messieurs Callahan and Knode. But that’s okay. More than okay, really… what’s the point of following along with a literary survey if we don’t get to pound the table occasionally and shout “You lunkheads!” Really, the primary pleasure we old-timers get these days is disagreeing with self-proclaimed experts. Loudly, and at length.

But overall I think Callahan and Knode, the Lewis and Clark of Appendix N, have done a fine job. They’ve surveyed every entry in Gary Gygax’s original list of authors who influenced Dungeons and Dragons, just as they promised when they set out nine months ago. Along the way, they’ve shared their opinions — sometimes as informed experts, sometimes as newbies coming to the work of the masters for the first time.

And at every stop, they’ve been honest with us on whether or not the books spoke to them as modern readers. I don’t think we can ask for anything more than that.

I’m going to miss following along with Tim and Mordicai. Whether I agreed with them or not — nodding along with “Yup, yer darn tootin’,” or banging my head on the table and cursing every reader born after 1990 — they were always entertaining, enlightening, and frequently very funny.

But we still have two last articles to examine: Mordicai’s appreciation of the grand old lady of science fantasy, Leigh Brackett, and Mordicai and Tim’s wrap-up of the entire series, their salute to J.R.R. Tolkien. Let’s see if these last two pieces bring more nodding, or table-banging.

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Basic Dungeons and Dragons is Still Kicking: An Interview with Module Writer Geoff Gander

Basic Dungeons and Dragons is Still Kicking: An Interview with Module Writer Geoff Gander

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To_End_the_Rising_Web_CoverGeoff Gander is a dark fantasy writer and D&D module-creator living in Ottawa, Canada. Geoff and I met over early morning coffee to talk gaming.

Derek: So, you write Basic D&D modules. You’ve had 2 modules printed by Expeditious Retreat Press. Even when I was a small town teenager, I could still get my hands on a variety of role playing games, especially AD&D, making Basic seem like yesterday’s news. Now, twenty-five years later, people are paying you money to write modules for Basic. Where’s that market coming from?

Geoff: We’re seeing the rise of old school gaming in classic pen-and-paper RPGs as well as computers. Many old schoolers who played D&D and similar games in the 80s are now introducing the games to their children, or they may have followed the general flow of gaming culture towards the latest products on the market, and have grown nostalgic for what got them into the hobby in the first place.

There are also people like me, who grew dissatisfied with the quality of mainstream gaming products and stayed with the systems they enjoyed, long after they went out of print.

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Bioshock Creator Irrational Games Shuts its Doors

Bioshock Creator Irrational Games Shuts its Doors

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Bioshock Infinite-smallThe tumult in the computer entertainment industry continued this week, with word that A-list game studio Irrational Games is shutting down, effective immediately.

Irrational Games was formed in 1997 from the wreckage of legendary Looking Glass Studios (Ultima Underworld, System Shock, Thief) by three ex-Looking Glass employees: Jonathan Chey, Robert Fermier, and Ken Levine. Never an exceptionally prolific studio, they nonetheless released three excellent games over the next seven years: System Shock 2 (1999), Freedom Force (2002), and Tribes: Vengeance (2004).

Irrational Games was acquired by one of the largest distributors in the industry,Take-Two Interactive (publishers of Grand Theft Auto and The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, among many others); for several years after that, their games appeared under the 2K Games label. They had perhaps their greatest hit in 2007 with the worldwide success of Bioshock, a first-person shooter set in the beautiful and mysterious underwater city of Rapture (which offered, incidentally, one of the finest and most touching endings I’ve ever seen in a video game). Bioshock eventually sold over four million copies and won almost universal critical acclaim, winning PC Game of the Year from IGN and the top spot on their Top 25 Modern PC Games list in 2012. Time magazine named it one of the greatest video games of all time in November 2012. The game inspired two sequels: Bioshock 2 (developed by 2K Marin) and Bioshock Infinite (from Irrational Games.)

In a message posted on the Irrational Games website yesterday, co-founder Ken Levine announced the studio was closing its doors. No explanation was given, although Levine did confirm that 15 employees (out of an estimated 150) will be retained “To make narrative-driven games for the core gamer that are highly replayable.” It’s no secret that Bioshock Infinite‘s development was highly troubled, but the game was considered a major success, selling over 3.7 million copies in the first two months.

It’s been a troubled time for games studios — the much-loved LucasArts was shuttered by Disney just last year, and other developers have moved away from big-budget releases to focus on smaller games for mobile environments. It reminds me of the gradual move to consoles from PCs, which cost us such storied developers as Interplay, Origin Systems, SSI, Microprose, Sierra Entertainment, and of course, the brilliant Black Isle. I’m certain there will be plenty of great games on many new platforms in my future, but for now I’m still mourning what might have been.