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Some Mysteries You Don’t Want to Solve: Exploring Dead Rock Seven

Some Mysteries You Don’t Want to Solve: Exploring Dead Rock Seven

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dead-rock-sevenOne of the most popular gaming articles I’ve written in the last year was my review of Robin D. Laws’s Ashen Stars, the new science fiction RPG from Pelgrane Press. Month after month, that review has been creeping up the traffic charts.

It’s not hard to see why. Ashen Stars is one of the best new SF games on the market — and one of the best new RPGs in any category. It was a winner in the “Best Setting” category in the 2012 ENnie Awards and Pelgrane Press has continued to support it with top-notch adventures and other supplements. It’s taken a while to catch on, but the industry is starting to notice.

Here’s what I said, in part, in my October review:

Robin D. Laws has created an extremely appealing game of space opera procedural mysteries. In the tradition of the best hard boiled detective fiction, players are constantly scrambling for money, equipment, and respect… all of which they’ll need to succeed in a war-ravaged perimeter where trust is a precious commodity, and very little is truly what it seems.

The players in Ashen Stars are private eyes — excuse me, licensed mercenaries — acting as freelance law enforcement on a rough-and-tumble frontier called “the Bleed,” where humans and half a dozen alien races mingle, compete, and trade. The Mohilar War that devastated the once powerful governing Combine ended seven years ago, and no one is sure exactly how. The Combine is in no shape to govern the Bleed, and rely on loosely-chartered bands like the players to maintain peace in the sector, keep a lid on crime, and investigate odd distress signals from strange corners of space…

The writing and color art are impressive throughout, and the book is filled with fascinating tidbits that will make you anxious to play, and re-introduce you to the essential joy of role playing.

Given a game with that much promise, I was anxious to see what kinds of adventures would arrive to really flesh it out. Now I finally have my hands on the first major campaign for the setting, Dead Rock Seven, a set of four scenarios by Gareth Hanrahan, and I’m pleased to report that I’m not disappointed.

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Revisit Pavis: Gateway to Adventure

Revisit Pavis: Gateway to Adventure

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Pavis Gateway to Adventure-smallLast April, Sarah Newton wrote a marvelous two-part review of Moon Design’s Pavis: Gateway to Adventure, the third (and easily the most massive) edition of a fantasy setting I first enjoyed 30 years ago.

Getting my hands on one proved to be more challenging than I expected, however. Apparently, the first printing sold out quickly and I had to wait until it was reprinted. Finally, more than a year after Sarah’s enticing review appeared here at Black Gate, I was able to sit down with my own copy.

Why was I so intrigued? Partly it was memories of that marvelous first edition, a gorgeous boxed set from Chaosium. Pavis was one of the most ambitious RPG adventure supplements ever made when it appeared in 1983: a completely realized bronze age city, packed with historical detail, strange cultures and cults, maps, thieves, profiteers, and adventurers.

Most important of all, however, Pavis was a launching point for adventure in Big Rubble, its sister publication, a ruined city overrun by trolls, snakes — and much worse things. The subtitle of the new edition is “Gateway to Adventure,” and that’s a wholly accurate description.

The new edition combines both Pavis and Big Rubble under a single cover, adding a host of new material on top of an already well-realized setting.

The result is a terrific product, with more tightly-woven encounters and plot threads and everything you need to kick off a grand adventure.

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Gygax Magazine #2 Announced for Gen Con

Gygax Magazine #2 Announced for Gen Con

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Gygax Magazine 2The second issue of Gygax magazine is now at the printer and will ship in time for Gen Con.

Holy cats, that’s next week. This year Gen Con, the largest game convention in the country, takes place August 15-18 at the Indiana Convention Center.

We’ve been anxiously (and impatiently) awaiting the second issue of Gygax. I reviewed the fabulous first issue back in March and thought it was entirely successful at capturing the spirit of the earliest days of role playing, particularly the first issues of The Dragon, the magazine that shaped and guided the industry in the mid-1970s.

Gygax is a “quarterly adventure role-playing aid” that seems to be sticking more closely to an annual publishing schedule. As that sounds eerily similar to the eventual schedule for the print version of my own magazine, Black Gate, I’m just going to keep my mouth shut and not throw stones.

What I am going to do is peer closely at the pic of the Table of Contents recently published at the MTV Geek and see what I can make out. Looks like Tim Kask has an article on Tactics in Samurai Battles, Joy Libby looks at Hitchhiking in Doctor Who, Bryan Pope (Pipe? Page?) examines Building a Winning Spellbook for Mage Wars, and Vincent Flavio looks at The Old-School Renaissance.

That’s about all I could get before my eyes gave out. I’ll have to wait for the print version to discover the rest. For now, I’ll enjoy that tantalizing Jeff Easley cover and keep an eye on the magazine stand at my local game shop.

Unleash your inner Conan with Barbarian Kings

Unleash your inner Conan with Barbarian Kings

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Barbarian Kings SPI-smallMagic Spells and Enchantments! Elves and Orcs and Dwarves! Airships and Pirate Fleets! Heroes and Wizards and… Barbarian Kings.

That’s the cover copy on the boxed version of Barbarian Kings, one of the most fascinating games from my childhood, a game clearly inspired in equal measure by Robert E. Howard and J.R.R. Tolkien. Except for the airships, which I think maybe was an attempt to throw in a little Edgar Rice Burroughs and John Carter of Mars.

My fascination didn’t stem from any virtue of the game design. In fact, I never even had the chance to play it when it was first released in 1980. But it loomed large in my imagination.

Barbarian Kings was originally published in Ares #3. I’ve mentioned Ares before — it was the short-lived (and today, highly collectible) magazine published by SPI that included a science fiction or fantasy board game in every issue.

And what games they were. Star Trader, simulating high-stakes interstellar trade, commerce, and piracy; The High Crusade, inspired by Poul Anderson’s classic novel of a medieval conquest of the galaxy; Nightmare House, which featured intrepid explorers venturing into a haunted house; Voyage of the B.S.M. Pandora, a solitaire game of interstellar exploration on savage worlds; The Omega War, simulating a post-apocalyptic battle on a war-scarred North America in 2419. And nearly a dozen others.

And in issue #3, it was Barbarian Kings, a simple but compelling game of fantasy empires in conflict for 2-5 players. The Jack Kirby-inspired art on the cover communicated just about everything you needed to know (click on the image at right for a bigger version). This was a game of empire building in a world of dwarves, orcs, and magic, just like any of a hundred fantasy novels crowding the shelves in the 70s. It was a compact theatre of the imagination that could drop you smack dab into your favorite fantasy setting and let you run rampant with an army at your back. And airships. Let’s not forget the airships.

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Roger Zelazny, August Derleth and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

Roger Zelazny, August Derleth and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

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The Great Book of Amber-smallI’ve been spending a lot of time with Gary Gygax’s Dungeon Masters Guide recently, as I guide my young players through a wilderness campaign using Outdoor Survival. The DMG is a treasure trove of handy tables, excellent advice, and fascinating tangents — atrociously organized, of course, but that’s part of its charm. Like the most useful book in all fantasy, the Junior Woodchucks Guidebook (seriously — I’d kill for a copy of that book), you can flip pages at random and never know what indispensable tidbit you’ll find.

Appendix N, which lists the great fantasy writers whose collective contributions laid the groundwork for Dungeons and Dragons, is just one of those finds; but it’s one which has received a great deal of attention. Mordicai Knode and Tim Callahan at Tor.com are sampling the work of every author in Appendix N; so far they’ve covered Robert E. Howard, Poul Anderson, Sterling E. Lanier, Fritz Leiber, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Jack Vance.

Last week, Tim turned his attention to Roger Zelazny and The Chronicles of Amber. He wasn’t impressed:

I merely sampled the first book in the series, Nine Princes in Amber, originally published in 1970, and that was more than enough… if the first book in Roger Zelazny’s Amber series is considered any kind of classic, then it must be because the novel is graded on a curve. A curve called “pretty good for an opening novel in a series that gets a whole lot better,” or maybe a curve called, “better than a lot of other, trashier fantasy novels released in 1970, when there was nothing on television but episodes of Marcus Welby and the Flip Wilson Show…”

It’s not that I found Nine Princes in Amber uninteresting; it’s just that I found the novel shockingly discordant and unsatisfying to actually read all the way through. It’s a novel that slams together jokey Hamlet references in the narration with pop psychoanalysis and superhuman beings and shadow realms and dungeons and swords and pistols and Mercedes-Benzes.

Actually, that last sentence is almost exactly how I remember Nine Princes in Amber. Shadow realms and dungeons and swords and pistols and Mercedes-Benzes. Yeah, that pretty much covers it.

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Pathfinder RPG: Chronicles of the Righteous

Pathfinder RPG: Chronicles of the Righteous

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ChroniclesRighteousIf you’re one of the generation of gamers who cut their teeth on 20-sided dice, you know that the mythology around the Dungeons & Dragons fantasy settings often hinge upon the machinations of deities, at times capricious and petty, at times aloof, at times all too ready to lend a not-particularly-helpful hand. (Yes, I’m looking at you, Fizban.)

The gods also play a central role in the D&D-stepchild game of Pathfinder RPG, produced by Paizo Publishing. Their setting of Golarion puts an interesting twist on the gods, by featuring a number of deities that were once mortals who ascended to godhood. The gods of Golarion are controversial and the cause of much conflict, with the desert nation of Rahadoum going so far as to outlaw the worship of any deity under penalty of death. (The atheism of Rahadoum is a central theme in James L. Sutter’s fantastic novel, Pathfinder Tales: Death’s Heretic.)

But the gods are not the only otherworldly beings that have designs on Golarion. In their recent Pathfinder Campaign Settings release, Chronicles of the Righteous (Amazon, Paizo), Paizo dives more deeply into the Empyreal Lords. These are supernatural beings from other realms who have ascended to prominence in the Outer Planes, becoming almost like lesser gods who focus on their domains of interest and gather smaller groups of dedicated followers and servants to further their interests on Golarion.

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Tabletop Gaming On The Rise

Tabletop Gaming On The Rise

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Tabletop RPGs-smallThere’s an interesting article in the Times Free Press this week that examines the growing evidence that tabletop role playing is experiencing a significant resurgence.

Written by Casey Phillips, the article, “After 40 years, popularity of tabletop gaming rises despite high-tech competition,” mixes industry stats with anecdotal evidence gathered from the Chattanooga area.

D&D and other role-playing games increasingly are becoming a mainstream activity. In a 2000 survey, Wizards of the Coast — the current owners of the D&D universe of products — estimated that 5.5 million people in the U.S. regularly play tabletop roleplaying games…

With the recent growth of nerd culture through blockbuster comic book films and the growth of the video game industry, role-playing has been embraced more positively by pop culture, serving as a plot device in TV shows such as Futurama, Freaks and Geeks, Community and The Big Bang Theory…

In a 2004 essay about his introduction to D&D as a seventh grader, talk show host Stephen Colbert writes, “I… was instantly hooked. It allowed me to enter the world of the books I was reading. I put more effort into that game than I ever did into my school work.” In 2011, he also issued an on-air shout-out to “any half-elf thieves who are joining us tonight.”

I’m not sure I believe that 5.5 million people stat from Wizards of the Coast — unless maybe they define “regularly plays tabletop roleplaying games” as “daydreamed about being Legolas one time.” But I definitely concur that D&D has become tightly identified with the rise of nerd culture, and that has played a very real part in popularizing it and other role playing games. I witnessed that first hand, when my daughter asked to play after her friends watched the “Advanced Dungeons and Dragons” episode of Community.

Read the complete article here.

Experience the Epic Madness of Eternal Lies From Pelgrane Press

Experience the Epic Madness of Eternal Lies From Pelgrane Press

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Eternal LiesPelgrane Press has been producing some of the most ambitious and exciting RPGs in recent memory.

They began in 2001 with one of my favorite RPGs, The Dying Earth, based on the rich world created by Jack Vance. More recently, we covered their ENnie Award-winning SF game Ashen Stars; the mammoth adventure compilation for Trail of Cthulhu, Out of Space; and their epic fantasy release 13th Age — which topped the list of 9 Most Anticipated RPGs of 2013 recently compiled by EN World.

But it’s quite possible they’ve topped all of those with Eternal Lies, a massive new campaign for Trail of Cthulhu by Will Hindmarch, Jeff Tidball, and Jeremy Keller. The early buzz on Eternal Lies compares it very favorably to Masks of Nyarlathotep, the seminal 1984 mega-adventure for Call of Cthulhu that is frequently (and justifiably) cited as the finest role playing adventure ever written.

A decade ago, a band of occult investigators battled against the summoning of an ancient and monstrous evil.

They failed.

Now, you must piece together what went wrong. Investigate ancient crypts, abandoned estates, and festering slums. Explore choked jungles and the crushed psyches of your predecessors. Follow in their footprints and make new ones of your own. This time, there won’t be another chance. The world is yours to save… or lose.

Pelgrane Press is selling the adventure in a special pre-release bundle with the soundtrack album, print edition, and PDF. They’ve created an audio trailer voiced by Wil Wheaton, which you can listen to here.

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The Secret Supplement: Greyhawk, Gygax, and Outdoor Survival

The Secret Supplement: Greyhawk, Gygax, and Outdoor Survival

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Outdoor Survival-smallA while ago, my 13-year-old daughter Taylor told me her friend Will had seen the famous “Advanced Dungeons and Dragons” episode of Community and wanted to learn how to play.

“Sure,” I said. “Tell him to come over on Saturday and I’ll put together a quick adventure for both of you.” My 15-year-old son Drew joined in, creating a fighter, and even Tim, my 17-year old, got in on the action, rolling up a 1st level magic user.

That was over six months ago. What began as a simple session, involving a bunch of farm kids rescuing a dwarven thief named Jasper from marauding gobins, has evolved into an epic campaign, a desperate adventure to stop an army of hobgobins and orcs from completing a railroad that will bring war to their frontier home.

It’s the most fun I’ve had role playing in decades.

I introduced my kids to D&D years ago, but we played only intermittently, and the campaign — such as it was — never really built up steam. The addition of a fourth player, from outside the family, has brought with it a regular Saturday morning schedule, and the result is a much heightened level of interest from everyone involved.

Things are happening faster, they’re leveling up quicker, and they spend the days between sessions talking excitedly, planning, and trying to puzzle out how all the clues they’ve uncovered fit together to reveal the sinister plan behind events.

It’s brought a change in how I dungeon master, too. When I was DM for a group my own age, from roughly 1980 to 2000, there was a certain level of performance anxiety. Every session had to be bigger and better, each adventure more ambitious and epic than the last. I couldn’t just create a fun, two-hour subterranean module… I had to bring an entire underworld civilization to life, with a believable backstory and vast cast of heroes and villains.

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Jack Vance and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

Jack Vance and Appendix N: Advanced Readings in D&D

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The Eyes of the Overworld-smallAh, Appendix N, the gift that keeps on giving. In the years before the Internet, it’s how young readers discovered great fantasy.

Over at Tor.com, Tim Callahan and Mordicai Knode continue with their ambitious and well-researched journey through Gary Gygax’s famous Appendix N, the library of fantasy and SF titles in the back of the Dungeon Master’s Guide. They’ve already covered Fritz Leiber, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sterling E. Lanier and Robert E. Howard. Here they are on Jack Vance:

Mordicai Knode: Also worth noting that everybody’s favorite evil wizard turned lich turned demigod turned major deity, Vecna, is named after a “Vance” anagram. & while we are pointing out bits and pieces — like the prismatic spray, which is such an amazing piece of writing, such a great turn of phrase, that it inspired a whole range of spells — I want to mention the ioun stones. In Dungeons & Dragons they are these little gemstones that float around your head—I always imagined the Bit from Tron — but in The Dying Earth story that inspired them, the IOUN stones are much more sinister and are gleaned from the center of a dwarf star that has been cut in half by the shrinking edges of the universe. Just let that sink in; that is really an incredible idea… And those sorts of ideas are scattered all over the book, like some pirate with holes in his pocket idly scattered gold doubloons all over it.

Tim Callahan: It’s kind of like, for me anyway, when I was a kid, and I’d read the AD&D Player’s Handbook or Dungeon Master’s Guide and just read through some of the spell names or magic item titles (without reading the descriptions below) and imagine what weird and wonderful things these powers and items could do. Vance reminded me of that world of possibilities, almost on every page.

Read the complete article here.

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