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A Touch of Evil: Colonial Gothic Horror Board Gaming At Its Finest

A Touch of Evil: Colonial Gothic Horror Board Gaming At Its Finest

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TouchofEvilThe quiet colonial hamlet of Shadowbrook is cursed by evil and you are one of the small group of people who can investigate the growing danger, discover the evil’s source, and then collect together a group of Town Elders to destroy it!

That is the premise of Flying Frog Productions’ board game A Touch of Evil (Amazon). You move through the village, exploring various locations and getting clues and equipment. Your currency in the game are Investigation points, which you can spend to learn the secrets behind the Town Elders, or to buy new equipment from the town’s blacksmith. Each round, you uncover new mysteries … many of which result in a confrontation with the foul minions of the main villain tormenting the village and bringing it more under the sway of darkness.

The victory at the end comes from purchasing a Lair card (the price of which changes as evil gains control over Shadowbrook), gathering together a group of Town Elders, and going to confront the villain. However, the Town Elders all have secrets, and if you’re not careful, those secrets could cause them to turn on you, increasing the villain’s power during the confrontation. If you fail to defeat the villain, it escapes and play continues until another player is able to trigger a confrontation. This process continues until someone succeeds at actually defeating the villain.

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Win One of Four New Copies of The Unearthed Arcana 1st Edition Premium Reprint!

Win One of Four New Copies of The Unearthed Arcana 1st Edition Premium Reprint!

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unearthed arcanaWizards of the Coast has offered us four new copies of The Unearthed Arcana 1st Edition Premium Reprint as giveaways. Is this a great country or what?

Until last week, Gary Gygax’s seminal Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rule book Unearthed Arcana — which introduced the Cavalier, Barbarian, and Thief-Acrobat classes, among many other earth-shaking changes — had never been reprinted. This premium reprint incorporates the many corrections and updates published in Dragon magazine, making it the definitive edition. We first covered the release on Thursday and the excited discussion still continues in the Comments. Here’s what Seven Kings author John R. Fultz has to say:

The release of Unearthed Arcana changed everything. Suddenly we had new spells! Weapon Specialization! Barbarians and Cavaliers! One of the greatest long-term campaigns I ever ran centered around two players that exemplified the classic “buddy-cop” paradigm, although they were opposites: Lystoke the Cavalier and Braigore the Barbarian. One was all about civility and the martial code of honor, the other was a Chaotic Neutral ass-kicker who took no prisoners. Together they made a legendary team… at one point they kicked Mammon’s ass, drove him back to Hell, and plundered his treasure room. Ah, memories.

Oh, I almost forgot one of the other major game-changers from Arcana: Tons of new Magic Items!!! First Edition just isn’t the same without this book.

How do you win a copy? Easy! Just follow in John’s footsteps and send an e-mail to john@blackgate.com with a one-paragraph summary of your most memorable D&D or AD&D characters. Points will be awarded for conciseness and originality. We’ll publish the best here at Black Gate, and the Top Ten as decided by our judges will be included in a draw for one of four copies of the new Unearthed Arcana 1st Edition Premium Reprint, compliments of Wizards of the Coast.

All entries become the property of New Epoch Press. No purchase necessary. Must be 12 or older. Decisions of the judges (capricious as they may be) are final. Sorry, US entrants only. Not valid where prohibited by law. Eat your vegetables.

Kickstarter Alert: Up Your Game with Realm Works

Kickstarter Alert: Up Your Game with Realm Works

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RealmWorksI’m in the midst of starting up a Pathfinder RPG, the first game that I’ve run in several years. As always, the planning and character creation is half the fun. The setting, especially as outlined in the Inner Sea World Guide, contains a lot of opportunities for diverse storylines, from traditional fantasy to sword and sorcery to pirate adventures to planetary romance.

But all of these opportunities also create difficulties. I have the backstories that my characters have come up with, the mysterious things about their past that I have come up with, the skeletons in their various family and friend’s closet, plot hooks and story arcs that I’ve got to seed which will likely take months to bear fruit, if they ever do.

Unfortunately, I’ve got enough demands on my time that I know I’m not as focused as I once was, and I’m concerned about keeping it all straight. I’m starting a binder and notebook to track the events in, and have typed some up in Google Docs so that I can share the background information they know with my players. I’m thinking of keeping a blog, so that we all can reference back to figure out what events have taken place, as I anticipate this will be a fairly long-lived campaign if all goes well. There’s a lot to potentially keep track of …

Which brings me to the Kickstarter for Realm Works, which has 49 hours to go as I write this. Realm Works is a RPG campaign management engine that is being designed by Lone Wolf Development, with the goal of streamlining exactly the sort of things that I’m currently in the process of meticulously tracking. I’ve heard good things about Lone Wolf’s Hero Lab software, though I’ve never used it, but Realm Works looks like it’ll really be useful.

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New Treasures: The Unearthed Arcana 1st Edition Premium Reprint

New Treasures: The Unearthed Arcana 1st Edition Premium Reprint

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unearthed arcanaThe Premium 1st Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons reprint series is one of the best ideas Wizards of the Coast has ever had.

By bringing Gary Gygax’s original AD&D rulebooks back into print in deluxe editions, Wizards is making the groundbreaking work of the father of role playing available to a modern audience. More than that, it’s a tacit acknowledgement of the growing popularity of retro-gaming, a nod to those players who still enjoy playing first edition (or OE, Original Edition) D&D and AD&D.

I’m one of them. My most recent game of D&D was last Sunday, and one of the books we reached for during play — as a troop of goblins chased my player characters through a dark wood — was the first edition AD&D volume Unearthed Arcana.

Unlike the Players Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Masters Guide, Gygax’s Unearthed Arcana — which, among many other innovations, introduced the Cavalier, Barbarian, and Thief-Acrobat classes — had never been reprinted, and the copy we used to quickly check the effects of my daughter’s druid’s “Goodberry” spell was the original TSR printing from 1985. That’s a hard book to come across these days, as one of my young players lamented.

But no longer. Wizards of the Coast released the Unearthed Arcana 1st Edition Premium Reprint on Tuesday of this week. Best of all, this edition incorporates the corrections and updates published under Gygax’s supervision in Dragon magazine, making this the definitive edition of the text. At long last, players can assemble a complete collection of the most essential rule books for the greatest role playing game ever written, without having to pay collector’s prices for long out-of-print volumes.

The Unearthed Arcana 1st Edition Premium Reprint was published by Wizards of the Coast on February 19, 2013. It is 128 pages in hardcover, priced at $49.95. There is no digital or softcover edition.

Renovating Tegel Manor

Renovating Tegel Manor

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Tegel Manor-smallWhile I was assembling my Judges Guild article on Tuesday, I stumbled on an odd reference to a revised version of one of their earliest (and most famous) products: Tegel Manor. I’d never seen a copy however, and was pretty sure it didn’t exist, so I set it aside to investigate later.

What makes Tegel Manor so famous? I don’t think I could articulate its wonders as well as the talented James Maliszewski, author of the Grognardia blog; here he is:

Tegel Manor is without a doubt one of Bob Bledsaw’s masterpieces. Describing a sprawling 240-room haunted castle, the module is a textbook example of a funhouse dungeon, utterly lacking in anything resembling an ecology and filled with many encounters for which the adjective “whimsical” is charitable at best. The contents and/or inhabitants of each room are random — in some cases literally — meaning that, here you might find nothing more threatening than some giant beetles but next door you might find a Type III demon polymorphed as a kindly old beggar…

With its random encounter charts containing 100 members of the cursed and unfortunately named Rump family (all of whose names start with the letter R) and its goofy encounters (“Four Zombies … bowing to a Giant White Rat … in a pink cape and red plumed hat”), it certainly seems that way. It’s one thing to sidestep naturalism, but Tegel Manor goes above and beyond the call of duty when it comes to “gonzo.”

But the map is a thing of beauty. Nothing — and I mean nothing — has ever beaten it… It’s filled with winding passages, secret doors, mazes, empty rooms, weird features, and more.

James’s complete review is here. Tegel Manor was originally released in 1977, and revised and expanded in later editions. A little digging revealed that Necromancer Games had contracted to do an updated version for the Old School Renaissance market — and even produced the cover at right — but Judges Guild withdrew the rights before it saw the light of day. But that’s a story that deserves a post of its own.

New Treasures: Wilderlands of High Fantasy

New Treasures: Wilderlands of High Fantasy

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Wilderlands of High FantasyIn the very early days of adventure gaming, there were two companies you could count on: TSR, creator of Dungeons and Dragons, and Judges Guild.

Judges Guild was admittedly second tier. While TSR was constantly innovating, with full color cover art and high production values, Judges Guild saw no reason to deviate from the look they established in 1976: rudimentary layout and typesetting, and two-color covers that looked torn from a coloring book.

But they were prolific. My weekly pilgrimages to the gaming store in 1979 rarely yielded a new TSR release — they were few and far between — but Judges Guild never let me down, and I went home satisfied with many a JG product tucked under my arm. At their peak in the early 80s, they employed 42 people and had over 250 products in print, an astounding output.

Judges Guild was founded by Bob Bledsaw and Bill Owen; their first major product (and claim to fame) was the City State of the Invincible Overlord. The ambitious setting for the City State — a massive 18 maps covering nine continents drawn from Bledsaw’s home campaign, ultimately used as the locale for numerous adventure modules — became their next major release: The Wilderlands of High Fantasy, the first licensed D&D product and the first true campaign setting for the game.

Wilderlands was different in other ways, too. Perhaps most importantly it had a true sandbox feel, rather than the tightly-focused adventures of Gygax and Co, in which players were expected to follow a linear path. It encouraged a wide-open style of gaming, focused on exploring vast and wondrous forests and rugged landscapes, rather than dungeon crawls.

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Dungeon Board Game from Wizards of the Coast

Dungeon Board Game from Wizards of the Coast

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Dungeon board game from Wizards of the Coast
Dungeon board game from Wizards of the Coast

There were a lot of releases and announcements from Wizards of the Coast to get excited about in 2012, such as D&D Next, the Lords of Waterdeep board game, and the first four Dungeon Command faction packs (covered here and here). But one game slipped through the 2012 coverage here at the rooftop headquarters of Black Gate… in large part because it lacks the bells, whistles, and minis from some of these other games. But, at the same time, that’s part of its charm.

Dungeon (Amazon, B&N) is a straight dungeon crawl game at a bargain basement price ($19.99!) compared to almost any other RPG-related board game that you’ll find in the market these days. This is because there are no miniatures, just little cards and cardboard tokens.

This streamlined approach to the game design also makes Dungeon a pretty quick game to sail through. There isn’t the sort of intrigue that drew our Black Gate overlord John O’Neill into Lords of Waterdeep, but the goal is something that most gamers can get behind: the one with the most treasure wins.

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Wizards of the Coast Releases the First D&D Next Conversion Notes

Wizards of the Coast Releases the First D&D Next Conversion Notes

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D&D Next

We last reported on D&D Next when our intrepid man-on-the-scene Andrew Zimmerman Jones live-blogged the Dungeons & Dragons Next Keynote at GenCon last August. This week, Wizards of the Coast released the first D&D Next conversion notes, as part of the new playtest packet.

The playtest packet is now usable with D&D Encounters seasons. The next one, Against the Cult of Chaos, commences on February 6. Here’s the description:

Against the Cult of Chaos is a new adventure that takes inspiration from classics such as Village of Hommlet and Against the Cult of the Reptile God. Not only does this new story feature characters and locations from beloved past adventures, but there’s another compelling reason to participate – there’s two ways to play! The season runs from February 6 through April 3.

Players will need to decide which version of D&D they want to play — D&D 4th Edition or D&D Next –- when they create their Encounters characters. Dungeon Masters who choose to run the upcoming season under D&D Next rules will be able to download conversion notes at a later date at www.DNDNext.com.

Hasbro Announces It Will Cut 550 Jobs

Hasbro Announces It Will Cut 550 Jobs

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dungeons and dragons logo2Hasbro, owner of Dungeons & Dragons and Magic the Gathering, announced plans today to cut about 10 percent of its workforce and consolidate facilities to reduce expenses.

Hasbro, known chiefly for its toy line, said fourth-quarter revenue failed to meet expectations due to weaker than expected holiday demand. Hasbro expects revenue for the quarter to decline nearly 4% to $1.28 billion, badly missing earlier expectation for a 6% jump.

Hasbro’s brands include Monopoly, Nerf, G.I. Joe, and Transformers. The company didn’t break down the earnings disappointment so it’s difficult to lay the blame on any particular division, but it probably didn’t help that last year’s Battleship film, co-produced by Hasbro, was a significant flop. The next Transformers film isn’t due until 2014.

Hasbro employs 5,500 worldwide; a 10 percent cut would affect about 550 people. Since Hasbro doesn’t break out earnings for its Wizards of the Coast division, fans are in the dark about just how successful the division is — and whether or not it’s likely to be affected by the coming cuts.

Stay tuned to Black Gate for news, gossip, and unwarranted speculation as it develops.

A Slew of Old D&D (and AD&D) Books Now Available Digitally

A Slew of Old D&D (and AD&D) Books Now Available Digitally

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Fiends Folio for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 1st Edition
Fiend Folio for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, 1st Edition

Yesterday, Wizards of the Coast officially released the first wave of backlist products available in digital format. These books are available in PDF format through DriveThruRPG, and you can access all of the Wizards of the Coast titles there … or through their new website, DnDClassics.com.

The move to make their classic backlist titles available was originally announced back at their GenCon keynote (which I liveblogged back in August). The ultimate plan is to have every Dungeons & Dragons resource ever published available, but that’ll obviously take a while.

They appear to have started with collection of about 86 products, ranging from some core rulebooks, adventure modules, setting manuals, and so on. Even in just this first wave of products, we’ve got access to some truly classic material, such as the Basic Set Rulebook and the original Fiend Folio for Advanced D&D.

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