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Art of the Genre: Review of the Inner Sea World Guide

Art of the Genre: Review of the Inner Sea World Guide

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pzo9226_500My very first campaign setting, as probably the bulk of old time gamers would also claim, was The World of Greyhawk. I still have great nostalgia for that world, and the classic adventure modules set in it, but sometimes you just need to upgrade, you know? I mean, Greyhawk is over thirty years old, and has gone through a number of facelifts, but still it’s always nice to try on something new.

And speaking of new! How about Paizo’s Pathfinder Campaign Setting The Inner Sea World Guide. I mean the name alone is worth the price! I’m not sure when the first time I saw this book, but I know when I did I WANTED IT!

Pathfinder is already an outstanding supplemental system, with a massive amount of core books, adventure paths, and gazetteers, but if you’re looking for a new age setting or simply want to steal some quality ideas for your own world, this book is an incredible resource.

As I delved into the pages it was like opening a Pandora’s Box of fantasy grandeur. The book begins with a nice expansion of the races of The Inner Sea, and like Iron Kingdoms did some years back for their setting, Paizo defines twelve different human races before delivering a nice history on the usual suspects like elves, dwarves, and the like.

I was intrigued by this kind of detail, and as I flipped through the different races I couldn’t help by smile at those chosen and the great adventures that could be set in a country populated by these individuals.

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Vintage Treasures: SPI’s Swords and Sorcery

Vintage Treasures: SPI’s Swords and Sorcery

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82 bucks later, all this was mine. Click for bigger version.
71 bucks later, all this was mine. Click for bigger version.

Well, technically it’s not a new treasure, since it was first published in the late Middle Ages of fantasy gaming (1978). But this copy is new to me, courtesy of eBay.

And just look at it. Isn’t it gorgeous?

Okay, so maybe you’re not into vintage fantasy games the way I am (that shout you hear is my long-suffering wife, saying “Like that’s even possible.”) Or maybe you find the flimsy paper maps and counters of older board games a little quaint, compared to the deluxe contemporary offerings from Fantasy Flight and Wizards of the Coast.

But really, you just have to open the Swords and Sorcery box to know it’s something special. 400 counters, 56 playing cards, a big 56-page rulebook, player aids, a tantalizingly complex Diplomacy Display… and best of all, that beautiful map.

Yeah, maybe it’s a little shallow to fall in love with a game because of a map. But really, isn’t a cool setting at the heart of all great fantasy?

And the setting for Swords and Sorcery isn’t just cool. It’s sumptuous.

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Join the Heroes of the Feywild

Join the Heroes of the Feywild

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heroesfeywildPlayer’s Option: Heroes of the Feywild (Amazon, B&N)
Dungeons & Dragons – Rodney Thompson, Claudio Pozas, Steve Townshend
Wizards of the Coast (160 pp, $29.95, Nov. 2011)

Fury of the Feywild Fortune Cards (Amazon)
Dungeons and Dragons
Wizards of the Coast ($3.99, Nov. 2011)

Reviewed by Andrew Zimmerman Jones

In roleplaying games, I’ve always been a fan of taking full advantage of each character’s unique traits. The statistics are a reflection of these unique traits, of course, but they aren’t the most important element. The differences between Dwarves and Elves goes far beyond just their Dexterity and Constitution bonuses, reflecting deep cultural differences that are far more interesting.

As such,I love supplements that help to differentiate even more between different types of characters. The Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Option book Heroes of the Feywild is superb at doing that for Feywild characters, providing both storytelling details about these engaging character types as well as new mechanics designed to support stories that feature the Feywild. If you want to enter into this world of raw magical power, this is definitely a must-have supplement.

To supplement the book, Wizards of the Coast also released an Fortune Cards expansion, Fury of the Feywild, which allows you to invoke feywild-linked events into your Dungeon & Dragons game in a more random fashion. You can download the rules for using Fortune Cards from Wizards directly.

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SEP: Business Vs. Hobby

SEP: Business Vs. Hobby

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When my associate and I created Sword’s Edge Publishing, we had a very limited goal – we were going to publish a collection of military adventures for modern d20, and then another series of adventures for d20 fantasy. In there, I intended to write a supplement for playing covert, special operations characters in modern d20 and my associate wanted the series of fantasy adventures to lead to a setting. We expected a relatively tight timeline and then we’d likely sit back, see what happened and maybe see about publishing other people’s stuff.

We did complete the Albenistan series, just that we were eight months late. The fantasy adventure series never saw fruition. We totally departed from our plan. How did it all go off the rails? Can you guess? Real life and project drift took its toll in that first year.

However, while we were not doing exactly what we had planned, we had found a niche. Our production schedule followed the generally favorable reviews our modern d20 products received, and it was this critical praise rather than sales that informed my plans for SEP.

And it was very quickly my plans that mattered, as my partner could invest less and less time in SEP, and when his dream job came through, he was gone. Long before that, I had become solely responsible for SEP and I was not then, and am not now a businessman.

I’m sure there were methods I could have used to help me decide our way forward. I did consider our sales numbers, but they were small. Critical reception and personal interest informed my decisions rather than business considerations.

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Have Fun Storming the Chaostle

Have Fun Storming the Chaostle

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chaostleChaostle (Amazon)
Chivalry Games ($69.99, May 2011)

Reviewed by Andrew Zimmerman Jones

Many fantasy board games have you performing some sort of dungeon crawl, but the approach in Chaostle is a bit different. Instead of crawling through the bowels of a castle’s lower levels, you are instead moving through various levels, leaping from floor to floor in an effort to make it through the castle as quickly as possible. There are a variety of different paths to take and these choices are as significant as any others that you make in the game.

Designed for 2 to 8 players (ages 10 and up), the goal of Chaostle is to beat the other groups of adventurers through the castle. Once you enter the Sanctuary in the center of the castle, you still haven’t won until you are able to beat the castle itself, meaning that the other players do have an opportunity to catch up and sweep in for victory at the last minute.

The game has a fairly sophisticated style of play, so it’s not for the feint of heart. If you are an experienced fantasy gamer, then this will be  fun game, but be warned:

Do not use this game as a means to get your kids, girlfriend, spouse, or other non-gamer involved in the genre.

If you’ve already got a solid group of gamer friends available to you, though, Chaostle can provides hours of entertainment with combat and surprises aplenty.

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New to the Interwebs: D&D Next

New to the Interwebs: D&D Next

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Wizards of the Coast has just announced the creation of a new online portal which will feature information about the upcoming next iteration of Dungeons & Dragons. They seem to be specifically avoiding the “5th edition” label for the moment, instead going with the working title of D&D Next for the naming convention of the websites (although that name itself doesn’t appear in the text of most of the pages).

dndnext

The website includes links to some recent Q&A’s and other resources about the game, based upon the handful of demonstrations at the D&D Experience convention (and perhaps elsewhere), until the time when wide scale playtesting begins.

I repeat: Playtesting has not yet begun, but this portal allows you to sign up, in the hopes of getting access as early as possible. Once playtesting does begin, the relevant materials will be available for download through this website.

What are your thoughts on the next iteration of Dungeons & Dragons? What aspects of the game would you like to see kept (or reintroduced) from previous editions?

It’s a World of Slaughter: Small World Board Game

It’s a World of Slaughter: Small World Board Game

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smallworldSmall World (Amazon)
Days of Wonder ($49.99)
2 to 5 players
Recommended ages: 8+
Playtime: Around 1 hour

Reviewed by Andrew Zimmerman Jones

Small World is a game where various fantasy races get to fight over a world that’s just too small for them all to coexist. The intriguing gameplay mechanic ultimately drives your races into decline, forcing you to select new races to sweep in and take their place. The victor is the one with the most Victory Points at the end of the game.

Each Race has special powers which are randomly chosen each game, resulting in a total of 280 different possible Race & Special Power combinations, from Swamp Giants to Dragon Master Skeletons to Seafaring Dwarves. (Or, in another permutation, Dragon Master Giants, Seafaring Skeletons, and Swamp Dwarves.)

The set-up can be a bit overwhelming when you first open the game, but once you’ve played it once, it’s a quick, fun game for the whole family. One nice feature is that there’s nothing hidden about the game, so this is excellent for introducing younger players to gaming. Though the recommended age is 8+, my precocious 6-year-old son and I have played this game multiple times. He often has questions about the way certain powers work, so the game lasts longer than an hour, but it’s loads of fun.

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The Birth of Sword’s Edge Publishing

The Birth of Sword’s Edge Publishing

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SEP LogoSword’s Edge Publishing released its first product in 2004. Looking back, I think that the reason for starting the company were faulty. Not because it was self-publishing – self-publishing is considered “indy” for role-playing games and not frowned on as it is in fiction – but because myself and my initial partner in the venture wanted to publish rather than be publishers. That is an important distinction. We created SEP not because we wanted to start our own business, but because we wanted to have control over our creations. This is perhaps a laudable goal, but in hindsight I think we could have achieved artistic control without self-publishing.

In truth, while there were a few companies that might have been interested in the modern military adventures for the d20 RPG market – which is what SEP was producing – none of them were “publishers” in the sense that Wizards of the Coast (producers of Dungeons & Dragons), White Wulf (Vampire) or Steve Jackson Game (GURPS) were. Most were relatively successful self-publishers that had expanded into publishing the works of others. Given that these companies were mostly publishing PDFs and that the barrier for entry into the PDF market was low, we decided to just do it ourselves. As with punk rock, DIY has a certain cachet in RPGs. It didn’t necessarily indicate quality, but DIY certainly reflects passion.

We had that.

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New Treasures: Kiss My Axe: Thirteen Warriors and an Angel of Death

New Treasures: Kiss My Axe: Thirteen Warriors and an Angel of Death

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kiss-my-axeLast summer I played around with Fraser Ronald’s RPG Sword Noir, a fun new game of hardboiled crime fiction in worlds of sword & sorcery.

Readers familiar with Fraser’s story in Black Gate 15, “A Pound of Dead Flesh,” will instantly get what Sword Noir is all about. The story centered on two legionnaires tangled up in a plot to cheat a very powerful necromancer, who quickly find themselves caught in a lethal web of secrets and betrayals. It’s a terrific sword-and-sorcery action piece, with characters who find skill with a sword is only slightly less critical to their survival than the ability to think on their feet — and quickly read a bad situation.

Sword Noir captured the same aesthetic in a wonderfully concise set of role playing rules, offering guidelines on crafting compelling adventures for players interested in unraveling labyrinthine plots in dark urban settings.

As the author described it: “Now is the time for your characters to walk down mean streets, drenched in rain, hidden in fog, and unravel mysteries, murders, and villainy.” (See Fraser’s complete overview in his most recent post for the Black Gate blog here).

Sword Noir was a wonderfully inventive system, and it was obvious Fraser had great ambitions for it. The fruit of those ambitions arrived this month: Kiss My Axe: Thirteen Warriors and an Angel of Death, a role-playing game of Viking adventure.

While it’s based on the underlying system from Sword Noir and the Sword’s Edge System, Kiss My Axe turns its attention to the heroics of the great Norse sagas, and the mechanics have been altered to provide more vivid and exciting combat.

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WotC Announces Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons

WotC Announces Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons

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ddMike Mearls, senior manager of D&D research and development at Wizards of the Coast, today announced the project that will become the fifth edition of the world’s most popular role playing game.

Confused by the plethora of editions? Wondering if this is really a big deal? You’re not alone.

Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson published the first Dungeons and Dragons rules in a hand-assembled boxed set in 1974; in 1977 Gygax completely revamped the game into Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the version that catapulted it into a household name. In 1989 David “Zeb” Cook and a new team at TSR rewrote the game, releasing a Second Edition of AD&D aimed primarily at younger players. D&D 3rd Edition arrived in 2000 from new owners Wizards of the Coast; it is widely credited with saving the game — and revitalizing the entire RPG industry with the streamlined d20 System, released at the same time. Version 3.5 came along in 2003, tweaking numerous rules, and the most recent incarnation is the Fourth Edition, published in 2008.

And yes, it’s a big deal.

Wizards is putting out the call to players around the world to assist in development, with an ambitious open playtesting program starting this spring. You can help shape the future of the game by signing up for the playtest here. According to Mearls,

The ultimate goal of this next iteration of D&D a game that rises above differences of play styles, campaign settings, and editions, one that takes the fundamental essence of D&D and brings it to the forefront of the game.

You can read the complete announcement here, and read more about the genesis of the new edition in today’s New York Times.