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Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition on Sale Tomorrow

Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition on Sale Tomorrow

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baldurs-gate-enhanced-logoOver ten years ago, at GenCon 1998, I came across a tiny booth in the Grand Hall manned by a very friendly group of software developers from Edmonton, Alberta. They were promoting an upcoming game called Baldur’s Gate and boy, did it look terrific. Traffic in the booth was slow and they seemed grateful for the company — so much so that when I finally left, they handed me part of their display, a giant mock-up of the retail box. To this day it occupies a place of pride in my office.

When Baldur’s Gate was released in November 1998, it quickly became one of the most acclaimed computer role playing games in history. It put those friendly Edmonton developers, an outfit named BioWare, on the road to stardom, and over the next decade they came to dominate the industry with titles like Neverwinter Nights, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, and Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Baldur’s Gate, with its splendid story, characters, and revolutionary (for the time) Infinity game engine, still occupies a special place in the hearts of modern gamers. It was released for Windows 95/98 and doesn’t run well on modern machines — so for most of us, Baldur’s Gate is a distant memory, like those late nights playing Dungeon Master on an Amiga.

All that is about to change. A small start-up named Overhaul Games launched by two ex-Bioware employees, co-founder Trent Oster and lead programmer Cameron Tofer, has spent the last two years working on Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition, a complete re-write of the original title for modern platforms. The new version boasts over 400 enhancements — including new high-res cinematics, an enhanced interface, improved multiplayer, core game improvements & bug fixes, higher level cap, over six hours of bonus quests & new adventures, new party members, and much more. It includes both the original game and the 1999 expansion pack, Tales of the Sword Coast.

Best of all, the game has been optimized for modern platforms, including the iPad and Android tablet. I for one can’t wait to sit down on the couch and play Baldur’s Gate on my iPad. You can see more details, including screenshots and a gorgeous trailer, at the Overhaul website.

The PC version of Baldur’s Gate is priced at $19.95; it will be available for download this Wednesday exclusively through the new Beamdog digital distribution platform. iPad and Mac OS editions will be sold through the Mac App Store in November; release date for the Android version is TBA.

The Guide to Glorantha Kickstarter

The Guide to Glorantha Kickstarter

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There’s an amazing Kickstarter running at the moment. If you’re a fan of world-building, if you want to check out a world that’s been built over more than 40 years of group endeavour, with deep myths, histories, and cultures, one of the most compelling worlds in fantasy and certainly in fantasy roleplaying, you may want to take a look.

I’ve written previously at Black Gate about Glorantha, the fantasy world invented by Greg Stafford which lies behind the roleplaying games RuneQuest and HeroQuest. It’s a gorgeously detailed world; back in the days when Dungeons & Dragons was all about faux-medieval Tolkienery, Glorantha emerged as a lavish fantasy analog to the ancient world of Greece, Persia, and Rome. It’s a world of centaurs, heroes in bronze-crested helms, giants as big as mountains, and arcane cults which reshape the world as their worshippers offer sacrifice. Rich, complex, and sophisticated, it can offer the lightest play styles, or a rich immersive shared storytelling experience, with as much detail as anyone could want.

Glorantha owes a lot to Joseph Campbell, too. The “hero path” is an integral part of the world – how its inhabitants relate to the very real (and often mercurial) gods which surround them, and how heroes can penetrate the timeless realms of the gods and return with treasures physical and mystical. If, like me, you’re interested in the transcendent aspects of the stories we tell one another, Glorantha is a compelling world.

I’ve been gaming there since 1980; parts of it I feel I know better than my own hometown. But, over the past few years, Glorantha has entered a new golden age, as under the leadership of Jeff Richard and Rick Meints, Moon Design Publications have released multiple very high quality books providing new and deeper detail to the world. I’ve written about Sartar, Kingdom of Heroes; the Sartar Companion; and Pavis, Gateway to Adventure in previous posts – they’re all well worth a look, and highly recommended.

Over the past few years, Jeff Richard has been working on a book which looks like it will set a new standard in RPG supplements – a guide to the whole world of Glorantha itself. It’s a massive undertaking – an encyclopaedic opus detailing the places and cultures of a whole fantasy world, in exquisite detail. It’s been attempted twice before – once in the 1980s and once a decade ago – but in relatively abbreviated form. The new Guide to Glorantha is anything but abbreviated: it comes in at a whopping 400 pages of 10″ x 12″ book, detailing the geography, history, and cosmology of Glorantha, its cultures and races, as well as two continents, two subcontinents, and multiple archipelagos, plus a massive atlas filled with highly detailed and gorgeous maps – over 64 pages worth at the last count. The Guide to Glorantha is system agnostic – it doesn’t contain any games mechanics content, it’s pure setting detail, so you can use it with any game ruleset, or just read it for the pure pleasure of it. The Kickstarter has been running for a little over a week, and already has blown through its initial target. As a result, the initial scope of the project has expanded hugely, so that we’re now getting more regions detailed, more maps added, and an entire new “Companion” to the guide detailing things like the geography of the mythic regions of Glorantha, plus monographs by key industry writers. For those of us who’ve been playing quests into the realms of myth, this is nothing short of breathtaking in its ambition.

Check it out. If you’re a fan of Glorantha, or of fantasy worlds, or just want to see a beautiful example of world-building, the Guide to Glorantha may be for you. The Kickstarter runs until Tuesday, 18th December, and features a flexible pledging scale and increasingly attractive rewards.

Gygax Magazine: A New Gaming Magazine from TSR Games

Gygax Magazine: A New Gaming Magazine from TSR Games

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gygax-magazine3There’s been some buzz recently about Gygax Magazine, a new online tabletop gaming magazine set to launch in December.

Editor Jayson Elliot, in a post at ENWorld, revealed that the core team behind the magazine includes Ernie Gygax, Luke Gygax, Tim Kask, James Carpio, and Jim Wampler. The first issue is scheduled for December. TSR, the original publishers of Dungeons and Dragons, was purchased by Wizards of the Coast in the 1997. According to Jayson the TSR trademark was abandoned about nine years ago, and they were able to register it last year. Their first project is Gygax, a gaming magazine, “because we wanted a way to bridge the traditions of the old guard with the awesome new games that are out today.”

Here’s what Tim Kask, founding editor of The Dragon magazine, had to say on his Facebook page:

Gygax is a gaming magazine for new and old players alike. We are looking forward to the games of tomorrow and today, while preserving the traditions and history that got us where we are now.

Our articles and features cover current independent and major publisher games such as Pathfinder, Savage Worlds, The One Ring, Shadowrun, Godlike, Labyrinth Lord, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, Warhammer 40k Roleplay, Traveller, and others, as well as classic out-of-print games with a modern following, like AD&D, Top Secret, and Gamma World.

Our features include comics by Phil Foglio (What’s New With Phil and Dixie), Jim Wampler (Marvin the Mage), and Rich Burlew (Order of the Stick). Contributors include Jim Ward, Cory Doctorow, James Carpio, Ethan Gilsdorf, Dennis Sustare, and many more. Publishing quarterly in print as well as PDF and iPad editions, we hope each issue of Gygax will be an anticipated and treasured addition to any gamer’s library.

The magazine hasn’t even launched yet and it’s already stirring controversy, with Gygax’s widow, Gail, stating publicly “Gygax Magazine… does not have the support of the Gygax Family Estate.” Stay tuned for further updates as they become available.

Wake Up to a New World With Awakening: The Art of Halo 4

Wake Up to a New World With Awakening: The Art of Halo 4

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awakening-the-art-of-halo-4-smallI took the family to Best Buy yesterday to buy a new phone for my wife. They didn’t have anything below $250, so we trooped back to the car to return to the Verizon store. My teenage boys, flush with dog-sitting money, were the only happy shoppers, chortling excitedly in the back seat over a copy of 343 Industries’ Halo 4.

I got some scattered details over breakfast this morning. Master Chief, hot-babe AI Cortana, abruptly awakened from deep sleep, a Covenant fleet, a giant Forerunner planet, alien mysteries, and a lot of shooting. Sounds like Halo to me.

So when I sat down to sort through the week’s stack of review copies, my hand naturally gravitated towards the copy of Awakening: The Art of Halo 4, a thick oversize hardcover sent our way by Titan Books. It turned out to be an excellent choice, and  it thoroughly captivated my interest for the next 90 minutes.

Awakening is probably not a good choice if you’re not a fan of art, cutting edge computer games, or far-future science fiction. But if you’re interested in any of those things, you’ll find it very interesting and if, like me, you have more than a passing interest in all three, you’ll find it fascinating.

Awakening is packed with nearly 200 pages of full-color art, concept designs, and sketches from some of the top artists in the field, including Sparth, Robogabo, John Liberto, Glenn Israel, Jhoon Kim, and Thomas Scholes. The descriptive text, by “incurable Halo fanatic” Paul Davies, is brief and to-the-point, rarely more than a slender paragraph on each page. Davies wisely lets the artists do most of the talking, quoting Senior Art Director Kenneth Scott and concept artist Sparth at length.

And the art is indeed spectacular. The design breakdowns — for Master Chief, his mostly naked AI companion Cortana, numerous weapons, the truly splendid vehicle fleet, and the gun-toting alien Covenant and mysterious Forerunners — are detailed and a lot of fun, but it’s the gorgeous alien landscapes and breathtaking unexplored vistas that really fire the imagination. I guarantee there are sights here that you’ve never seen before, from the nebula-like clouds trapped between two vast constructs to the massive Didact ship, so large it can only be explored using a UNSC Broadsword fighter.  More proof that it’s computer entertainment pushing the sense-of-wonder envelope for SF and fantasy fans today.

Awakening: The Art of Halo 4 was published in hardcover by Titan Books on November 6. It is $34.95 for 192 pages. Get more info, including reproductions of some of the artwork, at the Titan website.

A Dark and Glorious World: The New Midgard Campaign Setting

A Dark and Glorious World: The New Midgard Campaign Setting

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midgard-smallI confess that I have a problem with a lot of RPG campaign settings on the market. Some of them are simply tired and played out. Some are designed to lock customers into purchasing adventures and sourcebooks, leaving little room for customization. Some take a “kitchen sink” approach, avoiding anything too distinctive in an effort to support every type of campaign.

As the lead designer and publisher at Kobold Press, I decided it was time to launch a project that would reinvent a few fantasy traditions, and restore all that I think is great and good in classic fantasy RPGs. It would be based on time-tested elements of my own homebrew campaign, not on market research, potential licensing opportunities, or maximizing shareholder value. It was time to let slip the drakes of war, sharpen up the great ax, and split some skulls with a new setting!

With that in mind, I worked with my talented colleagues Jeff Grubb and Brandon Hodge, and the Open Design community, to create the Midgard Campaign Setting. It’s made for conflict, plunder, deep magic, and horrific secrets. That’s reflected in the design choice to provide clear adventure hooks for every place described in the book, for instance, and in the decision to provide a system of ley line magic. Better yet, much original material for Midgard is written by newcomers, so it’s a place where everyone can sharpen their game design chops (more on that in a minute!).

When you’re in Midgard, you’ve got big missions, mythic adventures, and lots of options — but the setting is designed to be compact and easy to pick up. There’s also the part that’s harder to explain, the getting-fantasy-right part. To quote a new fan TwistedGamer

Not since I was a teenager and first peeled back the plastic that had been wrapped around my first Forgotten Realms campaign boxed set have I felt the giddiness that I feel right now…

The masks of the gods, the blending of myth and pure invention, the shadow roads and some new, lighter elements like the beer goddess and the school of clockwork magic all make Midgard sing.

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Art of the Genre: Art of the Disappearing MMORPG

Art of the Genre: Art of the Disappearing MMORPG

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Are we the only two left in Final Fantasy XI? Yes, but at least we look good together my love...
Are we the only two left in Final Fantasy XI? Yes, but at least we look good together my love...

You can never go home again, or at least I believe that’s the saying. I tend to agree, as my home town in NowhereVille Indiana stands as a shining example of the power that ‘getting out’ has on a person’s life. Still, when I do make it ‘home’ — and yes, although I’ve lived in four other states and half a dozen apartments, condos, and houses longer than the days where I spent my youth, my mother’s house on the Tippecanoe is still my home — I can breathe easy like nowhere else in the world. [On a sad note, someone recently related to me that maturity is achieved the day you lose your last parent because you are truly on your own. I’ve luckily not reached that level of independence, and certainly that is why my mother’s house still holds such warmth, because there I’m still the child, and who doesn’t like being the child once in a while?]

Honestly, I could shed tears as I write such profound revelations, as I think about home, three thousand miles from the City of Angels and all the chaos that goes with it, but I won’t. Instead, I want to try to translate that same feeling to another venue, that being the art of the quickly disappearing MMORPG.

Before I can truly begin to talk about the vanishing, however, I suppose I should first discuss life. On the 16th of March, 1999, Sony’s 989 Studios released Everquest and the world of online gaming was never the same. Sure, Ultima Online had been around since 1997, but it never stole gamers’ attention and basked in the world spotlight like Everquest, or ‘Evercrack’ as it was called by many because of its addictive qualities.

This game, eventually wrapped into the Sony Online Entertainment bundle, had hundreds of thousands of registered players by 2004. Somewhat unbelievably, thirteen years later, another expansion for the game appeared this November [2012], but like most games of its kind, the death throes can be a long and lonely road.

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Vintage Bits: In Search of the Lost Black Crypt

Vintage Bits: In Search of the Lost Black Crypt

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black-crypt-smallSome 20 years ago, shortly after I graduated from the University of Illinois, I bought my first home computer. It was an Amiga 2000, essentially the same as the entry-level Amiga 500 but with a hard drive. The hobby computing industry — which is now dead — was booming in the early 90s, and there were thousands of fun things the dedicated hobbyist could do with a decent home computer. Video editing, BASIC programming, ray trace imaging, indexing Chicken Cacciatore recipes… and if you were cutting edge enough to buy a modem, you could even log into BITNET and post on those electronic bulletin boards everyone was talking about. Crazy.

All of that was very interesting. But I shelled out my $1,500 bucks for one reason, and one reason only: to play games. And that’s exactly what I did.

I played the role playing games I’d been aching to try out in my last year of grad school, while feverishly finishing my Ph.D. thesis: Pool of Radiance, Bard’s Tale, Dragon Wars, many others. I played late into the night, before dragging my weary butt into work at Amoco Oil the next morning. It was an exhausting and emotionally draining lifestyle but, let’s face it, those dungeons weren’t going to clean themselves out. Countless terrified townspeople in tiny electronic villages were counting on me, and I wasn’t going to let them down.

About a year after I bought my Amiga, in March 1992, Electronic Arts published one of the most acclaimed role playing games ever made for that platform: Black Crypt, the first release from Raven Software, future makers of the popular Hexen, Soldier of Fortune, Quake 4, and Call of Duty: Modern Warware 3. Inspired by the legendary game Dungeon Master, another famous Amiga title, Black Crypt was nothing less than a vast trap-filled dungeon crammed with monsters, secret passages, hidden switches, and magical loot. The graphics were gorgeous, and the wonderful sound effects — the distant clanking of trapdoors, odd footsteps, and telltale sounds of the teleporters — immersed players like never before, and made you want to play with the sound cranked up and the lights turned down low.

I played the first few levels and was mesmerized. Then, in November 1992, I got married and moved to Belgium, leaving my beloved Amiga behind. I thought about the game many times in the intervening years, as I returned to the States, got a job at a tiny software company, worked on Internet Explorer 1.0, and was at ground zero of the Internet revolution that transformed the entire country. Some time during those turbulent years, my Amiga was moved to the basement, where it quietly sits today, collecting dust.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been on a quest to find and complete Black Crypt. It’s a quest filled with exactly the kind of twists and turns you’d expect for a man determined to find a long-lost crypt, spoken of only in half-forgotten legend. While critics raved, Black Crypt was released when the Amiga was already in decline, and was never successful enough to be ported to any other platform. It vanished quickly, both from store shelves and collective memory. As I search for the right magical tools that will allow me to open the crypt, I’m well aware that it’s not going to be easy.

But that’s okay. After twenty years, one of the things I’ve learned is that true joy isn’t always in the destination. It’s in the journey.

Our most recent Vintage Bits articles were Sword of Aragon, Lordlings of Yore, and Battletech: The Crescent Hawk’s Inception.

An Intro to Warhammer 40K: Explore the Horrors of the Jericho Reach in Deathwatch: The Achilus Assault

An Intro to Warhammer 40K: Explore the Horrors of the Jericho Reach in Deathwatch: The Achilus Assault

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the-achilus-assault-smallI’ve mentioned a few times now that the modern game that has most captured my interest is Fantasy Flight’s Rogue Trader, set in the darkly fascinating Warhammer 40,000 universe.

Let’s back up a bit, because that was probably confusing. What is Warhammer 40,000? Back in 1983, British game company Games Workshop released Warhammer, a tabletop miniatures game which allowed fantasy fans to simulate massive battles between orcs, elves, humans, and the forces of Chaos using thousands of hand-painted lead miniatures.

The game was a major success, and in 1987 wargaming designer Rick Priestley asked the fateful question: “Hey lads — what would happen if we gave orcs space suits?”

Thus was born Warhammer 40,000, a tabletop miniatures game which allowed fantasy fans to simulate massive battles between orks, elves, humans, and the forces of Chaos — in space. And yes, it’s exactly as cool as it sounds.

Of course, a concept as powerful as Orks in Space couldn’t be contained in one genre for long. The tabletop game is currently in its sixth edition, and by 1999 Games Workshop was publishing Warhammer 40K novels and comics through its Black Library imprint. Over the last dozen years, it has produced well over 200 titles, including The New York Times bestselling Horus Heresy series.

The novels have vastly expanded the far-future setting of Warhammer 40,000, filling in the back story of the all-powerful Emperor of Mankind, who sits on his throne on Earth while his Space Marines sweep across the vast reaches of the galaxy, reclaiming the far-flung worlds of man lost in the dark millennia since the treasonous forces of Chaos brought an end to the Golden Age of Mankind. The loyal Marines — and the Rogue Traders who follow closely behind, powerful merchant princes of the stars — come face to face with strange mutant offshoots of humanity, ancient and sinister alien Xenos, gene-stealing Tyranids, and whole civilizations fallen to the corruption of Chaos.

And of course, space Orks.

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Adventure in the Spaceways with Perry Rhodan: The Cosmic League

Adventure in the Spaceways with Perry Rhodan: The Cosmic League

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perry-rhodan-the-cosmic-leagueI’m willing to bet most of you have no idea who Perry Rhodan is.

Believe it or not, Perry Rhodan is the most ambitious future history ever written. Since its creation in 1961, over 3,000 Perry Rhodan novels have been published; the series has been translated into half a dozen languages and spawned at least one movie and a popular computer game, The Immortals of Terra.

Why haven’t you heard of him? Probably because the last English-language Perry Rhodan novel, #118 The Shadows Attack, was published by Ace Books in 1977. The English-language version was the brainchild of Forrest J. Ackerman, who hired his wife Wendy to do most of the translations. The series has continued in its native Germany, where it is published weekly.

I bring all this up because A) Perry Rhodan practically introduced me to science fiction, at the tender age of eleven, and B) I recently purchased Perry Rhodan: The Cosmic League, a two-player card game from Z-Man games that makes use of the Perry Rhodan license in a fast-paced game of interstellar trading and politics:

A newly colonized star system, populated by different peoples… Mysterious remains of age-old technology… Orbital stations to organize the trade between the worlds… and you and your spaceship right in the middle of it all…

Discover the Ambourella system with all its opportunities. Fight the adversities of gravity and do business with the planets. Your are the captain of a spaceship transporting goods and passengers. Invest your earnings early in valuable technologies and thus strive to become the most wealthy merchant of the Cosmic League.

Perry Rhodan doesn’t actually appear in the game, but it does draw on the rich backdrop of the Cosmic League. It comes with 60 technology and interventions cards, 6 planet tokens, 30 different cargo cards, and 2 spaceships. The average playing time is under half an hour. It’s a fairly simple game at heart, and the tie-in with Perry Rhodan is fairly light, but nonetheless it brought back a lot of great memories of 1970s pulp science fiction.

Perry Rhodan: The Cosmic League was published by Z-Man Games in 2007. It retails for $24.99, but I bought my copy new online for around 10 bucks.

Keep up on Fantasy Gaming with Kobold Quarterly

Keep up on Fantasy Gaming with Kobold Quarterly

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kobold-quarterly-fall-2012-smallIn the early days of the adventure gaming hobby, the field was pretty diverse, with a healthy assortment of successful RPGs and board games. Much like today, as a matter of fact.

One major difference, however, was that each of the major titles was supported with its own magazine: Dragon (for D&D and other TSR games), Different Worlds (Runequest, Call of Cthulhu), Sorcerer’s Apprentice (Tunnels and Trolls), White Dwarf (Warhammer), Space Gamer (The Fantasy Trip), The Journal of the Traveller’s Aid Society (Traveller), and many others. Board gamers, too, weren’t overlooked on the magazine rack, with Nexus (Star Fleet Battles), Ares (SPI’s sci-fi games), The General (Avalon Hill), and others.

With the exception of White Dwarf, all those magazines are dead today.

And I miss them. Many were good, and a handful — including The Space Gamer and Different Worlds — were excellent. They kept us up-to-date on rapid market changes, talked-up overlooked games, and generally kept the level of excitement high around the whole industry.

I never expected the era of the specialized gaming magazine to return. For one thing, I know what it takes to keep a magazine alive these days (a series of miracles).

But Wolfgang Baur’s Kobold Quarterly has changed my mind.

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