Last month I wrote about the state of modern d20 gaming and mentioned there might be a project in the works to update it for Pathfinder. Well, the project is up and taking donations! It’s being done as a patronage project by Super Genius Games, which consists of Owen K.C. Stephens, Stan!, and R. Hyrum Savage. They’re calling it “P20 Modern.”
Follow along and see how it goes! I liked d20 Modern OK and think it could be done a lot better, and it’s a great time to take it on.
I was just listening to a big ol long video of Erik Mona speaking on “Pen & Paper Gaming in the 21st Century” that Louis Porter Jr, had posted on his blog, and he mentions that Paizo has three iPhone apps in the works. Watch starting around 26 minutes in.
Specifically he describes the “Live Character Sheet” for Pathfinder – add all your stats and stuff there. One person casts Bless – you can see the other iPhones on the local network and select what characters get Blessed – and then it takes care of counting down rounds for you.” Nice! Suck it, Digital Initiative.
He talks about other technology stuff like Surface and ARGs, PDF publishing, POD, etc. Check it out!
Fantasy Flight Games has announced that they are finally putting out a Space Marine Warhammer 40k RPG called Deathwatch.
I never played the Warhammer 40k minis game, but it’s hard to be a gamer and not be aware of the general mythos. Space Marines, Chaos Marines, Orks, Eldar… But after everyone waited for 20 years for there to be any Warhammer 40k RPG, what did they come out with? First Dark Heresy for Inquisitors, then Rogue Trader for… traders. They’ve been successful enough, but they just seem kinda fringe to the core 40k experience. I had at least head of Inquisitors, but I hadn’t even heard of Rogue Traders. But the one thing everyone who has even wandered by a table of people playing 40k have heard of is the Space Marines!
It’s a pretty… daring plan to leave your big bang for the third game. I’m not a minis player, but liked the 2e Warhammer Fantasy RPG, and thought “Hey, a 40k RPG would be nice” – for some reason the “space marine” concept, though a super popular part of the genre, hasn’t been treated well in RPGs. There’s a couple super old ones (Aliens, Bughunters), a new indie-high concept one (3:16), and you can do it “on the side” in Traveller… But oddly, there’s not a lot of crunchy space marine games out there given the proportion of popular SF that features them.
I bought Dark Heresy, and thought it was OK… I had done a lot of stuff along that Inquisitor line in Fading Suns… Basically it boiled down to “this is nice, but I don’t think I’m going to run it.” Rogue Trader, I didn’t even buy. Other games like Traveller have traders as the core gameplay, I didn’t see the need. A Space Marine game, though – that I’d buy and really want to run!
P.S. In researching this article I discovered Rogue Traders do date back to the first edition of 40k (1989) so I guess they have nostalgia value to grognards, so that’s something. I still think most vaguely informed bystanders have never heard of them.
P.P.S. Going and looking at the FFG forums, there’s a bunch of people hand-wringing about “Oh but how could this be a viable RPG, it’ll just be all combat! What opportunity for roleplay will there be?” Oh, come on. Never watched Space: Above and Beyond, Battlestar Galactica, or Starship Troopers have we? Never seen games like 3:16 or Bughunters? Never read Hammer’s Slammers, Honor Harrington, or The Forever War? Oh never mind, anyone who thinks a military genre is necessarily limited to “kill kill kill” clearly doesn’t want to think more than 2 seconds about it. Heck, I’m watching an episode of “The Unit” on TV right now and that thing’s half military show half soap opera.
P.P.S. I really hope they don’t go the component-heavy route that Warhammer Fantasy 3e has gone… That’s not my thing.
In a lovely hearkening back to sensationalist reporting from the 1980s, Laurel Sweet of the Boston Herald has, via diligent investigative reporting, determined that Dungeons & Dragons is linked to not only recent campus killer Amy Bishop’s slayings, but other ones as well! It must be a vast role-playing kill conspiracy.
And I for one welcome the return of our notoriety. I think it’s about time we get the respect and fear given to biker gangs. Some bozo messing with you in a store or bank? “Well, I need to get this taken care of before I go to my D&D game…” Watch them pale in fear, lest you start shooting everyone in the room just like your fourth level rogue would!
Check out these awesome black gunpowder weapons rules for Pathfinder published as a free preview for LPJ Design’s upcoming “Pirates of the Bronze Sky.”
Do they look familiar? They should, since they’re the firearms rules I put up here some months ago! Woot! Thanks to Louis Porter for putting me in print! I can’t wait for the full product to come out, it’s looking to be loads of fun.
Meanwhile, I’m working as a proofer on Sinister Adventures‘ much-delayed Nick Logue mega-adventure Razor Coast. Nick finally realized he was never going to get it all done himself so has handed it over to Lou Agresta to take it from manuscript to product. He has quickly mobilized forces and put a process in place that I’m convinced will finally get this puppy out in a decent timeframe. See the Sinister forums for updates.
What can I say, I’m a sucker for pirate adventures. Heck, now that Green Ronin is going to be doing a Pathfinder version of their Freeport book, it’s a new Golden Age of D&D piracy! I’m already running my own Pathfinder version of the Freeport Trilogy.
So right now, I’m a busy boy – please forgive the lighter than usual blog-posting regimen!
Paizo, in their traditionally open and fan-friendly way, have been offering the six new PC classes from the upcoming Advanced Player’s Guide for public playtest! They have taken the feedback into account and have released a final playtest version, freely downloadable from paizo.com. Comments are still open till Feb 15, when they’ll bake ’em and print ’em!
Boy, there’s a lot of great Pathfinder news this week.
I have a soft spot for Green Ronin’s Freeport, a crime-ridden city of dirty pirates and Cthulhoid cultists. My very first D&D 3e campaign was the original Freeport trilogy and those are some fond memories. I’m actually using the Freeport stuff, hybridized with Golarions’ Riddleport, in my current Pathfinder campaign, Reavers on the Seas of Fate.
Well, word on the street (or at least on the Green Ronin forums) is that they’re working on a Pathfinder version of the Freeport setting! I’m looking forward to that. If you’ve never played in Freeport before, pick it up when it’s out and discover the joys of rapine and plunder!
Every year, Paizo Publishing holds a RPG design competition, open to all who care to enter, called RPG Superstar. They have a set of prominent RPG designers judge the entries and winnow the crowd down to a smaller and smaller set of contestants. It’s like fantasy Survivor!
Anyway, one of the best parts is that the stuff the contestants create is there for the using on the Web site. Round One got us a mess of wondrous items, and rounds Two and Three will get us some cool monsters. In the end, the winner gets a gig writing an adventure for Paizo!
It’s a great way to generate interest, promote innovation in your customer base, and in general demonstrate that they are the anti-… Well, I was going to say WotC, but really about half the RPG companies out there seem to actively disdain their fans.
Anyway, it’s too late to enter this year, but those of you that harbor dreams of fame can plan ahead. And raid the excellent content – not just from this year but from RPG Superstar 2009 and RPG Superstar 2008 as well! Innovative! Fan-friendly! Consistent! Have we entered a second golden age of gaming, or what?
Wayfinder is a free, fan created, high-quality pdf e-zine for players of the Pathfinder RPG. Issue 1 was really good, and they’re not stopping there. Issue 2 is now out! Download it from paizo.com for free!
It’s a real miscellany; fiction, humor, monsters, NPCs, adventures, races, recipes, fluff, crunch – it’s all here!
Well, Jim Shipman, sole proprietor of Outlaw Press and the psychotic perpetrator of art and IP theft on a large line of Tunnels & Trolls products has recently moved on to good old fashioned eBay fraud.
As discussed on Tome of Treasures and The Acaeum, Shipman (under the name selling4u2) is selling “first editions” and other rare and valuable Tunnels & Trolls stuff on eBay. But sadly, what one hapless buyer, who paid $1338 for a first edition, got in the mail was not what he paid for. (Compare the eBay pic to the recieved pic.)
I can’t imagine the Tunnels and Trolls community is that large – have some of you really not gotten the news yet!?! WAKE UP SHEELPLE! This guy is using every existing way and some new ones of ripping people off he conceivably can.
Jim Shipman posts on eBay under the names jimship1, Hobbit_King, actionseller99 and selling4u2, using the hobbit_king@yahoo.com PayPal account. Try not to get screwed!
Conversation among our gaming group recently turned to “Hey, was there ever another edition of d20 Modern?” It got me thinking about modern gaming and d20 modern-type gaming, especially as there may be some new breakthroughs coming on that front soon. (Teaser! I’ll spill the beans later in the article!)
I thought d20 Modern was just okay. It was serviceable. I didn’t like the stat-based classes, I think that’s lame. And I didn’t like the way they halfheartedly supported it – it’s like it wasn’t a real product, just a spoiler product to steal sales from Shadowrun, etc. In my mind it didn’t compare well; they proposed d20 Modern Dark Matter and Star*Drive, for example, which pretty much were better using the Alternity system. d20 Past and Future were just insulting in how light they were. “You could use this to replace a number of other existing games! We won’t provide enough content for you to do it out of the box, but look, you clearly could do it!” Not sure what they were thinking.
Two other major d20-based games tried to fill the gap – True20 and Modern20. True20 is Green Ronin’s generic, somewhat simplified d20 system; they use variants of it in Mutants & Masterminds and Blue Rose. I like it better than d20 Modern, but am not wildly enthusiastic about it. I don’t like the wound system, particularly. And there’s not a lot of direct support for modern gaming; it’s meant to not be purely fantasy-tied so you *can* do it but it seems spread thin. Every support book feels like it has to cover fantasy/modern/future/etc. which means you only get a little of each in the Companion, class books, etc. That’s a poor marketing strategy because it means if I want material for a modern warrior, I have to buy a book with fantasy stuff in it. I’m sure there are 10 or so people out there so in love with True20 they want to buy everything, but normal people would like books focused around information useful in a specific game they’re gonna run.
Modern20, from RPGObjects, is more specifically modern focused, which is nice. It still goes with a largely stat-tied set of core classes, though it tries to add a little more “zazz” to them. They have supplements for horror, martial arts, etc. Seems serviceable.
Mutants & Masterminds, from Green Ronin, is a great superheroes game. I love it – well, the first edition. I felt like the second edition overcomplicated things and decided the book should read more like a dictionary than a gamebook. I understand some people like that kind of “definition centric” format but I say bah. Anyway, I really like M&M 1e. Beautiful books, you can build beautiful Marvelesque characters, and fun gameplay. Criticisms – the way damage works can be a little problematic sometimes and I’ve learned over time that games that give the DM action points to use for villains suck. Anyway, it’s the best d20 supers game hands down and IMO one of the best supers games in any system. But it’s pretty much just for supers, which is great for that genre and not relevant for others.
Spycraft was another excellent game – in its first edition. It’s weird that I also don’t like its second edition; it’s super overcomplicated and also goes for that descriptor stuff, must have been a fad at the time. It was an espionage game, but because of that could work perfectly well for modern action, crime, investigation, military, etc. If you’re looking to play a “subtle” genre, d20 probably isn’t the right thing to use anyway. But if you want to be a faceman, soldier, wheelman, or fixer, it’s the game to use! For most traditional modern genres, though, in my opinion Spycraft 1.0 is the shizznit. (I didn’t like their uber gonzo “G.I. Joe on meth” setting, Shadowforce Archer, but all the class guides are nice.) They went the ‘real class’ direction instead of the ‘stat class’ – heck, Spycraft 2.0 minimized stats to the degree where they did away with ability checks! You can find all the Spycraft 1.0 stuff easily at Half Price Books etc. I don’t know what the heck Crafty is doing with the game line now that they have 2.0 – their supplements are bizarre (convert to d20 Modern! Add fantasy! Book after book of new guns!).
Haven: City of Violence, from LPJ Designs, also seems like a good bet. I haven’t played it, but it seems to stay squarely in the modern action/crime/etc and not try to add in psychic mutant magic-using bugbears or other crap like that. Seems to be Grand Theft Auto in Sin City directed by John Woo. I’d like to give it a shot sometime.
Well, there may be a Pathfinder version of Modern in the works! People asked Paizo to do it from time to time but they said “we’re busy with the core stuff.” Recently, however, on the Paizo boards, some names you may recognize – Stan!, Owen K.C. Stephens, and Hyrum Savage, who have formed Super Genius Games – are seriously talking about doing a Pathfinder Modern, possibly as a patronage project. Although I’m leery of patronage projects, as the RPGverse is full of long promised and never delivered products (Nick Logue and Razor Coast, I’m looking at you), it’d be interesting to get a new version of d20 Modern with the learnin’ of the last 10 years baked in.
Here’s what such a game should look like IMO.
In case you don’t read any other gaming blog or forum, I thought I’d mention the Haiti earthquake relief effort RPGNow/DriveThruRPG is running. You can donate $20 and you get free PDF products from a staggering number of companies in return – more than $1400 worth! It’s like 180 different products. And the cash goes to Doctors Without Borders, a “known good” charity (as opposed to, sadly, some of the dodgy ones that have sprung up to profit off the disaster). You should consider donating more, just to help and not for graft, but there’s no harm in getting some graft for $20 of it! (You can donate $5 or $10 instead, and they match it, but no freebies.) As of this writing they’ve raised $72,125!!! I bet you didn’t know there were even that many gamers that knew how to get to the Internet. 🙂
They’ve had such demand that they’re totally overwhelmed, you can’t download yet – but no rush. If you haven’t yet, go check this out!
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