In or around Austin and want to know where to go and who to meet? Here’s a quick cheat sheet for you.
Game Stores
Groups
Conventions
More as I find ’em!
I came across a couple old RPGs that had gone out of print and then been made available for free on the Web by their owners, and I asked around on RPG.net and got a lot more! I wanted to make the list available here for two reasons.
Please note this is a list of legally available games only, not torrent sites or other pirate stuff (as best as I can tell). It’s also only for games that used to be for sale and are now free; there’s plenty of other lists of “made for free” RPGs out there on the Web. It’s also not “Lite,” “free,” or “SRD” versions of pay games, though I may post later with a list of those.
So how is the RPG industry doing, anyway? (Besides WotC trying to run people out of business with their ill-advised plans to eliminate the OGL in 4e with a much more restrictive scheme.)
Well, several of the companies out there like to share! So here’s some compiled information from several gaming companies about how they did in 2007 and what they plan for 2008.
Green Ronin Publishing – http://www.greenronin.com/ – Three-part “New Year’s Message from the President” – Mutants & Masterminds, True20, Song of Ice & Fire, and Freeport. Not too much in terms of hard numbers, though.
The venerable old sci-fi game Traveller is getting a new release soon, from Mongoose Publishing. And since they’re planning on making the rules open, they have an open playtest! The current version of the playtest docs are linked from their Traveller product page.
I took the opportunity to do some character generation. Like WFRP, Traveller has a random lifepathy character generation system, but in this case it takes you well into your character’s midlife. You can even die during character generation in the “Iron Man” (classic) version.
While I’m griping about things dying, I may as well lament the passing of one of my favorite RPGs of all time – Feng Shui. Atlas Games just put out the last planned supplement for it, Glimpse of the Abyss. It’s a monster book; I’ll probably submit a review of it to RPG.net soon.
Alas. The end was a long time coming, its run lasted more than a decade – Feng Shui is one of the coolest RPGs ever, by skilled game designer Robin Laws. It popularized the concept of “mook” opponents (generic bad guys who are easy to beat and less mechanically complicated than full villains) and advanced the notion of limited player authorship – in other words, don’t ask “is there a nearby pizza cutter I can pick up?” in a fight in a pizza parlor. Instead, say “I pick up a nearby pizza cutter and rake it across the gangbanger’s face!”
The venerable Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay had, in the last couple years, been brought back to life by the skilled Black Industries, a British Games Workshop organ working in concert with ever-favorite American company Green Ronin. They even just launched a Warhammer 40k RPG, Dark Heresy. And now, despite that fact that it’s doing very well, Games Workshop has decided to discontinue BI including WFRP and WH40kRP and just focus on Warhammer novels. This is a strange decision as the only reason anyone cares about WH novels is being led there either by the minis game or the RPG.
Pinnacle Entertainment Group and Green Ronin Publishing have made an agreement to come out with the Savage Worlds Freeport Companion. To explain, Freeport, the City of Adventure, is the best known third party setting for D&D. “Death in Freeport” was available at Gen Con along with the D&D 3e launch, and Green Ronin continued to support the tales of this pirate haven with many scenarios and some sourcebooks. I introduced my Memphis gaming group to Freeport back in 2000 and we ran in it for many years. Good times!
Posted in talk
Tagged freeport, gaming resources, green ronin, pinnacle, RPG, savage worlds
There’s a new D&D PSA up, and it has my favorite characters Hennet, Lidda and Tordek in it. If it had Regdar too it’d be the perfect PSA. If you haven’t seen any of these, they’re a hilarious video series spoofing D&D done by some college students. Check it out!
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