(Bonus points for naming the reference!)
Anyway, Topless Robot has brought us the kind of D&D article that only comes around once in a blue moon. Remember the random harlot table in the AD&D 1e DMG? Well, here’s the extended dance remix!
The 12 Harlots of the Dungeons & Dragons Random Harlot Table Explained
I’ve always had a soft spot for the brazen strumpets myself.
Well, looks like the new RPG Bloggers Network wasn’t expecting the load. When you hit their page you get redirected to a page which says, in short,
This Account Has Been Suspended
Please contact the billing/support department as soon as possible.
Hey guys… Contact the billing/support department!!!
I went to http://www.critical-hits.com to see if they had info but they’re on the same hosting account apparently. 😦
Update: I contacted Dave Chalker and they’re trying to get more info from their ISP.
Update: It’s back up, panic over.
This came to mind while I was researching for my recent “Indie RPG Awards” article.
Let me give one bit of advice to our indie RPG people out there. Let’s pretend someone hears about your game and would like information on it. Well, some of you make it very difficult. If you don’t have any “product page” besides the sale page on RPGnow or whatnot, you’re doing it wrong. Let’s take Ave Molech. Morbid Games has a Web site, but once you get on it and try to find out information about Ave Molech, you’re screwed. The best you can do is find a link to an online store that has a two-sentence blurb on it. HTML’s free, boys, if you have a whole frickin’ Web site already take the time to put up a couple pages about your product, its world, etc. Same goes for Valent Games re: The Princess Game.
Even if your game is free you need to do this. It still takes a minor commitment from a person to download a big ass PDF and look through it. So even though the Dead’s site does a good job of just getting you to the game, it can turn off a casual browser. How about a couple paragraphs on what this is and why I might care? When I first was going down the Indie RPG list, I came very close to not clicking on it. “Another survival horror game, whatever,” I thought. Luckily the “Death and relationships” tagline got me just enough that I did dl it, and it’s really neat. But you’re shaving off your audience bit by bit if you don’t give them enough information to know whether they want your game or not. If they aren’t sure, you’re not going to close them.
You’re indie already, and getting an audience is hard. Don’t deliberately make it harder. With the Web, it’s pretty darn easy to get a message out there. If all you really want to market to is the other two dozen indie wonks at the FORGE, then fine, but I would hope most proud authors would like to see more people experience their fine work.
Lest I be accused of giving more love to the Corp$, here’s a rundown of the Indie RPG awards, also presented at Gen Con yesterday!
I’ve done some value-add by hyperlinking them for you, apparently that’s what “the Man wants you to do” since they don’t bother on the awards site. Go there to read about all the runners-up, I like how they indicate point totals so you can see how close (or not) the race was. For example, Grey Ranks didn’t even have a close competitor for Best Game, pulling 52 points to Reign’s 29 in the category. Congratulations to all winners, runners-up,and nominees!
Here’s the complete nominee game list and supplement list. The ones that intrigue me the most personally are The Princess Game, The Dead (free), and Ave Molech (supplement). But they’re all cool!
Our doughty band travelled way past the settled frontier into the Kodar Mountains, seeking the legendary golden streets of Xin-Shalast, Runelord Kharzoug’s millenia-lost capital. But, holed up by a blizzard out in that remote place, trapped in a shelter together for what seemed like an infinity, our hunger grew different. More severe… savage. Not to be sated by magically conjured gruel. What strange meat might quench it? Oh, what?!?
Find out in Part I of the Spires of Xin-Shalast, the latest installment of the Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path!
Posted in session summaries
Tagged 3.5e, adventure path, D&D, Pathfinder, rise of the runelords, RPG, RPGs, runelords
The ENnies were announced last night at Gen Con, and here’s the winners! When I compare my picks to the results, I wonder… What’s all this love for Changeling? It looks OK, but “Best” in interior art and production values just isn’t supportable over the other entries – if I open Changeling and Alpha & Omega and just look at them, there’s no compare… In fact, Solomon Kane and Changeling were my picks for weakest entries in that field, and they’re the winners? Odd. Here, look at the A&O PDF preview. Can you honestly pop them open side by side and say that Changeling or Kane are anywhere in that league in production values? No, of course not. I support Changeling winning for writing and Kane for rules, but that’s just strange.
Here, let’s start by me giving you a medal summary, Olympics style!
Super congrats to big winner Paizo! It’s well deserved. I hear they already sold out of all of their Pathfinder RPG Beta stock at Gen Con in nine hours! Here’s the detailed list of awards, straight from EN World.
Heard of the new Pathfinder RPG? It’s Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition. Well, not really, but it should have been.
While Wizards took D&D in 4e and fundamentally changed it, Paizo took the OGL part of Third Edition and retooled it into what many people call “D&D 3.75e” – an improved version but still mostly 3e-compatible.
Believing strongly in involving the gamer community in the development of the game, they went through a number of public Alpha drafts and have now released their Beta product. This will be playtested by anyone who wants to for a year and then the final “1.0” version will be released this time next year.
You can buy the Beta in hardcover for $50, softcover for $25, or… download the PDF for free! That’s right, go to Paizo Publishing’s Pathfinder RPG page and get it for free (you have to register, the process to get it is via their online store/shopping cart). Then, you can go and give rules and playtest feedback on their forums.
So far, they’re doing everything I wish Wizards had done with D&D 4e.
Pathfinder RPG Beta – What’s In It
They’ve streamlined and simplified the combat mechanics while making the core classes a bit more bad ass. Races have a bit more put into them, making them more distinctive. The barbarian’s rage powers are very interesting, and there’s more abilities for bards. Fighters get armor and weapon training abilities in addition to their bonus feats so they get something at every level. Sorcerers have “bloodlines” that give them additional powers.
The Pathfinder Society is the new Paizo Publishing-sponsored organized play campaign, similar in concept to the RPGA’s Living campaigns.
What does that mean? Well, way back in the day, when you went to conventions to play games, all of them were what is now called “classic” format. You showed up and either they had pregen characters ready for you, or there was a quick chargen as part of the session.
Then, they came up with the idea that for large, recurring stuff it would be cool if you could play the same character, ideally your character, from game to game. Thus was born the Living City, set in the Forgotten Realms. You could generate your own character according to slightly-modified 2e rules, and in each session you got XP and treasure you could take to the next game. This required a little complexity and was only suitable for larger efforts, because you had to split players into level ranges and whatnot. (Characters couldn’t “port” between home games and the Living campaign for strict fairness – you can only advance them within the campaign.) And thus was born the “campaign” format of organized play.
Great news courtesy Mad Brew Labs – Wizards has announced that they plan to revise the GSL!
They’re not committing to details, or a date, and the dreaded fan site policy is still pending (a fan site policy wasn’t needed for the last ten years, why now?) but they at least admit that everyone hates the GSL and if they don’t want to lose product support and customers they need to get their act together.
So to all the messageboard fanboys who said “don’t complain, it’ll come to naught and you’re not showing proper respect to our beloved Wizards overlords” – TAKE THIS!!!
Cowards who never stand up for what’s right always claim standing up won’t have an effect. Good work to all the publishers, from Clark at Necro, Green Ronin, Kenzer & Co, on through about everyone else, who have refused to mortgage their comapny’s futures to this heavy handed move. If even a quarter of the holdouts had caved, we might not be having this discussion.
As most of the initial hype vs furor wars have settled down there’s some good “what 4e is” information starting to emerge out there. Ones I’ve found the most helpful are:
A Noobian Guide to 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons – A new D&D player gives their rundown of “what the deal is with this D&D thing.” What’s interesting is that even to a noob, 4e is clearly heavily MMO-influenced and half minis board game (the people that deny this are either disingenuous or dumber than chimps) but of course the point of 4e is that WotC wants to market to the people that enjoy that. It’s interesting to read someone who’s new to all of it taking it all in, and pointing out the good (minis are pretty!) and bad (minis are sold in random packs to rip me off!). It’s actually a quite positive review; ironically his analysis of 4e is pretty much factually identical to mine except he likes that kind of thing more, which is fine. Different strokes for different folks, I don’t mind people liking the new 4e paradigm, I do mind them claiming it’s not changed or that there’s nothing about those changes a roleplayer could dislike.
Game Day: Comparing 3e vs 4e DM Prep Times – Basically 4e prep time for the DM is much reduced, counterbalanced by the fact that you as a player seem to have many fewer options. (That’s what people are complaining about when they lament the MMO-ization of D&D – any computer game has to have fewer options, and more strictly defined and less organic options, because a computer has to make all the DM decisions. It’s nothing against MMOs to say that turning a human-run RPG game into that is a massive evisceration). To quote:
Ultimately, this is one of the aspects of 4th Edition that I find so frustrating. From my side of the screen, I find the game to be a significant improvement because at every turn, they’ve made my job easier. Combined with my Three Page Manifesto, I’m able to knock my D&D prep time down to an hour. As a geek dad who never has enough time, that’s a huge deal.
And yet, at the same time on the player side I find the system far more limiting. Powers have made all of the classes feel more generic, and while there’s still a good deal of customization available in the game, I miss the quirky uniqueness that each class had under previous editions and yes, I miss the inherent, amazingly deep 3E crunch factor.
Playtesting Fourth Edition – A very thorough playtest with loads of in depth analysis of each mechanic. Looks like the guy and his group gave it a real runthrough and I’m surprised at some of their findings, like combat’s not faster (“like padded sumo wrestlers” is the quote). This is the most detailed playtest writeup I’ve seen of 4e hands down.
Check out the new RPG Bloggers Network! It was announced less than a week ago, and is run by Dave Chalker of critical-hits.com. It’s a much better idea, in the Web 2.0 sense, than Gleemax. Where Gleemax was “come use our shit software and blog here! And we’ll own what you post, you know,” this is really just an aggregator for existing blogs. WordPress, Blogger, etc. all do blogging much better than any random gaming company is going to come up with, and tags, search, etc. exist to drive navigation nowadays without everything having to physically “be in one place.”
So all you have to do to sign up for the RPG Bloggers Network is send them your site name, URL, and a feed, and they syndicate it to one place with all the other folks who’ve signed up! Simple and elegant. I found it because half the gamers’ blogs I read frequently were suddenly part of it! So I’ve signed up too. Join us!
So no more than a week after they announced pulling the plug on Gleemax to focus on the electronics D&D Insider stuff that was supposed to launch with D&D 4e but didn’t, Wizards has announced the next part of D&DI that will be ready for players to use. Which is it?
Give up? That’s right, the new feature is that they’re going to start charging for it now. No, nothing more is coming online. Although they promise to get the DMG rules into the Rules Compendium. But you do get the honor of starting to pay $5 to $8 a month, depending on how many months you buy in advance. That’s so sweet that I’m having a hard time expressing how sweet it is.
Geek Related 