Why Things Like The ConTessa Convention Are More Important Than My Opinions On The Matter

The real reason that my opinion on the matter doesn't count has zero to do with my being a guy. The real reason why my opinion doesn't count is because, whether I agree with the existence of this online convention or not (and I do, by the way) it is something that needs to happen. I've been gaming for a long time, a very long time, and I have always been lucky to be able to share my gaming with groups that were diverse in some form or another, whether due to gender, sexuality, ethnicity or some combination of these factors. The thing is, you cannot have too much diversity. That's what makes something like ConTessa important.

Let's see more conventions like this, virtually and otherwise, where diversity is put at the forefront. Yeah, guys can't run the panels or GM the games. Not being able to do that is really going to kill anyone for a weekend, particularly when they can go back to their set ways the rest of the year. This is a good idea, whether anyone else likes it or not.

Click one of the links and join a game. Check out the +ConTessa G+ profile. Play something that you might not normally play. Have some fun and focus on the games, not the shape or color of the people. Ultimately we're all just people and it shouldn't matter who wants to run a game or a panel.

Dorkland! Roundtable with Jeff Dee

I spoke with +Jeff Dee on the Dorkland! Roundtable. Apparently a couple of the questions about the early days of TSR were a bit too far back for a clear remembrance, but I think that I did get some interesting stories about the early days of TSR out of him.

We did talk about the background of Villains & Vigilantes, how it came about because of one of the deep, philosophical questions that only comic fans worry about (which you can find out about in the video). We also talked a lot about his work as an artist and his recent embracing of Kickstarter.

Chaosium Q&A For The Call of Cthulhu 7e Kickstarter

In light of the Kickstarter campaign for the new edition of Call of Cthulhu from Chaosium Games, I sent the company an email with some questions about the campaign and the changes to the game. These are the answers that I received from Chaosium's Charlie Krank:

Chaosium seems to have jumped into the Kickstarter paradigm pretty wholeheartedly. For an established company like Chaosium, does that come with any risks to the established distribution channels and do the benefits outnumber the risks?
We have not jumped in wholeheartedly at all. Our current Kickstarter is only our second campaign and we have a third planned for the future, but Kickstarter is another way for us to publish our books. Usually we must print a book, convince a distributor to carry it, who then convinces a retail store to buy it, who sells it to our fans. With Kickstarter we reverse the flow of interest; we directly interact with our customers who end up with a book they want. Their energy and excitement then flows to the store owner and up to the distributor.

Do you worry that you might be taking some of the audience from gaming stores with a successful Kickstarter? If enough of your existing audience is buying the game directly from Chaosium, where does that leave the stores?
Of course. There have been similar worries throughout the history of roleplaying and in many other industries. After MAGIC was released, many distributors worried that WOTC would go direct to the retailers. Similar worries accompany the proliferation of downloadable books vs. print books. Wise stores do what successful stores have always done: focus on customer service and product knowledge.

Also, the potential market for a product is not defined by the whole of the Kickstarter audience. In the end, both we and the customers build a better product that will eventually hit the "normal" distribution chain, and should be more attractive to all customers.

What sorts of changes to their approaches to publishing does a company like Chaosium face when dealing with something like Kickstarter? Have there been speedbumps in the process for you guys, and if so what have they been?

Kickstarter result in changes and improvements to a project. Having published roleplaying games and supplements for many years, we understand that these are complex projects. For example, our BEYOND THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS campaign was the result of ten years of effort.

There always are speed bumps, and I think that is where your skill comes into play--mitigating the delaying effects of such bumps.

Call of Cthulhu is one of the oldest tabletop RPGs that have been in continuous publication. Most of the contemporaries in RPG publishing for Chaosium have either faded away, changed hands or disappeared completely. A lot of people are asking why a game like this has to change. What do you say to those questions?
For a product such as a roleplaying game to survive for more than 30 years in this marketplace it needs to be refreshed occasionally. It has been almost 12 years since the last edition of Call of Cthulhu was published. The new edition streamlines some of the combat rules and opposition rolls.

What are some of the changes that have been made to the game for this new edition? Can you also explain some of the reasons behind why these changes have been made?

As always, our primary consideration is telling a good story and having fun. We try to keep our rules intuitive and out-of-the-way of the Keeper's narrative. We noticed that the system occasionally results in "no-effect" combat rounds; so we tried to smooth combat just a bit. We extended the use of some mechanics already used in the game, making them more consistently-applied.

Besides a successful Kickstarer, what would make a game like Call of Cthulhu of interest to newer gamers? When the game first came out, there wasn't much in the way of horror gaming but now there is a lot more competition in the market. What sets this new edition apart from other games out there?

Call of Cthulhu is, first and foremost, a game in which ordinary people are thrust into extraordinary, and sanity-threatening, situations. The thrill comes from seeing if your character, lacking the powers, magic, and armor of (essentially) super-hero knights and wizards, can prevail against superhuman enemies. Lacking the accoutrements of the high-powered roleplaying systems, your sense of achievement is the greater should your characters prevail. I think this results in a more memorable, and satisfying, roleplaying experience.

You have set a tight window for publishing the new edition. Do you have any worries that you will be late?

Yeah, it is tight. I had hoped to begin it a month or two ago but life events intervened. I always worry that books will be late, but the rules have been written and in revision for more than a year, so we have been working up to this point. What we need to know is the final shape of the books. It is fun to work with the fans, to learn what is important and fun for them, and to try to surprise them in the end.

Besides, what would be a better release day than Halloween?

Diana Jones 2013 Shortlist Announced

From a list of nominations that included traditional board-games, card-games, miniatures games and role-playing games, as well as events, books about games and gaming, and for the first time a PhD thesis, the secretive committee of the Diana Jones Award has built a shortlist of five items that it believes best exemplify ‘excellence’ in the field of hobby-gaming.

The Diana Jones committee is proud to announce the shortlist for its annual Award for Excellence in Gaming:

Dog Eat Dog, an RPG by Liam Burke, together with the Asocena supplement
Published by Liwanag Press
‘Dog Eat Dog is a game about colonialism that skilfully brings issues of violence and assimilation to the fore. A lightweight economy forces the native players to continually make agonizing decisions and the colonial player to be an utter dick. The Asocena supplement includes “setting hacks” that move the action from a player-created fictitious island to real-world settings – Italy under German occupation, for example – which shows off the game's true potential as a tool for empathy and understanding.’

Love Letter, a card game by Seiji Kanai
Published by AEG
‘A game like a fine watch mechanism: tiny, intricate and beautiful.’

Metatopia, a games convention in Morristown, New Jersey
Organised by Double Exposure, Inc.
‘Metatopia is a sui generis experience, in which game designers pay the con to demo their games for alpha gamers (who pay less for tickets, as they're the “attraction”) and/or experienced alpha designers. It's half retreat, half academic conference, half workshop, half game convention.’

Playing at the World, a book by Jon Peterson
Published by Unreason Press
‘A thorough, scholarly account of the history of hobby gaming in general and Dungeons & Dragons in particular. It convincingly traces the roots of D&D's core mechanics all the way back to chess, its tropes through fantasy fiction and mythology, and its community back to the wargaming societies that formed at the turn of the last century. Peterson's book is a must-read for anyone in the industry.’

Tabletop, a web series created by Wil Wheaton
Produced by Geek ‘n’ Sundry
‘Tabletop has brought a new energy and humour to the board-game field: its blend of good humour and gameplay is pitch-perfect and has introduced a range of titles from modern classics to indie RPGs to thousands of new players. The games hobby could not want a better public face than Wil Wheaton.’


PRESENTATION
The winner of this year’s award will be announced and the Diana Jones trophy will be presented at the annual Diana Jones Party, which will be held at the Cadillac Ranch, 39 West Jackson Place, Indianapolis, at 9pm on August 14th – the night before the Gen Con games convention opens to the public. All games-industry professionals are invited to attend.

The 4C System

I've put up a page with the 4C System rules, here on the blog. If you've never checked these out, this was an early retroclone (of a certain popular Marvelous role-playing game) that had the misfortune of coming about before people really accepted and understood what retroclones really were. Much like OSRIC, 4C was intended to be a way to allow publishers (and fans!) to make new material that would be compatible with the old game.

The game, while complete and playable, is a bit dry and barebones. One of my goals has been to do a cleaned up new edition of these rules that expand these basics, give plenty of examples and even have some sample characters included. Basically build out and demonstrate what can be done with the basics.

For now, enjoy the SRD for the game. The text of it has been released into the public domain by it's creator, so you can do with it what you will.

If you're so inclined, you can also find some cool stuff made by small press publishers for the system over at RPGNow.com.

Let's Visit The Doctor's Grave...For The First Time In Lawrence Miles' Alien Bodies

This week's season finale of Doctor Who was a lead-in to the upcoming 50th Anniversary Special. And it had to do with a visit to the final resting point of The Doctor.

Recently I decided to embark upon a return journey through the Eighth Doctor Adventures published by BBC Books during that horrible period of time when there was no Doctor Who on television, and the only way that we could experience The Doctor's adventures was through (to many) the non-canonical novels and audio dramas. I decided to start this journey with Lawrence Miles' Alien Bodies (mostly because I am a not so closet fan of his Faction Paradox concept). The parallels between this novel and the season finale are interesting (and I am pretty sure coincidental).

I should warn that there might be spoilers in this, but I think that spoilers have a statute of limitations...and 16 years is more than enough time for everyone to catch up on the book. If you don't want to see any spoilers of the novel, don't go past the jump.

Dorkland! Roundtable with C.A. Suleiman

I spoke with White Wolf Developer/Designer C.A. Suleiman on the Dorkland! Roundtable. We talked about his time in the gaming business, working for companies like Wizards of the Coast and Green Ronin on projects like Eberron and Hamunaptra. We talked about his recent work for White Wolf on the Mummy RPG as well as his music.

Time Lord: The "Lost" Doctor Who RPG

In the 90s, back in the dark ages of Doctor Who fandom when the show itself was on a razor-thin path that lead eventually to the cancellation of the program, Virgin Books was doing licensed Doctor Who novels. I am not really a huge fan of licensed tie-in novels, I think that (at best) you have to consider them to be in some sort of weird parallel universe where the characters are almost but not quite the characters that you are used to in your movies or TV programs. With Doctor Who, I think this is an easier pill to swallow because there's already parallel universes that are part of the setting.

The Virgin Books period is marked by quirky and inventive storylines that advanced the story of the (then current) Seventh Doctor. Not as quirky as the BBC Books fiction that would follow (the Eighth Doctor Adventures in particular fleshed out a character that only received one appearance on our TV screens).

But during this period, the people at Virgin Books decided to try their hand at a role-playing game set in the Doctor Who universe that they could sell side-by-side with their novels. It was a great idea that, unfortunately, fell short in a few ways. They didn't really market the book as being an RPG, and since it looked like the novels in their trade dress, some bought this and didn't really know what to do with it, since it wasn't actually a novel. The game also wasn't distributed to hobby stores, so gaming fans of the show weren't really exposed to it either. I picked up my copy one year at Origins. I've run it a few times, in the distant past, and while it has some quirky features it was a fun game to play and run.

Intended as an entry level game, the rules do a very good job of explaining themselves and introducing the concepts of role-playing to those who might not know what it is. The rules themselves are fairly simple, with resolution being based around a 2d6 roll (where the lower of the two dice is subtracted from the higher to get a result that is compared to the difficulty). In the original rules, character creation was minimal preferring an approach where the players play the characters from the show. Seeing as how this was intended primarily for fan of the show I can understand this approach. This is not to say that there was no character creation rules in the game, just that they were perfunctory and not very good. In the free PDF release (linked below) the authors tried to make this option more robust, having learned from talk with players of the game that no one liked the character generation rules.

The game does have an extensive list of writeups of Doctors, Companions, aliens and varies nemesis of the Doctor from the first seven regenerations. It does have the advantage of being written during the period when Doctor Who was off the air, so their writeups weren't going to be contradicted by the show. It is an interesting snapshot of the Classic Doctor Who show in this regard.

After Virgin Books lost their Doctor Who license, the game went out of print. No supplements were every published (and as far as I can tell none were ever actually planned). Outside of the current (at the time of this post) Doctor Who game put out by Cubicle 7, this is my only real experience with Doctor Who role-playing, and probably my favorite of these two. While the current Doctor Who game definitely reflects the New Who era, I think that Time Lord is an accurate reflection of Classic era in RPG form. The original authors (with permission of the BBC) put the Time Lord game out on the internet as a free PDF, back in the mid-90s, and it still floats around out there today. Below I've included links to the PDF of the game, along with two fan-produced supplements that expanded and explained some of the rules a bit better. Check these out, and I hope that you enjoy them.

Time Lord: This is the basic game, as originally published by Virgin Books. The PDF is a no art version, since the authors didn't have permission to reproduce the art from the game.

Time Lord Companion: Originally produced as a text file (yeah, welcome to the old days of the internet), this was eventually turned into a PDF. This has some expanded character creation options, and some character writeups and rule expansions.

Time Lord Journies: (Yeah, I know but that's how it was spelled.) This supplement built on the Time Lord Companion and added a number of new character creation options as well. There are also a number of rules clarifications and expansions, from the viewpoint of the author of this fan supplement.

All three of these files are saved up on my Google Drive, so hopefully there shouldn't be any downloading issues. If there are, all that I can say is wait and try again in a bit. It is a free service, so there are bound to be bandwidth limitations at times.

If this post causes you to run games with Time Lord, let me know.leave a comment here or say something about it to me on Twitter or Google+. I want to hear more about your Time Lord games.

DriveThruRPG's OSR Promotion

From Monday, May 13 - Sunday, May 19, DriveThruRPG is going to be running an OSR-related promotion. For this week 10 of the site's best selling old school games will be eligible for an additional 15% savings with the coupon OSRF711F2. This coupon is only good for one week and only on the products listed here. There are some good games to be found on that list. I can recommend Crypts & Things (a Swords & Wizardry variant) and Spellcraft & Swordplay (an excellent old school styled game from Jason Vey. If you don't have either of these games on your gaming pile, you really should. I don't think that I have to suggest picking up the original D&D Basic Rules to anyone.

Dorkland! Roundtable with Patrick Kapera

I spoke with +Patrick Kapera of Crafy Games about many things on the Dorkland! Roundtable. We discussed the history of the development of Spycraft, how that lead to Fantasy Craft and how designers who'd made a book as big as Spycraft 2.0 could then do something as small as the Mistborn Adventure Game. It was a good talk, and it gave some interesting insights into Patrick's and Crafty's processes, as well as looking at how they approach the development of a new RPG.

We had a slight technical glitch at one point, so just bear with us at that point.