Archive for July, 2009

How I Voted In the ENnie Awards

Thursday, July 30th, 2009

For reasons not unrelated to massive deadlines and/or Chicago’s uncharacteristically perfect summer weather, we never really got around to an Origins Awards breakdown in this space. But although the weather remains perfect, I’ve carved out enough deadline time to break down the ENnie Awards nominations. Voting closes at midnight on August 1, so if you’re reading this before then, go vote!

As I used to do with the Origins Awards, I’m not discussing categories I don’t know anything about, as amusing as the contrary might be. (I’ve only seen the Monster Manual, for instance, so I can’t judge the Monster or Adversary category properly. Which is a shame, because I love that category.) I’m also not going to deal with the Fan Award For Best Publisher, as it’s a silly award. (Quick, what’s your favorite movie studio?)

Best Cover Art

I’m going with Paul Bourne’s magnificent cover for 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars, which almost alone among the nominees conveys a sense of action instead of “standing around portentously.” The arguable exception is the swell dragon-rider on the Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide, but spaceships beats dragons, and 3:16 beats FR.

Best Interior Art

In a walk, for Mouse Guard. David Petersen illustrates in the great tradition of fairy tale art with a splash of Audubon. The other nominees all convey their own style and feel, to be sure — Petersen just does it better.

Best Writing

Don’t Lose Your Mind is not Benjamin Baugh’s best work, and while Hot War has an excellent spare harshness to it, the great thing about Malcolm Craig’s game isn’t his prose. KQ and Hunter Horror Recognition Guide are mulligatawnies; some is wonderful, some isn’t. The noble Baron Munchausen, however, is by turns florid, clear, amusing, ironic, arch, and riotous — one imagines that editor James Wallis didn’t have to touch a syllable of it. My third easy vote in a row, for The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen RPG, Suppressed 1808 Edition.

Best Production Values

Again, Mouse Guard, although HELLAS gives it a run for its money.

Best Rules

This is the first hard choice I’ve faced so far this ballot. As games, I probably prefer Hunter and Starblazer Adventures, but D&D 4e is the ruleset that arguably is pushing the boundaries of the form more than either of the other two. An exceptions-based RPG, tuned for astonishingly fast and fun monster-whacking, with GM prep time calved down to a bare minimum. Despite a broken (but ambitious) skill challenge system and a wonky item economy (both call-backs to old-school D&D?), the core of the game — kick open the door and kill it — is better than ever. (Neither Song of Ice & Fire nor Dark Heresy particularly blew me away, although they’re both good games.) That said, if I wasn’t going to get a chance to vote for both Hunter and Starblazer Adventures farther down the ballot, I might hesitate even longer. But this one I’m giving to Mike Mearls, Rob Heinsoo, and their party.

Best Setting

This is another killer. Chad Underkoffler’s Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies is a fantastic Maxfield Parrish fun-scape, carefully crafted to hold your own internal Errol Flynn. Malcolm Craig’s Hot War is pure Wyndham-Wells, with just enough Nigel Kneale to keep my antennae aquiver throughout. Benjamin Baugh’s The Dreadful Secrets of Candlewick Manor is sheer Gorey genius, with extra-lemony Snicket to bring up the flavor. At least I only have to pick from three: Slipstream is grand Flash Gordon serial fun, but S7S beats it on that metric; Pathfinder is great for what it is, but my tolerance for Big Ole Fantasy Worlds isn’t what it once was. I could easily pick any of those first three, but I’m going with Baugh on a mordant whim.

Best Supplement

I mentioned above (and elsewhere in this space) how much I like Hunter: the Vigil. I especially like that it’s technically a supplement, so I can vote for it here with no regrets.

Best Electronic Product

This column is published and paid for by IPR, which is partially owned by Fred Hicks, head of One Bad Egg. So I can’t tell you what I voted for in this category.

Best Podcast

Or in this one.

Best Game

Stay with me here. Remember all those nice things I said upstairs about the excellent rules in Dungeons & Dragons 4e? And remember what I said about how I’d actually rather run Starblazer Adventures? And then when I deprecated Big Ole Fantasy Worlds? Can you see where I’m going with this? Starblazer Adventures, which is definitely getting a fuller review in this space, takes the FATE engine and blends it with British space-opera comics for a complete-in-one-book package of adventure with a truly engaging flavor. Or should that be “flavour”? Anyhow, I’m voting for  Chris Burch and Stuart Newman’s fantastic feat; Starblazer Adventures it is.

Product of the Year

Again, the other worthy contenders (S7S, Hunter, D&D 4e, Starblazer Adventures) notwithstanding, the clear winner on all levels — story, theme, rules, world, art, production, game — is Mouse Guard. Hey, it beat my game for the Origins Award — it must be the best!

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Nibbled To Death By Mice: Origins 2009 Con Report

Friday, July 3rd, 2009

This weekend is Independence Day, which used to be the weekend I’d spend in Columbus, Ohio, at the Origins Game Fair. But this year, it was last weekend, if that makes anything clearer.

There are two big stories out of Origins this year: First, my game Trail of Cthulhu was beaten for the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Game by Luke Crane’s Mouse Guard RPG. Second, so was Dungeons & Dragons 4e. Now, I play 4e (when my DM can manage to schedule a game for a quorum of us) and enjoy it very much, and I absolutely believe observers like Joseph “Goodman Games” Goodman who say that 4e is showing strength not only in the mass market (its new corebooks reliably make, for instance, the Wall Street Journal best-seller lists) but in the hobby channel. But for it to lose Best RPG to a (brilliant, beautiful) game about talking mice is not business as usual.

Possible explanations include, in no particular order: 1) Since every attendee at Origins could vote for any award, the card-floppers and lead-pushers and chit-flippers voted against D&D for the same reason that I (had I not lost my ballot between bars) would probably have voted against Magic: Version Whatever for Best CCG: sheer cussedness. That said, Magic won for Best CCG this year, so obviously that explanation only goes so far. 2) Same set-up as #1, but the voters were seduced by a beautiful cover full of cute li’l mice. Seems shallow, although there are (Origins-Award-winning) publishers who claim to believe it. Of their own products, even. 3) My columns are amazingly powerful, and my love for Mouse Guard (strategically unveiled right before Origins) hoist me (and 4e) with my own petard. Let’s just say that the science on this question is not settled. 4) Mouse Guard had huge buzz, because it’s an awesome game with a better network of mavens and connectors in today’s wired con-attendee community. Possible, but — beating D&D? Really? 5) It was just the best game up for the award, so of course it won. This has the advantage of being true, but not of explaining very many other Origins Awards.

Really, the best possible news out of this contretemps is that there were three nominees (two were withdrawn after the nomination process as ineligible) that all could be said to deserve the Origins Award that year, and that I and Wizards of the Coast just got caught in a perfect storm of design excellence.

Don’t worry about me too much, though: I did win an Origins Award, for Best Non-Fiction Product, for Tour de Lovecraft: the Tales. Other, non Hite-related results can be seen here: Wizards wound up winning three all around, and my minis friends were generally pretty stoked about the quality of those awards, too. The “deck building as game” card game Dominion won the Spiel des Jahres and the Origins Award, so that’s hard to argue; Pandemic was an SdJ nominee, and won for Best Boardgame. In short, a really good run for the Origins Awards.

Not such a great run for the Origins convention: it was smaller and bereft of some major players in the dealer’s hall: Wizards, White Wolf, Paizo, Games Workshop, AEG, Green Ronin, and Fantasy Flight all skipped the show (though Wizards and, I believe, Paizo, ran some events), which can’t be where the organizers wanted to be even in these times of global economic brouhaha. It’s still considerably bigger than a regional con, and the game rooms were still pretty full, so there’s a foundation to build on — but there’s some load-bearing beams that could use a look-see first, methinks. That said, the new GAMA Executive Director has run a juvenile detention system and a Gulf War POW camp, which is pretty much the minimum requirement for running a game convention as I understand it.

So what was at the show that was any good? The games, of course. For my money, the single best new game at the show was Darren Watts and Jason Walters’ Lucha Libre Hero, which is even better than it sounds. Other standouts were Mike Fiegel and Jerry Grayson’s Hellas (literally a “space Odyssey”), Z-Man’s remake of Eric Goldberg’s “choose your own adventure boardgame” Tales of the Arabian Nights, and Gareth Hanrahan’s Hammer’s Slammers mod for Traveller. So there was good games to be bought, and even more good gaming to be had, at Origins on Not Independence Day.

Just stay away from the mice.

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