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¿Qué Es Un Libro Género Perfecto?

Wednesday, March 10th, 2010

Well, I’ll tell you. A perfect genre book should be comprehensive; nobody who loves that genre should feel slighted by it. (This makes loose or enormous genres, like steampunk or fantasy, nearly impossible to do perfectly. Fortunately, they can still be done very well indeed, say by Bill Stoddard.) A perfect genre book should also be welcoming; nobody who doesn’t know that genre should feel mystified. (Ideally, even an utter genre newbie should have an idea for the game she’d like to play after reading it.) Both of these conditions argue for a certain narrowness of view: you may not be able to make any kind of usable genre book out of “road stories,” but Midnight Roads made a pretty good one out of “modern American haunted road stories.” But a useful genre book has to offer more than one story; ideally, the whole narrative cosmos should unfold out of its genre treatment like a fractal flower. And finally, the perfect genre book should be for a game system ideally suited to telling its sort of stories. A genre centered on long, dramatic, wild and wonderful fights should have rules for them.

Also, there should be awesome monsters.

All these considerations are on display in Lucha Libre HERO (263 black-and-white pages, $29.99), which is comprehensively compiled by two maniacal lucha fans, Darren Watts and Jason Walters, and seductively astonishing to an almost-complete lucha ignoramus (me). Mexico’s masked wrestling films (now you know) are part detective story, part horror, part martial arts adventure, part social commentary, part SF, and part smacking Aztec mummies around. Like a good Puebla mole, it is the blending of these disparate, even psychotronic, ingredients that makes the dish sublime. Not merely mad doctors and Aztec mummies, but Ape People, Blonde Martians, and lady vampires festoon this book, along with patented wrestling moves like “Freightliner,” “Extended Fight Scene,” and “No! Not My Laboratory!” Plus a history of Mexican wrestling, a full filmography, and a guide to Backlot Mexico City. And midgets. All lovingly (even slaveringly) detailed for HERO 5th Edition — a completely playable version of which, tuned for the squared circle, is included in the back. If ever there was a game system designed for brutal, knock-down, drag-out fights driving narrative turns and clinches, it’s HERO. (And but me no buts about HERO 6th Edition. If you’re able to play HERO, you’re able to swap the stats in this book out if you want.) In short, genre perfection, slam-bang fights, and Aztec mummies. All in One Book. Todos En Libro Uno.

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Not Just Another Bug Hunt

Monday, January 4th, 2010

What can I say about Gregor Hutton’s space-war masterpiece 3:16 : Carnage Among the Stars (96-page black-and-white softcover, 8.5″ x 5.5″, $20) that hasn’t already been said by its adoring fan community? Robin Laws, for example, says it “out-Verhoevens Verhoeven,” which is if anything an understatement, given that 3:16 is actually fun and playable, as compared to Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers clanker. What Hutton’s game does do is present a superb piece of battle-ready game design, a brilliant evocation of genre, as much satire as you want to chew on, and a fine lesson in minimalism, all at once.

Character creation is simplicity itself: you have two stats (Fighting Ability and Non-Fighting Ability), which drive your Rank, which sets your basic loadout. Given that 3:16 is a game of interplanetary amphibious infantry warfare (there’s that Starship Troopers reference), the speed of chargen comes in handy when you have to build replacements. Because it’s brutal, tactical, and not a little bit cynical all at once (there’s that genre evocation), your characters may die through no fault of their own, through their own stupid fault, or thanks to their officers’ incompetence. You feel it when they do, though; each character has Strengths and Weaknesses revealed in flashbacks, aimed to reduce the GM’s threat pool for each planetary invasion. (Note how all of this is tying together.) That’s right; as in Agon, the GM has a “pain budget,” and if the troopers of the 3:16th can dish out more pain than they absorb, they win!

A clever, old-school style planet generation system helps the GM build worlds, vicious aliens, and missions in a hurry, varying the rules just enough to keep everything tactically interesting, but never slowing down the game or hampering the players. The characters are plenty hampered, but if they can just rack up more kills than the next squaddie, they’ll get promoted … just in time for the next mission. The rules hit a perfect sweet spot, where there are just enough tactical options to keep everyone guessing and surprised (happily or not), but not enough to drown players in options or soak up game time. (And lots and lots of play examples cut the learning curve down still farther.) Extended play can aim toward satire, as the 3:16th uses ever more comically vast weaponry on their missions of pre-emptive genocide, or simply provide a soap-operatic extension of adrenaline and exploding aliens.

This simplicity and speed make 3:16 an ideal “not everyone can show up tonight” game, while the themes and mechanics allow a surprising amount of meat and depth to come off the bone. It can be as dark, or as simple, as you’d like to make it — and if you want to play out Starship Troopers (either version), you can do it as fast and fatal as the M.I. themselves.

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Marqued For Death

Tuesday, September 29th, 2009

For those of you who love space mercenaries, there’s more to game with, if not necessarily more to love. Genevieve Cogman’s wryly loving GURPS Vorkosigan Saga (238-page full-color hardback, $35; $30 as PDF) covers the ructions of Lois McMaster Bujold’s size-challenged and galaxy-challenging aristocrat, Miles Vorkosigan, in fine form. About 100 pages are pure source material: canon NPCs, races, planets, tech, and so forth. Another 44 pages are a retuned version of GURPS Lite — like Miles himself, short but startlingly effective — making the game complete in one book. Add 48 more pages of spaceships (with plenty of worked examples) and a dedicated space combat system, and you’re left with only about 30 pages to answer the killer question all RPGs, especially licensed RPGs, face: “What do I do with this?” If you already know the answer — if you’re a fanatical wanna-Bujoldian with stories aching to be told — this book will backstop you admirably. If not, there’s not much in the way of hand-holding to get you there. One can argue that between Bujold’s epic novel series on one hand, and GURPS‘ epic pile of sourcebooks and campaign frames on the other, you shouldn’t have any shortage of raw material. But I’d say you might still want some guidance refining it.

A similar criticism could obtain in Gareth Hanrahan’s straight-shooting Traveller adaptation of David Drake’s mercenary-fic Hammer’s Slammers (206-page full-color hardback, $40; $28 PDF) from Mongoose. It, too, devotes 150-odd pages to its source material, with Trav stats for AFVs, planets, and NPC mercenaries from Drake’s books. (And it has its own setting-specific combat sub-system, this one for tank battles.) And again, this is pretty much de rigeur, and indeed downright essential, in a licensed property, and doubly so in an F/SF property where the basic assumptions have to be literally spelled out in game-mechanical terms. Like Cogman, Hanrahan knows his material cold, but presents it piping hot. But Hanrahan is able to use Traveller’s old-school “random encounter table” feel to get much closer to “what do I do now?” in a packed 15-page “Conflict” chapter. You get, essentially, the Not-Quite-Random War Table  – which is, Drake would doubtless say, true to life. Unlike life, and like a good RPG, Hanrahan provides plenty of explanatory support with these tables: the consequences of “no orbital support” are spelled out both in rules and table modifiers, and in suitably grim prose. Add in an excellent “grunt’s eye view” diary-style treatment of a campaign (RPG or mercenary?), a sample war, and an introductory scenario, and you’re on your way to slamming with and for tools of all descriptions.

The “I already know what I want” GM will perhaps find this all too much of a muchness, but I have come around to thinking that the original Dungeon Master’s Guide knew what it was doing with all those random tables and lists. “You can tell mercenary stories of duty and honor in conflict” is all well and good, but Col. Hammer might add that to his list of pieties that’s trumped by laser-firing tanks, and by tables telling you how many of them are just over the ridge. Hanrahan doesn’t quite get that far: his admirably complete mission breakdown is a checklist, not a table (random or otherwise) — and it’s only a page long. (Followed by four pages of examples.) Something like it would have greatly stiffened the spine of GURPS Vorkosigan, while allowing the novelistic impulses of freer-form GMs plenty of room.

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Hoosier Daddy? GenCon 2009 Indianapolis Con Report

Tuesday, September 1st, 2009

I got back from GenCon two weeks ago, and I still haven’t read everything I got, or digested everything I heard, or placed everything I saw, there. It’s not just that it’s too big for one columnist — I realized that some time ago — even the part of it that’s small enough for one columnist to cover is getting too big: there were more stories, more developments in RPG design and marketing, and more great games at this show than I could take in. So I’ve spent some of the last two weeks following up on GenCon news that I didn’t quite get my head around at the show.

But the most important piece of GenCon news is just this — there was a GenCon! With GenCon LLC (the company that owns and runs the show) in bankruptcy last year, a lot of folks wondered if there would be a show at all. Then a hostile buyout surfaced, and we wondered who would run the show, if show there was to be run. But GenCon LLC shot those rapids and bobbed to the surface, unsinkable and back in business in time for the show. And business was — well, not necessarily booming, but way better than anyone would have hoped to predict in these times of economic foofaraw. Attendance was almost 28,000, not very much less (2 or 3 percent down) than last year. Some of that might be the economy, and some of it might just be the difference between Big Yu-Gi-Oh Year and Normal Yu-Gi-Oh Year. The dealers almost all reported great sales and good crowds; the games I heard about were packed; the streets of Indianapolis held even more fat guys than usual. And it wasn’t business as usual for GenCon, either — they unrolled a new registration system and a GenCon app for the iPhone. Both had their bugs and flaws (the registration system kept gamers lined up for two hours in some cases), but both are symptomatic not of a desperate, play-it-safe GenCon barely out of the weeds, but of a GenCon intending to grow and evolve into the next decade and beyond. This is a good sign beyond the telling of it.

Three For Flinching

The continued existence of GenCon established, there are three perhaps bigger stories yet that broached at the show, at least as relates to the craft and future of RPG design. Firstly, Catalyst Game Labs took the bold step of releasing their new transhuman SF-horror game Eclipse Phase under the Creative Commons license (non-commercial, share-alike). This means not only can you download it for free (from, say, here), you can also chop out stuff you don’t like, put in your own house rules or weird setting variants (Eclipse Phase: 10,000 B.C. as the fall of the ancient astronauts! Eclipse Phase with biological hive-mind vampires! Eclipse Phase with the OGL Traveller engine!) and post it on your own website (for free, of course) without getting a nasty email. While The Shadow of Yesterday did Creative Commons first, and the CC non-commercial restriction is less open than the OGL, Catalyst is still the first major RPG company to allow gamers to mashup and remix their intellectual property as well as their rules. (Which I should point out are also available at DriveThruRPG for $15, if “free” is too little for you to pay.) This would seem to be one way to connect with one’s fans — from a position of trust and fun. Almost like an RPG.

And along those same lines comes another course in “How To Build An RPG, 21st Century Version,” as Paizo’s years-long gamble with Pathfinder has paid off massively well. For those who weren’t paying attention, Paizo’s developers announced their “D&D 3.5, Only Better” RPG back in March of 2008 and opened up the whole alpha version of the Pathfinder ruleset for free download. 25,000 people did so. Last GenCon, the results of 25,000 pieces of persnickety feedback (sight unseen, I would estimate that 24,500 of them at one point or other mentioned attacks of opportunity) and six months of backbreaking work by Jason Bulmahn and others became the beta version of Pathfinder — which Paizo sold out of in nine hours, despite giving the whole thing away again for free, simultaneously, in PDF form. For another six to eight months, Paizo ran a ginormous Web-based playtest of the beta version on their forums, which finally resulted in the actual 576-page RPG Pathfinder — which sold out its entire print run in pre-orders. In a week. And I am reliably informed that said print run would have been very respectable even last century, which means it was epochal for this one. At the show, the Paizo booth was slammed; lines around the booth eight times like a proverbial Midgard Conga Line of gamers. Pathfinder was the unmistakable Hot Buzz Thing of the show. “If you offer to let them help build it, they will come.” The kicker? The Pathfinder PDF is $10. D&D is building a brand. Pathfinder is building a religion.

The third big thing surfacing at the show was the word of a Third Edition for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, visible under glass at the Fantasy Flight Games booth. (Booths. Boothoplex. FFG had something like five or eight booths — which is to say, almost enough room to set up a game of Arkham Horror with all the expansions.) This edition promises specialized dice (like Descent or Memoir ‘44), heroic power cards (like D&D 4e inexplicably didn’t come with), a “plot stress” mechanic straight outta FATE, “character stance” mechanics straight outta the Indie Narrativist Playbook, and other attempts to build a 21st century RPG like a boardgame — which is to say, with interesting physical components and a larger sense of kinesthetic play. I can’t speak to the actual rules, although I suspect we’re in for the edition war to end all edition wars when the $100 boxed set drops (with an echoing crash, if it’s like most FFG boxes) this fall.

Also in the future (2010), Wizards of the Coast plans to revamp the Dark Sun setting for 4e. So that will be fun.

The Future Scares Me! What About Two Weeks Ago?

All that excitement aside, GenCon also saw more normal RPGs appear to more normal sorts of reactions. White Wolf introduced Geist: The Sin-Eaters, Hero Games sold loads of CDs of the Hero 6th Edition rules (the actual books being trapped behind the Bamboo Curtain), and Crafty Games debuted FantasyCraft, which does for fantasy about two-thirds of what SpyCraft did for modern adventure, but give it time. Mongoose repped Earthdawn 3e; Margaret Weis Productions had hard copies of a Supernatural RPG almost as pretty as Dean Winchester his own self; Studio 2 had the long-awaited (and simply glorious) upgrade of Weird War II into a Savage Worlds setting book.

There was Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor redressed for 4e, GURPS Vorkosigan (a POD of the PDF, but nice enough looking), Mysteries of the Hollow Earth (for Hollow Earth Expedition), and Rogue Trader (for the WH40K RPG). Arc Dream flooded the zone with three new Wild Talents campaign setting books: the weird-Victorian Kerberos Club by Benjamin Baugh, This Favored Land (basically GODLIKE in the Civil War), and Grim War (a taut contemporary setting featuring mutants and mages by Greg Stolze and, ahem, Kenneth Hite). Alderac dropped its delightful Compendium of GM Tables, the Ultimate Toolbox, while Green Ronin did fine with Mecha & Manga and Warriors & Warlocks and True20 Freeport: The Lost Ampersand. Rogue Games had Colonial Gothic Revised and Foundation Transmissions (a bunch of fine meta-setting stuff) for Thousand Suns. Pelgrane Press (an owner of IPR, and thus a sponsor of this column) had adventure compilations for Mutant City Blues (Hard Helix), Esoterrorists (The Esoterror Fact Book), and Trail of Cthulhu (Arkham Detective Tales), as well as a new book of magic rules for Trail of Cthulhu (Rough Magicks, by, ahem, Kenneth Hite again).

I might as well finish this section by mentioning that Atomic Overmind and Hero Games both had my new Hero 6e version of The Day After Ragnarok (the first supplement for Hero 6e, I’ll note smugly here), and Atomic Overmind and Adventure Retail both had my new introductory goof Cthulhu 101, and that Adventure Retail had my new children’s book from Atlas Games, The Antarctic Express. Honest, that’s all the plugs. I think.

ENnie, Meet Indy. And Indie. And Diana.

You will all no doubt be gratified to know that I picked precisely one Gold ENnie: Best Rules for D&D 4e. In nothing else did I and the ENnie judges see eye to eye, although worthy winners emerged in the silver categories (Mouse Guard for Interior Art, Production Values, and Product of the Year; Don’t Lose Your Mind for Writing; Swashbucklers of the 7 Skies for Setting) and for all I know in the categories I didn’t know enough to vote in. My podcaster buddies seemed very happy to see All Games Considered win Best Podcast, for example, and the D&D 4e Monster Manual is certainly a deserving candidate for Best Monster or Adversary Book for all that I didn’t know any of its competitors. WotC was the big winner (six golds, three silvers), but Paizo (four golds, two silvers) and FFG (two golds, one silver) kept it respectable.

The Indie RPG Awards were announced by ninjas at night in a snowstorm, apparently, as nobody could find anything about them at the show. But they have appeared online, and I can gladly endorse the voters’ choices for Indie Game of the Year (Mouse Guard), Supplement of the Year (Don’t Lose Your Mind), and Most Innovative (Sweet Agatha), among others. Sweet Agatha didn’t quite get the Diana Jones Award this year, which was announced by Matt Forbeck in a loud, happy bar full of free drinks. (That alone is why this is the best award in gaming.) That signal honor went to the very worthy card game Dominion, although all the nominees were powerfully strong this year: D&D 4e, the Jeepform movement, and Mouse Guard were also also-rans.

How Was GenCon Like Columbus? You Had To Go Looking For The Indies

Rather than one big happy “Indie Alley,” the various indie designers spread all across the waist of the dealer’s hall. There was the Forge, featuring Ron Edwards’ new full-on version of Trollbabe and a beta of his new game S/Lay W/Me (which I believe may be the single finest Northwest Smith RPG imaginable), along with Tony Pace and Nathan Leeson’s Venus 2141 and Tony Dowler’s new ashcan of Renaissance cinematic philosophy-fightin’, Principia. Emily Care Boss’ first-contact SF RPG Sign In Stranger headed up the “Pirate Jenny” booth of female game designers, also featuring Julia Bond Ellingboe’s wonderful Tale of the Fisherman’s Wife, Danielle Lewon’s Kagematsu, and Kat & Michael Miller’s Serial Homicide Unit. Luke Crane had a new supplement for Burning Empires (Bloodstained Stars) and Jared Sorensen had his first Parsley “parser-emulator” game, Action Castle (“get to the point. i see no point.”), in Luke’s booth. Or that’s where he was when I saw him. In their own booth, the Design Matters krewe had Gregor Hutton’s ashcan of AD 316 (3:16 in Roman times), Epidiah Ravachol’s Time & Temp, Joe McDonald’s road-movie RPG Ribbon Drive, and Nathan Paoletta’s new-to-me vampire game Annalise. And the IPR booth boasted Jeremy Keller’s medieval RPG Chronica Feudalis, Bill White’s Inuit-ish wonderment Gangakagok, and Paul Tevis’ exercise in wild amnesiac chargen-as-narrativism, A Penny For My Thoughts.

And Those Thoughts Are …

I haven’t even mentioned the wedding I attended, but I don’t think any RPGs debuted there. I can’t swear to the White Wolf party. And just like GenCon itself, we end with a party, and we’re out of time.

If you still haven’t had enough of me on GenCon, though, you can listen to my two appearances on Ryan Macklin’s podcast This Just In … From GenCon! — the Saturday 11 a.m. episode, and the Monday 1 a.m. wrap-up. Enjoy!

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Clash City Rockets

Tuesday, August 11th, 2009

The most important thing to know about Chris Birch and Stuart Newman’s game Starblazer Adventures (629-page black-and-white hardback, $49.95) from Cubicle 7 is that it has nothing to do with Star Blazers, the Englished version of some anime or other. No, “The Rock and Roll Space Opera Game” is based on a 1980s British comic book series called Starblazer. This was an anthology comic book series set all across (various different futures of) the Galaxy and all across millennia, barely connected by occasional series characters or conceits — in short, exactly how an RPG setting should be: sketchy, large, and packed with familiar tropes, plentiful blank space, and contradictions. If you don’t know anything about the comic book series, don’t worry — it’s pretty much the exact same “default comic outer space” assumed by every Silver Age DC comic: there are domed cities, and space dogfights, and aliens, and post-apocalypses, and sentient computers, and robots, and space dreadnaughts, and silvery jumpsuits galore. With just a soupcon of wonders like the “Fi-Sci” (short for “Fighting Scientists”) and the Moonstealers to give it some zing, which you can ignore or replace or change, because most of the writers of the original comic did. I like to think of it as a setting based on a random six-foot section of my SF bookshelf, or rather of my SF bookshelf in 1979. Plus, there’s a lot of setting stuff given stats (or just name-checked) if you’re lost, and whole tranches of adventure generation, planet generation, and “campaign starters” in the back.

The other important thing you need to know about Starblazer Adventures is that it uses the FATE engine, as seen in Spirit of the Century, and does at least as good a job laying out the “FATE Space” ruleset as SotC did the “FATE Pulp” ruleset. It introduces some new fillips: Scale (for starships and doomsday machines and sentient moons and …) and organizational rules (for star empires and secret brotherhoods of space monks and Fighting Scientists) between them give you a mechanical (and therefore story) hold on anything from a dogfight to mass combat between twin planets’ armadas. “Plot stress” is a magnificent innovation, applying “hit points” to story elements — when your space station suffers too much drama, the reactor melts down! Last, Starblazer Adventures takes SotC’s story-driven character creation to the next level for collaborative story-driven campaign creation! It’s only two pages, but it opens up, well, worlds!

Topped off with a super index, and lovingly blanketed with original Starblazer comics art (which is so iconic as to cause nostalgic fits even in people who never read the original Starblazer comics), this is one monstrously usable, magnificently story-starting game book. You could easily port it to Star Wars, the Kree-Skrull War, old-school Star Trek, or any game of fightin’ robots, fightin’ spaceships … or, of course, Fightin’ Scientists!

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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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Burning Down the Mouse

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

Luke Crane’s Mouse Guard Roleplaying Game (full-color 8″x8″ hardback, 320 pages, $34.95) is a work of staggering genius. Actually, it’s the work of two staggering geniuses, as it’s based on (and has lots and lots and lots of lush art from) David Petersen’s Mouse Guard comic. (Of course it’s gorgeous to boot: it’s by Luke, based on a gorgeous comic, and published by Archaia Studios.) Said comic pits talking, metal-working, valiant mice against the predators and dangers of … well, of everything larger than a mouse. Which is everything. Said roleplaying game pits the GM against the player characters, the titular guardmice: This is not a game of hand-holding and collaboration, any more than Nature is. Each bout of play starts with the GM’s Turn, in which active, harsh confrontation is the order of the day: the book urges the GM to “beat the crap” out of the guardmice. Test their Beliefs, prey upon their Instincts, force hard choices, and throw obstacles in their way. During the Players’ Turn, after all that stress, the players spend checks to pursue their guardmice’s goals or relationships, re-equip themselves, and get some individual spotlight time.

The game uses a focused, robust version of Crane’s excellent Burning Wheel engine, streamlined for quicker play and more brightly-colored characters. It keeps BW’s scripted combat, which can encompass everything from a desperate fight with talking weasels to a debate about how to ration grain during a hard winter. There is a particularly nice balance between a mouse’s Nature (you know, skittering around finding grain) and his Persona (his store of experience), and another poised on your Traits (from Longtail to Open-Minded): use them favorably and get extra dice; use them to trip yourself up and get more checks during the Players’ Turn.

The game is admirably complete in one book. It’s structured very much as “the only book you’ll ever need,” not just to play Mouse Guard, but for any roleplaying game, leading the reader from an introduction of the RPG concept, through a summary of the comic background, through setting up a Mouse Guard mission, and only at the very end creating a character. It’s gamebook as storybook, driving game as story, while keeping the fierce adversarial edge that makes such fun from old-school D&D to Agon. This edge suits the story: bravery when the whole world is against you. (Special kudos for recognizing that “the whole world” definitely includes the weather; the natural world is foregrounded amazingly well in art, rules, and flavor throughout. I would use this game to play in Middle-Earth, it’s so good at this.) The result is an optimistic, bold, metal-working game that talks clearly and knows what it wants — just like the Mouse Guard itself.

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I Thought There Would Be News Of The Catastrophe

Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009

There is! My post-apocalyptic Savage Worlds setting, The Day After Ragnarok, is available from Atomic Overmind! Thanks so much for asking! Oh, you meant the State of the Industry report? Sadly, I had to delay assembling that so I could complete a new project. You might have heard of it: The Day After Ragnarok. In all seriousness, I plan to get to the State of the Industry between Origins and GenCon, which is to say, between the two major barometers of the State of the Hobby.

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Is Paris Gaming? Salon du Jeu de Société 2009 Con Report

Wednesday, May 13th, 2009

Toward the end of April, I was fortunate enough to be a guest at the Salon du Jeu de Société in Montreuil, on the eastern lip of Paris. (Only its URL indicated its connection with GenCon France.) I attended through the benevolence of the French RPG publisher 7eme Circle, who translated and published my game Trail of Cthulhu in French, as Cthulhu. (My fellow guest was Jérôme Huguenin, that game’s startlingly gifted illustrator — he also illustrated 7eme Cercle’s new hotness, Kuro Tensei, which looks all apocalyptic and J-horrific.) I speak essentially no French, save that which accretes after a year of grade-school instruction, a decade of French horror films, and a lifelong fondness for good food. So of course I did two interviews there.

So what was the convention like? It was mostly a boardgame show held in one giant dealer’s hall. (I was informed there is a more RPG-focused convention in September. My calendar is open …) Asmodee, the main sponsor, used to publish RPGs but now mostly produces boardgames — plus ca change. Gaming happened primarily at company demo booths, but there were a dozen or so RPG tables set up in one section under the benevolent gaze of Grog. French gamers (based on my random sampling from the thousand or so attendees) are pretty much just like American gamers, although they smoke more — the only barrier was linguistic. The ’satiably curious can see photos of the festivities at the Sci-Fi Universe site, or watch a riveting video shot at the event.

French games, from what I could tell within my Anglophone box, are primarily concerned with world and feel (consider Nephilim, In Nomine, and Qin, to name three French games with English-language versions), which may be part of the reason why they are (as a rule) far prettier than American ones. Given the relative sizes of the Anglophone and Francophone RPG markets, I haven’t the faintest idea how French publishers (very much including mine) support such gorgeous art and production quality. France also has an “indie” scene, if Johan Scipion’s Sombre is any guide — a stripped-down horror game with a number of similarly minimalist sub-games in planning or complete, among them Cthulhu DDR (“No Nazis, No Stasis” says designer Thierry Salaün).

I shan’t mention every game I saw there, but I will single out the upcoming 7eme Cercle game Devastra, which takes the long overdue step of “game-ifying” the legendary history of India, and Jean-Philippe Jaworski’s extraordinarily recondite game Te Deum pour un Massacre, a game about noble machinations surrounding the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, and the French Wars of Religion generally. (It has five supplements, I think.) Both are extraordinarily beautiful. Both assume a level of comfort with history and pseudo-history that American games mostly don’t.

Which leads me as if by predetermined column outline to the book Jouer avec l’Histoire, or Playing Games With History, which debuted at the show. Edited by Olivier Caïra and Jérôme Larré, this anthology presents essays by game designers and critics discussing the intersection of RPGs with history. Ranging from designer’s notes to “does making Nazis into orcs trivialize the Holocaust?” the book is probably years ahead of the state of the art in English-language RPG criticism. I say “probably,” because it’s not impossible to imagine someone putting together a similarly thoughtful, wide-ranging anthology for American games. (An arguable exception is Wardrip-Fruin and Harrigan’s “… Person” series from MIT Press, but that takes a primarily narratological approach.) Caïra is a leading ludological scholar in France, having published a broad sociological study of RPGs, Jeux de Role, with the prestigious CNRS (the equivalent of the National Science Foundation in the U.S.). He is also very generous with his champagne, which has no bearing on my appreciation of his scholarship.

Which, as I may have pointed out, I can’t actually read. But the typography is very nice.

Which is French gaming in a nutshell. Next, the State of American Gaming, such as it is, and such as I can suss it out.

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