|
Post by bigjackbrass on Jul 5, 2014 1:19:39 GMT -6
If you're interested in seeing what the new starter set includes then Hal at RPGMP3.com has just posted an unboxing video: D&D 5th edition starter
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Oct 26, 2013 7:56:27 GMT -6
It's possible there were rights issues with the original cover pieces. That was the explanation given back when they first were mentioned by WOTC. On Twitter or FB, IIRC. I've no problem with new covers per se, but as others have said the tone of these seems an ill fit with the game, worst offender being the first book. As I am not the target audience for WotC products (and since I already have the PDFs from when they were legally available) it's nothing I will be getting worked up about, but I do wish that "extreme chaos spiky bits" aesthetic hadn't crept over from Games Workshop in the 90s to D&D. I prefer my D&D fighting men to look as though they could happily fit in with Ivanhoe.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Feb 4, 2013 15:30:02 GMT -6
I was looking at some of the Brigade minis yesterday, as it happens, certainly the most promising in terms of scale and style, although let down for me by having only partial distribution in the UK and not selling the figures I'd like as singles. Next move is to scour possible suppliers over here. The nose doesn't trouble me, as I assumed I'd have to adapt a figure slightly, although it does seem surprising that nobody appears to make a mini for such a famous individual / character.
Thanks for the suggestion.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Feb 3, 2013 10:31:36 GMT -6
Many of you will know of the Tom Moldvay game / scenario The Future King, in which a typically Moldvayian group of trans-temperal personalities team up on an Arthurian quest of sorts. I'm thinking of running it at our annual gaming gettogether later this year and thought it might be nice to have some minis of the characters. This has not proved quite as straightforward as I expected.
There are six main characters:
Cyrano de Bergerac Nostradamus Harald Hardraada Owen Glendower Bruce Lee Doc Holliday
Of these, I already own a Doc Holliday figure and know of a good Bruce Lee one. Harald Hardraada and Owen Glendower are fairly easy to source too, as there are plenty of historical miniatures ranges featuring suitable options, but Cyrano and Nostradamus are causing problems. Does anyone know of suitable miniatures for these characters? The rest of the minis are the oversized 25mm scale common these days (so actually more like 28mm or 30mm for a six foot tall human), which unfortunately rules out a few possibilities I've found as all of the figures need to look reasonably in scale; older or more authentic 25mm figures inevitably look like children next to modern minis. There must surely be scholar, priest and swashbuckler figures out there with a resemblance to Nostradamus and Cyrano, mustn't there?
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Jan 28, 2013 13:51:55 GMT -6
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Jan 22, 2013 12:10:45 GMT -6
I'll be very interested to see what effect this has on the retroclones. After all, the reason (or at least the main reason) why they appeared in the first place was to let people play and write adventures for an out-of-print system.
Of course, the whole "OSR" thing has expanded beyond that, with many games offering substantial variation on the D&D template, but still, there are a few games which will presumably largely be differentiated by price when compared to the once-more-in-print originals.
EDIT: Certainly looks as though there's a lot of initial interest in the D&D PDFs; the site keeps crashing :-)
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Dec 17, 2012 11:19:00 GMT -6
As yet I've not seen the film, so of course I'm in no position to judge it. I can, however, make an observation about what Peter Jackson has tried to produce, based on the trailers, marketing and various interviews Mr Jackson has given in recent weeks. Essentially, I think the decision was made not to film The Hobbit but to film a prequel to the earlier Lord of the Rings film trilogy. There is no way for the tone of a faithfully adapted version of The Hobbit to fit with those earlier films. Putting aside matters like length, pacing and padding (about which I am hearing largely consistent reports) I suspect that one simply has to understand the creative decision underlying the entire film and not go into it hoping for dwarves wearing their best detachable party hoods. Hopefully I'll enjoy it, but I don't believe for a moment that it will be a film of The Hobbit; luckily, that glorious little book remains unaffected, regardless. But then, what do I know? I'm the chap who wishes they'd stop cutting Tom Bombadil out of the adaptations
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Nov 3, 2012 6:38:06 GMT -6
You might like to get hold of a copy of Douglas A. Anderson's The Annotated Hobbit, which not only has lots of additional notes accompanying the text but also points out many of the changes made in the revised version, such as the removal of tomatoes because they were New World and seemed out of place. There have been a few book club editions too, which makes it relatively cheap on the secondhand market.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Sept 12, 2012 10:02:49 GMT -6
A number of the traps certainly came from actual games (I've been lucky enough to play in some sessions run by Ken St. Andre and his Gristlegrim dungeon can be deadly!) but I suspect that as the series progressed more and more of them were designed as entertainment for readers of the book, rather than being intended for use.
There were always exceptions to the general rule of lethality (I was fond of the indestructible vase containing a valuable gem: tip it out and the gem is yours, but if you touch it your hand temporarily balloons in size... so if you reached into the vase to grab it then you suddenly found yourself with a club for a hand) and later books explicitly included more annoying, embarrassing and inconvenient traps instead of instant killers. A couple of my traps appeared in Traps Ate and you'd have to be quite unlucky to get killed by them.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Jul 16, 2012 9:33:03 GMT -6
Open range is a great tale because it uses the economic aspect of the old west to the tale: I.e. open range vs closed. I wonder if this would fall foul of many people's issues with historical/semi-historical RPGs, the notion that you can't change history? There's an inevitability to the end of the range; indeed, the film plays strongly on that sense of the world changing and Costner and Duvall's characters finding it hard to adapt and move with it. Sadly, I've met too many people who won't explore the wonderful possibilities for depth in situations like that because they can't see beyond the fact that the world did change, so anything their character may do feels futile to them. I've even known someone who dismissed Call of Cthulhu because World War II was going to happen eventually and he didn't like the idea of his character being unable to change it. My observation that the chances of a 1920s CoC character still being alive and functional in 1939 were somewhat remote was not met graciously
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Jul 13, 2012 9:43:51 GMT -6
It's an absolutely corking film, although as the basis for an adventure I think that Tombstone has the edge. What I particularly like about Open Range are moments like the business with the chocolate bar, splashing out on an absurd luxury like that at such a seemingly inappropriate moment which drives home how truly dangerous the impending situation is.
To be honest I'm a fan of neither Costner or Duvall generally, but both deserve praise for their performances in Open Range. Michael Gambon plays it a little too broadly for my taste, but it's a small criticism of a great film.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Jun 5, 2012 3:41:34 GMT -6
From section 710 of Empire of the Petal Throne:
"As each player enters the game, he or she shakes one 6-sided die to determine his or her available hit dice points. As each succeeding level of experience is reached, the indicated number of 6-sided dice are shaken to determine his new total... No character may ever have LESS hit points at a higher level than he did at a lower one. Thus, if a warrior shook two 5's and had 10 hit points at level II, and then on reaching level III shook three dice but only got a total of 7, he adds 3 points to maintain his previous 10. He must thus always equal his previous total, although he may not be lucky enough to surpass it."
EPT dates from 1975 in published form. I've not yet seen the pre-publication version which is out as a PDF, so I can't confirm that it has the same rule. It's worth remembering that EPT wasn't a distant product from a minor company, it was published by TSR with direct input from Gary Gygax (how much is arguable, but Professor Barker wrote in Space Gamer issue 71, "I sent Mr. Gygax a set of my rules and maps, and he responded enthusiastically. He advised me to make certain changes to make EPT more compatible with his major product, Dungeons & Dragons, and this was done.") and Dave Arneson was gaming with Professor Barker from at least 1974.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Jun 2, 2012 5:15:15 GMT -6
Since my scanner appears not to work with Windows 7 (Canon's website effectively says "You can't just use things forever, you know! Hard cheese, pal!") I've had to take a photo of the page from Space Gamer issue 71 (The Tékumel special, as it happens), so apologies for the quality but I think you'll get the idea:
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Jun 1, 2012 10:21:26 GMT -6
Are you referring to the UK Steve Jackson (pic above) or the US Steve Jackson (GURPS)? There was a great picture in an old copy of Space Gamer of the two of them playing tug-of-war with a "Steve Jackson Games" sign. I'll see if I can dig it out.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on May 29, 2012 9:59:33 GMT -6
Back from the UK Games Expo, a wonderful show as ever, and some splendid gaming. The combination of a very tight budget and limited time to browse the trade halls meant that I didn't splash the cash around, but there was one book I was hoping to get: Carcosa. And Lo! There was James Raggi's stall of wonder, delight and weirdness. Any tiny amount of resolve I might have had faded once I picked up the book again, having previously seen the review copy Marty had for The Silver Lodge, and I bought a copy. It's practically an artifact, a beautiful example of what a gaming book can be and a terrific riposte to those who associate "old school" with poorly printed staple-bound pamphlets. Can't wait to inflict the horror and strangeness on my players
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Feb 26, 2012 13:58:56 GMT -6
I especially like when you guys flip through the Isle of the Unknown book, talking about which monsters you think are the weirdest. It's a funny thing, really. If you asked me to name some things I don't especially like about typical D&D games I would certainly list the overabundance of weird monsters, thrown in purely for novelty or to provide a specific challenge without making a lot of sense and hand-waved with the justification that it's because of magic. Then I started looking through Isle of the Unknown and found myself thinking, "Ooh, I'd love to put this in a game!" Just goes to show that not all weird is created equal
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Feb 26, 2012 4:05:04 GMT -6
I suspect that most of those who frequent these boards and are interested in Carcosa have already bought a copy, but for the curious you may like to know that Marty Jopson has reviewed the new edition of Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown over at The Silver Lodge: Parlour podcast number three. This is a new podcast from Yog-Sothoth.com which opens with a review section made freely available to anyone. The rest of the show is available to site patrons. The review runs for roughly half an hour. I toss in the occasional comment, as I was recently drafted in as a co-host
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Nov 7, 2011 11:29:58 GMT -6
It's an odd duck, compared to previous books on the hobby. In particular, the focus of this book is on the companies rather more than the games, individuals or even the hobby itself. All of those are covered, to some degree, through the articles on the companies but there are many occasions when the history of company Y repeats the history of company X to such a degree that I do wish we'd had more of an emphasis on the people. In a nutshell, RPG companies tend to start enthusiastically, continue in a slightly haphazard and extremely underfunded way and then collapse or disappear into a different company: you can read a variation on that obvious history over and again in this book.
The binding is nice (much better than many earlier Mongoose efforts), but hardly impressive, and the paper is rather poor given the price. Editing lives down to Mongoose's reputation, I'm afraid, with stray apostrophes being only one frequent annoyance. There's also a very grating matter of style, a legacy, I suspect, of the book starting life as a series of articles. It seems that almost every page has some variation on "as we will see" or "something we will return to later", sometimes cropping up more than once on a two-page spread. On top of that is the author's somewhat eccentric understanding of what "ironically" means.
That said, and bearing in mind the factual blunders mentioned in aldarron's review above, there is much to enjoy here. As a first draft it's quite good... but of course it's supposed to be a finished product. Retro-clones and the "old school renaissance" get short shrift (barely a sidebar, if I recall) and the "indie" crowd are currently being quite vocal about having the entire "story game" movement crammed into the chapter about Ron Edwards's Adept Press, but given the focus of the book on companies both of those problems are hard to avoid. I should also mention that Mr. Appelcline does a fair job of avoiding glaring bias in discussing, for example, Chaosium and other areas where he has been directly involved.
Overall I have mostly enjoyed the book, despite the horrendous editing and clumsy style, yet it's a difficult thing to recommend. The price is very high, not at all helped by nagging concerns of accuracy. There are no footnotes, few sources, and generally a sense of falling rather short of its goals. The final few chapters were increasingly a slog to get through, but perhaps it's best digested in shorter bursts.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Oct 22, 2011 10:43:40 GMT -6
Do your adventurers ever return to a dungeon? or are any of the intelligent monsters in communication with outside groups?
If so, I'd be inclined to let the PCs lob their burning oil and have it work as written, but in future games the orcs and goblins may have heard about what an effective weapon they are up against. Not only would they be keen to try it for themselves, they might also look into ways to counter it. A flask of an alchemical "fire extinguisher" might be an option, or simply strategically located water barrels. That way you don't have to veto a classic weapon outright, but it's not a guaranteed success in future adventures. The players learn and adapt to new tactics, so why shouldn't the opposition?
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Oct 9, 2011 14:45:20 GMT -6
In the late eighties I was lucky enough to be invited to visit John Blanche at his Games Workshop office. They were based behind an insurance office then, and I ended up wandering in and through much of the building trying to find him before anyone bothered to ask why I was there! Spent a very enjoyable few hours looking through stacks (literally) of amazing art by some of the best people in the field at the time, Mr Blanche included, then we went to the pub ;D
His miniature painting and conversion is equally stunning.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Aug 15, 2011 6:01:36 GMT -6
I've been eyeing this at Tita's for a while. Is it worth the Kaitars? Overall I'd say it is. To the best of my knowledge (based on an article I can't find at the moment, so I may easily be mistaken) Mr Pettigrew was writing from well outside of Professor Barker's groups, so if you're a real stickler you might grumble that his Tékumel isn't "authentic", but if you're more interested in playable content than only using materials from one source "The Pettigrew Selections" has much to offer. The booklet (which is a little cheaply produced, with rather low-resolution scans of illustrations, but does have very clear and readable text) contains these sections: - Tauknélin Zu'aryal: A Thousand Flowers - fairly short piece about an artform akin to origami.
- Marching with the Ever-Glorious - advice, tables and events for running a military RPG campaign.
- The High Seas of Tékumel - similar material but for sea-borne adventures.
- The Underworlds - which sparked this thread, all those years ago ;D . A detailed but not overly intricate way of making fairly coherent underworld settings.
- New Magical Items for EPT - the least interesting part of the book for me, a pretty typical selection of the sorts of magic items listed in every RPG magazine of the day. It's not poorly done, but personally I've very rarely used such material.
- The Hirilákte Arena - charts and rules for rolling up arena combatants and betting on the fights.
- NPC Personalities for EPT - charts and rules for adding personality traits to NPCs to make them a little more varied. Quite handy.
Most of the pieces follow a similar format, with multiple charts and brief rules for using them. On the whole I think they work quite nicely to produce interesting and coherent results. The problem with charts and table is often that the results from one gel badly with the next, which isn't often the case here. If the contents sound like they cover any topics of use to you then I don't think you would regret buying the book.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Jul 14, 2011 11:08:49 GMT -6
Not the most direct route, but if you're on Twitter you could try sending a message to @pramas (Chris Pramas). Although I don't suppose he's dealing with the day-to-day stuff of the boards he might be able to give someone a nudge or suggest who to contact.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Jun 7, 2011 10:28:44 GMT -6
I picked up both books at the Expo, followed by PDFs when I returned home. Terrific stuff, one of the most engaging and entertaining little games I've seen for a while, brimming with potential. My group has been on hold for a few weeks (the usual real life disruptions, nothing serious) but we'll be getting together next week and I'm seriously considering giving Job 1: That Scottish Play a go, the alternative being Zombie Cinema which one of the other players bought at the show. I'm nudging them towards the tights and ruffs ;D
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on May 11, 2010 9:36:47 GMT -6
I've never run Boot Hill, despite a fondness for western RPGs. Generally my group prefers westerns with a "twist," such as Deadlands, and it's hard to persuade them to try something straight. Still, I've been using Glenn Rahman's Cash & carry for cowboys article from Dragon for years in other western games. ...Cowboys and Dinosaurs sounds good right about now. If you have access to a copy of Space Gamer #64 it contains a nicely done adventure titled Big Lizzie, statted out for Boot Hill and FGU's Wild West, on that very subject. Steve Jackson Games recently released it as a PDF through their e23 site, although that version has been rewritten for GURPS instead.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Apr 25, 2010 10:03:59 GMT -6
Both came out in 1984, published by Tékumel Games Inc; I first heard of them in the Tékumel special of Space Gamer (#71, Nov/Dec 1984.) Reprints are available from Tita's House of Games, along with The Best of the Journal: The Pettigrew Selections, a compilation of articles from The Tékumel Journal.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Apr 25, 2010 3:13:40 GMT -6
I had some problems with the name of the author of the Elric books, but I think I fixed that one. Who, Michael Moorthingy? One of my favourite authors!
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Apr 25, 2010 2:21:56 GMT -6
Who is Mr. Pettigrew? Is he a player in Prof. Barker's campaign? He was more famous as the (very young) author of FGU's Flashing Blades RPG, still an excellent game for lovers of the Three Musketeers. There was a rare interview with him on the Imagonem website a couple of years ago, but the whole site appears to have disappeared and the Wayback Machine isn't retrieving it. Nothing I have read suggests that he was ever a part of Professor Barker's group - indeed, geographically Pettigrew was quite distant from it - but it's interesting to note that in the interview his current job is mentioned: Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at Queens College, City University of New York. Perhaps it was the "language bug," as Professor Barker put it, that attracted him to Tékumel. One part of the interview particularly stands out: "I had a surreal experience at a gaming convention when I was 18 or 19. I met some fans of Empire of the Petal Throne who had read everything I had ever written for that system. They seemed very disappointed that I was so young and that I didn't speak fluent Tsolyani (the language of the dominant empire on M.A.R. Barker's imaginary world, Tekumel). I loved RPGs, but they were just a hobby to me. I had trouble relating to people whose lives revolved around them. That was my last convention."
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Apr 24, 2010 8:55:24 GMT -6
It's also worth mentioning that the map is a bit "muddy" and unclear in a couple of places. There's a redrawn version in the miscellaneous files section of The Tékumel Yahoo! Group (requires registration to access.)
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Apr 24, 2010 3:14:37 GMT -6
... I am pretty sure that The Tomb Complex is as well.... The Tomb seems to be your basic dungeon. Right on both counts. Tomb also has stats for Swords & Glory, but it is fully statted out for EPT.
|
|
|
Post by bigjackbrass on Apr 6, 2010 9:10:46 GMT -6
All remaining box orders start shipping this week. Splendid news. Can't wait to see my copy and have yet another go at persuading my group to try some "old style" gaming
|
|