Tag Archives: rpg

Headkick

Posted by under funding, narrative, roleplaying games

A week ago I put up a post talking about the just-started Kickstarter campaign for Alas Vegas, my new RPG. I’ve just written a sober description of that week for the Spaaace front-page blog, inviting analysis. But this is my personal blog, so here are some personal opinions.

1. Kickstarter is as addictive as meth, and possibly as bad for your teeth. Certainly for your fingernails.

2. Alas Vegas hit its funding goal in seven and three-quarter hours. Before the campaign started I was honestly wondering if £3000 was ambitious for a first Kickstarter. We hit that target in a third of a day. Then we blew through the first two stretch goals in the rest of that day, and knocked down the third—Yet Already, a fantastic fractured-time setting for the game’s Fugue mechanics, designed by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, in a couple of days more.

If you’re one of the people who has pledged money to Alas Vegas, thank you. Thank you more than I can say. If not, then…

3. Things have slowed down a bit now, which is a shame as we’re just getting to the really interesting stretch goals—Allen Varney, Robin D. Laws and others have offered material, but progress has got bogged down in some additional-artwork funding. Which brings me to:

4. Keep your campaign focused, don’t let it pull in two directions. Alas Vegas has a lot of people asking for an official Tarot deck. Well, that would be great, but it’s equally clear that there are a lot of people who don’t care a sou for Tarot decks one way or another, and who won’t back the Kickstarter while we’re asking for money for Tarot art. I have got a solution for the Tarot fans, conditional on sign-off from a couple of people, but as soon as we’ve cleared this stretch goal (it’s to commission the rest of the Major Arcana from the amazing John Coulthart) then the Alas Vegas campaign will be back to cool new stuff for the game.

5. Seriously, Allen Varney’s pitch for his new Fugue mechanics setting made me spit assorted foodstuffs across my laptop. It’s genius. And before that we have John Tynes promising to write a selection of Vegas-style cocktail recipes for Alas Vegas, suitable for drinking while playing the game.

6. Did I mention that this is the most fun I’ve had in the games industry for a long time? Not counting Warpcon, of course.

7. Which leads me to a future post, which I will write when I have time, about gamification. It’s been fermenting for a long time, and I think you’ll enjoy it. But it won’t happen until you have pledged more of your money. Go on! You could get the game dedicated to you.

Ain’t That A Kick In The Head

Posted by under funding, game design, roleplaying games

I learned a long time ago that the only sure way to get an idea out of my head is to write it down and publish it. Therefore after two years of Alas Vegas not going away—and a previous fifteen years when it was an unwritten novel called Vague As Hell not going away either—it has finally come time to do something with the project.

Shortly before this post went live, the Alas Vegas RPG page appeared on Kickstarter. We’re asking for £3000 to release a four-session RPG set in a place that looks a lot like Vegas but isn’t. It’s a lot more violent for a start. Also, corpses disappear. And there’s no way to leave.

Alas Vegas is my first new RPG design for fifteen years (since The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, in fact) and I think it’s some of the best work I’ve ever done. In a phrase, it’s Ocean’s Eleven directed by David Lynch.  The mechanics are simple and hit that sweet spot of advancing the narrative as they go. The story is very cool, and pacing it over four sessions lets the players experience proper cliffhangers and an actual ending that ties up all the loose plot threads.

There’s a lot more about the game on its Kickstarter page, and I’ve written about it here before. I’m excited about the fact that it’s moving towards print, but I’m also excited about exploring the process of crowdfunding. A while back, pre the existence of this blog, I discussed ways to reinstate the eighteenth-century model of subscription-funding the publication of a book, the model that Johnson’s Dictionary used. It’s here now, and it’s transforming the industry. Getting my teeth into the guts of the process is going to be really interesting.

Of course I’ll be bitterly disappointed if you don’t pledge at least £100.

Hide & Seek & Aliens Among Us

Posted by under game design, street games

The third Hide & Seek Weekender is kicking off in a couple of days, and should be fantastic. Three more days of brilliant, gorgeous and eccentric social, street and pervasive games, in and around the South Bank. I’ve been privy to a lot of the plans and preparations—Spaaace has been sharing office-space with Hide & Seek for a couple of months, which is a truly sweet deal—and there are some very cool things coming up. Head over to the Weekender’s own website for a glimpse of what’s coming up, and if you’re anywhere near the National Theatre in London on Friday, Saturday or Sunday then you’d be a fool not to drop in.

Of special interest to traditional gamers is an event I’m running on Friday night: ALIENS AMONG US. This is a post-Werewolf/Mafia game, which is to say a social game for a large group in which a minority of the group are intent on killing everyone, and the rest of the group has to work out who they are and kill them first. The difference between Werewolf/Mafia and Aliens Among Us is that in Aliens Among Us everyone has big guns.

AAU is not my game. Well, okay, this iteration of it is, but I didn’t come up with the core idea. The game was originally devised by Erick Wujcik, sometime in the early 1980s—which makes it extraordinarily early for a game of this type, predating Mafia/Werewolf by five years. The thing is, he never published it. In fact, as far as I can tell and I’ve asked a bunch of people, he never even wrote it down as a playtest set of rules. He did, however, play it with many groups at conventions and gatherings around the world, and he would describe it enthusiastically to fellow games designers, such as myself. I only heard the description once. Once was enough to know it was genius.

In the James Wallis 12″ dance-remix it goes like this:

  1. Earth has been invaded by aliens. Lots of them. The human-to-alien ratio is about 10:1. Aliens and humans look identical, and can only be differentiated after they are dead.
  2. Aliens want to kill all the humans. As a result the humans want to kill all the aliens.
  3. You are a member of the Ultimate Defence Force (because the Penultimate Defence Force didn’t really work out.) You are tasked with seeking out and destroying all aliens. Some collateral damage is inevitable, of course, and is expected.
  4. The UDF has itself been infiltrated by aliens. Some say it’s been heavily infiltrated—so heavily that the ratio of humans and aliens in its ranks is more like 5:1
  5. Humans get 5 points for killing an alien, minus 1 for every human they kill. Aliens get 1 point per human they kill, minus 5 if they kill an alien.
  6. The number of points your character has when they die (and they will die) is the number of points you have to generate your next character.

Erick ran the game as a conventional post-Gygax/Arneson RPG, with GM and players. I’m not doing that: I’m going to brief the players and let them get on with it, intervening only to deliver updates on the situation. I’ve also wonked the character-generation bit for a more general audience. In my version you don’t buy attributes or skills; you buy the two things that really matter in a game like this: (a) your rank in the UDF, from boy scout to general; and (b) your weaponry, from pointy stick to portable 22-kiloton warhead.

Erick Wujcik, as some as you know, is someone with whom I had a troubled history. He started off as my mentor in the industry, stalled my career for three years and ended up shoving an enormous blade into my back. He died of pancreatic cancer in 2008. The thing is, whatever he was like as a person or a business associate, there’s no question that he was a brilliant games designer. Also there’s no copyright in game concepts, and I firmly believe that Aliens Among Us is too good an idea to let die with its creator.

So there’s this playtest at the Weekender, and if it comes together then I’ve been talking to an American games designer about various possibilities, and—well, if that comes together too then it will do so with a rightness and a pleasingness that I think will satisfy anyone who knew Erick or his work.

I’ll keep you posted.

Today I am smug

Posted by under Uncategorized

The estimable Gareth Hanrahan has observed that it’s possible to wonk the index of RPGs at RPG.net to give you a list of the top 50 (tabletop) RPGs ever, based on review scores on the site. Not hotlinkable, alas, but easy enough to do.

It turns out that Hogshead Publishing, which I founded and ran, was behind four of the fifty titles on the list, including the #1 game Nobilis. I personally wrote #47, which isn’t bad considering that a lot of people don’t believe it’s actually an RPG.

Hogshead only ever published eight RPGs, the last in 2002.

I am going to be unbearably smug about this for the rest of the afternoon.

Release the Baron!

Posted by under magnum opus press, munchausen

Update on the new edition of The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which is to be released in September:

The first thousand copies of the book will be of the deluxe-format Gentleman’s Edition (black leather-effect cover with gold embossing), suitable for reading, prominent display in your library, and hurling at inattentive pot-boys. The remainder of the print run will be of the Wives’ and Servants’ Edition, having a plain white cover with simple black lettering designed to not over-stimulate the excitable temperaments of domestics and the lower social orders.

There will also be a PDF edition, available exclusively from e23 (a division of Steve Jackson Games) from August 1st. Though ideas for the title of this edition have been plentiful, none has yet hit the mark. Suggestions are welcomed, good ones doubly so, and the best shall receive a copy of the PDF in gratitude.

n00b World Reorder, part 4

Posted by under game design, geophysics, mmorpg, world of warcraft

(This is the fourth part of an ongoing series  of skientific infestigations into the physics, chemistry and biology of Azeroth, the world known as ‘of Warcraft’. This will probably be gibberish unless you have read part 1, part 2 and part 3 first.)

The ecology of Azeroth, part 2

The strangest aspect of the animal life (and some parts of the plant life) of Azeroth is its physical nature. This section is based on the following observable phenomena:

  • Fauna (and mobile flora) cannot pass through physical objects such as rocks, walls, etc.
  • Fauna (including members of the PC races) can pass through other creatures and certain plants as if they were not there.
  • Carried objects including weapons can pass through creatures without effect except during specific moments when the item’s carrier is in combat with the creature in question. These objects include a combatant’s native weapons such as fangs, claws or fists. Objects fired from a bow or gun can pass through a creature not in combat with the firer, to then strike and wound the intended combatant.
  • Spirit creatures including ghosts cannot pass through walls, rocks, etc. but can be hit with any weapon, and can carry solid objects including coins and cloth. In other words spirit creatures are as corporeal as any other creature on the World of Warcraft, except for their partial transparency (though they still cast shadows—see below). This is not true of the spirit-forms of the PC races, who cannot harm or be harmed in the time between the death of their corporeal body and their resurrection, but which are also blocked by physical objects.
  • All animate creatures can recover from life-threatening wounds to full health in minutes, and return to their regular activities as if nothing had happened.
  • All animate creatures including spirits cast a shadow that is not influenced by the position of the sun or moon, other light-sources or other observable phenomena. Instead it always lies at their feet, as if they were being illuminated by a single point-source a short distance above their centre of gravity.

Based on these observations, we might hypothesise that there are two forms of matter on Azeroth. The first is ‘physical matter’, comprising almost all inanimate objects from mountains to fenceposts, major plant-life, and weapons. It is non-reactive, cannot be destroyed, and is essentially inert. The second is ‘animate matter’: if something on Azeroth moves or can be moved then it is made of animate matter, and conversely if it is not made of animate matter then it cannot move. Thus all living creatures, ambulatory plants, small vegetation, some small objects, ghosts and other spirit-based beings are all comprised of animate matter. Animate matter has a much lower molecular density than inanimate matter, and so any two objects made of animate matter can occupy the same physical space or pass through each other without interference or displacement.

However, this theory requires too many special cases and exceptions to be plausible. For example, it does not explain how weapons normally can pass through living beings without harming them outside a combat situation, but immediately combat starts will cause injury and death. Nor does it explain the movement of large pieces of Goblin engineering seen in Gadgetzan and Everlook, or zeppelins and ships which all move but appear to be made of physical matter. Besides, it does not fit any known theory of the way that the universe works, and there is another hypothesis that does, for a certain select value of ‘theory’.

Azeroth is a world in which all living creatures repeatedly retread the same paths to perform a small set of the same actions, often fighting and killing (or being killed by) adversaries that they have killed (or been killed by) many times before. Some have a wider range of actions than others, but none are able to break free and do what we would think of as ‘normal’ actions, either for animals—eating, breeding, dying of old age—or for intelligent humanoids—having a meal with friends, spending time with family, finding a partner, raising children, or retiring. We do not know why the animals do this; but the intelligent humanoids do it because they believe there is some kind of goal they are heading for, some kind of nebulous reward: power, reknown, perhaps an escape of some kind, a need not to participate in these actions any more.

When one combines these observations with the above notes on the fluid nature of living beings on Azeroth (their abilities to pass through some solid objects, for example) it becomes clear that there are parallels for this kind of existence in our universe, though one not properly understood or even recognised by most scientists. Nonetheless, in most cultures this state of being would be called an ‘afterlife’, and the people inhabiting it ‘ghosts’, trapped in a purgatorial netherworld where they must endlessly repeat the same actions, even if those actions include repeatedly dying.

This hypothesis fits well with many of the observable phenomena on Azeroth. It explains, for example, how in combat a sword can clearly be seen to bisect an opponent’s torso without cutting them in half or even leaving a visible wound. The only plausible explanation is that these beings are trapped in a spirit-based half-life of performing actions and missions that have been done a million times before, endless repetitions of violence and endless, meaningless deaths. Some conventional theories of such things would classify this as “Hell”.

We cannot hypothesise why this should be, or if there is any way for the inhabitants of Azeroth to escape from their situation.

(To be concluded, eventually in part 5)

My guy, Gax

Posted by under game design

Some years ago, someone—it could have been Andrew Rilstone but I’m honestly not sure—commented that he wished Gary Gygax would hurry up and die, so people would stop talking about what he was doing now (which at the time was Dangerous Journeys, a tedious rules-heavy fantasy RPG at a time when the market was making it clear it wasn’t interested in such things, and dreadful fantasy novels) and remember him for the good stuff he did.

Gary Gygax created modern gaming. You cannot move these days for games with class-and-level systems: even modern FPS games like Call Of Duty 4 are grabbing RPG elements and building them in as an integral gameplay. The class-and-level system dates explicitly to Gygax’s work, and specifically to the first edition of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974.

(Yes, I know Dave Arneson deserves co-credit for the creation of D&D. But Dave Arneson didn’t write Chainmail, which D&D’s rules drew on heavily, and he also didn’t die today.)

By today’s standards, after thirty-five years of refinement and polish, the original edition of D&D looks incredibly clunky. But if you look beyond its unclear rules, its incompleteness and its tendency to assume existing knowledge on the part of the reader, what’s astonishing is how much of the game is right. It wasn’t the concept of roleplay in D&D that birthed the genre, it was the way the rules encapsulated the core ideas behind it—not, to the chagrin of many of us who considered ourselves on the cutting edge, ways to encourage players to inhabit their fictional avatars more fully, but ways to keep players playing and interested in progressing in the game.

And that same energy went on to power Mines of Moria, and Ultima, and the Final Fantasy series, and countless other tabletop and CRPGs, and is making Blizzard a billion dollars a year through World of Warcraft. It taps into something very primal at the heart of the gaming impulse and wraps it in a covering that has been nicked, borrowed and retrod so many times since that it pretty much defines what we think of as ‘fantasy’ today. Not that Gygax didn’t nick most of that himself, but at least he acknowledged his sources. Pretty much everything in World of Warcraft that isn’t straight out of Warhammer is straight out of D&D.

Now, at last, we can forget all the crap he did later. Even if he only had one moment of genius, it’s such a moment of such genius that it instantly elevates him into the very highest echelons of game-design greatness. His work built not one but two industries—how quickly would computer games have moved out of the arcade without the likes of Colossal Cave?—a genre, and a language of shared experience in fantastic worlds shared by hundreds of millions of people.

And if anyone disagrees, I will fight them. Roll for initiative.

The Song Remains The Same

Posted by under Uncategorized

It’s taken me a while but I finally tore myself away from WoW to start playing Eternal Sonata (Bandai/Namco, Xbox 360) today. I have been looking forward to this. It’s a JRPG set in the dreams of Frédéric Chopin as he lies dying of tuberculosis in Paris in 1849. And that is the kind of idea for an RPG that gets me really excited.

I mean that in all honesty. When I play a game I want to see things I’ve never seen before. Admittedly my usual taste in music is for stuff that sounds like a 70s analog synthesizer being fed through a wood-chipper covered in beeswax, while someone uses a sledgehammer to beat out the baseline on the Forth Bridge and someone else fires off the James Soane Collection of Badboy Kickdrums in the background. But Chopin’s dying dreams filtered through a Japanese sensibility, and interactive, from the same house that brought us Katamari and Xenosaga? Oooooo in approving and anticipatory tones.

Things begin quite promisingly. The first (game-engine-based) cutscene is beautifully animated and intriguing. The next one is also beautifully animated, is too long, and has voiceover that clanks more than Marley’s chains. The third one is about the same. But there’s a sense of atmosphere building, themes and mood, and a couple of (clanky) musical metaphors that bode well.

And finally the game itself begins, and I find myself escorting a young girl called Polka along a sun-dappled woodland path. It is very pretty. What’s that curious object sparkling over there? Why, it’s a save-point—how quaint! I am feeling quietly excited about the potential of the coming experience.

Suddenly Polka collides with something that looks like the mutant offspring of a leek and a pumpkin, and can’t proceed until she’s battered it to death with her umbrella, to the swelling sounds of a musical score that is almost completely unlike Chopin.

Then there are more leek-pumpkins. And a chest that someone’s left in a clearing, perhaps in tribute to the thousands of old-school RPGs with chests containing health-ups left in unlikely locations. And then more leek-pumpkins.

Ah well.

Heroics

Posted by under game design, narrative

I’ve been musing recently on the nature of courage, bravery and heroism, and their role in games and game-narrative.

It’s been spurred by this photograph: Life magazine’s photograph of the week from October 1949.
Sea Fury on fire

It was taken by an automatic camera on the flight deck of the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious, during trials of a new design of Sea Fury. The pilot has come in too high, the undercarriage has caught on the crash barrier, and the plane has somersaulted and burst into flames, trapping the pilot in the cockpit.

It is the job of the man at bottom left to get the pilot out.

Does the fact that it’s his job make his action—rushing into that inferno in a thin asbestos suit—any less brave? Of course not.

Let’s talk about this in the context of a videogame. Can we as designers replicate the sensation that must have gone through his mind: the conflict between duty and stark terror, the very real risk of injury or death? It’s a yes/no choice: either he goes in, or he funks it.

Players, of course, face no actual risk. But even so games have, in recent years, lessened the amount of virtual risk that the player faces. It has become progressively harder to die, and the ‘punishment’ for doing so has been reduced. Therefore, as the games themselves have become more action-packed and realistic, the opportunities for the player to experience any sense of risk, or of consequence of failure, have almost evaporated.

(One notable exception—possibly the only one—is Steel Battalion, the g-robot simulator for the Xbox, with the dedicated and terrifying three-foot controller. If your bot is destroyed and you fail to punch the ‘eject’ button in time, your save-game is erased. Brutal? Absolutely. Awesome? Oh yes.)

Without risk, without the possibility of failure and loss, there can be no sense of bravery. Sure, the sargeant can tell the rookie private that he’s a gutsy kid, and the cut-scene can show the GI studying the photo of his wife and the new baby he’s never held before plunging into combat, and the genetic supersoldier can understand that the fate of millions rests on his actions to try to create the story-context and emotional state for an act of heroism. But if the character’s cut to ribbons in ten seconds, and comes back to life at the last checkpoint, then you’re not going to feel like a hero, you’re just a pawn trapped in a tactics-puzzle. Your bravery is irrelevant. It’s taken for granted that you’re going to rush into the fire-fight. And yes, the Royal Navy took it for granted that the Naval Airman in the picture would run into the fire, but he knew there were real consequences that went beyond his own physical wellbeing or likely punishment if he refused.

It’s primarily sandbox games like GTA and World of Warcraft that let the player avoid anything that smacks of bravery. Find a fight that looks like it might be a bit tough, why not wander off until you’re a couple of levels higher or you’ve picked up a better gun and some more health? It’s the tightly scripted, linear stuff that moves closer to capturing the essence of heroic action, and that’s more by punishing a lack of adventureousness—’No more gameplay for you!’—than by presenting challenges with actual risk involved. There are, at present, no good solutions.

Of course, a lot depends on how the player views their avatar, whether they regard the game-character they’re controlling as ‘me’, as a companion who they care about, or as a disposable camera and weapon-wielding tool. I’ve got a long post in the works about that.

But basically players don’t like risk. They like the appearance of risk, the semblance of heroism, but they really hate it when you make them feel like failures or take stuff away from them. Try telling a player that because they screwed up they broke their magic sword, or they’re going to have to sell their plasma-armour to pay for their half-body med-regen. They want to progress on all fronts, not just story and accomplishment but stats, equipment and fortune. It goes back as far as traditional tabletop RPGs: D&D lets you heal away injury and even death with cheap spells and potions; while also-rans like Runequest, T&T and Traveller were far more stingy with their cures.

Is there a way to get past this give-the-player-what-they-think-they-want mentality, this spoonfeeding of pseudo-emotion rather than the actual exhilaration of taking a real risk and having it pay off? Yes, yes there is. Actually challenge your players. They’ve bought your product, they’re locked in, they’re going to experience the gameplay and narrative the way you want them to. Don’t pander to them. Let them invest in their damn character for a change.

And give them a real narrative, one that lets them actually fail. If they screw up a set piece, don’t respawn them ten paces back and let them try again and again. Move on. They wake up in hospital a week later, and Pode, their hated rival from Company B, has grabbed all the glory for storming the machine-gun nest. Does this mean that they could play through the whole game the first time in thirty minutes of stupid, ignominious deaths? Yes it does, and they’ll get the suck-ass ending: the war ends, they go home to their girl, and she’s pregnant with Pode’s ugly baby.  ”Try again. Fail again. Fail better”, as Beckett said. Let them know that the possibility of failure exists, not just in game terms but in narrative terms as well, that screwing up affects the story, and the successes will be that much sweeter. Better than bottlenecking them at a hard part until they get it right through luck or quit through frustration, I think you’ll agree.

As for the man in the asbestos suit, Naval Airman Simon Wallis was my father. The Sea Fury pilot lived, and Dad received the King’s Commendation for Bravery. My dad was not the bravest man I’ve known, but he was proof that ordinary people can and will do extraordinary things if it’s demanded of them, and if they’re given a chance.

Gen 'n' Tonic

Posted by under munchausen

Gen Con Indianapolis starts today, being Thursday, which means I can finally talk about three things. For those who don’t know Gen Con it’s the largest public games event in the English-speaking world, attracting more than 25,000 people to the four days of its show. I am not there this year, partly because my wife is very pregnant and partly because America, and in particular passing through its immigration channels knowing I could be imprisoned without charge indefinitely for no reason, scares the living crap out of me.

What do I have to talk about?

The convention kicks off with the announcement and presentation of the 2007 Diana Jones Award on the Wednesday evening, pretty much right now as I type this. This prestigious trophy, awarded annually ‘for excellence in gaming’, is the closest thing that the games hobby has to a Nobel prize. Hyperbole perhaps, but I am allowed to say that about it because I founded it. The Award itself is handed out at a party open only to industry professionals (of which there was a notable lack at Gen Con after TSR stopped running its legendary freelancer parties in the mid 90s). And this year’s winner, I’m overjoyed to announce, is The Great Pendragon Campaign by Greg Stafford. Greg is one of the great pillars of the entire RPG field and I sincerely hope that the representatives of Irish Games Convention Charity Auctions, who won the DJA last year, got the trophy to the award ceremony in time so he could receive it.

Secondly, this is Gen Con’s 40th year which is a hell of an achievement for any kind of event. To celebrate, Gen Con LLC commissioned Robin D. Laws to write a book, imaginatively titled 40 Years of Gen Con, about the event’s history. Robin in turn interviewed a lot of notable designers, personalities and people who had helped shape the event, and also me. I am told my words are in the book. It’s published by Atlas Games, priced $29.95, and is available at the show. If you’re at the show then why not stop reading blogs and go and play some games, why don’t you?

And thirdly, there’s another book released at Gen Con Indy, that I referred to a few months back. This one is Hobby Games: the Top 100, compiled by James Lowder and published by Green Ronin, and it’s five bucks cheaper than 40 Years of Gen Con. As the name might suggest it’s a list of 100 of the most important hobby-games products ever, chosen and lovingly described by 100 notable figures in the hobby-games field, from Gary Gygax, Ian Livingstone, both Steve Jacksons and Greg Stafford, down to…. me, a designer so minor that my name doesn’t feature on the press release. And it looks like a really interesting compilation of essays covering one hundred important tabletop games, old and new, classic and obscure. I’ve not seen the whole book but from the contents page and list of contributors I recommend it wholeheartedly.

As you read this copies will be on sale so I can finally break the bonds of silence and say that my contribution is about Ghostbusters, the fantastic 1986 RPG published by West End Games but designed by Chaosium. meaning it bears the fingerprints of Sandy ‘Call of Cthulhu’ Petersen, Greg Stafford, Lynn Willis, Greg Costikyan and many other notables. Not just groundbreaking and influential but also a pinnacle of design and writing, twenty years after publication it remains a brilliant example of How To Get A Licence Right. Plus of course, it’s wonderful fun to play.

Flipping through the HG:100B contents list, I note that Greg Stafford’s games RuneQuest and Pendragon are also included, making him (by my rough tally) the only designer with three titles in the book. Which is some indication of why I’m so glad he’s won the DJA.

Oh, I have two titles in there. Once Upon a Time and The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen both made it in. I am pleased, honoured, incredibly smug, and a bit biased about the quality of the book as a result. Have a flip through it if you see a copy, make up your own mind.

And back to Gen Con for one last moment, I gather Wizards of the Coast will be making an announcement about the fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons at the show. After they made such a comprehensive balls-up of version 3.5, the direction for 4e could make or break the backbone of the whole RPG industry. Interesting times, interesting times.