Blog Archives
New System Thursday – Hunter: The Vigil
It’s Thursday and you know what that means! It means we’ve hunted down another RPG system to add to our list of over 165! Did you know there were over 165 RPG systems? Because I had no idea. Anyway, this week’s new system is White Wolf’s Hunter: The Vigil
The scales have fallen from your eyes. A fire is lit: is it a lamp perched over the inscription upon an ancient blade? Or a roaring conflagration consuming the house in which the howling fiends wait? Things will never be the same after this. You ve set forth on a damning path. Carry the Vigil. Fight back the shadows.
Hot dog! Well, what are you waiting for? Grab some friends, grab the rulebook, and fight against the shadows now!
Vote for SquidGirl!
We just held a contest where folks could enter Stats, Art, Background, and more for SquidGirl, the enigmatic cover girl from the upcoming Gamma World RPG. See, we thought that picking a winner would be easy, right?
WRONG!
It turns out, there’s a squidload of talent to be found in our forums. So now we need your help. Again. We need YOU to choose our grandprize winner from the 6 finalists below! Who’s it going to be? Who’s going to win the 100 dollar Amazon gift card?! Let’s meet our contestants:
Duskreign’s The SquidGirl
Click to Embiggen
WesleyKinsmanHall’s Improved Employment
Click to Embiggen
Erwin’s Squidonna with Child
Click to Embiggen
Duskreign’s Hit Single Ain’t No Time (for a Squidgirl)
Click to play: Squidgirl – Ain’t No Time (for a Squidgirl)
AnimaUmbrae’s SquidGirl’s Facebook Page
Click to visit Squidgirl on Facebook
JonathonVolkmer’s Shakespear’s SquidGirl Caeser
Squidgirl, written by Shakespeare for performance as a grammar school play when he was still a boy, has long been thought lost to the modern world. However, after long searching, I have come into ownership of a partial manuscript of the play. Judging from the following excerpts it would seem that the Bard based one of his later plays on this, his first great tale.
Excerpts from the final scene of “SQUIDGIRL,” one of Shakespeare’s lost plays:
From ACT 1, SCENE 2:
SHARK ANTONY
I shall remember:
When Squidgirl says “Do this,” it is perform’d.SQUIDGIRL
Set on; and leave no ceremony out.SOOTHSAYER
Squidgirl!
Read the full entry (it’s hilarious)
Time to Vote
Ok, those are our top 6. Now we need your help. (You can vote from this link if the voting doesn’t appear below.)
Voting Closed!
We’ll be announcing a winner and awarding prizes in the next couple days. Stay tuned!
Textile Update – Moving to the latest
In Part 1 and Part 2, I discuss the motivations to upgrade to the latest version of Textile, along with my findings when I tested it out. In summary, the new Textile works great for 99% of people, but the 1% that get shafted are the ones who put in the most work. We help many, but harm our most ardent and energetic users. Not exactly a great bargain.
Still, we can’t be forever frozen and afraid to move forward. In a rare move for us, we’ve decided to make the Textile parsing an option. In general, we try to avoid making things optional. It’s difficult for us to support, and makes the overall system more confusing to use. But in this case, we needed a way to please everyone, and providing backwards compatibility was the only way.
We strongly recommend using the newest version of Textile, which is why we automatically upgraded everyone to it. But, if you have put in a lot of work on your campaign and it looks funky with the latest version, you’ll need to edit your campaign settings and select to use the older version.
If you do choose to use the old parser, we would still suggest using the newest one on your new campaigns. The automatic line breaks alone make it much easier to use.
Important!
After you make the change to your campaign setting, you will need to edit and re-save the pages that are looking strange. The change won’t be visible until you re-save a particular page.
SquidGirl Art, Stats, & Backstory Contest
SquidGirl: part squid, part girl. Here, have a look.
SquidGirl appears on the cover of the upcoming RPG GammaWorld by Wizards of the Coast, and based on her abilities to multitask, take charge of a dangerous situation, and use her extranious limbs as hair, we are ready to pledge our undying love for her. But there’s just one problem: We have no idea who SquidGirl really is! I mean, what makes her tick? What are her goals in life? What are her pet peeves? Why is she a SquidGirl?
That’s where you come in, see? We’re putting a bounty out for information. We want background info, we want her stats (in whatever game system you prefer), we want pictures of her in her everyday life, we want personal journal entries, we want it all!
CONTEST RULES:
This contest is open to anyone, anywhere! Also, creators own all applicable rights to their creations. We make no claims of ownership to said creations. To participate, all you have to do is:
1) Make one of the following.
- A picture of SquidGirl doing things in her everyday life
- A fictional journal entry from SquidGirl’s perspective
- Stats for SquidGirl in your favorite RPG system
- A background story for SquidGirl
- Something else entirely but still about SquidGirl
2) Post your creation (or a link to it) in this thread on our forums.
That’s it! We will choose winners based on a variety of criteria including attention to detail, humor, awesomeness, and amazingness. One grand prize winner will recieve a 100 dollar Amazon Gift Card. We’ll also pick 5 runner ups (one in each of the 5 categories) and they will also win prizes. Winners will be chosen on Thursday September 16th at 6pm PST. Yes you can win in multiple categories, and yes multiple entries are allowed. Feel free to give feedback or constructive critisim with your fellow contestants.
Interview with Mike Mearls and Rich Baker (Part 2)
Welcome back to part 2 of our interview with Mike Mearls and Rich Baker. We’ve talked about DnD Essentials; now let’s move on to the other games!
Obsidian Portal: Let’s jump right into Castle Ravenloft. It’s a board game now and eventually it will be its own RPG?
Mike Mearls: Yep, that’s correct. So the board game just came out this month and then… well we can’t really talk about the RPG yet as it’s still in process. But next fall is when the Ravenloft Role-playing Game is coming out.
Obsidian Portal: I see. Back to the board game, are there options for players to commit to ongoing campaigns through a series of linked adventures? Can the same group of players sit down with the same group of characters game after game and still hit new content?
Mike Mearls: So the Castle Ravenloft board game is really meant to be a much faster play experience than DnD. Basically the idea behind was that maybe there would be some times when you and your friends like DnD and you’re at a cook out or wrapping up a small dinner party…
Obsidian Portal: Or as I like to call it, Tuesday night.
Mike Mearls: Haha, but you might say “Ok, let’s play DnD. You guys go make characters and I’ll make the adventure, but it’s going to take a while to get setup.” Well Ravenloft is kind of our effort to fill that spot. It’s a very quick to setup DnD dungeon crawl experience, so it doesn’t really support an ongoing cast of characters. However it is definitely something we’ve gotten a lot of feedback from people on. It’s something we might look into for possible expansions of the game.
Rich Baker: Castle Ravenloft certainly has a lot of replayability and it’s organized into a distinct set of missions and quests. So you could certainly play through those quests in order if you really had a mind to. Essentially we were looking for replayability instead of campaign building.
Obsidian Portal: The box for the Castle Ravenloft game says that it supports 1 to 5 players. That brings up two questions in my mind: How is it a one player game, and will additional rules be made available adding additional players? I ask this because most of gaming groups that I am aware of have 5-6 players and a DM?
Rich Baker: First of all, the Castle Ravenloft board game is DMless. You don’t have to have a DM. No one is playing the monsters. The monsters essentially act on the players’ turn. To put it simply, the game tells you what to do with the monsters. Like Mike said, it’s not to replace your DnD game. Maybe it’s Tuesday night and Joe couldn’t make it to the game. So your group is short 1 player… let’s bust out the board game. ‘Cause you know, “Hey we’ve got an hour…”
Obsidian Portal: “Let’s go visit Strahd and see what he’s doing for the evening.”
Rich Baker: We really kind of view it as… as… You know, I think it would be fun to play with a huge group. I bet you we could come out with an expansion that would let that happen. In fact, that’s a good idea… we’ll put that one away.
Obsidian Portal: Awesome. You can just put me in the credits.
Rich Baker: Hahaha. But yeah, it’s designed to be something that you don’t have to have a lot of prep time for. You don’t have to have a DM for it. And really, that’s where the 1 player thing comes in. You could play the game solo if you cared to.
Mike Mearls: The way the game works is that when you take a turn as a player you move and attack just like in DnD, but you build the dungeon as you go. The dungeon consists of tiles that are face down, and when you explore a section of the map you haven’t explored yet… well it’s kind of like how if you play StarCraft the map starts out black and when you send a unit out it starts to reveal the terrain. When you get to the edge of the dungeon, you flip a tile and add it to the dungeon.
Obsidian Portal: Oh so there’s a sort of Fog of War element. Wow!
Mike Mearls: Exactly. You flip tiles and you add more monsters. Basically the way it works, is that after a player takes their turn, that player then takes a turn for the game. Monsters activate and attack the players. There may be traps that you draw and that goes off. There are random event cards. You might draw an event card that says “A swarm of bats emerges from the crypt.” And everyone would take damage as they bite and swarm past you.
You can play with just one player because the danger scales up when you add more players. The more players, the more chances for the dungeon to take turns.
You know, in November we have another board game coming out. It’s called Wrath of Ashardalon and it uses the same rule set as the Castle Ravenloft board game. If you bought both of those games, you could very easily take the characters from either game and put them in the other. In theory you could then play with up to ten people. But you may have to tinker with the adventures a little bit to make that work.
Obsidian Portal: So you give your blessing to let other folks tinker with the board games?
Mike Mearls: Oh sure! You know, that’s one of the things that’s most exciting about it. The game hasn’t been out for a full week yet and we’re already seeing people write their own adventures, come up with characters…
Obsidian Portal: That’s exciting!
Rich Baker: Yeah. Once you’ve seen how a few of the scenarios are put together, you can create your own very easily.
Mike Mearls: Really, the only things you have to be careful of are a few of the rules tweaks. Like there’s one adventure where you go into the dungeon to find an item. When you find the item a bunch of monsters ambush you. And you have to defeat the monsters and grab the item to win. There’s another scenario where you find a villager that’s been bitten by a vampire and you have to escort the villager through the dungeon to a fountain that will cure him of vampirism.
So you have these very different scenarios that use the core basic rules (how to move, how to attack monsters) and then on top of that each scenario comes with 2 or 3 unique rules. Rules that change how the game plays, and how that scenario works.
Does whatever a SquidGirl can!
Obsidian Portal: Fantastic! Ok. So. You have a third board game coming out, right? Gamma World is a board game, correct?
Rich Baker: No, Gamma World is an RPG.
Obsidian Portal: Ah! Gamma World is an RPG in a box.
Rich Baker: Yes. Exactly.
Obsidian Portal: So Gamma World is kind of like… Fallout meets Borderlands meets Final Fantasy 7 meets Candy Land. Is it…
Rich Baker: Hahaha. Yeah it’s some pretty far out stuff. Gamma World is an old, old RPG property, right? It goes back to… gosh, the late 70s. Basically it’s a post-apocalyptic world in which all sorts of radiation, mutagenic bombs, and reality distorting devices have been set off. We’ve created a world in which your character can be anything from…
Obsidian Portal: I’ve heard I can play as a SquidGirl. Could I play as a SquidGirl?
Rich Baker: Yes you could play as a SquidGirl. SquidGirl is on the cover.
Obsidian Portal: Awesome.
Mike Mearls: The last time I played I was a giant baby. I was a ten-foot-tall toddler with a giant rattle. I was mutated, massively strong, and I had the moral outlook of a 3 year-old.
Obsidian Portal: That’s terrifying.
Mike Mearls: Yeah, to the monsters it was.
Rich Baker: Basically, in the Gamma World box, you get a 160 page rule book, which includes your first Gamma World adventure. You get a couple of token sheets, so there are player pieces and monster pieces. There are a couple of poster maps and a set of cards for Alpha Mutations and Omega Tech. Those cards are things about your character that change not just from session to session, but sometimes right in the middle of the encounter.
You might suddenly say “Hey! I didn’t know this, but apparently I have laser-beam eyes!” And then halfway through the encounter you might suddenly discover “I no longer have Laser-beam eyes. Turns out I’m bulletproof instead. Well that’s handy… That’s good. I can go with that.” Or “Now it turns out I have big floppy feet. Well that’s not really all that helpful now.”
Mike Mearls: The original game was basically: We have an atomic war and there was all this radiation everywhere. We tweaked that back-story a little bit to speak more to this idea of alternate realities colliding. I think we worked in the Large Hadron Collider as a reference at some point…
Rich Baker: Yes.
Mike Mearls: And this is why mutations and player abilities are constantly changing. You basically have all these different possibilities of Earth. Including atomic war in some realities. These are all colliding at once. So reality is a little unstable for some characters.
Rich Baker: So yeah. “Not only do I now have laser-beam eyes, but I’ve always had laser-beam eyes. Didn’t you remember that?”
Obsidian Portal: That sounds like a hell of a lot of fun. So it looks like we’re running out of time, but I wanted to ask about the DDI real quick: Can we expect any digital content (Essentials, Castle Ravenloft RPG, Gamma World) going to show up in the DDI?
Mike Mearls: Well, for Gamma World, I don’t think it’s going to show up in the DDI in terms of the Character Builder. There might be some plans; I’m not sure because I don’t have the schedule in front of me. Gamma World is meant to be a very quick pick-up-and-play game as far as character generation goes.
For the Castle Ravenloft board game, we already have two additional adventures available on our website and we plan on releasing some more.
And finally for Essentials, yes. Yes just like any other content for DnD, it will make its way into the DDI.
Rich Baker: We have a lot of good essentials stuff coming to the DDI, even this month I think!
Obsidian Portal: Great guys. Thanks so much for your time, and enjoy the rest of PAX!
We’d like to say thanks to Katie Page who made this interview possible and, of course, to Mike and Rich for being such good sports about the whole forgetting-to-hit-record thing. So what do you think? Care to see what good old Stradh has been up to these last few years? Interested in trying out Gamma World? What about some of the new races, classes, tile sets, and rules clarifications from the Essentials line?
Interview with Mike Mearls and Rich Baker
So there it is, Saturday afternoon. I’m half way through PAX, and I’m escorted on to the DnD Bus. There in the back of the bus I’m introduced to Mike Mearls and Richard Baker. They’re watching the Princess Bride on dvd. My first thought is “Holy shit, that’s Mike Mearls and Richard Baker and they’re watching Princess Bride on dvd! I sure hope I don’t screw up this interview!”
Image of The DnD Bus by The Portland Mercury (http://bit.ly/9zYQdV)
Obsidian Portal: This is a really nice bus! Is it just for PAX, or will it be making rounds to other conventions?
Mike Mearls photo stolen with love from www.NewbieDM.com
Mike Mearls: Well PAX is right here in our backyard, and we wanted to have a big block party to celebrate all the great products we have coming out this year. So it’s just for PAX.
Obsidian Portal: So let’s move on to DnD Essentials. Why the change in the product line name to Essentials?
NOTE: Rich Baker had a fantastic off the cuff answer for this question that went above and beyond. And then I realized that I wasn’t recording audio. He was kind enough to repeat most of it on the second go around. Thanks for your patience Rich!
Image of Rich Baker stolen from Rich's Blog (http://bit.ly/dxaLxc)
Rich Baker: The idea behind the Essentials line is that we want to provide new players with an easy place to start. We have a bit of a hang up now in terms of our product line that we have some pretty advanced products out there in terms of things like Players Handbook 2, Players Handbook 3, Martial Power 1 and 2 and Arcane Power.
There are all these places that new users could go, and the idea with Essentials is “Let’s try to bring this into a single trade dress that’s pretty recognizable so that the new player knows where she’s supposed to go, so retailers know what they should stock, and to make starting the game easier.”
It can be pretty daunting for people worried about starting with the wrong book or not getting the help they need from retailers. In addition to the obvious changes in the packaging and the marketing message, we did actually work on the game play elements to make sure there where simple options available for what should be simple character classes.
Obsidian Portal: Great answer! Thank you so much. It’s almost like you said it twice. So the Red Box is only for new players and DMs then?
Rich Baker: Yes. Yes, we did wrap it in nostalgia by calling it the Red Box and putting the original art and trade dress with the logos and everything. But the guts of it are essentially 4th Edition. It contains the first two levels of play for a set of basic character classes (Fighter, Rogue, Cleric, and Wizard) and we hope it’s something brand new players would be interested in, but it’s also our hope that people who have been away from DnD for a long time will see this is a great place to start in again!
Obsidian Portal: So where is the Red Box going to be sold? Will it just be in our Favorite Local Gaming Store, or will it be sold stores like Wal-Mart and Target?
DnD Essentials: The Red Box
Mike Mearls: It should be available in both Wal-Mart and Target, from what I understand they’re both picking it up and it’ll be found in the area of the store where they sell collectable card games like Magic and Pokémon. And of course, it’ll be available at your local game store.
Obsidian Portal: I’m glad to hear it’s going to go into those big stores, because it gives a chance for kids who’ve never been to a game store to see it and try out a tabletop RPG. What other Essentials products do you all have coming out this year?
Mike Mearls: If you start with the Red Box, there are two tracks for folks to take. For the players, there are two books coming out that are 320 pages each and they’re both the 6×9 soft cover format and they each retail for twenty dollars. The first one out is Heroes of the Fallen Lands and it’s coming out on the 21st of this month and it’ll be available sooner at Premier Stores of course.
Heroes of the Fallen Lands takes the classes from the Red Box and extend them from levels 1 to 30. It covers the same races and all the feats. For the player, this book has all the core DnD Rules. The second book, Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms, comes out in November. So if you think of Heroes of the Fallen Lands and the Red Box as the core rules for players, Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms has the next tier of options. It will include races like Dragonborn and Tiefling, that are a little more unique to DnD. We’re also introducing the Drow and the Halforc…
Rich: Paladin and Ranger.
Obsidian Portal: Paladin and Halforc? Awesome!
Mike Mearls: Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms will include the classes Paladin, Ranger, Druid, and Warlock. So you can think of Heroes of the Fallen Lands as the core of DnD, and Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms as the next ring out.
Obsidian Portal: Sounds great! So what do the DMs get?
Mike Mearls: Yep. Oh, there’s also this one book that sort of rests in the middle. There’s the Rules Compendium that is also 320 pages with the same format and price point of twenty dollars. The Rules Compendium… I kind of think of it as Robert’s Rules of Order for DnD. “What happens when I fall prone and I’m next to a pit?” It’s a rules encyclopedia. All the rules and technical terms laid out, all the latest errata and updates. Its aim is to be an easy reference point for the table and the DM.
Rich Baker: It’s organized much differently than our previous ‘how to play the game’ chapters.
Mike Mearls: That’s right. And for the DMs, there is a DM Kit. It’s a box set and it comes with a DM booklet in the same 6×9 soft cover format. It also comes with adventures, maps, and tokens. If you want to be a DM, that box is where you start.
One of the things we’re trying to emphasize with DnD Essentials is the all-in-one nature of the product. Whereas before if you wanted to DM you’d have to buy the Dungeon Masters Guide, the Monster Manual, a play surface, and some miniatures. We wanted to include everything the new gaming group needs in the Red Box, and everything a New DM needs in the DM Kit.
There’s also the Monster Vault, which is also a boxed set that comes with an adventure, a poster map, and tokens for every monster in the Monster Vault book. Which is also in the same 6×9 soft cover format. I know I’m going to forget something, so Richard if you catch something let me know.
Rich Baker: I’m working on it.
Mike Mearls: The final part of the DM track is the three tile sets we’re releasing. One for the dungeon, one for the outdoors, and one for the city. Each one is a box set that retails for twenty dollars I believe. And that’s a lot like the other Essentials products. If you buy the Dungeon tile set, then you have all the tiles you need to build a dungeon encounter. There are 10 Essentials products in total, but you don’t need to buy all of them.
The way we see it, if your local shop has these 10 things on the shelf, you can find out pretty easily where to start. Say you want to DM. You start with the DM Kit. After running the adventures there, you want to make your own adventures, so you pick up the Monster Vault. Then say your party is leaving the dungeon so then you get the Outdoor tiles. So you didn’t buy all of that at once, but over say, a year or so of playing.
Obsidian Portal: So the Essentials line of products is supposed to grow with the needs of the gaming group?
Mike Mearls: Exactly.
This wraps up the first part of our interview. Check out the next part of our interview tomorrow where we’ll cover Castle Ravenloft, Gamma World, and more!
