Welcome to another edition of the Weekly Assembly! If you want to talk about anything contained in this edition, feel free to drop by the Gamer Assembly Web Chat and talk with us. But for now, enjoy this week’s links!
At Home
Articles posted here on The Gamer Assembly.
- Only 18 Gaming Days Until PAX East! If you'll be in Boston on Easter weekend April 6-8, you owe it to yourself to attend the best gaming con. Three-day passes have sold out, but you can still pick up day passes. We'll be there running the “Fix Your RPG Problems with the RPG Doctor and Gamer Assembly” panel on Friday, April 6 at 7 pm in the Merman Theatre. Will we see you there?
- March's Blog Theme at The Gamer Assembly is “Gaming in the Modern Age”. Have an RPG article idea set in Information Age earth? Contact us for guest blogger opportunities!
- The Call To Assembly, Volume 1, our collection of the first 2 months of Gamer Assembly posts is now available as a free PDF at RPG Now and as a not-free printed magazine at Lulu!
- Modern Assembly: Mundane Items by Brian Liberge provides a list of modern-specific purchasable equipment. You can use the existing 4e price list for items with similar functions, like paying the lantern price for a flashlight, or the backpack price for a briefcase or backpack.
Away
Content from people involved with The Gamer Assembly posted elsewhere across the Internet.
- T.W.Wombat finally catches up with last September's OSR Challenge A September of Short Adventures by working on his Traveller Adventure Arc. This week's mini-adventures are: MediShield's Black Market, Dossier on the Pandora Research Facility, Heading Off-World, and Stowaway 1 – Will Urchins Never Cease?.
- On RPG Circus, Season 4, Episode 5, Brian Liberge discusses Kickstarter, Dave A. Hargrave and Narrative Combat, specifically of the Marvel RPG.
- Brent Newhall continues his series of Let's Play an Interesting RPG actual play videos with Episode 8: Dungeon Raiders, continued in Part 2 and Part 3.
- Make Mine Marvel gives us a look into Brian Liberge's between-campaign foray into playing Marvel Heroic Roleplaying.
Notes From Abroad
Other interesting articles and cool links.
Wizards of the Coast went public with their announcement about the next edition of D&D on Monday 09 January 2012. We're collecting D&D Next links in our wiki. If we've missed any good ones that you've read, feel free to let us know in the comments or join us in the chat.
- Happy belated first birthday to The Id DM! First Steps Into A Larger World sums up the blog so far, giving us the highlights of the first year and plans for years to come.
- And while we're on the subject of birthdays, Warhammer 40K just turned 25. Here's a short BBC video on Why Warhammer 40,000 is still popular after 25 years.
- Thursday was the 75th anniversary of H. P. Lovecraft's death. The folks over at Pelgrane Press collected some stories about Lovecraft's continuing legacy with fiction authors and game designers in Lovecraft's Influence.
- Sarah Darkmagic recounts her recent first experiences playing both Night's Black Agents and Leagues of Adventure in Adventures in Spying and Steampunk Investigation.
- There's a new Tumblr that focuses on RPG projects listed on Kickstarter called RPG Kickstarters.
- In The Swag of Yore, Vanir at Critical-Hits wonders where all the D&D toys and marketing tie-ins went now that D&D is owned by a game And Toy company. I would totally buy an Otiluke brand refrigerator to keep my Beholder Bites cold.
- Tangentially related, Steve Winter discusses how a large RPG company makes money by offering more game choices to players, and why that model requires periodic rules revisions to clean the slate in Dysfunctional and Co-Dependent at Howling Tower.
- Also at Howling Tower, Effect vs. Meanings talks about associative and dissociative design approaches and their impact on the game itself. Do you want more game effects with trumped-up or non-existent causes, or more consistent game worlds with game effects figured as outcomes of the internal logic?
- A Newbie's Guide to the First Time Behind the Screen at Gaming Tonic gives some advice to first-time GMs.
- Sly Flourish provides some quick thoughts on maintaining a good pace in your game and some tips on how to Keep Things Moving.
- In Don't Take Free Work, Ryan Macklin evangelizes some great advice to keep your professional and personal lives separated and happier: don't offer free work to friends.
- Here's a straightforward answer to Why Aren't There More Girl Gamers? at the new blog Four Girls to Die For. As the comments show your mileage may vary, but I tend to assume anyone in a game store is a) a human being, and b) a gamer.
- And speaking of new blogs covering topics of interest to gamers who happen to be female, check out Gaming As Women. I found so many great articles over there in just the first 2 weeks that my head is still spinning.
- One Hour Roleplaying with Burning Wheel offers excellent advice on running a short introductory role-playing game for new players, not just of Burning Wheel, but of any system.
- Wizards of the Coast thinks about ways to let D&D Next players pick up a game and run something substantial in today's Legends & Lore column, entitled The One Hour D&D Game.
- Friday was Draw Vecna Day, which went from joke tweet to gamer event in a matter of minutes, and there's even talk of an annual event on 3/16. Check out entries from Jared von Hindman (Vecnards!), J. J. Sloane, Dungeon Bastard Bill Cavalier, James Stowe, Tracy Hurley, d20 Monkey's Brian Patterson, and so many others. Browse your fill in the hashtags #DrawVecna and #DrawVecnaDay.
MetaRoundup
A roundup of roundups featuring links of interest to the tabletop RPG community.
Please let us know about other weekly roundups in the comments!
- Game Knight Reviews comes out with Friday Knight News articles on Fridays. Check out this week's news to see random tables for making horses distinctive, picking up on your GM's tells, and encouraging your party to pick a base of operations so they'll be more likely to get involved and save it when it's attacked.
- Roving Band of Misfits publishes their Weekly Roundup column every Sunday. This week's One Page Dungeon Contest Edition gives us monster weaknesses, the vast gray area around “victory”, and analysis of who's using the #DNDNext hashtag the most on Twitter.
- Critical Hits aggregates their Twitter feed and publishes it on Sundays under Critical Bits. This week's Critical Bits mentions Marvel RPG resources, a 40K version of Talisman, and Baldur's Gate Enhanced coming this summer.
