PAX East is this week! We’re excited for PAX, can you tell? We’ll be running a panel and wearing Gamer Assembly T-Shirts, so feel free to introduce yourself if you see one of us. We’ve got a great slate of links this week, so let’s get to ‘em…
At Home
Articles posted here on The Gamer Assembly.
- Only 4 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?
- April’s Blog Theme at The Gamer Assembly is “Gaming Fools”, covering the outlandish, crazy, and over-the-top games and situations that grace every table. Have a gonzo RPG article idea? 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!
- Firearms and other Modern Weapons by Brian Liberge brings chainsaws, grenades, guns and the like into your 4e game.
- Fated Theme by Brian Liberge presents heroes for Modern Assembly who become great in extraordinary circumstances.
- The Gamer Assembly Will Be at PAX East! Thanks to Brian Liberge for pulling this post together.
- Designer Tool: A Blank Playing Card Template by Brent Newhall provides a pre-formattted template for Excel or OpenOffice to quickly churn out a deck of cards for playtesting by printing 6 standard-sized cards per sheet of paper. You’re on your own for printing card backs and cutting the cards.
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: Slipping Away with Dr. Falken, The Chase Is Joined, Who’s Chasing Whom?, and The Patron.
- Party of One: Kalgor Bloodhammer and the Ghouls Through the Breach, a review by Chris Jackson gives a review of the first in Open Design’s new “Party of One” series of solo adventures.
- Magic In Classic D&D is an article over at Troll In the Corner by our very own Brent Newhall wherein he discusses the thought processes involved in creating his own retroclone, Dungeon Raiders.
- For this month’s entry in the Game Night Blog Carnival, T.W.Wombat reviewed the Steve Jackson classic Car Wars: The Card Game. It’s been 11 years since the second edition came out, so I think it’s time for a reprint.
- Great Generic RPG Systems at Brent Newhall‘s RPG Doctor blog describes a handful of useful generic RPG systems to keep in your back pocket.
- Marvel Editable Datafile featuring Thor by Brian Liberge provides a Word-style datafile for use with the Marvel RPG containing stats for the God of Thunder!
- Brent Newhall continues his 50 Games in 50 Weeks series with a review of A Game Of Thrones: The Card Game.
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.
- How Economics Ruined My Gaming Joie De Médiocre by Vanir at Critical-Hits takes a look at how having less available leisure time makes us morecritical of the games we play.
- And while we’re short on time, No More Average Campaigns at Gnome Stew says there’s no shame in killing an average campaign since there’s only so much gaming time to go around. Go for the awesome and eschew the merely adequate.
- Also on Gnome Stew, Martin Ralya achieves a state of Zen as he preps his dice in Things I Learned While “Inking” 14 GameScience Dice with a Crayon.
- It’s a Man Ray Kind of Sky encourages all of us to out ourselves as gamers and to shed the mantle of self-loathing. “People often ask how wargamers justify their fascination with playing games about mass destruction. … The best argument I’ve heard is who cares, because if you don’t like it, you’re free to go to hell.”
- Speaking of outing gamers, Norway’s new Minister of International Development gives an interview about his gamer roots entitled LARPs Can Change the World. Also take a look at How Roleplaying Games Could Spark Social Change for some commentary over at Nerd Approved.
- If you’re looking for really good anecdotes from the gaming table, take a long look at the Fake War Stories Tumblr. Yeah, there’s an Arrow of Slaying for that.
- Risking It All on the just-launched-this-week blog Character Generation shares a simple equation involving risk and impact that explains why we strive for the heroic even when the rules don’t support that choice. Congratulations on the blog launch, and I look forward to more great articles from Liz and Lyndsay in the weeks and months to come!
- Character Generation is also mentioned in Space Race over at Some Space to Think. The rest of the article covers how Bulldogs! handles race using a short list of attributes to pick from. It’s a great technique that can extend beyond FATE to breathe some life into PC races in other systems as well. You can also use the same approach to make institutions like martial arts schools have a specific and recognizable flavor.
- The Bard for Basic D&D at Strange Magic reimagines the much-maligned bard in OD&D or OSR systems as a sub-class of Magic User who can wear leather armor and identify magic items. I really like the flavor that brings to the Bard.
- The Oil of D&D–Residuum as Natural Resource at The Dungeon’s Master explores the possibility of utilizing residuum as a marketable commodity and source of economic exploitation. Magic-based Industrial Revolution, anyone?
- Beyond Random Plot Points and Dynamic Worlds at Sarah Darkmagic makes a pitch for a system that blends rigid planning, random tables, and wild improvisation to build adventures that appeal to many different styles of player. Also check out her related thoughts about D&D Next in Backstab, Sneak Attack, and Suggestions for a More Modular Design. And as an all too appropriate three-fer, Happy Third Anniversary!
- Over at Hack & Slash, On the Village Calm puts forth a system for describing villages and other small settlements called Quadruple D. I love a good framework for describing things.
- Gothridge Manor gives us some quick thoughts on Adding Quirk into NPCs. Spoiler: Don’t overdo it.
- A 3×5 Map Experiment expands dungeon geomorphs into small connected dungeon areas drawn on 3×5 cards. That’s a great-looking dungeon shown in the article over at Blood of Prokopius, plus a challenge to make more 3×5 maps to hook together into more organic-looking larger dungeons.
- Also on the mapping front, Dungeons of Carcassonne at In My Campaign presents the kernel of an idea to adapt Carcassonne kingdom tiles for use as random dungeon tiles. I’d love to see this fleshed out a bit more.
- For those of you (like me) who really enjoy the WyRM system from Stargazer Games that powers Warrior, Rogue & Mage and Resolute, Adventurer & Genius, there’s a new Wyrm SF game in the works. Here’s a Directional Discussion over at the RPG Table Talk forums.
- How is roleplaying like smoking pot? Hint: It’s a technique used to prevent overindulgence and nothing directly mind-altering. Read the full answer at Thoughtcrime, called Table Techniques: Puff-Puff-Pass.
- It’s the Little Things at Deadly Fredly shows us where the Kickstarters for Dinocalypse clicked through in another fascinating bit of financial transparency from Fred Hicks.
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 on Fridays. Check out this week’s news to see 10 secrets to creating unforgettable supporting characters, players taking center stage less (and more) often than they should, and achieving a state of Flow in gaming.
- Roving Band of Misfits publishes their Weekly Roundup column every Sunday. This week’s Errata Messed me Up Edition gives us some phenomenal tips on running a 4e D&D game, a look at art across all the D&D editions, and character damage output across all 30 character levels.
- Keith Davies maintains In My Campaign and he publishes a collection of Links of the Week including recommended Kickstarter projects and interesting YouTube videos. Take a look at this week’s collection which includes the five rules of monster design, Kickstarter rewards for retailers, and a tower defense game built on top of 8-Bit Google Maps called MapsTD.
- Critical Hits aggregates their Twitter feed and publishes it on Sundays under Critical Bits. This week’s Critical Bits mentions a 4e D&D hack for Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, a new small press fiction shop started by gamers called Candlemark & Gleam, and a new line of D&D minis (April Fools!).
