Yes, we’re winding down. It’s been a very distracting week which means I’ve been unable to keep up with social media as much as I’d like, and it shows in the sparseness of this week’s links. Remember, next week is our final regular release of the Weekly Assembly, so if you want something plugged please let me know. Enjoy!
At Home
Articles posted here on The Gamer Assembly.
Away
Content from people involved with The Gamer Assembly posted elsewhere across the Internet.
- Modern Backgrounds by Brian Liberge at Stuffer Shack: Using backgrounds is an easy way to give access to the new skills in Modern Assembly.
- The Places of Pyre: The Merchant’s District by Brent Newhall at Dr. Worldcrafter: Brent explores the Merchant’s District in the dead city of Pyre. At last! Undead in a crashed airship!
Product Announcements
New products and special events announced this week.
- Reaper Miniatures Bones: An Evolution Of Gaming Miniatures by Reaper Miniatures at Kickstarter: Go get yourself a pile of new mini sculpts from Reaper for $100.
- Publish the +5 Food Of Eating cookbook by Tiffany at Kickstarter: Do you like some good food while you game? Come support a gamer’s book of recipes, and you can even add your own if you pledge enough.
- Blood Red Sands – Competitive Swords-and-Sorcery RPG by Brennan Taylor at Kickstarter: Competitive role playing? Interesting concept, and I’d love to see more.
- Better Angels — A Hell of a Roleplaying Game by Greg Stolze by Arc Dream Publishing at Kickstarter: Want earth-shattering power? What are you willing to pay for it? Find out here.
Notes From Abroad
Other interesting articles and cool links.
- Yes, we’re open again! A very brief history of what the hell happened. at Troll in the Corner: For those of you unaware, Troll in the Corner got hacked last weekend. Here’s the summary of what happened and the people who got the site online again in record time.
- Why Not d20? by Monte Cook at Monte Cook Games: Monte gives some reasons for developing his system in something other than d20.
- Inside Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition at The Unspeakable Oath: A sneak preview of the upcoming overhaul of the Call of Cthulhu rules with the developers.
- Gary Gygax: The Father of Games Design | GamesIndustry International: How do you get into video game design? Start by shutting off the PC and getting some friends to play D&D.
- Thank you, Gary at d20 Monkey: A simple tribute to Gary Gygax for his birthday.
- Who Gets To Be a Geek? Anyone Who Wants to Be – Whatever: John Scalzi reminds us that geekdom is the most open community on Earth. Let’s keep it that way.
- Marvel Mondays at Thoughtcrime Games: Want to see the Marvel RPG in action? Join the Bullpen on Monday nights, or catch up on the action with all the videos of past games.
- An Idea I Love That I CAN Do Something With at Some Space to Think: Rob Donoghue took the WaRP System rules released by Atlas Games under the OGL, and reformatted it to make it readable and functional.
- The Clash of the Expectations/Reading the Game at Rhetorical Gamer: Exploring rules systems vs. the implied setting embedded in those systems, and realizing that D&D and Pathfinder aren’t true toolbox rules systems.
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 Gaming Edition to see resources for sci-fi game props, helping Dread Gazebo choose the next game for his group to play, and the sales numbers for the top 5 RPGs of the spring.
- Roving Band of Misfits publishes their Weekly Roundup column every Sunday. This week's CONCurrent Edition gives us an excellent roundup of gaming aids, random tables to create religious orders, and a pile of ideas for villains in your game.
- Keith Davies maintains In My Campaign and on Mondays 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 is delayed this week, but I appreciate the comparison of PHP and Mythos Lore.
- Gaming As Women gathers links in their This Week in Gaming and This Week in Feminism series of articles on Sundays. Both series are collected under the News category. This Week in Gaming features a scathing commentary on the art featured at this year’s ComicCon, and a shout out to women gamers in an update to the The Gamers: Hands of Fate Kickstarter.
- Critical Hits aggregates their Twitter feed and publishes it on Sundays under Critical Bits. This week’s Critical Bits mentions the Christmas in July sale at DriveThruRPG, Call of Cthulhu 7th edition, and White Wolf’s schedule for August.
I’ve been doing Links of the Week for about a year now, and it’s been getting really irregular for me lately. I’m thinking of suspending it for a while or changing format or something, since I really don’t have time to do it as I have been.
Given the constraints on my time, picking between ‘doing new stuff’ or ‘collecting links of the week’ is a pretty simple decision.
Which I think may be too bad, I like just sitting down and reading blogs and collecting this sort of thing. I’ll see how it goes.
Agreed. It’s a large chunk of time to sift through and find links, never mind the time needed to read the article, decide if it’s relevant, and come up with a one-line summary of it for the database. I like it, but I find I’m gathering links to populate the database rather than to read and digest ideas. Over the past 8 months it’s transformed into a work task rather than a small extra step on top of an enjoyable pastime. Maybe we’ll come back to this format, but for the short term I need to step away from it.
I’m hopeful your aggregator (Aggro-Gator?) comes online in a non-beta form. Having something automatically harvest links and make the content searchable is huge. It’ll still need a curator/editor to delete the chaff, even on high signal-to-noise blogs, but getting a pool of articles to edit will make the process much easier, I think.