Weekly Assembly: Creative License

I’ve been a little busy this week, but I hope all of you have been exercising your creative impulses. Onward with this week’s links!

At Home

Articles posted here on The Gamer Assembly.

Apparently we’ve all been busy this week, and summer is hell on schedules.

Away

Content from people involved with The Gamer Assembly posted elsewhere across the Internet.

• Ruminating on Next by John Pope at Daily Encounter: After all the criticism flying around online lately, we need a little breath of optimism about D&D Next. Here are some reasons to look forward to the next playtest.

• Let’s Play an Interesting RPG, episode 11: Houses of the Blooded session 1 by Brent Newhall at Dr. Worldcrafter: Brent continues his series of actual play recordings with a rousing game of Houses of the Blooded.

• The Dangers of Pyre: Doms by Brent Newhall at Dr. Worldcrafter: Here’s a non-combat construct that helps other constructs in the ruined pre-magical city of Pyre.

• The Dangers of Pyre: Entrapment Orbs by Brent Newhall at Dr. Worldcrafter: Need a character to stay put? Send in one of these charged floating orbs in the ruined pre-magical city of Pyre.

• Designer Diaries: Midgard Bestiary, 4th Edition Style (Part 2) by Brian Liberge at Kobold Quarterly: Brian talks about the upcoming Midgard Bestiary and his design work on the Goblins of the Wasted West.

• Designer Diaries: Midgard Bestiary, 4th Edition Style (Part 3) / Kobold Quarterly by Brian Liberge at Kobold Quarterly: Brian looks into the design of the Zmey for 4e.

• GM Drunk. Design Sober. by T.W.Wombat at Wombat’s Gaming Den of Iniquity: With apologies to Hemingway for bastardizing his quote. Exploring the nature of creativity, Open and Closed Modes of thinking, brain activity, writer’s block, and how each of those can help improve improvisational GMing.

• Sauron – Distinctions and Milestones by Brian Liberge at Stuffer Shack: Everything you need to make the Watcher character from the Marvel Basic Game and playable PC.

Product Announcements

New products and special events announced this week.

• Conspiracy X The Conspiracies Sourcebook by George Vasilakos at Kickstarter: Like roleplaying in a dark world where everyone has an agenda involving power, aliens, and Things man Was Not Meant To Know? You’ll probably like Conspiracy X.

• Dwarven Adventurers Box Set by Stonehaven Miniatures at Kickstarter: What’s cooler than a box of 28mm dwarf minis? An undead dwarf mini, still taunting us as an unachieved stretch goal.

• HYDRA DICE – NECRON by George Edward Purdy at Kickstarter: Dice with a skull on every face. What more needs to be said?

• The Round 10 Role-Playing Game System by Nicholas Kory at Kickstarter: This looks interesting: a lightweight generic RPG, easily customized using setting modules.

• Tales From the Fallen Empire: Sword and Sorcery Setting by James Carpio at Kickstarter: Check out this Kickstarter for a new and darker setting for Dungeon Crawl Classics.

• Doomed Slayers at DriveThruRPG: Here’s an interesting take on fantasy adventurers: A code of conduct that keeps your character moving and hopefully surviving. This is the first published product from Jurgen Hubert, so congratulations for that!

Notes From Abroad

Other interesting articles and cool links.

• Clerics at Untimately: Exploring possible clerical backgrounds opens up all sorts of roleplaying hooks.

• A Vital Issue That Affects The Entire DIY Gaming Community at Playing D&D with Porn Stars: Gammarauders as RPG inspiration for the DIY Gaming Community.

• Simple Mental Powers at Telecanter’s Receding Rules: The Head of Vecna is better than AD&D psionic combat. Here’s a balanced, simple-to-use hack of psionic powers for your OSR game.

• Cthulhu, She Wrote at Trollish Delver: Jessica Fletcher and Miss Marple investigating Mythos cultists. Why hasn’t this setting been published yet?

• Joining the Party: Caves of Chaos by Tracy Hurley at Wizards of the Coast: Adding more to the D&D Next Playtest adventure, plus links to community blog articles.

• Dungeons, Dragons, and Fanboys at YouTube: A video documentary about gamers in and around Fanboy3, a game shop in Manchester, UK.

• fuck yeah british old-school gaming: Cover art, interior art, posters, ads, and miscellaneous.

• Let’s Talk About … Agents of S.W.I.N.G. at Dorkland: A cool review of a groovy FATE 3.0 hack about espionage in ’60s London.

• Dungeons & Dragons – The Book of Vile Darkness at This is My Game: Randall Walker takes us from the trailer for the new D&D Movie to explaining how to do a D&D TV series for the masses. Hint: Don’t promote the D&D part.

• Telling Tales: Keeping the Bad Guy Alive at Difficult Terrain: How to plan for a major villain’s survival in your campaign.

• Project Ninja Panda Taco by Jennifer Steen: The homepage for a collaborative, low-prep RPG about masterminds who want to take over the world, and the minions who use them to learn about becoming masterminds themselves.

• A Quick Peek Behind the “Red” Curtain With Kickstarter by Fred Hicks at Deadly Fredly: Fred takes us inside the Kickstarter plan for Race to Adventure. He looks at built-in expenses and the long haul to breaking even, all by design. Transparency rocks.

• I Ain’t Rage Quitting: The Angry DM goes off on opinions of opinions and how the people who can’t not respond only feed the trolls. “It all comes down to respect. And giving everyone the benefit of the doubt. And assuming that anyone’s feelings are probably just as valid as yours, whether you agree or not.”

• Minions: Full Disclosure at Dungeon’s Master: When using minions, do you reveal the fact that they’re minions to your players?

• So You Wanna Hire a Henchman? at The Riders of Lohan: Need a henchman? Use these tables to get a wide variety of henchmen on the fly.

• art by gygax and arneson at Blog of Holding: Take a look at the early art in the OD&D books. Did you know some of it was drawn by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson?

• Main Sequence: A Free Space RPG at Chaos Grenade: SF-flavored role playing in interstellar space using the WYRM system that you can download for free. What are you waiting for?

• Fantasy Paper Miniature Models: Hero-quest style furniture for your dungeon: Take a look at some fine set pieces for your miniatures to interact with and move around.

• Iron Heroes & Adventure Motivation at Untimately: In reading through Iron Heroes, it suggests that the GM should motivate the characters. Or should that be the players’ jobs?

• The Bingo Event Horizon [Behaviourism] – What Games Are: This article focuses on metrics and profit margins stifling creativity in social games and online gamification initiatives. Do some of these ideas resonate with the RPG market?

• How do we Demystify Writer’s Block? at Ryan Macklin: Writer’s Block exists, regardless of what the experts say. How do you break through it and be creative when you need to?

• Make Like A Gaming Pirate: Sports at RPG Musings: Looking for something a little different? What about a campaign based around team sports? Advancement, cheating, competition, crime, and intrigue abound!

• Legends & Lore: Playtest Update by Mike Mearls at Wizards of the Coast: Mike Mearls checks in to give us a view into the D&D Next playtest feedback and how that impacts the design process of the next playtest version.

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 Fired Up Edition to see curses with purpose, an analysis of Marvel Heroic Roleplaying’s unique mechanics, and an ambient sound generator to give your next session some sonic texture.

• Roving Band of Misfits publishes their Weekly Roundup column every Sunday. This week's DnDpr Edition gives us the DnDpr Tumblr featuring public radio shows set in a high fantasy world, creating character backstory, and a story about how gaming makes a difference.

• 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 contains only a delay/cancellation notice. Let us know how the RPG Blog Aggregator works, Keith!

• 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 the Durance Kickstarter from Bully Pulpit Games, the upcoming Indie+ con on Google+, and a video showing the price of success on Kickstarter.

• Critical Hits aggregates their Twitter feed and publishes it on Sundays under Critical Bits. This week’s Critical Bits mentions Wizards of the Coast’s D&D 3.5 reprints and the “Achtung! Cthulhu” WW2 setting for Call of Cthulhu.