At Home

Articles posted here on The Gamer Assembly.

• The Call To Assembly, Volume 2, our 2nd collection of Gamer Assembly posts is now available as a free PDF at RPG Now and as a not-free printed magazine at Lulu!

• Doctor Who in Marvel Heroic Roleplaying by Brent Newhall gives us a take on Dr. Who statted up for Marvel.

• Another Doctor for Marvel Heroic Roleplaying by Brian Liberge provides a different take on The Doctor, also statted up for Marvel.

Both of these writeups for The Doctor completely nail it. Who says there’s only one way to do something?

Away

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

• $200 of RPGs for $25 by Brent Newhall plugs the 2nd Annual Wayne Foundation Charity Pack. It’s only available until Friday, so hop to it!

Notes From Abroad

Other interesting articles and cool links.

• The Pathfinder Online Technology Demo is a Kickstarter project to build a demo for a Pathfinder MMO. Here’s hoping it does well.

• First Dungeons and a Thank You to Mom at Gothridge Manor: A remembrance of mom’s generosity in giving a whole tablet of graph paper to a young gamer.

• Page Layout for Greg at Keith Davies – In My Campaign: Keith Davies provides some thoughts on laying out text and graphics in an RPG book.

• Underwater Cloak Monster: This article from Business Insider shows underwater footage of a type of jellyfish that’s basically one big undulating sheet.

• RPG Kickstarters: An index of only RPG-related projects on Kickstarter.

• I’m a Bad Geek at Dread Gazebo: Dread Gazebo shares his thoughts on the current state of the RPG blogosphere, and his relationship to it.

• Heroic Roleplaying Event – Batman’s Arkham Asylum at Exploring Infinity: A 51-page, 3-act Event for Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, featuring an assault on Arkham Asylum!

• Dave’s Mapper: A wonderful random dungeon generator, using multiple old-school-style tile sets.

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 why we GM and who we GM for, 4 ways to use an iPad to help with your tabletop RPG, and 25 tips to create mystery.

• Roving Band of Misfits publishes their Weekly Roundup column every Sunday. This week’s Unhallowed Grove Map Edition gives us the phrase that makes cons more fun, several links to maps, and invented worlds known more clinically as paracosms.

• 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 includes the arcane and awesome-looking Serpent’s Tongue Kickstarter, Gaiman on Copyright, and the release of Heroes Against Darkness.

• 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 Lizzie Stark’s book Leaving Mundania: Inside the Transformative World of Live Action Role Playing Games and sightings of Monsterhearts in the wild.

• Critical Hits aggregates their Twitter feed and publishes it on Sundays under Critical Bits. This week’s Critical Bits mentions descriptive phrases to swipe for your next combat scene, and Fantasy Flight updating the Netrunner CCG.

At Home

Articles posted here on The Gamer Assembly.

• The Call To Assembly, Volume 2, our 2nd collection of Gamer Assembly posts is now available as a free PDF at RPG Now and as a not-free printed magazine at Lulu!

Away

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

• Deadpool – Marvel Editable Datafile by Brian Liberge gives us stats for one of the most recognizable heroes in all of comics. He’s got guns, super cancer, and the ability to comment on game mechanics!

• What Are Gaming Cons Good For? by Brent Newhall shows us his reasons for why cons still attract us in this age of the always-connected Internet.

• The Creative Struggle by Brian Liberge brings yoga techniques into the creative process for RPGs. It’s not the struggle to get words on paper that kills, it’s the struggle to get out of your own way so you can write.

• Thedandmom kicked off a webcomic about hijinks at a high fantasy gym open to all called The NO FEAR Vale. We brainstormed this idea in the chat room, and now it exists, so hang on to your hats.

Notes From Abroad

Other interesting articles and cool links.

• Listen to RPG Podcasts? Help podcasters learn more about the demographics by taking the RPG Podcast Listener Survey! You can also check out the results from the 2011 survey by listening to a discussion or reading the final report.

• Speaking of podcasts, I just listened to the first episode of Roll For News. It runs just under 21 minutes and has three interviews. Good stuff!

• Lyndsay at Character Generation wrote up the game she ran for her mother in My Mom Plays Pathfinder, Everybody Dies. Quote of the game: “It takes 45 seconds for the human body to bleed out so I get to ask him some questions!”

• Troll in the Corner gives us some options for your Sin-Eater this week in All Sins Must Be Eaten: 5 Geists for Your NWoD Game.

• Generating a Year of Random Fantasy Weather Using Dragon Magazine #137 makes random weather tables slightly more useful by putting them in an Excel sheet.

• Rob Donoghue posted Index Card Tactics, a first draft of a Final Fantasy Tactics/Marvel hack kind of thing. Bonus: a character sheet fits on an index card, and monsters on a sticky note.

• Exploring Infinity has a great collection of community resources, reviews, and other posts in Marvel Heroic Roleplaying: Collected Miscellanies

• Here’s an interesting Spirit of the Century hack for the Planescape setting called Fatescape! FATE Meets D&D.

• The Ogre Designer’s Edition Kickstarter added a stretch goal at $700K: Do a Kickstarter to rerelease Car Wars. Only $59,500 to go in the next 3 days.

• The Content of Our Characters: “The question to ask isn’t, ‘How do we attract more women (or people of color, or queer people) to gaming?’ It’s ‘How do we stop driving them away?’” Also see a well-received follow-up post over on Google Plus.

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 Avengers Edition to see the demand for D&D Miniatures, using Picozu to touch up your images, and tips for Epic Tier D&D campaigns.

• Roving Band of Misfits publishes their Weekly Roundup column every Sunday. This week’s Wayne Foundation Charity RPG Bundle Edition gives us the fate of the character builder, what playtesting is and isn’t, and the ongoing May of the Dead Blog Carnival.

• 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. Apparently this week’s collection has been delayed until Wednesday for lack of time. I know the feeling, 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 a TED talk about using games to learn what history really means, the Matriarchy beta has opened, and a few articles on inclusive artwork in RPG books.

• Critical Hits aggregates their Twitter feed and publishes it on Sundays under Critical Bits. This week’s Critical Bits mentions Tales of an Orc with Grok Bloodface, the 2012 Stuffer Shack Site of the Year, and the Obsidian Portal Excellence In Innovation Award.

At Home

Articles posted here on The Gamer Assembly.

• 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! Volume 2 is now available at RPG Now as well. The printed version of Volume 2 is in progress.

• Brent Newhall wonders aloud if the alignment axes of good/evil and law/chaos make sense in all settings by asking the simple question, What If Each Setting Had Its Own Alignments?

• Science Skill – Modern Assembly by Brian Liberge Defines and explores the new Science skill for the modern-day 4e D&D hack we call Modern Assembly. Useful for monster knowledge, programming, and computer hacking.

Away

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

• Building a Dungeon in Classic D&D by Brent Newhall at Troll in the Corner takes a more scene-based approach to dungeon design. This information in this article originally appeared in Brent’s Dungeon Raiders.

• There has been talk about lycanthropy in 4e D&D this week on Twitter. Adam Page adds his take on it in A Different Take on a Werewolf Theme at Daily Encounter.

• Ghosts of Cyberpunks Past by T.W.Wombat at Wombat’s Gaming Den of Iniquity rants about the dystopian future we’re living in, and how we let it happen while we were focused on trying to prevent the dystopian future portrayed in Cyberpunk games and fiction from the ’80s and ’90s.

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.

• Playing Drow Part 1: Embracing the Evil at Dungeon’s Master sheds some light on playing an effective character who just happens to be evil. Thinking about motivations, selfishness, and boundaries can make any character spring to life, evil or not.

• While we’re on the subject of drow, check out the UK D&D Drowathon Promotional Blog. If you’re anywhere near Nottingham on Saturday 12 May, get yourself over to Mondo Comico by 11AM to play The Sun Never Rises, which starts the whole Rise of the Underdark storyline, and the first session of the Web of the Spider Queen encounters season.

• Going Last jumps into the land of RPG Blog Carnivals by hosting May of the Dead. If you like the undead, hurry on over and sign up. Guest bloggers welcomed.

• Big news this week. Monte Cook left Wizards of the Coast. That news prompted other defections as reported by Blue Box Rebellion.

• Bat in the Attic gives us some thoughts and reactions to that news in D&D Next, Monte Cook, and All That.

• The End of a(n) (Eclipse) Phase at This Is My Game shares insights on the abrupt end of an Eclipse Phase campaign as part of the post-mortem discussion process.

• Liz at Character Generation shares some great advice in GM Tactics for Sidelined Players.

• Truth of the week: “Roleplaying is a team sport.” Read more sage advice for players who want to GM in Your Time Is Now at Gnome Stew.

• Food for thought: “Being Very Good at Anything Involved Being Somewhat Addicted”: Hard Truth on the Sheer Difficulty of Making an Impact.

• Artist Jenna Fowler sees some large expenses looming on the horizon, so she’s rustling up some business by having a Commission Sale! Take a look around Art By Jenna Fowler, especially the Gallery, and see if you can’t throw some work her way before the end of May.

• After the success (and physical therapy bills) of emulating women in excessively-sexy cover art Striking a Pose, Jim C. Hines takes a look at beefcake cover art poses in Posing Like a Man.

• Apparently Wizards of the Coast is releasing the Dungeon! Board Game Refresh in October. Sweet.

• Over the Edge 20th Anniversary Edition will be a limited print run of the enhanced Over the Edge 2nd Edition core book from Atlas Games. It’s coming in August, but you can reserve your copy now.

• Dungeon World is now available on GitHub for hacking under a Creative Commons license.

• The Board Games Edition of Tracy Hurley’s Joining the Party takes a look at favorite board games for gamers, including an overview of all the D&D-themed board games from Wizards of the Coast. Also be sure to check out the links to articles across the D&D community in the Tavern Tales section.

• And like we need another distraction, there’s a new lazy MMO fantasy RPG based on your Twitter traffic called Tweenk. Lazy or not, I want better loot.

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 a Lego dice tower, photos of New Your City from the 1880s, and enforcing your game setting’s laws when characters turn vigilante.

• Roving Band of Misfits publishes their Weekly Roundup column every Sunday. This week’s May of the Dead is Coming Edition gives us ways to bring non-gamers to the table, a brief look at the forthcoming book Dungeons & Dragons & Philosophy, and giving some unexpected real-life professions to your fantasy NPCs.

• 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 includes silly putty for potholes, a Coat of Arms Design Studio, and two takes on analyzing and building random encounter tables.

• 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 Dungeon World’s switch to a Creative Commons license and the finalists for the 2012 Game Chef competition.

• Critical Hits aggregates their Twitter feed and publishes it on Sundays under Critical Bits. This week’s Critical Bits mentions the Dungeon! board game reprint, the Dice Tower Gaming Award nominees for 2011, and Monte Cook leaving Wizards of the Coast.

I’ll stop gabbing so you can enjoy this week’s data smorgasbord.

At Home

Articles posted here on The Gamer Assembly.

• 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 at least once. 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!

• Designing a Ghibli RPG by Brent Newhall starts brainstorming by listing useful pieces of existing RPG systems with the ultimate goal of making a game in the style of a Hayao Miyazaki animated film.

• Mechanics Skill – Modern Assembly by Brian Liberge Defines and explores the new Mechanics skill for the modern-day 4e D&D hack we call Modern Assembly.

• In What Does a Kobold Sound Like?, Brent Newhall suggests accents for various fantasy monsters in a quick (1:16) video.

Away

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

• The MacGyver Theory by T.W.Wombat takes some improvisational GMing pointers from the king of hacking the ordinary into the extraordinary. Another in the Schrödinger’s Gun GMing series of articles.

• RPG Rx: Letting Players Drive Lovecraft by Brent Newhall advises place-driven adventures rather than GM-intensive mysteries for a more flexible Lovecraftian sandbox game.

• T.W.Wombat continues his Art Spotlight series by featuring the artist responsible for his logo: Jeremy Kostiew, Mighty Nightgaunt.

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.

• Spotted by Martin Ralya and shared in this Google Plus post, Jason Zavoda transcribed Gary Gygax’s Letter from Alarums & Excursions #2. I hear some of the design ideas for D&D Next in this passage:
  I desire variance in interpretation and, as long as I am editor of the TSR line and its magazine, I will do my utmost to see that there is as little trend towards standardization as possible. Each campaign should be a “variant”, and there is no “official interpretation” from me or anyone else. If a game of “Dungeons and Beavers” suits a group, all I say is more power to them, for every fine referee runs his own variant of DandD anyway.

• And while we’re looking at the early history of gaming, Your Blog Is Your Eighties Fanzine at Fighting Fantasist asks you to take the last five posts to your blog and format it like a cheesy home-copied game fanzine. Bonus points awarded for using typewriter fonts and filters to mimic early photocopy or even mimeograph reproduction.

• It’s been a year since it’s been updated regularly, but Hell Yeah, Gamemasters! is once again soliciting stories that describe awesome GMing.

• Story And Game at The Rhetorical Gamer explores how story and game can interact while pointedly avoiding talking about story games.

• Gaming as Women suggests using the term “flavor” rather than the more dismissive “fluff” in Crunch vs Fluff: The Argument We’re Doin’ Wrong. I wholeheartedly endorse the suggested licking of the Ravenloft book. On a related note, What Is Role Playing Exactly? explores different approaches to RPGs and the fact that a game means something slightly different to each person at the table.

• Nothing Is Fluff in a Fairy Tale at Playing D&D With Porn Stars looks at the 1e Oriental Adventures Wu Jen’s chosen taboo as an excellent example of how fairy tale logic inspires story more effectively than contrived system mechanics.

• Jeff’s Gameblog talks about having each player run a stable of PCs to cover different situations in Troupe Traveller. He also extols the virtues of using the 1e Oriental Adventures Event Charts in non-oriental settings, or even in Classic Traveller as a commenter suggests.

• Frothsof 4e offers a system for creating and handling OD&D-style Henchmen and Hirelings in 4e. I love the idea of generic themes to breathe some life into hirelings, and the Morale Score rides again!

• New D&D 4e DMs should heed Geek Ken‘s advice when he recommends Fallcrest – Where a New 4e DM Should Start.

• On Decisions & Delvers at Hack & Slash examines a list of the virtues of D&D and encourages implementing all of them in whatever version or variant you’re playing right now.

• Fred Hicks points to What the Hell These Game Developers Did with Your Kickstarter Money as an example of “Worst Case Success” with Kickstarter funding. Snagged from this tweet. See also The ugly side of Kickstarter: the risks in backing game dev campaigns are greater than you think at the Penny Arcade Report.

• 10 Free RPGs You Must Play at Trollish Delver lists several great and free RPGs. It’s hardly an exhaustive list (*cough*Warrior, Rogue & Mage*cough*Stars Without Number*cough*Voidjumpers of Space*cough*too many others to cover with coughing*cough*), but it’s well worth a look.

• Bradley at The Cheese Shop takes a look at several ways to handle the death of a PC in GM – “Your Character Has Met His End.”

• On Wednesday, the folks in charge of Paizo decided to solicit and answer questions on the /r/rpg Reddit in a thread called We Make Pathfinder — Ask Us Anything! Great questions and conversations are contained in those 862 comments.

• Why I’m Not Using the OGL at Strange Magic gives some insight into the restrictions hidden in the OGL agreement and what bits copyright or Creative Commons handles differently.

• Judd the Librarian at Githyanki Diaspora thinks that more games would have stronger foundations if more GMs took an active role with PC creation in an article entitled Leading Chargen, an Underrated GM Skill.

• Troll in the Corner tackles life’s inevitables in the series Reality Makes the Best Fantasy. Last week’s article looked at death, and this week’s article covers Taxes and Fees.

• And speaking of taxes, Benoit at Roving Band of Misfits gives some general guidelines on when and how to claim your gaming expenses as deductions in Deducting Dice: A Gamer’s Guide to Taxes.

• Experimenting: Free for Free – Product Publicity at Mithril and Mages hooks new readers by releasing the http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/101410/Treasure-Book-on-DemandLabyrinth Lord Treasure Book on Demand for free on DriveThruRPG as a marketing tactic.

• Jonathan Roberts runs Fantastic Maps, and he’s released some of his work for personal use in a section of his site called Free Maps, including a set of Creative Commons dungeon tiles that can be assembled in a nearly-infinite number of ways.

• Thoughtcrime released a couple of new games this week. Death by a Thousand Posts models internet forum debates and flame wars using dice in a quick multiplayer storytelling game. Good, Fast, and Cheap: Temptation’s Gate lets every player get exactly what they want if they’re willing to pay the price.

• Poor Abby Farnsworth from Hyperbole Games takes deckbuilding to the Salem witch trials an adds a dash of Monty Python. The design process continues, but the current rules, notes, and cards are available through the site for enterprising people interested in playtesting.

• With all this talk of free games, Stargarzer’s World wishes for a clean distribution site in We Need a RPGNow for Free RPGs!

• Tracy Hurley’s Joining the Party: PAX East 2012 went up this week on the Wizards site. Great overview of PAX East, great pics and videos, and great community links in the Tavern Tales section.

• Tycho’s Penny Arcade news post on Friday inspired Vannevar to turn his words into a jpg. Spotted on Reddit.

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 sci-fi art at the Concept Ships blog, managing time to keep your game on track, and making a successful game out of a failed quest.

• Roving Band of Misfits publishes their Weekly Roundup column every Sunday. This week’s Open Submission window halfway Closed Edition gives us campaign endings from two angles, a Wizards of the Coast podcast featuring Lords of Waterdeep, and setting up scenes instead of locations for a successful sandbox 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 includes impelementing danger rooms in Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, how basic needs cause massive pleasure, and faithfully translating tabletop cameraderie into the online world with the Roll20 Kickstarter.

• 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 Farewell to Fear Kickstarter, a well-done apology to women gamers from the Oatmeal, and a question: Does the success of Tabletop mean that analog games are getting more popular?

• Critical Hits aggregates their Twitter feed and publishes it on Sundays under Critical Bits. This week’s Critical Bits didn’t mention anything since Gato has been suspiciously quiet for the past 7 days.

At Home

Articles posted here on The Gamer Assembly.

• 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 at least once. 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!

• Background Questions for Players by Brent Newhall lists some starter questions to get your players thinking about what makes their characters tick.

Away

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

• T.W.Wombat writes about his PAX East experience in several chunks, including Field Guide to the New England PAXbound Wombat, The First Day of PAX East, PAX East: Saturday Retrospective, PAX East: Goals Checklist, PAX East: The Secret to Great Gaming, and PAX East: Other Voices.

• Helping Player Play Better by Brent Newhall introduces a tool for more effective player immersion. Try declaring “Drama Time” at your next game and encourage your players to get into their characters.

• Brian Patterson, the d20 Monkey showcases the creator of the d20 Monkey webcomic in this week's Art Spotlight from T.W.Wombat.

• Take a look at T.W.Wombat's gaming to do list in Irons in the Fire.

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.

• Monte Cook thinks Crunch vs. Fluff is a false dichotomy that ignores the essence of role playing games. Robin Laws takes a different angle on that idea in False Dichotomy, or Real, Though Annoying Dichotomy? This discussion took off this week, spawning other articles like Fluff vs. Useless Fluff at 9 and 30 Kingdoms, and Robin Laws revisited it with Crunch vs. Fluff: The Unstackening.

• D&D Next Design Considerations at Wizards of the Coast gives a peek into how the designers approach the rules revision with a list of directives. Syntax Error gives us a reaction to this article in D&D Next Design Considerations.

• Role Playing Tips for Beginners at the new blog Leaping Wizards gives some guidance for players and GMs just starting with RPGs. You can also find some great food for thought in GM Tips: Story vs. Mechanics.

• The Gassy Gnoll: How I Came to Love/Hate Combat at Game Knight Reviews takes a look at combat avoidance and how to keep combat interesting as an entry in the April RPG Blog Carnival being hosted at Exchange of Realities.

• Gnome Stew published a couple of great articles this week. Story Mashups for Improvising provides a framework for taking several story plotlines and combining them into a richly-detailed game at the drop of a hat. Also, DNA Phil lists the approaches and elements that work well for his games and encourages you to do the same in Signs of Campaign Greatness.

• Liz at Character Generation lists the five role playing games that have shaped the way she sees gaming in My Five Games.

• Ryan Shelton muses about emotional manipulation as a reason why he plays RPGs in this Google Plus post.

• Cutting Away Messiness (Game Prep) at Deeper in the Game gives some ideas to simplify game prep. Spoiler: Don't overprep or you'll bury yourself in notes you don't need during the game.

• Why do authors publish proofread but unfinished writing? Amanda Valentine reminds authors who self-publish to Respect Your Readers.

• ChaosGrenade Update: WyRM SF gives us a taste of what will be in the upcoming WyRM SF game.

• Skwervo Games just released the alpha playtest version of The Writer's System, a flexible RPG focused on storytelling and characterization.

• If you remember the “No Elves” ads in Dragon Magazine, you'll be happy to know that Talislanta books of all editions are being scanned in and made available for free downloads. Talislanta also got a mention this week over at Tenkar's Tavern.

• If you're in the mood to play a totally random superhero, check out this Random Marvel Datafile Generator. It's a little clunky, but then again it's totally random.

• A ruthless terrorist organization determined to rule the world has been statted up for Marvel Heroic Roleplaying in The Gang's All Here: G.I. Joe's Cobra at Exploring Infinity.

• Telecanter's Receding Rules decides to take a completely different approach to dungeon design with The Rule-Based Dungeon, where the specific dungeon features shift based on set rules like performing prior actions or how many characters are in the party.

• Dave Chalker takes a look at four levels of mapping and miniature usage in The Easily Lost Explorer's Guide to Dungeon Crawling at Critical Hits. The issue goes a little deeper than battle grid vs. no grid.

• Dungeon Painter Online at Pyromancers gives you a way to create your own dungeon tiles or other maps and export them in image or PDF formats.

• Where are the moons tonight? Jeff's Gameblog has a very cool random tool to answer that question, called The Orrery of Sarpedon.

• From Old Books provides free public domain images and pictures copied from old books. I'll need to take a closer look at this site for some upcoming projects.

• Every game has the threat of death, but very few groups spend time on coming up with funerary rites. Take some time to work through the questions posed in Reality Makes the Best Fantasy: Death and Funerals at Troll in the Corner and you'll provide a much richer game world experience for your players.

• The RPG Stackexchange is out of beta, and they've got a great new design to boot. Check out this free Q&A site for RPGs. Ask or answer questions and help out the community!

• If you're interested in Kickstarter projects, Geek Industrial Complex has done some analysis on crowdsourced projects in 2011-2012 Report on 150 RPG Crowdfunding Projects.

• House Rules, Intent, and Affordances at Gaming As Women takes a look at the various possibilities in the intersection between design and perception. The cases of mismatched design and perception are fascinating to think about – either you've designed something that nobody uses or your players have made something you didn't intend.

• It may be unintentional, but some situations make women uncomfortable, like this one described in Sexism in the Industry at OMG Lazer Kittens.

• 100 Monkeys, 100 Typewriters, 100 Wands of Magic Missile by Vanir at Critical-Hits inspires me to submit while the Dragon and Dungeon submission window is open.

• And while on the subject of inspiration, take 3 minutes to watch Ze Frank's An Invocation For Beginnings. Powerful motivation juice. FILDI.

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 the Triskaidekaphobic Gaming Edition to see how Wizards of the Coast got its name, the Dice Chuckers Kickstarter campaign, and embracing epic failures at the game table.

• Roving Band of Misfits publishes their Weekly Roundup column every Sunday. This week's Site of the Year Voting Edition gives us character motivations beyond simple survival, crafting tentacles for your game, and leaving monster traces to foreshadow encounters while heightening dread in your players.

• 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 athletic body diversity reference for artists, John Cleese on creativity, and the magic of Polyhedral Pantheons.

• Gaming As Women gathers links in their This Week in Gaming and This Week in Feminism series of articles. Both series are collected under the News category. This Week in Gaming features increasing diversity in the art for D&D Next, the importance of story over combat in Prose Before Blows, and a plea for more entries into this year's ENnies.

• Critical Hits aggregates their Twitter feed and publishes it on Sundays under Critical Bits. This week's Critical Bits mentions PAX East panels, designing Halls of the Undermountain, and the OGRE Kickstarter from Steve Jackson Games.

At Home

Articles posted here on The Gamer Assembly.

• 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 at least once. 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!

• The GA Panel at PAX East by T.W.Wombat gives a panelist-eye view of the Gamer Assembly panel at PAX East on Friday. Thank you to everyone who came, and a double thank you to everyone who asked us questions!

Away

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

• T.W.Wombat finally finishes last September’s OSR Challenge A September of Short Adventures by completing his Traveller Adventure Arc. This week’s mini-adventures are: Whistleblowing and Denouement: Loose Ends.

• Create a Little World with Your Friends by Brent Newhall takes a closer look at Microscope and examines the game we’ve been playing online recently here at the Gamer Assembly.

• 50 Games in 50 Weeks: Munchkin continues Brent Newhall‘s exploration of new games with this beer & pretzels, screw your neighbor card game from Steve Jackson Games.

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.

• The RPG User Agreement at Syntax Error leads with “Due to a printing error this text did not appear in every RPG ever published. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

• No Resurrection Is Perfect at Wampus Country raises some doubts as to the infallibility of resurrection with a random table of 100 quirks you can impose on characters rising from the dead.

• On Village Resource at Hack & Slash contains a great collection of links to online generators of all stripes. From names to descriptions to mottos to demographics to adventure seeds, take a look here for online shortcuts when creating towns.

• Here’s a quick and unpolished system to connect a player character to the game’s setting with personal relationships from Rob Donoghue’s Some Space To Think simply called An Idea. Looks like a great base for a more social RPG, and it can be used with almost any rules system.

• Roleplaying Games About Evil at Deeper in the Game muses about how games that handle evil well always include some mechanism for compromising with evil with a quick decision in the moment that leads to regret. Also provides a great overview of some darkly-themed RPGs.

• Also at Deeper in the Game but requiring a totally different entry, The Many XPs of D&D looks at rewards in past versions of D&D and imagines “XP Sockets” to personalize how the system gives rewards based on the campaign the group wants to have. Want to reward greed? Give XP for treasure. Story? Give XP for achieving plot milestones. I love this idea.

• Roles, Classes, and Themes! Oh My! at RPG Musings imagines a stripped-down four-class structure for D&D, allowing players to personalize their characters with an endless variation of themes. Classes reflect the current 4e Roles, and things like weapon and armor choice would be tied to Themes.

• Why did old-school D&D steer clear of rules for social conflict involving the PCs? Social Combat is Asymetric at Untimately looks at both OD&D and the Moldvay Basic/Expert D&D rules to examine the extent of social conflict rules, then extends the line of thought to explain why they stopped where they did. Great analysis and spot on conclusions.

• Strange Magic offers some artistic examples of Africans in Europe During the Middle Ages.

• If you’re looking for awesome terrain for the Shattered Isles, look no further than Discount Fares to Shattered Isles at The Id DM. Great-looking necrotic sludge!

• What If You Owned the Rights to D&D? By asking this hypothetical question, Big Ball of No Fun highlights some of the monumental challenges facing the designers of D&D Next.

• I Am Dungeonmaster! at The Rhetorical Gamer recently watched the Dungeon Master in the D&D cartoon with horror. “That’s who I’m supposed to model myself after when I sit behind the screen? Seriously, no wonder we got a generation of D&Ders which spawned so many bad DMS.” And on a much more useful note, The Sages of Yore advocates using sage NPCs as information-based story pacing devices, which makes a great amount of sense to me.

• Character Generation lets us know that playing an RPG does not require constantly spouting Jeopardy-like trivia in “Well Actually” is the Death of “Yes, And”. Fact checking destroys narrative flow, so please just play the game instead of correcting other people.

• I read a couple of great posts over at Gothridge Manor this week. Playing It Fast and Loose explores the good and bad sides of low-prep games, and includes a clip from The Hustler. Also, the classy local Assassins’ Guild provides many opportunities for story using only a bulletin board by posting a Notice of Impending Assassination. I love that plot device and will totally steal it for my game.

• Forbes goes geek with some great freelancing tips illustrated by Star Wars in 5 Lessons in Freelancing from Han Solo. Also applicable for gaming freelancers.

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 a call for people interested in posting game reviews at GKR, theories about why dungeons exist, and a Steampunk 101 article to introduce the genre.

• Roving Band of Misfits publishes their Weekly Roundup column every Sunday. This week’s Papercraft Dragon Edition gives us a reaction to Dungeon Crawl Classic, a week’s worth of articles on random encounters, and the Fourthcore One Page Dungeon submission entitled “The Tears of Mother Pestilence”.

• 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 map porn at The Cartographers’ Guild, very cool colored tokens called Penny Gems, and blog articles on reskinning monsters and monster variants.

• Critical Hits aggregates their Twitter feed and publishes it on Sundays under Critical Bits. This week’s Critical Bits mentions the Shadowrun Returns kickstarter project, this month’s Dungeon and Dragon table of contents, and the Rock Band Board Game (April Fools!).

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!).

At Home

Articles posted here on The Gamer Assembly.

• Only 11 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?

• 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!

• Some harmless joking on Twitter inspired T.W.Wombat to mine the chat room for ideas, culminating in a collection of Code Phrases for D&D Next, now including a code phrase randomizer at the top of the page.

• Modern Assembly: Faceman Theme by Brian Liberge shows us the benefits of Charisma as your character’s prime attribute. I especially enjoy the Nothing To See Here utility power.

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: Stowaway 2 – Ore Slugs in the Hold, Drafting Research Subjects, Approaching Pandora, and Meeting with Dr. Laura Falken.

• On Mission Statements by T.W.Wombat reflects on the past 1.5 years of RPG blogging and what it all means to focus the action going forward. Then again, the same technique works just as well with your campaign.

• Environments and Characters by Emily Vitori features the photography and fantasy portraiture of Emily Vitori, another great artist in T.W.Wombat‘s ongoing Art Spotlight series.

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.

• The One Page Dungeon Contest is back for 2012. It’s a great competition in minimalist adventure design that offers great prizes.

• On Successful Communication With the Other Side details an exchange of ideas and meeting of the minds between an Old School Renaissance enthusiast and a Story Game enthusiast. All communication of new ideas should be this civil and productive.

• Thoughtcrime Games, a new venture from Ryven Cedrylle, Quinn Murphy, and David Welsh (@doubleplusfun on Twitter), provides an actual play description of how Marvel Heroic Roleplaying’s system handles social, mechanical, and combat situations with equal ease.

• Todd VanDerWerff tries D&D for the first time after getting past his youthful belief that nerdy things are inherently bad in this article on A. V. Club, the first article in the Nerd Curious monthly series. It also includes some great history and unfortunate misconceptions about role playing games.

• Precisely Subjective by Robin Laws shines a light onto the preconceptions built into the rules that may be excluding some of your players.

• Meanwhile, over on The Forge Forums, Emily Care hopes to gather experiences from independent RPG publishers in her State of the Indie Publisher thread. If you’ve published an RPG, head on over and share your story.

• Swords and Sorcery Heroic Roleplaying at Exploring Infinity shows us a few sample characters as a cool finale to a great series of articles on hacking Marvel Heroic Roleplaying to run a pulpy swords & sorcery game. Part 4 of 3 is rumored to be on the way, so stay tuned.

• The Fantasy Traveller Part 6 – Dungeon Combat at Alegis Downport demonstrates how a typical dungeon combat would run using Classic Traveller rules as part of their ongoing Fantasy Traveller series of articles. The first article contains guidelines and source material. Interesting hack, but potentially deadly for dungeon crawlers.

• Thinking about starting a Science Fiction RPG? Stargazer’s World provides Some Thoughts on Roleplaying in the SF Genre, including deciding setting the dials for visualization and how hard you want your science.

• If talking about the RPG business model interests you, take a look at this thread on the RPG Reddit. 91 comments later the opinions remain civil and thoughtworthy, except for the hipster/porn star/art stripper thread.

• This Game Starts at Level Three at Tenkar’s Tavern talks about alternate ways to handle training new players other than setting aside the first two levels of play as training levels. I see some interesting ideas on both sides of the discussion in the comments.

• Further musings on starting a game above first level can be found in Starting Above First Level at Untimately, including the insight that the deadliness of a setting is inversely proportional to how long it takes to create a character.

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 a list of differences between D&D and Savage Worlds, trying out Tabletop Forge for Google+ gaming, and 20 ways to add color to your darkness. Thanks for hanging out and mentioning the chat, Fitz!

• Roving Band of Misfits publishes their Weekly Roundup column every Sunday. This week’s 500 New Fairy Tales Edition gives us ways to overcome story block, an Alpha Mutation draft in Gamma World, and pretending with Monte Cook.

• 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 excellent series of articles showing how to make a fantasy sandbox, the Birthday Shoggoth, and a video for World of Workcraft – Papers and Paychecks upgraded for the MMO crowd.

• Critical Hits aggregates their Twitter feed and publishes it on Sundays under Critical Bits. This week’s Critical Bits mentions The Id DM’s Disposable Heroes: What Does Save Or Die Really Kill?, Steve Townshend’s “3 Things Happen” adventure design, and Baldur’s Gate on the iPad.

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.

At Home

Articles posted here on The Gamer Assembly.

• Only 25 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!

• A Warlock With a Gun: Re-skinning Basic D&D Classes for Modern Games by Brian Liberge tweaks character classes for use in a modern port of the D&D 4e rules.

• Modern Complications Table by Brian Liberge gives 50 ideas for random happenings in your modern game. Use it in good health, even while fending off your food coma as your cell phone blares “It’s Raining Men” and you’re caught in the middle of a flashmob.

Away

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

• Designing Fantasy Cities: Location by Brian Liberge is part of a series of articles about quickly giving your location depth through purpose. This time we discuss location.

• Rogue Space Roleplaying Game, A review by Chris Jackson explores the flexibility of the ultra-lightweight spacefaring roleplaying game, Rogue Space.

• Rogue Space: The Dark Frontier by Chris Jackson follows up on the review of the “basic” rules of Rogue Space with a review of the “full” rules, titled “The Dark Frontier.”

• Character Portraits and Ponies by @thedandmom features Gamer Assembly’s own @thedandmom as this week’s entry in T.W.Wombat‘s experiment to spotlight artists over at Wombat’s Gaming Den of Iniquity. If you’re an artist, drop him a line to talk about an upcoming spot.

• Schrödinger’s Gun GMing: Baiting Your Plot Hooks by T.W.Wombat provides a few tips for making your adventure hooks irresistible to your party. Throwing more hooks into the water should incite a feeding frenzy, or at least some intense intra-party discussion about what to do next.

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.

• Apparently is was a good week for 800 pound gorilla mentions, as evidenced by Why D&D Next Is Important To All Of Us over at Stargazer’s World.

• D&D, 5e, and eBook Formats at Writer@Large pitches digitizing D&D to not only have every rulebook and supplement available electronically, but to enhance the gameplay experience at the table.

• Save Or Die over at Mist Imp’s Musings makes a case for adding resurrection and save or die mechanics back into D&D Next.

• Going back to the soul of the game talks about walking the fine line between strict adherence to rules and overruling cursed dice across the previous editions over at D&D 5th edition – Addicts’ thoughts and opinions.

• Greywulf brings up an interesting idea from the AD&D archives to partially de-emphasize combat in D&D in The Case For Awarding XP For Gold.

• For those of you interested in skill system design, Skills: A Conclusion With 10 Rules summarizes the findings of the Skills Series at Hack & Slash with links to the rest of the articles. I’m not sure I agree with all the rules, but there’s some great food for thought in there.

• Reality Makes the Best Fantasy: Alcohol (Not the Rubbing Kind) at Troll in the Corner lists plot hooks and questions for GMs and players alike about how alcohol fits into the campaign world. This series of articles provides potent brainstorming food.

• More Spellcasting Malarkey takes a look at the spells known/spells per day in Monte Cook’s Arcana Unearthed with an eye toward adapting it into a BECMI-like game.

• Fantasy Traveller: Noble gives us the latest career hack in the ongoing Fantasy Traveller hack over at The Wandering Gamist. Written for Mongoose Traveller, the magic noodling and career tables would fit nicely into Original Traveller’s little black books as well.

• Run a lethal game? Character Binder at Gutter Cult details a way to keep players playing in Labyrinth Lord by rolling up a stable of potential PCs and keeping them in a binder waiting to be called up and played.

• It’s The Squares, Man from Robin D. Laws argues that a grid on a battlemap changes the perception from Map to Game Board, and that changes our approach the game.

• Blazing Ahead: City Placement asks questions about prime locations for cities and how closely to place them. The answers to these questions will help to create a programmatic map maker called Generated Worlds.

• And speaking of world map generators, here’s one posted by someone at Stanford.

• If a world map is too much for you, This Google+ post holds a small collection of links to random dungeon generators as gathered by Valerio De Camillis and shared by Brian Takle.

• PVP Roleplaying Table 1-1: Not Paying Attention Chart gives us a lively collection of random consequences for players whose attention drifts from your game.

• Obsidian Portal is having a contest as announced on their Haste Podcast, Episode 36. Post your most over-the-top, Baron Munchaussen-esque story about how you got into gaming in 200 words or less, and you’re in the running for a month of Ascendant membership and a T-shirt.

• Galileo Games posted an open call for compelling character-driven fiction about people who have fallen through society’s cracks for their upcoming project The Lost: A Kingdom of Nothing Anthology. The anthology’s stories will be based in the world of their Kingdom of Nothing game.

• The RPG Guy has organized a one-hour online information session entitled How To Break Into The RPG Industry and Game Design Q&A. If you’re interested, free up your schedule on Thursday March 15th, 2012 at 9PM EST.

• I like the broad range of questions in this interview that Charisma Bonus did with Amanda Valentine and Cam Banks (or Grammar Vandal and the Red Kiwi) in Amanda & Cam Talk Marvel Heroic RPG.

• The Fun Now Manifesto at Deeper In The Game. Never postpone having fun or finding a way to fix a game that’s not working for you.

• Art Inspiration in Wizards of the Coast’s Joining The Party column provides links to all sorts of art resources that you can use for inspiration. Double-check your rights agreements before using them for anything more than inspiration, since nobody wants to run into legal problems.

• Drow at Dungeons and Drawings gives us an interpretation of a drow priestess. I’d love to see that as a poster. Keep an eye on this site, as there’s new monster art posted every Sunday.

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 zombie hand bookmarks, a collection of random tables so your d12 doesn’t feel neglected, the Angry DM weighing in about lethality in D&D Next, and links to GM helper smartphone apps at Campaign Mastery. Check out the Tools section for all sorts of fun things to use.

• Roving Band of Misfits publishes their Weekly Roundup column every Sunday. This week’s Where Are The Arts & Crafts Edition gives us real-world locations for fantasy worldbuilding inspiration, a Twitter-sourced list of books and movies that would make a fantastic RPG, and breaking the fourth wall at the table with @TheIdDM.

• Critical Hits aggregates their Twitter feed and publishes it on Sundays under Critical Bits. This week’s Critical Bits mentions a prototype 4e damage dice calculator and a 20th anniversary limited edition of the Over The Edge core book from Atlas Games.