I got it finally!

The copy I ordered through my local comics shop never showed up. So, I called a game-store from across town and luckily they still had a copy of the long awaited Basic Roleplaying System.

I love the BRP rules set as it is very intuitive and easy to learn. I'm still quite miffed that it took almost two decades for Chaosiun to put this project together but irregardless, all the various games from Call of Cthulhu and Runequest to Pendaragon and Stormbringer have finally been brought together and reconciled in one great game at last. Whatever genre you want, it's now here using the best engine around.

In a nice bit of simpatico Kurt Wiegel of Game Geeks just reviewed Basic Roleplaying.



Now with all the oodles of time I have after caring for Swinebread jr. I can game a lot!

....oh wait....


-Swinebread


P.S. this is my 300th post for the year... whoa!

New Adventures in Roleplaying

Well, the 4th edition of Dungeons and Dragons is out and the majority of reviews have been very positive. Wired Magazine’s take is quite good, here’ s a section:

In D&D 4th Edition, dungeon masters, or DMs, are freed from a good deal of the bookkeeping associated with the hobby in previous editions of the game, as the designers have streamlined the process for preparing adventures. Boxes of statistical information and extensive charts were once the norm, but now DMs can almost throw together an adventure on the fly. This philosophy has also lead to some radical changes in monster design. Just as players now have a fun trick or two up their sleeves, monsters now wield fantastic abilities that are wholly unique.

The possibilities these mechanical changes unlock are exciting in and of themselves. Nerds love to debate game mechanics, but what all this ultimately means for the player and the DM is more time focusing on more important things.

Combat moves so fluidly now, and the DM has so much less prep time to worry about, that the art of role-playing itself finally moves into the foreground of Dungeons & Dragons. Telling a compelling story, and having a ton of fun doing it, is ultimately the reason players sit down to game in the first place. What D&D 4th Edition represents is the chance to have fun with your friends without a ton of hassle, to immerse yourself in a fantasy world without working at it.

In fact, many of the mechanics are so easy to use that they remind players of what it feels like to play a massively multiplayer game. Wizards' Slavicsek has absolutely no problem with those comparisons, as all good games build on what has come before.

It seems that D&D has finally, finally shed most of its clunky rules but for me, it comes too late. The lawyering, number crunching, and game preparation were way out of hand. I've always stressed that Roleplaying games should just be that, about roleplaying and sadly the D&D folks never quite understood this until now. Most people don’t enjoy nor have the time to endlessly scourer the rules just to do the most basic tasks. Versatility and ease of story creation is the way to go and so it sounds like 4th edition would now finally provid that. It might actually attract new, non-geeky types… well probably not, but Wizards of the Coast can dream can’t they? It seems like 4th edition would be right up my alley.

The problem is I’m way too invested in 3.5 to upgrade. I bought tons of D&D and D20 books, looking for ideas and hoping the next volume would be the one to unlock the secret of easy and fun gameplay. Now I’ve got no one to blame but myself, but why would I do this? Well, I was sublimating my desire for a universal roleplaying game into the D20 system. It was the most prevalent RPG and I thought that it would provide more opportunities to actually sit down with somebody and game. I was wrong about that.

What I really wanted was a universal gamming system from Chaosium. I've always loved how their mechanics work in a simple but appropriate manner for their various games like Call of Cthulhu, and Stormbringer. Their core mechanic has a name, it’s called Basic Roleplaying or BRP but Chaosium hadn’t really pushed it as a universal gamming platform before except for a halfhearted attempt with Worlds of Wonder. So in my desire to fill the void, that Chaosium seemed unwilling to satisfy, I self medicated with 3.5 and D20.

It’s ironic that D&D 4th edition is being released at about the same time as Chaosium’s new Basic Roleplaying game. Finally, I’m getting the game I really want, and it’s not from Wizards of the Coast. Of course, Chaosium should have done this years ago but at least it’s happening at a time when I’m feeling particularly left out of the next big jump in RPG industry.

Basic Roleplaying the Chaosium System is rolling out to a store near you as I type this. But if you’re more of a PDF type of person, downloads are now available for purchase on the website. Dungeons & Dragons and Chaosuim have changed with the times even if both were very late to do so.

See basicroleplaying.net and basicroleplaying.com for info on BRP outside of Chaosium’s website.

-Swinbread

Randomness

An interesting and slightly clueless (did this guy read any comics made before the 1990s?) article titled "how superhero movies made comic books cooler if not better on io9 caught my attention. Most of these changes I don't consider making comics any better but yes maybe cooler for a little while at least.

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engaging Watchmen costume design video



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Chaosium is running a new pole on their webpage's sidebar called: Which Genre would you most like to see as a Chaosium BRP setting? (See here) The choices are Fantasy, Historical Horror, Post Apocalypse, Pulp, & Science Fiction. Of course I chose Post Apocalypse. head over and make your vote count.


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Black Cat on Spectacular Spiderman this Saturday (may 17th) at 10AM on The CW. I've always liked her, so I'm glad she's getting her TV due. Black Cat takes me back to a time when I first read comics and reminds me of what I used to enjoy about the Spiderman stories. Oh and the Black costume symbiote shows up as well. What, No Secret Wars?


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Ron Perlman talks Hellboy

In all of Guillermo’s movies, the monsters are the ones who are the most human and the humans are the ones who are the most monstrous. He’s been playing in that world ever since he made his first film and that’s a theme that fascinates him for all the right reasons. And even if you don’t see it necessarily on the surface of the entertainment he is giving you, it’s there and this is why you are so stirred when watching his films for reasons that you can’t even really articulate. There’s so much there that he’s grappling with.

See full article here


-Swinebread

The Chaosium d100 system is at the Printer

cover art

That's right folks, the BASIC ROLEPLAYING SYSTEM is finally going to be a reality. I've been waiting for real multi-genre game from Chaosium for years. They have finally wised up and are providing a game system that's user friendly, like Call of Cthulhu, and is easy to apply to any type of adventure you want to run from sci-fi to fantasy. I've got a ton of ideas that BRP would be perfect for and now I’ll get to make them a reality.

The truth is I love roleplaying, but I hate rules. Rules get in the way of having a good gamming experience, imo, mostly because they are too complicated and so I spend most of my time with my nose buried in the rulebooks rather than focused on the players. The weird need by most game designers to create RPGs with overly complicated rules sets which must be memorized has always astonished me. I think this is the main reason most folks aren’t interested in playing RPGs. If you like legalistic stuff that doesn’t represent any kind of reality then by all means keep playing that way but I certainly don’t have the time relearn an overly complicated rules set, like D&D, every time I want to add something to an adventure or a new addition comes out. Have you looked at the Stat blocks for creatures nowadays? I don't understand half of that crap. Plus, all the rules about levels, experience points and etc, etc just get in the way actually rolepaying, being the character and that’s what I find fun. Roleplaying, for me, is about being in the moment and BASIC ROLEPLAYING will allow that now that it’s not tied to a specific genre. Can you tell I’ve been waiting for this?

This book represents a first for BASIC ROLEPLAYING—a system complete in one book, without a defined setting. Previously, BASIC ROLEPLAYING has been an integral part of standalone games, usually with rich and deep world settings. Due to differences in these settings, BASIC ROLEPLAYING has had many different incarnations. Variant and sometimes contradictory rules have emerged between versions, to better support one particular setting over another.

Chaosium’s BASIC ROLEPLAYING system reconciles these different flavors of the system and brings many variant rules together into the covers of one book, something that has never been done before. Some of these rules are provided as optional extensions, some as alternate systems, and others have been integrated into the core system. By design this work is not a reinvention of Basic Roleplaying or a significant evolution of the system, but instead a collected and complete version, without setting, provided as a guide to players and gamemasters everywhere and compatible with most Basic Roleplaying games. It also allows the gamemaster the ability to create his or her own game world (or worlds), to adapt others from fiction, films, or even translate settings from other roleplaying games into Basic Roleplaying.

Take peak at the character sheet here.


-Swinebread

Game Geek Reviews

I just came across Kurt Wiegel’s roleplaying game reviews on youtube. Interesting and informative, Check ‘em out! See Here

This is his 50th video retrospective posted just last week:


-Swinebread

His Adventure Is Over: R.I.P. Gary Gygax

As some of you have heard by now, Gary Gygax, the D&D guru, has died. I wasn’t part of the first wave of roleplaying gamers and so I largely missed out on playing through most of Gary’s adventure modules, but I did encounter the large part of the game’s initial aftershock when the production values had increased. I love roleplaying games a lot but I kinda’ had a love hate relationship with them when I was a kid. Being able to inhabit another world and use you imagination was an incredibly powerful and fantastic experience, but the D&D rules were very encumbering and, for me, stymied that imagination. I never owned a copy of the main rulebooks until D&D 3.5 (well OK, except the Basic and Expert boxed sets) and I merely relied on others to run the game if we wanted to play Dungeons and Dragons.

It wasn’t until I encountered both the skills focused Basic Roleplaying System (via Call of Cthulhu and Stormbringer) and the rules light Storyteller System (Vampire, Werewolf), that I really found gamming a truly immersive experience. It was also around this time that finally realized why I found D&D to have such a strange, clunky, mechanistic feel. It’s because Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson were strategy game players first and then developed D&D roleplaying out of that. I was never a strategy game sorta’ guy and that’s why their approach to the gaming seemed backwards to me. Levels, experience points, tons of charts, character classes, and mutually excusive rules for every little aspect, was really just too much in my opinion. But for other folks, with a more mathematical or legalistic mind, probably found these rule mechanics pure heaven. For some, roleplaying was a numbers and accounting game but I never saw it like that. For me, gamming should be a character driven, story creation experience. On the other hand, I always greatly appreciated the world building that went into Dungeon and Dragons and the different types of dice as well. I believe those two aspects were some of D&D’s greatest strengths beyond just simply using your mind's eye.

Now it may seem like I’m bashing Mr. Gygax, but I don’t feel that I am, rest his soul, but rather I’m merely providing context and probing the memories his death has brought up. Gary Gygax was an entertainment innovator and brought a new way to experience, and harness imagination. I just needed it in a different form than he originally designed it. Regardless, thanks for starting the roleplaying game industry Mr. Gygax.

I think the New York Times has the best article about Gary Gygax, so I’ll post the whole of it here, as it will eventually disappear behind a registered user function.

Gary Gygax, Game Pioneer, Dies at 69

By SETH SCHIESEL
Published: March 5, 2008

Gary Gygax, a pioneer of the imagination who transported a fantasy realm of wizards, goblins and elves onto millions of kitchen tables around the world through the game he helped create, Dungeons & Dragons, died Tuesday at his home in Lake Geneva, Wis. He was 69.

His death was confirmed by his wife, Gail Gygax, who said he had been ailing and had recently suffered an abdominal aneurysm, The Associated Press reported.
As co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, the seminal role-playing game introduced in 1974, Mr. Gygax wielded a cultural influence far broader than his relatively narrow fame among hard-core game enthusiasts.

Before Dungeons & Dragons, a fantasy world was something to be merely read about in the works of authors like J. R. R. Tolkien and Robert Howard. But with Dungeons & Dragons, Mr. Gygax and his collaborator, Dave Arneson, created the first fantasy universe that could actually be inhabited. In that sense, Dungeons & Dragons formed a bridge between the noninteractive world of books and films and the exploding interactive video game industry. It also became a commercial phenomenon, selling an estimated $1 billion in books and equipment. More than 20 million people are estimated to have played the game.

While Dungeons & Dragons became famous for its voluminous rules, Mr. Gygax was always adamant that the game’s most important rule was to have fun and to enjoy the social experience of creating collaborative entertainment. In Dungeons & Dragons, players create an alternate persona, like a dwarven thief or a noble paladin, and go off on imagined adventures under the adjudication of another player called the Dungeon Master.

“The essence of a role-playing game is that it is a group, cooperative experience,” Mr. Gygax said in a telephone interview in 2006. “There is no winning or losing, but rather the value is in the experience of imagining yourself as a character in whatever genre you’re involved in, whether it’s a fantasy game, the Wild West, secret agents or whatever else. You get to sort of vicariously experience those things.”

When Mr. Gygax (pronounced GUY-gax) first published Dungeons & Dragons under the banner of his company, Tactical Studies Rules, the game appealed mostly to college-age players. But many of those early adopters continued to play into middle age, even as the game also trickled down to a younger audience.

“It initially went to the college-age group, and then it worked its way backward into the high schools and junior high schools as the college-age siblings brought the game home and the younger ones picked it up,” Mr. Gygax said.

Mr. Gygax’s company, renamed TSR, was acquired in 1997 by Wizards of the Coast, which was later acquired by Hasbro, which now publishes the game.

In addition to his wife, Mr. Gygax is survived by six children: three sons, Ernest G. Jr., Lucion Paul and Alexander; and three daughters, Mary Elise, Heidi Jo and Cindy Lee.

These days, pen-and-paper role-playing games have largely been supplanted by online computer games. Dungeons & Dragons itself has been translated into electronic games, including Dungeons & Dragons Online. Mr. Gygax recognized the shift, but he never fully approved. To him, all of the graphics of a computer dulled what he considered one of the major human faculties: the imagination ’ ”

“There is no intimacy; it’s not live,” he said of online games. “It’s being translated through a computer, and your imagination is not there the same way it is when you’re actually together with a group of people. It reminds me of one time where I saw some children talking about whether they liked radio or television, and I asked one little boy why he preferred radio, and he said, ‘Because the pictures are so much better.’ ”

Nice article huh.

On another note, if you are a serious journalist (by serious I mean you get paid) and you use the words “geek,” “geeky” or “geeks” in your news article about Gary Gygax's death, you can FUCK OFF… …Just go fuck yourself. Those geek words are pejorative and not appreciated. Some folks in the gamming community use them, but that’s simply to take the word geek and disarm it while turning it’s original demeaning meaning on it’s head. “Geek” has no place in a eulogy or a serious piece of journalism and certainly shouldn’t be used by folks that don’t consider themselves a part of “geek culture…”

-Swinebread

Basic Roleplaying Almost Here... Finally

This December we should see the publication of Basic Roleplaying (BRP). It’s a universal RPG system that uses the same rules set as the original Runequest, Stormbringer and Call of Cthulhu games. I’ve been waiting a long time for this. Chaosium really has the best rules system but they haven’t capitalized on it by publishing a generic set of rules until now. Finally, all those worlds I’ve dreamed of will much easier to bring to life. The only caveat: will they get it out in time…? Meeting public deadlines is not something they’re famous for.

From Chaosium’s web site here:

This book represents a first for BASIC ROLEPLAYING—a system complete in one book, without a defined setting. Previously, BASIC ROLEPLAYING has been an integral part of standalone games, usually with rich and deep world settings. Due to differences in these settings, BASIC ROLEPLAYING has had many different incarnations. Variant and sometimes contradictory rules have emerged between versions, to better support one particular setting over another. 



Chaosium’s BASIC ROLEPLAYING system reconciles these different flavors of the system and brings many variant rules together into the covers of one book, something that has never been done before. Some of these rules are provided as optional extensions, some as alternate systems, and others have been integrated into the core system. By design this work is not a reinvention of Basic Roleplaying or a significant evolution of the system, but instead a collected and complete version, without setting, provided as a guide to players and gamemasters everywhere and compatible with most Basic Roleplaying games. It also allows the gamemaster the ability to create his or her own game world (or worlds), to adapt others from fiction, films, or even translate settings from other roleplaying games into Basic Roleplaying.

Additionally, Chaosium has announced their first officially licensed setting, Deadword. See here

The DEADWORLD RPG is based upon Gary Reed's DEADWORLD comic, previously published by Caliber Comics and Image Comics, and soon to be released through Desperado Publishing. One of the forerunners of the zombie comic, DEADWORLD was an early work of artist Vincent Locke who went on to work on DC/Vertigo's SANDMAN and A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE, recently made into a major motion picture.
Seraphim Guard plans to release the DEADWORLD RPG in fall 2008, at the Wizard World Chicago comic convention.

Obviously that’s a ways off but it looks promising…

I really want this RPG, Chaosium don’t let me down!

-Swinebread

Random Stuff From Previews

I just thought I'd list a few things from September’s Previews that ticked me for some reason or another. Items to arrive in November.


Nurse Ogawa! Now your Star Trek: The Next Generation action figure set will be complete. Oh, and I guess they’re releasing an action figure for some character called Ensign Ro too. Page 444.

The Complete Terry and the Pirates Volume 2. This is one book series I really wish I could pick up but at 50 bucks a pop... I always wanted to read this classic strip due to the great art by Milton Caniff. Lots of strong Female characters, including the Dragon Lady. Page 314.


The Smurfs are coming to DVD! Season one is only $44.98. That’s 26 Smurftasitc episodes for chump change. Page 537.


Doctor Who’s Tardis, how cool is that? Pretty cool. If you’ve got the action figures you have to get the Tardis right? Page 488.


The Cthulhu Rainy-Day Activity Book. Mazes, drawing, coloring and Mad Libs (to name a few items) that will occupy your time and drive you totally crazy. Page 518.

It’s also worth noting that Chaosium is releasing their D100 RPG rulebook. Finally, a generic set of rules for any type of play using the Basic Roleplaying System. I’m looking foreword to this one. Page 518.

-Swinebread

Some Gaming News

I was in Powell’s Books the other day and happened across a copy of the new Hawkmoon RPG by Mongoose. I didn’t have a lot of time to look through it but the art looked very amateurish, and the overall book design uninspiring. While I was happy to see familiar Basic Role-playing Stats I wasn’t impressed with the mutation rules. I filed that away. When I read a review at RPG.net my doubts were confirmed.

the book is too short, the space between paragraphs is really huge and the page borders are enormous. This means that we have around 120 pages of real text, not enough for a traditional core book, and the consequences are huge. The rules are explained lightly, not improving the short descriptions from the SRD and lacking many examples, and the background is sparse.
The writing style is functional but never managed to catch my imagination, and the few interior illustrations are not good nor bad. At least the Tragic Europe map is adequate and well done…

…The game should be cool, but it's not, and I don't know what has happened. Maybe the Tragic Millennium is not suited for an RPG, or the book needed another focus and writing style.

For 30 bucks a pop it ought to be much better. Also, considering Mongoose is usually very good with design this is somewhat of a surprise. More books are coming so the world of Hawkmoon will be much more fleshed out and it’s compatible with all the other Runequest games published by Mongoose so that’s something. I guess I’ll wait for another edition down the road if I buy it at all.


Speaking of Mongoose, I’ve noticed that Conan 2nd Edition is a little late. It’s now coming out early September. I hope I still get the copy I ordered. Another Book, the Conan Bestiary has completely disappeared from their site. I was look forward to that one.

The big news that’s fired up the gamming community it the announcement of D&D 4th edition for 2008. From here:

Wizards of the Coast announced at Gen Con Indy Aug. 16 that the much-rumored fourth edition of the seminal role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons will be released in May 2008. However, several D&D support products…

D&D 4th Edition will continue to use the d20 game system — according to Wizards of the Coasts designers, the 4th Edition rules will be an “evolution of the system, not a revolution.” 4th Edition play is designed to be faster and easier for the Dungeon Master to adjudicate. Each character class will have a specific, defined role within an adventuring party, and the designers’ goal was to give each class interesting options for gameplay at every level. Character races have undergone a similar overhaul, with at least two new player races included in the Player's Handbook, and the core rules now go up to level 30 for characters; with the levels divided into three tiers: heroic for levels 1-10, paragon for 11-20, and epic for 21-30. One goal was to avoid having a single “sweet spot” — a specific range in levels where everyone wants to play. In D&D 3.5, this tends to be levels 7-13. For Dungeon Masters, the new edition includes new ways to build encounters by giving every monster in an encounter a role to play, and addresses or removes “game-stopping” rules like grappling in combat.

In addition to the physical rulebooks and supplements, a major component of 4th Edition will be digital. Wizards has launched a free beta version of Dungeons & Dragons Insider, the online component for 4th Edition, shortly after the Gen Con announcement. D&D Insider will change over to a subscription model around the time the new Player’s Handbook is released. For a monthly fee, D&D fans will have access to the online versions of Dragon and Dungeon magazines; online tools for players and DMs, including a character creator and map, encounter, and adventure building tools; D&D Anytime, a round-the-clock virtual game table which will allow gaming groups to get together and play D&D online; and forums and other community features.

I’m not mad I knew this was coming. I was thinking more like 2009. I’m not using the tons of 3.5 books I bought because I rarely role-play anyway. Oh well. It’s a good time to quit Dungeons and Dragons, although haven’t purchased anything new since 2006.



The future digital component of D&D explains why both Dragon and Dungeon magazines were cancelled. The final publication of these magazines was this month in fact. I thought about picking up that last Dragon, issue #359, because it’s supposed to have a retrospective, but most of it is info I wouldn’t use. So Long Dragon, I will miss the art.

Elric to Mongoose

There’s an unfulfilled yearning I’ve had for a long time. It was the hope that Chaosium (the guys that publish the Call of Cthulhu RPG) would really support their Michael Moorcock licensed game Stormbringer. It was the first non-TSR game I ever played that I honestly enjoyed and it was also my first introduction to Elric, the multiverse and the Eternal Champion. Well, that’s not entirely true as I had read the Oswald Bastable stories years before but at that time I hadn’t realized their connections to Moorcock’s other works. After playing the Stormbringer RPG, I immediately went out and scooped up and read all the Elric novels. This of course led me to Hawkmoon and Corum as well as the rest of the Eternal Champion titles. The battle between Law and Chaos both in the books and in the game was a fantastic backdrop for the adventures. Also the dimensional and time travel aspects fired me up as I greatly enjoy this type of fantasy.

Eventually, I bought all the Stormbinger game materials I could get my hands on, many from used bookstores. The product line went through many aborted restarts that included a name change to Elric for a while and even a poorly adapted version for D20. Many promised supplements never came out as the line was always thrown on the back burner in deference to Call of Cthulhu. We finally did see a Corum supplement and Chaosium finally put out some of their unpublished but promised books out as monographs (cheap photocopy tape bound books) but the fan base for their Moorcock inspired works seemed greatly reduced as was the enthusiasm for game itself.


Recently, I discovered that Mongoose Publishing acquired the RPG rights to the whole Eternal Champion line including Elric from Chaosium. See the link here. In the end it’s probably a good thing because Chaosium really wasn’t doing a whole lot with it (the biggest missed opportunity of the RPG world in my opinion), plus they had terribly damaged their relationship with Michael Moorcock. Still, it is a little sad as I thought we just might be on the verge of a Basic Role-Playing System Renaissance, Basic Role-Playing being Chaosium’s house system. Elric and Hawkmoon, which are coming out very soon, will be using Mongoose’s new Runequest rules (MRQ) to make them compatible with other game products they publish. This is good as the original Runequest formed the foundation for Basic Role-Playing (BRP) and Stormbringer, although the new Mongoose Runequest rules has been tweaked to make it appeal more to D20 fans.

I’m a little leery on dumping money on these new game products as I have spent a ton of cash on Mongoose’s Conan line only to see it revamped with an updated second addition. This is very much like how many fans were stuck when Wizards of the Coast decided to go from 3 to 3.5 on D&D. But if the past is any kind of prolog, Mongoose Publishing will be putting out a bunch of supplements for the Eternal Champion line, something Chaosium was unwilling or unable to do.

To sum it up, I guess it feels like I was in a relationship where I was never getting what I needed or wanted but still I stayed. Now, that bad relationship is over and I wonder if I should start a new one. I think I'll wait and see. I waited so long for Chaosium to step up to the plate, I guess I can wait a little longer to see if Mongoose’s game is any good before I buy.

-Swinebread