The Gaming News

Ah, GenCon weekend. Not going this year, but when I do go, I hunt down the small companies that I have never heard of before and check out their projects. These days, with the Internets and the Amazons, the throw-weight of smaller companies is a lot greater, but the chance to actually physically check out the product before purchase has a thrill. Also, the person you're buying it from may just be the designer.

Yet with GenCon there has been a sudden wave of activities on the Kickstarters and elsewhere for new products, many of which by people I know and some of which I have actually supported. Let's take a look.

First off, Let me start off with a Humble Bundle. Humble Bundles are collections of electronic media (games, pdfs, e-books) that are offered a low, low price (though you can make it higher and get more). The proceeds go to good causes. In this case the causes are Girls Make Games and Girls Who Code, both of which work to expand gender diversity in pretty male-overwhelmed areas. The books are a huge selection of books on game design, some of which I own, and some of which I have contributed to. AND this particular bundle has new, just published material by Mike Selinker.

If you're also looking for more books about games, take a gander at Your Best Game Ever from our friends at Monte Cook Games. It not rules for playing a game, but advice on how to use those rules for, well, your best game ever. Usable both by new players and old, YBGE is already blowing up in funding. Plus, if you want rules with your tools, they are offering the revised Cypher System Rulebook, which is MCG's "universal" system. Check it out.

Also in Kickstarter (and blowing up even bigger) is The Expanse RPG. I got into The Expanse from the Lovely Bride - she tends to Tivo entire seasons and binge-watch, and my attention is collateral damage (I would walk into the room, sit down, and then cross-examine her at the commercial breaks). It's a great TV show, but it is based on books (no, really, books. With words and letters and chapter and everything). And The Expanse RPG is based on those books. It uses Green Ronin's AGE system, but sounds like it has a couple neat tweaks to it.

Also on the Kickstarter is Demon City, by Zak Smith. Call it experimental gestalt weird fantasy. Call it millennial urban horror. I really liked both the presentation and the content of Red and Pleasant Land (Alice's adventures in a D&D universe - better than the old Through the Magic Mirror), and Maze of the Blue Medusa (which neatly juggles a bunch of different subplots into one major adventure). Both readable and playable. So I expect to like this as well.

Staying with Kickstarter, but moving into the past, Steve Jackson is bringing back The Fantasy Trip, which was one of those foundational games back in the early days of D&D/ Originally micro-games with paper chips and maps, it was a hex-based combat game that simply recapitulated the nature of fantasy combat. At a time when D&D options were just starting to sprout up, it took the dungeon to the boardgame long, long before 4th Edition. I think I still have a copy or two in the basement. This looks like a faithful recreation of the original, more of an update than a complete revision.

And ALSO from Kickstarter AND with a healthy whiff of updated nostalgia, we have Over the Edge, which back in the day was a brilliant combo of mechanics and world-building. Imagine D&D if Hunter Thompson had teamed up with Gygax and Arneson, and if Bill Burroughs replaced Edgar Rice Burroughs in Appendix N. Unlike The Fantasy Trip, this is an all-new edition set on the island nation of Al Amarja, and I want to see what they've done with it.

Fine, you want some games that are already finished and available? Do you have IOs on your tablet or phone? Take a look at the Cthulhu Chronicles, which gives you solitaire adventures in the Mythos/ There are both transposed Call of Cthulhu adventures (Alone against the Flames) and original material here. The first three sanity-shattering adventures for the day are free! The classic nature of the old choose-your-own-adventure books with modern-age technology! Indulge your Lovecraftian desires!

And since I'm still talking about games, how about some fanzines? I would mention both Warlock #6 (from Kobold Press) which deals with the City of Brass and The Excellent Traveling Volume #8, a wonderful Empire of the Petal Throne 'zine. The mere fact I have articles in both of them has nothing to do with my hearty recommendation.

And finally, let me mention Dungeons & Dragons Art and Arcana: A Visual History, which is NOT out yet, will prove to be the ultimate source for art in the golden age of TSR. The authors are recognized masters in reporting the history of D&D, and, I am have been informed, the book will include several pieces of art from the Private Collection at Grubb Street. I'm really looking forward to this!

And with that, the Gaming News wraps up. More later,

Conspiracy

As a method of explaining the universe, conspiracy theory falls more to the belief/religion end of the scale than the knowledge/science end. The unprovable existence of a clique involved in world domination is more strongly related to the ideas of phlogiston and aether - substances that exist because they MUST exist in order to make the theory work.

That is not so say that conspiracies do not exist. Any gathering of individuals for a particular end can be said to be a conspiracy, particularly if that gathering is aimed at excluding others that might disagree. Price-fixing corporations, wheeling-dealing politicans, and bomb-planting terrorists all engage in conspiracies. But these conspiracies have a single goal (keep profits high, push a political agenda, blow up a building). The conspiracies of conspiracy theory exist as a self-sustaining creation with a broad range of ongoing goals, generally operating under the title "global domination". The Elders of Zion, The Illuminati, Vampires, and Doctor Evil are all examples of this type of conspiracy. Conspiracy exists as a verb, not a noun - it is something people are doing, not a structure that does many things.

All of which gets me to the Society of Jesus, better known as the Jesuits. A friend send me this link the other day, seeking to "prove" the conspiracy of the Jesuits by publishing a list of influential graduates from Marquette, a college in Milwaukee. I'm sorry, a JESUIT college, which is churning out influential JESUITs who are therefore part of the JESUIT conspiracy.

On that list are some people I know Carrie Bebris (author of the Jane Austin Detective novel Pride and Prescience), James Lowder (author and comic book editor - more on that last one later), and John Rateliff, who known in these pages as Sacnoth. John is that most dangerous of Jesuits, a Southern Presbyterian, who claims that he went to Marquette only for its Tolkien collection, but sounds much TOO EASY, so he MUST be part of the conspiracy.

I understand conspiracists, I really do. It is easier to believe in some world-controlling malicious organization (secret, of course) responsible for all the worlds' ills. It beats the heck out of the alternative - that we are hurtling randomly through an uncaring universe with no control and no ultimate destiny. We can take solace in the fact that even an EVIL plan is still a plan, and the existence of a greater force, be it god or conspiracy, lifts the burden of responsibility and action from one's own shoulders, and places it in a fictious entity.

And the thing is, I believe more in god than I do in conspiracies like the Jesuits. God's got more options.

More later,