This Just In: Holiday Gift Wrapup

This latest batch of games and other stuff is interesting in that they are mostly not things I paid money for. And by that I don't mean I-got-it-on-Kickstarter-so-I-already-paid-for-it (and kicked in a bit more for shipping) but rather stuff that has tumbled into my lap as gifts. Here's the latest batch.

Zenimax Zippered Sweatshirt (Black with Zenimax logo on front)- This was a surprise holiday present from my new employers at Zenimax Online Studios. Oh, yeah, for those that don't follow my LinkedIn account, I have a new gig as a senior writer/designer at Zenimax. working on Elder Scrolls Online. Cool beans (and a nice pullover as well).

Midgard Worldbook (Wolfgang Baur, Richard Green, Dan Dillon, Chris Harris, Jeff Grubb, and Brian Suskind, Edited by Michele Carter, Kobold Press, 464 page hardbound book). I already have a copy of this book. Heck, I wrote (small) parts of this book. When Wolf was cleaning out a work area, he found an extra copy of the leather-bound, gold-foiled stamped edition, and passed it along. Which gave me the excuse to cruise through it again and wonder at how great is it. Midgard, the "home campaign" for Kobold Publishing, is a world full of worlds. Broken down into various broad areas, it not only reflects different cultures, but different styles of play as well. History, species, gods - regardless of your play style, there's something here for you.

Spelljammer (Christopher Perkins, Wizards of the Coast, three 64-page hardbound books with DM's screen, in Slipcase) Hang on, Jeff, I hear you say, didn't you already talk about this one? Well, yes, but Chris Perkins over at WotC was kind enough to pass along the "standard edition" of the setting, which is the same except for the art on the slipcase. I've had more of a chance to peruse what they have, and to a great degree it has grown on me. Yeah, there needs to be a better ship-to-ship combat systems, but back in the day we really did improve the basic system in original Spelljammer set with the later War Captain's Companion. This feels foundational, with a lot of room for individuals to grow and develop it.

Blade Runner RPG (Tomas Harenstam and Joe LeFavi, Free League, 232 page hardbound book) and Blade Runner Starter Set (Tomas Harenstam and Joe LeFavi, Free League, Boxed set w/rules, adventure, dice, cards, maps) I swear that Free League is either getting a subsidy from the Swedish government, or is secretly owned by a printing company/design house, since the company has some of the BEST looking products in the business (In addition to this one, we're looking at The One Ring, Vaasen, and Tales from the Loop as examples). Nice art, great production values, solid rules. Blade Runner pushes itself as being a dystopian SF world, and I don't think you escape a single paragraph in the book without being reminded that the future sucks, in particular for you.

John Company, Second Edition, A Game of Nepotism and Bureaucracy in the British East India Company for One to Six Players  (Cole Wehrle and Drew Wehrle, Wehrlegig Games, Boxed Game ) I've been spotty on doing board games from Kickstarter, if only because I have a couple boxes down in the basement that I intend to get around to playing some day. John Company is one of those games I supported on a whim, and upon delivery, I realize I may have bitten off more than I can chew. The box is crammed to the point where the lid does not quite fit. And the intro rules strongly recommend I spend a quiet hour, undisturbed, with a pot of coffee (what, no tea?) to puzzle them out. In the game you control a British family working for the East India Company (the John Company of the title), and maneuvering around others in order to set your familial line up for success and avoid total disaster. This is quite simply a labor of love - the game components and impressive and well-rendered, and even the box itself it artistically rendered. However, I am daunted by its sheer impressiveness. Reminds me of those long, engaging SPI/AH games I have on the shelves downstairs.

Kepler's Intergalactic Guide to Spaceships (Jake Parker, JP Creative, 128 page softbound book) I've also been hit and miss with art books - some good, some just average. Kepler's is just really, really good, and I found it a delight leafing through it. It is collection of various ship types, with commentary by Kepler, a four-armed starship mechanic. The ships themselves are pretty cool-looking and the world that is revealed by their descriptions (and the comic story that threads them together) is intriguing. My one regret is that these need more stats and a system for interactions (like ship-to-ship combat). In short, it would be a perfect setting for an RPG. Came with a calendar, two stickers (one bumper, one laptop) as Kickstarter tchotchkes. 

Court of Blades (Shawn and Navi Drake, A Couple of Drakes Publishing, 328 page hardbound book). There's a lot of discussion going on about D&D's OGL right now, but one thing it accomplished in the past 20 years is set the limits of the d20 system. And in doing so it allowed for a new generation of radically different RPGs. The Forged in the Dark system is one such solar system of RPGs, which depowers the GM, increases continual player interaction, and creates a more cinematic space of play. I've had the chance to play a few of these, and while I think it would a challenge for my grognard nature to run them, I really appreciate them. The system itself concentrates on one type of adventure, but as a result allows a wide variety of games to evolve from the core system. We have heists, military campaigns, space smuggling, and in this case, courtly intrigue. It describes itself as Gunpowder Diplomacy, the coterie of players represents servants of a particular noble house they are supporting, and would be comfortable from Shakespearean tales to the Three Musketeers. The rules follow the formatting of other Blades products, so if you are familiar with one, you will be able to follow along here, and the artwork is excellent. 

Downtime in Zyan ( Ben Laurence, Through Ultan's Door, 36 page pamphlet 'zine). After raving about the art and production values of the previous three items, I have to come clean and admit the art for this latest addition to Through Ultan's Door is below the quality of its predecessors. It is drawings of fantasy mole rats in a style similar to Adventure Time cartoons. But the subject matter and quality redeems all things. The entire subject involves what do do in the down time between adventures, including investment, social relationships, training, carousing, and spell research. We've all taken stabs at doing things between the sword-swinging, and this gives a great structure and some room for thought about entire process. Recommended. 

Secrets of Los Angeles (Peter Aperlo, Chaosium, 2007, 192 page softbound book) This was a gift from fellow creative Steve Winter, who discovered he had two copies and offered me one. My affection for the Call of Cthulhu RPG is well-know, and my shelves are starting to groan with the wide variety of products published over the years. But I have a special place in my heart of the layout and graphic design of the black and white sourcebooks they produced. Texturally dense but divided into bite-sized nuggets, with photos of the era and a large amount of sidebars, this is a grand tour of 1920s LA, along with two short scenarios to drive you players mad with. Yeah, I'm a softy for the presentation, the subject and the era (spilling over into the hard-boiled 1930s).

That's enough rambling for now. I think I need to settle down with a little light reading in Midgard at the moment.  

More later,

New Arrivals: PreConventional Entry

 So later this week I'm heading out to Gamehole Con in Madison, Wisconsin, along with a whole host of friends, colleagues, fans, and fellow professionals. So I want to get all this out the way before I add more to the pile.

The vast bulk of these come from Kickstarters resolving, and arriving on the doorstep. So I may comment on the process as well as the product.

Let's start.

Ryder's Intergalactic Guide to Robots by Jake Parker, JP Creative, 128-page landscape-formatted softbound, 2024, Kickstarter. Jake Parker did Kepler's Guide to Spaceships last year, and I thought well enough of it to get the next volume. Parker wraps a story around a collection of autonomous robots, worker mechs, AI-guided vehicles, and warbots. I love the variety, and am sure there is a full universe in here somewhere, just waiting to come out.

Sentai & Sensibility, by Bug Boll, 9th Level Games, 108-page digest-sized softbound, 2024, Kickstarter. This is one of the stranger games I've picked up, but I'm glad I have. It's a combination of Japanese tokusatsu (live action with extensive special effects) with Regency Romance, in Boll's words, "Power Rangers as written by Jane Austen". You are one of the Gentlefolk (gentry), who can become a heroic Ranger when danger threatens, and with the rest of your allies (sentai) you combine to form a colossus (Voltron) to battle kaiju (giant monsters). The rule system is interesting in that your class (Station) determines the die you roll, and different type of challenges (Dance Moves) require different results, such that the physically weakest class is also the best at social interactions. The challenge is that all of this is buried under a mass of unique terminology set for the Regency era, so you're learning new terms to go with new mechanics. The Kickstarter comes with a deck of cards (characters, classes, and rules) and some standups, which are very nice, but now I have to make sure they don't get separated in my mess of an office. 

The Electrum Archives Issues 1 & 2 By Emiel Boven and Ava Islam, Cult of the Lizard King, 70-page and 78-page Digest-sized softbound books w/ four-panel paper maps, 2024, Kickstarter. This is a game system masquerading as a campaign setting. It is set in Orn, a desertified world that has seen several rulers and conquerors (and their ruins) over its long history. It is alien in many ways, and its magic runs off of ancient ink, which is also the coinage. Five attributes, three character classes, and a whole lot of weirdness which really tickles my Tekumel-based biases. The rules are presented cleanly and clearly, and while the players need a bit more investment (Spell names are random-rolled, and you get to figure out what they mean with your GM/Seer), it looks absolutely fascinating. My only gripe? I saw it for sale at GenCon a month before I got it in my hands. Yeah, it would be nice for the original funders to get their copies. 

Historica Arcanum: Era of the Crusades, Sarp Duyar &  Doga Can Sayilkan (Project Leads), Meta Creative 272 page hardback,  and Historica Arcanum: The Sigil of Jerusalem,  240-page hardback, two full-color maps, slipcased, 2024, Kickstarter. Meta Creative, out of Istanbul, rates up there with Free League for producing beautiful-looking books. They've concentrated on historical fantasy, expanding out the 5E system into Cairo and Jerusalem in the 13th century. There are new classes, the the system is growing outwards with new Professions, and a Deck of the Damned to make combat more stressful (with the stress mechanic developing in a similar fashion to CoC's Sanity Rules). Sigil of Jerusalem repeats some of the player-facing material, and launches into a conspiracy in Jerusalem itself.  Metis does itself a great favor in its release schedule, as this showed up on my doorstep JUST as they were launching their new Kickstarter. 

Campaign Builder: Castles & Crowns, by Richard Green, Tim Hitchcock, Brian Suskind (Lead Designers), Kobold Press, 272-page hardbound,2024, Kickstarter. Kobold hews closer to 5E than a lot of the other D&D Descendants listed here. This is the second volume of their Campaign Builder series, and deals with the elites - nobility and the court. And it is a toybox of new heritages, subclasses, settings, factions, kingdom types and monsters. It works closer to traditional Western European D&D, but has a lot of good foundational material for kingdom building. Yes, I Kickstarted this, even though I could have mooched a copy off chief Kobold Wolfgang Baur, but I wanted to see what was in it. 

Never Going Home by Braden Aten and Matthew Orr, Wet Ink Games, 118-page softbound, 2019, Purchased from Grandcon (Grand Rapids) from Pete Petrusha, who had a booth there, This was originally Kickstarted, but I don't know why I didn't go in for it at the time. It is an original system using both dice and cards for resolution and resources. The setting in 1916 in the trenches of WWI. In the Battle of the Somme, a tear between worlds has unleashed a horde of nastiness on the battlefield. Where your unit is. Your squad has to deal the the atrocities of the battlefield as well as horrible things that crawling into our reality. 

Sol System by a small host of talented people, Green Ronin Publishing, 112-page softbound, 2024, Midgard Comics. Designed for The Expanse RPG, this is very much an old-school sourcebook, with tons of subject matter and just a smattering of RPG rules. It handles a lot of the factions, corporations, religions, and criminal operations in the sol system, an expansion of the trade rules from the original book. This is much more in the "readable" column than the must use to play column, but given that the company is upgrading the core rulebook to handle the current situation in the universe, it's pretty cool.

Astro Inferno by Andreas Ruu, Haxan Studios, 384-page hardbound, 2024, Kickstarter. Astro Inferno is the most recent arrival here, and requires a bit more thought. It is both stylish and convoluted. Set in a post-apocalyptic demonic SF universe, it uses a lot of unique mechanics and, like Sentai & Sensibility, buries them under a mass of setting-related names and descriptions. It is a beautiful art-game, with excellent production qualities, and a variety of hard-to-read fonts, including that jagged-lightning typography favored by heavy metal bands. Long ago, at TSR, we received a copy of Wraith, from White Wolf, which used this iconography for its cover, and could not decide what the title was - we finally settled on "Noseroids". It's the same thing here. Yeah, this one's going to be a tough climb to wrap my brain around.

And that's it for the moment. I will be at Gamehole Con later in the week, and will probably find some more cool stuff there. 

So definitely More later. Noseroids.