It's no great mystery that the new, Black Industries version of Talisman is probably my favorite new, old game of the past few months. (And apparently not just mine since it's headed up to Xbox Live here soonish.) As with most deluxo boardgames, though, the price tag is just about as hefty as the sturdy cardboard box. But, if the price to play has kept you away from one of the best games the '80s had to offer, you can find relief in this month's issue of Game Trade Magazine. Yup, a short skimming of the game news, previews, and reviews magazine/webzine leads you to their month's game giveaway, this time featuring the magical quest game Talisman. The four games they're giving away also include mysterious bonus cards from Black Industries. So, just jump on over to GTM's giveaway website, type in your info, and you could be slaying dragons and turning your friends into frogs in just a few short weeks!
That's right, with the next few clicks you could start a journey into a world of vampires and werewolves, of unquiet spirits and dark-souled hunters. Consider your next choice carefully, because White Wolf in looking for interns, and that could mean you! Yup, gearing up for the creation of their MMORPG, the makers of Vampire, Werewolf, and other roleplaying games that go bump in the night need fresh blood. Especially fresh blood with experience working with C++ and some programming skill. If your steeled to stride into the abyss, check out the full posting on the White Wolf website.
Or, more aptly, Steve Jackson Games plays dress-up! After seeing the host of video gaming companies decked out this All Hollow's Eve, I was a little disappointed that there weren't more tabletop gaming companies to post images of themselves in all their frightful fabulousness (though, Paizo did threaten to turn people into mummies and Fantasy Flight Games dished out some new Tannhauser tokens). Fortunately, if there's any company that knows about tradition it's Steve Jackson Games, who posted a gallery of spooks haunting their offices last Wednesday! While there's no Team Fortress teams, we've got some Marvel zombies, furries, and cross-dressing for ya!
So, did anyone get dressed up as their character or favorite NPC this week? Come on, be honest!
Think you've got what it takes to compete in the fast-paced, hard-drinking, sleep-deprived world of professional tabletop RPG design? Well Paizo Publishing is giving you the chance to find out! Yesterday they announced RPG Superstar, a contest wherein would-be game designers run the gamut of d20 game design trials—from magic items and monsters to encounter creation. Each challenge is then judged by a panel of celebrity professionals, determining who advances to the next levels and who heads back to the obscurity of their parents' basement. The panel of dreammakers and dreambreakers includes Greyhawk scholar and Paizo's Publisher, Erik Mona; former Dragon editor and editor of Kobold Quarterly, Wolfgang Baur; and the cult leader of Necromancer Games Clark Peterson. In the end, the four most successful designers eventually advance to the final, most challenging round, wherein they submit a proposal for a complete adventure, vying for a chance at a paid commission to write a full, published module for Paizo's GameMastery line.
"With the end of the print editions of Dragon and Dungeon magazines, Paizo has lost a conduit to find new talent," said Lisa Stevens, CEO of Paizo Publishing, "so we decided to launch an RPG design contest similar to American Idol, giving unknown talent a chance to get noticed!"
The contest starts today, with participants being challenged to create the coolest wondrous item. Since this is a contest created to let some new stars shine, Paizo worked a nice little caveat in as their first rule: "Anyone who has been employed full-time as a designer for a game company is ineligible. Anyone with a cover credit on a hardcover RPG book is ineligible. Designers who have been credited on Paizo's Pathfinder or GameMastery products are ineligible." You can check out the full rules and details on RPG Superstar on the official rules website.
So, if you've always wanted to get your foot in the RPG industry door, or even just said "My game's better than this," now's your chance to prove it!
In exactly the sort of news that makes you happy to wake up in the morning, Privateer Press has announced a new game: Monsterpocalypse. A collectable miniatures game from the makers of some of the hottest minis games in the last five years (if you haven't played Warmachine, you're doing yourself a disservice), the name Monsterpocalypse pretty much sums up what the game's about: giant kaiju fighting on the battlefields of puny human cities.
Yes Gojira fans, this one's for you.
The initial set is planned to launch sometime in 2008 with more than 80 pre-painted plastic minis, including buildings to destroy, vehicles, and a number of familiar-looking but different enough not to get sued giant monsters. It looks like they're headed the start and randomly organized booster pack route, but for kaiju rumbling, that's fine by me! Head on over to Privateer's website for the full announcement, including a preview of some of the unpainted sculpts.
Matt Wilson, the big boss over at Privateer, also wrote a really optimistic letter about the state of the company, assuring all their fans that they're doing well and that this new thing doesn't herald an end to all their old things. But you know what that letter isn't? A giant radioactive tyrannosaurus, so I'm going to go back to drooling over that!
Okay, so I've been hard on Wizards of the Coast the last couple of days, but mainly because they're big boys and they can take it. But, since you only get points for things you like, looking on the bright side of things reveals that the cover of Elder Evils, WotC's big book of world-ending villains to kill the hell out of your 3E campaign, has slipped onto the internet. And best of all, there in all his wormy wrath is Kyuss (the deity, not the band). If you're not familiar with the Worm that Walks, he's the father of some of D&D's scariest undead, the spawn of Kyuss; the demigod of corruption and undead naughtiness; and the main villain of Dungeon magazine's Age of Worms Adventure Path—probably the most epic story to be told in third edition D&D.
There's a discussion about the book where a few authors chime in on ENworld, as well as several misreadings of the book's title as "Elder Elvis."
So, say what you will about WotC and the 3E end times, but if I get to customize my own end of the world, I'm going to make the apocalypse squirm!
Wow. So, I caught wind a few days ago that the ravening masses over at Hordelings—a well-connected fan site for diehard D&D Miniatures fans—had posted up a healthy number of scans from the set poster for next month's D&D Minis expansion, Desert of Desolation. Taking a peek at their selection, boy-oh-boy did it look like someone had left the corral door open at Rancho Deformo. Talk about some ugly minis.
Fortunately, today Maxminis has posted up the complete preview poster (in obnoxiously horizontal pieces), restoring the balance between the fetching and the fugly. Finally! A shadar-kai with lavender stretch pants! Why this wasn't in Harbinger I'll never know.
Okay, so it's like you've waited nine months and the baby's finally here—but it's one of those beat-up, smoosh-face brand ugly babies. But all the parts work and it's still what you've been waiting almost a year for so, of course, you take it home and you still love it and all... but you just know it's going to have one tough road to hoe.
Yeah. That's kind of the deal with the Dragonlance movie. The trailer's up on YouTube now... and the signs are not good. That’s pretty much all I’m going to say… except for that that’s one ugly baby.
Germans take their board games seriously. You'd expect as much from the country of origin for some of the best known modern classics like Settlers of Catan and Caracassonne. So it makes sense that the biggest, convention for board games and their makers takes places every year in Essen, Germany at Spie. Going on this past weekend, Spiel 2007 is were games go to get noticed, each hoping to get the attention of new players and hopefully fall under the right eyes to get them distributed throughout Europe and beyond. That’s also not to mention the thousands of attendees who go just to try out some new games, do some cosplaying, and all the usual gaming con stuff.
Although I wasn't able to travel to the other side of the world this year to check it out, the folks over at both Board Game Geek and and Spotlight On Games did, snapping a bunch of pictures and talking about some of the more than 500 new titles that debuted! So if you're into board games, check out the news from the show and see what you can expect to show up on your game store shelves in the next year. Or, just take a gander at the official Spiel gallery to ogle a few cute German guys. Nett!
Just a little more buzz on the upcoming Xbox Live release of Talisman. If you pop on over to Kotaku today you'll be treated to a gallery of six of the character models to be featured in the game: a troll in dress pants, a math-teacher-looking priest, a sorceress showing off her cleavage, and others, along with the in-game card they're inspired by. There's still no toad or devil art for those of you looking for the most dreaded parts of the game, but hopefully this tidbit will help tide you over till the game's release later this year.
Yes, there's nothing more exciting in an MMORPG than killing the same monster over and over again, hoping that it'll drop your fiftieth "Bungscale Cobra-Toe," thus allowing you to craft your green, +1 to fancy walkin', pair of Bungscale Boots. That is—you know—except for going on quests and killing dragons and stuff.
Well now, thanks to the magic of Upper Deck'sWorld of Warcraft Trading Card Game, you can relive all the magic of gathering up trash and turning it into something passingly good with their new Crafting Redemption Program! Starting with the upcoming Fires of Outland expansion, one of every booster pack's fifteen precious cards will be a trade good (like cobrascales, or heavy knothide leather, or shadow cloth) that you can collect. Get enough—somewhere in the twenty to thirty range—that match the requirements of specific recipes and you can turn your crap loot into something maybe actually useable. Just like in the game! Fires of Outland will have five crafting recipes, and if you get the prereqs, you can trade in your ingredients either at a number of WOW TCG events or just mail them in, and in return, you get your newly "crafted" card.
The idea is pretty innovative—as in, I can't think of anything else like this short of collecting box-tops to get your Ovaltine Secret Decoder Ring. However, do the widely-held boring parts of an MMO need to be translated into the TCG too? Personally, I think I'd rather kill monsters rather then make boots.
One of the big pieces of news out of this past weekend's Diamond & Alliance Retailer Summit (a big industry thing with tabletop gaming's two largest distributors) was the announcement that the three core rulebooks for Dungeons & Dragons fourth edition will not be releasing over a three month period early next year (May, June, July 2008) as previously touted, but instead will now all be released in June. For players, this is good news (you get the whole game at once) and bad news(you have to wait another month), but for retailers this is quite a blow, essentially forcing stores to buy significant volumes of three hardcover books in one month instead of spread out over a three month period. Wizard's of the Coast's Sara Girard reiterated her statements at the retailer summit on ENWorld yesterday, saying, "Due to customer feedback, we made the decision to release all three core rulebooks in June. Keep on the Shadowfell releases in May. And the Special Edition Core Rulebooks release in October." I'll not get into rumor mongering or conspiracy theories here (though there's plenty of those too), but I can't remember the last time I ever heard a gamer offer the "feedback" that they want something later.
By the by. Isn't that Satan, the Prince of Darkness, on the cover of the new Player's Handbook? Good thing D&D doesn't have a long-standing stigma associated with it for just this sort of thing.
Gay Gamer Of The Week: David
Name: David Age: 19 Astrological sign: Gemini! Gay, Straight or Bi: Gay Relationship Status: Single :( Consoles/handhelds you own: Gameboy, Gameboy Color, Gameboy Advance, Nintendo DS, Sega Game Gear, PSP, Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Gamecube, Wii, PS1, PS2...
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