Archive for category Gamey
A thing of power
Posted by Rockjaw in Gamey, Personal, Roleplaying on April 14th, 2009
Taken this weekend in mid-roleplaying session. I wasn’t even using the die, it just looked good in the light.
Very happy with how this turned out considering it was off my cameraphone.
Godspeed, get well and good health
Posted by Rockjaw in Gamey, Roleplaying on April 9th, 2009
After a false alarm earlier this week, I wake up this morning to read that sadly Dave Arneson, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons (along with Gary Gygax), passed away late on April 7th, at 61 years old, falling victim to cancer.
In another part of America, Aaron Allston, who I raved about just the other day as author of many Star Wars novels, plus Champions 5th Edition and my personal all-time favourite RPG book, Strike Force, suffered a heart attack while on his latest book tour. He required a quadruple bypass operation – not exactly an easy procedure – but I’m thankful to say, is on the mend.
After hearing about those two roleplaying icons, it felt slightly spooky to read a blog entry from Jeff Grubb (designer of Marvel Super Heroes, amongst many other things, and now a designer for Guild Wars 2) talking about his health, which in his words is “pretty sound”, but “could be better in many ways”. I’m sure Jeff’s going to be designing for many years to come, but all of this reminds me how far the roleplaying hobby, along with everything that span off from it, has come.
Dave Arneson was born in 1947, so he was approaching 30 when Dungeons & Dragons began to really take off. Thirty odd years later the roleplaying hobby has been an industry, and is now shrinking and maybe changing back into hobby it was, but it gave birth to something else: the computer-based descendants of RPGs, both single and multiplayer.
Those games, I’d argue, are struggling to find their defining moment, when they’ll break out of the original mold roleplaying formed for them. They’ll get there, but it might take a while. After all, today’s independent RPGs are fairly radically different from the original dungeon delvers.
Today though, there’s time for some reflection. I’ve never met Arneson, Allston or Grubb, and of course never will meet Arneson now, but all three of them have had a huge impact on my life. Perhaps I should start acknowledging that with more than a blog entry.
There are plenty of kind words for Dave Arneson around the web, by people who knew him and some who didn’t. I’ll list a few below, but this quote from Jeff Grubb summed up Arneson and Gygax’s legacy for me:
Gary and Dave were the Stan Lee and Jack Kirby of our hobby, the names by which later generations would conjure. They created what would be modern roleplaying, and the rest of us are caught up in their wake.
Five roleplaying games I’ve played, and you should too
Posted by Rockjaw in Gamey, Roleplaying on April 6th, 2009
I tend to ignore ‘pingbacks’ or ‘trackbacks’, because nine times out of ten they’re from RSS-scrapers who are linking back to where they stole the original content from, so they can die in a fire. However, very rarely, I get a genuine blog post at the other end; even more rarely, I get a blog post I actually take an interest in.
Witness: 100 Pen and Paper Roleplaying Games You Should Play Before You Die, an impressive inaugural blog post on Games Info Depot’s Games Information Blog. (Looks to me like someone’s been reading hints on making catchy blog headlines. Hey, it worked!)
It’s a pretty good list, admit stretched a bit to get to that catchy one hundred figure; as well as a lot of old favourites there’s some new indie stuff in there too, along with a few titles I’d never heard of, so kudos for the research.
No clue why I got linked for Marvel Heroes (sic) though – if you’re after Marvel Super Heroes stuff (thanks, Pedant Man!) then you should head over to Classic Marvel Forever for everything you’ll ever need.
I thought about compiling my own list of roleplaying games that I’d rate a ‘must try’, but me being me, what started as a simple list turned into a long trip down memory lane, and a lot of research into games I’d never even played.
So in an attempt to give you something that might be a bit more personal, instead of just rehashing Wikipedia, what follows is a look at five noteworthy RPGs I’ve at least played, and figure that hey, you might enjoy too. I’ll get to five more before too long.
Artifacts of roleplaying: the Marvel Super Heroes City Map
Posted by Rockjaw in Gamey, Personal, Roleplaying on March 27th, 2009
Roleplayers put a lot of stock in maps.
Maps can fire the imagination, make you see worlds in a way that description can’t. A good map of a fantasy world can supercharge your play experience, and take you into that world better than anything else. I think there’s a reason why the most popular request for Collector’s Edition items in MMOGs was always “a cloth map”.
Not all maps are of fantasy locations, however, and the map that made the greatest impression on my mind as a roleplaying teenager was this:
The city map as seen in the original ‘yellow box’ of Marvel Super Heroes, from TSR in 1984.
No single item (with the probable exception of the map that came in the Advanced Set, two years later) had more of a jumpstart on my gaming than this map. I played endlessly on this thing, generating plotlines simply based off the names on the buildings. It came alone in the box, with no explanation, no attempt to define everything you’d find on it; in other words, your imagination was allowed to run wild.
Looking at it brings back waves of nostalgia, to be sure, but also two definite urges: one, to use it again; and two, to create something similar for myself, even if my illustration knowledge is minimal. Let’s see what I can do….
You said what?