Everyone has had enough of 2020, maybe more so than any year in recent (or distant!) memory. Isn’t it about time we have more fun? Simon & Schuster imprint Adams Media has a quick way to get started. Editor James D’Amato has enlisted forty game players and game makers to build 40 quick-to-learn roleplaying games in The Ultimate Micro-RPG Book. The ideas are brilliant, the breadth of content, completely creative. You can choose from several levels of complexity, different genres, game types, game tie-in props and tools, and a variety of tones and formats. If you like to play roleplaying games (RPGs) or you’re a beginner, you’ll find a lot to propel you to create your own games and enjoy something new to play right now in this volume.
Just when you’re looking for a stocking stuffer for your favorite Dungeons & Dragons gamer, Wizards of the Coast steps in with an update to one of its classic card games. The Great Dalmuti is a multi-player card game from the mind of Richard Garfield, creator of Magic the Gathering. Artist Harry Conway has provided the D&D spin on the cards, but the core rules remain the same. It’s available now here at Amazon, and via your local game shop.
Video game dabblers and players turn into game company entrepreneurs in Netflix’s latest retro fix, High Score, a documentary in the vein of shows like VH1’s Behind the Music and The Toys That Made Us. Pioneer designers and creators like Space Invaders creator Tomohiro Nishikado, Nintendo’s Hirokazu Tanaka, and Atari’s Nolan Bushnell piece together a brief history of video games with an emphasis on home play in this new six-episode, limited series now streaming on Netflix. The series goes through the development and rise of games moving from upright consoles to the television set, with Mystery House, Space Invaders, Star Fox, Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Mario Bros., Sonic the Hedgehog, Madden Football, Street Fighter II, Mortal Kombat, and Doom rising to the top as the touchstones of this modern corner of history.
This week the Wizards of the Coast roleplaying game team introduces a third way to enter its family friendly world of Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying fun in a card game format with Dungeon Mayhem: Monster Madness. Along with the barbarian Sutha the Skullcrusher, the wizard Azzan the Mystic, the paladin Lia the Radiant, and the rogue Oriax the Clever from 2018’s Dungeon Mayhem base card game, and ranger Minsc with his miniature-giant space hamster, Boo, and the shapeshifting druid Jaheira from theBattle for Baldur’s Gate expansion pack, players now have six new monsters to add to the mix, and a stylized deluxe box that allows for all 12 character card decks to be housed in one place and played as a single game for up to six players.
In Dungeon Mayhem: Monster Madness, you play as one of six D&D monsters, each with their own way to charm, crush, disintegrate, and devour their foes. They include the beholder Delilah Deathray, the mind flayer Dr. Tentaculous, Blorp the gelatinous cube, the killer lounge chair mimic Mimi Lechaise, the red dragon Lord Cinderpuff, and the owlbear Hoots McGoots. Select a character from the core deck and one from the six monsters or combine decks from any past edition you have–each player chooses a character and corresponding deck of cards and all prepare for mayhem.
If you enjoyed the previously released six characters, you’re going to love mixing them up with the new six. Their personalities are smartly coordinated with their individual powers, and players will soon find their own favorites. Kids of all ages will love attacks like crushing hugs from an owlbear, or defending an attack from a rogue using “all the daggers.” Whether prompted by an evil sneer from a wizard or an eviler sneer from a dragon, everyone will have fun with the now complete set of Dungeon Mayhem characters.
Sometimes the marketeers get everything exactly right (one of our favorites is still that Coma ad pack we received 7 years ago). And that goes for a new roleplaying game from Wendy’s. Yep, that’s right, a fully fleshed-out roleplaying game from everyone’s favorite fast food restaurant that serves Frostys. And best of all, it’s free (you can download the entire 97-page rulebook and campaign guide below). Not only is it capitalizing (“capital” as in in-your-face, unapologetic commercialism) on the recent wave of interest in Dungeons & Dragons that was re-kindled by Stranger Things, the new roleplaying game Feast of Legends will probably divert at least a few groups of Wednesday night gamers to join in on a fun (and humorous) new adventure.
Feast of Legendsis another good introduction to roleplaying games and springboard to the real deal. It includes a Rule Book and Game Master’s Guide with five campaigns to be led by your designated Game Master: Take on The Queen’s Quest, Trouble at Frosty Canyon, Lighting of the Bacon Beacon, The Biggie Vale, and The Deep Freeze, plus there’s a chapter on expansion play. Make your own character, join one of the 14 orders, or use pre-designed character sheets via a “quick start guide” to get on your way, with instructions on how to do so. This isn’t your typical throwaway giveaway. Players have five levels to achieve, and the book has all of the details on gameplay, adventuring, and yes, you will use food, specifically Wendy’s menu items, cleverly incorporated along the way. One of the underlying themes is Wendy’s advertising fresh meat over frozen, so a key villain here is the Ice Jester–a not-so-subtle jab at Ronald McDonald. His lair? A playhouse with tunnels and a colorful ball pit. Brilliant! Constable Von Freeze steps in for Mayor McCheese… Beware the Mimic Meal… Can you help Queen Wendy, by sneaking into the Deep Freeze and stop the Ice Jester before he can march on Freshtovia and start a new Frozen Age?
Although we wish we could credit by name the Wendy’s inside marketing team that wrote these rules, a big shout-out is owed to Alex Lopez for illustrations that mash-up the visual style from both classic RPG and Wendy’s iconography. Neither Lopez nor mapmaker Collin Fogel appear to have created illustrations before for D&D producer Wizards of the Coast, but this rule book should help them get their foot in the door (if D&D is really their thing).
Ahoy there, matey. Gaming developer Rare and distributor Microsoft have said they expect their new shared world action-adventure game Sea of Thieves to be a major success for Xbox One and Windows PC, with a Rare company executive stating he expects the game to become a franchise as popular as Halo, Gears of War, and Minecraft. As part of its efforts to bring in players, Rare has partnered with Titan Books to publish a tie-in to the game,Tales from the Sea of Thieves. Sea of Thieves the game is a first-person pirate adventure allowing players to sail a legendary world alone or with a crew of up to four players. Released in March, the game’s greatest appeal so far for fans has been its great visuals, opting for a cartoon-like palette versus a photo-real world, and its cooperative gameplay.
Written by Paul Davies, Tales from the Sea of Thieves is a fictional journal written loosely in the style of seafaring lore like you’d find in A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly novels, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, more recently William Goldings’ To the Ends of the Earth, and countless other historical accounts. Its design becomes a real-world take-home prop from the game, a mock “battered and beaten” textured hardcover that looks and feels like a 19th century book that will go well with your tricorn, Jolly Roger, parrot, compass, and telescope. The contents are in-universe, providing the accounts of pirate crew experienced years before the events of the game, introducing the types of adventures players can encounter in the game.
The tales are light fare, suitable for any age. They don’t go so far as the darker side of the high seas as you would find in Lovecraft, but the voices are similarly evocative of his style. The artwork is stylized from the game and fun, full color with the icons and emblems you’d expect from pirate lore. Even the page edges are untrimmed as with journals and books of years past.
You still have 12 days to get in on what has become a fully funded Kickstarter campaign for a new tabletop roleplaying game. Half wargame, half tactics game, The Terminator: The Official Board Game is an asymmetrical strategy game in the making for 2-5 players played across two game boards: one in 1984 and one in 2029. It’s all based on the original 1984 science fiction classic, James Cameron film starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
One player takes control of all of Skynet’s forces, including Hunter Killer machines and Terminator cyborgs. The rest of the players take the role of the human resistance, like Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese, struggling against the impossible odds of the machine uprising. Each of the two game boards play differently: 2029 focuses on light troop and resource management in a lopsided battle for dominance. 1984 focuses on personal missions with high stakes and intense pacing. Missions arise through the course of gameplay, and have players make decisions in 1984 that will affect the future, erasing and adding components in real time. You can download and try your own paper version of the game now, including game boards, game cards, tokens, and rules at this link. Take a look at a full half hour video of gameplay below.
In well under a month since the Kickstarter began, the crowd-funding campaign was full funded. A wide variety of game purchase options remain available, as well as great perks for donors. Check out all the options at the The Terminator: The Official Board Gamehere.
Count Strahd von Zarovich is having guests for dinner – and you are invited.
The latest storyline in Dungeon & Dragons 5th Edition debuts this Tuesday, March 15, 2016, and much like the three previous storylines (Tyranny of Dragons, Elemental Evil and Rage of Demons), it takes a tried-and-true theme from the original edition of the “world’s greatest roleplaying game” and re-vamps it, adding in more flavor, updating the theme, and expanding it with many more areas to explore. Curse of Strahd takes one of the most beloved adventures from 1st Edition D&D’s Castle Ravenloft and presents a large, in-depth and exciting reincarnation of the classic adventure for players and game masters of all levels of expertise.
The campaign book for the Rage of Demons storyline, entitled Out of the Abyss, was an excellent adventure, but that manual is thick with rules and can be difficult to run in several places, lending itself to a more experienced game master and players. Curse of Strahd is just as well thought-out and immersive an experience, but can be handled by those with less experience and even, dare I say, newbie game masters looking to cut their teeth on a meaty adventure. And CoS has the meats!
Waaaay back in the first iteration of Dungeons & Dragons (before anyone thought to call it “First Edition” because, hey, that’s all there was!), adventures were typically narrow of scope and limited to a couple of locations. They were meant to be played in a single or handful of sessions, and then the game master would have to look elsewhere for another challenge for their players. And most of these adventures were the stuff of pulp fiction; simple goals, thin plots and lots of monsters to hack your way through in order to gain the treasure and gold. And everyone loved that.
Then along came Tracy Hickman (of Dragonlance, Darksword Trilogy and Death Gate Cycle fame) and he had the audacity to think “Why are these monsters here? Why are they trying to defeat us? What’s their story?” Tracy and his wife Laura came up with Count Strahd von Zarovich, a tragic but thoroughly evil and menacing figure modeled after the original vampires of Bram Stoker’s Dracula novel and Nosferatu of early cinema. Then they wrapped an immersive story around this figure, with NPCs (non-player characters, for the uninitiated), locations and lesser foes who made sense, who thoroughly belonged in the adventure and had more depth than a set of statistics to be overcome by the power-hungry party of adventurers. To top it off, they added a groundbreaking 3D map (shown below) and guidelines for adding an ambience to the story that no other adventure had ever provided before.
Thus was born Ravenloft, one of the most popular and loved adventures (and then series) in all of tabletop role-playing game history. It has been re-created and expanded in almost every edition of Dungeons & Dragons ever since, for better or worse (as these things always go, more worse than better).
