I don’t know if it’s an awareness thing because my group started playing Star Wars, but there seem to be a lot of science fiction games being released over the last year or so, and particularly the last few months. Case in point: over the last two weeks there have been reviews of Slipstream, Imperium … Read more
Some of the second-stage books for D&D 4th Edition are hitting book stores, which has ignited a new wave of reviews among bloggers. I don’t think any of these new books are going to change hearts and minds among those who dislike 4E — that will have to wait for 2009’s Player’s Handbook II — … Read more
I slacked on my own game review duties at Nuketown this week (though I did pitch a review to a new market) but thankfully others remained on the ball, yielding a number of new reviews.
There are two more Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition reviews out this week. The Geek Gazette offers some initial thoughts on the Forgotten Realms Campaign Guide and rants about the necessity of buying both a campaign guide and a player’s guide. This is undoubtedly great for WotC’s bottom line, he argues, but no so great for players.
My understanding is that Wizards is scaling back its campaign offerings, so these may be the only two FR books you get this year. I have to think they’ll publish additional Forgotten Realms source books in 2009, but at the same time they’ve been pretty upfront about releasing books for one campaign setting a year (FR this year, Eberron next, maybe Dark Sun after that).
I think the bigger question could end up being not “is this too much?” but “is it enough?”
RPG.net has a favorable review of Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition. Reviewer Eric Christian Berg liked the ease of building encounters and the dynamic nature of combat.
Last week’s surge of Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition reviews has abated, but there’s a few new ones out there. What I find interesting about the reviews that are coming out now is that folks have had a chance to digest and (more importantly) play the game. As a result, people are getting past the … Read more
There’s an old Star Trek acronym called “IDIC”, which stands for “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations”. Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition was all about IDIC, with infinite combinations of characters played out across thousands of campaigns and dozens of different game systems. Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition is about FDFC — Finite Diversity in Finite … Read more
Since I mentioned last week that I thought the RPG blogging community should do more reviews, I thought it might be a good idea to follow-up on that and see what’s available this week. It turns out it’s a good week for reviews, with a slew having been posted for the new D&D 4th Edition … Read more
Superheroes need tall buildings to leap in a single bound … not to mention needing them to serve as backdrops for battles, penthouse homes for their mild-mannered millionaire personas, and possibly even secret lairs.
Freedom City’s Pyramid Plaza offers almost all this, and its entry in the Freedom City Atlas provides everything GMs need to incorporate it into their Mutants & Masterminds games.
The RPG Bloggers Network has been a tremendous success, sparking plenty of cross-blog traffic and comments. I’ve read lots of great articles and discovered a bunch of new sites, but I think there’s one area where the community can improve: game reviews.
Simply put, there aren’t enough of them. There’s plenty of speculation, analysis and debate but there aren’t nearly enough reviews (or, if they are there, they are quickly lost among the flurry of other posts). The RPG Bloggers guys are working on improvements to bring order to the chaos by adding new categories, but even then I think there will be a need for bloggers to knuckle down and review games.
I have as much work to do as anyone else. It shocked me earlier this week when I looked at my own RPG reviews category and discovered that five months had passed between my Battlestar Galactica RPG review and my new one for Star Wars: Threats of the Galaxy. Now granted, my sense of what I’ve written is distorted by all the writing I do for SCIFI, and I’ve certainly posted a bunch of quasi-reviews in the form of playtest reports, but still … there need to be more.
Now that it looks like my gaming group’s long-proposed Knights of the Old Republic campaign may actually be coming to fruition, I’ve been stocking up on source books. The first of these is Star Wars: Threats of the Galaxy, which I hoped would provide me with a toolbox of non-player characters, monsters and other challenges … Read more
It’s no secret to my gaming group that I’m getting burned out playing Dungeons & Dragons. I’ve wanted to try something new for years now, but as D&D 3.5’s variant rules (and even core rules) have proliferated with its end-of-edition publishing spasms, my desire to try something different has intensified. The Battlestar Galactica RPG was … Read more