Back to Normalcy for a While....on Raging Swan, Firefall, Defiance and Thief

I was going to do "13 Days of 13th age" but that requires some effort. I have a 13th Age module I plan to put on the blog soon, but I did not actually find time between now and when I came up with the idea to actually write anything. Yet. So maybe soon, perhaps another month with 13 days in it. Or maybe I'll just play catch-up later on in March. I need to recover from my 28 Days of Savage Space a little bit longer...

Today's blog is back to talking about meandering stuff.....

Raging Swan Press

Raging Swan makes some fantastic Pathfinder books, very utility-focused and useful for GMs who like to mine modules for content. Great stuff. But, did you know they are also available in print through Amazon, Noble Knight and possibly other locales? I discovered this by accident while emailing them about if they'd ever do a print option on rpgnow.com, and the answer was just what I wanted to hear: so I now own all three Tribes compilations, Caves & Caverns, The Shadowed Keep on the Borderlands and Scions of Evil. Scions of Evil, by the way, is a 200 page book full of fully statted villains of all varieties. Great stuff.

Firefall Beta

I tried Firefall's beta....again....at the urging of cohorts who love it. All it did was remind me that I really do like Defiance and need to play more of that (which I did). Firefall looks and feels to me like a slightly subpar shooter/MMO blend (Defiances heavy on the shooter side, Firefall slightly on the MMO side) with awkward armor designs and a heavy dose of crafting mania. I plan to give it more time, but not before I've divested myself of more gaming with Defiance.

Thief

Thief finally arrived, the first new title for the next gen consoles since their release days (Tomb Raider doesn't count). It's fun....and it does open up more after the opening sequence, fyi...but i can see why some people might have issues with it. I find it to be a rather enjoyable, low-key game about a thief in a grimy dark ages-meets-steampunk city of misery, and it's really kind of fun in its own special way. However, if you can try before you buy it's a good idea, as people have a lot of different expectations about titles like this. For me, it's reminiscent of Dishonored, but with you as more of a average Joe thief with a couple cool tricks and an absolute disdain for violence, rather than being a supernatural super assassin.