Deathbat's Tabletop Gaming Predictions for 2019

Ah, this is going to be a tough one because the game industry (for RPGs, at least) is fairly stable and predictable these days. But I'll give it a shot with some suggestions for what may come to be:

1. D&D will see an official sourcebook for at least two of these: Spelljammer, Dark Suns, or Eberron

It's clear that Wizards of the Coast has been setting up all three for a return at some point, the question is just: when? And will we see more Ravnica/Planewalker stuff for Magic soon?

2. Far West will not appear this year, and therefore not appear this decade

I have no bone in this failed Kickstarter that is somehow still in limbo after something like seven years. Follow Erik Tenkar for occasional "updates" on the Kickstarter, but the only certainty anymore is that clocks are right twice a day, and this Kickstarter kicked the bucket a long time ago, but the author manages to keep stringing it out to hopefully run out the statute of limitations on lawsuits, I am guessing. 

3. Modiphius will hit some sort of Criticality this year

Modiphius is a prolific publisher and distributor, and just acquired the controls to the entire World of Darkness line in the wake of some shake ups at Paradox/White Wolf over poor editorial controls. As a result Modiphius now has a ridiculous number of titles and IPs under its belt, possibly more than they can handle, although I admit I have no information on total staff size or arrangements.

In general Modiphius has been brilliant at handling high quality print and PDF distribution, Kickstarters and distribution deals. I don't know how long they can sustain, and given that they were the only retailer online I ordered from in the last two months that was not quite able to fulfill their orders within the same month that the orders were placed, I suspect that they may be a bit overwhelmed. My prediction is that this year Modiphius could do very well, but it is possible --likely, even-- that they have bitten off more than they can chew at last, and I wonder if some of their product lines are maybe not moving as fast as they should? Even Cubicle 7 seems to have streamlined their product schedule, for example.

It could be that Modiphius is effectively sliding in to a new category of publisher/distributor and maybe is closer to Fantasy Flight Games in terms of scope now than, say, Cubicle 7. But I predict either way that we'll see some sort of impact on their high volume of product output this year.

4. D&D will see more than four major releases from WotC this year

D&D seems to be doing well enough that we're seeing more product creep, which is either a good thing or not depending on who you are. I predict we will see five major releases this year instead of four like last year, with some clever tie-ins to work it all together.

5. Pathfinder 2.0 Release will please the hardcore and capture the curious but fail to expand market share

I don't think this is a brave prediction, unfotunately. I think that the open playtest led to an unfortunate feedback loop in which players turned off by the playtest simply bailed out, and the ones willing to embrace it stayed in, and as a result the playtest will be a solid refinement of what that core likes, while missing the information necessary to expand the game to include the larger overall audience. Will it be playable? Absolutely. Will it be worth playing? Only if it offers an experience that is competitive with D&D in a way that is going to capture new players. Unfortunately I think it's going in the opposite direction.

6. Palladium may go belly up

Possibly not until 2020, but I have a feeling that Palladium will hit rock bottom and finally go kaput this year. Too much negativity from burned fans over Robotech may be the cause, but it's chiefly due to the fact that while many could argue Palladium's games have been stuck in the nineties, now even their business practices are stuck in the nineties, and this along with what seem to be perpetual financial woes may be it for them. I could possibly be wrong here.....but only in that this may not happen until 2020 or maybe 2021, but since I need something contentious for my list this is a good bet.

7. The Fantasy Trip gets a serious revival

This is a no-brainer: TFT is being released, in print, by Marchish. Steve Jackson Games is providing an encouraging online storefront for new product. We'll see the release of classic TFT lead either to serious expansions or a 2nd edition announced before the end of the year.

8. BRP revised finally appears

Fingers crossed, we will see the new 32 page BRP book and maybe an updated Mythic Iceland in PDF at least before December 2019. Of course, Chaosium still needs to get print versions of the Glorantha Bestiary and GM Screen out, which I sincerely hope does happen....even if you're not a Glorantha fan, the game is amazing and deserves attention. It will MAKE you a Glorantha fan!

....okay, that's enough of that! I'll do one for Computer Gaming next.

2016: The Cleaning of the Shelves - a resolution many biblioholics may have gone through at least once or twice

Well I'm almost two weeks in to 2016 and working vigorously to clean out my overly large collection of gaming books. I did not help this situation last year....but after a move in December my wife and I agreed that we absolutely were not going to go through that experience again; dozens and dozens of book boxes are just no fun to move anymore, let me tell ya! So some of these books will seek out a home at the local used book shops, some will migrate on to Ebay, and some may be gifted out. I'll work on this over the next several weeks.

Cutting down my RPG selection will be easy and hard....an enormous number of my RPG tomes were bought for reading, not playing; that said, the ones that I do use, or plan to use, are pretty voluminous. Still, there's nothing like downsizing the collection to hammer home how prolific this hobby is, almost to a fault....we produce far more content, and som of us purchase far more content...than we can ever use.

Its not ALL me though. My wife has more knick-knacks, clothes and books than I will EVER have combined, and she's going to investigate shearing that all down a bit, too....

One of the booksellers who owned a shop off Broadway in Seattle
when I lived there gifted this book to me one day. I was a
frequent flyer customer....my reputation grew with every tome purchased, every
tome traded. I have kept this book as a reminder ever since not to fall
off the wagon, but it's damned hard....!!!!

State of the RPG-verse

The never-ending death of the RPG Industry Continues

Appendix N had an interesting discussion on exactly what, precisely, WotC's goal seems to be with D&D 5E. Personally I'd be happy with 1 rulebook or module release a month. 1 new rule book, 1 new monster manual and 10 modules a year would be all I could ask for, but I wouldn't ask for more than that, simply because it seems like the market can't support it (whether Paizo is an anomaly or some other factor is at play...which I think is the case.... remains to be seen).

That, of course, is not what's going on at all. We're going to be lucky, one might posit, if we have the Elemental Evil book in April, another adventure path in August and possibly --maybe!-- something by December. The new WotC publishing strategy seems to be one of austerity, and frankly I think they've gone way too far in the opposite direction from the era of "a new rulebook a month."

It seems like this isn't a strategy necessarily exclusive to WotC, either. Other publishers of note appear to have more or less given up, moving to a sort of "safety maintenance" model of publishing whereby their product continues to exist in some format which keeps a stream of modest sales rolling in from the regulars, but which is in no way, shape or form designed to grow the crowd. Others seem to have taken a different path, though. Let's analyze a few....

Steve Jackson Games--they are making their money on Munchkin, just like WotC makes its money on Magic. GURPS exists as a footnote to this, producing occasional PDFs and maybe once every few years a print release if they see reason to do so....but print is very much "dead" or at least off the table to SJG as Kromm has indicated on their forums over there. As it stands, SJG's print sales, which have traditionally been quite open, suggest a market for GURPS dominated by a tight community that ultimately is not growing.

My theory: they can't be bothered. The effort to make GURPS popular again is too much for Kromm and co. to want to deal with, or be able to afford, and Munchkin is too easy. GURPS is recognizably niche, and the feeling over there is that no amount of effort will make it a popular system in an era when reading past the first paragraph in a blog post is something less than 1% of the clicks bother to do (heh).

Hero Games--Hero Games moved to a primarily online direct to consumer sort of system a few years back, and has also worked to leverage Kickstarters to get some more accessible versions of the Hero System out in the market. That said, it's a shadow of its former self, but at least they keep their core line of books out there in PoD format. If you judge the health of a game by how easy it is to get print copies, Hero System is looking like the survivor over GURPS these days.....although if you want to consider fresh PDF content GURPS might win by a hair.

Evil Hat--I think Evil Hat's motto is "better to give for free and beg for some recognition in coin than to be robbed blind and see nothing anyway." They put many books on PWYW which is great, and then they sell their print tomes at what feels to me like charitable donation...as if the Evil Hats are concerned enough that I don't have a copy of FATE or Spirit of the Century that they drop the price 50% just to make sure we can all get one. I think they're on to something....maybe.....is the younger gamer generation one which basically despises being told to pay for product, but will happily shovel coin at someone when begged from? No idea. I'm buying all Evil Hat's books in print though, that's for sure.

Onyx Path Publishing--Who?!?! you might ask if you are not into rpgnow or White Wolf. Heck, even if you are in to White Wolf if you don't keep up online you might be surprised to know that the erstwhile publisher of the Storyteller System, which more or less did not survive its buy-out by CCP, the Icelandic publisher of Eve Online, in it's failed attempt to leverage the World of Darkness into an MMORPG. For a time it looked very bleak. All of a sudden, an enthusiastic group of former WW auteurs and designers surfaced to produce Onyx Path, and suddenly the game is alive again....so long as you know they exist on rpgnow in PDF and PoD format. Forget trying to get them in your FLGS. They're not quite the sadsack story that some of the prior examples are....Onyx is cooking up a lot of stuff, and the World of Darkness universes are both very much alive and getting some very high quality product as a result, with a format sure to please the young hipster with his tablet and the old grognard with his crusty tomes.

I love that example because it really doesn't fit my own anecdote: my buddy Wes locally is as hipster as it can get and he despises electronic media; meanwhile I love tablet readers and relish the day someone can produce a PDF viewer that functions properly.

Paizo: so here's my theory, backed by various stuff I've read but can't be bothered to source right now: the Paizo adventure books and such....pretty much all the "magazine format" adventures....are sold and marketed like one-off recyclables that happen to be undated, unlike magazines, giving them longer shelf lives. They probably sell a lot less than they produce (judging by the veritable tide of product littering local Hastings stores this certainly seems true) but the retailer cost must be fairly low. I am guessing Paizo doesn't have an unfavorable return policy on this stuff, or they'd be getting lots of returned product all the time, but I could be wrong. However, I think Paizo realizes that the prices of success is the perception of affluence. Lots of product means high visibility, and high visibility in the RPG market means people see your game think, "Hey, look at all this stuff. It's well supported and all over the place...it must be popular. Gimme!" I'm not talking about the usual D20 gamer who has a chip on his shoulder over some D&D edition going to Pathfinder...I'm talking people who just now went to go buy an RPG for the first time. They can try to make heads and tails over the mincemeat that is D&D's five coterminous editions for sale right now, or they can get Pathfinder, which has tons of module support for people who don't know how to write that stuff.

Good strategy, and its nice to see WotC believes in Paizo so much they are helping them along.

I'm not going to mention Green Ronin, because they have their act together and only the hassle of working with lots of licensed IP holds them back from a more robust release schedule.

There is also Mongoose Publishing, which as best I can tell tried to move toward a more PDF-focused, austerity driven model beginning in late 2013, with a focus on minis, and here we are in 2015 and they are very happy to get back to having print products available and while they design minis it looks like they prefer to let someone else take the hit of manufacturing and marketing. But a significant chunk of what Mongoose publishes boils down to three niche titles with a heavy fanbase that likes print product: the BRP-based Legend, Traveller, and Paranoia. Duh!

I'll briefly mention Pelgrane Press, which is also doing well, cutting edge, and producing products people want NOW. Pelgrane is definitely like Evil Hat: it's aware of the current market, and its aimed squarely at the needs of current consumers.

There's Pinnacle/Take 2. They are purely awesome, and like Green Ronin not much more need be said....they seem to have this all down just fine. Likewise for Cubicle 7, known more for getting products out and in retail that would never otherwise make it. Throw enough tomatoes and some will be bound to stick.

Who else is there? Well, there is one venerable publisher that seems to be doing something WotC might be trying for....

Chaosium: Chaosium runs to its own beat, and is doing its own game. It's niche, but it has a corner on the "BRP/Cthulhu" crowd pretty much, with lots of other niche publishers muscling in....but guess what, good news! The people inclined to buy Chaosium products tend to buy all the products from all the publishers in this corner. I don't think it's hurt Chaosium, and their modest pace over the years has become something of a steady stream of periodic releases that the fans love. It helps that they provide a modest but steady stream of print support for a universal system as well in a time when the other big two competitors (Hero and GURPS) are on maintenance mode, and the closest real competition now isn't really playing in the same field (Savage Worlds and FATE Core). Chaosium's only real competition is Pelgrane press.....and to be honest, there's not a lot of real overlap; people either love the Gumshoe engine or they don't, so much like FATE its not really the same thing.

Chaosium has, in essence, found a golden middle ground between fan satisfaction, the anticipation of new product, and ability to churn said product out. Maybe WotC is looking at doing something like Chaosium? Is it possible we could all be enjoying D&D 5E in five years, having only seen 10 or so new major products in that time?

Games as Good Reads vs. Games As Good Rules

Expounding on my thoughts yesterday, I realized that you can really measure most RPGs on the market in terms of their readability vs. their functionality....that is, how fun it is to read the book, vs. how easy it is to figure out how to play from that book.

Most games seem to skew sharply in one direction or the other in my experience. If you're lucky the game will be both fun to read and as a side effect it will explain the rules to you along the way. More than a few contemporary games are fun to read because they are full of exciting fiction but the moment you get to the actual rules the game turns south, becoming morbidly dry text by comparison to the effective fiction it had up to that point been tantalizing you with. A few games suck horribly at the fiction, and those are unmentionables which neither entertain nor inform you of their intent in any meaningful way....they're the $1 bargain basement/ebay specials we run across on occasion in many cases.

In case you're wondering I'd label a lot of White Wolf/Onyx Publishing content in this category: fantastic reads, and with any luck the rules will become apparent as a side effect.

Of course...I'd probably suggest a number of FATE systems for games where the reading is great but the rules exposition is a nightmare of confusion. But I am self-identified as too "traditional" to grokk FATE so whadda I know.

Games which inform the reader of the rules extremely well usually do so by getting right to the point, being brief and clear. Only a few games in my experience really do this well. Savage Worlds is (in my estimation) the pinnacle (pun intended) of such design: clear, highly focused and lighting rod-on-the-money rules with no frills beyond lots of cool graphics and suggested but brief exposition by the author to keep you learning. Other games known for such flare include Tunnels & Trolls 5th edition, B/X Dungeons & Dragons, and Call of Cthulhu. It probably helps that the game systems for each is fairly basic.

More complex systems have given it a go, usually by refining their core rules into a lite package with generally okay results; Hero Basic does pretty well at condensing the whole game into a digestible package that's not too painful to read through, while GURPS has a fantastic lite edition which while ultimately short on enough content to use on its own is still the ideal teaching tool for GURPS. Speaking of which, as complex systems go I have to commend GURPS 4E for being fairly readable (imo) if convoluted....you'll enjoy trying to learn GURPS, even if the game still has too much crunch for most mortals to handle. Hero is similar; it's a fun read even if I never properly absorb any of it all for actual play.

There are games which fail at all of the above....some quite good, but nonetheless coming up short in terms of their ability to fullly engage the reader with either prose or clarity for obscure reasons. It's a bit of a personal call on what systems fit the bill, but I have a few of my own: I've always been baffled at just why I, a guy who reads a lot of modern SF and transgenic fiction, can't stomach reading Eclipse Phase. I similarly find Numenera hard to get into despite liking everything it seems to offer. Edge of the Empire might be a fantastic system but the little symbols the game uses are hard for my brain to pronounce/reconcile so I will never know. Similarly I know I should love Runequest 6 but my nagging visual disorder which prevents me from tolerating its odd font loops stops me cold. Then there are games like Mutants & Masterminds which feels like an enormous word count for what should be a more wiz-bang get-to-the-fun sort of game. MnM desperately needs a 64 page lite version that gets to the point....

There are some games that are just badly written and maybe even poorly designed, though it's hard to discover that if you're too busy suffering in pain at the prose. I honestly label a fair chunk of the Pathfinder/3rd edition D&D body of works under this label; there's a lot of stuff out there that's just not fun to read at all, and anyone who tells you otherwise is just trying to justify their obsessive collection habits in the face of crap. Most games that fail to be entertaining or illuminating usually die or get buried....there are a quite a few out there, lingering like the onerous beasts they are, hulking in the wilds of used book shops and PDF sales events.

I happen to have a short list of what I believe are the five coolest, most smartly written RPGs on the market. These are the five games I feel do the best job of both telling you and teaching you what they are and how they work. In no particular order:

Tunnels & Trolls 5th edition - the definitive T&T, and the one most people think of when they take a trip down nostalgia lane.

Cyberpunk 2020 - Mike Pondsmith's (NOT Richard Talsorian) engaging street samurai prose made this game come to life big time, and was fully integrated with the rules. Every game he wrote was great, but CP2020 was far and away the most engagingly written, fun read in an RPG before or since, and the reason most other cyberpunk genre RPGs fail is because they couldn't figure this part about CP2020's success out.

Savage Worlds - as I said earlier, Hensley writes to the point and keeps you on target. Anyone can take the Explorers Edition and run a game in thirty minutes, or be world building in two hours.

13th Age - nestled somewhere between old school and very, very new school 13th Age is an interesting beast. It's got a huge thing going for it: the game is well written, with an engaging tone and ease of style that makes figuring out the game very easy. This is probably the only full RPG I've bought in the last year that I have read cover to cover and thoroughly enjoyed. It's only flaw is that they are taking too long to get new books out.

Call of Cthulhu - the core rules are elegant and simple; the subject matter compelling and detailed. This horror game has survived as long as it has for a reason.

And now for the Best of the Inversion, fantastic story that conveys the rules, even if by accident:

Over the Edge - in a curious inversion, the engaging dialogue teaches you how to play with little effort at all; the rest of the game is all prose and fiction about the bizarre world of OtE on the island of Al'Amarja, and that's where most people will spend their time puzzling crap out...

Blood & Smoke (or anything WoD): The Strix Chronicles - a excellent reimagining of 2nd edition Vampire: the Requiem in which every page drips with suggestions, ideas, story and character. The game is in there somewhere too, I think.

And four games I love which are fun reads but terrible at teaching their own game (or making it interesting, anyway):

Legends of Anglerre - the only FATE game I got close to understanding. Well written and makes me want to play it, but even LoA didn't quite have what it takes to explain to a FATE newb how the hell it works (or at least how you can shed old school sensibilities and embrace the structured chaos of the FATE mechanics).

Conspiracy X and AFMBE - I have always found Eden Studios' wonderful games (Conspiracy X and All Flesh Must Be Eaten) to be awesome reads but the actual rules component is dry, sterile and uninteresting. I love both games but have never bothered to run either due to the agonizing, jarring contrast of the bland rules text vs. the amazing story text of those systems.

Mutants & Masterminds - oh god how can such a cool game be so boring to read?!?!?! Is it just me? I refer to the 3rd edition, which mechanically looks like exactly what I want out of a superhero RPG, but oh my god I can't suffer through reading the damned thing.

Finally, I give Hero System and GURPS 4E a pass, because I've learned (and run) both albeit with a strong desire not to devote more time to either game in the future without lots of pre-made stuff to cut down the "work time" it takes to make either system function.

Post-Apocalyptic Plot Seeds

These sixteen plot seeds for Post Apocalyptic adventures originally appeared in TSS 43, but I'm reprinting them here....possibly for a second time, my memory fails me!...for your enjoyment:

1 While traveling through wasted ruins, characters stumble across a colony of sentient rats which have descended from genetic experiments before the holocaust.

2 The players see a distant shooting star that grows ominously large, and crashes somewhere nearby. On investigating, they find a starship, out of which emerges a cosmonaut who claims to have been part of an experiment to test a ship that could travel close to the speed of light. The cosmonaut’s ship left Earth orbit in 1970.

3 The entrance to a hidden vault is found, in which a fabulously wealthy billionaire from Old Earth, surrounded by very human-like android servants has whiled away the years, kept unnaturally young by telomerase resequencing treatments. Recently, he discovered that his auto-docs are failing, and he need to find the tools and materials necessary to repair his anti-aging system.

4 One of the players discovers what appears to be an impressive ebony sword trapped in a lava flow. After pulling it out, the local survivor villagers proclaim him a new warlord. Unfortunately, the sword was lodged in the chest plate of a powerful pre-cataclysmic warbot, which, weapon now removed, begins to heal up with nano-repair bots before shattering its rocky tomb. Oh, and it wants its sword back.

5 A nearby volcano (which may be a smoldering crater from the end times) is radiating a lethal cloud of spores, which infect local humans and animals with a silicone-based life form that drives them in to madness and frenzy. The spores are wafting from a lava tube inside the crater, where the deadly plants are blooming, having grown up and out after being exposed from the depths of the earth.

6 A war satellite is still functioning, zapping targets at random on the planet below with a powerful particle beam weapon. It is possible to be stopped, but this involves finding an ancient comm. Station, breaking in past the still-functioning robot security units, and shutting it off.

7 A squad of immortal super-soldiers wanders the wastelands, carrying out a need for war which was genetically encoded as a biological imperative. They wander in to the peaceful lands of a survivor community, and attempt to forge an army out of the weary folk, or destroy them if they wont cooperate.

8 An alien vessel arrives in orbit and sends a contingent of scientists down to the surface of the apocalyptic world to investigate. It turns out they are from Earth, and that the Wasteworld is really a colony that succumbed to civil war decades ago!

9 While traveling the across the wasteland, the players stumble across a humongous relic from the old war, a tripod-like tank left over from the Martian invasion of Earth.

10 Locals are terrorized by what appear to be immense ravaging dinosaurs straight out of the cretaceous and beyond. They ask the adventurers to stop this menace. The trail leads to a ruined laboratory where particle physicists once worked on creating wormholes. It turns out that the AI which runs the facility is still quite active, and finished their work, creating a wormhole in time which leads back in to the distant past. It’s trying to perfect a way to send people through, to test the laws of causality!

11 Sometime during the cataclysm an ancient army of war machines was buried beneath waves of lava. The basalt later proved to be a valuable mining source for a local colony of survivors, who were digging for the metallic parts and pieces entombed within. One of the war machines was otherwise preserved intact in the quick-cooling lava flow and has awakened! It now seeks to reconstruct the interred army of its machine brothers, to complete the job they started…and needs humans to serve as "living brain cases" for the hyper-advanced machine intellects!

12 A horde of slavering, liquefying mutants that generate voluminous quantities of highly corrosive vomit are marauding the land and terrorizing the local citizens. The heroes stumble upon a camp of survivors in an otherwise intact resort facility from before the end times who are being terrorized by these slimers.

13 An alien vessel investigating the burnt out shell of Earth has crash landed, and the alien is on the loose! The alien is masquerading as a mutant, or perhaps even looks human enough, but some of the more savvy scavengers in the area have gotten wind of this high tech marvel wandering around and are trying to find it. The characters might benefit from aiding the creature in repairing is starship, either for gifts it offers them, or a chance to escape the Wasteworld. Of course, they could just as easily by the scavengers!

14 There’s a local hermit in the mountains called Big Ben who is a survivor from the old days, an ageless cyborg soldier who has lived through a hundred years of struggle and doom. Rumor has it that he’s the only one who knows where the crazy cyber-mutants from the nearby city ruins are coming from, and the PCs need to convince him to help their little survivor town.

15 Monstrous mutant insects are coming from south of the old border, larger than skyscrapers and leaving massive swaths of destruction in their wake! The PCs are not only challenged with protecting their local community, they have to figure out why the bugs are migrating north, and what could possibly be so terrifying to these immense mutants that they would flee from?

16 The PCs are investigating rumors of a local mystery, where people are seeing a strange, supernatural entity that they are calling the Mothman. Someone still has a working DVD player, or one of them curious “books” about the mysterious Mothman, so they know this is a supernatural being from before the end-times, and a small cult is growing up around this being, which people believe is a harbinger of doom. A local skeptic thinks the Mothman is a fake, and that someone is behind it, maybe even the preacher who’s initiating the new cult growing up around the creature, and he wants the PCs to debunk it in favor of his techno-church that’s losing its congregation! Of course, the mystery of the Mothman could be a fraud, but maybe, just maybe there's something more to it....

A Feast of Gaming - Why I like Robust Toolkit Games

This could also be titled, "Why I will continue to put up with Pathfinder even though I have a deep admiration for Magic World and Runequest 6."

One advantage of Dungeons & Dragons and its close cousin, Pathfinder, is that they are fantastic toolkit games. They give you pretty much everything you need, ready to go, and if you want to tweak something they also give you the rules to do it. Those rules can be fast and loose (OSR style) or precise and methodical (3.5 style), but they are still there. Pick your flavor, pick your level of complexity, and go.

While working on a game for Magic World I decided to change focus and drag out one of my old, venerable campaigns that I now feel it is time once more to revisit. Specifically, I'm dragging out my Warlords of Lingusia campaign. My Lingusia setting was born in D&D, and has been the center piece for campaigns set in all editions of D&D to date, as well as in other games, including T&T, Runequest, Dragonquest, Palladium Fantasy and GURPS. But it has always come home to roost in D&D, or more recently in Pathfinder.

Trying to work out setting material for MW using this setting is proving problematic because it has hammered home just why Pathfinder is such a great game. Pathfinder, by virtue of it's D&D DNA, is loaded to the gills with stuff. I want some monstrous aquatic humanoids, a society of vile witches, a red dragon, a realm of catacombs loaded with undead denizens commanded by some sort of death knight (grave knight in the Pathfinder parlance) and a strange connection between a mysterious island and the planar realms.

Now, I could do all of this in Magic World or Runequest, but it's going to require a lot of work. For any non-D&D fantasy game there's going to be a gap, at least partially due to the fact that no other system contains quite so many ready-to-go elements. Thus, the problem with many not-D&D fantasy games is that they have to sell themselves on their system rather than their resources. "Sure, we don't have a bestiary with 500 critters, or 1,000 spells, or an entire tome on planar magic, but we do have {insert game system here} powering everything."

Some of these games would be a lot easier if I could just run them as presented, and ignore the almost visceral need I often feel to include one of my campaign worlds in the mix. Invariably, when I try to break away, to write a new setting specifically for whatever game I am aiming for, it feels a bit hollow. Almost but not quite like I'm "cheating" on my other settings. I mean....sure, this is a great game, and I love the system, but the world I'm setting the scenarios in? It's so not you, baby. It's like I have this deep and meaningful relationship over here, and I'm off for a night on the town flirting with floozies. Yikes!

So....all I need to do tonight is figure out how to reconcile these facts. I was planning on ditching Sarvaelen and running Lingusia, so I could take advantage of the more robust options of a classic fantasy setting with which I have a familiarity so strong I can run it in my sleep, and a history begging to be added to once more. But it's just not a good mesh for MW, and Pathfinder makes more sense. If I use MW I have a lot of stuff I need to build for the game. If I use Pathfinder: it's already there and waiting.

At this point, it's a sort of startling realization for me that I'm not, perhaps, as diverse a gamer as I might think....at least, not anymore. With my narrow window of gaming opportunities, the need to consolidate my focus to what I enjoy most (games set in my long-running campaign settings, my "characters," if you will) maybe should take priority.

From this perspective, running games with Pathfinder or a similar system which provides the most robust and ready-to-use level of support possible only makes sense. Maybe D&D Next, once its out, will show the same level of depth and content that is pretty much a prerequisite for D&D by any modern standard.  I guess I'll have to talk with my group tonight about this, or maybe back up on my interest in running a game for this particular campaign setting for the moment, and stick with the campaign tailor-made for BRP, instead.


TL;DR: I'm realizing I have become a lazy GM, that I like to use stuff I am already prepped for and have strong familiarity with, which pretty much means D&D and/or Pathfinder right now, with my homebrew campaign settings that are loaded with ready-to-go content. This strategy does not mesh well with adopting new (or even modestly different) game systems that come with less "ready to go" content out of the box.

This is causing a problem when it comes to the mindset necessary to run Magic World. I may just grin and bear it, or maybe I'll see if everyone wants to give D&D Next a go tonight. I'll letcha know how it all goes down...

How We Devalued Our Hobby and Made Piracy Okay

Over on rpg.net there was a discussion on the perceived worth of RPGs and the general of cheapness of gamers. I made the following comment:

This hobby is especially attractive to people with a lower income situation because you can make a single purchase and effectively be set for life, especially if you're set on being a player only. The whales of the tabletop industry tend to be GMs and dedicated players with some extra cash to burn, but even then we have a problem, which is that the time to money value of our products are way the hell out of sync.

In computer games, $60 can get you a game which might net you a 12 hour single player campaign and maybe a few dozen hours of multiplayer gaming unless you're really, really obsessive about it. You might pay $60 and get one hundred hours out of a good CRPG.

In tabletop, a $40 rule book may look expensive but then you'll get, potentially, thousands of hours of play time over a period of years or even decades. Now factor in dozens of supplements and eventually you reach a weird saturation point, where the game effectively offers you "too much." It's effectively been devalued by virtue of its own weight in content. With a CRPG, you know that there's an end point eventually, where you've reached the end of the experience and can put it away. With tabletop RPGs its effectively impossible to reach an end, especially for a well-supported product.

I remember in the early D20 days I was trying to buy all the books as a good collector, and I was about four months in to 3.0's release when I realized that my "collect it all" habit from the pre 3.0 days was effectively over, that the new approach to D&D and its SRD/OGL was going to make it functionally impossible to keep up, both in terms of free time, space, dollars and effort.

Even with being forced to learn how not to collect a game like I had before, I subsequently came to realize that even sticking to the core output from WotC was impossible; when I realized that I had on my shelf dozens of books filled with hundreds of prestige classes, and that by 2006 I had seen exactly 13-odd prestige classes in play, that I had effectively wasted my money on a ton of books which I would never, ever get any use out of.

Anyway, the idea I have is that a lot of gamers like me probably felt an obligation to keep up with their preferred game, especially in the 90's and early 00's, but that the heavy churn on supplemental material forced a great many of us to reconsider what we were buying, and what it's real value was. Given that, once again, you probably only need one (or maybe at most three) books to cover a literal lifetime's worth of gaming, ever....it's a serious problem for the industry, and part of the reason that everyone publishing in this industry does it for love of the game and far, far less often for love of money.

Then I realized that this dovetails nicely with my perception on the PDF market and why we not only devalue the PDF editions of games, but why piracy is so rampant.

There's a sense of need in our hobby to keep up with the games we love. There's also a real desire to stay informed or aware of what's going on in the hobby, to know what's being published. But this is a tough thing when there's a lot of content being written, and at peak periods in this hobby the volume of product is far, far in excess of the average person's leisure time to read up on it.

                                               

Role playing games also have a special problem that books don't: their value isn't about what the book contains, necessarily, but about what the book offers at the table. A gamer with money who loves a specific RPG is probably (anecdotally) more willing to buy that game at full price because he knows its worth to him: countless gaming hours at the table. But a gamer who is sort of interested in an RPG for fun, but who has not stake in playing it (due to all his free time being taken up by his other, preferred RPG) is not going to value that other book in the same way...it's really no more significant to him than a typical novel, really. Unless he reads it and learns it's something he could get into, that book has no real worth outside of curiosity in his or her eyes, and the effort and time it took the authors and artists to produce that book is irrelevant to the potential reader/buyer.

A lot of gamers in the past did indeed buy into the constant purchase of supplements to keep their games supported. Part of this was because we earnestly felt that there was a need for those books, that they were extensions of the games we loved and supported. Some of it was simply habit, and lack of a better place to spend. A big chunk of supplement churn stems from older business practices in the 90's and before, which have in the last decade begun to morph into newer, different models that are better able to predict demand and print accordingly. The old days, which killed TSR, are long gone. Buying habits may not have changed for all of us, though. I personally still have to wrestle with the sense that a game without a ton of supplement churn is considered dead or unsupported....it's a veritable paradigm shift to look at a monobook RPG these days and see that as an asset "a single game in one book!" and not as a detraction.

PDFs are a weird thing, because they are usually very cheap (but you get what you pay for, often), sometimes highly focused (want to play a dragonborn frost mage? This 7 page PDF is for you!), and occasionally are more than worth the money but no one will ever know because we have a sense of worth for the physical that trumps the value of virtual goods. Accepting that PDFs have the same worth as a physical product is an entirely different issue for many people, especially if they are coming from the aforementioned group of gamers who bought into the idea of supplement churn, of keeping up with products for its own sake. 

Somewhere along the line, the idea of "I must have it all" became divorced from "I must buy all of this." The concept of supporting your preferred game morphed into the mere act of acquiring your own game. Our own penchant for rampant consumerism in a hobby which essentially provides the main course right up front for a modest 1-3 rulebook introductory price, followed by an endless array of desserts is part of the reason for this problem in perspective. We also have a few other contributing factors, not the least of which is that this hobby attracts a lot of people with very little money to spend.

When money is precious, but a person has an addictive desire to collect something, it can lead to an internal rationalization about the perceived worth of a product. This happens all the time in the game industry, both for tabletop and computer gaming. People don't like to think they're doing something wrong, and gifted with brains fully capable of bizarre rationalization and self deception can lead to all sorts of interesting internal strategies for making us feel better about our buying decisions:

"They're price gouging me, so it's okay to pirate it." 

"This game isn't worth playing, so why pay?"

"I'd never use this supplement in a million years."

"I just wanted to take a look at it, and the publisher doesn't offer a free version or a demo."

"I'd pay for it if I really, really liked it after playing the pirated version." (usually ends up that they rationalize why they didn't really, really like it enough after finishing the game)

"Who would pay for this in the first place?"

Etc. etc.

So what's the answer? How does one fix the perception of so many gamers that has led to the devaluation and effective destruction of all artistic and personal worth in our hobby?

Today, most RPG publishers are going through a contraction. There are some very specific exceptions: Paizo is clearly aiming their publishing model for Pathfinder at the expectations of an older crowd, and its paying off, at least partially because their chief competition (WotC) has stopped supporting that same model almost entirely, going instead after premium nostalgia releases instead (until 2014, anyway, after which...who knows). Aside from Paizo (and maybe Fantasy Flight), almost every other RPG publisher out there has narrowed down their focus to either a set of core intermittent products with modest support, and the rest of the hobby is supported entirely by what amounts to grass roots effort where the intent was never to make money in the first place, and doing so is a happy and unexpected coincidence.*

In short....most publishers have accepted that most gamers either have no money or will not spend that money on their hobby. They have instead accepted, to whatever degree either by intention or accident, that the core money to be made comes from the tabletop equivalent of the aforementioned whales, those few dedicates who both have money and also still actually place value on their hobby and its creative worth. The idea is that the whales generate the income, and bring in the umpteen other more conventional gamers, the guys for whom spending $50 a year might be a stretch, even if they own 25 GB of pirated data from Demonoid or the Pirate Bay at home....data which they will likely never read, but will still own because, after all they may not be good hobbyists, but they are fantastic consumers. 

*And then there are the Kickstarters, which changed everything about buy-in and the consumer/creator/publisher relationship. More on that later!

Three Days Left on the Tunnels & Trolls Kickstarter

If you haven't jumped in, but like the broader old school revolution in all its facets, now is the time to get in on a chunk of the second fantasy RPG to come into existence and help T&T Deluxe hit a $100,000 stretch goal. (barring Empire of the Petal Throne....anyone know if T&T or EPT came first? I have no idea.)

State of Contrast: How different RPG publishers framed 2012 going into 2013

Green Ronin recently posted its "2013" overview of things to come, and the hint that they are doing reasonably well (two new staff hires, plenty of products lined up for this year). It's in stark contrast with the more earnest but doomy Mongoose State of Mongoose I mentioned previously, which paints a bleak picture for the tabletop industry (or more specifically Mongoose's corner of it). So on the one hand Mongoose sees tabletop at an all time low, and while there's a dedicated fanbase for their RPG products, its not enough to keep them from doing more than shifting to a POD/online approach to their books. Functionally in my neck of the woods this will have no impact other than to make getting their books slightly harder if they don't put them into distribution....but so far I'm guessing the plans to do this are farther away, because my FLGS says it can order the latest batch of upcoming Legend books for me.

Meanwhile, Green Ronin is doing quite well, and I am pleased because it means I can continue to support Mutants & Masterminds and the Dragon Age RPG, as well as the eventual AGE System release they keep hinting at. Unlike Mongoose, Green Ronin is focused entirely on tabletop RPGs, and licensed RPGs in particular, as their bread and butter. GR is also good at keeping existing popular products (cough >Freeport< cough) in print and available for numerous systems. Lastly, GR puts out products at a slower, more methodical pace.....but their products always look great, and have fewer problems on average with editing issues and errata, in my experience.

I haven't seen Steve Jackson's Year-End recap yet, and I think he started this tradition a few years ago. I can predict it will talk about the glory of Ogre Deluxe, Munchkin, and have more off-comments about GURPS as a niche that is supported entirely by PDF product now, with vague suggestions that the game just doesn't sell well (despite the fact that not offering print products for a tabletop experience will by definition limit the audience to just those people who have accepted PDFs as a viable way to experience the game's content). I remain slightly bitter, of course, because when it comes to RPGs I still prefer print product for the table, and have not yet found electronic books to be useful at the game table (and indeed groups which were primarily electronic often ran into a sort of "laptop/tablet paralysis" when actually trying to game.)

Other publishers don't tend to chat as much, but Goodman Games did well last year according to their website, and I am inclined to believe it. DCC ended up not being a game I cared for....I think I'm getting a bit burned out and jaded at the entire revivalist/fetishist approach to the hobby's roots these days, due mainly to the fact that I have--wait for it!--played too much (been there, done that, it's lost its magic for me)....but it is absolutely a great game for what it does and there's a definite market for it. There's a lot more DCC on the horizon, and in contrast with, say, the open license for Legend there is also a lot more 3PP DCC material out there now, and to come. This is a damned good thing, I think. It also shows that the old school revivalism has a definite niche that is large enough to support a decent product in print and circulation (Frog God's Kickstarters have been proving this too, I think....just not in a way that makes their products accessible to a person like me who prefers to support his local FLGS).

Speaking of Frog God Games, they've got the Razor Coast Kickstarter going into 2013. I think that, even without a recap of 2012, the Frog God has done quite well, both for its S&W and Pathfinder support, and has some noteworthy Kickstarters to prove it. Razor Coast appears to be no exception. About the only thing stopping me from backing it is that it's set to end in ten days, and I need to be conservative with my cash right now as I just found out I'm moving in February. Still....if things go well, I'll invest if time permits. Otherwise I'll just have to hope that somehow, some way, there are extra copies afloat in the future. With Frog God it's hard, because they don't make the sort of books one can drop a twenty on....they're not targeting the kind of gamer I was back in the early 80's (i.e. younger gamers), they're targeting the old collectors with money (like me now). Still, it's hard to properly justify such a lavish purchase these days. Unlike most forty-somethings, I have a brand new kid here and now commanding my time and money; your average guy my age or olrder usually has a kid or two who's already flown the coop, so that's just a unique spot I'm in, and the average Frog God follower has probably got the time and money to spare.

I'm not really going anywhere with this, other than to provide a few contrasting examples with the doom and gloom of Mongoose and the anticipated "GURPS is niche" feel of SJG's annual reports. Honestly, sometime your product (like GURPS) is just plain-old niche, and maybe this is where it was destined to end up. And for Mongoose....maybe their issue has more to do with Mongoose's long-running reputation in the industry for quality control issues, and bottom lining the cost and appearance of their product. Or maybe the print RPGs at Mongoose just don't bring the money in like their miniature games do. Either way, It seems like maybe the industry isn't contracting...it's just changing. Again.

Tunnels & Trolls Deluxe is Funded!

I actually pledged last night at the $60 level, and as of this morning T&T Deluxe has passed its funding goal, so it's all gravy and cake from here on out!

I'm really looking forward to this next iteration of T&T, which is sounding a lot like it could very well encompass the totality of T&T as all its fans imagine it, and add more cool stuff in on top of it. Ken St. Andre drops hints and bits to those of us over at Trollhalla about its direction and design, which of course only wets the appetite for the final product.

T&T Deluxe, along with Legends of Dawn and the colorvision edition of the Castles & Crusades PHB marks my third delve into Kickstarter. I can see how this phenomenon gets addictive...it's like buying a tiny stake in a creative venture, and to contribute to those creators that I know and respect (or, in the case of Legends of Dawn, just impressed me sufficiently) is a lot of fun.

Although I love T&T myself, and have been playing it since I discovered the 5th edition boxed set around 1982ish at Wargames West, I do have an ulterior motive to my love for this game: I have kept every module, solitaire, edition and variant (from MSPE to Monsters! Monsters!) in a special box, and plan to hand it all over to my son in about 8-9 years, should he look like he's following in his dad's footsteps. T&T is an ideal game to introduce new and younger gamers to, not just a fine system for the old school grognards out there.

State of the Mongoose 2012

It's been a hellish week and a half now for my poor wife, who started December with a bad case of strep throat, and has since been to urgent care and then the ER multiple times. She's in general care at the hospital now under monitor, as the infection simply kept getting worse and worse. She looks like she may be on recovery now, but it was scary for a while there.

Aside from that, I thought I'd share this really interesting assessment of the gaming industry for 2012 from the Mongoose point of view located here. Matthew Sprange seems to be sticking a fork (mostly) in the print RPG industry. Not totally done....POD and electronic seems to be Mongoose's expectations for the future, so it sounds like they are joining Steve Jackson Games to some degree in the camp of "companies who have decided the time, cost and effort to figure out how to expand the hobby is too much effort" and instead will now focus on their shrinking base. At least, that's how I'm reading it.

On the one hand I think this is probably a pretty accurate perspective. Matt mentions an unnamed publisher who's sales matched one of the bigger guys. If the unnamed fellow is Mr. Goodman and the game is Dungeon Crawl Classics (which did indeed get some high sales marks) recently, and the competitor is D&D 4E, then I could see those numbers. If he'd have named them, and they were....say....Barbarians of Lemuria vs. Pathfinder, then I'd have been shocked and worried.

One thing he also mentions is the contraction and disappearance of hobby shops (or was that only discussed in the other forum section talking about the State of the Mongoose? Ah well, will check later). This, I think, is probably something publishers need to consider: they can get "the hardcore crowd" online, a handful of guaranteed sales, no problem....or they can have a meaningful venue to expand the audience from, but without physical locations for a traditionally very hands-on, physical hobby they're not going to get it. And unfortunately the hardcore base for RPGs is fairly enamored with PDFs as a medium, and generally somewhat asocial, so the concept of "face time" with a broader public that is already getting a ton of face time from other media is anathema.

In short: I wonder if the hobby's contraction is because its core is too out of touch with the idea of how to go about publicizing and grabbing a share of the larger, fresher crowd of non-RPGers (I say "non RPGers" because there are more gamers now than ever; just most of them aren't playing tabletop RPGs anymore).

Then again, maybe its inevitable....in the world of fiction as entertainment, we've been stretched pretty thin, and its just possible that only the very specialized crowd of gamers who like tabletop RPGs can keep it going in the face of much flashier and more accessible entertainment media like video games, which strike me as the top dog in terms of siphoning off potential new players. In 1980 when I started playing the video game competition was the TSR-80 and the Atari 2600. Today it's WoW, Rift, and Skyrim, which offer some remarkably compelling experiences with zero hassle.

Anyway, something to think about.


ADDENDUM

There are two additional thoughts I had on this subject.

First: I still wonder just how much of the print and even PDF share of the tabletop RPG market is reduced by PDF piracy. I still feel that the single greatest factor in the devaluing of RPGs boils down to the rampant and pervasive tendency for gamers to grab something to check it out for free. This is probably related to the issue of shovelware, and how the RPG hobby also has been known, in the past, to dump torrential levels of cheap and easy splatbooks and other products on the market that we might have been willing to buy in ages past "just because" but for which there simply is no longer any disposable income to toss toward now.

Second: this isn't meant as a knock on Mongoose, but I also have to wonder to what extent Mongoose Publishing's own perspective isn't skewed by the simple fact that too many years of known problems has left their reputation damaged over time, such that their dedicated fan base has contracted out of a lack of trust. I still believe in Mongoose and will support them on the Traveller books I want, and anything Legend of course (but see below)....but my FLGS won't even stock their games anymore because of the reputation from years past involving editing and printing issues; people just don't but the stuff they sell around here, basically (except Traveller, and even that has diminished). So I sometimes wonder if Mongoose's reputation doesn't make it look just a bit worse off than it might otherwise be.

On Legend...even as I read about their "Cities" plans, for example, I know, from seing Skaar, City of Orcs, that they are probably just looking to retool old minimal-quality D20 era books for Legend. Most of the Legend releases are just reprinted/reformatted Runequest MRQ books so far, too (and not even edited beyond the basics, judging from books like Pirates of Legend that have errors/omissions that go back to the original RQ version still intact for legend). And the Monsters of Legend missing traits gap, for example. I mean, Mongoose might be looking at a core base that is (like me) willing to overlook all of these issues for the good meat of their games. I think a larger body of tabletop gamers are not so willing to accept so many editing and quality control issues these days, and when Mongoose's reputation for more than six years now has been synonymous with "poor editing and high errata" among almost every gamer I know, that's got to have an effect on their sales over time.

Blowing the Dust off of Second Edition AD&D

In the days before Perception was a skill

So my two sessions so far of the creeping AD&D 1st edition game have been fun, but the lengthy period of time between games is a real killer for the sort of plotline/sandbox thing I originally set out to do. By session two trying to keep track of who had what plot, who was interested in which potential quest or point of exploration and so forth was a muddy pit of confusion, as too many older gamers with poor memories equals disaster when it comes to consistency (I kid! Mostly it was my own lack of focus thanks to too much going on between games to even think about game scenarios or plots). So the game was retooled on the spot to focus on a core plot instead and migrated everyone in classic fashion through what I call AD&D's archetypal Roadtrip from Hell event (aka wilderness journey), involving boat rides, an owlbear and a large array of goblins using a giant stag beetle as a heavy assault beast. It ended with the discovery of a lost temple entrance, and enough suspicion pointing toward its doors as the solution to their problems.

Playing with 1st edition is a reminder to me of many, many things. Not least of these is that its reminding me that I used a lot of houserules, borrowed liberally when in doubt from B/X D&D, and that I don't think I ever applied the surprise, initiative and general combat rules as written in the DMG, relying instead on the outline of combat in Basic D&D and jumping to the DMG for the charts (and eventually using the Armor Class Wheel published in Dragon magazine).

It has also reminded me of just how quaint and amusing (and infuriating when running the game) the obscure wargame inches & rulers measurement system is. There are a huge number of little annoying bits like this that riddle the system (ascertaining encumbrance last session was another momentary headache). It's easy to see why Classic Original D&D tends to get the most love in the OSR community; it really is a simpler, more intuitive approach to the same basic game, and B/X D&D clearly owed much to the Holmes remastering from which they later were adapted (as best I can tell; keep in mind I got into the hobby October 1980, and I was nine years old, so some of the publication history of the game is something I learned about later on).

In any case, one thing has become clear: every moment with 1E that has been annoying me, or led to rules confusion or clarification, or otherwise caused a head-scratching moment is also an element which would be crystal-clear to me if I was running 2nd edition. 2E is, for me, the edition which I know best, the one where I still remember which page to flip through for whatever specific rule it is I need to reference....it's the edition that sits smack dab in my "comfort zone" of old games.

I plan to let everyone know next session (which won't at this rate be until December 8th) that I'll be bringing my 2nd edition books along, as it took about two games of AD&D 1E to remind me of why I stopped running it around 1985 (switching to T&T, Runequest and Palladium) and didn't come back until the game had been formally revised; and even then only because my college group  begged me to consider AD&D 2nd edition after I'd subjected them to several months of Dragonquest and Runequest. Hah!

That first game I ran of AD&D 2nd edition, using the heinously bad idea that was the Monstrous Compendium folio along with the new DMG and PHB was glorious. It involved an old farmstead that was abandoned, giant rats, some angry kobolds, a friendly and obnoxious pixie named Percy and an amassing horde of orcs and hobgoblins that the players realized was a threat to the local town. It cascaded rapidly into one of the coolest campaigns I'd ever run in AD&D.

Meat snacks!

While many players of 1st edition were decrying AD&D 2E for its changes, I was part of a crowd that had been lost to 1st edition, who associated that specific edition with the unpleasant Middle School years, and so 2nd edition was the opposite for me...it was like the game had cleaned up, matured a bit, and at last was trying to make sense of itself. It was the edition which I could embrace.

But I've complained about this before! I have lots of fond memories of AD&D 1st edition....but I just can't go back, it turns out. Hopefully my mess of players will understand. It's either that, or I find a copy of B/X D&D and try running AD&D 1E the way I actually did back in the day, as a hybrid mess of the two.

In any case, those 2nd edition reprint listings that popped up on Amazon are a good sign to me that WotC knows people like me are out there, those who were part of the crowd which embraced 2nd edition AD&D, and that we are all more than happy to shell a bit out on some shiny new copies of our favorite edition. I certainly hope that's how it works out...

Hopefully with a different cover!

Friday Blaaaaaaaaaghhhhhh! Rift and stuff

Well, I feel I earned a well-deserved break for a few days from the tumultuous October blog-o-thon I put myself through. This was a busy week for me, with work ramping up dramatically and calling for a lot of overtime, and of course that whole election thing (and regardless of party affiliation I think we can all comfortably be happy that the victories were decisive and that we won't spend weeks or months watching this get resolved in recounts, recalls and the courts. Yay for democracy!)

I've played Rift like a murderous fiend for the last six or so weeks. Raptr terrifies me with its numbers as I realize that it is still realistically possible to immerse one's self in a MMORPG even with huge work and family commitments, if you can keep yourself to a firm schedule. On the other hand a reasonable chunk of my play time is really "Kalitherios or Alidastra standing around in Sanctuary while their all-seeing god-controller CPU is AFK managing his 11 month old." Which is to say, I have sometimes logged on at 8 AM and then noticed I was still logged on a few hours later. Oddly, I rarely get kicked from the game for being AFK.

Rift has really sucked me in, though. I look forward to relaxing a bit on my playtime, as most of my effort was focused on getting one character to level 50....and by Jove I did! Kalitherios, ascended Guardian on the Faeblight RP server is now level 50. I was a bit nonplussed (and excited) to learn that there was an entirely new leveling system that kicks in then, involving souls, shards and an achievment point concept that is a bit reminiscent of what D&D Online's rank bonuses are like, except all end-loaded for the endgame. There's a ton of instanced content I have yet to scratch the surface on, and I will need to look to grouping to do much of it. Fortunately Rift makes this trivial and bearable.

Rift is one of the new generation of MMOs that tries to actively build easy grouping (or as I like to call it automatic grouping) into the play experience. It does not assume you must talk to people and be nice to them to get into a group....it does not assume you need to communicate at all; it just happens. This really is a good thing for those of us who like our MMOs like we like real life. Journey through your typical day and figure out how often you willingly engage random strangers in conversation, then proceed to invite them on your shopping or work quest (extroverts leave the room for this question, please!) Doesn't happen all that often, does it? I've always wondered why our MMOs naturally assumed we all wanted to talk to strangers voluntarily, when in truth much of your average MMO's content should be looked at as more like the kind of shared experience you get when you go to a theater, or drive a car on the freeway. We all are cooperating to get the job or experience done, and while we might have friends in the car or at the theater with us, 99.9% of the time we're not engaging total strangers in conversation while we're at it. And yes that does mean I'm equating bad PUGs to a car wreck or that talkative person in the theater!

In the meantime, since I suffer from alt-itis (and have 10 active characters in Rift) the Storm Legion prelude quests and instant adventures are happening all over the place and are clearly clever mechanisms by Trion to help aspiring or slow levelers boost their XP to level up characters. You can join an instant adventure in Sanctuary or Meridian and pretty much guarantee going from level 10 to 25 in about five hours. You can reasonably expect to jump 2 or 3 levels per hour afterward if you remain dedicated. Don't try to join a raid group and go AFK though (the temptation will be there, since you accrue raid group XP regardless of effort) or the "work for your share" crowd will kick you out. I've been more than working for my share, and all my alts are now somewhere in the mid to late 20's in level. I think these massive Storm Legion assault adventures won't end until next year, so there's a couple months yet to take advantage of them.



Rift is even creeping into my tabletop experience. My latest plot line (any of my players stop reading here!*) for the Wednesday group involves an eradariin (red elf-the bad elves in my setting) sorceress who intends to use an ancient fey relic called the Heart of the Wood to corrupt a planar gate to the realm of Arborea; she plans to force the gate open using an Astral Tether which will let the Heart of the Wood pass through. When this happens, Arborea will begin to transform into a new feywild.

The reason for this is simple: in the Realms of Chirak the feywild was destroyed, the entire faerie realm the first victim of the apocalypse that wiped out the gods and almost destroyed the world. The plane of the feywild was eaten entirely by Ga'thon the destroyer god, who shortly thereafter perished when he was slain by the protector gods in a Pyrrhic victory. Ga'Thon's corpse formed an entire mountain range, and within that range is the expulsion of detritus that was the feywild, a great wall of stone in which is frozen the terror-stricken, petrified remains of the feyfolk that were annihilated in this destruction. It had lasting ramifications, as many of the feyfolk that survived in the mortal plane were driven mad by the loss, and the feywild, a heaven-like place to which fey souls could travel for reincarnation after death, meant that there was no longer a fey afterworld, either; now, when elves and faeries and other kin die, they are likely to return as terrifying undead of different sorts if precautions are not taken.

Arborea: where the REAL eladrin roam

So this sorceress actually feels she is doing a good thing, but her motivations are cruel; she knows she can't just corrupt an entire godly plane like Arborea, but it has the "essence" necessary to jumpstart the process. So she intends to force the portal open, to allow her artifact to pass through, which will start a subtle change (thing magical strangelets) in Arborea; and while they will be stopped eventually in the planar realm by divine forces, will still channel unchecked** into the mortal world through the open portal, causing an inevitable shift in the mortal plane into a new feywild. Which may very well be bad for all sorts of odd reasons, not the least of which is the adverse effect the laws of the fey realms have on simple mortals, who cannot readily handle the weird time effects of the feywild, among other things.

So yes....some of this was brewing for a while as an idea for a future plot, but my obsession with Rift and the idea of planar invasions made it percolate into reality. I may toy more with the idea; Chirak has for many years now been assumed to be a world where reality is only loosely held together due to the severe damage of the near-apocalypse, and there are supposed to be many, many planar rifts across the land, caused by this fraying of reality. In the past the biggest rift tale I integrated into a campaign incolved the Abyssal Rift off the southwestern coast of Espanea, but I have only really focused on a few minor permanent rifts since then. This new campaign arc may well see an effort at expanding the concept.

Okay, I think I've blathered on enough. Maybe I'll finally do a review of the Leon Kennedy campaign from Resident Evil 6 next week (working on Chris Redfield's campaign now). I may also talk more about Tera soon, which I am slowly but surely playing more of (I love its combat, and its world has a different enough feel from Rift that I still want to explore it). Tera is going F2P through level 28 soon, for those interested and not keen to commit any money.

Impractical armor is impractical

* I don't normally post current game lore/plots on the blog to avoid spoilers, so this is a rare exception

** In Chirak all the old gods are dead and the young avatars and demiurges are too weak and still mortal, thus lacking the ability to protect the realm against such a catastrophe.