Two quick reviews as I run out the door…
Milkyfish Press
I’ve updated (and by updated, I mean ‘mangled the HTML of deli’s nice site, so she’s going to design another one I can’t break so easily’) Milkyfish.com, which is our self-publishing operation. We’re starting off with a trio of Traveller supplements.
I’m referring to these as ‘campaign toolkits’. They’re half-way between sourcebooks and adventures. It’s my contention that if you get past session five of a campaign, you’re fine – the game’s hit critical mass at that point, and has generated enough content and subplots to keep going indefinitely. The players are invested in their characters and know enough about how the setting works and how the group interacts to make plans and take charge of their own destinies. Running an awesome first session is easy enough; it’s running an awesome fourth session that’s tricky.
The campaign toolkit idea is to be a second-stage booster, keeping the game going past the first few sessions until it can fly under its own power.
There’s a poll on the Milkyfish site, where you can vote for your favourite of the three proposed toolkits. Regular readers of my livejournal will recognise one of them.
My Gaming DNA
Rob Donaghue has a great post where he traces his ‘gaming DNA’ – games he enjoyed and vividly remembers. I’m dying of the post-Warpcon manflu, so I shall be deeply unoriginal and copy his theme.
Warpcon XX
Warpcon happened again last weekend. Each con has its own unique twist; the theme this year seems to be ‘oh God, we’re old, we’re old.’
Warpcon XX. The twentieth year of the con. I was at Warpcon IV. That’s sixteen years ago. The people running the con are barely older than that.
I’m old.
Bundle Reviews #2
More short reviews from the Gamers Help Haiti bundle. This week, two sets of minis, an indie rpg, a comic, and some maps. Some of the products in this set didn’t grab me at all, but seeing as they were donated for charity, I won’t complain.
Click to see me dance around the issue!
Review: Echo Bazaar
Along with half my Twitter friends list, I’ve been playing a lot of Echo Bazaar lately.
Bundle Reviews #1
Along with thousands of other gamers, I picked up the Gamers Help Haiti bundle from DriveThruRPG. It’s an astonishingly generous offer from the hundreds of publishers involved, giving something like $1400 worth of products away for free with a $20 donation to disaster relief. It’s raised nearly $140,000 at the time of writing.
In a moment of madness, I’ve decided to review each and ever one of the products in the bundle. A few ground rules, first:
- I’m only going to skim most of the products. There’s more stuff here than I have time to read. If something catches my eye, I’ll look at it in more detail, but most products are only going to get short, off-the-cuff reviews.
- I’ll review two to five products per post.
- I’m grabbing products at random, initially. I may do themed posts later on.
- I intend to find something positive about each and every product. Well, I’ll try to do so, anyway.
So, the first to be randomly clicked on is…
Gamers Help Haiti
There’s an absurdly good charity offer over at DriveThruRPG today – more than a thousand dollars worth of .pdf rpgs for $20. It’s so generous I almost feel guilty for buying it.
Admittedly, I can’t buy it right now, as their credit card authentication server appears to have melted under the strain, but I’ll grab it when I can, and so should you. There’s something for everyone in the bundle. Fred Hicks has a list of the contents here.
Personally, I’m grabbing it for Chronica Feudalis, Kerberos Club, Mars and the Trail of Cthulhu Player’s Guide (and, well, charity), but some of the other titles are intriguing and possibly useful, too.
Probably not Fantasy Women Clipart JPEG 7, admittedly, but to each their own.
2009.9999, repeating
I’ve always said that my year doesn’t start until Warpcon, and that’s definitely true this year. That lets me put the last week, which includes hard drive failures, medical bills and the car dying in the middle of the road in torrential rain as well as the whole redundancy issue under the heading of 2009, and 2009 already sucks.
