The Core Worlds

I discovered, today, that Q-workshop and Paizo have released some new dice.

They describe them as:

Q-workshop present dice set for the third part of series released by Paizo Publishing – Pathfinder Chronicles: Second Darkness. Dice in our new colour scheme – purple & silver – vividly reflect the devious nature of Dark Elves, their cunning, secrecy and

… but, for whatever reason, trail off.

I wonder how that sentence is supposed to end?

Having given it some thought, I suspect it should be: squinty eyes that are cursed to suffer reading spidery script in low light conditions. (I confess, I like to be able to read my dice).

Can you do better?

I have a couple of friends who live in interesting places far, far away from civilisation (i.e. London) and manage to get less gaming in then their taste would like.

I’ve been looking around for software to run an online game, mostly focusing on video conferencing software. My efforts haven’t been all that fruitful though, every time I find something that looks suitable, it turns out to need a monthly fee to unlock essential features (such as supporting more then three people in the call).

So, since I think a few people are actually reading this blog now (thanks to RPG Bloggers), I thought I’d ask the community.

I think voice support is essential, as is support for at least five people. Video would be nice. A whiteboard, file sharing and dice rolling would be bonuses. I’d like to avoid paying money, but would be less annoyed by a one-off fee then something recurring. That said, if something is good and has a monthly fee, don’t be afraid to mention it.

What can you recommend? (Comments below please!). Thanks!

Friday night and I set off for Nottingham. I started by going south from the office to Oprington to avoid the most expensive railway line in the country. Things would have worked out better if Jim hadn’t got lost trying to find the station.

Still, we got there in the end and Adam was pleased to receive the Xbox 360 that Simon had collected for him. We were saved from suffering through people playing on it all night by virtue of the absence of any games for it.

Saturday dawned.

Several hours later we got up and found some breakfast before recapping York by Night. The trouble with late starts is that lunchtime arrives before you know it, and the pub is far too close to places which sell video games.

Andy prompted fled to retrieve his jumper from the pub, while the game was played.

WoD began in earnest when he returned. I won’t provide any details, since I know Andy is working on a proper write-up, but suffice it to say that it was a lot of fun, and we players were driven sufficiently insane.

Sadly, it was the last session of York by Night, but we’ll be kicking off York Unveiled sometime next year so we spent a fair chunk of the weekend tossing around character ideas (and playing Halo 3).

Sunday was a relaxed wind down with a number of games of Infernal Contraption and a little bit of fighting over Mage: The Awakening books. We finished off the day with Ingenius! but came to the conclusion that we were playing it with too much focus on scoring points and not enough on blocking other players. According to the rulebook scoring 18 on every track should happen “very rarely” but it is how I won the game on my first attempt, with at least two other players coming very close to matching the score.

Sadly the trip home was less than fun. The weather turned so the drive back to Kent took so long that I was stranded in Tonbridge for the night. Happily the commute to the office from there is only marginally longer then from my current address so the major consequences were a slightly more expensive train ticket, and turning up at the office with a large rucksack full of my gear for the weekend. I think this is scuppering my plan to collect some times to take home tonight – I’ve too much to carry already.

Photo credit: Jumping the ‘phant by Neil Crosby, Ingenious! by Jon Bristow

In previous years, Mongoose Publishing has held their open days at their offices, but this time they moved out to a sports centre on the edge Swindon Old Town.

This made it easier to get to and eliminated the usual fight for parking with Saturday morning shoppers, but an echoy room doesn’t lend itself very well to demos of RPGs (which involve lots of talking).

With the extra space, Mongoose was able to open up to some third party vendors who dangled some very tempting goodies in front of me. I was tempted to pick up some scenery models, but forced myself to resist the urge until after I’ve finished moving home.

Unfortunately, the event seemed smaller (in terms of attendance) than previous years. I’m not sure if this was to do with the room simply being bigger, or if people pulled out after Claudia Christian gave her apologies and spent the time filming episodes of Nip/Tuck.

There might not have been all that many people there, but there was plenty to see. Mongoose unveiled their shiny new license – Traveller. It is a game I’ve heard a great deal of praise for, but never actually got around to playing.

The new Conan book is out (running to something in the order of 460 pages) and using art appropriate to the tradition (kids, don’t show this one to your mothers, at least not without slicing out the outside margin on every left hand page).

A Call To Arms second edition is out, and looks nice. I didn’t get much time to look at it in the end, but it sounds like fighters have been made rather less useless.

There were also plenty of demo games going on. Since I’d arrived, looked up, and found Sam and Louise parked next to me, we ended up in a trio for most of the day, and we’d barely made it trough the door before being roped into a game of Paranoia by Ian.

A lowly team of troubleshooters we were not! No, we were destined for greater things and our BLUE clearance officers were responsible for the smooth running of an entire sector. We were, of course, suitable grateful to Friend Computer for the honour (“Oh ****!”).

If you don’t know Paranoia then “responsible for the smooth running” is code for “responsible for everything that goes wrong”.

Still, we managed to come out of it in one piece, even if we did have a reactor explode, a High Programmer drugged into insensibility, and unleashed a batch of scrubbots on our neighbours with orders to leak oil in treasonous patterns all over the neighbouring sector, and steal more oil when they ran out. Their poor little bot brains couldn’t cope and they went insane (and not in a good way, at least not if you’re anywhere near them).

Umm, obviously FEMB sector was being run by traitors and we only planted the evidence to expedite due process. Honest.

Kudos to Gareth Hanrahan for running a highly entertaining game.

Old Bear was running Kerakhistan Race of Death, a car racing game with machine guns based on the Battlefield Evolution rules. It was good fun, although I think the victory conditions need tweaking (people who have scored points in previous rounds are better off trying to end the race rather then score more points), but it was good fun overall.

Unfortunately, the race followed by lunch made it too late for us to join in any of the afternoon games, but it gave us a chance to look at all the goodies. Sam and Louise had a game of ACTA and I wandered around and did some catching up with people I haven’t had much contact with since moving away from Swindon.

Overall, it was a good day out.

The first issue of Kobold Quarterly turned up in my inbox this morning. I haven’t finished reading it yet (I’ve got a weekend ahead of me for that), but my first impressions are favourable.

It has a fair bit of crunch (game mechanics), but most of the content is fluff (setting information) which is how I like it. I have access to more then enough D&D game mechanics already so I’d rather have inspiration for plots then anything else (and I’ll confess to finding fluff more enjoyable to read than tables of combat statistics).

Having a high fluff content has the added bonus of making it handy for people who are running non-D&D games with a sword and sorcery setting (I know at least one person planning a RuneQuest game in a D&Desque setting).

One feature I’m happy to see is the Ecology of series, which was one of my favourite bits of the late Dragon magazine.

If you like RPGs then I suggest you pick up a subscription. At $16/year it is pretty inexpensive and is aimed at both DMs and players (although, it seems slightly more suited to the former).