37th Annual Origins Award Nominees Announced

The Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design Announces 37th Annual Origins Awards Nominees

COLUMBUS, OH (April 13, 2011) The Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design is proud to announce the nominees for the 37th Annual Origins Awards.

The Origins Awards are presented annually by the Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design to recognize outstanding achievement in design and production of games and game related products.

The nominees were voted on by hobby game retailers at the GAMA Trade Show in March 2011 from a short list in each category determined by a jury of hobby game professionals and knowledgeable enthusiasts. The winner of each category will be determined by the votes of attendees at the Origins Game Fair in Columbus OH, June 22nd-26th. The winners will be announced and the coveted Calliope statues presented at the Origins Awards Ceremony on the evening of Saturday June 25th. Submitted games that were not nominated will be available to play in the Open Gaming Area at the Origins Game Fair.

In the next couple of days, I'll be providing descriptions and reviews of the products that received nominations this year as well as making some comments regarding those who opted not to submit their products for consideration. For example...Black Gate Magazine has published media tie-in stories and regularly publishes reviews. Why didn't they submit for game related publication? Let the retailers decide if you warrant a nomination, but submit for goodness' sake.

This year's nominees are quite strong. For the first time ever, I think that every nominee in the best RPG category deserves to win an award. As I wrote earlier, there will be more praise lavished upon the nominees in the days to come. For now, let's just have a look at that list.

BEST ROLEPLAYING GAME

DC Adventures - Green Ronin Publishing
Designer: Steve Kenson

Dragon Age, Set 1 - Green Ronin Publishing
Designer: Chris Pramas

The Dresden Files RPG: Your Story - Evil Hat Productions
Designers: Leonard Balsera, Jim Butcher, Genevieve Cogman, Robert Donoghue, Fred Hicks, Kenneth Hite, Ryan Macklin, Chad Underkoffler, Clark Valentine

Fiasco - Bully Pulpit Games
Designer: Jason Morningstar

Gamma World RPG - Wizards of the Coast
Designers: Rich Baker, Bruce Cordell

BEST ROLEPLAYING SUPPLEMENT

A Song of Ice and Fire Campaign Guide (A Song of Ice and Fire RPG) - Green Ronin Publishing
Designers: David Chart, Joshua Frost, Brian Kirby, Jon Leitheusser, Anthony Pryor, Robert J. Schwalb, Owen K.C. Stephens

Our World (The Dresden Files RPG) - Evil Hat Productions
Designers: Leonard Balsera, Jim Butcher, Genevieve Cogman, Robert Donoghue, Fred Hicks, Kenneth Hite, Ryan Macklin, Chad Underkoffler, Clark Valentine

Advanced Player's Guide (Pathfinder RPG) - Paizo Publishing
Designers: Judy Bauer, Jason Bulmahn, Christopher Carey, James Jacobs, Steve Kenson, Hal Maclean, Rob McCreary, Erik Mona, Jason Nelson, Stephen Radney-MacFarland, Sean K. Reynolds, F. Wesley Schneider, Owen K.C. Stephens, Lisa Stevens, James L. Sutter, Russ Taylor, Vic Wertz

Sixth World Almanac (Shadowrun RPG)- Catalyst Game Labs
Designers: Jason Hardy, John Heifers, John Dunn

Sunward: The Inner System (Eclipse Phase RPG) - Posthuman Studios
Designers: Rob Boyle, Brian Cross, Adam Jury

BEST BOARD GAME

Castle Ravenloft - Wizards of the Coast
Designer: Bill Slaviciek, Mike Mearls

Defenders of the Realm - Eagle Games
Designer: Richard Launius

Fresco - Queen Games
Designer: Wolfgang Panning, Marco Ruskowski, Marcel Süßelbeck

Lords of Vegas - Mayfair Games
Designer: James Ernest, Mike Selinker

Nuns on the Run - Mayfair Games
Designer: Fréderic Moyersoen

BEST TRADITIONAL CARD GAME

Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer - Gary Games
Designer: Justin Gary

Back to the Future: The Card Game - Looney Labs, Inc.
Designer: Andrew Looney

Hecho - Glowfly Games
Designers: Brian Knudsen, Brent Knudsen

Hex Hex XL - Smirk & Dagger Games
Designers: Curt Covert, Justin Brunetto

Railways of the World: The Card Game - Eagle Games
Designer: James Eastham, Steve Ellis

BEST FAMILY, PARTY, OR CHILDREN'S GAME

Ligretto Dice - Playroom Entertainment
Designers: Inka Brand, Markus Brand

Telestrations - USAopoly, Inc.
Designer: USAopoly

Wits and Wagers Family Edition - North Star Games
Designer: Dominic Crapuchettes

Word on the Street Junior - Out of the Box Publishing
Designer: Jack Degnan

Zombie Dice - Steve Jackson Games
Designer: Steve Jackson

BEST GAMING ACCESSORY

Color Primer: Dragon Red - The Army Painter
Designer: Bo Penstoft, Jonas Faering

Adventurers Tiles - Battle Bunker Games
Designer: Tony Ironmonger, Daniel Hinkle

Battlefield XP Swamp Tufts - The Army Painter
Designer: Bo Penstoft, Jonas Faering

Cthulhu Dice Bag - Steve Jackson Games
Designer: Alex Fernandez

BattleTech Hex Pack: Lakes & Rivers - Catalyst Game Labs
Designer: Randall N. Bills

BEST MINIATURES RULES

Adventures in the Lost Lands - Two Hour Wargames
Designer: Ed Teixeira

BattleTech Technical Readout: 3085 - Catalyst Game Labs
Designer: Joel Bancroft-Conners

DC HeroClix Blackest Knight Starter Game - WizKids/NECA
Designers: Eric Engelhard, Jake Theis, Norman Barth, Drew Nolosco

Hordes: Primal MK2 - Privateer Press
Designer: Matt Wilson

MERCS Games Rule - MERCS Miniatures, LLC
Designer: Brian Shotton

BEST HISTORICAL BOARD GAME

Warlords of Europe - GameBuilders
Designers: Ken Griffin, Kyle Battle, Russ Rupe

Conflict of Heroes: Price of Honour Poland 1939 - Academy Games
Designer: Uwe Eickect

Catan Histories - Settlers of America: Trails to Rails - Mayfair Games
Designer: Klaus Teuber

Panzer General: Allied Assault - Petroglyph Games, Inc.
Designers: Chuck Kroegel, George Chastain

BEST GAME-RELATED PUBLICATION

No Quarter Magazine - Privateer Press
Editors: Matt Wilson, Aeryn Rudel, Privateer Press

Hamlet's Hit Points - Gameplaywright
Author: Robin Laws

Family Games: The 100 Best - Green Ronin Publishing
Editor: James Lowder

Shadowrun: Spells and Chrome - Catalyst Game Labs
Editor: John Helfers

World at War: Revelation - Lock ‘n Load Publishing
Author: Mark H. Walker

G is for Gamut -- A Gamut of Games

Originally published in 1969, Sid Sackson's A Gamut of Games is a "must own" publication for any serious game collector/game hobbyist. Sid Sackson was one of the great game design geniuses of the history of the gaming hobby and many of his designs -- especially Acquire -- helped to fuel an explosion of gaming in Europe and set the standard for the modern Euro or Designer game.

Sackson wrote A Gamut of Games to provide game enthusiasts with a book that could be used as an alternative or supplement to all the "Hoyle" books that cluttered the shelves of book stores. As Sackson put it in his preface, "The purpose of this book is to present a selection of games, thirty-eight it turns out, that will not be found in the "Hoyles," either because they were invented by my friends and me, or because they are old -- but good -- games that somehow got lost in the shuffle."

What a list of games it is as well. There are card games like HEKATON, board games like LINES OF ACTION and CROSSINGS. The game CROSSINGS has since been released as the game EPAMINONDAS. Gamut also includes the rules for playing Sackson's excellent game FOCUS. The tome is a veritable treasure trove for the game enthusiast. If you have the core supplies needed for the "Cheap Ass Games" catalog, then you have everything you need to play every game in this book.

Someday, I'd love to see a publisher release a boxed set that includes a copy of the book and all the pieces necessary for all the games.

F is for Fantasy

Fantasy is arguably the most ancient genre of storytelling. One can imagine that some ancient storyteller regaled his fellow hut dwellers with a tale of the day's hunt, but one can also imagine that the "one that got away" was unbelievably big and had fantastic powers. Fantasy is as old as civilization and encompasses all forms of imaginative storytelling -- even the plausible/possible. Everything from Tolkien's "Middle Earth" to the New York of ABC's Castle is a fantasy world where a storyteller engages an audience in an attempt to educate and delight them.

Yet for all its ubiquity, Fantasy that typically brings to mind a vary narrow set of tales. These are stories of Feudal societies where valiant knights slay evil demons/trolls/dragons and where the writing is "uninspired," "lacks seriousness," "is for children," or "isn't literature." What is it about fantasy, the progenitor of all fiction, that makes some rebuff it and seek to separate their own favored fiction as somehow superior to "mere fantasy"?

Recently, David Brin of all people, wrote a blog post claiming that Science Fiction differed from Fantasy in that SF stories believed in the "perfectibility of man," while Fantasy seemed steeped in an almost authoritarian desire to ensure that "the social order stays the same." The thrust of his argument, though he might disagree, appears to be that SF is superior to Fantasy because it breaks free from the "reactionary" notion that we are doomed to repeat our past or that human nature is a fixed thing. SF assumes we can learn and overcome the sins of our fathers, and if we don't accomplish this very possible thing then we are tragic figures. For Brin it is the cautionary tale that makes SF superior.

There are too many ways in which Brin's essay fails to make its case for me to itemize here -- to be fair this and it were only blog posts and one could/should spend an entire semester in a lit genre class discussing this very question.

Brin isn't the first, nor even the best at making this argument.

Michael Moorcock's seminal essay on Tolkien's "trilogy," Epic Pooh, cuts right to the core of Brin's argument. In that piece, Moorcock argues:

"The sort of prose most often identified with 'high' fantasy is the prose of the nursery-room. It is a lullaby; it is meant to soothe and console. It is mouth music...It coddles; it makes friends with you; it tells comforting lies..."

"Like Chesterton, and other markedly Christian writers who substituted faith for artistic rigour, he sees the petite bourgeoisie, the honest artisans and peasants, as the bulwark against Chaos. These people are always sentimentalised in such fiction because, traditionally, they are always the last to complain about any deficiencies in the status quo."

"In many ways, The Lord of the Rings is, if not exactly anti-romantic, an anti-romance."

"I find this sort of consolatory Christianity as distasteful as any other fundamentally misathropic doctrine."

"I sometimes think that as Britain declines, dreaming of a sweeter past, entertaining few hopes of a finer future, her middle classes turn increasingly to the fantasy of the rural life and talking animals, the safety of the woods that are the pattern of the paper on the nursery-room wall."

There is so much more that the brief quotes above to Moorcock's essay, which is available in both Monkey Brain Book's Wizardry and Wild Romance and in Savoy Books' invaluable Michael Moorcock: Into the Media Web. Needless to say, Moorcock views a certain vein of fantasy storytelling as misanthropic -- due to its sentiments regarding human nature and the need of a heavenly protector/father to comfort us -- and as inferior to fantasy that is truly romantic and humanistic.

Brin is more reductive in his post, implying that Fantasy is regressive/reactionary while SF is progressive and positive, but his main point is the same. Type of fiction A is superior to type of fiction B because of type of fiction B's superior understanding of humanity. In the case of Moorcock there is an argument for what it means to be human -- and that it means facing terrors -- that is clearly articulated and compelling. In Brin, it seems that there is a kind of equally misanthropic Post-Human/Trans-Human/Singularity argument going on. I find much transhuman, post-singularity, fiction to be as misanthropic as anything Moorcock accuses Tolkien of writing.

To be fair, Brin's own novels aren't misanthropic and feature interesting tales of human struggle. Equally though, there are moments when he demonstrates that mankind can fall back to those feudal tendencies if they aren't continually reminded of the lessons of the past and provided the connections with the past necessary to learn from it. In his novel The Postman human society collapses back to feudal principles, only to be saved by communication and connection to others. That book has a powerful argument, but underlying it is a sort of assumption to the fixed nature of man. The society may improve, but the people don't -- nor do their motives.

In fact, there are whole genres of SF that are obsessed with the lack of perfectibility in man. The cyberpunk genre may have people who are physically improved through technology, but the societies created by these people are mere mercantilist nightmares. Dystopic SF isn't always a "cautionary tale," it is often a lamenting screed of "if only we could, but we can't."

Where I do agree with Brin is that Fantasy "ought" to have stories where the old order can be overcome, where people can learn from the past to make better societies, and humans are completely doomed by human nature to be flawed creatures for eternity.

There are many books and essays about what Fantasy is or isn't, where it fails or doesn't fail, what genre is superior to what other genre, how modern Fantasy is immoral, how old fantasy is reactionary and lame, how SF is fascist...the list is nigh infinite. I highly recommend Moorcock's Epic Pooh, Tolkien's On Fairy Stories,, The Language of the Night by Ursula LeGuin, and HP Lovecraft's Supernatural Horror in Literature. Each of these essays approach the topic from a different perspective, but all are worth while -- as is Brin's post for that matter.

I like all the forms of Fantasy. I love the nursery stories of Winnie the Pooh, the tragic tale of Achilles, the tale of the everyman hero Frodo, the tales of the super heroic and noble John Carter, the complex politics of The Culture, the wide eyed optimism of the Golden Age SF, the cynical and depressing pessimism of cyberpunk, the progressive and the reactionary. They all have a place on my bookshelf with none holding a moral high ground over the other. Fantasy and SF each have reactionary and progressive tales.

The fantasies I love the most though, are those created by my twin daughters. In their world, they are Jungle Junction (what my daughters call Ellyvan) and Iron Man battling the Grabbing Goblin and the Mandarin in order to save Uniqua and Captain D'Amedicada.

E is for Encounters

When the 4th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons was released, Wizards of the Coast attempted a dual strategy of organized play. The first was to continue their Living Forgotten Realms campaign, while getting rid of Living Greyhawk and the Mark of Heroes Eberron games. The second was to run a series of "Game Day" adventures that coincided with individual products that were soon to be released. Most of these adventures were meant to be played in a single sitting of 4 hours. Many people enjoy the Living Forgotten Realms format, but the "Game Day" format was one of the things that contributed to my initial misunderstanding of the 4th Edition system.

The "Game Day" adventures weren't very complex. Designing an adventure that is supposed to tell a story in four encounters -- approximately four hours of play -- isn't easy and these adventures largely suffered from this major flaw. These adventures also suffered from the fact that they were geared entirely to promoting a singular product that was being released within a week or so of the adventure. This meant that the adventures were only being written when products were scheduled for release -- and we are talking major "Players Handbook" type products not regular products. Thus these "Game Days" weren't frequent occurrences, or at least not frequent enough to build a real following.

Last year, Wizards combined the regular game play experience of the Living Forgotten Realms games with the market driven adventure design of the "Game Day" adventures to create their Encounters Program. One thing that differentiated the Encounters program from other organized play events was that the individual sessions were designed to be played in 2 hours, and that each sitting was only one Encounter in a larger tale. The first two Encounters "Seasons" -- what Wizards calls the individual Adventures which last for 8 to 20 weeks of play -- were a bit of a mixed bag.

The first season took place in the popular Undermountain environment, and the second took place in the fan favorite Dark Sun world, but both of these adventures missed the mark in execution -- either for story or game balance reasons. By the third season -- Keep on the Borderlands -- the Wizards staff was really beginning to hit stride. The adventure was an ambitious 20 chapter storyline that was the first adventure in the series to incorporate a robust narrative. It still contained a predictable storyline, but it was an adventure that prompted role playing more so than prior adventures and the scenes were well designed with some interesting challenges like Dragons on rooftops and using Trebuchet against mobs of attackers. The current season, March of the Phantom Brigade, is even more role play oriented than Keep and the adventure hooks for the story are fairly unique.

In the most recent season, the players take the role of Pioneers seeking to create a new settlement in Nentir Vale. That's right...Pioneers...Settlers. No mere mercenary band these characters. No avenging champions seeking wrongs to right. Those may be the motivations of individuals, sure, but the tone of the adventure is open to social interaction as the players might choose sides in the leadership. Do they favor the priest founding the new "city on the hill," the ever vigilant Ranger who is there to provide protection and create the law enforcement/militia for the new society, or do they side with the historian/archeologist who wishes to study the location to learn of its past. They can befriend them all, but there are role playing hooks a plenty.

Each adventure in the series has been better than the last, and each has shown a growth in the way that adventures are written for the 4th edition rules. Gone are the feelings of pure combat emulation, and in are feelings of storytelling and narrative.

My hope is that Wizards will mimic the old days of TSR. In the 70s, TSR used to have adventures that they only ran at conventions. These adventures included Rahasia, the "Slave Lords" series, "Against the Giants," and "Tomb of Horrors" -- all classics in the field. These adventures gained interest through word of mouth. They were playtested by gamers at cons, then they were released for sale. Not everyone has a game store in their local community, so it would be wonderful if Wizards released these adventures -- edited based on playtesting -- some six to eight months after the seasons were over.

Regardless, my local store has seen growing interest in 4th Edition since I have begun running games for them every week. Our group has a wide range of ages -- it's the first time I've gamed with high school students in quite some time.

Find a store near you running the Encounters program and give 4e a try...even if you have been resisting up until now.

D is for DragonQuest

In 1977, Simulations Publications Inc. (SPI) published a booked entitled Wargame Design: The History, Production, and Use of Conflict Simulation Games. This book is one of the great artifacts of the wargaming hobby and is an invaluable resource that provides accurate historical information about the state of the wargaming industry up to 1977. At that time, SPI had unit sales of 420,000 games a year to an audience of approximately 100,000-150,000 active gamers (Dunnigan, 140). The average cost of a war game at the time was $8 (in 1977 dollars), meaning that SPI had approximately $3.36 million in annual sales. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, this is about $12,272,400 in 2011 dollars.

By any standard, SPI was a big business in a small market -- they held a 50% market share by units sold and a 43% market share in percentage of cash spent by gamers. But 1977 was a time of massive transitions in the industry. At that time 10% of wargamers were "miniature" gamers -- in addition to being general wargamers -- though given the cost of miniatures and supplies, these individuals made up 30% of the money spent on war games. This was also the time of the rise of a new kind of game, the fantasy role playing game. 1974 had seen the publication of the first printed role playing game, Dungeons and Dragons, and that game was altering the gaming landscape forever.

Roleplaying games expanded the gaming market from the small community of 100,000-150,000 gamers, to a community of millions of gamers. By 2000, there were over 2 million people playing table top role playing games on a monthly basis. Modern sales figures for individual role playing game companies are nigh impossible to find. The revenues are either unpublished -- because the majority of the companies are privately owned -- or they are buried in consolidated reports like Hasbro's annual report. Chris Pramas estimated that the RPG industry had annual sales in the $30 million range in 2008. That number seems off by a wide margin for a couple of reasons. First, that would mean that the RPG industry is about the size of the wargame industry in 1977, which means that all the growth in the market since 1977 has collapsed -- assuming inflation adjusted dollars the market in 1977 was approximately $25 million. Second, according to their financials, Games Workshop -- a major fantasy miniatures gaming company -- reported £126.5 million in revenue in 2010. This signals that miniatures gaming has exploded since 1977 as a part of the market. One imagines that role playing games lag behind the miniatures market by a significant margin, but this hints that the market may be larger than Pramas fears. There are currently 49,983 members of Wizards of the Coast's "DDI Subscriber Group" which is a good estimate of the number of people who are subscribers to the site's functions. These subscriptions alone provide somewhere around $5 million in revenue. It is likely that the majority of these subscribers have purchased physical products in the year as well. I would guess that the entire rpg market is somewhere skyward of $50 million -- a little better than Pramas' guess. At least, I hopes so because a lower figure would mean that his company Green Ronin -- who publish a number of the best games in the market -- are tragically under appreciated by the market. Needless to say, the market has expanded as these figures don't include the modern war game market -- which is probably similar in size to the 1977 market -- the board game market (Settlers of Catan alone has sold more than 18 million copies), trading card games, or computer rpgs. All of these are descendants of the old wargaming market place.

For the most part, SPI was a smart company and realized that the market was in flux and that these newfangled role playing games and miniatures games were where the market was headed. They gathered together some of their best and brightest game designers (Eric Goldberg, David James Ritchie, Edward J. Woods, Greg Costikyan, and Redmond A. Simonsen) and produced their own role playing game. The resulting product, DragonQuest was published in 1980 with much fanfare, but less than stellar reviews.

[15.2]A character who is adjacent to, but not in the Attack Zone of, a Hostile character may employ actions A, B, C, D, E, F, H, J, L, M, P, Q, R, S, T, or X.
He could not implement Action G or W. Further, while he could Fire, he could not Fire at an adjacent character. He could also Hurl a weapon, but, again, not at an adjacent character. -- DragonQuest First Edition pg. 20 Rule 15.2

Forrest Johnson reviewing the game for in Space Gamer magazine, had the following to say:

"1.784 DESIGN IN HASTE, REPENT AT LEISURE. With all its talented staff, SPI has managed to do what companies like TSR and Metagaming did with lesser resources -- mess up a promising new system...DRAGONQUEST is not your dream game, And appearing in 1980, it is at a competitive disadvantage. But it was put together by professionals. Despite its faults, it still presents a pleasing contrast to the sloppiness of TFT, the illogic of D&D, the incoherence of C&S. It borrows good ideas liberally from the older systems, and offers some new innovatiosn of its own. Furthermore, the planned supplements, if only half of them see print, will make this an incredibly rich game."

The Chaosium affiliated magazine Different Worlds in its 11th issue wrote that the game, "functions as a FRP game the same way a sledge hammer functions as a mousetrap. Both get the job done, but the effort involved in getting it to work is not worth the end result." This review prompted a response from designer Eric Goldberg which stated, "while mice have escaped from conventional mousetraps, none have survived being spattered about by a sledgehammer."

SPI published the combat rules for DragonQuest as a stand alone game entitled Arena of Death in SPI's in house Ares magazine in its 4th issue and later as a stand alone boxed game. The first edition combat rules were bogged down by the fact that the rules structure and design was modeled after traditional war game presentations and not on the more narrative presentation of role playing games. As such, the combat rules were difficult to understand and very mechanical in play. DragonQuest included many innovations in its magic system and its skill system, as well as its universal attribute test system, but the combat system of the first edition was arcane and overly complex. SPI quickly responded to the need to improve the game and released a second edition in 1981 -- one year after the original. One name stands out among those added to the list of "Game Testing and Advice," that I believe made all the difference in the world. That name is Greg Gorden. Gorden is one of the best designers in the business, and the changes between the two editions -- in addition to seeing Gorden's later work -- lead me to believe he was a major influence in the second edition.

[15.2]Figures with a modified Agility of 22 through 25 are allowed one extra hex of movement when executing any of the following actions: Melee attack, Evade, Withdraw, Pass, and Retreat.
Thus Eaglewing the Elf, whose modified Agility is 25 due to the lack of weight he carried, his natural Agility and his bonus due to being an Elf can move three hexes while preparing his Tulwar instead of two. -- DragonQuest 2nd Edition page 16 rule [15.2]

The second edition of the game kept all of the interesting quirks of the first edition, but cleaned up the play of the combat system -- and made some other minor tweaks as well. It also added images of miniatures in use during play and clearer examples of game play. The game seemed ready to take the market by storm. But then TSR -- the publishers of D&D -- purchased SPI on March 31, 1982. With that purchase support for DragonQuest was minimal at best as TSR focused on their own games instead of the old SPI games. There were about 6 articles supporting DragonQuest published in Dragon magazine, but the "rumored" 4th rule book for the game Arcane Wisdom never hit the stands. It wasn't just TSR's lack of interest in DragonQuest that led to the lack of support. It was also the fact that when TSR bought SPI, most of the key SPI designers left the company to work for a new company called Victory Games. Gerard Klug, John Butterfield, and Greg Gorden all went to work for the new company. Within a year of their leaving TSR/SPI for Victory Games, these designers created the James Bond 007 role playing game which built on some concepts presented in DragonQuest, but completely abandoned the old school war game rules presentation.

TSR eventually published a cleaned up and revised 3rd edition of DragonQuest in 1989, but for all of the improvements it made to the mechanics of the game it lost some of the flair of the original. Gone was the "College of Greater Summonings" with its demon bound magicians, and in was a lighter tone similar to many of the "Culture Wars scared" products TSR was publishing at the time. The 3rd edition is a good rules set, but if you're going to play the game you should also have a copy of the 2nd edition. The rich feel of the game's magical colleges is one of the best features of the game.

DragonQuest isn't without a literary legacy either. James Barclay's "Raven" stories are based on his own DragonQuest campaign.

Thundercats Ho!

I am overjoyed that I live in a world where I will be able to share new episodes of Thundercats with my twin daughters.

C is for Chill

You are about to enter the world of CHILL, where unknown things sneak, and crawl, and creep, and slither in the darkness of a moonless night. This is the world of horror, the world of the vampire, ghost, and ghoul, the world of things not know, and best not dreamt of. CHILL is a role-playing game of adventure into the Unknown and your first adventure is about to begin -- CHILL Introductory Folder

In 1984 a group of former TSR Employees -- including Mark Acres, Troy Denning, and Stephen Sullivan -- formed Pacesetter Ltd. Games and released the Chill role playing game. Chill wasn't the first horror role playing game, nor was it the best, but it has long held a place as a "cult" favorite in the role playing game world. Where other horror role playing games sought to capture the dark nihilistic material horror of H.P. Lovecraft, or the gruesome horror of many films, Chill tried to capture the tone of Hammer and AIP productions.

Because of its focus, and because its creators were former TSR employees, Rick Swan reviewed the game quite negatively in Dragon magazine and in his Complete Guide to Role-Playing Games. He described the game as, "A horror game for the easily frightened...While most of Chill's vampires, werewolves, and other B-movie refugees wouldn't scare a ten-year-old, they're appropriate to the modest ambitions of the game...Chill is too shallow for extended campaigns, and lacks the depth to please anyone but the most undemanding players. For beginners only."

Swan was correct that the game was simple, and appropriate for beginners, but he was far from the mark when he claimed that it lacked depth that could appeal to demanding players who want extended campaigns. The game has solid underlying mechanics that encourage a loose style of play that encourages storytelling over combat and reduces the dependency on die rolls that so many role playing games often overly promote. Like many Pacesetter games, Chill is innovative and slightly ahead of its time -- nowhere is this more the case than with their Chill: Black Morn Manor board game -- but like many things ahead of their time there are some flaws to the mechanics. Nothing too big, but definitely things that might make some gamers reject it out of hand. The game is simple enough that a group of players can pick up the rules and start to play within 15 minutes...from scratch.

Let me repeat that. This game, made in 1984, is easy enough to learn that a group can open the box and begin playing within fifteen minutes. Given how complex rpgs seem to the non-gamer, this is quite a marvelous achievement in and of itself.

The most comprehensive review of Chill -- during its era -- was the review in Space Gamer 75 by Warren Spector. In the article, Spector provided a balanced review -- not all of it positive -- but described the game as follows:

You won't find better, more consistently entertaining writing in any set of game rules...
Chill is the first to include an introductory folder advising players to begin playing that adventure before they've read the rules of the game! To begin, players have only to read a four page READ-ME-FIRST! introduction to the rules, pick up the 16-page adventure booklet and begin playing! And, sure enough, the cockamamie scheme works!

Spector's final word on the game is that it "falls somewhat short of the mark," but his analysis is clear and he seems to understand that he is looking at something new here.

There are many games from the 80s that -- mechanically and tonally -- seem extremely dated by modern gaming standards. Chill -- the first Pacesetter edition -- isn't one of them. It has a kind of classic feel to it, just like all the Hammer and AIP movies it was inspired by. It isn't a dark and serious horror game, but it is an adventurous one. If you want to experience existential horror, you can do no better than Call of Cthulhu, but if you want to pretend to be Peter Cushing's Van Helsing hunting Christopher Lee's Dracula you want Chill.

A hand touched his face, but he felt no warmth of human reassurance in that other hand, no sense of comradeship against the dark foes of the night. Boulton shrank from the touch. Then scrambled back. Then shouted. For now he could see the hand, rising like a pale, icy plant, from the churning soil of a grave. -- Chill Campaign Book