You Got Your TWILIGHT in My Fighting Fantasy Style Gamebook, and I'm Glad.

When I purchased An Assassin in Orlandes, the first of Tin Man Games Gamebook Adventures, I did so out of a nostalgia for the old Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks by Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson and other excellent books in that genre.  I had recently acquired my first smart phone and was impressed that many of the old Fighting Fantasy books were available for purchase.  It was nice to revisit the books that along with Tunnels and Trolls solos had been my proxy game group during my middle and early high school years.  During that time, I was only able to play role playing games sporadically and the game books were a great substitute.  The smart phone versions brought back fond memories, even if it was harder to finish an adventure where one couldn't "accidentally" read future entries for clues.

The Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, and their eventual competitors, became a huge phenomenon.  One thing they never managed to do was expand their audience beyond certain market sectors which were mostly male readers.  TSR made a brief attempt at expanding the demographic with their Heart Quest books, but they didn't catch on for various reasons.

With the smart phone and the transition to ebooks, the gamebook has seen a resurgence.  One of the leading publishers in this resurgence is Tin Man Games, and with good reason.  When I began playing An Assassin in Orlandes, just to see how this "small upstart's Fighting Fantasy competitor" would fare, I was impressed with the thoughtfulness that went into the production. The book had a compelling narrative, a fun little game system (that also allows for a little "tilting" of die rolls which is a nice touch), and even had "Achievements" that could be earned by successful and unsuccessful play.  In short, it was clear that Tin Man was going to be big.  Their success continued with the acquisition of the license to produce future Fighting Fantasy Gamebooks, taking them from competitor to partner, and the acquisition of the Judge Dredd license.  I've been playing around with their Judge Dredd gamebook app, and it is quite fun -- more on that later. 

Tin Man really seems to know what they are doing, and they are also doing what publishers should have been doing during the first boom.  They are expanding the pool of potential gamebook players.  While we geeks might be precious to protect our hobbies from "fakes," "hipsters," or "sparkly vampires," as John Scalzi points out -- we shouldn't be.  Whoever wants to be a geek should be allowed to be, and they should be welcomed into our hobbies with open arms.  One of the things that I've learned from living in Southern California is that everyone is a geek.  That's right...everyone.  Disneyland's profits are based on the premise, and have been working for years.  Walk around Disneyland one day as an observer of people.  What do you see?  People from all walks of life joyously expressing their love and affection for fantasy, science fiction, and cartoons.  It is a place where they let down their pretentious guard and allow themselves to have fun.  And that is what being a geek is about.  It is about never loosing the "Golden Age of Science Fiction is 14" attitude and making the Golden Age of Science Fiction right now.  The same is true for comic books, role playing games, or whatever else you geek out about.  When Vampire the Masquerade hit the gaming hobby, I remember those who wrong-mindedly poo pooed Goths coming into our hobby playing their "weepy Goth Anne Rice game."  While others were doing that, I was meeting some great friends who it eventually turned out happened to be willing to try playing Warhammer 40k and Globbo.  Trust me, if you can get someone to play Globbo you've won the pop-culture wars and I credit White Wolf with getting Vampire fans who would never think of playing Globbo in the first place to try it out.  VtM was the gateway game that lead to more gaming for a lot of people.

It appears that Tin Man Games is trying to give fans of the Twilight books and Vampire Diaries a gateway gamebook into my favorite hobby with Strange Loves: Vampire Boyfriends.  This is something we should be praising.  After all, how far is it from Vampire Boyfriends -- a book with game mechanics -- to Vampire the Masquerade?  And as I've mentioned already, Vampire the Masquerade can lead to Twilight Imperium play.

Check out Tin Man's book trailer for their new book Vampire Boyfriends, the first in the Strange Loves series.

 

You know what?  I think I might just pick up a copy of this book/game.

Nintendo and Why I Love Minor League Baseball

Bull Durham is one of the best baseball films ever made.  It's one of the classics like Major League, Bang the Drum Slowly, For the Love of the Game, Fear Strikes Out, and Pride of the Yankees (not a complete list by any means).  One of the things that separates it from those other films is that it is a story about Minor League baseball players who play for the Durham Bulls.  The Bulls are currently Tampa Bay's Triple A affiliate, but were an Atlanta Braves Single-A team at the time of the film.  The film's protagonist "Crash" Davis is a long time minor league veteran who had been playing AAA and is sent down to Single-A to season a pitching phenom.

"Crash" may be the protagonist, but the Minor Leagues are the spotlight character of the film.  If you follow the background dialogue, you get to hear about many of the unique events and promotions that happen in the minors.  Taco nights, Little League Nights, "Clowns of Baseball," hot dog eating contests, and a lot of other classic small town activities abound in their mentions.  Add to that baseball that is played at a level much better than most of us ever played the game, but clumsy in comparison to the play in "the show" and you have a perfect demonstration of why baseball continues to capture the American imagination.  Yes, home runs in the Majors and phenoms like Mike Trout are awe inspiring to watch, but games played by the Rancho Cucamonga Quakes which open with FUNTAINMENT are Americana at its best.  They are filled with hope, inspiration, and the delusion that if we'd only listened to our High School coaches a little more often, that we too might have a fun career.  As Willie Stargell said,  "It's supposed to be fun, the man says 'Play Ball' not 'Work Ball' you know.

And fun is what it looks like the players of the Dunedin Blue Jays are having.  They recently qualified for the playoffs, and have taken this as an opportunity to create a unique season highlight video.  They have created a fictional Nintendo Entertainment System baseball game that depicts their recent accomplishment.  The video is a good deal of fun, and shows once more why I love Minor League Baseball.

It brings back memories of the 8-Bit version of the infamous Bill Buckner World Series moment.

13 Game Books You Must Own

A couple of years ago, I blogged about how every gamer should own a copy of Rick Swan's Complete Guide to Role Playing Games.  I still agree with this sentiment, but I would like to share another 13 books that every gamer should add to their library.  I'll be blogging about these books over the next few weeks, but I thought it would be good to point them out as a group now.  That way, we can hopefully talk more specifics later as I hope some of you will add a couple of these titles to your library if you haven't already.  These will by no means be the last books I mention, they just happen to be the handful that I grabbed off the shelf today.

Every gamer has an aspiration to design, and to design one must know what has gone before and get some sense of place within the hobby.  The following books are a great place to start:

1. Thirty Years of Adventure: A Celebration of Dungeons & Dragons: If you want a good glimpse of the game that launched our hobby, or at least the market for our hobby, this is a great place to start.  It is a "propaganda" piece, but it's still quite good.  I'll talk more about the strengths and weaknesses of this book when I get around to its post.
2. 40 Years of Gen Con: Robin Laws and Michelle Nephew give us a good collection that discusses the biggest gaming con in America.
3. The Complete Book of Wargames: Jon Freeman (aka John Jackson) gives an excellent overview of the War Game hobby at a time when that hobby was in an early transition.  By the late 80s, this hobby was nearly dead.  Today?  It likely has more players than ever, but its marketplace is very different.
4. The Fantasy Role Playing Gamer's Bible: Sean Patrick Fannon's excellent entry into the "so this is role playing and you should love it" library.  Try to get the purple 1st edition, the stick figure cartoons make the book.
5. Game Design -- Theory and Practice vol. 1:  There is no volume 2 to this book by Steve Jackson Games, but this is an essential addition to anyone's library.
6. Wargame Design: If you want to know the history of the gaming hobby, from its early Wargaming roots, this is a must own book.  The staff of SPI give a great overview of the hobby's founding, and present some good design guidelines.
7. A Player's Guide to Table Games: This is a great book to get your friends to bridge the gap from "mass market" games into "hobby games."  John Jackson (aka Jon Freeman) reviews and discusses everything from Monopoly to Sniper and the Sid Sackson revolution.  This book helps to demonstrate the Sackson/Euro link. 
8. Family Games -- The 100 Best:  This is one of two books that end up with 200 recommendations that every gamer should have in their library.  Trust me, these books provide a great "core" collection.
9. Hobby Games -- The 100 Best:  This is the second of the 100 Best books, and it contains titles that are less mainstream than in Family.  You should own every game in this book.
10. Heroic Worlds:  This book is a very good overview of the role playing game hobby as of the early 90s.  It is a vital research resource, and a good checklist for completists.
11. The Comprehensive Guide to Board Wargaming: Nicholas Palmer's essential introduction to the war game hobby.  It includes an overview of systems, and some puzzles to work out.
12. The Best of Board Wargaming:  A second book by Palmer.  This one contains more detailed reviews of games, and a good discussion of Simulation vs. Playability.
13. The Playboy Winner's Guide to Boardgames: Jon Freeman's reprint of John Jackson's book, and why I believe they are the same person.  You'll definitely read this one for the prose, as there are no pictures.  This book extends the discussion in Player's Guide to include RPGs and Squad Leader -- thus includes essay regarding Playability vs. Simulation.

Fear, Dread, Imagination, and Pennies

One of the first lessons that I learned as the father of twins is that parenting is largely comprised of two emotional states, fear and dread.  The sense of dread at the nigh infinite array of terrible events that can befall vulnerable babies and toddlers is a constant.  It is the background music of parenting.  Fear is the musical stings, the cat scream in horror movies if you will, that jumps out at you and gets your adrenaline pumping.  Fear is what parents experience when their toddlers, who have just barely begun to walk, meander toward sharp objects and stairways.

In short, being a parent is exhausting.  Surprisingly so, even during moments in which not much really seems to be happening.  Fear and dread find a way to sap whatever energy you thought you might have.  I can't imagine how parents coped before caffeine.

All of that might make it seem like being a parent is a joyless chore.  Quite the contrary.  Much like a great horror film, one finds oneself almost inexplicably finding the fear and dread to be the most enjoyable emotions possible.  Only two things seem more pleasurable.  The joy a parent shares with his/her partner when the toddlers do something completely silly, being the first.  The second?  I think this picture is all that is needed to explain the second extremely pleasurable part of being a parent.

There are also moments which combine fear/dread with completely silly activities.  Jody and I recently encountered one of these.  Our daughters History and Mystery (shown above) are wonderfully creative young girls.  I have written before of how they have adapted Candy Land into a gingerbread man's journey to visit Hello Kitty and Boxie for some tea.  They have also recently turned bath time into Water Bending practice.  I'm sure that they'll be giving Korra a run for her money very soon.

Recently, History and Mystery decided that they wanted to develop superpowers like their brothers Superman and Iron Man.  They decided that a key to acquiring superpowers was to suck on a penny.  Doing so, they assured us much later after things went very awry, would give them stronger teeth and aid them in battling "sugar bugs."  To advance their plan, they scrounged a penny and began alternating who was allowed to suck on it.  First Mystery and then History, hand off, repeat.  They did all of this while they were playing "quietly" in their room.  Which should have given Jody and me suspicions that something was going horribly wrong, as quiet signals a rule #1 violation.

Parenting rule #1:  If play time is actually quiet, then something is going horribly wrong.

In this case, the something wrong was History swallowing a penny.  I think by the description of the twins' master plan to create an origin story, you probably guessed this is what happened.  Needless to say, History's throat hurt.  Jody commanded me to immediately go online to find which of the local hospitals was on our insurance plan, and began collecting as much information as possible regarding how History felt.

A trip to the hospital and three X-rays later, History acquired Wolverine-esque Copper and Zinc laced bones as the penny reacted with the X-ray machines photonic emanations...

Oh, wait.  That's not what happened.  The X-rays happened, all three of them, and they located the penny.  It had already wandered down to her stomach, which meant a couple of days of waiting before we located the penny during one of History's potty breaks.  She kept expecting to "pee" it out, but it came out in a more conventional manner -- which I won't attempt to describe.

Thankfully, nothing terrible happened.  There was no permanent damage.  But as Jody and I would rather not experience anything like this ever again, we had a long conversation with History and Mystery regarding not eating things that mommy and daddy don't say are okay to eat.  The girls aren't Matter Eater Lasses, after all.

It's a joy raising highly imaginative twins, but it does make for quite a roller coaster.  The film Parenthood was correct about parenting being a roller coaster, thankfully Jody and I were coaster junkies when we were younger.

Real Battlemechs Have Arrived. Can the Succession Wars Be Far Behind?

I would appear that House Kurita of the Draconis Combine is not named for Shiro Kurita, but is the 23rd century's adaptation of artist Kogoru Kurata the designer of Terra's first real world Battlemech.

Kurata has parntered with Japanese robotics expert Wataru Yoshizaki of Suidobashi Heavy Industry to create a robot that people can ride and battle in. 

The robot has been named KURATAS after the artist who designed the vehicle, but any Battletech fan knows that this is really the first Kurita mech.  It weighs about 4,500kg (4-tons), making it an ultra-light mech. The vehicle measures 4m-high (13 feet), 3m-wide and 4m-long, and one can be yours for a mere $2.37 million. 

Mechwarriors can control the vehicle in one of two ways.  They can sit in the cockpit like proper warriors, or they can use their iPhones.

It seems that FASA was wrong about the date of the invention of the Battlemech. We won't have to wait until 2439, the predecessor is already here.  We can see by the wheels of the vehicle that this is a first stage Battlemech, but can the "upright" mech be far behind?


The Successor Wars may exist in the far future, but the how long until the first of the Predecessor Wars?  I am officially changing the name of Draconis Combine in by Battletech games to Suidobashi Heavy Industry.

Hat Tip: Design Taxi

Fanzines, Blogs, and Circuses

I just received the copy of Alarums & Excursions #236 that I won in the recent auction of some of Gary Gygax's personal game collection.  This issue contains a 'zine from Gary discussing a letter he had written to A&E for their second issue many years in the past.  It's an interesting letter to read for a couple of reasons, but I'll save that discussion for a later post. 

In reading through this issue of A&E to find Gary's letter, I have been having a great time reading the individual 'zines by the various contributors. Though it was alarming to read references to "Christian" Pramas being attacked.  I wonder how he was attacked and was pleasantly surprised to see that a certain Green Ronin and I share a first name...if that is the same C. Pramas.  What struck me strongest about these 'zines were the comments referencing earlier entries by contributors.  Most of the new 'zines featured a section discussing points of agreement/disagreement (often about Alignment in this issue) at the end of a contribution that might have been regarding a completely different topic.   Let me give you an example, purely for illustrative purposes.

In a 'zine by Spike Y. Jones which contains 101 Uses for a Wet Blanket and a review of Shattered Dreams, Spike includes the following:

NICOLE LINDROOS FREIN: Re How Loud And Crowded The White Wolf Party At GenCon Was: But you can remember when WW's party was only loud and crowded because it was being held in a hotel room instead of a ballroom.

I chose this comment at random for demonstrative purposes.  These comments are the conversational part of the 'zine and one of the joys of A&E is reading them.  In many ways they seem a bit like a good blog's comments section.  With one major difference.

As I mentioned before, these are all within other 'zines.  Rather than being like comments sections, they are more akin to post-scripts on a blog with hyperlinks to other blogs.
 
When I started this blog in March of 2004 (it was called Cinerati in those days), the blogosphere was a pretty young place.  And in some ways it behaved more like the 'zines of A&E than the internet does today.  Certainly, there are great places for rpg conversations on the internet (RPG.net, Kobold Quarterly, the Paizo and Wizards forums, Grognardia), but they often seem more isolated from each other than the early blogs and A&E.  Earlier blogs seemed to be in conversation with each other more so in the past than today, and that is something that I miss.  I fondly remember writing posts in response to other posts and linking them in my blog.  I also remember joining a couple of opt in social media-esque services that would track your blog and categorize it so that you could see other blogs in your "ecosystem."  It was this kind of activity that led me to meeting several very interesting people in the Los Angeles area.  There was a kind of fanzine communal quality to the blogosphere.  Now there seems to be more of a "major network" feel to the whole endeavor.  I am happy with the number of people who read my blog, and very grateful for those few who comment, but I miss the blog to blog interchange of the earlier days.  They were more community and 'zinish.  In writing my own blog posts now, I'll often delete or postpone something I've written because it has just been touched upon by Grognardia or another blog I follow because I don't want to be seen as a copy cat.

It seems that we are a victim of our own success, by which I mean gamers as a creative force who are able to create so many blogs worth reading that some have become brands.  But I lament the iO9-ing of the internet, though I like iO9. 

There was a time, not too long ago, when people participated in "circuses" or memes like "get your geek on" (which was very recent) with some regularity.  I understand that there are too many blogs to return to them being a small tight knit community akin to 'zines, but I would like to see more circuses about RPG subjects and more "get your geek on" blog marathons.

Let's get together and do this.  And I'm no longer going to let seeing that one of my favorite blogs has blogged about something I've just been thinking about dissuade me from blogging about the very same thing.

Remembering Gary Gygax

For geeks like me, today is a day of memorial celebration. E Gary Gygax, co-creator with Dave Arneson of the Dungeons and Dragons game, was born on this day in 1938.

Gary Gygax and Arneson created a game that provided me with untold hours of entertainment, a game that introduced me to great literature (and horrible drivel), a game that helped me form life long friendships. Because of this man's creation, my life (and many others) were made better and more enjoyable. I am extremely grateful to Gary.

Gary Gygax Memorial Day seems the perfect time to share Gary stories of gaming goodness and fun.  It seems that every gamer worth his or her salt has a Gary Gygax story, and I envy those that do their stories. I have no "when I met Gary story." Instead, I have a when I "almost" met Gary story.

You see...in April of 2007 I was on a trip for work in eastern Wisconsin -- Racine to be specific, and I decided I wanted to do two things. First, I wanted to watch a baseball game in Wrigley field. I am a huge Cubs fan, and there is no better place to watch baseball. Second, I wanted to tour Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, the birthplace of gaming in America. Trust me. Whether you play modern boardgames, video games, collectible card games, or role playing games, the game you are playing likely has some connection to the gaming movement started in that small Wisconsin town.

So I drove to Lake Geneva and toured all of the locations that once housed the offices of TSR, the company that published D&D. Then finally, I stood in front of what I believed to be Gary's house and took about 10 pictures from across the street. It was relatively early in the evening and I contemplated walking up to the door and knocking, just to tell Gary how much entertainment his game has provided me over the past three decades. I walked up to the cars parked in front of the house (pictured below), but then I thought..."what if it is the wrong house?"


What if I walk up to the door, knock and ask for Gary and it's the wrong house? What if it's the right house? What kind of crazy stalker gamer knocks on a game designer's door uninvited?

So...I walked to the library, took a couple of pictures of the beautiful lake, walked around the small downtown area, and left. I was angry at myself for not emailing/message boarding Gary earlier, or later, and I promised myself that I would do so when I next traveled to the Wisconsin or Chicago area.

That day cannot come now.

While I am sad about that, today is not a day of sadness.  It is a day of remembrance and celebration.  So let me share with you a couple of pictures from a D&D Encounters session I ran last night at Emerald Knights Comics and Games.  These pictures show the real gift that Gary and Dave gave to the world.  They gave us  a tool with which to build community and have a good time.  Gary might not have liked the 4th Edition of the D&D game, but I think he would be happy to see the enjoyment these gamers had last night.

A little pre-game discussion.

Did Christian actually bring a character sheet for Miles Edgeworth?

It looks like the Kobold Wizard Speelock is in a bit of trouble.

Can his companions help him out, or will the Drow win the day?

Later this month, I'll make my group endure a small reading from one of the books Gygax wrote. We all need to push through a little Gygaxian prose every now and then. Maybe I'll open up "Master of the Game," or read the introduction to the Player's Handbook (1st edition) one more time. That introduction made me feel like I was part of something special, even before I rolled my first die.

It also seems like a good time to make a donation to the Gygax Memorial Fund.