And Now is the Time on Sprockets When We Self-Promote -- Cthulhu Claus Holiday Cards Season 2

I'm very excited to announce that Twin Suns Entertainment - a company that I and a couple of friends started in 2011 - launched our second Kickstarter campaign today with Cthulhu Claus Holiday Cards Series 2.

When we launched the first series of cards in 2012, Twin Suns Entertainment had already attempted a failed Kickstarter program for a documentary about gamers that was going to be directed by our own Wes Kobernick. My wife Jody came up with the idea of doing a series of Holiday Cards based around a doodle she had done depicting Cthulhu as Santa Claus. My partners, Wes and Joel, thought it was a very good idea and so our project was researched, price quotes obtained, contracts with Jody Lindke and Kenneth Hite negotiated, and project launched. During the process, we teamed up with Game Salute as our distributor for those who wanted to purchase the cards after the Kickstarter campaign. You can still buy cards from them at this link.

Here is some sample art from the first campaign:

This image is a much cleaned up and colorized version of the illustration that inspired the first campaign.

The Cthulhu Claus sleigh ride illustration is probably my favorite illustration in the first set. I love not only the design on the "reindeer," but also the way Jody used color.

These are what the cards look like in the box of 25. There are five cards of each illustration that Jody did for the piece.

Even Cthulhu like's cookies. I really like how Jody used the image of frosting and red hots to represent a stomach wound and intestines.

And if Cthulhu can eat a cookies, why can't we. I hope that some day we'll be able to put together a Cthulhu Claus cookie cutter, but talk about an expensive proposition for the initial set up. And I thought trying to get die-cut stickers was a pain.

The new series of cards will have a slightly different look as the inspirations for the illustrations will come from multiple sources and stem from another project we are working on at present, but here is a glimpse.

I really think that Jody has knocked the ball out of the park with this illustration, but we'll see if you agree.  If you want to back our latest project, you can do so my clicking on the widget below. Please spread the word to your friends.

Support Green Ronin's Attempt to Publish "Love 2 Hate"

Before I post today's #RPGaDay post, I thought that I would take a moment to highlight a great game project that Green Ronin has running on Kickstarter through tomorrow. The game is called LOVE 2 HATE and looks to be a fantastic entry into the "saying inappropriate things" category of party games that have been very successful of late. An early entry into the genre was APPLES TO APPLES which I think accidentally created the category as AtoA judges selected funnier choices as the winners, a trend that led to the creation of CARDS AGAINST HUMANITY where the goal was to create misanthropic combinations...often offensive combinations.


LOVE 2 HATE uses a "sentence finishing" mechanic where players use one card that says "I Hate the way/I Love the way..." (Some Noun)... and other cards have finishing clauses that lead to some hilarious results.  Here are two examples of combinations from the game that have been shared by Green Ronin's Nicole Lindroos.

Looking at these examples it appears that Green Ronin are navigating the balance between inappropriate yet hilarious and the possibly offensive with a great deal of care. Some might argue too much care as there really should be very few boundaries to comedy, but I think that some of these finishing cards can lead to some pretty interesting results and I am very much looking forward to playing this game with my regular gaming group.

You can support the game by visiting their Kickstarter page and the buy in is very affordable. While you are there, you might just consider backing at the level that gets you a copy of WALK THE PLANK. I've owned that game for some time now and think it is a fantastic little card game.

It's nice to see Green Ronin throwing their hat back into the card game ring.

#RPGaDAY #2: First RPG Gamemastered -- Sieging the Keep of the Borderlands and Advanced Dungeons & Monty Haul vs. Actual Gamemastering

What was the first role playing game I Gamemastered for anyone? This may seem like a simple answer at first. After all, the first game you Gamemaster is the first one where you serve as the individual "running" the game right? I'm not sure that is true. Whether or not someone has actually "Gamemastered" a game depends upon what one means by Gamemastered.

• Does it mean the person who hosted the game, refereed the rules, read box text, and took on the role of NPCs an monsters? 
• Does it mean the person who facilitated an entertaining narrative experience that included the above listed hosting and refereeing?
• Does it mean someone who has achieved what Gary Gygax called Gaming Mastery? 

If I use the first category of Gamemastery, then there are two games that vie for my first game. I co-Gamemastered Moldvay Basic with my friend Sean. I mentioned in the first post in this series that Sean and I had done a mash up of Broadsides and Boarding Parties and Moldvay Basic, but that's not the game we co-Gamemastered. The mash up of B&BP/D&D was a 2 player competitive game with campaign rules. The first game that we worked together to run for each other was the famous module Keep on the Borderlands. Neither one of us had read the module cover to cover before deciding to adventure in the Keep and its environs, so our first adventure is best named "The Great Siege of Castellan Keep and Sacking of the Caves of Chaos." Sean and I rolled up a number of characters, probably around 10 each. My characters had names that ranged from Darg to Jamis Kelton depending on how "balanced" the stats of the character were. The aforementioned Darg had an 18 Strength in Moldvay Basic no less, but had very little else to offer statistically and thus had a name worthy of his intellectual capacity. Sean and I took those rolled up characters and began the siege of the Keep. We weren't fools. We had our characters attack at night and had the Thieves climb the walls to eliminate the guards before they could raise the alarm, but if I am to be completely honest our efforts to have life at the Keep "dynamic" were minimal and the mayhem we caused from one building to the next were largely unnoticed by neighbors. Unbelievably so. After slaying all within our path in the Keep, and taking their sweet loots, we headed out into the wilderness and the caves.

I'm quite surprised it never occurred to us that the city might be there as a place of rest and basecamp, but it didn't occur to me until a month or so later.

Still using the first category of Gamemastery, but making it a case where I am the sole person running a game for others, my first foray as Dungeonmaster was running an all night session of AD&D for some friends at a sleepover. The module we played that night was...the Monster Manual. I'm sure there was some bizarre thread that I attempted to maintain to have the evening make any kind of sense. For example, I'm sure the adventure started in a Tavern. After that though, things get fuzzy. From what I remember, the players essentially got into a series of fights wherein monsters teleported in a random or the PCs instantly transported to the monster's location to engage in life and death struggle. The battles started small with a couple of kobolds or goblins - treasure was rolled from the tables in the back of the book - but by morning time the players were taking their high level warriors and wizards to the 1st level of Hell to combat Tiamat. They won. It seemed exciting at the time, but in memory seems both ridiculous and dull. I am actually embarrassed to share the story...except for the fact that the idea of a band of adventurers riding Apparatuses of Kwalish and toting Portable Fortresses of Dearn while wielding Holy Avengers, Staves of the Magi, and the Sword of Kas as they venture into the 1st layer of Hell to kill Tiamat still sounds a bit awesome to me in a perverse way.

It wasn't the kind of play that would have engendered long term stories and fostered friendship though. To get to that kind of Gamemastering, I have to shift over to the second category above. And when it comes to fulfilling the entertaining narrative experience definition of Gamemastering, then I'd have to say that DC Heroes was the first game I ever truly Gamemastered. By the time I ran that game, I had played in campaigns run by several excellent GMs. My friend Sean was the first of these as his running of Ravenloft stressed the importance of setting the stage, my friend Rob who ran excellent Villains and Vigilantes and Basic D&D adventures, Ron who's sense of adventure and pace were extraordinary, Matt for infusing character, Roger for downplaying the role of dice, and several Champions groups who "role" played more than roll played. With experience as a player, and with the knowledge of several systems, I ran a couple of DC Heroes campaigns. Prior to my current group, they were the best time I had ever had playing an rpg. My players immersed themselves in their characters. The rules were loose enough to allow almost anything to occur, and I think I was able to construct some entertaining banter between the players and the NPCs.

Of course in that description of my journey there was that bit about knowledge of several systems, and that is what Gygax talks about in his two books on Gaming Mastery. So maybe it takes a bit of Gaming Mastery...and a willingness to make a fool out of yourself while making funny voices...that really makes a good Gamemaster.

#RPGaDAY #1: First RPG Played -- Dungeons & ... Boarding Parties?

I'm a couple of days behind schedule with my first #RPGaDAY post, but work and vacation took priority. It's my hope that I'll be able to do one of these a day for the next month and answer all of the questions posted by @autocratik. I don't often participate in list-memes, but this one has more of a blog carnival feel to it.

I've been playing role playing games for a long time and most of the friends I have today are connected one way or another with game play. Mirroring that sentiment, I was first introduced to gaming by one of my dearest lifelong friends Sean McPhail -- or rather he and I were introduced to gaming by one of his older brothers. I have discussed my first gaming session on this blog before when writing about "Pants Issues." In that post, I use the image of the Moldvay edited Basic Set to represent the version of Dungeons & Dragons that Sean and I "played" on that occasion.

Thinking back about that first gaming session though, I don't think that is correct. My parents did purchase me a copy of the Moldvay set for Christmas after I came home and conveyed how exciting my introduction to D&D had been, but I didn't own the boxed set at the time. My friend Sean owned some of the AD&D books and had rolled up 1st level characters named Gandalf and Aragorn. When the friend of one of Sean's brothers said he knew how to run a D&D game, Sean loaned me Gandalf and the adventure was on. BTW, the fate of Gandalf is discussed in the Pants Issues post.

The "game" that Sean and I experienced had very little relation - as far as I can remember - to Sean's description of the AD&D rules, but it was definitely some form of D&D. It was D&D that was highly adversarial in its player to DM relationship and it was so free form and abstract in its description of combat that I think I can claim that my first gaming experience wasn't Moldvay Basic. Though Moldvay Basic with its rich introduction is the reason I continued playing. It most certainly wasn't AD&D. There was no talk of segments, modifiers against armor type, or any of the particularities of that rules set. I think that Sean and I were introduced to White Box OD&D...though as the Pants Issues post makes clear I wouldn't say that I actually got much of a chance to play it. 

And if I didn't get much of a chance to play it, then what was my actual first RPG played?

That would be something that my friend Sean and I put together ourselves. We had been playing a bunch of Broadsides & Boarding Parties and we loved everything about the game...except the hand-to-hand combat and campaign rules.

So we decided to use the rules from Moldvay Basic as our combat system. Thus began a couple of weeks worth of piratical adventures with Fighter, Thief, and Wizard ship captains, and thus began the first of many house rule adaptations in my role playing game career.

Mantic Games Launches New Dungeon Crawl Game on Kickstarter

Mantic Games was created in 2008 by Ronnie Renton who used his experience as former Global Marketing Director for Games Workshop to create a company dedicated to bringing gamers the best in fantasy and sci-fi miniatures and games at affordable prices. Where Games Workshop recently seems to have shifted its focus into intellectual property development and high end exclusive hobby products, Mantic is very much about getting gamers playable games on a reasonable budget.

I've been a fan of Mantic's Dwarf King's Hold games designed by Jake Thornton who has previously worked on a number of GW products like Circle of Blood and  the Dark Shadows campaign as well as several Warhammer army books back in the day. I find that the price to miniatures ratio in Mantic's products place them in the more affordable side of the hobby, but by no means are the games inexpensive. The rules to their games are simple, but I have always hoped they would beef them up a little and create a more comprehensive dungeon crawl game. My hope - one that they hint might be fulfilled in the Kickstarter video - is that Dungeon Saga, the sequel line to Dwarf King's Hold, will have those rules.



The new Dungeon Saga: The Dwarf King's Quest game that Mantic is launching on Kickstarter has only one pledge level and at $100.00 it comes in as one of the more expensive products Mantic has released to date. That's a similar price to Mantic's Mars Attacks game, but Mars Attacks comes with 39 miniatures, terrain, etc. where Dungeon Saga currently has 22 on offer. That number is likely to increase as stretch goals are reached and more people back the project. If the Mars Attacks Kickstarter that Mantic ran last year is any indication, then Mantic will end up providing a great deal of value to backers by the end of the project.

What is certain is that I will be backing this latest project by Mantic and I look forward to seeing what comes next.

Chatting with The Big Bang Theory Screenwriters on Geekerati

Sometimes I forget how blessed my life is, living as I do in beautiful southern California. There are times when I need to take a break from grumbling that not enough people listen to the Geekerati podcast I do with Shawna Benson, or wondering why no one has spontaneously noticed that I would be perfect as a voice on their latest animated series. Today is one of those times when I remind myself that no matter how challenging and intimidating my life might be I pretty much live in "Pops Town" as depicted in one of the Hallmark puzzles by Robert Blair Martin. A heavily populated version of Pops Town, to be sure, but one none the less. The Los Angeles area can be a scary place if you don't know anyone, but it also happens to be filled with wonderful people who can make this megalopolis feel like it's just the right size.

Let me walk you on a brief tangent about this aspect of L.A. before we get back to the main point of this post...getting you to listen to the Big Bang Theory interviews Shawna and I did on Geekerati.

My wife Jody and I moved down here so that she could attend film school at USC and I could begin pursuing graduate education. We moved to Los Angeles from Reno and we immediately experienced culture shock. Let me tell you, unless you are from a big city it is quite shocking to be surrounded by so many people. The Reno/Sparks Metropolitan Statistical Area has a population of roughly 425,000... or roughly 3 Comic-Cons. The Los Angeles Combined Statistical Area - or as someone who lives in Glendale and commutes to Riverside for my Ph.D. classes calls "L.A." - has roughly 18 million. That's roughly 120 Comic-Cons. That is a lot of people and when Jody and I first moved down here it was mind-boggling. We lived in Crenshaw at the time, and finding any place that wasn't crowded was a quest suitable for 16th level Rangers and not wide eyed newbs from the Sierras. Though we did discover that the "vacant lot" where Elizabeth Short' body was found is a 9 minute walk from the Crenshaw Krispy Kreme.

How crowded is Los Angeles you ask?

There is so much light pollution in the area that Jody and I describe the Los Angeles day as having two parts, "Day and Dim." There is no night, only dim. There are so few stars visible that we wondered why they bothered to maintain the Griffith Observatory, though at the time the Observatory was closed for renovation.

Our first Christmas in Los Angeles, we made the mistake of heading over to Universal City Walk to get a feel of L.A. at Christmas-time. For Jody, who grew up in Nevada City where they have Cornish Christmas/Victorian Christmas every year, venturing into a pseudo-mall that has a Santa hat wearing King Kong as its only acknowledgement of the season was horrifying. It was anti-Christmas for her. There was no snow. There were no Christmas carols. It was 70 degrees. We later learned that the Southland celebrates Christmas - and so many other wonderful celebrations - magnificently, it's only Universal City Walk that is terrible...except at Halloween when it is appropriately horrifying.

For our first year, we were very lonely in a very large place. Then something magical happened. We wandered from our cave and managed to meet some Angelinos. Some where natives, but most - like us - were transplants. Some of them were semi-famous, but most were normal people getting by. I'd like to take a moment to highlight a couple of lynch pin people who have made our day to day lives in L.A. wonderful: Bill Cunningham, Shawna Benson, Wes Kobernick, Joel Allan, Eric Lytle, Luke Y. Thompson, David N. Scott, Julie Scott, Kate Coe, Dale Launer, Scott Kaufer, Caryn Mamrack, Kevin Burke and Nicholas Santillan. These names only scratch the surface of people who have been more than generous with their time and energy to both Jody and me...and are people I can name without feeling like I am "name dropping." I would mention some of the people in my gaming group, but it is my hope that I have been able to do for them what the above people have done for me and Jody.

These people make Los Angeles feel like a very small town. Small in the cozy way and not in the gossipy loss of privacy way.

It is through these people, and some of un-named individuals, that I have had the ability to get some great guests on the Geekerati podcast that Shawna Benson, Bill Cunningham, Wes Kobernick, Eric Lytle, and I started in 2007. Of the many great guests, the "gets" that most surprised me in that I was able to get them at all were writers from the biggest comedy on television...The Big Bang Theory. There are really only three "gets" that I would geek out more over, William Shatner, Bruce Campbell, and Nathan Fillion. I'll add them to my bucket list.

We had Executive Producer David Goetsch on our show in early 2008. In that episode we discussed a number of topics, but I remember one thing fairly distinctly. It was Goetsch's kind tolerance of me telling him that TBBT had better not commit a BOSTON COMMON. For those who don't know, BOSTON COMMON was a sit com starring Anthony Clark who played a geeky hick who is madly in love with much cooler Traylor Howard. Needless to say, they get together in Romantic Comedy fashion at the end of the short - due to it being a mid-season pick up - season. The show was picked up for another season, which apparently made the writers panic because they broke the couple up in order to "recapture the magic." As an aside, Traylor Howard went on to star in TWO GUYS, A GIRL, AND A PIZZA JOINT which starred two geek favorites (Nathan Fillion and Julius Carry), someone geeks love to hate (Ryan Reynolds), and a highly under appreciated comic actor (Richard Ruccolo).

Since its launch, TBBT has been Jody and my favorite modern sit com, it falls somewhere behind FRAZIER and THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW on the all-time list. Jody has even written a spec screenplay for it, which is a double edged sword for a struggling screenwriter. You've written for what you love, but you don't tend to have people read specs for their own show. This isn't for "IP" reasons. It's more due to the fact that if you don't get the characterization perfect - in the minds of the shows creators - they might be very resistant to your interpretation. This is true even if your screenplay is funny. That's one of the reasons writers submit screenplays for similar shows, or other popular shows. You want to demonstrate you can write in the genre, but you don't want to claim you understand the characters better than the show's creators.

Anyway, enough of the build up. You will find the two episodes we interview TBBT writers embedded below. If you need any proof of the show's geek cred, just think about the fact that they were willing to spend time with a fellow geek to chat for over an hour...twice...and hopefully again.

Interview with David Goetsch

Find Additional Blogcritics Podcasts with Geekerati Radio on BlogTalkRadio

Interview with Maria Ferrari

Online Entertainment Radio at Blog Talk Radio with Geekerati Radio on BlogTalkRadio

Guardians of the Galaxy in D&D Gamma World: Rocket Raccoon

Like most geeks, I am extremely excited about Guardians of the Galaxy. The latest Marvel Studios film is a brave leap into the lesser known characters of the Marvel-verse. Until Dan Abnett, Keith Giffen, and Andy Lanning's run on Annihilation the Guardians -like Alpha Flight - had been an acquired taste of a small niche of comic book fans. Abnett and Lanning populated the new Guardians with a strange group of characters - otherwise comical characters - and put them in extreme circumstances. Following after Tolkien's model, the Guardians' narrative within Annihilation is that of the "common man." Sure Rocket and Groot are a competent pair, and Drax has been a Marvel heavy hitter in the past, but none of them match the cosmic might of Firelord, Silver Surfer, or Nova.

It made for compelling stuff and now that same band of misfits - and not those who bear the power cosmic - are going to be featured in the upcoming film.

I asked my friends in the Social Network-verse what game system they would use to run a Guardians of the Galaxy campaign and received some very good answers. Some would run it in Hero System, others in Savage Worlds, and still others in Bulldogs!. I am intimately familiar with two of those systems, and almost chose to create statistics in Savage Worlds, but in the end I chose Wizards of the Coasts' excellent D&D Gamma World as my game of choice. As I was thinking how to stat the characters in as simple a fashion as possible, the ideas just leaped out at me. Groot was a "Giant Plant" and that's all I needed to know to stat him. I'll likely attempt a Savage Worlds conversion in the future...and a Marvel Saga and Marvel Heroic as well as purchase a copy of Bulldogs!...but for now, I'm using D&D Gamma World. It should be noted that all characters will be 10th level as most Gamma Supers should be.

My first entry is none other than my twin daughters' - History and Mystery - favorite Guardian...

Rocket