For anyone who wants to flip through the pages first, The Bandit Map is also available for purchase at The Source. (You know, the best FLGS in the universe.) They have both the color and the B&W editions. Go check it out!
It’s great that the Source continues to support small-time publishers like me. Thanks, Burl!
The Bandit Map is finally ready to buy! You can buy it in either a B&W printed format, a color printed format or a color PDF.
It’s the first official adventure supplement for Blade & Crown. In it, the PCs find a mysterious map — a map that might help them stop the bandits who’ve been plaguing the area. It can be played in a single session, or form the core of an extended campaign.
The Bandit Map is something of a sandbox, with some great side-adventures. The Bandit Map includes extensive maps, illustrations and GM tools.
The Bandit Map is available for purchase three different ways:
And to celebrate, Blade & Crown is on sale! The main game will be 25% off (regardless of format) until September 30.
Please check it out, and let your friends know!
A month or so ago, I had a chance to play Timeline, the inventions edition. I had some frustrations with it, but overall liked it a lot, so when I went to Rogue Robot and saw Timeline on the shelf, I bought a copy.
Timeline is a very simple card game about history. Players take turns putting cards down, guessing whether they happened before or after what’s already been played. Was the crowning of Charlemagne before or after the Battle of Hastings? Which came first, the Grand Canal of China or the Great Wall? Was the shopping cart invented before or after the beginning of World War I? That sort of thing.
As play progresses, the timeline of cards gets more and more dense, and the decisions get harder and harder. It ramps up very naturally and elegantly.
There are, as I mentioned, some frustrations. Almost all of them are because the game’s definitions of some historical events seem a little wonky. For example, when was the start of the Cold War? I’d say the Yalta Conference, but I could see an argument for the end of WWII, the dropping of the first nuke or the Berlin Airlift. Yet every card in the game has a single, solitary, definitive year listed. Distilling history down to single, defined dates necessarily involves some simplification, and sometimes oversimplification.
Another example: in the Inventions edition of the game, there’s a card that says simply “Uranus”. Presumably this means the discovery of it, rather than, say, its formation out of the solar system’s protoplanetary disk. Even so, Uranus was never “invented”! The game kind of resembles Trivial Pursuit, in that it’s as much about figuring out what definitions the card-writers are operating under as it is about knowing the facts.
Still, though, it’s a very good, fast card game. It makes a great filler for when you’re uncertain what to play next. It takes about 30 seconds to figure out how to play it, and a complete game of Timeline can easily take only about 15 minutes.
The game as written recommends a sort of “sudden death” round in the event of a tie, where all players who put down their last card on the same round keep going until someone messes up. But the game is simple enough that this isn’t the only way to play it. I mostly play where simultaneous wins are possible. This both gets rid of the player elimination, makes the game less competitive, and makes it shorter.
There seems to be a little bit of strategy (in addition to paying attention in history class): hoard your really easy cards (“the beginning of the universe”, “death of the dinosaurs”) until the end.
I can already see that the game doesn’t have a huge amount of replay value — after playing only a few sessions, I’m already starting to memorize when the first hot air balloon flight was and when (they say) the Cold War started. Good reason to buy more editions, and mix them together. But that’s not replay value of the original game, just adding supplements.
Still, for about US$15, it’s quite a fun little game, with a good amount of replay value, and it makes a nice, portable, quick, easy-to-learn filler game.
Another Trait that came out of a session with the monthly group:
You are Oblivious. Little things don’t bother you, and even the big things aren’t that big a deal. It’s not that you’re stupid (which would imply a low LOG) or have poor senses (which would mean low PER). It’s just that you tend not to be fazed by things. This can mean that you don’t get bothered when someone tries to influence you, or when scary things are about, or when more attuned people would be getting anxious. And of course it can also mean that you don’t pay attention to things you should, or that you’re excessively focused at times.
About a month ago, I was going through Duluth again, so I stopped at another well-known FLGS: Rogue Robot.
Don’t let the basement location fool you. Rogue Robot is quite a large space, with multiple rooms. The store is connected via back hallways to the other offices in the building. The restrooms are also on this hallway.
Rogue Robot sells a wide and deep range of things. They have a good selection of comics, including tons of back issues; a decent selection of RPGs; lots of minis; a big selection of boardgames; and tons of HeroClix. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that much HeroClix on sale in one place.
They have a fairly huge gaming room in the back. In terms of total area, I think it’s about equal to the Source’s back gaming area — plenty of room for multiple minis games, a bunch of boardgames, some RPGs and card games all to go on at the same time. They also have a large selection of minis scenery on the shelves. The temperatures here seemed fairly high on the day I visited, but maybe that’s an aberration.
Near this gaming area, they had lockers. Is this a Duluth thing? I’ve never seen lockers in Twin Cities FLGSs, but now both the stores I’ve been to in Duluth have them.
As I breezed through, I bought a copy of the card game Timeline (more on that in a later post), a few dice (they had some nice d12s, good for use with Blade & Crown) and a pop. Rogue Robot has the usual snacks on sale, a fridge of pop, etc.
The woman working behind the counter hit just the right level of customer service: friendly, open to helping without being obnoxious, etc.
Rogue Robot doesn’t seem as huge or as RPG-focused as Dungeons End, and parking wasn’t quite as convenient. But it seems like a pretty good FLGS nonetheless.
I have gotten the message, at times, that one of my biggest potential selling points for my game(s) is that they’re written by a trans woman. I feel pressure to publicly appeal to that fact in order for them to succeed.
Why don’t I discuss that part of myself more? Well, first, I don’t like discussing it, because I think — I know — that it opens me up to a lot of abuse. Abuse that I get enough of from other aspects of my life, and don’t want to invite more of. Because of many things going on in my life, I try to — I need to — steer clear of those issues. The result is that I am forced to be silent, and to lose opportunities, because safety is a pressing concern.
Second, I don’t like discussing those things because I don’t want my games to need to be about such narrow foci. Those aspects of my identity are important to me, of course, but so are other aspects of myself. I don’t want to be, as Elizabeth Sampat puts it, “professionally female”.
A lot is going on right now in fandom: D&D 5’s active but non-ideal inclusion of gender diversity; the handling of harassment in fandom (WisCon, skeptic circles, San Diego Comic-Con, various online fora and many, many other settings); confronting video game publishers who treat women characters as afterthoughts, at best; and so many other loci of change. (I would like to include background links here, but I honestly don’t think I could come close to summarizing everything that’s going on right now.) We are coming up against a lot of deep-seated, insidious issues in fandom — issues that a lot of us have been experiencing for a very long time, but which haven’t gotten enough airplay until now. I’ve personally put up with a lot of crap that is part and parcel of all of this.
As a result, I feel like I should express where I stand. I’ve been working on an essay about feminism, diversity, exclusion, marketing, identity and other issues. But it’s getting too painful, convoluted and long.
I’d like to see, instead, if I can boil it down to the basics. I’d like to make a brief(er) statement of principles:
Those are my principles, such as they are. That’s what I try to live by and work for these days in fandom.
Hmm, still not all that brief. Well, these issues are complex. Hopefully I’ve said it all clearly enough.
I love gaming, and fandom in general. I enjoy many aspects of this great family of hobbies, in many different ways. I intend to keep enjoying them in all the ways I can, as long as I can. And I intend to keep working to make sure lots of different people get the opportunity to do the same, in all the ways I can.
As with last year, I’m wondering what to run at next year’s Con of the North. Somehow the submission deadline always comes up too quickly!
Here’s what I’m thinking of so far:
What do you think? If you plan to be at Con of the North and have preferences, let me know!
I just noticed a couple small errors in Blade & Crown. That means errata!
From page 68:
Combatants declare in order from lowest Initiative Phase to Initiative Phase to highest. Therefore, those with the highest Initiative Phase get to react to what everyone else is doing. If someone wants to bid for a higher Initiative Phase (see Initiative Phase & Turn Order, below, for more on this).
The parentheses there got placed wrong. It should probably say something like:
Combatants declare in order from lowest Initiative Phase to Initiative Phase to highest. Therefore, those with the highest Initiative Phase get to react to what everyone else is doing. If someone wants to bid for a higher Initiative Phase, they may do so; see Initiative Phase & Turn Order, below, for more on this.
And on page 69, a smaller typo:
Your Initiative Phase is 7, meaning you go before everyone else, but also meaning that you have to take a penalty of (Initiative Phase = 3) — 7, or -4, to all your physical skill rolls this round. Let’s hope being first was worth the effort!
That em-dash should of course be a subtraction symbol, so it should read something more like:
Your Initiative Phase is 7, meaning you go before everyone else, but also meaning that you have to take a penalty of (Initiative Phase = 3) – 7, or -4, to all your physical skill rolls this round. Let’s hope being first was worth the effort!
It seems like B&C is pretty error-free, but I’m sure there are a few others lurking in there somewhere. Let me know if you find any other mistakes.
The header image for Roll 2d6
Roll 2d6 has had 23 episodes (that I know of) so far. They deal with all sorts of tabletop gaming. They’ve covered Car Wars, gaming at cons, Dwarven Forge resin scenery, D&D, Champions, Runebound, gaming setups, Star Trek miniatures games, computer mapping software, playing miniatures wargames with plastic soldiers, and lots more. A lot of the topics are very dear to my heart. I think their episodes that deal with gaming on the cheap have inspired a lot of my own desire to find low-cost gaming options.
And even when they’re talking about games that I’m not personally interested in, their sheer enthusiasm and friendliness make the show extremely enjoyable. The show is very well-produced, with good sound quality and great writing. Adam and Nate seem like a couple of nice guys you’d easily want to have join your gaming group, regardless of what you’re currently playing. (But especially if it’s a Star Trek game.) They’re sometimes downright hilarious, like when they riff on the Ultimate Gaming Table (The Ultimate Gaming Table? The Ultimate Gaming Table? No, The Ultimate Gaming Table!) and how fun it would be to have trained hamsters who run messages back and forth. Adam and Nate’s enthusiasm is very infectious. In at least one case, they’ve actually convinced me to get into a game. (More on that in a later post.) For sheer fun value, listening to them talk about games comes close to actually playing games.
Shut Up & Sit Down owe them a debt, at least in spirit if not in actual inspiration. “Two guys talking about all sorts of tabletop games with great, funny writing, honest reviews and genuine enthusiasm” describes both shows quite well.
In recent years, they’ve posted less and less frequently. Most of their recent output has been semi-annual reviews of what they played at KublaCon. Still worth listening to.
In even more recent years, they actually lost the domain “roll2d6.com”, and both apparently got very busy with Real Life. (Edit: As Adam very gently corrects below, they didn’t lose the domain; it just isn’t working as it used to.) It sounds unlikely that they’ll restart the podcast, but who knows? A couple months ago, in a spate of re-listening to their podcasts, I wrote to the Roll2d6 email address on the chance that they’re still around. Adam wrote back with his usual kind enthusiasm and said he “still has inklings to start it up again sometime.” So I’m not giving up hope.
If you’d like to listen to the Roll2d6 podcast, Archive.org still has a quite good set of snapshots of their website, including the podcast downloads.
The default for Blade & Crown is definitely on the ‘realistic human’ end of the scale, and that’s as it should be — that’s what I designed it for. But it can work with higher power levels. Traits are critical here.
One nice side effect of Trait ratings in Blade & Crown is that they’re a very direct ‘dial’ with which you can tune the power level of your game. When Traits get higher, the things that players can accomplish in the game get wilder, more amazing and probably more gonzo.
In a default, low-power game, start the characters off with 2, 1, 1, 1 as I describe in the rules. But if you want a higher-power game, you can start with other ratings. I’ve experimented a little with 3, 2, 1, 1 and it’s worked fairly well, albeit with a caveat.
The caveat is that players need to really understand what they can accomplish with those high-level Traits. When running a higher-powered game, it’s probably a necessity to explain, level by level, what the different ratings can actually do, in terms of narrative. (Actually, it might be necessary to explain them anyway, because players often use Traits only in mechanical ways, staying away from narrative uses. I’ve noticed this even with players who are quite experienced in games with player narrative control, so I don’t think it’s just a hesitance to take control of the story. It may just be the very human tendency to cling to what can be quantified. It may also be the difficulty of applying a particular Trait to a particular situation.) Describe this to the players, going through at least the first four rating levels. Then, perhaps, put out a table tent reminding them of what they can use their Traits to accomplish, or add an explanatory note to your GM screen, or start each session with someone recounting a cool thing they did for each Trait rating.
I’ve never tried a game with Trait levels higher than 4. Seems like it could get very high-powered indeed! Might even work as a superhero-level game. I wonder: At this level, would the Traits start to get more narrative use, since they’re less valuable in a mechanical mode? (Less valuable? Yes, because at very high levels, skill + characteristic + Trait all tends towards the same range of die rolls, such that one extra die doesn’t make that big a difference. But one extra level in terms of narrative power can be huge.) It’s certainly an interesting thing to think about.
I have a scenario in mind for Con of the North 2015; high-powered Traits might be a good addition to it. I’ll have to explore this.
Have you ever played B&C with high-rated Traits? I’m curious how it’s worked for you!