A Few Random Thoughts

There's an exciting new open play test going on. I'm sure you've heard about it. You can find the play test document here.

That's right, Dragon Age RPG Set 3 is on it's way. I'm still not finished exploring the lower levels so am probably not going to be able to contribute much to the play test but it's exciting none the less.

Another new product that you can get free documents to help you try it out is Leviathans by Catalyst Game Labs. It's apparently going to be ready for release as a box set 'any month now'. It looks pretty cool and has evocative fiction that goes with it. Fans of Battletech will feel at home with the rules. You just have to hope that it doesn't become a competitor to Battletech rather than bringing in new players of tactical wargames. I don't think there's much of a market to share around and you would hate to see a dilution of a brand.

And while I'm talking about things coming to fruition I'd like to quickly mention the Marvel RPG (Marvel Heroic Roleplaying) which came out on DriveThruRpg today. I bought it and downloaded it because I've been hearing so much about it and the first impressions are that it looks good. It's a variation on the Cortex+ system and looks like it should be able to do things in a quite fun way. There are some places where it looks a little cluttered, like too many people have tried to cram their ideas in. It'll certainly be worth a play to work out how the game works in practice.

It took a while before I got to read the rules as I always buy too much other stuff when I shop at DriveThruRPG and ended up with a large download. I picked up a bundle of maps from Jonathan Roberts which made up the bulk of the download as well as Don't Rest Your Head from Evil Hat and a texture pack from Posthuman Studios. Neither of these have I had a chance to look at yet.

Since writing for the blog last I've been very busy moving house and with work. I haven't had too much time for role playing and nor have my groups. Two people I play with had had babies in the last couple of months and that is, understandably, eating in to their free time. We have had some gaming though, I got Spirit of the Century and Diaspora for Christmas and we spent New Years Eve doing character and system generation for Diaspora. That went tremendously well and we almost missed midnight while making up back story for our characters. The Fate system really speaks to me. Our new Pathfinder game is getting going well. We had a few introductory sessions where I was the only player that could make it and now we're off and knee deep (or waist deep for my dwarf) in intrigue and stolen relics.

We also had character creation for the Savage Worlds game set in the same world as our 4E D&D game but a new baby has, in a good way, put pay to that game for the moment. Meanwhile the adventure keeps getting rewritten with better and better ideas. By the time it gets played it's going to have more information in it that an old TSR or MERP supplement.

Last random thought for the night is Kickstarter (www.kickstarter.com). I've become addicted to backing cool sounding projects on there. I've done 4 in the last week. It's a great idea and it's good to see people using it in different ways. The latest couple of projects I've backed are School Daze and Rogue Mage and if you are interested in cool, new RPGs then they are worth taking a look.

That's it for randomness. That was just a few things that I wanted to get out of my system. I'll write something more in depth about a subject soon.