A Song of Ice and Fire
HBO greenlights A Game of Thrones
George R. R. Martin reacts here, with links. I’m pretty excited about this – the series is human-centric enough to not require much in the way of effects and the story is complex enough that it needs TV, not movie, timelines. Who knows how well it will do but I can’t wait.
2010 – A year in gaming
With KapCon now behind me I’m starting to look forward to what kind of gaming experiences I want to have in 2010. Essentially a list that I can look back on later in the year to see how I’m going.
So with out any further ado. The List!
- Actually finish my KapCon SDC entry this year. I’m going to tidy up and polish Still to Come.
- Stop being so soft on the players in the A Song of Ice and Fire game I GM. It’s a tough world and sometimes, people die.
- Continue to overcome the distrust I have of LARPing.
- Play more of the games I look at and think “I really want to play that!”.
- Blog more, not just re-posting cool stuff from elsewhere.
- Get a new PC so I can play all these awesome CPRGs on the platform they are meant for.
I think that’s it really. There are other things, but these are the main ones. What about you? Do you have any gaming goals for the year?
Seven more to the mix
Yesterday, US time, seven more parts of the HBO pilot for A Game of Thrones were cast. They all seem to be actors of relative unknowness this time round, though by all accounts very strong. An article over at The Hollywood Reporter runs through them all, but for ease of use I’ll list them here:
- Jaime Lannister – played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau
- Daenerys – played by Tamzin Merchant
- Robb Stark – played by Richard Madden
- Ser Jorah Mormont – played by Iain Glen
- Theon Greyjoy – played by Alfie Allen
- Sansa Stark – played by Sophie Turner
- Arya Stark – played by Maisie Williams
Some of these actors are such unknowns that they barely have a web pressence at all. So for more info head over to George R. R. Martin’s Not a Blog to read up on them.
This is all very good news. The finished product is still a long way away, but it looks like it’ll be pretty grand once it gets here!
And the winner is…
The ENnie awards were announced last week and I was pretty pleased to see that a game I’ve talked rather a lot about here, A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplay picked up a Silver for Best Rules as well as the Gold for Best Free Product for the Quickstart rules. Coming second place to a game like Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition is a pretty good feat and Green Ronin Publishing must be very pleased.
I’m hoping that off the back of this positive response to the game that Green Ronin firms up the plans for further products as well as officially announcing when the Campaign Guide will be released. According to a report from Gen Con on the Green Ronin boards, the hold up is not that they are waiting on approvals from George R.R. Martin. Though this of course should be taken with a grain of salt until there is some sort word from Green Ronin.
Most of the other award winners covered off DnD 4th ed, Dark Heresy and Paizo Publishing, though it was great to see that some of the smaller publishers and games had a good showing like Mouse Guard (which I own, but have never actually played) and Evil Hat Productions with both Don’t Rest Your Head and Swashbucklers of the Seven Skies. Unfortunately my friend Malcolm’s Hot War didn’t pick up awards in the two categories (Best Setting and Best Writing) it was nominated.
A full list of winners can be found over at the ENnie Awards site.
A small GRRM update
The Wertzone, a great fantasy book and other things blog, has a small update about A Dance of Dragons from George R. R. Martin’s recent FinnCon appearance. Martin is apparently saying he hopes to finish by the end of the year. He also says that he ‘envisages The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring taking three years apiece’.
We can only hope. At that rate, he might be finished in time for me to get the last book for my 40th birthday…
The Chronicles of Araeden
Further to my last post about ASIFRP house creation I’ve made a campaign page in the Campaign Files section. I’ll be adding details about the history of the world and other titbits as I come up with them. You can find it here.
House creation in A Song of Ice and Fire roleplaying
A few weeks ago my long running gaming group sat down with the new Green Ronin A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying rules to make a House and characters. I had read the rules, but not actually put them into play yet so was really looking forward to how this very collaborative part of the game panned out.
To start with the World this house is going to inhabit is not George R R Martin’s Westeros. I’d decided a while ago that as two of the players hadn’t read the books and as I wanted them to have as much freedom as they wanted to mess up the world that I’d make my own setting, which borrows very heavily from George R R Martin’s masterwork. So I filled the players in a little on what to expect, and then we lept straight in with total random rolls to let the dice decide the history of the House.
More news about A Song of Ice and Fire
It seems that George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series is all sorts of hotness at the moment. First the new, shiny RPG from Green Ronin finally came out, and then (as Nick reported in this post) the HBO series based on the first book in the series, Game of Thrones, is starting to get traction.
Talking of which the Hollywood Reporter has this small article giving the first names (other than Martin’s) to be attached to the project. It seems that the star and director of The Station Agent are joining together again, but for something quite different. I think that Peter Dinklage as Tyrion is a very good start at casting. Looking forward to hearing more news.
Now over to the computer game world and it seems that the rights have been obtained by a company I’ve never heard of, Cyanide. At the moment I’m not going to get in anyway excited as in all honesty I think these books would be extremely difficult to turn into a computer game. Possibly you could do a Total War type thing and have the houses facing off across the battle field, but I’m not sure. The thing about the books I enjoy so much is that they are made up of complex webs of characters which would be extremely difficult to emulate. However the setting that Martin has created is very rich and it will be interesting to see how it pans out.
The Dragon Age PnP RPG and Nick’s thinking
As Sophie’s posted, Green Ronin have announced that they’re producing a pen-and-paper version of Bioware’s upcoming CRPG Dragon Age. This was hyped by a series of clues on the GR twitter feed and now Chris Pramas has updated the thinking behind these clues on his blog.
GR have done a bit of a closet Mongoose thing of late, publishing increasing numbers of licensed properties alongside their original settings: A Song of Ice and Fire, Wild Cards (George R. R. Martin’s shared world superheros setting), Thieve’s World and the Black Company. More than anyone, they must know how to make this work for them financially. And Dragon Age will expose them to a great new mass of potential customers – there’s already a page up on the official Dragon Age site and presumably there will be mentions in the manual and possible even load screens and the like. Pramas specifically says that:
As for “something needed,” I was talking about a really good intro game for new roleplayers. I don’t think D&D has had that since the early 80s (hence “something overdue”) and the tabletop roleplaying hobby needs new blood. It is not a coincidence that the first release is a boxed set.
I could be wrong, but I don’t think that this is going to bring in these new gamers in large numbers, box set or not. The vast majority of video gamers don’t care about tabletop games – if you look at the offical forums, you’ll see that near everyone commenting on this is an old tabletop RPGer. No one has popped in to say “I’ve always wanted to play a table top RPG and now here’s my chance!”
One other concern I have is that Bioware’s best work has been with other people’s settings. Star Wars and the Forgotten Realms in particular. Mass Effect is the only game of theirs I know with a totally original setting (Jade Empire is pseudo-historical) and I was fairly under whelmed.
I have every faith that GR will do this well and that it will be an interesting game , and I’ll probably pick it up if I like the setting from the game, but I hope no one thinks this is going to make RPGs mainstream again.
Wedding Knight – scenario for A Song of Ice and Fire RPG
Green Ronin have just released their first adventure for the A Song of Ice and Fire RPG, call Wedding Knight. I downloaded it today and was very happy that I did. As I’m likely to run it (at least in part) I won’t go into any detail but here are some initial impressions.
Firstly it is only 17 pages long, but they are really good quality. The adventure contains the main NPCs, a location and a well thought out number of plot hooks and potential events which all surround an imminent wedding between two houses.
The thing that really struck me was that as an adventure it was a quick easy read and I didn’t spend my whole time thinking about how much unneeded material there was. The NPCs were well fleshed out with good belivable back stories. The reasons given for why the PCs would even be there plausible and most importantly (for me at least) the writter wasn’t trying to tell me how to run the game or spoon feeding when each event would happen. This lack of rail roading meant that I would be able to slip this adventure in at any point that I felt I needed a week off, with out needing extensive re-writes before use.
Adventures at this length feel like they would take between 3-4 hours to play through, which is exactly the length I want my pre-written adventures to come in at. So I was really happy that I picked this up and I hope this is indicitive of things to come.
You can get the adventure through Green Ronin’s store for US$4.95.