A Song of Ice and Fire
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.
More SoIaF TV show news
George R. R. Martin has posted on his blog about shooting locations for the pilot of A Game of Thrones, the hopefully upcoming HBO show based on his A Song of Ice and Fire novels. It’s nice to see something happening here and we can only hope the show actually gets picked up.
A shame for all the Kiwi readers it won’t be shot in New Zealand as you could have tried to become extras!
A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplay – First Thoughts
It’s been awhile in coming but I have finally managed to have a bit of a read through of my new shiny PDF copy of Green Ronin‘s Song of Ice and Fire Roleplay (or ASIFRP for short, which is good ’cause it gets a bit wordy). So I’ve decided to sit down and dissect it a little for those who might want to know. › Continue reading
A Song of Ice and Fire RPG is printed
Thanks to the power of Twitter we can now all see an actual physical copy of the new Green Ronin vision for A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying. Check it out:
Defending George
It’s a bit odd but, in the last week, three extensive defences of why George R. R. Martin hasn’t finished A Dance of Dragons yet: one (in two parts) from The Wertzone, one from Suvudu and one from A Dribble of Ink (although this is more a commentary on the Suvudu one).
This is one of these odd things that never would have happened before the internet. Before the net, we never would have known anything about why he hadn’t finished it. But now we know about his football watching, travel plans, work on other books and we have forums dedicated to people moaning.
As for me? I don’t care. Yes, it’s kind of stupid that he is taking so long and yes, it does put off some people. But I still enjoyed the first books in the series and have no regrets that I read them. And Martin doesn’t ‘owe’ me the end of the series anymore than Fox owed me the end of Firefly. I’d prefer to have a conclusion but there is no implicit contract between author and reader that someone will finish a series to my satisfaction. But I’m certainly not going to spend my time defending Martin from critics either – he made his bed.
Things to look forward to in ’09
With January almost done 2009 is well under way so I thought I’d jot down a list of the things I’m looking forward to this year.
- Receiving, reading and playing Mouse Guard. An RPG of the graphic novels by David Petersen it has had a number of great reviews and as a gaming friend said to me:
“It is one of the most playable RPGs I have come across.”
- Pulling off Day of Games on May 16th. A small one day event here in Wellington with games being offered on the day and people voting for an choosing the game they feel like playing most. More info once I re-do the blog.
- As Nick mentioned in a previous post Green Ronin have announced that A Song of Ice and Fire rpg has been approved and is on it’s way to the printers. I ran through the quick-start adventure back in July’08 and really liked what they had done. The core book is due out in March so I’ll be doing a write up once I get my hands on it.
- Writing my Buffy: the Vampire Slayer RPG scenario series, The Slayer Chronicals.
- Playing in my new Buffy game (there seems to be a theme), Fall. It’s a great group of people and I think will be heaps of fun. I’ll do a write up on our first mini-session soon.
- Dollhouse starting on TV in the US.
I think that’s it for now. I’ll be back at certain points to see how these things all pan out.
Some nice links
Chris Pramas announces that the A Song of Ice & Fire RPG has finally been given approval by George R. R. Martin.
According to Kotaku, the Chicago Tribune has asked if GTAIV contains the century’s best writing. Clearly the answer is no – I can think of 30 or so things that are better written from the last 8 years, including some other video games. But interesting the question is being asked.
It’s either fun culture jamming or annoying viral marketing, but they have some funny road signs in Austin.
And continuing on from the other day’s theme, the Guardian has some commentary on the unrepresentativeness of a lot of SFF. This was sparked by a post by Elizabeth Bear on how to produce more representative genre writing. All good stuff and thanks to Pat’s Fantasy Hotlist for the heads up.