Check out the first 4 pages here, and check back every Friday (North American time) for a new page. It’s pretty cool and looks to be doing a bit on the back story before the game starts.

Enjoy!

• Regular readers know that Sophie and I are pretty excited about upcoming PC/console RPG Dragon Age and may have even picked up that we’re both planning on playing it on the Xbox 360. Good news for us then because the Kotaku writers have had some time with the 360 version and say the controls work fine!
• There was also an interesting interview with video game designer Tim Schafer about the need for games to expand their subject matter beyond sci-fi and fantasy if the medium is going to grow larger. I could give a fuck about it getting bigger, but he’s probably not wrong.
• Finally, magicians Penn & Teller have dedicated an episode of their show Bullshit! to violent video games – pretty funny stuff.

I need to read a video game blog other than Kotaku. Any suggestions?

Chris Pramas has done a Dragon Age PnP RPG interview here. It sounds like a simple, introductory system which gels with what Pramas has said before and could be interesting. Also surprising was that Bioware approached them, not the other way around.

Our first release is a boxed set and it presumes no previous experience with tabletop RPGs. It’s designed to teach people how to play, so it has lots of advice and examples.

In less promising news, the Kuzui’s (producers of Buffy) are planning another Buffy movie, without Whedon. Fran Kuzui was the director of the original movie and there’s obviously some terrible, complex rights issues here. Needless to say, I can’t imagine the new movie would be any better than the first without Whedon’s input.

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.

First up is how uber-CRPG designer Chris Avellone hates CRPGs and their clichés.

Second up is how horses change the design of CRPGs and why Dragon Age won’t have any.

Both of these are reasons that as long as I’ve got friends and dice, I’ll keep playing table top games.