Dark Heresy
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.
WFRP 3e? Really? Oh dear.
There’s been a bunch of rumours around RPG.net and the like recently that a third edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay might be happening. This was fuelled by comments on the official Fantasy Flight Games message boards and the like and by the fact that FFG have released bugger all WFRP books since they got the license, concentrating instead on Dark Heresy. All that has been released is a) the Career Compendium, a classic end of line product (see the Spell and Magic Item Compendiums Wizards released just before announcing D&D 4e); b) Shades of Empire, a organisations source book and c) The Thousand Thrones a big adventure. My understanding is that at least the latter two of these were basically written before FFG took the license as well. Other than that, they’ve made the out of print 2e books available as PDFs. No other action.
Then today I see that The Altdorf Correspondent blog has a post linking to Black Library Author Graham McNeil’s blog. Here’s the relevant section:
WFRP 3
A coupe of weeks ago, our regular roleplaying group was privileged enough to playtest 3rd Edition Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. The guys from Fantasy Flight Games were over at Games Workshop HQ, and Jay Little very kindly did a show and tell for us over at Alessio Cavatore’s house, where we saw how much the game has changed from its previous incarnation. Our gaming group has been going for some time and we were all interested to see what was new with WFRP, since we’d playtested the previous edition also. It was in interesting evening, and the game was very different to anything I’ve played before, with a lot of table space taken up by character sheets, action and ability cards, dice etc. It felt like a strange hybrid of board game and roleplaying game at first, but once the notions of the new mechanics took hold, it felt very natural. Likewise, the new dice pool system felt odd at first, but once we’d rolled a few dice it immediately became very intuitive, which is surely the holy grail of any roleplaying system.By the time we’d despatched the goblins and rescued the coachman, we didn’t have much time left to play out the more interpersonal encounters of the intro game, but we’d already gotten our heads around the system and were already looking to develop our characters – which is a good sign in any playtest. Overall, I really liked the changes to the game, and it makes a nice change from sitting with my Players Handbook and a grubby character sheet. I’m liking what Jay has done with the game, and there’s a clear desire to make it fit properly with the Warhammer World, where a lot of the previous edition’s books, with the best will in the world, just didn’t.
Oh dear. Ability cards? Fitting more into the Warhammer World?
I’m a traditionalist in these things, by and large. I like my RPGs to be RPGS – dice, books, character sheets and some minis (sometimes). And I like the WFRP version of the Old World, not the current battlegame version. So this doesn’t appeal.
This is a watch this space, but I’m glad currently I’ve got my WFRP 2e and 1e books…
What Nice Flagellations You Have – a Dark Heresy actual play
On Friday night, I got to play some Dark Heresy at last (tick another geek resolution off the list). Dark Heresy is the Warhammer 40,000 (commonly abbreviated to 40k) roleplaying game and I’ve been a big fan of the setting, if not the wargame rules, since high school. For the uninitiated, it’s basically a gothic horror sci-fi game set in a universe where everyone is fairly horrible – there’s lots of nasty demons, corrupt officials and generally bleak outlook. While none of the other players had ever played 40k before, luckily for me one player had done enough playing of the PC 40k game Dawn of War to get a sense of the setting which helped. In the RPG, you play ‘acolytes’, the agents for an Inquisitor who tasks you to seek out heresy, corruption and alien influence largely though extreme violence. Most of this is going to involve a fair amount of ‘40k-speak’ I’m afraid so bare with me and I’ll provide links where I can. › Continue reading
Resolution update!
Whew. It’s March already and I’ve only just managed to do any of my 2009 geek resolutions.
- I finished Fable II this morning when Abbie took Felix to the markets with her. This was a good fun, if a bit too casual, RPG. I didn’t adore it but I certainly enjoyed it. I’ll try to write a proper review in the coming week.
- I’m running a game of Dark Heresy next weekend, all going according to plan, while Ciaran is here.
- I’ve also been playing in Dan’s Mythic Senguko Japan game as a sort of Buddhist mystic. Only 2 sessions for me so far but good fun and a very well realised campaign world. I’ve been meaning to write up some character notes and stuff about the game as well.
That’s it so far – 5 video games left to finish and 3 RPGs left to try, but progress at least!