After cracking it open and having a read a few things hit me to begin with.

1. There is a good amount of background info on the setting with out being too bogged down. As I mentioned I’ve been playing the Bioware game a lot, but due to playing on the Xbox I haven’t been reading all that much of the huge amount of setting info that they included in the game. So getting to read up on a little of this history in the Green Ronin RPG was great.
2. The character creation options are basically the same as the CRPG, but with a few differences. You still have only three character classes and three races, but the backgrounds have been opened up a little. The two biggest ones for me are the option to play an Avvar Hillsman or a Fereldan Freedman. Both of these are human backgrounds, but so culturally different that they are almost different races. I think from a campaign point of view that will allow for a lot of different adventures and tensions than just a Fereldan noble as in the Bioware game.
3. The game system itself is an interesting mix of a litte True20 and a little Song of Ice and Fire Roleplay with one major difference in the Dragon Dice & Stunts System. The basic mechanic is that you roll 3d6, add your ability and any extras and see if you’ve beaten the TN. The Dragon Dice is one dice in your three that is a different colour, it’s used to break ties and say how well you did a task (successes). It’s most important function though is to decide how many stunt points you get. Stunts are (as far as I can tell from my initial read throughs) basically extra actions you get to do in combat. They are triggered when/if you get a double on your 3d6. This is meant to make combat a little more dynamic and different than just “I swing my sword and hit”. I’m looking forward to see how this works in play.

Green Ronin have very obviously tried to make Dragon Age easily accessible for new RPG players with streamlined rules, a setting which is likely to b at least a little bit familar to people interested in table top gaming and from the outset plenty of adventures. They announced just the other day that one of their next releases will be a book of three adventures with another three adventure outlines (the other release wil be a GMs Toolkit. More here).

It is also being released in a series of box sets, this first one (due for release in Jan ’10) is to take characters from level 1-5. There is a Player’s Guide, a GM’s guide and (in the first box) 3 special d6. The GM guide ships with a pre-written adventure straight off the bat called The Dalish Curse. I haven’t read it, as I’m playing it next week, so I can’t give a review but I will certainly do a follow up actual play then.

All in all I think Green Ronin has started something good with Dragon Age and I look forward to seeing where it leads. At this stage, if I decide to run another high fantasy campaign I think it will be with this system. I just hope that the lengthy approvals process that stopped the table top game being released with the CPRG doesn’t stop the momentum in the same way that approvals for Green Ronin’s other current licenced product has.

The book is well laid out with the first chapter being a nice quick(ish) overview of the history of the setting. It doesn’t go too far into the back ground through which is good if you’re keen to just make your own way in this rich world invented by George R.R. Martin. It then gives an overview of the game rules, followed by a really great character creation section (more on this in a moment) before getting into the nitty gritty of characters, the Noble house, intrigue rules, combat, warfare and a bit of advice for the GM or Narrator as that role is called here.

I’m not going to dissect each and every chapter, if you want that much detail I highly recommend you go get the pdf, however I’m going to touch on the stand out parts briefly.

Firstly character creation. Like a number of more ‘traditional’ games that have been released recently AISFRP has incorporated a really nice element of collaborative game creation with the creation of the Noble house that all of the PCs will belong to. This process means that all of the PCs have an instant reason to be together and to give a damn. It also means from a player perspective that you get a chance to let the GM know what kind of game you want to play in. In the A Song of Ice and Fire books the house a character belongs to has a huge impact on their place in the world, Green Ronin have tried hard to recreate that in their game. The rest of character creation is pretty standard but one nice touch is that depending on your age you have a set number of experience points to use to create your PC. So the younger you are, the less powerful your abilities and skills but the more opportunity you have to give your self special qualities that will help you out during play. It makes age relevant in a way I haven’t seen before.

Talking of skills and abilities one of the things I’ve liked about this game since I first picked up the quick start rules is that rather than the standard array of abilities (such as strength, dexterity, intelligence etc) skills and abilities are combined. It’s a slightly different take on a well established character element and one that I think will not only simplify player’s character sheets, but also make things faster in game.

The only other element of the rules I’m going go into any detail on is the intrigue system. Essentially in a game set in the Song of Ice and Fire world you need to have a way to re-create the great battles of wits that are often even more devastating than the pitched battles. In ASIFRP they’ve done just that, essentially making the combat system work in personal battles. It is in no way meant to replace the standard roleplaying elements of conversations or attempted seductions, however it is there for when those conversations or seductions have something riding on them. However I have a suspicion that the first few times it’s used there will be a lot of looking things up and referring to the rules.

So there you have it. I haven’t read the whole book yet, sections like the chapter on warfare aren’t overly of interest to me, but everything I have read is really solid and well thought through. It’s a game I look forward to running both in some shorter one-shot adventures and a longer campaign.

I sat down to watch this quite excited. It’s a show with a premise that I think is cool and created by someone who’s work I’ve pretty much always loved. But I have to say that the first 15 minutes or so didn’t grab me. I felt the way the scenes flowed was jarring and like they were trying to cram as much info in as they could into a short space of time.

But I stuck with it and once we got through the “set up and explain stuff” portion of the episode and got into the guts of it all it was great. And I was surprised by Eliza Duchku, while I won’t go so far as to say her performance blew me away I will say that she seemed to have more range than I would have attributed to her.

The vague creepiness of the premise, coupled with the way the actors swtich between their “engaged” and “unengaged” selves is really quite cool. I’m not 100% sold on Dollhouse yet, but I will be watching more of it to see where it takes me.

I’m not sure where I first heard of this game. Either it was on the NZRag boards or perhaps Story Games. Where ever it was the premise grabbed me immediately.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about this is a game about Space Marines. Space Marines who are members of Terra’s Expeditionary Force, the 16^th Brigade of the 3^rd Army to be precise. An army whose main directive is to go into the stars, find life and kill it. However the subtleties and possibilities open to a gamer with a bit of imagination and willingness to do things differently is huge.

While I haven’t been able to play this game properly yet (I’m planning a Skype game, but more on that later) I have read the pdf from cover to cover and love what I’ve read.

It is a game about conflict. Players vs bugs, players vs shitty COs, players vs each other and the mechanic that drives all this is simple, effective and devastating. Unlike many games in which combat is one of the main elements 3: 16 doesn’t want to know how much damage you do to one enemy. Oh no, if you hit (using the oh so well named FA or Fighting Ability) you roll to see how many enemies you kill. Not just one, but many. It’s almost as if the designer of this game, Gregor Hutton (http://boxninja.com), thought that just one person to kill wasn’t quite ambitious enough.

As I’m talking about the use of FA I might as well touch on the lightening fast character creation. You choose a name, a characteristic and split 10 points between FA and NFA, or Non-fighting Ability. If you try to kill things, then it’s FA for everything else there’s NFA (to rip of a well known credit card company). That’s it, you’re done! Now it’s time for the GM to randomly roll for the planet and it’s aliens and you’re done.

There are more rules around levelling and gaining rank, as well as different weapons and gadgets that you can eventually get as well. All this is standard and I might even say necessary fare for a sci-fi game. But the thing I like most about it is that if you never want your Trooper to walk the halls of officer-hood then you can still be damn kick-arse! If you want to try your hand at choosing the planets and the missions as a Captain or even the terrifying Brigadier then you can do that as well.

While it seems at first glance like this game is just about killing aliens it actually appears to have the scope for a far richer experience, if of course you think there needs to be more than just shooting bugs.