George R. R. Martin
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.
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!
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.