The launch of their last two licenses was done with a hiss, a roar and the promise of great support and interest. However as time marches on it seems that this isn’t quite happening.

A Song of Ice and Fire has had it’s core book, a GM screen and an adventure in the year an a half since it’s been released which is great. But the Campaign Guide is almost a year overdue and momentum seems to have really slowed. This is a great game and one which has given me many hours of fun, but despite winning ENnie awards and getting great feedback from the community, I worry that it isn’t going to get many more books released.

Dragon Age is the other major licence they’ve recently released and while this has only been around since late last year there has been very little in the way of news about new products. A book of adventures and adventure seeds called Blood of Feralden has been announced, but a release date hasn’t been. This game has the potential to tap into a whole group of gamers who don’t have any experience with dice, but unless GR keeps up the momentum on this licence I think it’s just going to fade away.

While I’m sure that Green Ronin is certainly very keen to support these lines and no doubt see them prosper, it is hard to stay enthused when there is next to no news of what’s coming up. I know that they are a small company and that they no doubt would rather be writing and producing games than creating hype. However part of keeping a fan base happy is news, rumor and titbits of information. It would be nice if they were a little more forthcoming with this sort of thing.

So the point of this post, if there is one, is that a great company like Green Ronin, who release interesting games with good systems needs to work a little harder to support the communities it has already established. I’m more than happy to accept that games like A Song of Ice and Fire and Dragon Age will have long approval processes. But if that is what is holding things up, tell me and while you’re at it, tease me with what’s next to come.

The stunt system was a fun way to make combat more dynamic, with out bogging down the rules. I’ll be especially interested in how they add new stunts as the box sets are released. I noticed even in our one session that people gravitated to the same stunts. Unfortunately the other day my dice weren’t in the mood to pair up, which made each time they did that much more exciting.

Otherwise the system was easy to pick up and didn’t seem overly intrusive in play. There was some discussion around the table on the Dragon Die and it’s place as the decider of success levels. Personally that didn’t bother me too much. If you succeed at a task, you succeed. The number of successes you have only matters occasionally. Using them in extended tests did seem a little cumbersome to me however. But as with all these things I’d just adjust how I used them so it didn’t get in the way.

I was playing a Dalish ranger type so didn’t have much to do with the magic system. there was quite a lot of discussion after the game on whether mages are ineffective. Reading through the rules I’m not sure it’s such a problem. The ability for people to turn aside a spell seems like a good one, especially going forward. Perhaps it could have been streamlined so that you have a Magic defence score rather than needing to do a roll every time to see if it gets through. But I’m sure that is the type of thing groups will house rule if they feel strongly about it.

I’d be a little reluctant to kick off any sort of campaign (even if I had the time) until I had a firm idea of when box set 2 will be out. I have a feeling that many of the gripes I’ve read in forums about the lack of setting info will be addressed in the up coming box sets. There are two releases already announced, the Blood in Fereldan adventure pack and the Dragon Age Game Master’s Kit. No release dates for these yet however.

All in all I liked the system and think it works well and has room to grow with the additions. If you have been looking for a light weight fantasy system then this might just be it. I’m planning on running an adventure at KapCon this month, so look out for the actual play report of that.

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.

Not sure exactly what I’ll do here – I’m planning on getting a new PC but it probably won’t be until next year and I don’t want to wait for Dragon Age. Stink!

In other DA news, there’s some details of the pen and paper RPG in a new podcast at the Green Ronin site. I haven’t listened but there’s details in this RPG.net thread. It sounds interesting actually – simple but with a stunt die sort of system called a ‘Dragon Die’.

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.

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.

But what to buy if I wanted to get into Wolverine? This link is all about how the comics business interacts and fails to win from successful movie tie-ins. And a key reason is a lack of obvious starting points for characters – especially characters that have been going since before I was even born. This is similar to the complaints that are made about the lack of a good introductory RPG – attempts Chris Pramas and Green Ronin are trying to solve with their Dragon Age RPG.

I don’t have the time or inclination to get seriously into superhero comics, especially big name ones from the big two publishers, so I’m glad the films like Iron Man, the first 2 X-Men and Spiderman movies and the recent Batman movies are getting made – they allow me to get my big super hero fix without spending wads of cash on comics of variable-quality comics. I just hope that they re better than Wolverine…

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.

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.

A mod on their forums for upcoming MMO closed a thread discussing discrimination against gay and lesbian forum members by saying that gay and lesbian are terms that “do not exist in Star Wars”.

Oh dear.

Bioware apologised and made the staffer apologise, but what a stupid move. One good thing was that it helped raise the issues surrounding gay and lesbian gamers and their treatment online. Kotaku ran a good history of these issues that hopefully a lot of people read. Just try to stay out of the comments…