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’.

• Inquisitor – Another cool looking isometric indie RPG. I hope that and Age of Decadence come out!
• The Magicians – this book looks pretty cool and based on this interview, the author Lev Grossman is pretty cool as well! He’s also writen a great article about the improtance of plot in the Wall Street Journal.
• Erik Mona is doing a new blog – there’s no RSS but Erik Mona, Publisher at Paizo is going a blog over at ENWorld. The 1st entry is all about his history as a gamer.
• DragonAge‘s lead writer – here’s an interview with David Gaider! Pretty interesting stuff…
• A huge list of sci-fi – writen by people who aren’t white men.
• Tim Holman’s new blog – Mr Holman is the Publisher at Orbit. He’s writen some cool stuff including the state of the Urban Fantasy sub-genre and what gets onto the covers of fantasy books.

Phew.

• 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?

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…

You can read all about it here but it sounds pretty damn cool! Given that Avellone worked on the magnificent Planescape: Torment amongst other clasic games, plus has a tabletop background too it would be very interesting to compare the two Fallout 3 based games when New Vegas is released.

There’s actually a longer interview with Avellone from Edge magazine here as well which is worth a read.