Friday, September 14th, 2018
You may go play video games if you wish.
Remember this: Walk away now and you walk away from your interest in history, your ability to tell a good story, your ability to translate dreams into reality; leaving the next generation with nothing but recycled, unimaginative first-person shooters, online quasi-historical strategy games, yet another multiplayer NFL game, violence-laden driving simulations, and mindless revisions of innumerable cute Japanese animations. Depart now and you forever separate yourselves from the vital gaming legacies of James Dunnigan, Steve Jackson, Gary Gygax, Marc Miller, Loren Wiseman, Frank Chadwick, Andrew Keith, William Keith, John Harshman, Professor Barker, and Richard Tucholka.Turn your backs now and you snuff out the fragile candles of Board Gaming, Miniatures, Fantasy and Science Fiction Roleplaying, and when those flames flicker and expire, the light of the world is extinguished because the creative thought which has moved mankind through the decades leading to the millennium will wither and die on the vine of abandonment and neglect.
— John Kwon on the Traveller Mailing List
Tags: quote, Quote of the Day, Role Playing Game, RPG
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Monday, February 9th, 2015
Quag Keep by Andre Norton
Let us venture back to 1978 for the very first novel about a role playing game. A group of adventures, including a Lizard Man, have these strange and vague memories of living in a technological society and having some hobby that involved books, papers, and dice. Dice just like the ones on the bracelets locked on their wrists that spin when they do things like fight or cast spells. Nearly four decades later, there is a pocket industry of game related novels. They all trace their roots to this classic.
Monday Book Pick Archive
Tags: book, D&D, Monday Book Pick, RPG
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Monday, January 13th, 2014
The Forever Engine by Frank Chadwick
Crunchy Steampunk goodness from one of the founders of the genre. Yes, it’s that Frank Chadwick, creater of the Space:1889 RPG. Those of you, like me, will find a good deal familiar with tale of adventure and Mad Science. Including Liftwood, stout hearted British Marines, and a five barrel Nordenfelt!
Monday Book Pick Archive
Tags: Baen Books, book, Monday Book Pick, RPG, Science Fiction, SciFi, Steampunk
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Sunday, July 15th, 2012
I have to say I was pleasantly surprised about the amount of Dieselpunk on Pinterest.
It looks like the old FASA RPG Crimson Skies counts as Dieselpunk these days.
Tags: Crimson Skies, Dieselpunk, Pulp, RPG, Science Fiction, SciFi
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Sunday, July 1st, 2012
I’ve been a Buckaroo Banzai fan since I saw it, twice, during the opening week back in 1984. Saw it at the old Juliet Theater in Poughkeepsie.
Got the paperback and the long sleeved Jet Car t-shirt.
Now there is a Buckaroo Banzai RPG.
This is not Doctor Banzai’s first appearance in an RPG. Team Banzai was an official part of the Battletech universe.
This is the first official RPG focused on the Banzai Institute though.
Bottom line, Buckaroo Banzai was a fun movie, a good read, and it’s a damn shame a sequel was never made.
Check it out.
Tags: BattleTech, book, Buckaroo Banzai, Movie, RPG, Science Fiction, SciFi, Sunday SciFi
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Sunday, May 13th, 2012
The classic SciFi RPG is Traveller. Originally released in 1977 by GDW (Games Designer Workshop) and written by Marc Miller.
It consisted of three little black books:
1. Characters and Combat
2. Starships
3. Worlds and Adventures
That’s it and it was all you needed to get started. Define your character, how to get to other planets, and what you find once you get there.
Oh there was more, GDW published additional rule books, adventures, and other supplements, including two reworkings of the rule set. Those were MegaTraveller and Traveller: The New Era.
Steve Jackson Games put out a licensed version for their GURPS rules, and Mongoose Publishing is producing books with that LBB (Little Black Book) feel.
I’ve enjoyed Traveller for a lot of years, and it has a very rich and detailed game history that you can use or ignore as you desire.
Tags: RPG, SciFi, Sunday SciFi, Traveller
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Wednesday, January 11th, 2012
Here is the executive summary. The 4th Edition rules were a bad business decision and resulted in decrease in market share.
This new edition is supposed to be a return to their “roots” in a effort to win back their core fan base.
For more details, try Ace’s take on the Forbes story.
HT to Mr. Reynolds, and oh BTW, there have been several Traveller movies. Namely Serenity and Dark Star.
Marc Miller and Loren Wiseman never made a dime off those however.
Tags: Dungeons & Dragons, Movie, RPG, Science Fiction, SciFi, Traveller
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Wednesday, June 8th, 2011
For a change of place, I came across a bit of pure awesome RPG fiction over at Leslie Bates’s Living in the Surreal World. Go read the whole thing, but here are some of my favorites:
We poison our air and water to weed out the weak. We set off fission bombs in our only biosphere. We nailed our god to a stick. Don’t fuck with the human race.
We drink poison too, and derive enjoyment from the temporary malfunctioning it causes in our higher brain functions. The higher the toxin level the greater the beverage; diluting the toxin with water is severely frowned upon.
Humans are so hardcore their first innovations were ways of making killing easier. Don’t mess with homo sapiens sapiens.
Humans consider one of the greatest career paths available to be piloting conveyances that use explosions for thrust.
The human capacity to change is fascinating.
I myself have witnessed a human military officer, who is tasked solely with the purpose of abusing his subordinates until they bond, take a group I suspected of severe genetic ailments – excess fat tissue, panic during crisis situations – and turn them into the perfect murder machines that we have come to know and fear. We have long suspected that humans in their homelands are weaker than those we regularly encounter, but it is clear that even the weak ones can become dangerous with minimal effort.
I would not advise an invasion of any human-controlled system at this time.
Not just good advice…take care not to tease the apes. They will fling more than poo when angered.
Just one more, from the page Leslie got the source material from:
“I once met a Human at a waystation on a Class 1 world. It did some kind of rough work for one of their colonies. It called itself a “search and retrieval expert” but I’m guessing the translation software couldn’t find the proper words. A few weeks later, it returns to the waystation, sans its trans-grav (rented, I might add). Apparently the people it was hunting took down its transport, but it continued on foot after escaping the wreckage and patching itself up. The scary part was that it was wearing clothes fashioned from Tharge pelts, had its targets’ ears on a necklace (DNA proof, I guess), and had fashioned a spear from a jagged piece of the trans-grav’s hull and an Iron-root. And it was honestly none the worst for wear, just sauntered over to the AENet terminal and collected on its kills.”
Tags: BadAss, Humans, Role Playing Game, RPG, Science Fiction, SciFi
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