Monthly Archives: February 2012

My Warcraft Problem

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When I got my first job working on a MMO four years ago at Flying Lab, I thought I should become more familiar with World of Warcraft because it was the clear market leader. WoW was and continues to be the standard, so I figured it’d help me in my job to be better acquainted with it. So I got the game and the latest expansion and spent the required hours patching and updating. I played for one afternoon and found it intensely boring. Was the game really supposed to suck me in with starting quests like Kill 10 of Monster X? I figured I’d get back to it, however, so I kept paying the monthly fee. My co-workers assured me that if I got deeper into the game and joined a guild, I’d enjoy it a lot more. I just never did though because I was working FLS, running Green Ronin, and trying to have a family and social life and that kept me plenty busy.

A year later my credit card expired and I thought that was a sign. At this point I’d invested a couple of hundred dollars into WoW and had one play session to show for it. I did not update my credit info and figured that was that. Then four or five months later I was looking at a bank statement and noticed I somehow was still being charged. So I e-mailed Blizzard and explained the situation. I told them I had played their game exactly once. I was clear with them that paying for that first year was on me though. I could have cancelled but I didn’t, despite not playing, and that was no one’s fault but my own. However, I had not given them my revised credit card info and I felt they had no right to keep charging me. In fact, I was at a loss as to how they even did it. The response I got: “It is not Blizzard’s policy to refund money.” I exchanged three of our e-mails with a custserv rep, always remaining polite and trying to be reasonable. I got the same inane response every time: “It is not Blizzard’s policy to refund money.” I called my bank and explain the situation. They said Blizzard must have “pre-approved” my card for six months before it expired and I could fight it but I’d probably lose. So I formally cancelled my account and sent a final e-mail to Blizzard that I asked be kicked up to a manager. I explained my issue again, remaining polite, and said that this whole encounter was making me think less of Blizzard. Did they really need to squeeze that last $60 out of me? Naturally, I received no response and no refund. It’s not their policy, you see. Of course, it’s not my policy to be ripped off.

So now I’m back working in the MMO field at Vigil and just like at FLS, people talk about WoW all the time. It’s a constant reference point, both positive and negative. “We want to do X like WoW, but Y very differently. And oh, this bit is like the Blood Fuck Canyon section of WoW.” It’s gibberish to me, especially when they use the leet acronyms and such. Now on the one hand I’d like to be able to do my job better and I could participate in these conversions more meaningfully if I knew WoW. On the other hand, those weasels bilked me out of money and I’m not keen to reward that behavior by reactivating my account. My righteous indignation is at my war with my dispassionate professionalism. Which side do you think should win?

Originally posted on LiveJournal on November 14, 2010.

The Pramas Fall Tour

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The last two months has been one the most intense periods of travel and activity of my life. This is how it went down.

It started with a weekend trip to Vancouver, BC with Nicole. At this point we knew craziness was about to descend, so we decided to get a weekend to ourselves in and enjoy one of our favorite cities. We returned to Tojo’s, a great Japanese restaurant Nicole first introduced me to in 1995, for the first time in many years. We also took the opportunity to see Machete (awesome), The Girl Who Played with Fire (very good), and The American (meh).

We got back late on a Sunday night. The very next morning I went to the airport to fly back to Canada. This time my destination was Edmonton. I spent a couple of days visiting BioWare’s office and talking about all things Dragon Age. I got to see some of Dragon Age 2, which looks awesome, and had good discussions with the folks there.

The day after I returned from Edmonton, the Green Ronin crew began arriving for our annual summit. This is usually a three day affair at which we make our plans for the following year and discuss the overall state of the company. We extended it one day this year so we could have most of the staff in town for our 10 year anniversary party at Dragon’s Lair in Bellevue. Summit and party both went well, and we had a productive few days and a bit of fun.

Before all the Ronins had even left Seattle, I was on board another plane and heading to Chicago. I was there for a week, primarily to attend Riot Fest. I saw 24 punk bands in 5 days and had a blast. Most awesome for me was finally getting to see Articles of Faith, one of my favorite hardcore bands of all time. I had waited 23 years for the opportunity and they did not disappoint. Since they also played a “secret show,” I got to see them twice. Bonus! Other great moments included the Busted at Oz reunion show (featuring bands like the Subverts, Silver Abuse, and the original lineup of Naked Raygun) and a terrific performance by the Zero Boys.

The punk rock was awesome but that was only part of the Chicago fun. Ken Hite was kind enough to put me up at his house and when I wasn’t at punk shows I was eating my way across Chi-town with Ken and frequent guest Will Hindmarch. Had some great food at Hot Doug’s, Frontera Grill, Xoco, The Publican, Kuma’s Corner, and Dawali Mediterranean Grill. Also got to see a Nazi u-boat, play For the People, and talk a lot of history with Ken. I squeezed a lot into those 7 days.

I got back to Seattle late on October 11. I then had two days to pack because I was moving to Austin! Thankfully, I was not trying to pack up all my shit, just what I thought I’d want to have in Texas in my new apartment. In moves that were very much us, Nicole started by packing up kitchen stuff so I could cook, while I picked what games and miniatures to bring so I could play. By Thursday morning the U-Haul was packed and ready, and we’d even squeezed in a dinner with Rob Schwalb, who was in town visiting his corporate masters. Always great to see Dr. Evil.

We took off on the 14th and we had four days to get to Austin. Nicole had a clever plan to stop in Portland and go to Ikea for the furniture I’d need. Since there’s no sales tax in Oregon, we saved a bunch of dough. The drive was about 2500 miles and Nicole had to do it all since I have no license. She was awesome and did not blanch even at the 15 hour day we had on Saturday. We listened to two audio books on the way (American On Purpose by Craig Ferguson and Eye of the Needle by Ken Follett) and they really helped pass the time. We went east through Oregon into Idaho, then south through Utah, and southeast through Arizona, New Mexico, and finally Texas. We arrived at my new apartment on Sunday night. Phil, Gina, and Andrew helped us with the move in, for which we were very grateful. Then at 9 am the next day I started my new job at Vigil on the 40K MMO.

I’ll talk about Vigil and settling into Austin later. For now suffice to say that I had a couple of weeks to acclimatize to both new city and new job and things are going well. Nicole flew back to Seattle after the first couple of days. It was weird to live alone all of a sudden but I had something to look forward to: NeonCon. This convention in Las Vegas happened to fall just a couple of days before Nicole’s birthday. We decided to meet there to celebrate. This gave us a chance to see a bunch of our friends and enjoy Vegas for a couple of days. It was a brief reunion but we made the most of it. I won’t see Nicole or Miss Kate now until Christmas (boo!).

You’d think that would be quite enough travel for the time being but I have one more trip this year. On Thanksgiving Day I’m flying to London. I’m going to be a guest at Dragonmeet, a one day game convention held on November 27. I last attended Dragonmeet in 2002 and it was a great time. I’m looking forward to going again, seeing many of my UK friends, and squeezing in as much London fun as I can manage. After that the whirlwind really will subside. The return to a day job means accruing vacation days and such, so such travel won’t be as easy. I also won’t be as broke, so it’s a trade-off. I guess I really need a day job that’ll pay me well and allow me to travel a lot, but for now the grim darkness of the far future will have to do.

Originally published on LiveJournal on November 10, 2010. 

Vancouver Weekend

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This Thursday is Nicole and I’s 9 year wedding anniversary. Since I’m going to be up visiting BioWare Monday to Wednesday and on Thursday the guys are arriving for the Green Ronin Summit, we decided we had best celebrate over the weekend. So Friday we drove up to Vancouver, dropped Kate off with her dad, and checked into the Hyatt downtown. Our plan was simple: spent time together alone. Our apologies to our Vancouver friends, but we just wanted to relax and be together. We did not bring computers and tried not to worry about work, money, or my impending move to Austin.

We’re back now and I have to say mission accomplished. We decided we didn’t want to run around a lot, so the basic plan was to eat well, see movies, and lounge around in between. We saw three movies: Machete, The Girl Who Played with Fire, and The American. That’s the order we saw them in and also how’d I’d rank them for enjoyment. Machete was a blast. It delivered exactly what was promised in that original trailer and then some. Over the top, funny, and politically appropriate for this year. The Girl Who Played With Fire was also good. Both of the leads do an excellent job and the story continues to be engaging. The American I was lukewarm on. It was slow paced, didn’t have a lot of dialog, and didn’t do much to make me give a shit about George Clooney’s character. And the ending was pretty much exactly what you’d suspect.

For food we went to a mix of old favorites and new places. Friday night we just sort of stumbled on to a Greek place, Kalypso. While it was no Panos Kleftiko (our favorite Greek place in Seattle), it was decent and their calamari was excellent. Saturday we went to this placed called The Edge. We had picked it because its menu boasted things like poutine with ox tail gravy. On arrival we discovered that they were only serving food from their brunch menu, so no poutine. On the upside, the eggs benedict with sockeye salmon was delicious. Saturday night we went to Tojo’s, a great Japanese restaurant we’ve been patronizing since the 90s. We were saddened to discovered one of favorite dishes (Tojo’s baked oysters) was taken off the menu during the Olympics and has not been reinstated. We love that dish so much we had planned to order one for each of us and lick the shells clean. The food we did have was excellent apart from the snapper (which was a little tough and not nearly as buttery as the sablefish they typically serve). Sunday we went for dim sum at the restaurant formerly known as Bo Kong. It’s called the Whole Vegetarian Restaurant now, but the menu is exactly the same and just as good. We got many old favorites like fried bean curds in black bean sauce and turnip cakes, but also tried some new stuff like vegetable cutlets with orange sauce. That latter tasted uncannily like fried chicken and we devoured it.

Saturday we also spent a couple of hours browsing at Chapters. I always like seeing what Canadian bookstores have that you wouldn’t find down here. I ended up getting Juno: Canadians at D-Day, June 6, 1944 by Ted Barris. I noticed that there was a cookbook for Vij’s, a terrific Indian restaurant in Vancouver that we did not get to on this trip, and that came home with Nicole. I’m looking forward to tasting some of those recipes.

I’m glad we had a chance to get away, even for a couple of days. Cheers to 9 great years with my awesome wife. I’m going to miss Nicole and Kate hard when I’m in Austin without them.

And now that I’m back from Canada…I’m leaving for Canada in the morning. This time to Edmonton for business. I have unpacked and repacked and I’m ready to go. Maybe I can get some poutine up there…

Originally published on LiveJournal on September 27, 2010. 

In the Grim Darkness of the Far Future There is Only Pramas

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As most of you know I spent three years working at Flying Lab Software on the Pirates of the Burning Sea MMO as a writer and then creative director. That ended last October and since then I’ve been concentrating on Green Ronin. It was nice to get a breather after working two jobs for all that time. The factors that led me to take the FLS job reasserted themselves after a few months though and earlier this year I started looking for another day job in the computer game industry. After much searching and many interviews, I have found the sort of position I was looking for at a good company. As an added bonus, it’s on a property I know and love.

Yesterday I accepted a position at Vigil Games, which is part of the THQ family. I’ll be a senior designer on the Warhammer 40K MMO, Dark Millennium Online. This is a narrative design gig, so I’ll be writing dialog, mission text, background material, faction info, and so on. In other words: the stuff I’m best at.

The wrinkle is that Vigil is in Austin and I’ve been in Seattle since 1997. Certainly I never imagined living in Texas. I hate hot weather for one thing. At least it’s Austin though, which is sort of like the West Berlin of Texas. Now my step-daughter Kate has just started high school and after all her years at that stupid hippie school she’s finally at a school that she seems to like and I don’t want to rip her away without notice. Nicole and I also own a house here, so it’s not easy to just pull up stakes on move on. So the plan is that I’m going to go to Austin, get an apartment, and work the job. Nicole and Kate will stay here at least until Kate finishes her first year of high school. Next summer we’ll assess where we are at and look at a full relocation. Not seeing my family regularly is a downside for sure, but I’m willing to do it if it means relieving the financial pressure on us.

So what does this mean for Green Ronin? Not a whole lot. I will continue to run the company on nights and weekends, which is the way it was for three years when I was at FLS. I will continue working on Dragon Age, though that’s likely going to be the only design work I’m going to take on in the near future. Thankfully, we have Jeff Tidball onboard as Dragon Age developer and he’ll be pushing the line forward. Set 2 is almost done, so this is actually fairly good timing for me.

The next few weeks are going to be crazy leading up to an initial move mid-October. I’m heading up to Edmonton next week to meet with BioWare, returning in time for the Green Ronin summit and 10 year anniversary party. Then I’m going to Chicago for a week for Riot Fest, a five day punk rock festival that I’m so looking forward to. I’ll finally get my chance to see Articles of Faith, one of my all time favorite bands, as well as groups like Negative Approach, The Effigies, and Naked Raygun. I’m staying with Ken Hite (thanks, Ken!), which means there will also be war gaming and good eating. I hadn’t planned it this way, but the Chicago trip is going to be a last hurrah before the biggest change in my life since I moved to Seattle all those years ago. I plan to have a hell of a time.

Originally published on LiveJournal on September 23, 2010. 

The Hows and Whys of the Green Ronin Pre-Order Plus Program

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Earlier this year Green Ronin experimented with some pre-order bundle deals in which you got the PDF of the title for free if you pre-ordered the book. Starting with DC Adventures, we’ve modified that so you can get the PDF for only $5 when you pre-order the book. While this is still a savings of $10 to $15, we’ve had several people ask about the change. This post will explain how and why we settled on the new standard. I will warn you that it’s long and involves a lot of business talk. If that doesn’t interest you, you’ll probably want to skip this post.

So let’s start many years ago when Green Ronin first started to sell PDF versions of our products. We treated the PDF and the book as entirely separate products. If you wanted both, you paid full price for both. We viewed this like a novel and its audio version. Same book, yes, but different formats. No one argues that you should get a free audio book with the purchase of the physical book.

That was the state of affairs for years. It wasn’t until the Dragon Age pre-order that we tried using the freebie PDF as a premium. That worked really well, but it was not without consequences. We were concerned that in the long term our PDFs would be devalued, that they would be seen as giveaways and not something with intrinsic worth. We also got complaints from retailers about the deal. They said that such a deal was unfair to them because they could not match it. It encouraged direct orders and dissuaded gamers from supporting their local stores.

Now I love a good game store and Green Ronin has always tried to treat our retail partners with respect and fairness. Some of them thought we should simply extend the freebie PDF offer to them but that wouldn’t have been great for us. As I explained, our original standard was that PDFs and books were separate products. We had a fair number of customers that would buy them both, so when we did the freebie offer we were knowingly losing some revenue in order to encourage sales of the print version. We felt OK eating that to get the full MSRP on the book. However, we do not get full MSRP when a retailer sells one of our books. We get 40% of the cover price at best. So I posed the question to some of my retailer friends. “We are giving up revenue from some PDF sales when we make this offer. What are you willing to give up to get the same deal?” Their honest answer was nothing. Retailers are just as strapped as everyone else so they weren’t willing to make sacrifices on their end, particularly in a category (RPGs) that is shrinking in many stores. I realized at a certain point this was a nut I was going to have to crack myself.

A secondary problem to the revenue was delivery of a PDF to a customer who ordered something in a retail store. The folks at Evil Hat just give PDFs to retailers via Dropbox and let them hand the files out in any convenient way. With the licenses we have, that simply wasn’t an option. We needed a method that could be tracked and reported.

So ultimately what I needed was a deal that was still attractive to customers that could also be offered to retailers without causing us to lose revenue and whose sales I could track precisely. Trying to meet all these criteria is how the current deal took shape. Evan Sass, Green Ronin’s hard workin’ webmaster, solved the technology end of the problem. He told me he could generate one use codes for our webstore that would provide a discount on a PDF. Since all this traffic would then flow through the webstore, it could be tracked for reports.

Now it was also important the retailers have access to the same deal that we offered. If we gave away free PDFs but they had to charge $5 for theirs, that wouldn’t be real attractive to them. We decided that $5 was a fair price for customers to pay for the PDF when pre-ordering a book. The products we are talking about typically have a PDF price of $13.50 to $20, so getting one for $5 is still a deal. That $5 we get for the PDF makes it financially sensible for us to offer the pre-order deal through retail stores. So retailers can match the deal we have in our webstore and customers can choose to order through us or support their local stores. The ideal outcome is happy customers, happy retailers, and happy Green Ronin.

With the ideas hammered out, I decided to create a formal program, which we call GR Pre-Order Plus. In its final form, it works like this. When we have a final PDF of a book or boxed set that’s ready for sale, Evan generates webstore discount codes and sends them to Bill Bodden, our sales guy. Hal Mangold or Marc Schmalz creates a flier about the deal that retailers can print out and put up in their stores. Evan puts that in the Retailer Support section of our website, so it can be downloaded. Bill then sends out an e-mail to the retailers in the program, telling them about the new title and pointing them towards the flier. He then sends 10 unique codes to interested retailers (and they can get more if they need them). While that’s going on, Marc preps the final PDF files and then Evan uploads them to our website. Everything is now ready.

On release day Evan posts an announcement on greenronin.com and any of our other sites that make senses (mutantsandmasterminds.com for M&M books, for example). This message relays the basic deal: pre-order the new product and get the PDF of same for $5. We point out you can get that deal from us or participating retailers. On their end retailers make the offer in their stores and hopefully use the fliers we have created. When they take an order, they give the purchaser one of the codes we provided. The buyer can then take that home and use the code to buy the PDF for $5 in our online store.

You will note that for a simple deal it actually requires a fair bit of work and coordination to pull off. We are willing to do that because we believe retail stores are a valuable part of the gaming ecosystem and we want to support them and their gaming communities. At the same time we want to assure a reasonable return on all the hard work we’ve put into our games. I believe this program is a fair one that still offers a good deal to gamers at the end of the day.

If your local store is not participating, point them here for more info:http://greenronin.com/retailer/2010/07/green_ronin_pre-order_program_.php

We currently have two items up for pre-order, Blood in Ferelden for the Dragon Age RPG and the Freeport Companion: Pathfinder Roleplaying Game Edition. They will be joined shortly by Aces & Jokers, the final book in the M&M 2nd Edition line. You can find out more at http://www.greenronin.com.

Originally published on LiveJournal on August 24, 2010.

Fuck Wil Wheaton, I Want to Game!

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It was 1987 and I was a freshman at New York University. I’m not sure why, but I thought at the time that I might not do much gaming at college. As it happened, however, I stumbled across a game group playing in the lounge of my dorm when returning from a punk rock show at CBGB. I talked to a guy named Sandeep and he invited me to the game the following week. That’s how I joined the Society for Strategic Gaming at NYU (funny name, as we did way more roleplaying than strategic gaming, but there you go).

We played on Sunday nights. We’d have dinner and then rally up around 7 for roleplaying. This was AD&D at first, then other games like Runequest, MERP, Twilight 2000, TORG, WEG’s Star Wars, and especially WFRP. We’d usually end the session between midnight and 1 am and then a group of us would inevitably head off to the Washington Square Restaurant (a nearby 24 hour diner) for food, coffee, and conversation. The hardcore would then return to the dorm at 3 am and play a boardgame. We had nights when we’d start a game of Talisman at that time, finish at 8 in the morning, and then go get breakfast in the cafeteria. Ah, college. Sometimes we even found time to go to class.

This was all just starting in September though and I was getting to know the group. John Footen was trying to run up to a dozen people through the original Dragonlance modules and it was no great surprise that it was bogging down. Nonetheless, it was great to get to game and to make some new friends who shared my geeky interests (and indeed many of these folks are my good friends to this day).

One Sunday we were eating dinner and Chris Keefe (who later did art for Green Ronin) informed me that we’d be starting the game hours late that night. When I asked why, he said, “Star Trek: The Next Generation debuts tonight.” I was not impressed. Surely we could watch it later. Chris said no, the plan was to watch it in the lounge with a big group of people. He added, “Come on, Wil Wheaton is in it, and he was great in Stand By Me.”

“Fuck Wil Wheaton,” I said. “I want to game!”

I lost the argument. We watched Encounter at Farpoint and didn’t start gaming until something like 10 pm. While I would later come to like the show, my response at the time was, “I can’t believe we delayed gaming to watch that bullshit.”

Life, of course, is weird, and I could never have predicted that 20 years after I said, “Fuck Wil Wheaton,” we’d become friends. I think it was at a PAX that we first met, courtesy of our mutual friend Andrew Hackard. As I’m sure you all know, Wil is also a gamer and nerd. Turns out we also like many of the same bands and we are both step-dads, so we had a lot in common. Subsequently, Nicole and I would try to meet up with Wil for a meal when he came to Seattle. We’d talk about trying to game together but it was always hard to coordinate with his travel schedule.

A couple of months ago Wil told me he was going to be at GenCon. Knowing he had enjoyed my Dragon Age RPG, I asked him if he’d like me to run a game at the show. His response was something like, “OMG, YES!” And amazingly, despite the craziness of GenCon, the game actually went off. The group was on the big side but we made it work and the game was really fun. Nicole invented a new maneuver, the Axe Tackle, and that’s been a running gag amongst the players since the game, no doubt to the confusion of many a Twitter user.

Now the Penny Arcade Expo is coming up. Wil, of course, will be here to deliver the blessings of the Omnigeek to his people. Many of the other players from the GenCon session will also be at PAX so naturally the idea of playing more Dragon Age came up. To which I can only respond:

“Fuck yeah, Wil Wheaton, let’s game!”

Originally published on LiveJournal on August 23, 2010. 

GenCon Swag

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It’s just not a GenCon if I don’t bring home some new games and such. Sadly, I did not have a whole lot of time to walk the exhibit hall this show. I got in maybe two hours of browsing time across four days. I paid cash money for two games (the minis games AE Bounty and War Rocket). The rest I either traded for or was given by friends. It is good to have friends. Here’s the run down:

AE Bounty: This is a scifi skirmish miniatures game from Darkson Designs. Basically, designer Matt Hope took his system from AE World War II and ported it over to scifi. You have your choice of three types of crew: bounty hunters, mercenaries, and pirates. All are quite customizable, so though the game is designed for Darkson’s minis you can easily use other scifi figs you already own. If you liked Necromunda, you should check this out. It’s a little spendy at $25 for a 98 page digest sized book, but it is color throughout and print on demand color is not cheap. The rules are also more complete than 98 pages might suggest.

Battles of Westeros: This is the first new BattleLore board game that FFG has published since acquiring the line from Days of Wonder. I love BattleLore and I love A Song of Ice and Fire, so this should be a win win. I have not had a chance to play it yet, but a read of rules showed that is more complicated than the original BattleLore game. I will give it a spin and see if that’s for good or ill. Components are of course quite nice.

Duel of the Giants: Paul from Z-man hooked me up with this board game before the exhibit hall even opened. It’s another World War II game from the team that did the groovy Duel in the Dark a couple of years back. This has some similarities to Memoir ’44, but concentrates on Eastern Front tank battles in 1943. Nice components that include 11 plastic tanks (Tigers and T-34s, and their turrets even rotate). It’s like Paul somehow divined that I might enjoy a WWII game. What gave it away?

Fantasy Craft RPG: This is the fantasy port of Spycraft from the fine fellows at Crafty Games. Basically, they have taken the core d20 rules, broken them down into component parts, and reassembled them into a highly customizable system for fantasy roleplaying. The results are quite crunchy, as you’d expect, but everything seems sensible and flexible. If you liked the guts of D&D3 but felt Pathfinder didn’t change enough for your tastes, Fantasy Craft may be what you are looking for.

Icons RPG: Green Ronin stalwart Steve Kenson, who designed Mutants & Masterminds and DC Adventures, decided he had to design a completely different supers game. He was nice enough to hook me up with a copy of the print version from Adamant/Cubicle 7. I haven’t had a chance to dig into it yet, but as I understand it’s a supers riff on FATE. I like Steve’s designs and I like FATE, so I look forward to reading it.

Legend of the Five Rings, Fourth Edition RPG: I remember playing first edition back in my WotC days, so I’m curious to see how it looks ten years later. Physically, it is a beautiful book. The page design drips with Japanese flavor and the art is excellent (you go, pinto). I was also glad to see the book devotes some pages to different ways to play the game (something the first edition sorely needed).

Realms of Cthulhu: This is a Savage Worlds RPG sourcebook from Reality Blurs. I believe I have Sean Preston to thank for it, as I discovered a book with my name on it while packing up our booth at the end of the show. Thanks, Sean. Haven’t done more than flip through it, but I’d presume this is meant for a more pulp style Cthulhu game. That seems best suited for the Savage Worlds rules anyway.

Shattered Empires RPG: Veterans of the d20 era may remember the world of Arcanis from Paradigm Concepts. Those rules were never the best fit for the setting, so Paradigm has taken advantage of the post-d20 environment to launch their own rule set customized for Arcanis. Although labeled as a “Quicklauch,” Shattered Empires is a full RPG and over 200 pages at that. It is perhaps better to think of it as Book 1. Again, haven’t really had a chance to dig into it, but it looks interesting. Thanks to Henry for the hook up.

The Ultimate Unofficial Fan Collector’s Guide to D&D: I believe there are three of these books out now and I got volumes 1 (OD&D and Basic D&D) and 3 (AD&D 1st Edition). Each one breaks out the products from the era, providing a cover shot and fairly comprehensive description (page count, levels covered, authors, etc.). They also include some non-TSR stuff (like Wee Warriors, Metro Detroit Gamers, etc) and checklists at the back. Gamers Rule, the publisher, could use a little help in the graphic design department but overall these appear well-researched and quite handy for those interested in all the nooks and crannies of D&D’s history.

War Rocket: This is a new minis game from a fairly new company, Hydra Miniatures. I know nothing about them but was immediately sold on the concept. War Rocket is advertised as “Space Combat in the Atomic Age.” 1950s-style rockets in a fast paced minis game? I’m there. The rules look easy to pick up. There is not a lot of Starfleet Battles type damage tracking. A rocket is either OK, stunned, or destroyed—that’s it. There are four fleets to choose from and what makes it interesting is that each has rockets with a different mode of movement: flying, thruster, pulse, or saucer. This gives each a different flavor and means they fight differently as well. The graphic presentation of each ship’s stats is quite clever and let’s you see in an instant what your ship can do. I didn’t get any of the minis that go with War Rocket, but I may if I can convince a friend to do the same. This really looks like fun.

So what did I miss? Well, this may be the first GenCon I didn’t bring home any miniatures, though to be fair I wasn’t looking for a whole lot either. I had my eye out for a box of Immortal’s plastic Greek hoplites, but I didn’t find them anywhere. I meant to pick up Red Sands, the new Savage Worlds Space: 1889 book, but didn’t get around to trading with Shane. Always liked the setting but the original rules left a lot to be desired. I would have picked up Blitzkrieg, the first early war book for Flames of War, but it wasn’t out yet. I will be patient until its September release, since I have plenty to keep me busy in the meantime.

Originally published on LiveJournal on August 15, 2010.

Another GenCon Down

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It’s the Monday morning after my 21st GenCon and I’m sitting in the lobby of the hotel grabbing some free wifi. Nicole is crashed out upstairs. She went to the Dead Dog party after our traditional Green Ronin dinner and then it seems to Steak & Shake in the middle of the night. I don’t expect her to get up for a bit so I thought I’d scribble down some thoughts about the show.

The big news for GR was, of course, the launch of our DC Adventures RPG. Fans didn’t have long to wait after our initial announcement in May, but Thursday was a day we’d long anticipated. It took three years from the beginning of our negotiation to the release of the game, and that doesn’t include the proposals and such we did back during the Black Industries era when it seemed we might do a DC game for them. The response was fantastic. Gamers rushed in when the hall opened and we had a line that wrapped around our booth. We brought 300 copies and had sold so many by Friday that we had the warehouse ship in more on Saturday. By Sunday they were all gone. Dragon Age too did really well. I thought I had brought enough for the whole show but we sold out on Friday. Brought more in Saturday and sold those out on Sunday too.

And gaming? Yes, I actually got to do some. On Thursday night I ran a Dragon Age game for Wil Wheaton, Jeff Tidball, Will Hindmarch, Andrew Hackard, Evan Sass, Nicole Lindroos, and my step-daughter Kate. I wrote a new adventure before the show and everyone seemed to have a fun time. The characters were 5th level and Grey Warden recruits. After completing the adventure and acquiring some darkspawn blood, they went through the joining and ended the session as full Grey Wardens. None of them died in the joining either.

Kate was a riot. She had been nervous about the idea of playing before the show. I told her that she’d either be playing or watching, so she might as well play and have fun with us. Then she was the one who found the missing Grey Warden early in the adventure, and she who solved the riddle later in the adventure. On the way back to our hotel afterwards, she asked if I could run Dragon Age for her nerd posse back home. She is a next gen gamer for sure!

Saturday night I played in a Pathfinder game with Rob Schwalb, Steve Kenson, Evan Sass, Marc Schmalz, and Crazy Todd Miller. My old friend Bill Simoni ran the game and it was a good time. Bill was the guy who kept me playing AD&D in college when I was otherwise exploring the further reaches of RPGs. We don’t get to game too often anymore so we try to get together when we can and GenCon is a prime opportunity. Crazy Todd is also a member of my college game group, so it was like old times except with the addition of the unique roleplaying styling of Rob “Dr. Evil” Schwalb. I think we’ll all remember Rob’s hilarious quest for a “shady seamstress” early in the game.

Bill wrote a cool adventure involving a murdered mage who wasn’t really murdered at all. He outdid himself on presentation too, with beautifully painted minis and 3D terrain and props. I played a sorcerer and wreaked some major havoc. It’s been ages since I played a d20 game, so I had to dust off my knowledge base. As I said at the time, it’s been a long time since my square has been threatened. Considering he’s been working on 4E for the past three years, Schwalb’s recall of 3.5 era rules was impressive.

The only real downside to GenCon was my increasing exhaustion as the show went on. I did not sleep for more than 4 hours any night until Sunday (when I got a glorious 6 until coughing with con crud woke me). Saturday after Bill’s game, I feel asleep for 2 hours and then awoke. After staring at the ceiling for awhile, I grabbed my laptop bag and went to the lobby at 5 am. Pretty ridiculous and it’s no surprise that I’m feeling like crap now. Hopefully, the flights home won’t be too bad later today.

Overall though, pretty great GenCon. I had the chance to catch up with many good friends, do some profitable business, find new opportunities, and even play some games. I do regret I didn’t get more time to walk the exhibit floor, but the Green Ronin booth and various meetings kept me ridiculously busy. I did manage to buy and trade for a few things and I may blog about that later. Right now I need to see about getting some fried chicken and waffles before I leave town!

Originally posted on LiveJournal on August 9, 2010. 

Green Ronin: The Early Years

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It was a decade ago this month that Green Ronin released its first product at the Origins Game Fair in Columbus, Ohio. I remember getting that first box of games and cutting it open on the convention floor. I could have no idea that the company would still be going 10 years and well over 100 products later.

In the beginning it was just Nicole and I. I was working at Wizards of the Coast in the company’s first attempt to do miniatures games. I had previously worked in Roleplaying R&D, mostly on Dungeons & Dragons, but moved over to the new minis division because it seemed a good opportunity to get in on the ground floor of what could be a major new part of the company. By early 2000 I had been working on the game that ultimately came to be known as Chainmail for a while, and I found I missed doing RPG work. It would also be fair to say that I was frustrated with my job and WotC’s corporate backstabbing environment.

In February of 2000 I decided to go ahead and start my own company on the side to do roleplaying games. The goals were modest. We’d try doing two books and see how it went. Having previously been part of a small press RPG operation (the original Ronin Publishing), I was under no illusions.

Our first release was Ork!: The Roleplaying Game. Back in college my friend Crazy Todd had run this fun and totally zany campaign in which we all played Orks. It was in theory an AD&D game but really the rules amounted to Todd saying, “Roll some dice,” at appropriate moments. I suggested to Todd that Ork could be a fun beer and pretzels RPG and that I’d design a set of rules if he wrote up what was dubbed “The World of Orkness.” We aimed for a short, punchy game and succeeded in bringing it home in 64 pages of wackiness.

At the same time the Open Game License was under development at WotC and with it the idea of D&D3 as the “d20 System.” I remember sitting in a meeting with most of R&D about the OGL and d20. Many folks were dubious about the whole endeavor. One argument made at the time was that third party companies could do products that WotC itself had trouble doing profitably. In other words, adventures. And I thought, “I bet I could turn a profit selling an adventure when D&D3 hits the shelves.”

That thought led to Death in Freeport, our second product. It debuted at GenCon on the same day as the third edition D&D Player’s Handbook. Atlas Games also had a short adventure out that day by John Tynes. If you wanted to play some third edition D&D on August 10, 2000, there were exactly three books you could buy. That’s how I justified doing a print run that was, by any normal standard, insane. A gamble certainly but one that did actually pay off. Death in Freeport was a hit, we sold gobs of it, and soon the d20 market exploded.

If I was rash, I wold have quit WotC right then and gone full on with Green Ronin. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I had. I tried to be sensible, however, and still believed that we could make a traditional miniatures business work at a company that simply didn’t understand it. So I stayed on after the Hasbro buyout, but ultimately was laid off in 2002. By that point Green Ronin was thriving and I just stepped into doing the company full time. Hal Mangold, who had helped us out with cover design early on, came on as well and the core of the company was set.

Since then we’ve had highs and lows, successes and disasters, great times and dire times. I never thought we’d last as long as we did, but now that we’ve hit that 10 year mark, I can look back at what we’ve achieved and feel proud. Next week at GenCon we’re launching the DC Adventures RPG and starting another new chapter of our history. How many more will there be? Hell if I know, but as I said back in 2000, “Let’s put out good games and see what happens.”

Originally published on LiveJournal on July 30, 2010. 

Prague, You Will Be Mine!

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In 1990 I spent a couple of months of the summer traveling Europe with my girlfriend Stacey and our friend Kathy. We started in Scotland, moved down to England, and then over to the Continent, where it was youth hostels and Eurail all over. We visited many countries and had a great time. One place we didn’t get to, however, was Prague. It was on my list for sure, but when we got the Eurail passes in NYC, we were told they were no good in Czechoslovakia. Since our budget was already quite tight ($20 a day for hostel, food, and fun), we decided to save the expense of an extra train ticket and skip Prague.

Towards the end of the trip, we were in Munich and went to visit Dachau. Perhaps the most bizarre incident of the whole trip occurred when I ran into my friend Cecil (Castellucci, author of the awesome The Plain Janes graphic novels; you should buy her new book Rose Sees Red next month) in the middle of Dachau. The Nazi death camp. We had met at NYU but she had left (for Montreal IIRC) the year before and I hadn’t seen her since. To run into each other there of all places was pretty weird. She and her friend had just come from Prague and they said they had gone there on Eurail passes. So we had been lied to in NYC and now it was too late to work Prague into our schedule. Lame.

In 1994 I was back in Europe for another two month trip, this time as a roadie for a French punk band called Scraps. That’s a long story for another day, but the pertinent bit is that we were scheduled to do a gig in Prague. I had been robbed in 1990 and here at last was a chance to make good. After various misadventures in France, Basque country, Spain, and Italy, we moved into Germany to do the biggest shows of the tour, many of them with a shitty straight edge band from California.

We were driving down the autobahn one day when I smelled something funny. Well, funnier than a van with 8-10 punks in it at any rate. Suddenly the driver swerved to the side of the road and yelled that we should all bail out. The reason was obvious when I jumped out: the engine was on fire! I and several others moved to the back of the van and started tossing out our bags and the equipment. Meanwhile, others tried to get the fire out. The bass player succeeded when he dumped soy milk on the blaze. The good news was that the van had not blown up or burned out. The bad news was that we were stranded in an East German town know for its Nazi skinheads. Awesome.

We got the van to a shop and they said it was going to take several days to fix. In the meantime, we had to rent a couple of cars and continue on to Berlin, where we had our next gig. We were supposed to go to Prague after that but guess what? The cars we rented could not be taken across the border. Apparently too many people were renting cars, driving to Eastern Europe to sell them, and then reporting them stolen. Once again I was denied a chance to see Prague. To make matters worse, when we next played with the band from Callie they said the Prague show was great and they had had an awesome time there.

I thought of all this tonight because I was watching the Prague episode of No Reservations. Seeing Bourdain gallivanting around the city and eating an endless array of pork and sausage made me think about how I still hadn’t gotten there in all these years. The game business has taken me back to Germany and England, and even to Finland, but not to goddamn Prague. Someday I will cross that city off my list.

Originally published on LiveJournal on July 6, 2010.