Hitsville US

A few quick notes before I get back to packing.

1. The most exciting news is that the game I spent the last year plus working on, the Dragon Age RPG, is out in stores this week. It's a classic style boxed set and it looks like it's going to do really well for us. Look for it in a game store near you.

I must also tip my hat to our partners at BioWare, whose Dragon Age: Origins computer game has sold over 3.2 million copies to date. There's a company that knows how to launch a property and make a great game.

2. I will be at Dundracon in San Ramon, CA this weekend. We won't have a booth (Endgame, one of my favorite game stores in the world, will be selling our stuff there), but I'll be around doing some seminars and playing games. I believe I'll be on the panel at the following seminars: Alternate Histories for Gaming, What's Cool, and Where Is the Hobby Going. I may also be on one in which old timers reminisce about coloring our dice with crayons and the like, but I'm not sure if I'm old enough to qualify at 40. Maybe Ken St. Andre will call me a whippersnapper.

3. I had thought I might head home to the Boston area for PAX East. After I left Flying Lab, I had to reconsider in light of new financial realities. Now it turns out that Wil Wheaton is doing the keynote, so I wish I had kept to my original plan. I still hope Wil has a wicked pissah time.

4. The forecast says chilly with a high chance of feijoada, churrasco, caipirinha.

5. Winter is almost over. And yet, it's still coming.

6. A note for readers of chrispramas.com. I was recently informed by Blogger that they are disabling the ftp option for blog updates, which is what I use. It is unclear if I can continue using Blogger with this URL, and I'm not keen on having one of theirs. I mirror this blog on Livejournal and Facebook though. If this site seems moribund to you, look over at http://freeport-pirate.livejournal.com or find me on Facebook. If that's not enough, I'm also on Twitter as @Pramas.

Randomness in Dragon Age

Last week Dragon Age, the game I've been working on for the last year, had its electronic debut. It's at print now (just got the printer proofs today, in fact) and will be in stores in January but you can buy the PDF version right now. This has naturally led to a lot of commentary on the usual gaming message boards.

So my biggest goal for this first Dragon Age release was to create an intro product like the industry hasn't seen since D&D's famed red box from the 80s. I was thus quite careful about what went into Set 1 and what didn't. I wanted this to be as attractive as possible to people who had never roleplayed. Thus it looks like a game (it comes in a box), it comes with the dice you need, and it includes two modest, 64 page books. I was simply not going to put a 300 page hardback in front of newbs and hope they'd read it. Nor did I want to create an intro product that was disposable. I didn't want to say, "Spend $30 on this and then you can spend $100 on the real game." So Set 1 is Dragon Age. It's the core of the game we'll be building on and it's designed to be approachable and easy to learn.

Some long time gamers have expressed surprise at seeing that there are a couple of random elements in the character creation process. Surely we've moved past such antiquity methods, they argue. The randomness largely shows up in two places: generating your abilities and gaining some background benefits. The latter is trivial so I'm going to concentrate my comments on abilities. So why is that I decided to go with a random method for generating abilities? Four reasons.

First, I wanted to make this process easy for new players. Generating abilities is the second step of the process. If you are a newb making your first character, your understanding of the game is shaky at best. I didn't want to ask them to assign stats at this stage. It is much faster and much easier to have them roll some dice.

Second, getting those dice out early in the process serves to engage people. You are making a character and rolling dice makes it feel like you are really doing something. Rolling 3d6 and adding the results together is the key mechanism of the game. This method begins drilling the importance of the 3d6 roll right at the start.

Third, when BioWare approached us about doing a pen & paper RPG for Dragon Age, one of their goals was to play up the old school nature of the Dragon Age property. It's no secret that the roots of Dragon Age: Origins lay in the earliest days of tabletop roleplaying. While I was not looking to design a retro clone, I did want Dragon Age to have a certain old school feel. To me rolling for abilities strikes the right chord. This is why many people still refer to "rolling up" new characters, even when playing systems that don't use random stat generation.

Fourth, rolling random abilities can actually lead to interesting characters in a way that other methods do not. You may not have planned for your warrior to be particularly smart, but if you roll a high Cunning, it may suggest a different and fun way to play the character.

Now all of that is fair enough, some folks say, but why not include an optional rule for non-random ability generation? Here's why. Early on I decided that I did not want Set 1 to include a bunch of optional rules. Every optional rule is another choice that has to be made, and again I did not feel this was friendly to the new players. I'm comfortable putting optional rules in follow-up products because anyone who buys them will have enough experience with the system to make more informed decisions.

Set 2 will include a non-random option, but to prove I'm not a big meanie who is going to make you have badwrongfun, here's a simple method you can use in the interim. Your abilities start at 0 and you get 10 points to buy them up. No ability can be greater than 3. Why not 4, you may ask, when the random table goes to 4? Well, on the table it's a rare result. You have a less than 1% chance to rolling an 18 on 3d6. If you could simply buy a 4, that would become the standard not the exception.

I hope that answers everyone's questions. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got proofs to get back to.

The GR Summit

We had our annual Green Ronin Summit this past weekend. Hal, Steve, Jon, and Bill all flew into Seattle and met up Nicole, Evan, Sparky, and I for several days of meeting, planning, eating, and even a little bit of gaming. We did a debrief on the last year, talking about what went well and not so well. Then we reviewed our various lines, brainstormed new ideas, and banged out a schedule through the end of 2010. After we adjourned the summit proper, some of us recorded new material for the Green Ronin podcast. All in all it was a productive and enjoyable weekend and it's always nice tohang out with the other ronins away from a convention environment.

I have sometimes pondered handling this stuff via e-mail like we do most of our business, but it's really worth getting everyone in the same room at least once a year. There's a spontaneity you don't get in e-mail and sometimes it's the little asides that you wouldn't type that send the conversation off in a direction that proves fruitful. This year we had a particularly large knot to untangle and the solution we came up with was not something I had considered beforehand. It was the back and forth discussion during the brainstorming that led us to something I think will be really cool. That's the sort of result that makes the summit so worthwhile.

Secrets Revealed

As you likely have read already, we announced our mystery license today and it is Dragon Age: Origins, BioWare's upcoming fantasy CRPG. I will be talking more about the game over the coming months, but I thought I'd start by going through the clues I sent out over the past week via Twitter and Facebook. They certainly led to some lively discussion, but here's what I had in mind when I came up with them.

"Next week we herald the beginning of a new age."
The new age is the Dragon Age, of course. I even thought about adding a second sentence to this with the word dragon in it, but I didn't want to give the game away on the first clue. "New Age" is also a song by punk legends D.O.A. and both the band and BioWare are Canadian but that's just a coincidence.

"Something old, something new, something needed, something overdue."
Here I was getting at the nature of the game and what I'm trying to do with it. The pen & paper game shares some structure with the computer game, but uses its own system. "Something old" refers to the class and level nature of the game, which go back to the dawn of RPGs. "Something new" is the system I buit using it and other structural elements of the computer game. 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.

"You'll find great adventure beyond the gate."
Here I was referring to BioWare's Baldur's Gate, one of the best CRPGs of all time. Dragon Age: Origins is the "spiritual successor" of Baldur's Gate, with all that implies. It is the next step, a journey beyond the gate.

"If you want to be a knight, you better be prepared to earn it."
You get two clues for the price of one here. First, knights in the realm of Ferelden (where Dragon Age: Origins takes place) can win the title through their deeds. In the tabletop game you will not start as a knight, but you can strive to become one. Second, this is an oblique reference to Knights of the Old Republic, another classic BioWare game for meatbags like you.

"No time for a day or rest when the world is imperiled."
Another reference to the Dragon Age setting. There are those who do not believe that the threat to Ferelden is so serious, and they of course are gravely mistaken. I posted this on a Sunday, and meant to type "day of rest." I realized later I had actually typed "day or rest" but I let it stand that way. Figured it couldn't hurt to be more mysterious!

"Few believe the threat is real. Will there be mass hysteria when the truth can no longer be denied?"
This is similar to the previous clue, but allowed me to use the phrase "mass hysteria." The pertinent reference is Mass Effect, yet another awesome BioWare game. "Mass Hysteria" is also a classic old punk rock song by Social Distortion, which has nothing to do with Dragon Age but it made me smile.

Now all the secrets have been revealed, I need to get back to finishing the game!

Countdown

I have mentioned a few times this year that I've been working on a new licensed game. Well, the clock is finally ticking down to when I can talk about, and I mean that literally. We have a countdown clock to the announcement going on www.greenronin.com. I've also been sending out some cryptic hints on Twitter (@GreenRoninPub) and Facebook. This has caused some interesting speculation on various forums. Some good guesses but also some that are far from the mark. To whit:

"Green Ronin is going 4e!" After all the long and ridiculous saga of the GSL, do you really think we'd suddenly reverse ourselves?

"Green Ronin is going to do the 4E version of True20." We don't even know what that means.

"He said gate. It must be Stargate." C'mon, I'm not that obvious.

Yes, I know, I'm teasing you, but not for much longer. Only a few days to go.

For You 4E Freeport Fans

Once Green Ronin had made its final decision not to sign the revised Game System License, my thoughts turned immediately to licensing. While Green Ronin could not do a Freeport Companion for 4th Edition D&D, a company that had signed the GSL could. One of the points of doing the Pirate's Guide to Freeport as a systemless setting book was that mechanical support for different RPGs could be provided. Since it had begun as a d20 setting, I knew there were Freeport fans amongst the 4E community and I wanted to support them with a companion if I could.

So I started thinking about companies who could publish a 4E Freeport Companion. I wanted a company with a reputation for quality products who would treat the property right. It didn't take long for Expeditious Retreat Press to bubble up to the top of my list. I contacted Suzi and Joe and asked if they were interested in licensing Freeport for a 4E companion. It took us less than a week to hammer out a deal and a contract. They announced it today.

I'm glad we were able to work this out. There are already Freeport Companions for True20 Adventure Roleplaying, Savage Worlds, Castles & Crusades, and D&D 3.5. Warriors & Warlocks, a sword and sorcery sourcebook for Mutants & Masterminds, has a section on Freeport and acts as a default M&M companion as well. That's heading to print any day now and the PDF will be out next week. Once XRP gets the 4E version out, the Pirate's Guide to Freeport will have mechanical support for six different game systems.

I look forward to seeing how XRP models the Freeport setting with the 4E rules.

Once More into the Breach

I didn't want to write this post.

The revised version of the Game System License, which allows third party companies to publish support material for the new edition of Dungeons & Dragons, came out this week. I dutifully looked it, noted a couple of improvements, but quickly realized it wasn't enough to get me to change my mind about using the license. An e-mail discussion with my Green Ronin cohorts confirmed that they felt the same way. I didn't really feel like talking about it public though, so I was going to let it lie, but then queries started rolling in. Lots of folks wanted to know what GR's plans were regarding 4E with the license change. I realized then I was going to have to say something, so here we are.

The reason I was reluctant to get back into this discussion goes back a couple of months. I was trying to remember something I did last year and went back to look over the entries in my blog for 2008. Paging through my entries I realized how much time I spent thinking, writing, and analyzing D&D4E, the OGL, and the GSL. And the upshot of all that was that we did one product, the Green Ronin Character Record Folio. It's an awesome accessory but ultimately the time I spent on all this was not well spent.

Now you will see people on message boards say that GR never seriously considered supporting 4E because I hate WotC, blah, blah, blah. While our ultimate decision is to go our own way, that was in no way predetermined. We had discussions about what 4E could mean to our various lines as far back as 2005. After it was announced, we brainstormed a bunch of ideas. I started doing some research and taking notes for a potential new campaign setting. We look at what sort of adventure support we might provide. We considered a 4E Freeport Companion to join the four we had already done. I even commissioned a conversion of an unpublished 3.5 adventure so we'd have something to release if the license looked good.

Had the rollout and the terms of the license been better, perhaps things would have ended up differently. The fact that it took 10 months from the announcement of 4E to the actual release of the GSL was in itself a problem for a company of Green Ronin's size (never mind the fact that the announced plans changed several times throughout that period). GR sells into the book trade, and that means that ideally we want to solicit new books 9 months in advance of release. Well, I certainly wasn't going to solicit books for a game I hadn't even seen using a license who terms I didn't know. Nor was I going to start designing blind in the hopes that it'd all work out.

It became clear during this period that there was a faction with WotC that wanted to close the door to third party publishing all together. There were also advocates, most notably Scott and Linae, but it seemed they were in a constant battle to make anything happen at all. The resultant license, the GSL, looked like an attempted compromise between the factions within WotC that probably pleased no one. It certainly pleased few of the established third party publishers. So within two months of the release of the original GSL, a revision was announce to address some of these concerns. It took over six months for that to happen, and while the revision has some improvements the core of it is very similar indeed to the original.

Now while this was all going on, Green Ronin was by no means standing still. We had existing lines like M&M and True20 to support, a new game line in A Song of Ice and Fire to launch, and new deals to negotiate. The company had begun diversifying away from d20 material many years earlier so it was really just a case of continuing that momentum. While d20 was good to us and we published some great books in that era, we ultimately got to a place where we controlled all of our own lines and were beholden to no one.

So when the GSL revision came out, I had to ask myself if I wanted GR to get pulled into WotC's orbit, even a little bit. The answer had to be no. I don't ever want to have to wonder again what a new edition of D&D means to my business. I don't want to worry about whether 5E or 6E is going to be open to third party publishers. I don't want to live with the spectre of the wrong person becoming an exec at WotC and wrecking my business with the stroke of a pen. It's just not worth it, particularly for the level of sales we'd be likely to see doing 4E support. (The best anyone has been able to say about sales of third party 4E stuff is that it's better than late era 3.5 sales, which is like saying that Friday the 13th Part 13 sold more tickets than Friday the 13th Part 12.)

And even leaving aside all the business talk and analysis for a moment, it might still be tempting to publish something for a game that we were excited about. I spent the second half of last year both running and playing 4E. I would play it again, but I have no burning desire to design for it. Nor do my GR cohorts. It has been my experience in the game industry that you don't do great work on a game that you aren't passionate about. You may recall during the d20 boom, a bunch of established companies jumped into the pool once they realized there was money to be made. They didn't really know or care about the rules and that was clear in the resultant products. Fans quickly sussed this out too. Well, I don't want to be one of those guys who is designing through gritted teeth because that's what he thinks "the kids" like these days.

I know there are some GR fans who were hoping we'd end up doing some 4E support. I'm sorry to disappoint you but I know that I'm making the right decision here. We can be much more successful working on games that excite us and that we control. Creatively and financially, it just makes more sense for us to chart our own course.

In the Good News Department

First, GR's A Song of Ice and Fire RPG has been approved and is heading to print. You can read more about that and future products for the line at www.greenronin.com. Glad I never called this the "must have RPG of 2008."

Also found out today that Pirates of the Burning Sea was nominated as MMO Game of the Year by the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences. There's no chance we'll win but it's nice to get the nod.

Winter Wonderland

I must admit that I've been enjoying being snowed in these last few days. Kate is up in Vancouver visiting her dad, so Nicole and I have had the house to ourselves. We have enjoyed the quiet, particularly as the snow and cold have kept the world's lamest gangstas out of the kiddie park next to our place. We were able to make a supermarket run just as the snow was starting again on Saturday, so we haven't wanted for anything but a snow shovel (Lowe's had none). It's been nice spending some time alone in a calm environment. I shared Love and Death, still my favorite Woody Allen movie, with her last night. Today we took a pleasant walk down to the library. It was icy but the sun was out and the snowy vistas were beautiful.

I've gotten a lot of work done on the game I'm designing as well. I've written down enough of the thoughts that have been swirling around in my head for the past several months that the basic framework is in place. Now it's a matter of building on it and refining it.I'll be doing more of this on my days off over Xmas. Hopefully we'll be announcing the game in January.

I've also been trying to get caught up on GR mail orders. We had a lot come in because of the d20 blowout sale we've been running. Orders backed up and the snow has made it worse. We got five bins to the post office on Saturday before the storm. Today I spent an hour in the cold garage picking more orders. Soon this will be handled at our warehouse and I'm so looking forward to that.

My only problem right now is that it's 2:30 am and I should be asleep. I'm going to try to bus to Flying Lab in the morning and I need to get an early start. I was saying to Nicole earlier that although I've been working every day I've been home, I still felt more relaxed than usual. She smirked and said, "That's because you've only been working one job." Good point.

3rd Era

With the status of the d20 logo unclear, I decided to go ahead and create a new brand under which to sell our d20 back catalog. Sparky is working his way through the PDF files, deleting out the d20 logo and its legal language, and subbing in the new 3rd Era logo (nicely designed by Hal). We should be able to put up a couple a week, so in time our whole catalog ought to be available (save for a few titles due to the deals under which they were published). This doesn't mean we're going to be doing new D&D 3.5 material; it's just a way to ID our existing products.

Some of you may recall that I pondered whether or not to brand our stuff as Pathfinder compatible rather than creating our own brand. I decided that this was the more honest approach. While you'll certainly be able to use any of the 3rd Era books with Pathfinder, we won't be spending the time to update them to reflect Pathfinder's changes to 3.5. I wouldn't want someone expecting that to be disappointed when they purchased one of our books. 3rd Era seemed a better way to go.

One bonus of this move is that we're going to start offering these books on Lulu, so folks who want print copies can get them. For titles that have been long out of print (like Book of Fiends), this gives us an easy way to make print copies available again.

There's a press release about this on GR's website. You can read it here.

BRP Freeport

About a month ago I talked about getting the new Basic Roleplaying core book from Chaosium and mused about doing a BRP Freeport Companion. It is an appealing idea, as Freeport is certainly influenced by Call of Cthulhu and doing a BRP companion would bring the setting closer to its roots in some sense. The question remains whether it makes business sense to do the book for Green Ronin?

Apparently, the BRP fan community discovered my blog post because all week I've had gamers posting comments on that entry telling me they'd love to see a BRP Freeport Companion. It's not exactly market research but it's nice to see some interest in the idea. Thanks for being pro-active, BRP fans! I can't commit to anything but I am considering ways to make this happen.

Decision Made

I don't normally cross-post announcements from GreenRonin.com to my blog, but since I have written a lot about D&D and third party publishers this year I thought readers would be interested in the final decision.

Green Ronin and 4E

I know a lot of fans have been waiting to find out if Green Ronin is going to support 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons and it's a fair question. Green Ronin's second product ever was Death in Freeport, an adventure for 3rd Edition that debuted the same day as the Player's Handbook almost eight years ago. We went on to do quite a lot of 3E support, ending only a couple of months back with the d20 Freeport Companion. Now Wizards of the Coast is terminating the d20 license and offering a different way to support the new edition of D&D. It's called the Game System License and we waited from August of last year until June of this year to see it. We've spent the last few weeks reviewing the license and discussing it internally and we have come to a consensus.

Green Ronin will not be signing the Game System License (GSL) at this time.

We plan to do one product in support of 4E: the Green Ronin Character Record Folio. This will be an update of the d20 System Character Record Folio and we'll be publishing it under the Open Game License (OGL).

Other than that we'll be giving our full attention to our own game lines: Mutants & Masterminds, A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying, True20 Adventure Roleplaying, and Freeport: The City of Adventure.

We had hoped to include 4E support in our plans, but the terms of the GSL are too one-sided as they stand. We certainly do not blame Wizards of the Coast for wanting to defend their intellectual property and take more control over the type of support products D&D receives. We do not, however, feel that this license treats third party publishers as valued partners. Under its terms WotC could frivolously sue a signatory for supposed violations of the GSL, lose the actual court case, and still ruin the winning company because the license specifies that the signatory has to pay WotC's legal fees. Also, the GSL can be changed at any time and WotC is not legally required to so much as inform its licensees.

Let me be clear in stating that I don't think that the people in charge of WotC currently are just waiting to attack companies with frivolous lawsuits. Once you sign the GSL though, you open yourself up to that at any point in the future. Who knows when new people will take over the D&D brand and who can say what their vision will be? Who knows when the political winds at WotC will change again and things will get even more restrictive? We do not want to operate under such a cloud moving ahead so that's why we won't be signing the GSL.

This means the Green Ronin Character Record Folio is the only 4E compatible product you'll be seeing from us this year and likely for 2009 as well. Perhaps WotC will revise the GSL in the positive way, but we cannot build our business on maybes. We know this will disappoint those of our fans who have embraced 4E and we're sorry about that. We have to make the best business decision for Green Ronin's future and right now this is it.

Thank you for your continued support.

Look Out! Soul Is Back

Well it took me a month but I finally got this site up and running again. My old host just went out of business with warning. This wouldn’t have been so bad but I got the domain through them. That made getting it transferred tricky because there was no one there to deal with. Now I’ve taken care of that and gotten a new hosting company. The package includes 500 e-mail addresses and I have no idea what to do with those. If there’s one thing I don’t need it’s another e-mail address.

Last night Nik and I went to see the Comedians of Comedy tour. The Showbox (site, strangely enough, of WotC’s employee Xmas party in 1999) is a pretty shitty venue for comedy, having nearly no seats. I think the Moore Theater would have been better suited for the event. Anyway, other than having to stand up for three plus hours the show was really good. The always funny Patton Oswalt warmed up the crowd, then six other comics performed before he came back to give the final performance. Brian Posehn, who’s easily the best part of the Sarah Silverman Program, put in a great set. He and Patton are like the poster nerds of comedy. They totally need to play some Mutants & Masterminds.

Tomorrow the Green Ronin Summit starts. Once a year we fly everybody out to Seattle so we can spend a few days planning, kibitzing, and organizing. We’ve found that this face time is really valuable for a company that does most of its work virtually. There are GR folks in five states spread all over the country, so we don’t have “water cooler talk” or lunch time gaming. If I have a random idea, I can’t shout over the cube wall to Rob and ask him what he thinks. You can certainly do a lot with phones and e-mail, but it’s hard to replace good old human interaction.

Podcast, Episode 3

On Sunday Erik Mona came by Chez Ronin to do a guest spot on the podcast. We chatted for over an hour about the announcement of 4th edition and what that means for the OGL and d20. I thought folks might enjoy hearing two of the most prominent d20 publishers talk about recent events, amongst other gaming nerdery. The podcast is now available on the Green Ronin website and on I-Tunes for your listening pleasure.

I must say that I’m enjoying doing the podcast. It’s a new challenge and I’m learning a lot as I do each episode. I was initially planning to try to do one every month, but so far I’m turning them out faster than that. It’d be great to do it weekly, but I don’t think I have the time to do that at the moment. Hopefully, folks are enjoying the show.

New Podcast Up

The second episode of the Green Ronin podcast is up on www.greenronin.com. This one was recorded Sunday night at Gen Con. It features an interview with Russ Morrissey of EN World, and then a roundtable discussion with myself, Nicole, Steve Kenson, and Chris McGlothlin in which we discuss many M&M products, nazis, super pets, and more.

5 Days in Indy

My Gen Con trip did not start well. My redeye flight on Wednesday night was delayed. When we got into Detroit, there was only the slimmest chance I'd make my connection. Then the plane sat at the gate for nearly 15 minutes because the ground crew wasn't ready with the jetway. That meant a 3 hour layover there, which put me into Indianapolis at 11 am instead of 7:30. I thus missed the opening of the exhibit hall, which was a bit of a drag. I really like being there for that. I love seeing the doors open and the gamers spill in. It's a nice feeling when people race for your booth to be the first to snap up the new books. I missed that entirely this year and didn't make it to the hall until about noon.

Thankfully, it was pretty much uphill from there. We finally announced the Wild Cards license for M&M, which we've had to keep quiet about since NY Comic Con in February. All 9 of our books showed up (7 by opening and the final 2 on Friday). We sold a ton of Paragons, Pirate's Guide to Freeport, Hero High, and Hobby Games: the 100 Best. We once again did very well at the ENnies, winning 7 awards for GR's own books, 4 for those we designed for Black Industries, and the silver award for Best Publisher. The fans were enthusiastic, the sales were great, and the show was exciting. So hats off again to Peter and crew for another excellent Gen Con.

I managed to catch up with a lot of old friends, which is one of the best parts of Gen Con for me these days. Others I missed in the madness, but there's only so much time. Three members of my old college game group (Aaron, Bill, and Brian) made it out this year and it was great hanging out with them. We all live in different cities now so don't see each other as often as we'd like. Saturday night, though I was dragging after working on 2 hours of sleep all day, I went to the open board game hall and played FFG's new game Tannhauser with Bill and Brian. It was more of a minis game than I thought it was going to be, but that's no bad thing in my book. The cleverest bit is that the spaces on the board are all color coded so you know instantly and without argument who has line of sight to whom. Great idea!

Sunday Bill and I spent a couple of hours walking the exhibit hall. I was disappointed that that there was so little in the way of historical minis, but otherwise the hall was bursting with stuff. Here's what I took home:

Duel in the Dark: Z-Man's new boardgame of British night bombing raids in WWII. This looks terrific and I hope to play with Ray soon.

Reign: Greg Stolze's new fantasy RPG of power and politics.

Witch Hunter: Paradigm's alternate history RPG of righteous puritans vs. the forces of darkness.

Legendary Encounters: Reaper's entry into the pre-painted plastic minis market. I picked up all of the first wave. They look pretty decent, though I wish the bases were a little bigger.

Johnny Reb: This is a Civil War minis game by John Hill of Squad Leader fame. I found a first edition copy in good shape at Crazy Egor's. It's one of the games in Hobby Games: The 100 Best that I didn't own and I wanted to rectify that.

Classic Battletech Introductory Box Set: Battletech's new publisher, Catalyst, have hit the ground running with a great new entry point for the game. This is something BT has needed for some time and it's really a great package.

Sword and Dragon: An expansion book for the above that delves into the history of a couple of Battletech's classic opponents.

Battletech Tech Manual: A huge BT hardback with all the construction rules. Not for the faint of heart.

Battleground Fantasy Warfare: This is a "minis game on cards" by Your Move Games. I got the dwarf starter. I've heard good things about the game and I know Rick has a couple of starters as well so we can give it a try some Thursday. They were sadly out of the new lizardman starter with dinosaurs before I stopped by.

I was tempted by some other boardgames but I didn't have room in my luggage so I saved those for another day. I got a quick look at Grey Ranks, a RPG about the rising of the Polish Home Army in 1944. It looks interesting, but it had no price printed on it and I didn't have time to mess around so I left it for further investigation. I was seriously tempted by Dwarven Forge's new water set, which has simply gorgeous underground rivers and pools, but my house just isn't big enough to start collecting 3D dungeons.

My return flight was also pretty shitty. After an hour delay, we boarded the aircraft and taxied out on the runway. Then the plane stopped and they announced that we had to wait for another hour. I got back to Seattle hours late, totally wiped out. Now back to FLS this morning and of course there's Penny Arcade Expo this weekend. Go go August continues!

Freeport in the House

We got a single advanced copy of the Pirate's Guide to Freeport today. After all the work that's gone into this book I was worried that at the last minute some stupid printer problem was going to muck it up. I can now relax because the finished product looks great. Not that I hadn't gone through the PDF many a time, but holding the physical product is different. You can feel how hefty it is and see the Wayne Reynolds cover in its full glory. We tried to make this book premium and it shows. The paper is a better stock than we use in our softbacks, there's a lovely color section with yet more Wayne Reynolds art, and Andy Law's beautiful maps are printed on the end papers. Quite slick all in all. I also confirmed with the printer today that everything is on track for book to debut at Gen Con. It's also looking like the True20 Freeport Companion and Dark Wings Over Freeport will release at the show as well, so it's going to be a Freeport bonanza. Since Death in Freeport came out at Gen Con seven years ago, this couldn’t be more appropriate.