Nuketown

August 2009

Game Day: Fighting SciFi RPG Writer’s Cramp

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Fri, 08/28/2009 - 4:30am

We’re well into Episode 5 of our Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic campaign and I’ve got to say I’ve found switching gears from fantasy to science fiction harder than I expected. 

It’s not that I don’t know science fiction; hell I’ve been reading it ever since I could read. But after a dozen years of playing D&D in Greyhawk, I’ve grown used to certain kinds of stories, and being able to rely on the genres familiar tropes and clichés.

In some ways, it’s a question of switching tropes and clichés; when writing fantasy (or designing a fantasy campaign) there are certain standard story ideas (the dungeon crawl, the rampaging monster, the damsel in distress, the crazed cult) you can pull out with barely a moment’s thought. Make a few tweaks, change some of the setup and whammo, you’ve got an adventure.

Rediscover Magic with Duels of the Planewalkers

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Thu, 08/27/2009 - 5:19pm

My long, dark tea time of the gaming soul came in 1995. I was one year out of college and having no luck finding a regular Dungeons & Dragons game. I was working at a daily newspaper in Stroudsburg, within walking distance of a comic book store on Main Street. And it was there that I found my substitute: Magic: The Gathering.

The collectible card game was decimating the local role-playing game community; while it was difficult to get even a one-shot D&D game together, pick-up games of Magic were always waiting at the comic shop.

I was desperate. I needed my gaming fix. So I did what had been unthinkable in college: I put away my polyhedral dice, and started buying Magic cards. I spent two or three years playing Magic, finally giving it up once I was able to get the Blackrazor Guild campaign off the ground. During that time I had a lot of fun delving deep into the game's mechanics, constructing different concept decks, and spending way, way too much on boosters.

The Secret Lair: You’ve Got Your Fantasy in My Science Fiction!

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Mon, 08/24/2009 - 4:30am

Episode 27 of The Secret Lair is online and features a discussion of the (unwanted?) intersections of fantasy and science fiction. It also has the audio version of my review of The Day After Ragnarok, a campaign setting for Savage Worlds that asks the questions "what if the Nazis had summoned the Midgard Serpent in the end days of WWII ... and what if America had killed the wyrm with an atomic bomb?"

The Secret Lair is mixing up its format, bringing in more guests and special features, and I'm curious to see how it all shakes out. You should be too -- go listen now!

FollowFriday: Star Wars: Saga Edition

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Fri, 08/21/2009 - 10:44am

A whole host of people involved in Star Wars: Saga Edition in one form or another have joined Twitter over the last few weeks. It's great to see -- D&D 4th Edition and Pathfinder have sizable fan bases on Twitter, but until recently Star Wars has been lagging. Hopefully with these new additions we'll see a nice uptick in Saga Edition-related tweets. If nothing else I'd love to see in-game tweets from these folks -- we've had a blast tweeting our campaign adventures, and it's be cool to read about what others are doing.

Here's my Follow Friday list, Star Wars edition:

@GMChris, @GMDave, @TwilekGoodness Co-hosts of the Order 66 podcast, the fan podcast for the Star Wars: Saga Edition RPG #swse #followfriday

@wotc_rodney Developer for Star Wars: Saga Edition, Dark Sun at WotC, @silverforce77 Freelance writer for Star Wars #swse #followfriday

@Mapcrafter Scifi & fantasy mapmaker @jjmfaraway Knights of the Old Republic writer, Mass Effect comic book scripter #swse #followfriday

Eberron Campaign Guide at Game Cryer, The Tome

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Thu, 08/20/2009 - 7:47pm

My review of Eberron Campaign Guide for D&D 4th Edition is up on GameCryer.com. If you don't have time to read, then you can listen to me pontificate as a guest on The Tome with host Jeff Greiner and fellow guests Jeremiah McCoy and Nick DiPetrillo (from DungeonMastering).

The Tome episode is a monster of a show, at 1.5 hours, but we covered both the Eberron Campaign Guide and Eberron Player's Guide. It covers the game from a couple of perspectives: a newbie drawn to the setting by the new Player's Guide (McCoy), a casual fan who always liked the setting (that would be me) and a diehard Eberron fan (DiPetrillo). 

Short version? The Campaign Guide is a great book, providing a comprehensive overview of the Eberron setting, while simultaneously showing that it is possible to upgrade a setting to D&D 4E without radically transforming it (as was the case with the Forgotten Realms). It's a book that needed Player's Handbook  to really work, but it was well worth the wait.

Star Wars: Galaxy At War sourcebook previewed

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Tue, 08/18/2009 - 7:27am

Amazon.com has sample cover art and a blurb for the upcoming Galaxy at War source book for the Star Wars: Saga Edition Role-Playing Game. From the blurb, it looks like this book plans to do for war and soldiers what Scum and Villainy did for thievery and scoundrels. And based on what Wizards' own web site has to say, it appears the game will also offer options and rules for the Star Wars Miniatures Game as well.

RPG Blog Readers Survey

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Mon, 08/17/2009 - 4:30am

Gathering demographic data about gamers has proven to be a tricky proposition; Wizards of the Coast did it back in 2000, but since then we haven't had a lot of good numbers to draw on. Inkwell Ideas is looking to change that, at least when it comes to game blogs and their readers, with its RPG Blog Readers Survey.

The goal is find out what people like (or at least, say they like) to read on blogs, what games they're interested in, etc. It's a fairly short survey -- about 10 questions if I remember correctly -- and I'm curious to see how it shakes out. Take the survey.

Cover: Galaxy at War

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Sun, 08/16/2009 - 11:42am
Cover: Galaxy at War

The cover art from Galaxy at War, the upcoming source book for the Star Wars: Saga Edition RPG. Source: Amazon.com

Star Wars RPG Roundup: Dawn of Defiance, Rebellion Era Campaign Guide, Order 66

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Sun, 08/16/2009 - 5:17am

After seeing several Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition round ups over at RPG Bloggers, I decided that Star Wars: Saga Edition could use a little link love as well. There's not as much news for Saga Edition as there is for 4E, so expect these digests to be posted once or twice a month. In this round up I look at Wizards of the Coast's new web articles, a new lightsaber form at Saga-Edition.com, and the latest episode of the Order 66 podcast.

WotC: Role-playing Game

Nuketown Upgraded to Drupal 6

Posted in by Kenneth Newquist on Sat, 08/15/2009 - 6:44pm

Nuketown's been upgraded to Drupal 6, which is the latest stable version of the open source content management system. So far, things seem to have made it through the upgrade intact, though I discovered that the Image Assist module now only wants to display images that have been "published".

I think that my test instance (aka The Testing Range) may also have accidentally spammed those with user accounts by sending them an email with links to a bunch of published comments. If so, I apologizes for that -- I'm not exactly sure what why those messages had queued up.

It's possible that there's still some stuff that needs to be cleaned-up post-upgrade, so if you see anything that looks weird (or is outright broken) please post a comment to this thread or email me at nuketown@gmail.com.