Friday, December 11, 2015

The Gaming News - Kickstarter Edition

A lot of folk are talking about Kickstarter RPG stuff, so here's some general news from Grubb Street on that:

I received this week Rob Shwalb's Shadow of the Demon Lord RPG in hardback form. I got it by PDF earlier, along with a steady and ever-growing stream of small adventures by a host of  talented friends and allies in the gaming industry, PLUS I received over the Internets a PDF of the Demon Lord Companion, which includes a passel of stuff they didn't put in the initial book. Just breezing through the hardback it looks like a rich, dark world with straightforward mechanics. This is one of those Kickstarters that worked out real well, and deserves greater attention now that it has escaped been released to the greater world. And now I know what I'm reading over the holiday break.


Also in the mail, a surprise package arrived from Peterson Games containing more stuff for the Cthulhu Wars game that I supported and of which I had already received the core game (Note to self - get that review back in the works (Spoiler: Its a good game). The package contained two of the independent Old Ones I had ordered (Father Dagon and Mother Hydra), PLUS an entire set of one each of the miniatures for the game, which surprised the heck out of me. I had to go back through the messages for the Kickstarter to determine that yes, for my contributing level, I was supposed to get these as opposed to it just being some wacky mistake. Still, an impressive pre-holiday gift, and almost makes me want to start painting miniatures again (so I can spring these on my Call of Cthulhu players).


AND, Scott Gable, one of our local designers, has launched a kickstarter for The Faerie Ring, a project that has been in the works for some time. The Fey have always been a challenge in the D&D universes, and this project provides both powerful domain lords as well as player character options as new races. The writing is mostly done (and the first two chapters are available online) and this is to push it into the realm as print. It is worth checking out here.

And, finally, not connected to Kickstarter at all, the AV Club had a great article on the early books in the Dragonlance Series and its effect on fantasy fans in the 80s. You should check it out - I'm just going to sit over here and feel incredibly old.

More later,