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Kickstarting an RPG for kids 8 and up

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 07 May 2013 16:13:41 +0000

An illustrator and games publisher have teamed up to kickstart "Adventure Maximus!", a streamlined, cards-and-dice RPG aimed at kids eight and up (though there's an endorsement from a six-year-old on the site). The gameplay looks pretty clever and I really like the art. It's a minimum $35 pledge to get a finished game, though you can get a PDF of it for a pledge of $15. They're looking to raise $12K for manufacturing, marketing, and administration.

Adventure MAXIMUS! is a card based, introductory Role Playing Game for players 8 years-of-age and up. Players can take on roles from eight different races. Working together as a famous "Adventure Company" based in the fantastic, post-apocalyptic world of Ex-Machina where they can become heroes of legend.
When there is trouble, or innocent people need protection from the fierce creatures that populate Ex-Machina, they call on Adventure Companies to save the day!
Adventure MAXIMUS! follows the classic role playing game format consisting of someone who runs the adventure (who we call a Maximus Master) and 2 or more players who interact with the adventure. Inexperienced Maximus Masters will find using our Adventure Creation System helpful when making their first adventure. Also, the role of Maximus Master can be taken over by a player in mid adventure so that everyone gets a chance to play!
Players will be asked to make heroic actions fueled by Action Points. Players receive a limited amount of Action Points each round, so they must be budgeted. The bigger the action, the greater the cost. Action Points replenish each round. Racial Abilities, Class Abilities, Action Powers, Spells and Items all have Action Point costs printed on their cards.

As with all Kickstarters, you should be aware that you may get nothing for your money, in the event that the creators of the project flake out or just totally underestimate the amount of money they'll need to meet their obligations.

Adventure Maximus!

Old School Dungeons & Dragons: Wizards of the Coast’s Problem Child

Peter Bebergal — Mon, 06 May 2013 14:19:10 +0000

Over time, the rules governing classic role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons changed and took on a weight of their own. Role-playing elements sank into a mire of charts and tables and special abilities. This rules-heavy play really took hold when, in the late 1990s, publisher TSR was suffering financially. Wizards of the Coast, coasting on the sales of card game Magic: The Gathering, bought them out.

Not surprisingly, D&D—the way it was packaged and the way it was played—started to look a lot like Magic. The emphasis was heavy on combat, skills, and special feats. For many people D&D became more about creating quasi-Medieval superheroes than adventurers looking for the simple things like treasure, or a little boost in their archery ability.

What Wizards of the Coast did was take an experience so open as to allow group improvisation, and turn it into a tabletop game where the players merely pretend that they are the miniature figurines pushed around on a combat grid. Playing D&D began to mean buying all kinds of other stuff. Where figurines were once optional, the new rules made them essential, along with cardboard tiles and an enormous number of supplements. (The newest version of D&D has three different Players Handbooks).¹

To put it another way, Dungeons & Dragons has become a game preferring combat to role-playing. It favors prefab characters acquiring new skills and powers over a character that the player comes to identify with; a character whose development determines the course of the game.

In the wake of this, a small but mighty band of mostly middle-age gamers has tapped into a larger current of nostalgia that (like vinyl records and analog synthesizers) is trying to recapture the interactions with ideas and people that digital media have all but made obsolete.

Sometimes referred to as the Old School Renaissance (OSR), this loose gathering of gamers and designers are bound by a common message: all you really need to play a table-top fantasy role-playing game is notebook paper, pencils, dice and a few charts you can download for free.

OSR is also representative of a current obsession with how open things used to be, and with how much the culture and technology felt more participatory. When they were growing up, we weren’t just consumers, but pioneers. It was about being able to crack things open and look inside, and maybe even come up with your own changes&mash;be it computers, or audio hardware, or game rules. It’s about fighting back a little against a culture of consumption that's become stripped of its sense of participation, where everything is ready made and sealed, where you can’t even be trusted to change your own batteries.

It was copyright law, however, that made the old school renaissance possible. Copyright can be very complicated, especially in the internet age, but one thing remains clear: you cannot copyright game rules. You can copyright their presentation, the associated artwork, and the accompanying text, but not the rules themselves: that a dwarf gets a constitution bonus +1 cannot be copyrighted.

The earliest iterations of OSR games, like the Old School Reference and Index Compilation, are simply various editions of the early D&D rules with new art and accompanying text offered as PDFs (often free) or print-on-demand at cost. While many felt the original D&D had a kind of biblical authority, others realized that since the rules were not protected by copyright, they could be modified. Creators started to offer their own brand of old-school RPGs such as Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Dungeon Crawl Classics, not only fixing what they thought was broken, but re-instilling the game with all that was gloriously weird and pulpy about the early years.

Wizards of the Coast finally got around to acknowledging that some people like to play the earlier versions of the game and, seeing a small but flourishing market, tried to capture the spirit of OSR with a number of publishing initiatives. The first started in 2012, with the reprints of the three core books of the first edition of AD&D; The Monster Manual, The Players Handbook, and The Dungeon Masters Guide. This year Wizards published Unearthed Arcana—the much-maligned collection of Gygax’s Dragon Magazine writing—and Dungeons of Dread, an anthology of the four original TSR AD&D adventures.

The books are lovingly bound, detailing on the cover one small aspect of the original art. The books include a "red ribbon" bookmark: the universal publishing shorthand for “collector’s edition.” The paper stock used is high gloss and heavy weight, but feels kind of cheap, as if photocopied. To preserve some of the lighter drawings, the printing tends to be too dark, giving and almost-wet look to much of the art. The book most undermined by this is Dungeons of Dread: none of the colors in the art are preserved, and the lack of removable maps and other supplemental material makes it a difficult book to use.

The bigger news earlier this year is the online PDF store Dungeons and Dragons Classics where for a few bucks you can download the “classic” D&D material, including the Basic and Expert guides, as well as versions 2.0, 3.0, and 3.5. The site is not actually run by Wizards, but piggybacked onto the terrific DriveThru RPG, a stellar resource for role-playing. There are missed opportunities here, including not making these available as print-on-demand, an option that has become central to OSR culture.

A more cynical observation, and one I can’t help but make, is that the cost to post these items online is negligible. The operators are able to make a profit on material that it had no hand in producing—content that has long been available in OSR clones. This is not to say that it isn’t terrific to have these items available, as some of them are fairly collectible and Wizards deserves credit for buying TSR when the alternative might have been the end of the game itself. But there is something uninspired in the whole effort. It is as if Wizards does not really see new value in the old D&D material, but merely recognizes the opportunity to make money from those who do.

Nevertheless, reading through these items—particularly the AD&D hardcovers—is a joy. Here is Gygax describing playing a character: “Each of you will become an artful thespian as time goes by—you will acquire gold, magic items, and great renown... This game lets all your fantasies come true... Enjoy, for this game is what dreams are made.” Sure, it’s over the top. But it evoked wonder.

Maybe we don’t need to keep looking back. Is the spirit of OSR really just a bunch of throwback nerds, staring into the abyss? The biggest criticism of OSR, voiced by bloggers such as RPGpundit, is that what Gygax and Arneson were trying to do was create something new that would rattle the cages of the hardcore wargamers and make games something that were more open, less restrictive. Today’s old-school misanthropes are merely holding fast to something without any kind of creative impetus to push roleplaying into new territories. In this respect, OSR is itself a kind of fundamentalism. OSR gamers counter this by arguing innovation in D&D has merely meant more rules. And more rules means less wonder, less imagination.

Child psychologist Donald Winncott describes the pure play of youth, where an unboundedness is the required work of a healthy developing mind, and continues to be an vital part of being an authentic self into adulthood. Is this was role-playing is about? Authenticity? And is someone supposed to find authenticity imagining they are, say, a magic-user in search of arcane lore?

For the last year, once or twice a month if we’re lucky, some friends of mine gather to play AD&D. We’ve ended some sessions without any combat or dice rolling at all, all that precious time we are able to get away from our other responsibilities spent elaborating on a world and its inhabitants that has no other meaning outside of these hours together. I can’t be sure this is how Gygax and Dave Arneson meant the game to be played, but they certainly invented a game that never makes us feel like we are cheating for not adhering to every table and chart. And they also made a game capable of unbounded play, where I don’t have to pretend to be kid to pretend that I am not me.

[1] But one of the more telling changes in the D&D rules is not about the rules at all. The first edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons’ Dungeon Masters Guide includes an Appendix N: Inspirational and Educational Reading, in which Gary Gygax reminisces about his father telling him fairy tales, as well as a list of books he names as inspiration behind much of the D&D game’s original inception. Appendix N also includes a remarkable little nugget: that the major influence on D&D’s gameplay is not J.R.R. Tolkien, but Edgar Rice Burroughs and Fritz Leiber, among others. No subsequent edition of D&D included an appendix of this sort.

Illustration courtesy of Shutterstock.

Trial of the Clone: great choose-your-own-adventure from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal creator

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 13:02:35 +0000

Last summer, Zach Weiner (creator the most excellent Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal webcomic) ran a monumentally successful Kickstarter for a CC-licensed Choose-Your-Own-Adventure title called Trial of the Clone: An Interactive Adventure!.

I've finally gotten around to reading my copy and it's an absolute delight. Not only is it witty and often laugh-aloud funny -- it's also got a novel and well-thought-through game mechanic that introduces an element of tabletop RPG-playing to the system (instead of rolling dice, you flip randomly through the book and get your roll-value from the number at the bottom corner of the page).

The premise is a fun spoof of the Star Wars trilogy. You're an orphaned clone (they decanted you in order to fill a hot market wherein rich people competed to adopt orphans, quickly exhausting the existing pool of orphans and giving rise to the practice of cloning; alas you were decanted just as the market crashed) and you're sent to live with a mystic cult of warriors who train you and enlist you in an intergalactic war. The humor is trenchant, never too on-the-nose, and never gets in the way of what turns out to be rather a good story. As an added bonus, "nearly all the proper names in the book are dirty words in Czech."

Profits from this book are donated to Fight for the Future, one of the activist groups that led the charge that killed SOPA last year.

Trial of the Clone [Amazon]

Trial of the Clone [SMBC]

Opponents Wanted: forgotten gaming mags find new life on the net

Peter Bebergal — Thu, 28 Mar 2013 12:55:32 +0000

The Internet Archive is one of the great treasures of the internet, housing content in every media; texts, video, audio. It’s also the home of the Wayback Machine, an archive of the Internet from 1996. I thought I had explored the site pretty thoroughly—at least according to my own interests—but recently came across runs of some of the great gaming magazines of the 1970s and 80s; The Space Gamer, Ares, Polyhedron, The General, and—temporarily—Dragon Magazine. These magazines represent not only the golden age of gaming, but expose the thrill and excitement of gaming when it was still new, still on the margins. It was a time when gaming still felt a little, dare I say, punk.

Today, finding members of your particular community of interest is a Google search away, but in the 1970s the only way to be in contact with others who shared interests was through magazines. For many gamers, even finding the games could be difficult. Discovering the gaming magazines revealed an active gaming industry that still maintained a sense of being on the vanguard.

The earliest issues show off their newsletter origins. The Space Gamer and The Generalstarted off on plain paper in black and white. Even the first issues of Dragon look like a teenager’s fanzine, but the enthusiasm and energy are infectious. Who couldn’t love the introduction of new monsters for your campaign such as the Gem Var, a creature composed entirely of gemstone and that cannot take damage from bladed weapons. The artists, editors and letter writers were the best friends you had never met. Gaming in the 1970 and 80s felt a little like being into punk rock. You knew it was offbeat, knew that outsiders didn’t get it, but you also knew that this was cool. Even the advertisements and listings of conventions expanded the universe of gaming a thousandfold. Not unlike ordering 45s of unknown bands from punk zines, was sending away for microgames, miniatures and supplements from tiny game publishers.

Browsing through them now using Internet Archive’s terrific “read online” feature, it’s clear how important these magazines were to a fledgling hobby (and how wonderfully awful some of the artwork was). The amount of new gaming content these magazines offered is astonishing, and it was this very malleability of the rules that created a sense within the community of gamers that it was perpetually new, always reaching out towards the next idea. The first issue of Dragon Magazine from 1976 (then called The Dragon) admitted in its editor’s note that it was entering new territory, but managed to fill that pioneering issue with a story by Fritz Leiber, new spells, a discussion of science and magic in D&D, and introduced a regular section called “Mapping the Dungeons,” which was a list of the names and addresses of gamemasters looking for players (David Mumper of Henniker, New Hampshire, where are you now?).

Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) put out Ares Magazine, and each issue offered a complete game including a map and a rack of punch-out counters. The PDFs currently at Internet Archive include scans of these elements and it’s painful to not be able to press out those beautiful little counters. The Space Gamer focused mostly on publisher Metagaming’s own properties. By issue #27, the magazine came under the auspices of Steve Jackson Games (SJG) and offered a much greater variety of content, with material for AD&D, Call of Cthulhu and computer games.

The General , published by Avalon Hill (makers of PanzerBlitz and one of the great war games of all time, Starship Troopers, among others), was geared towards the historical with smatterings of science fiction, but later issues had quite a bit of fantasy fare as well. The Generalalso offered articles on strategy and tactics employed during actual wars and a classified section called “Opponents Wanted” where lonely gamers posted messages in the hopes of finding other players: “Adult player looking for opponents (female players welcomed) to play AH non-wargames, especially RB, KREM, DIP, CIV. RB fanatics. Write me!”

Having these magazines up at Internet Archive—or other easily-found online locations—corresponds perfectly with the old-school renaissance taking place in the world of role-playing games, as well as an overall nostalgia for ’70s gaming in general. The recent Kickstarter to republish Steve Jackson’s Ogre netted $923,680 (they were looking for $20,000). Wizards of the Coast recently made PDFs available the original rules and modules for AD&D, as well as a limited edition boxed set reprinting the impossibly rare “White Box.” And Gygax Magazine was just launched this January by Luke Gygax, Gary’s son.

Those of us who gamed in the ’70s and ’80s are hitting middle-age and have kids of our own who couldn’t draw a dungeon map if their life depended on it. We are looking back at our lives, remembering fondly the things we deeply loved.

When I was 12-years old, my older brother drove me down the mostly depressed Sterling Avenue in Hollywood, Florida to a nondescript storefront where there was a small variety store, a dry cleaner, and a shop called The Compleat Strategist. It was 1979 and I was just about done with my Legos and tragically losing interest in my Micronauts. We were there, of course, to check out Dungeons & Dragons. My brother chipped in and I walked out with the D&D Basic Set in the blue box, along with the Dungeon Geomorphs and the Monster and Treasure Assortment. I left with something else: a sense that I was about to be initiated into a secret order. Yet is was those magazines that created an idea of fraternity that would finally bring together so many aspects of my pre-adolescence: a love of fantasy and science fiction, an anxious imagination, and an almost righteous identity as an outsider.

RPG inside an Excel workbook

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 23:34:45 +0000

Cary Walkin, an accountant in Toronto, knows a thing or two about Excel. So great is his expertise that he was able to create a full-fledged RPG inside of its scripting environment, called Arena.Xlsm. I couldn't get it to run in LibreOffice, but it sounds like it's very featurful and fun, provided that you're willing to use Microsoft products:

* Random enemies: Over 2000 possible enemies with different AI abilities.
* Random items: 39 item modifiers result in over 1000 possible item combinations and attributes.
* An interesting story with 4 different endings depending on how the player has played the game.
* 8 boss encounters, each with their own tactics.
* 4 pre-programmed arenas followed by procedurally generated arenas. Each play-through has its own challenges.
* 31 Spells. There are many different strategies for success.
* 15 Unique items. Unique items have special properties and can only drop from specific enemies.
* 36 Achievements.
* This is all in a Microsoft Excel workbook.

Arena.Xlsm Released! (via Digg)

Geek A Week's Len Peralta Draws Your D & D and RPG Characters

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 16:43:20 +0000

Len sez, "A few years ago, you posted about my Monster By Mail project. Since then I've drawn a lot of things including Cory for my Geek A Week project. Now I am doing something similar to Monster By Mail with RPG and D&D characters. I'm drawing people's characters for their character sheets. They get an 8.5 x 11 drawing and a 72 dpi version for their character sheet and online use. As long as it is not a licensed character, I will draw it. You can see all the characters I've drawn so far here."

Geek A Week's Len Peralta Draws Your D & D and RPG Characters (Thanks, Len!)

Gygax Magazine: Dragon reborn

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 16:45:32 +0000

Jayson sez, "Gygax magazine is a quarterly adventure-gaming magazine, created in the spirit of such iconic '80s journals as Dragon, White Dwarf, Adventure Gaming, and Pegasus. At the helm are Gary Gygax's two eldest sons, Luke & Ernest Gary Gygax Jr., along with Jayson Elliot, and Dragon magazine founder Tim Kask. The first issue includes an article by Cory Doctorow on DMing for toddlers, as well as new comics from Phil Foglio (What's New With Phil & Dixie) and Rich Burlew (The Order of the Stick). Gygax will launch its first issue this Saturday at The Brooklyn Strategist. The event, which is open to the public, will also have lots of gaming (including a massive AD&D 1E dungeon delve with the founder of Dwarven Forge) and a video Q&A with the staff. The whole event will be live-streamed at GygaxMagazine.com."

Gygax Magazine

Kickstarter to revive Tunnels and Trolls, the sillier, more casual early cousin of D&D

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 17 Jan 2013 19:08:49 +0000

Stefan Jones sez,

One of the problems faced by early enthusiasts of Dungeons & Dragons was a severe shortage of the actual game. Tactical Studies Rules wasn't up to the job of supplying sufficient copies of a game that burst out of its traditional audience of miniatures wargamers. I remember photocopied sets of the first printing were ubiquitous at gaming hang-outs.
There was an alternative. Long before I was finally able to get my hands on a "white box" edition of Dungeons & Dragons, I was able to get my own copy low-rent competitor, Tunnels & Trolls.
Ken St. Andre's creation was sillier and far more casual than D&D, but you could use it to create adventures just as satisfying. Its basic design also made more sense than Gygax & Arneson's mutant offspring of miniature's rules: The characters' attributes played a direct role in game mechanics.
T&T never had the success of Dungeons & Dragons, but it was responsible for one major innovation (paragraph-based solitaire adventures) and has been through several editions. (One of the works of game writing I'm most proud of is Dark Temple, an epic solo adventure published back in 1994.)
After several years of being out of print, a new edition of T&T is in the works. To fund the development work, the original artistic and design team has put together a Kickstarter, with plenty of interesting reward levels and swag.

Deluxe Tunnels & Trolls

Autobiographical D&D maps kickstarter: TWO HOURS TO GO!

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 12 Jan 2013 02:42:13 +0000

You've got TWO HOURS to get in on Jeffrey Beebe's Kickstarter to produce limited edition prints of his maps of Refactoria, an autobiographical D&D style kingdom, previously featured here on Boing Boing!

Printing the Map of Western Refractoria (Thanks, Jeffrey!)

3D printed, hand-painted miniatures

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 03:43:34 +0000

These 3D printed, hand-painted white nylon miniatures are rather special:

Take a look atTurtleWorks shop on Shapeways that does not contain any turtles, but does contain many more 3D printed miniatures that you can order in the material of your choice then customize by hand painting for yourself. We also have an entire gallery of3D printed miniatures on Shapeways, if any of your models are suitable to be included in this category, be surte to assign them in your product page.

Amazing Hand Painted, 3D Printed Miniatures

Hand-drawn maps of an imaginary kingdom are artist's autobiography/confessional

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 15:08:35 +0000

Alain sez, "Artist Jeffrey Beebe's website dedicated to his autobiographical/imaginary world called Refractoria; the website features dozens hand-drawn geopolitical maps, city maps, celestial charts, genealogical charts, etc. profoundly influenced by OD&D/AD&D 1st Edition and various fantasy maps."

Map of Refractoria (Thanks, Alain!

Kickstarter to revive Glorantha, old RPG that was eclipsed by D&D

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 21:37:31 +0000

Robert sez, "Glorantha is one of the oldest role-playing worlds in the history of the genre. Unfortunately, due to many reasons, the world never really found traction after D&D conquered RPGs back in the early 1980s. Now, thanks to Rick Meints of Moon Design Publications, they are finally beginning to get some traction again. Now the company has a Kickstarter raising funds for a complete guide to Glorantha (which has been needed for decades)."

The Kickstarter's already met its minimum, but there's lots of cool stuff in the stretch goals.

The Guide to Glorantha

D10 engagement ring

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 10 Oct 2012 23:58:54 +0000

Dragonslorefury posted this wonderful D10 RPG-player's engagement ring to DeviantArt, along with these notes:

My engagement ring, designed by myself and a reality thanks to my amazing jeweller father. Yes that is a D10 (10 sided dice for those not used to the lingo XP), me and my partner are quite frequent roleplayers and I'm a huuuge geek and odd-ball. I wanted my ring to be one-of-a-kind and personal to me any my amazing finace so I eventually came up with this idea. If I want the dice can also be removed and replaced with a stone of my choice ^_^ Happy to be engaged to my amazing partner and to have my awesome engagement ring. <3

My Engagement Ring (via Geekologie)

Topless dungeon master sought

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 02:09:36 +0000

A Craigslist poster is looking for a woman to dungeon-master a D&D game/bachelor party. DM must be familiar with D&D 3.0 or 3.5, and topless. C-cup or greater preferred. "There will be 5 'guys' that will be participation (sic) including myself. We are at all above the age of 24. Each of us are gentlemen and will treat the Dungeon Master with the utmost of respect."

Kickstarting a book of homemade D&D modules from the 1980s

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 21 Sep 2012 19:22:15 +0000

Plagmada -- the Play Generated Map and Document Archive -- is kickstarting a book of homebrew D&D modules made by game-geeks in their misspent youth. The lead title is the remarkable The Habitition of the Stone Giant Lord, created by 13-year-old Gaius Stern in 1981. The book will contain other homebrew adventures, and is seeking your contributions, which you can email to collections@plagmada.org, for inclusion in the book, which will be called "The Habitition of the Stone Giant Lord and Other Adventures from Our Collective Youth."

The Habitition of the Stone Giant Lord & Other Adventures (Thanks, Tim!)

CC-licensed nerdy feature film breaks Kickstarter record

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 07 Sep 2012 19:02:02 +0000

Ben sez, "Our feature film comedy about roleplaying gamers and collectible card games, The Gamers: Hands of Fate, is just finishing up a very successful campaign on Kickstarter [ed: $384,174 and rising at the time of writing] and we wouldn't be here without Boing Boing. Reading this site taught us how to go directly to the fans, stop worrying about piracy, and embrace a 'dandelion' distribution model. We are now just a few thousand away from becoming the most-funded film on Kickstarter to date, for a movie about gaming that will be released online for free under a Creative Commons license. Thank you for the many years of content and commentary that convinced us to go this direction, rather than getting stuck in Hollywood!" (Thanks, Ben!)

RPG miniatures Kickstarter hits $1M

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 13:55:36 +0000

Matt writes in with news of the Reaper Miniatures Bones Kickstarter, which has hit an eyepopping $1M with five days to spare. Reaper makes paintable RPG miniatures and paints, and they're rather good (I have several sugrued to the top of my monitor, bought expertly painted at the Orcs Nest in Covent Garden).

Matt sez, "Even if you just want paints it's a great deal. The paint sets are $18 more for a set of 12, which is half or less what you pay retail. For minis the $100 is up to 182 plastic minis. Reapers claim, and the reviews agree, that their products are flexible hard to break and don't need primer (though you can use it). Among the minis there are some that are steampunk (the Chronoscope minis). Who wouldn't want a cybernetic gorilla? There are pirates and horror as well. You can also add for a little more cash a clockwork dragon, a jabberwocky, and a set including Cthulhu."

Some of the highest pledge levels include minis cast in sterling silver, as well as original molds.

Reaper Miniatures Bones: An Evolution Of Gaming Miniatures (Thanks, Matt!)

Five reasons to play D&D

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 14:37:53 +0000

I thought Grimm Wisdom's "5 reasons to play D&D" was a great list -- and it made me want to get my 4-y-o out of bed and have a go at the stripped-down version we play with random toys, polyhedral dice, and miniatures. But I blogged it instead -- here's the first three, I'm gonna get the kid up:

1. Dungeons and Dragons is about imagination. It is sitting at a table, with some books, paper and pencil (or their electronic equivalent, PDFs and spreadsheets), and using the power of your mind to throw yourself into a fantasy world. Everything that your characters do is something you decided for them to do. This is no video game designer laying out choices for you. In my 20-plus years of gaming, our characters have started wars, ended wars, rescued people, killed monsters, started towns, started criminal organizations, thrown parades, stopped parades, bought bars, built temples, in addition to countless other things.
2. Dungeons and Dragons is structure. No creative endeavor, be it art, music, writing or performance, can exist without a framework of r

ules and boundaries. Our English language is built on 26 letters and our music 12 notes. It is the creative person’s mission to build something in the context of that structure that is worthwhile and maybe even entertaining.
3. Dungeons and Dragons is social. You can’t play this game alone. It requires at least two people, and typically four to eight. Interacting with other people, especially face-to-face, is important. It just is.

5 reasons to play D&D (via Wil Wheaton)

If Dungeons and Dragons cartoons depicted real RPGs

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 23 Jun 2012 22:22:31 +0000

Here's 13 minutes' worth of the old (rather dreadful) Dungeons and Dragons cartoon, overdubbed with plausibly banal and profane dialog from a group of RPG players whose campaign the cartoon depicts. It's pretty danged funny in places, though 13 minutes is a bit much for the one-note joke.

Dadtucks (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Lost trove of D&D co-creator unearthed, up for auction

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 05 May 2012 02:00:52 +0000

Ethan sez, "The personal archives of legendary Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Dave Arneson -- some 10,000 items -- were abandoned by his heirs and lost in storage facility in Minnesota. Now they've been found and catalogued, and they're being auctioned starting this Sunday. Here's a story about it and an exclusive preview of Sunday's auction."

“It was by pure chance that the new owner attempted to find the meaning of some of the boxes of paper rather than deciding that there was no gold or jewelry to be found, and just tossing it all into the nearest dumpster,” wrote Cox on his company’s website.
Cox contacted Stormberg, whose company specializes in handling and evaluating the collections of RPG game designers and artists. They teamed up to buy and save the collection. Cox made an offer to the local auction company. The company agreed and The Collector’s Trove took possession of the materials for processing and auctioning. In an interview with GeekDad, Stormberg would not put a price tag on the collection, but he did say, “it was a substantial amount of money” — more than Cox had ever paid for an entire collection in 18 years of buying and selling for The Dragon’s Trove, which has had its hands on many of the largest and highest quality collections in the world...
...Stormberg said that “About 30% of the items are what I call product: published games, game accessories, periodicals, and books.” The remaining 70% of the collection is “non-product”: all those letters and scribbled notes, maps, objects, and personal and family items. There is Arneson’s Smith Corona: Mark IV typewriter; a set of lead crystal goblets etched with Arneson’s family heraldry; and a model ship made of metal. “Dave loved the age of sail and all things to do with naval military history. Indeed, one of his first published games was Don’t Give Up the Ship which he co-wrote with Gary Gygax and Mike Carr in 1972.”
Among the highlights: unpublished manuscripts that did not make it into the final draft of Dungeons & Dragons that date as far back as 1973. There are even older items from 1971 and 1972 “dealing with the Blackmoor campaign and the Castle itself,” Stormberg said. These may reveal secrets about the game’s origins. Domesday Book Newsletter, among the rarest and highly sought after collectibles by Dungeons & Dragons collectors.

GeekDad Exclusive: Auction Preview of D&D Co-Creator’s Personal Collection and Archives — Game’s Secrets to Be Revealed (Thanks, Ethan!)

Call for diversity in D&D rulebooks

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 04:23:16 +0000

On Tor.com, Mordicai Knode asks Wizards of the Coast to consider a more diverse set of portrayals of fantastic personages in the next edition of Dungeons and Dragons.

That being said, I think it is useful for some rough generalizations. Like the fact that in the Fourth Edition Player’s Handbook there are only four black characters. There are more diabolically red skinned people — tieflings — then there are dark skinned people. By a…fairly wide margin. Still, an improvement over the Third Edition Player’s Handbook in some respects. In the third edition, you’ve got Ember, the human monk — but other than her initial appearance under the class description, she’s absent from the rest of the book. Some artists have depicted Regdar as black, and he along with some of the other character have a generous color palate, by which I mean that their ethnicity is fluid on the page. They are hardly pale but neither are they a deep brown in skin tone, lending them a lot of flexibility for reader identification. (Scott McCloud of Understanding Comics would be proud.) And just for kicks, I flipped through an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Second Edition Player’s Handbook; there is an illustration so purple it could be ambiguous, but no, that book, like so much of yesteryear, is entirely Caucasian. Lots of crazy mustaches, though...
I’ve heard a litany of excuses for why there are predominantly white people portrayed in roleplaying art, but I’m not buying it. Maybe your claim is that the people buying the game are primarily Caucasian? Since when did it become a bad idea to have a product that appeals to a wider demographic? Dungeons & Dragons exists in the real world. A world where there are people who aren’t white. People who might want to start playing, if they saw themselves reflected in the product. Why artificially limit your profits by only pursuing a narrow demographic? and what, do you think white players are incapable of identifying with people of color? I don’t agree, and I’d point to the widespread acclaim that Order of the Stick has gotten; even if your motive is unmitigated greed, I can think of 1,254,120 reasons to support a diverse cast and complex story telling.

A Modest Proposal For Increased Diversity in D&D

Interview with Order of the Stick creator about his record-breaking $1.2M Kickstarter campaign

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 21:31:09 +0000

On Singularity Hub, Aaron Saenz interviews Rich Burlew, creator of the D&D-oriented webcomic Order of the Stick, whose record-breaking Kickstarter project raised more than $1.2 million.

SH: Has this fundraiser altered your business model or were pre-orders for the books (through the reward system) so dominant that you’re in the same model, just on a larger scale?
RB: Definitely the latter. The fundraiser has been incredibly successful in generating sales (as well as wider interest in the comic) but ultimately, I can’t run one of these every few months and expect to get another million dollars each time. The likelihood of me ever getting anything close to this response again is very low, so I’m treating it as a one-time opportunity. That’s the main reason why I’m trying to use as much of the excess funding to make permanent improvements to my business—buying new equipment, upgrading the server, and so on. That way, when the attention dies down and I’m back to doing things the way I’ve always done them, there will be concrete long-term benefits to me and the readers.
SH: What was the secret to your success on Kickstarter, and how much do you think can be repeated by other projects in the future?
RB: The most obvious secret is to already have an audience to sell to. The best way to get that audience is to put out a product of reliable quality over a long enough period of time that potential backers have no doubts about your ability to pull off whatever it is you’re promising to pull off. I’ve been drawing The Order of the Stick for almost nine years, and I’ve already printed and delivered seven books in that time. While some of them have had the sort of production delays you would expect from a small business, the fact is that I had a pretty good track record when it comes to self-publishing. So when I went out and said, “Hey, I need some funds up front if you want to get more books,” no one thought that I wasn’t capable of actually turning those funds into books. And because I’ve drawn well over a thousand pages of comics, most of them viewable for free, they also knew the exact quality level to expect for any additional stories that I threw in to sweeten the deal. That level of confidence is essential if you want a lot of people to give you money for something that doesn’t exist yet.
Beyond that, if you start a Kickstarter project, tend to it constantly. I see a lot of projects that put up their initial pitch and then never touch it again until it closes—and then they wonder why it wasn’t funded. Stay involved in your project: post frequent updates, respond to comments, and engage with your backers. Make your pledge drive an event that people want to be part of instead of just a purchase. When you sell a book, you’re competing with every other book out there. When you sell an experience, it’s always one-of-a-kind.

One of the things that gets missed when we talk about the evolution of "business models" for creative labor is that the pre-Internet system made virtually no money for nearly everyone who tried it ("don't quit your day job"), returned something like a living for a small minority, and handed out lottery-ticket winnings to a statistically insignificant few. The Web's business models for creative endeavor make virtually no money for nearly everyone who tries them, return a precarious living to a small minority, and, as we see, deliver lottery-ticket dividends to a statistically insignificant few.

This is not to take away from Burlew's remarkable achievement, his preserverence, or his skill. But Burlew (and Amanda Hocking, and others) are no more proof that the Web "works" than all those people who grossed $1.08 on eight years' worth of Google AdSense are proof that it fails. As cool and awesome as Burlew's story is, it's the wrong metric for measuring the success of the Web as a creative medium.

Instead, we should ask ourself how many people got to try it out, how many audiences were served, how many creators reached audiences, and how diverse the gatekeepers between audiences and artists have become, so that one tastemaker's prejudices don't end up warping discourse and markets. I think on all of these metrics, the Web is doing very well by creators.

And yeah, it's handing out some lotto jackpots, too, and that's awesome.

The Crowd-Funding Phenomenon Continues – Comic Raises $1.2M on Kickstarter (+Q&A with Creator Rich Burlew)!

Recursive D&D dungeon is a procedural dungeon-generation system

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 02:30:02 +0000

Tavis sez, "A mind-blowingly recursive poster that represents the AD&D rules for procedural dungeon generation as a flowchart which is drawn as a dungeon. From the The Mule Abides blog at NYC's intersection between role-playing games, the gallery art scene, and how Kickstarter can jam 'em together. Cory's linked the Mule before as HOWTO have a D&D party for 8-year-olds; also featured in this post is a nifty Kickstarter for the first publication from the Play-Generated Map and Documents Archive, similarly linked for Homemade D&D module, 1981."

Everything is Flowcharts (Thanks, Travis!)

Everything is Dolphins: old homebrew RPG about dolphins to become a kickstartered product

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 21 Feb 2012 20:48:34 +0000

Tim Hutchings, who maintains the most excellent PlaGMaDA (Play Generated Map and Document Archive) has recovered a bizarre but strangely compelling amateur RPG about dolphins and he's producing a published volume (with guest art) on Kickstarter:

Everything is Dolphins occupies a curious place. While it is clearly the work of someone new to the design of role-playing games, it also displays the some of the sophisticated sensibilites one would expect from an old hand. Rather than the excess of complexity that clutters most freshman efforts, Everything is Dolphins offers concision and simplicity. The author gives few examples to illustrate how to use the system and no sample adventure, leaving much to the player’s imagination (and effort). With its bare bones, lacunae, and undeniable beauty, Everything is Dolphins is the role-playing game analogue of outsider art.
Included in the lengthy Appendix of the book you will find scans of the author's original game notes and lots of playtest material. The inclusion reveals to us where the game began, how it was played over time, and what it looks like when it's played. And the game notes and documents are fun to look at.

Everything is Dolphins - an RPG and art book (Thanks, Tim H!)

(Image: Sean McCarthy)

HOWTO make a stained-glass D20

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 18:03:11 +0000

On Instructables, CaseyBorders's recipe for making stained glass 20-sided dice. A bit tricky to carry these around in your grandad's old Crown Royal bag, but otherwise, they make some pretty smashing (ahem) RPG accessories.

Now we need to cut 20 triangles out of our sheet of stained glass that match the template that we created. The easiest way to do that is to cut a stip of glass the same height as the triangles we cut in the jig. In the example pictures we used a strip that was 1.5" wide because our triangles ended up being 1.5" tall. Place the strip flush across the bottom of your cutting board and set your angle guide to 60 degrees. Follow your angle guide with your scorer so you end up with a 60 degree angle cut off the end of your glass strip. Depending on the kind of glass you bought you might simply need to flip it over to get the other side of the triangle, but the glass in the demo pictures is textured on the back, so we can only cut on the front, so we need to change our cutting guide to 60 degrees the other way. However you end up doing it, make sure that you are making your cuts and angle adjustments as precisely as you can, because if the triangles are not correctly shaped they will not make a good-looking d20.
Once you have 20 good pieces we can etch the numbers on them. Place each triangle in one of the holes of the cardboard template on the laser cutter's cutting surface. Now you can use the same file that we used to make the template but be sure to set your laser to etch only! We don't want to cut around the holes again!

Making a Stained-Glass d20 (via Neatorama)

Order of the Stick D&D webcomic breaking Kickstarter records

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 23:57:55 +0000

Courtney sez, "The D&D themed webcomic Order of the Stick has been running a Kickstarter campaign to get some of its out-of-print books back onto shelves. It's now broken $350,000 and is one of the top 10 funded projects of all time on Kickstarter and the most funded comics project of all time."

I've been self-publishing my comedy-fantasy-adventure webcomic The Order of the Stick in paper format since 2005, but one of the hardest parts about doing it all on my own is keeping the older books available. This project is designed to get at least one of those books back into print. The Order of the Stick: War and XPs was the third compilation of the color webcomic, covering a bunch of cool battle scenes like this and this and even this.

Comic "Order of the Stick" Kickstarter campaign breaks $350,000 (Thanks, Courtney!)

Homebrew Monster Manual

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 00:12:30 +0000

After seeing today's entry on a homebrew D&D module, Chris sends us his own addenda to the Monster Manual, lavishly illustrated with youthful zest.

My Monster Manual (Thanks, Chris!)

Homemade D&D module, 1981

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:00:48 +0000

Tim H sez, "A recent and amazing donation to the PlaGMaDA.org [ed: Play Generated Map and Document Archive] project: A beautiful, hand-made homebrew addition to the classic TSR Against the Giants series."

I wish I had the modules and monster sheets I painstakingly made in my youth. I used to cram them into envelopes and mail them, full of hope, to Dragon magazine. I suppose it's possible that they're in a filing cabinet at Hasbro or whomever ended up owning TSR's materials.

Habitition of the Stone Giant Lord (Thanks, Tim H!)

HOWTO typeset Call of Cthulhu spells to make them look like the scrawlings of a gibbering madman

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:28:53 +0000

Gnat sez, "The only thing cuter than this Game Master asking TeX gurus for help making his RPG notes 'look like they were scrawled by a gibbering madman, unhinged by the horrors he has witnessed' is the serious responses, with examples of output. He even got an answer saying how to typeset an Elder Sign! Truly, there is nothing more awesome than typesetting geeks helping gaming geeks."

I want to type up some spells from the RPG Call of Cthulhu and give them to my players. I could just type them up in Word or LaTeX, but that seems too....neat. I'd like to make these things look like they were scrawled by a gibbering madman, unhinged by the horrors he has witnessed. Bonus points if you can add any traces of H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.
Less poetically: Typefaces to make it look scrawled or handwritten, preferably with a quill or calligraphy pen. Ways to make the word spacing less regular (Abuse microtype in some way?) and ways to put in drop caps are the kind of things I'm looking for.
Bonus points if you can tell me how to typeset an elder sign.

How do I make my document look like it was written by an Cthulhu worshipping madman? (Thanks, Gnat!)