Black Gate

Hades (Supergiant Games, 2021)

When I looked at the list of Hugo winners this past week, I was thrilled to see one of my favorite video games had won for Best Video Game.

(And then I froze and said, “Wait, there’s a Hugo for video games??” Answer: yes! This was the first year an award was given for Best Video Game, and it was proposed as a special award category. The last two years have seen a sharp rise in the video game market as first time gamers and previously casual gamers suddenly found themselves with a lot more time and a need for both entertainment and a new way to connect with others. Hopefully, this will be established as a continuing award category for the WSFS, but time will tell.)

Hades, developed and published by Supergiant Games, now carries the honor of being either the first or the sole winner of this category, and it solidly deserves it. Is it the best game in the last twenty years? No. There are bigger, grander, more ambitious games out there. Dragon Age comes to mind (Origins or Inquisition, anyway), as do Skyrim and Call of Duty. But with that conceded, Hades is absolutely a worthy Hugo-bearer. Why?

…

Read More Read More

In this journey exploring the Twilight: 2000’s first edition adventures and supplements, we have two remaining items (other than the supplements of weapons and vehicles) that address the state of the United States and United Kingdom. Both are supplemental releases that allow players and referees (gamemasters) to conduct adventures and campaigns.

The Survivor’s Guide to the United Kingdom is the only official supplement by the late GDW that covers the isles. And the situation is not good in the old country.

…

Read More Read More

In the RPG by GDW released in 1984, Twilight: 2000, the action starts in Europe, specifically Poland. The players, members of the US Army’s 5th Mechanized Division, find themselves stranded in enemy territory when the last major offensive of World War III flounders and then implodes. The world inched across the line of nuclear holocaust. The American, Soviet, German, and Polish governments are hardly worthy of the name “government.”

The adventures and setting information that GDW published in subsequent releases favor heavily game play in Eastern Europe and then the war-shattered United States. While excursions to Greece and Norway are to be found, for the most part, players wander Poland, Czechoslovakia, and perhaps Ukraine in an effort to simply survive and find a way home — even if that is making a new home.

…

Read More Read More

The Gaean Reach and The Gaean Reach Gazetteer (Pelgrane Press, 2014). Covers by Chris Huth

The great Jack Vance doesn’t get a lot of love from role players. Despite his huge influence on the field (Gygax based the fundamental cast-and-forget spellcasting system of Dungeons and Dragons on the Vancian magic system the author developed for his Dying Earth tales, just as an example), there aren’t a lot of ways to use dice to explore the wonderful worlds Vance created.

Twenty years ago Pelgrane Press released The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game by Robin D. Laws, which went a long to rectifying this artistic injustice. More recently Laws and Pelgrane Press took the versatile Gumshoe System, designed for running investigative games like Trail of Cthulhu and Ashen Stars, and used it as the basis for The Gaean Reach, a science fiction RPG set in the lusciously detailed setting for much of Vance’s best science fiction, including The Demon Princes novels, the Cadwal Chronicles, the Alastor Cluster trilogy, and the Ports of Call novels.

…

Read More Read More

Player and gamemasters (GMs) of tabletop roleplaying games often refer to “crunch.” This is in reference to how the mechanics of the game work, and generally (though I suspect some folks will fight me on this), a crunchier game has more context-based rules. For example, the least crunchiest game is someone roles a 20-sided die and no matter what, if it rolls above 10, it is always a success. You start adding crunch to it when the rules start to say, “okay, not modify that roll by +2 for attempting to break a grapple or -1 if doing the task in the dark.” Games can get crunchy in a whole lot of ways (lots of rules for various situations–looking at you Starfinder). Some go way crunchy (an example of an extreme crunchy game is Dystopia 23, see my article here).

In the early 2000s, games tended to get more complex and crunchier and a “movement” referred to as the OSR, or old-school revival (sometimes old-school renaissance), crept into the tabletop gaming community. Originally hearkening back to the supposed simpler days of tabletop RPGs in the early 70s (okay, the early days of Dungeons & Dragons), the movement’s core can best be summed up in “rulings over rules.”

…

Read More Read More

Twilight 2000: Return to Warsaw (GDW, 1989)

Twilight: 2000, GDW’s mid 1980s post-apocalyptic roleplaying game, started out in Europe. The players, part of the US Army’s 5th Division, hear their commander’s last, chilling words: “You’re on your own. Good luck.” Trapped in Poland and far away from friendly lines, the players are presumed to want to return to the United States, where they believe conditions may be better.

The major powers in the conflict portrayed in Twilight: 2000 inched across nuclear apocalypse, and amongst the ruins of devastated cities, blasted landscapes, and radioactive craters, the players encounter groups of armed thugs, petty warlords, families struggling to survive, disease, and a host of other ills. But always a drip of hope.

…

Read More Read More

The Last Submarine (GDW, 1988)

Twilight: 2000 the 1980s tabletop Roleplaying game by GDW started with the players stranded behind enemy lines in Poland with the disintegration of the last major offensive of World War III. The first six published adventures, referred to as the Polish Campaign, deal with the players attempting to find passage back to the United States.

Twilight: 2000’s setting takes place after the US and USSR have exchanged nuclear strikes, inching across the nuclear apocalypse. Players find themselves in the midst of society breaking down — with pockets and dreams of hope and recovery. Once back in the US, they learn not all is well. The country has split into many semi-independent states, governing bodies, and anarchy. The military and remnants of the civilian government are competing for legitimacy and control. It seems only fitting that a trilogy of adventures, The Last Submarine Campaign, should see the players returning to Europe.

…

Read More Read More

I have heard it said that a number of the central ideas in James S. A. Corey’s The Expanse series were first developed for a tabletop RPG campaign (a series of adventures that usually tell a coherent story arc). I have been unable to validate this, but one find any number of chats positing the game they were playing. And the Foreword for The Expanse RPG does say “for a long run, it was a roleplaying game campaign.” Which RPG, I have not heard definitively stated.

James S. A. Corey is the pen name of authors Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham. What we do know for certain is that they originally pitched The Expanse for an MMPORG (I’m assuming something akin to World of Warcraft). Failing that, they hoped to make a tabletop RPG, and then decided to write the novels, the first of which was Leviathan Wakes in 2011. The ninth and final novel of the series, Leviathan Falls, releases in November this year. The series has exploded in popularity, spawning eight stories and novellas (the last of which is will appear in March 2022), a TV series (entering the sixth and final season in December on Amazon Prime), a board game, comics, and — yes — its own tabletop RPG. Full circle in a way.

…

Read More Read More