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Unearthed Adventures: Announcing the Winners of the Best One-Paragraph D&D Adventures

Unearthed Adventures: Announcing the Winners of the Best One-Paragraph D&D Adventures

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unearthed arcanaLast month we announced a contest seeking the best one-paragraph descriptions of your favorite D&D characters.

Because we’re awesome (and because we’re tight with Wizards of the Coast, who are even more awesome), we secured a very special reward for four lucky winners: a copy of the brand new Unearthed Arcana 1st Edition Premium Reprint — which we first examined here. Those four names were drawn at random from the ten best entries, as selected by our judges.

Before we get to the winners, let’s enjoy some of the best entries. First up is Daniel J. Davis:

When I created my first character, a Minotaur warrior named Glokk Maghorn, I rolled an 18/00 for strength. I couldn’t have been happier. At the time, I was an almost perfect stereotype of the “typical” D&D player. I was smaller and weaker than most kids my age. I was uncoordinated, awkward, and bullied. But in the land of Krynn, I was going to be an 8-foot tall mercenary beast man with a battle-axe and a loose definition of “fair play.” I didn’t care one whit about my low charisma score. I spent most of my waking life trying to compromise and bargain with people big enough to wipe the floor with me. This was D&D, and I was going to bash some heads for a change. I retired him at 15th level, after his crowning moment of awesome: Failing a saving throw against a white dragon’s breath weapon, surviving with a single hit point, and finishing it off with a critical hit on my very next action.

Any story involving an 8-foot Minotaur whose name rhymes with Foghorn Leghorn is an instant classic in our book. Nice one, Daniel.

Next up is John Burt, who found a more noble motivation for his character: petty larceny.

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Earn Your Gold Honestly in Valdora — By Digging For It

Earn Your Gold Honestly in Valdora — By Digging For It

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valdora gameOn March 10, I attended the Spring Auction at Games Plus in Mount Prospect, IL. I went chiefly in search of select fantasy games I’ve had my eye on for some time… but also in the hope of a surprise or two.

It didn’t take long to get what I wished for, at least in terms of surprises. I wasn’t in my seat ten minutes when an eye-catching box with three obvious adventurers on the cover came up for bid.

What the heck was this? The cover art — with snow-capped mountains, a medieval walled town, and three young lads decked out in standard issue dungeon-exploring garb — spoke of an adventure game, but I’d never heard of it. The box looked substantial (and expensive), and it appeared to be in great shape, but there’s only so much you can tell sitting in a metal chair at an auction.

Bidding was brisk, and I didn’t have much time to make up my mind. I took a chance, and seven seconds (and 15 bucks) later a nearly-new copy of Valdora was mine. Here’s what I found on the back when I was able to examine it:

Hidden far away from our time lies a valley of unimaginable riches. Drawn by the lure of gold, silver, and precious jewels, adventurers from all over the world soon find their way there. While some of them still carefully choose commissions and provisions, others quickly rush off to bring valuable gems back to their patrons. But those who wish for fame and fortune will have to be cleverer than their opponents!

Peeking through the box there seems to be a dearth of dungeons, but plenty of Settlers of Catan-like strategy, with players working to acquire tools, complete commissions, and control workshops. Looks like you have to earn your gold and gems the old-fashioned way: by earning them. The components — including a colorful and detailed game board, gemstones, cards, tiles, coins, pawns, a sturdy fabric bag, and four wooden books — are excellent. It looks like a solid family game that I can force all of my children to play with me.

Valdora was designed by Michael Schacht and published by ABACUSSPIELE/Rio Grande Games. It was released in 2009, and has a list price of $74.99 — which makes my auction purchase at $15 a real bargain. Score another point for the Paris Fashion Week of Games.

Tomb of Horrors Gets a Fourth Edition Makeover

Tomb of Horrors Gets a Fourth Edition Makeover

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Tomb of Horrors 4th EditionOne of the more intriguing treasures I brought home from the Paris Fashion Week of Games last week was the compact new edition of Gary Gygax’s famous player-killer Tomb of Horrors.

Now, if you don’t play role playing games yet still find the name Tomb of Horrors oddly familiar, it’s probably because it’s a touchstone of considerable significance in geek culture and you’ve come across one of the many modern references to it. Most recently, for example, it featured in Ernest Cline’s best-selling novel Ready Player One, which is set in a virtual reality world created by a fan of Tomb of Horrors. Or maybe your older brother’s beloved 10th-level paladin was killed by an unspeakable thing 20 minutes after he set foot inside the Tomb, and he’s been suffering from PTSD ever since, muttering the name Acererak and shuddering uncontrollably.

The original Tomb of Horrors was released in 1978; it’s one of the best-selling Dungeons and Dragons adventure modules of all time. I’m not sure why, to be completely honest. You don’t have fun playing Tomb of Horrors, exactly. And it has certainly killed far, far more player characters than it has rewarded. You know the phrase “Bad things happen to good people?” It was first spoken by the few, shell-shocked survivors of Tomb of Horrors.

Despite — or perhaps because of — its killer rep, the module is still highly regarded today, and has been remade and expanded several times, most recently as a 4th Edition hardcover by Ari Marmell and Scott Fitzgerald Gray in July 2010. This isn’t that version. This is a bare-bones conversion of the original adventure for 4th Edition rules, written by Scott Fitzgerald Gray and mailed out to members of the RPGA as part of the DM Rewards program. Instead of the separate art booklet — one of the most famous features of the original release, which allowed players to gawk in wonder at detailed renderings of the horrific things that had just killed them — this edition incorporates most of the original art into the body of the module. The cover is also recycled from the 2002 Greyhawk novel of the same name by Keith Francis Strohm (which we last discussed in “The Seven Greyhawk Classics of the Ancient World,” here).

For all that, it’s still fun to sit down and re-read Gygax’s original sadistic masterpiece again. The layout is clean and attractive, and the map of Acererak’s tomb has been given new life as a detailed color fold-out. Since it was never offered to retailers it’s a little tricky to find, however, and prices vary widely. As it was originally offered for free, some folks re-sell it at a reasonable price; but the average asking price I found on eBay was just over $50. I paid $7 for a shrinkwraped copy at auction.

Tomb of Horrors, by Gary Gygax and Scott Fitzgerald Gray, was published by Wizards of the Coast in 2010. It is a 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons adventure for five 9th-level characters. It is 36 pages in softcover, with a loose cardstock cover and a fold-out color map. It has no price.

Releasing This Week: Warhammer 40K: Relic From Fantasy Flight Games

Releasing This Week: Warhammer 40K: Relic From Fantasy Flight Games

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Game Designers Workshop and Fantasy Flight — the folks behind the superb Rogue Trader and Dark Heresy role playing games — have teamed up once again to release Relic, an intriguing new board game set in the Warhammer 40,000 universe.

Based on the streamlined (and well-honed) mechanics of the Talisman fantasy games, Relic allows two to four players to assume the role of powerful Imperial heroes, and bravely venture forth to protect the Antian Sector. By completing card-based missions and defeating dangerous enemies of the Imperium — including Nurgling Swarms, Fallen Inquisitors, Ork Vulcha squads, and even a Tyranid Hive-ship — characters compete to gain rewards and experience, increasing their chances to advance and ultimately be the first to defeat the evil that lies beyond the Warp rift. See all the details in the compact video run-through below.

Relic was published today, Mar 18, 2013, by Fantasy Flight, under license from Games Workshop. The game contains a game board, 10 plastic character pieces and character sheets, mysterious attribute and life dials, more than 300 cards, tokens, 4 six-sided dice, and a handsome rulebook. It retails for $59.95.

Weird of Oz Revisits Fighting Fantasy

Weird of Oz Revisits Fighting Fantasy

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0426111757Rogue Blades Entertainment continues to put out fine new projects — though, I lament, with far less frequency than in days of yore.

Also in those days of yore (about two years ago, to be precise), for a brief, shining, halcyon period of time (a few months, to be precise), RBE hosted a website that ran regular blogs under the banner “Home of Heroics.” It was my good fortune to be invited into HoH’s stable of bloggers, and I made a couple contributions before that heroism-vaunting home vanished like the fabled city of Xanadu. I only got in two or three posts, mind you, because I was on a monthly rotation rather than the weekly slot I enjoy here on Black Gate.

One of those posts that I wanted eventually to follow up on was an account of my experience revisiting Fighting Fantasy gamebooks. My report touched off similar nostalgic reminiscences from several readers.

Since, as far as I can tell, the material that ran on HoH is no longer accessible, I’d like to use this St. Patrick’s Day edition of Weird of Oz to resurrect that post here — with an eye to reviewing other single-player gamebooks down the road.

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Last Chance to Win One of Four New Copies of the Unearthed Arcana 1st Edition Premium Reprint

Last Chance to Win One of Four New Copies of the Unearthed Arcana 1st Edition Premium Reprint

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unearthed arcanaTwo weeks ago, we announced a contest to win one of four new copies of the Unearthed Arcana 1st Edition Premium Reprint, compliments of Wizards of the Coast.

How do you enter? Easy — by doing exactly what you’re doing already: telling complete strangers all about your D&D adventures.

Just send an e-mail to john@blackgate.com with a one-paragraph summary of your most memorable D&D or AD&D characters. Points will be awarded for conciseness and originality. We’ll publish the best here at Black Gate, and the Top Ten as decided by our judges will be included in a drawing for one of four copies of the new Unearthed Arcana 1st Edition Premium Reprint.

These WotC Premium Reprints have become quite the hot property, incidentally. The first three — the Players Handbook, Dungeon Masters Guide, and Monster Manual — are already sold out and out of print, and I strongly suspect the same will happen to this one. The upcoming volume Dungeons of Dread is perhaps the most interesting one yet, as it collects the first four adventures in the S Series — Tomb of Horrors, White Plume Mountain, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, and The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth — complete with the original b&w interior art.

All entries become the property of New Epoch Press. No purchase necessary. Must be 12 or older. Decisions of the judges (capricious as they may be) are final. Terms and conditions subject to change as our lawyers sober up and get back to us. Not valid where prohibited by law. Or anywhere postage for a hefty hardcover is more than, like, 10 bucks. Good luck!

Kickstarter Alert: Dungeon Roll Dice Game

Kickstarter Alert: Dungeon Roll Dice Game

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DungeonRoll-bitsTasty Minstrel Game’s latest Kickstarter project has blown away funding goals and, with a week left, looks to be one of the best Kickstarter deals that I’ve seen in quite some time. This game is basically a dice-based dungeon crawl in a box (a treasure box, no less … and a mimic box for Kickstarters!) that has 7 days to go as of this writing (funds at 1:00 am Eastern on March 20).

The basic gameplay (as demonstrated in this video) is that you’re rolling a group of Dungeon Dice to get the monsters on a given level of the dungeon and then the Party Dice to try to get a combination that can beat the monsters. The different faces of the Party Dice get different benefits against given monsters, such as a Wizard on the Party Dice being able to destroy all of the Oozes with a single attack. The Heroes can modify the basic rules (the first 5 Heroes are shown on the video here). The goal is to get treasure and experience, making your way through the dungeon.

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Vintage Treasures: Shadows of Yog-Sothoth

Vintage Treasures: Shadows of Yog-Sothoth

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Shadows of Yog SothothLast week I wrote about the death of Lynn Willis, the legendary editor at Chaosium, who gradually became the mastermind behind Call of Cthulhu, one of the finest RPGs ever made. While at Chaosium Lynn helped write and edit no less than 54 Call of Cthulhu books and supplements like Cthulhu by Gaslight, as well as a host of other board games and products, including Arkham Horror, RuneQuest, Thieves’ World, King Arthur Companion, Stormbringer Companion, Carse, Tulan of the Isles, Atlas of the Young Kingdoms, and dozens more.

In honor of Lynn, I dug around this week to find those products that first captured my attention all those years ago. They weren’t hard to find, as they still occupy a place of pride in my collection.

When Sandy Peterson’s Call of Cthulhu was first released as a boxed set in 1981, the entire industry took notice. Here was the first truly appealing contemporary (or, at least, semi-contemporary) role playing game, which drew on the horrifying cosmic milieu and fabulous bestiary of none other than H.P. Lovecraft. It was an instant hit. But by itself, Call of Cthulhu was just a fascinating oddity. It wasn’t until Chaosium released Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, A Global Campaign to Save Mankind a year later that we realized what the game was truly capable of.

Shadows of Yog-Sothoth is an epic, self-contained campaign which first introduced role players to the kind of play demanded by CoC. Players who treated Cthulhu and his minions as simply big D&D monsters, chubby creatures ready to be harvested for their experience point value, were in for a rude awakening.

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New Treasures: The Merriest Knight, The Collected Arthurian Tales of Theodore Goodridge Roberts

New Treasures: The Merriest Knight, The Collected Arthurian Tales of Theodore Goodridge Roberts

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AppleMarkYesterday, I spent the day at the Spring Auction at Games Plus, which I’ve taken to calling the Paris Fashion Week of Games. It was a very successful outing — so successful that I knew I had some explaining to do to Alice, who balances the family finances.

While I was waiting to settle up with the cashier, my eyes fell on a curious artifact in the tiny books section at Games Plus: The Merriest Knight, The Collected Arthurian Tales of Theodore Goodridge Roberts. Roberts was a Canadian pulp author whose tales of Sir Dinadan, whom Mallory called “the merriest knight,” appeared in the pulp magazine Blue Book in the 50s. Sir Dinadan was known as the most practical of the Knights of the Round Table, and Roberts’s stories differed from many of the Arthurian tales of the era in their warmth and wit.

Late in his career, Roberts wrote a final entry in the Dinadan saga, “Quest’s End,” which remained unpublished in his lifetime. Rumor had it he’d also begun collecting all the tales with an eye towards publishing a book, but the project remained unfinished when he died.

Now the peerless Mike Ashley, who’s edited countless anthologies — including 32 books in The Mammoth Book Of... series, and five other Arthurian Anthologies, such as The Pendragon Chronicles and Chronicles of the Holy Grail — has finished what Roberts began with The Merriest Knight, a beautiful collection of the complete tales of Sir Dinadan:

Under the guidance of editor Mike Ashley, The Merriest Knight gathers for the first time all of Roberts’ tales of Sir Dinadan — including the previously unpublished “Quest’s End” — and several other long lost Arthurian works by this master of the stylish adventure yarn and the historical romance. Within these pages, readers will find a collection of Arthurian tales that are sometimes poignant, often humorous, and always ingenious, as well as a Camelot made fresh by the wry and often scathing eye of Sir Dinadan, who never rushes into battle without first being certain of the need to fight at all.

Why is The Merriest Knight for sale in a games store? Ah, that’s an entirely different tale.

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Oz Fluxx – A Great and Powerful Card Game

Oz Fluxx – A Great and Powerful Card Game

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ozfluxxA while back, the classic card game Fluxx got a makeover in an edition that merges the game with a classic film. This certainly isn’t its first makeover for Fluxx, nor even the first time it’s merged with a classic film (there is a Monty Python Fluxx, for example), but given that Oz: The Great and Powerful is hitting theaters today, the version of Fluxx I’m going to talk about is Oz Fluxx (Amazon).

If you’ve never played Fluxx, here are the basics:

  • The game continually changes, as players use Rule and Goal cards to modify every aspect of the game.
  • Rule cards can modify the number of cards drawn, number of cards played in a turn, overall hand size, and pretty much any other asp
  • Goal cards redefine the objectives needed to win.
  • Keepers are cards you keep in front of you. Most Goals involve getting a certain combination of Keepers in play to win. Examples from this game include “The Artificial Heart” and “The Cowardly Lion.”
  • Creepers (which are a type of card not in the original edition of Fluxx) are sort of negative Keepers, which get stuck in front of you and prevent you from winning … unless the Goal in play requires the Creeper as a condition of victory. Examples include “The Wicked Witch of the East” and “Angry Trees.”
  • Action cards allow other actions, such as drawing extra cards, getting cards out of the discard pile, stealing or trading Keepers and Creepers, and so on.
  • Surprise cards can be played either during your turn or on your opponents’ turn, to throw an even bigger wrench in your opponents’ expectations.

Probably the best way to get a feel for the game play is to watch this episode of Wil Wheaton’s Tabletop game on the YouTube channel Geek and Sundry, in which Wheaton and his friends play Star Fluxx. This edition of the game is based upon science fiction classics, most notably (and unofficially) Star Trek, although I believe there are some non-copyright-infringing shout-outs to Doctor Who and other classics as well.

But, back to Oz Fluxx …

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