Hello everyone, Darryl here with this week's gaming news. The Diana Jones Award shortlist announced, Free RPG Day is this weekend, a live streaming marathon, EN World launches a podcast, Cyberpunk 2077 trailer debuts, and more!
The Diana Jones Award shortlist was announced today. This year’s nominees for the award are The 200 Word RPG Challenge, “Actual Play” (the recording and/or streaming of play sessions of tabletop games), the academic journal Analog Game Studies, the board game Charterstone, and the Call of Cthulhu/Gumshoe sourcebook Harlem Unbound. The Diana Jones Award is given to a single recipient each year, founded in 2001 and named after the half-destroyed copy of a TSR Indiana Jones module used as a trophy. The award will be presented at an industry-only event on Wednesday, August 1, in the lead-in to Gen Con.
Free RPG Day is this Saturday, June 16, 2018! At participating game stores, you can pick up free roleplaying products, including some previews of upcoming games. This year’s products include products for Unknown Armies 3, Pathfinder, Starfinder, Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, Munchkin, Warhammer 40K: Wrath & Glory, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Tunnels & Trolls, Numenera, Overlight, Kids on Bikes, Call of Cthulhu, Dungeons & Dragons, Delta Green/Cthulhu Confidential, and more. You can get more details from participating game stores, which you can find using the Free RPG Day retailer locator.
Pre-orders for the new edition of Legend of the Five Rings are now available from Fantasy Flight Games. Like other FFG roleplaying releases, Legend of the Five Rings is getting a Beginner Game that includes four pre-generated characters, an adventure, introductory rules set, tokens, the custom dice required to play, and a map of Rokugan. The boxed set is available for an MSRP of $39.95. The core rulebook will contain all the rules needed to run and play the game, coming in at 336 pages with an MSRP of $49.95. A Gamemaster’s Kit will also be available that includes a GM screen and an adventure set in Slow Tide Harbor. Finally, a dice set including the ten custom six and twelve-sided dice required to play will be available for an MSRP of $12.95 along with a dice app available for iOS and Android. As Fantasy Flight normally does, there is no firm release date at this time, only a release window of “third quarter 2018” for all products. If you can’t wait and would like a peek at the new edition, last year’s playtest “Beta Rules” are still available for free on DriveThruRPG in PDF.
While sometimes it’s new beginnings, other times it’s endings. Fantasy Flight announced that the Android: Netrunner living card game line will end after October 22, 2018. The card game was originally based on the Cyberpunk 2020 licensed collectible card game Netrunner, designed by Richard Garfield and published by Wizards of the Coast. Following the bust of the CCG bubble of the 1990s, the game went out of print until the license was purchased by Fantasy Flight Games and rebundled as a living card game in 2012, set in the Android universe rather than R. Talsorian’s Cyberpunk. The final product for Android: Netrunner will be Reign and Reverie, along with a final organized play event continuing until the license period ends. This loss of the license will only affect the living card game and accessories such as playmats and card sleeves, but will not affect Fantasy Flight’s other games set in the Android universe.
EN World’s own Morrus officially launched Morrus’ Unofficial Tabletop RPG Talk, a new podcast featuring EN World editor Russ “Morrus” Morrissey along with co-host Peter Coffey, director of Dream Park Southampton. The pilot episode, titled “Pilot Episode”, discusses new RPG releases, the Pathfinder 2nd Edition playtest, the new announcements from Wizards of the Coast for Dungeons & Dragons, Kickstarters and other crowdfunding live now, and GM advice from questions submitted by listeners (well, technically the questions weren’t submitted by “listeners” because they weren’t listeners yet since there wasn’t a podcast, but there was a call for questions put out on Twitter so close enough). You can find the show on Podbean, subscribe on iTunes, through your favorite podcasting app or program, on YouTube, or via the RSS feed. And feel free to leave a comment saying how wonderful the sound mixing and editing are and heap loads of praise upon whoever stayed up until 1 AM last night putting it together (it was me, I did the post-production work for the podcast).
If you heard a strange noise Sunday afternoon, it was me screaming for joy when the Microsoft E3 panel was “hacked” and the first full trailer for Cyberpunk 2077 premiered. Based on the R. Talsorian Games roleplaying game Cyberpunk, the game from Witcher developers CD Projekt Red is the first mainstream AAA video game licensed from a tabletop roleplaying game since Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines. And this isn’t an in-name-only adaptation either, as the video game will use the same attributes as the tabletop system and an updated version of the Lifepath character creation. It’s not surprising that the theme and tone as well as the mechanics are carrying over, as Cyberpunk creator Mike Pondsmith is heavily involved in the process. There is no release date yet for the game (though the first teaser trailer premiered in 2013 which was the year the first edition was set, while the second edition was set in 2020), but it can be pre-ordered on Amazon for Xbox One. Excitement for the game has also driven sales of the roleplaying game, as the Amazon Marketplace for used copies of the game’s second edition, Cyberpunk 2020, are now selling for over $100. If you’re wanting to relive the age of retro-future cyberpunk, I’d recommend buying the version on sale for $15 in PDF or $30 in softcover from Drive Thru RPG.
Saving Throw Show will be running their annual twenty-four hour marathon streaming event this weekend benefiting the Alzheimer’s Association. The stream starts on Friday, June 15, at 8:00 PM Pacific with their Wildcards Deadlands Reloaded stream and will continue into the evening on Saturday, June 16. Games include Shadowrun Anarchy, Dread, a Jurassic Park hack of Lasers and Feelings, a Savage Worlds adventure set in the world of Harry Potter one hundred years after the defeat of Voldemort, and the stream will close out with a game GMed by the Twitch chat! I was actually surprised with how well that worked when they tried it last year, with chat choosing character concepts and plot twists through polls. You can watch the stream live on Twitch on the SavingThrowShow channel linked above, or watch and donate through the SavingThrowShow Tiltify page.
Humble’s latest book bundle is 5e Dungeons, Hordes, & Horrors with over $381 worth of 5e compatible adventures and sourcebooks. The $1 level gets you three PDF game books, a world map of the Lost Lands setting, and a 30% off coupon for Kobold Press, Frog God, or Troll Lord Games. The $8 level adds another twelve books, including Prepared 2 from Kobold Press that has a dozen one-shot adventures for 5e. The $15 level gets you an extra seventeen more books and a pack of poster maps in PDF format and the Items Wondrous Strange book of magic items and treasure. The bundle runs until Wednesday, June 27, and benefits the Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society.
Dragonscales Fantasy RPG is a roleplaying game from James M. Ward and Fireside Creations. The game is set in “far away astral dimensions” in a war between heroes and dragons. The game uses the “Ward Card System”, which involves drawing cards from a deck of playing cards, one for the GM and one shared by the players. Black cards indicate a negative result while red cards cause a positive result. The PDF is available for a $25 pledge, a physical softcover copy for $45, and a premium hardcover edition for $50. This project just launched and is still short of its initial funding goal, but has plenty of time to fund as it runs until Monday, July 9.
The Board Game Book is pretty much what it says on the tin. This hardcover coffee table book features professional photography of different hobbyist board games including The Resistance, Pandemic, Dixit, Sakura, Stuffed Fables, and more in its over 250 pages. Each game is also profiled by industry professionals and journalists with detailed write-ups about the games. A digital copy is available for £14 (about US$19) and a hardcover for £20 (about US27), with other reward levels for sponsorships or consultations with designers. This project is also only about two-thirds of the way to its funding goal, but has three weeks to fund as it runs until Thursday, July 5.
That’s all from me for this week! Find more gaming crowdfunding news by following our Kickstarter news tag, and don’t forget to support our Patreon to bring you more gaming news content. If you have any news to submit, email us at news@enworldnews.com. You can follow me on Twitter @Abstruse where I live-tweeted my squeezing over Cyberpunk 2077, watch me live-stream Dragon Age: Origins on my Twitch channel, follow Gamer’s Tavern on YouTube featuring videos on gaming history and gaming Let’s Plays, or you can listen to the archives of the Gamer’s Tavern podcast. Until next time, may all your hits be crits! Note: Links to Amazon, Humble Store, Humble Bundle, and/or DriveThru may contain affiliate links with the proceeds going to the author of this column.
The Diana Jones Award shortlist was announced today. This year’s nominees for the award are The 200 Word RPG Challenge, “Actual Play” (the recording and/or streaming of play sessions of tabletop games), the academic journal Analog Game Studies, the board game Charterstone, and the Call of Cthulhu/Gumshoe sourcebook Harlem Unbound. The Diana Jones Award is given to a single recipient each year, founded in 2001 and named after the half-destroyed copy of a TSR Indiana Jones module used as a trophy. The award will be presented at an industry-only event on Wednesday, August 1, in the lead-in to Gen Con.
Free RPG Day is this Saturday, June 16, 2018! At participating game stores, you can pick up free roleplaying products, including some previews of upcoming games. This year’s products include products for Unknown Armies 3, Pathfinder, Starfinder, Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, Munchkin, Warhammer 40K: Wrath & Glory, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Tunnels & Trolls, Numenera, Overlight, Kids on Bikes, Call of Cthulhu, Dungeons & Dragons, Delta Green/Cthulhu Confidential, and more. You can get more details from participating game stores, which you can find using the Free RPG Day retailer locator.
Pre-orders for the new edition of Legend of the Five Rings are now available from Fantasy Flight Games. Like other FFG roleplaying releases, Legend of the Five Rings is getting a Beginner Game that includes four pre-generated characters, an adventure, introductory rules set, tokens, the custom dice required to play, and a map of Rokugan. The boxed set is available for an MSRP of $39.95. The core rulebook will contain all the rules needed to run and play the game, coming in at 336 pages with an MSRP of $49.95. A Gamemaster’s Kit will also be available that includes a GM screen and an adventure set in Slow Tide Harbor. Finally, a dice set including the ten custom six and twelve-sided dice required to play will be available for an MSRP of $12.95 along with a dice app available for iOS and Android. As Fantasy Flight normally does, there is no firm release date at this time, only a release window of “third quarter 2018” for all products. If you can’t wait and would like a peek at the new edition, last year’s playtest “Beta Rules” are still available for free on DriveThruRPG in PDF.
While sometimes it’s new beginnings, other times it’s endings. Fantasy Flight announced that the Android: Netrunner living card game line will end after October 22, 2018. The card game was originally based on the Cyberpunk 2020 licensed collectible card game Netrunner, designed by Richard Garfield and published by Wizards of the Coast. Following the bust of the CCG bubble of the 1990s, the game went out of print until the license was purchased by Fantasy Flight Games and rebundled as a living card game in 2012, set in the Android universe rather than R. Talsorian’s Cyberpunk. The final product for Android: Netrunner will be Reign and Reverie, along with a final organized play event continuing until the license period ends. This loss of the license will only affect the living card game and accessories such as playmats and card sleeves, but will not affect Fantasy Flight’s other games set in the Android universe.
EN World’s own Morrus officially launched Morrus’ Unofficial Tabletop RPG Talk, a new podcast featuring EN World editor Russ “Morrus” Morrissey along with co-host Peter Coffey, director of Dream Park Southampton. The pilot episode, titled “Pilot Episode”, discusses new RPG releases, the Pathfinder 2nd Edition playtest, the new announcements from Wizards of the Coast for Dungeons & Dragons, Kickstarters and other crowdfunding live now, and GM advice from questions submitted by listeners (well, technically the questions weren’t submitted by “listeners” because they weren’t listeners yet since there wasn’t a podcast, but there was a call for questions put out on Twitter so close enough). You can find the show on Podbean, subscribe on iTunes, through your favorite podcasting app or program, on YouTube, or via the RSS feed. And feel free to leave a comment saying how wonderful the sound mixing and editing are and heap loads of praise upon whoever stayed up until 1 AM last night putting it together (it was me, I did the post-production work for the podcast).
If you heard a strange noise Sunday afternoon, it was me screaming for joy when the Microsoft E3 panel was “hacked” and the first full trailer for Cyberpunk 2077 premiered. Based on the R. Talsorian Games roleplaying game Cyberpunk, the game from Witcher developers CD Projekt Red is the first mainstream AAA video game licensed from a tabletop roleplaying game since Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines. And this isn’t an in-name-only adaptation either, as the video game will use the same attributes as the tabletop system and an updated version of the Lifepath character creation. It’s not surprising that the theme and tone as well as the mechanics are carrying over, as Cyberpunk creator Mike Pondsmith is heavily involved in the process. There is no release date yet for the game (though the first teaser trailer premiered in 2013 which was the year the first edition was set, while the second edition was set in 2020), but it can be pre-ordered on Amazon for Xbox One. Excitement for the game has also driven sales of the roleplaying game, as the Amazon Marketplace for used copies of the game’s second edition, Cyberpunk 2020, are now selling for over $100. If you’re wanting to relive the age of retro-future cyberpunk, I’d recommend buying the version on sale for $15 in PDF or $30 in softcover from Drive Thru RPG.
Saving Throw Show will be running their annual twenty-four hour marathon streaming event this weekend benefiting the Alzheimer’s Association. The stream starts on Friday, June 15, at 8:00 PM Pacific with their Wildcards Deadlands Reloaded stream and will continue into the evening on Saturday, June 16. Games include Shadowrun Anarchy, Dread, a Jurassic Park hack of Lasers and Feelings, a Savage Worlds adventure set in the world of Harry Potter one hundred years after the defeat of Voldemort, and the stream will close out with a game GMed by the Twitch chat! I was actually surprised with how well that worked when they tried it last year, with chat choosing character concepts and plot twists through polls. You can watch the stream live on Twitch on the SavingThrowShow channel linked above, or watch and donate through the SavingThrowShow Tiltify page.
Humble’s latest book bundle is 5e Dungeons, Hordes, & Horrors with over $381 worth of 5e compatible adventures and sourcebooks. The $1 level gets you three PDF game books, a world map of the Lost Lands setting, and a 30% off coupon for Kobold Press, Frog God, or Troll Lord Games. The $8 level adds another twelve books, including Prepared 2 from Kobold Press that has a dozen one-shot adventures for 5e. The $15 level gets you an extra seventeen more books and a pack of poster maps in PDF format and the Items Wondrous Strange book of magic items and treasure. The bundle runs until Wednesday, June 27, and benefits the Navy-Marine Corps Relief Society.
Dragonscales Fantasy RPG is a roleplaying game from James M. Ward and Fireside Creations. The game is set in “far away astral dimensions” in a war between heroes and dragons. The game uses the “Ward Card System”, which involves drawing cards from a deck of playing cards, one for the GM and one shared by the players. Black cards indicate a negative result while red cards cause a positive result. The PDF is available for a $25 pledge, a physical softcover copy for $45, and a premium hardcover edition for $50. This project just launched and is still short of its initial funding goal, but has plenty of time to fund as it runs until Monday, July 9.
The Board Game Book is pretty much what it says on the tin. This hardcover coffee table book features professional photography of different hobbyist board games including The Resistance, Pandemic, Dixit, Sakura, Stuffed Fables, and more in its over 250 pages. Each game is also profiled by industry professionals and journalists with detailed write-ups about the games. A digital copy is available for £14 (about US$19) and a hardcover for £20 (about US27), with other reward levels for sponsorships or consultations with designers. This project is also only about two-thirds of the way to its funding goal, but has three weeks to fund as it runs until Thursday, July 5.
That’s all from me for this week! Find more gaming crowdfunding news by following our Kickstarter news tag, and don’t forget to support our Patreon to bring you more gaming news content. If you have any news to submit, email us at news@enworldnews.com. You can follow me on Twitter @Abstruse where I live-tweeted my squeezing over Cyberpunk 2077, watch me live-stream Dragon Age: Origins on my Twitch channel, follow Gamer’s Tavern on YouTube featuring videos on gaming history and gaming Let’s Plays, or you can listen to the archives of the Gamer’s Tavern podcast. Until next time, may all your hits be crits! Note: Links to Amazon, Humble Store, Humble Bundle, and/or DriveThru may contain affiliate links with the proceeds going to the author of this column.
