Hello everyone, Darryl here with this week’s gaming news! WOIN Starter Set live on Kickstarter, Adventure Time RPG, Baldur’s Gate 3 release date moved, Chaosium announces new events, and more!
For a quick summary of the week’s news, Jessica Hancock will bring you up to speed with EN Live's This Week in TTRPG every Friday.
Don’t forget, you can keep up with all the week’s gaming news in detail with Morrus’ Unofficial Tabletop RPG Talk. This week, Morrus, Peter, and Jessica discuss whether metagaming is cheating.
In case you missed it elsewhere on EN World this week:
The EN Publishing Kickstarter campaign for the What’s OLD is NEW Starter Box is now live. What’s OLD is New (WOIN for short) is a d6 dice pool based system designed by our own Russ Morrissey as a generic system suitable for any setting you want to run in, whether it’s the OLD of fantasy and historical, the NOW of modern-day action, adventure, mystery, urban fantasy, or horror, or the NEW of science fiction and space opera. The boxed set includes a 68-page softcover rulebook with bestiary, three 20-page softcover adventures (one for each of the eras of OLD, NOW, and NEW), three double-sided poster-sized battlemaps (one for each adventure), over 60 carboard tokens for characters and monsters, 18 pre-generated characters (six for each adventure), and 8 six-sided dice so everything you need to play is in the box.
If you want a sneak peek at the boxed set, EN Publishing released previews of the pre-generated characters for each adventure: The Grey Fellowship of OLD, The Alpha Squad of NOW, and The Crew of the Starship Murphy for NEW. With your pledge, you also get a virtual tabletop asset pack with tokens and maps. And the WOIN System has system reference documents licensed under all three major open licenses: OGL, Creative Commons, and the new ORC License. The digital “box” set in PDF format is available for £10 (about US$13) while the physical box set is £24 (about US$31) and if you want to jump all the way in, you can get the starter set and all three stand-alone core rulebooks (OLD, NOW, and NEW) in PDF at the £50 (about US$64) and physical hardcovers for £120 (about US$153). The Kickstarter funded on its first day and will run until August 3, 2023.
Crpytozoic Entertainment announced the upcoming crowdfunding campaign for an officially licensed Adventure Time tabletop roleplaying game. The fantasy animated series ran for ten seasons on Cartoon Network, set in the post-apocalyptic Land of Ooo, ravaged by a cataclysmic event thousands of years in the past known as the “Mushroom War” (as in the mushroom cloud of a nuclear bomb). The series was heavily inspired by Dungeons & Dragons according to creator Pendleton Ward, and developed a massive fanbase over its eight-year run from 2010 to 2018. This new RPG will use a new game system called the Yes And System featuring custom dice and a storytelling approach. From the press release:
Adventure Time: The Roleplaying Game will come to Kickstarter in late summer 2023, and you can sign up now for notification when the project goes live.
Chaosium announced an upcoming Kickstarter for the Call of Cthulhu actual play series Graveyards of Arkham. The high production value series will be hosted by veteran voice actor Mark Meer as Keeper, best known for his role as the male Commander Shephard in the Mass Effect franchise as well as roles in Baldur’s Gate, Dragon Age, Neverwinter Nights, and more. The series will function as a sequel to the Bookshops of Arkham series released earlier this year.
Chaosium also announced the cast for the All-Star Call of Cthulhu event for Gen Con this year. Mark Meer will be the Keeper and joined by cosplayer and streamer Harli Kane, Geek & Sundry alum Josephine McAdam, RPG streamer Noura Ibrahim, and actor and streamer Luis Carazo. The event will take place at Gen Con in Indianapolis on Thursday, August 3 starting at 8 PM with tickets available for $8.00 from the Gen Con website.
The release date for Baldur’s Gate 3 has gotten a bit of a shuffle once again. Originally scheduled for an August 31 release, the game has been moved forward to August 3 on PC and pushed back on PS4 to September 6. Larian Studios stated the delay for PlayStation is to ensure the game will hit a stable 60 FPS framerate on the console and needed an extra week for final tweaks to reach that goal. Meanwhile, the PC version is “essentially ready to use”, so the release date was moved forward to August 3 to avoid the crowded release schedule including Bethesda’s sci-fi open world Starfield and the large Cyberpunk 2077 DLC expansion Phantom Liberty due in September. It also makes sense to want a bit of breathing room as creative director Swen Vincke revealed that the main campaign of Baldur’s Gate 3 will take 75-100 hours while a completionist playthrough will be around 200 hours. The game will also include 174 hours of cinematics as well, though due to the branching nature of the storyline and different player choices, the majority of players won’t seen even most of those cutscenes in a single playthrough. If you can’t wait until August 3 or September 6 to play, Larian launched the browser-based prequel game Blood in Baldur’s Gate taking place 15 years before the start of the game and places you and the rest of the community in charge of finding the murderer before time runs out.
The One Ring has been found, ending the hunt for the exclusive Magic: The Gathering card. A single variant of The One Ring card from the Universes Beyond: Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth expansion for Magic: The Gathering was printed in gold foil with the text written in the black speech of Mordor and marked with a “001/001” numbering to indicate only one was printed. While the owner of the card wishes to remain anonymous, the hobby store Maximum Cards and Collectibles in Whitby, Ontario, Canada, confirmed that the card was pulled by a relative of a regular at the store. The card was then placed in a bank vault, the owner secured legal representation, and arrangements were made to have the card graded by the PSA which it received at a grade of Mint 9. The owner is currently accepting serious offers for the card, which will likely be in the seven-figure range as the largest public bounty made so far was from the Valencia, Spain, retailer Gremio de Dragones who offered €2 million (about US$2.18 million) plus a free trip to Spain. Prior to the announcement the One Ring had been found, ICv2’s June 2023 sales rankings for sealed trading card products had the Lord of the Rings set taking up the top four spots and 12 of the 25 total listings. The amount of money involved makes it unlikely for the best result for the One Ring card, casting it into the fires of Mount Doom to rid the world of Sauron’s evil once and for all.
That’s all from me for this week! Don’t forget to support our Patreon to bring you more gaming news content. 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.
For a quick summary of the week’s news, Jessica Hancock will bring you up to speed with EN Live's This Week in TTRPG every Friday.
Don’t forget, you can keep up with all the week’s gaming news in detail with Morrus’ Unofficial Tabletop RPG Talk. This week, Morrus, Peter, and Jessica discuss whether metagaming is cheating.
In case you missed it elsewhere on EN World this week:
- EN5ider #523 is a new Monstrous Menagerie, Myriad Mages featuring a collection of new spellcasting NPCs ready for your 5e games.
- Beth Rimmels got her hands on the Beadle & Grimm premium box set for the D&D adventure Keys from the Golden Vault.
- Rob Wieland takes a look at the English language version of the Italian diceless storytelling game Not The End.
- Charles Dunwoody interviewed designer Paul Mitchener about the urban fantasy RPG Liminal.
- Egg Embry spoke with Clifton Lambert of Fragging Unicorn Games about the upcoming FPS-inspired RPG Hellslayers.
- M.T. Black continues his journey through RPG periodicals past with Dragon Reflections $68 covering the December 1982 issue of Dragon.
- Michael Tresca’s newest RPG Evolutions offers a bit of RPG inspiration from real-life history with the invasion of the Sea Peoples, one of the major contributing factors of the Bronze Age Collapse.
- Don’t miss out on the newest RPG crowdfunding projects ending soon with Egg Embry’s RPG Crowdfunding News.
- Keep up with all the new print RPG releases with Charles Dunwoody’s RPG Print News.
- Find the big TTRPG sales, bundles, and charity fundraisers with the Freebies, Sales, and Charity Bundles News.
The EN Publishing Kickstarter campaign for the What’s OLD is NEW Starter Box is now live. What’s OLD is New (WOIN for short) is a d6 dice pool based system designed by our own Russ Morrissey as a generic system suitable for any setting you want to run in, whether it’s the OLD of fantasy and historical, the NOW of modern-day action, adventure, mystery, urban fantasy, or horror, or the NEW of science fiction and space opera. The boxed set includes a 68-page softcover rulebook with bestiary, three 20-page softcover adventures (one for each of the eras of OLD, NOW, and NEW), three double-sided poster-sized battlemaps (one for each adventure), over 60 carboard tokens for characters and monsters, 18 pre-generated characters (six for each adventure), and 8 six-sided dice so everything you need to play is in the box.
If you want a sneak peek at the boxed set, EN Publishing released previews of the pre-generated characters for each adventure: The Grey Fellowship of OLD, The Alpha Squad of NOW, and The Crew of the Starship Murphy for NEW. With your pledge, you also get a virtual tabletop asset pack with tokens and maps. And the WOIN System has system reference documents licensed under all three major open licenses: OGL, Creative Commons, and the new ORC License. The digital “box” set in PDF format is available for £10 (about US$13) while the physical box set is £24 (about US$31) and if you want to jump all the way in, you can get the starter set and all three stand-alone core rulebooks (OLD, NOW, and NEW) in PDF at the £50 (about US$64) and physical hardcovers for £120 (about US$153). The Kickstarter funded on its first day and will run until August 3, 2023.
Crpytozoic Entertainment announced the upcoming crowdfunding campaign for an officially licensed Adventure Time tabletop roleplaying game. The fantasy animated series ran for ten seasons on Cartoon Network, set in the post-apocalyptic Land of Ooo, ravaged by a cataclysmic event thousands of years in the past known as the “Mushroom War” (as in the mushroom cloud of a nuclear bomb). The series was heavily inspired by Dungeons & Dragons according to creator Pendleton Ward, and developed a massive fanbase over its eight-year run from 2010 to 2018. This new RPG will use a new game system called the Yes And System featuring custom dice and a storytelling approach. From the press release:
Adventure Time: The Roleplaying Game will come to Kickstarter in late summer 2023, and you can sign up now for notification when the project goes live.
Chaosium announced an upcoming Kickstarter for the Call of Cthulhu actual play series Graveyards of Arkham. The high production value series will be hosted by veteran voice actor Mark Meer as Keeper, best known for his role as the male Commander Shephard in the Mass Effect franchise as well as roles in Baldur’s Gate, Dragon Age, Neverwinter Nights, and more. The series will function as a sequel to the Bookshops of Arkham series released earlier this year.
Chaosium also announced the cast for the All-Star Call of Cthulhu event for Gen Con this year. Mark Meer will be the Keeper and joined by cosplayer and streamer Harli Kane, Geek & Sundry alum Josephine McAdam, RPG streamer Noura Ibrahim, and actor and streamer Luis Carazo. The event will take place at Gen Con in Indianapolis on Thursday, August 3 starting at 8 PM with tickets available for $8.00 from the Gen Con website.
The release date for Baldur’s Gate 3 has gotten a bit of a shuffle once again. Originally scheduled for an August 31 release, the game has been moved forward to August 3 on PC and pushed back on PS4 to September 6. Larian Studios stated the delay for PlayStation is to ensure the game will hit a stable 60 FPS framerate on the console and needed an extra week for final tweaks to reach that goal. Meanwhile, the PC version is “essentially ready to use”, so the release date was moved forward to August 3 to avoid the crowded release schedule including Bethesda’s sci-fi open world Starfield and the large Cyberpunk 2077 DLC expansion Phantom Liberty due in September. It also makes sense to want a bit of breathing room as creative director Swen Vincke revealed that the main campaign of Baldur’s Gate 3 will take 75-100 hours while a completionist playthrough will be around 200 hours. The game will also include 174 hours of cinematics as well, though due to the branching nature of the storyline and different player choices, the majority of players won’t seen even most of those cutscenes in a single playthrough. If you can’t wait until August 3 or September 6 to play, Larian launched the browser-based prequel game Blood in Baldur’s Gate taking place 15 years before the start of the game and places you and the rest of the community in charge of finding the murderer before time runs out.
The One Ring has been found, ending the hunt for the exclusive Magic: The Gathering card. A single variant of The One Ring card from the Universes Beyond: Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth expansion for Magic: The Gathering was printed in gold foil with the text written in the black speech of Mordor and marked with a “001/001” numbering to indicate only one was printed. While the owner of the card wishes to remain anonymous, the hobby store Maximum Cards and Collectibles in Whitby, Ontario, Canada, confirmed that the card was pulled by a relative of a regular at the store. The card was then placed in a bank vault, the owner secured legal representation, and arrangements were made to have the card graded by the PSA which it received at a grade of Mint 9. The owner is currently accepting serious offers for the card, which will likely be in the seven-figure range as the largest public bounty made so far was from the Valencia, Spain, retailer Gremio de Dragones who offered €2 million (about US$2.18 million) plus a free trip to Spain. Prior to the announcement the One Ring had been found, ICv2’s June 2023 sales rankings for sealed trading card products had the Lord of the Rings set taking up the top four spots and 12 of the 25 total listings. The amount of money involved makes it unlikely for the best result for the One Ring card, casting it into the fires of Mount Doom to rid the world of Sauron’s evil once and for all.
That’s all from me for this week! Don’t forget to support our Patreon to bring you more gaming news content. 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.
