Hello everyone, Darryl here with this week's gaming news! New D&D books leak before official announcement, Pathfinder video game pre-orders open, Asmodee may have a buyer for the company, and more!
Wizards of the Coast announced new products for Dungeons & Dragons. This time, actual game products. And each of the announcements leaked before they were officially confirmed on Monday, July 23. The first was Guildmasters’ Guide to Ravnica, a D&D setting book based on the Magic: The Gatherine plane Ravnica, the world on the plane also called Ravnica, and the city that takes up the entirety of that world called Ravnica. Amazon released pre-order information on their website early, as well as information on a Map Pack and Miscellany and a Dice Set. All three products will be released on November 20, with the book retailing for $49.95 and each of the accessory products for $24.95.
Later the same night/early morning, a game publisher noticed the back-end for uploading material to the DM’s Guild site through One Book Shelf/DriveThru had a new option for campaign settings, with Eberron joining Forgotten Realms and Ravenloft. On Monday, the Wayfinder’s Guide to Eberron was announced and released, a 176-page PDF available for $19.99 written by Eberron creator Keith Baker (along with Ruty Rutenberg, Jeremy Crawford, Mike Mearls, and Kate Welch) that provides playtest material to update the setting to 5e. Eberron was also officially added to DM’s Guild as a setting for third parties under the DM’s Guild License (though the site has not updated to include Eberron in its FAQ at time of writing).
Hasbro CEO Brian Goldner appeared on CNBC’s Mad Money and spoke about the success of both Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering. Goldner specifically defended Dungeons & Dragons from claims that it was a “so-so brand” by host Jim Cramer. However, the part of the segment that got the most attention from the roleplaying community on social media wasn’t in the interview itself. CNBC posted an article along with the video clip of the interview and included a bullet point:
In the interview itself, Goldner was referring to Magic: The Gathering Arena, the video game adaptation of the collectible card game currently in beta. I wrote a large Twitter thread about this myself (be warned, my Twitter feed tends to contain NSFW language), but the crux of the issue is that Goldner wasn’t on Mad Money to sell copies of Ravnica or the Waterdeep adventures, he wasn’t there to promote Eberron or the Wizards of the Coast Twitch channel. He was there to sell stock market investors on Hasbro stock. So the interview was packed with buzzwords and marketing speak frequently used by companies like EA, Ubisoft, Activision-Blizzard, and others when promoting their games to investors. And, to be honest, I’m not surprised that Goldner may not know the fine details of Dungeons & Dragons and I wouldn’t expect him to any more than I would expect him to be able to name every Monopoly token or explain the difference between each Transformers generation. Hasbro is a multibillion dollar conglomerate with thousands of different product lines in niche markets and it’s not surprising that the CEO of the company doesn’t know every single thing about every single one. And even if prepped for an interview about D&D, the audience for Mad Money isn’t the same audience for D&D and the majority of those watching the program aren’t going to know much about D&D nor are they likely to know the difference between “esports” and “Twitch streaming”. With that context, the full quote transcribed by Morrus on the main EN World article on the interview makes it a bit more clear:
Pre-orders have opened for Pathfinder: Kingmaker, an isometric roleplaying video game based on Pathfinder. Owlcat Games successfully raised $909,057 on Kickstarter last year to create the game, which will officially launch on September 25. The base game is available as the Explorer’s Edition for $39.99, and premium editions with additional material such as the Noble Edition for $54.99 with artbook and soundtrack, the Royal Edition for $69.99 with an in-game pet and Pathfinder PDF adventure module written by Chris Avellone, and the Imperial Edition for $84.99 that includes a Season Pass for all post-release DLC. Pre-orders will also include three in-game exclusive items, available for all editions of the game. The game will launch with support for Windows, iOS, and Linux.
Cool Mini or Not announced a new roleplaying game based on the popular Zombiecide line of board games. The new survival zombie game comes from Italian publisher Need Games! and will be designed by Marco Maggi and Francesco Nepitello. The game itself will have a rules system with asymmetrical play, as the rules that the players use will not be the same rules that the gamemaster uses, with the players using rules based on the board game while the GM has a set of special “Zombidice” that help determine task resolution for the players as well as governing enemy actions. The game is scheduled for a Kickstarter in “Q4 of 2019”, and Nepitello will be at Gen Con talking about the game at the CMON booth.
Winners of this year’s Spiel des Jahres have been announced, and my spellcheck is going to hate me. The winner of this year’s Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) is Azul from Plan B games. Funkelschatz (also known as Dragon’s Breath) from HABA won the Kinderspiel des Jahres (Children’s Game of the Year), though it does not currently have a release in the United States. Die Quacksalber von Quedlinburg from Schmidt Spiele won the Kennerspiel des Jahres (Expert/Connoisseur Game of the Year), which also is not currently available in the United States.
Asmodee may have found a buyer. PAI Partners, a French private equity house, entered into discussions with Eurazeo, the company that owns Asmodee for a reported €1.2 billion (about $1.4 billion). Asmodee is the parent company of Fantasy Flight Games, Days of Wonder, Z-Man Games, and many other roleplaying and tabletop gaming companies. While neither Eurazeo nor Asmodee themselves have interfered much in the running of companies they’ve acquired, some in the tabletop community have expressed concerns over whether that will change following a purchase by another company. The deal must first clear with French and EU regulators, but may finalize as soon as the end of this year.
Okay, I’m not even going to try to cover all the big-name Kickstarters going on at the moment in my normal fashion, so here’s the ones that need no long, detailed explanation:
The Expanse from Green Ronin Publishing, based on the novels by James S. A. Corey
The Fantasy Trip from Steve Jackson Games, a new edition of the classic fantasy roleplaying game originally published in 1977
Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition from Onyx Path Publishing, the new edition of the Chronicles of Darkness game
Dwarven Forge Caverns Deep!, the next line of Dwarven Forge miniature terrain focusing on natural cavern formations
Killing Lee Garvin still has a few more days to go before it closes and it needs a bit more help to push it over the finish line. I’ve talked about this one a lot, but remember that all proceeds from this Kickstarter go toward helping Lee Garvin and other game designers who have fallen into financial hardship.
Okay, we now go back to our regularly scheduled Kickstarter section already in progress.
Iron Edda Accelerated is a FATE Accelerated version of the Iron Edda RPG from Tracy Barnett. The game puts players in the role of heroes of a Viking holdfast during Ragnarok as they battle threats from outside and within for honor, glory, and clan. This epic-focused take on the battle for the end of the world takes the Norse legends and adds in cutthroat politics, magitek from the Dwarves of Svartalfheim, undead giants, and more. A PDF version of the game is available for a $15 pledge, and an at-cost printed version available for $25. This project has already met its funding goal and has until Thursday, August 23 to unlock more stretch goals.
Delta Green: The Labrynth takes the original Delta Green game of cosmic horror special forces action and adds something truly terrifying: Elements from the real-world 21st century. The game focuses on how the Cthulhu mythos elements interact with things such as live streaming, online conspiracy forums, internet start-ups, and our modern political climate. You can get the PDF for $20, the hardback for $45, or a bundle of over a dozen hardcover Delta Green books plus every PDF produced by Arc Dream Publishing for $2000. Even with the Director level reward still unclaimed, this project is fully funded and still has a few stretch goals to unlock before it ends on Tuesday, July 31.
The RPG Coloring Book is exactly what it says on the tin, a coloring book drawing inspiration from fantasy roleplaying. The line art in the examples from artist Mariana Ruiz Villarreal are everything you could want, from dragons to giants to oozes to kobolds with a pet dire badger. The linework is detailed yet still clean enough to work perfectly as a coloring book for children and adults both (though there is an image of a goblin licking a dagger, so maybe not too young for the children). The book is available for a $10 pledge, and this funded project ends on Tuesday, July 31.
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 you can help convince me to finally get back to streaming on Twitch and finishing up Dragon Age: Origins before deciding which game to play next, 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.
Wizards of the Coast announced new products for Dungeons & Dragons. This time, actual game products. And each of the announcements leaked before they were officially confirmed on Monday, July 23. The first was Guildmasters’ Guide to Ravnica, a D&D setting book based on the Magic: The Gatherine plane Ravnica, the world on the plane also called Ravnica, and the city that takes up the entirety of that world called Ravnica. Amazon released pre-order information on their website early, as well as information on a Map Pack and Miscellany and a Dice Set. All three products will be released on November 20, with the book retailing for $49.95 and each of the accessory products for $24.95.
Later the same night/early morning, a game publisher noticed the back-end for uploading material to the DM’s Guild site through One Book Shelf/DriveThru had a new option for campaign settings, with Eberron joining Forgotten Realms and Ravenloft. On Monday, the Wayfinder’s Guide to Eberron was announced and released, a 176-page PDF available for $19.99 written by Eberron creator Keith Baker (along with Ruty Rutenberg, Jeremy Crawford, Mike Mearls, and Kate Welch) that provides playtest material to update the setting to 5e. Eberron was also officially added to DM’s Guild as a setting for third parties under the DM’s Guild License (though the site has not updated to include Eberron in its FAQ at time of writing).
Hasbro CEO Brian Goldner appeared on CNBC’s Mad Money and spoke about the success of both Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering. Goldner specifically defended Dungeons & Dragons from claims that it was a “so-so brand” by host Jim Cramer. However, the part of the segment that got the most attention from the roleplaying community on social media wasn’t in the interview itself. CNBC posted an article along with the video clip of the interview and included a bullet point:
Games like “Dungeons & Dragons” could one day be “ripe for esports competition,” the CEO says.
In the interview itself, Goldner was referring to Magic: The Gathering Arena, the video game adaptation of the collectible card game currently in beta. I wrote a large Twitter thread about this myself (be warned, my Twitter feed tends to contain NSFW language), but the crux of the issue is that Goldner wasn’t on Mad Money to sell copies of Ravnica or the Waterdeep adventures, he wasn’t there to promote Eberron or the Wizards of the Coast Twitch channel. He was there to sell stock market investors on Hasbro stock. So the interview was packed with buzzwords and marketing speak frequently used by companies like EA, Ubisoft, Activision-Blizzard, and others when promoting their games to investors. And, to be honest, I’m not surprised that Goldner may not know the fine details of Dungeons & Dragons and I wouldn’t expect him to any more than I would expect him to be able to name every Monopoly token or explain the difference between each Transformers generation. Hasbro is a multibillion dollar conglomerate with thousands of different product lines in niche markets and it’s not surprising that the CEO of the company doesn’t know every single thing about every single one. And even if prepped for an interview about D&D, the audience for Mad Money isn’t the same audience for D&D and the majority of those watching the program aren’t going to know much about D&D nor are they likely to know the difference between “esports” and “Twitch streaming”. With that context, the full quote transcribed by Morrus on the main EN World article on the interview makes it a bit more clear:
"We're also building a suite of digital games around Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: the Gathering. Our Magic Arena product is underway in a closed beta, we've had more than a million people sign up, and we're very excited about launching that later this year. So you'll be able to play Magic: the Gathering or Dungeons & Dragons on a mobile device or online as well as face-to-face. […] Well, once you build this mobile game, we're also seeing that just with the analogue game, people are watching us on e-sports, we have about a million viewers a month watching a Magic: the Gathering game, and people watching Dungeons & Dragons on Twitch, and so we think over time we build this to be more of an e-sports property, it's a very immersive game, and it's global and ripe for e-sports competition."
Pre-orders have opened for Pathfinder: Kingmaker, an isometric roleplaying video game based on Pathfinder. Owlcat Games successfully raised $909,057 on Kickstarter last year to create the game, which will officially launch on September 25. The base game is available as the Explorer’s Edition for $39.99, and premium editions with additional material such as the Noble Edition for $54.99 with artbook and soundtrack, the Royal Edition for $69.99 with an in-game pet and Pathfinder PDF adventure module written by Chris Avellone, and the Imperial Edition for $84.99 that includes a Season Pass for all post-release DLC. Pre-orders will also include three in-game exclusive items, available for all editions of the game. The game will launch with support for Windows, iOS, and Linux.
Cool Mini or Not announced a new roleplaying game based on the popular Zombiecide line of board games. The new survival zombie game comes from Italian publisher Need Games! and will be designed by Marco Maggi and Francesco Nepitello. The game itself will have a rules system with asymmetrical play, as the rules that the players use will not be the same rules that the gamemaster uses, with the players using rules based on the board game while the GM has a set of special “Zombidice” that help determine task resolution for the players as well as governing enemy actions. The game is scheduled for a Kickstarter in “Q4 of 2019”, and Nepitello will be at Gen Con talking about the game at the CMON booth.
Winners of this year’s Spiel des Jahres have been announced, and my spellcheck is going to hate me. The winner of this year’s Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year) is Azul from Plan B games. Funkelschatz (also known as Dragon’s Breath) from HABA won the Kinderspiel des Jahres (Children’s Game of the Year), though it does not currently have a release in the United States. Die Quacksalber von Quedlinburg from Schmidt Spiele won the Kennerspiel des Jahres (Expert/Connoisseur Game of the Year), which also is not currently available in the United States.
Asmodee may have found a buyer. PAI Partners, a French private equity house, entered into discussions with Eurazeo, the company that owns Asmodee for a reported €1.2 billion (about $1.4 billion). Asmodee is the parent company of Fantasy Flight Games, Days of Wonder, Z-Man Games, and many other roleplaying and tabletop gaming companies. While neither Eurazeo nor Asmodee themselves have interfered much in the running of companies they’ve acquired, some in the tabletop community have expressed concerns over whether that will change following a purchase by another company. The deal must first clear with French and EU regulators, but may finalize as soon as the end of this year.
Okay, I’m not even going to try to cover all the big-name Kickstarters going on at the moment in my normal fashion, so here’s the ones that need no long, detailed explanation:
The Expanse from Green Ronin Publishing, based on the novels by James S. A. Corey
The Fantasy Trip from Steve Jackson Games, a new edition of the classic fantasy roleplaying game originally published in 1977
Geist: The Sin-Eaters 2nd Edition from Onyx Path Publishing, the new edition of the Chronicles of Darkness game
Dwarven Forge Caverns Deep!, the next line of Dwarven Forge miniature terrain focusing on natural cavern formations
Killing Lee Garvin still has a few more days to go before it closes and it needs a bit more help to push it over the finish line. I’ve talked about this one a lot, but remember that all proceeds from this Kickstarter go toward helping Lee Garvin and other game designers who have fallen into financial hardship.
Okay, we now go back to our regularly scheduled Kickstarter section already in progress.
Iron Edda Accelerated is a FATE Accelerated version of the Iron Edda RPG from Tracy Barnett. The game puts players in the role of heroes of a Viking holdfast during Ragnarok as they battle threats from outside and within for honor, glory, and clan. This epic-focused take on the battle for the end of the world takes the Norse legends and adds in cutthroat politics, magitek from the Dwarves of Svartalfheim, undead giants, and more. A PDF version of the game is available for a $15 pledge, and an at-cost printed version available for $25. This project has already met its funding goal and has until Thursday, August 23 to unlock more stretch goals.
Delta Green: The Labrynth takes the original Delta Green game of cosmic horror special forces action and adds something truly terrifying: Elements from the real-world 21st century. The game focuses on how the Cthulhu mythos elements interact with things such as live streaming, online conspiracy forums, internet start-ups, and our modern political climate. You can get the PDF for $20, the hardback for $45, or a bundle of over a dozen hardcover Delta Green books plus every PDF produced by Arc Dream Publishing for $2000. Even with the Director level reward still unclaimed, this project is fully funded and still has a few stretch goals to unlock before it ends on Tuesday, July 31.
The RPG Coloring Book is exactly what it says on the tin, a coloring book drawing inspiration from fantasy roleplaying. The line art in the examples from artist Mariana Ruiz Villarreal are everything you could want, from dragons to giants to oozes to kobolds with a pet dire badger. The linework is detailed yet still clean enough to work perfectly as a coloring book for children and adults both (though there is an image of a goblin licking a dagger, so maybe not too young for the children). The book is available for a $10 pledge, and this funded project ends on Tuesday, July 31.
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 you can help convince me to finally get back to streaming on Twitch and finishing up Dragon Age: Origins before deciding which game to play next, 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.
I have NO idea how they would do that. It's like trying to turn a complex thermodynamic math problem into a brand of perfume.
