One Gamer’s Diary part 5.3

And finally…

back to part 5.2, or 5.1 or all the way back to part 1.

The “Encyclopedia Eldoria” was launched in October 2005. It received good reviews and made moderate sales over its first year (after all it was being promoted by a small company). It’s never made anything that would allow me to quit work at the University but it’s out there and has its own small fan-base. The problem I have had since then is finding time to work on supportive material.

I have nearly finished “The Reliquary”, a book that fully details the religions and religious artifacts of Eldoria. In addition, I was able to track down the company that now owns Auran’s IP and secured the rights to the d20 modules that I wrote when working at Auran. This year a group of friends got together with me to form ‘FOE’ (friends of Eldoria). The plan is for them to work with me to re-work my existing material for re-release as ‘Pathfinder” and also work on new projects based in Eldoria. If you are interested in being a FOE, contact me – we’re always eager to share the work around.

You will see from the previous paragraph that I have gone over to the “Pathfinder” rules system. I have always written and played campaigns using the DnD rule system and believe DnD reached its optimum set of rules with 3.5; just the right balance of realism vs playability.

In 2007 WOTC released the 4th edition of the DnD rules system which varied greatly from 3.5. In my opinion, it dumbed down the game and included new things like ‘healing surges’ that were just totally unrealistic. There was a reaction against 4th Ed from the existing fan-base that resulted in the creation of “Pathfinder”, a system that came out of the Paizo stable. “Pathfinder” was published under the d20 licence and was basically DnD 3.5 with add-ons. It included some modifications to 3.5 rules that had always been clunky (e.g. hand-to-hand combat) and added new character classes and traits that allowed you to make you character different to other characters of the same class.

I bought into DnD 4th Ed and subsequently never used the books, continuing to run campaign games in DnD 3.5. “Pathfinder” was released in 2009 and I managed to resist it until 2011, until Ian Houlihan convinced me to give it a go.

Speaking of Ian, I must turn again to the convention scene in Brisbane. Auran had stopped sponsoring the BIG Weekend around 2003 and, although the Queensland Gamer’s Guild kept it running, it had faded into obscurity by 2006. Ian Houlihan came to the rescue with a bold vision and managed to acquire the rights to host Gencon in Australia.

Gencon Oz was a huge affair, bigger than any games convention I had attended in Australia. It ran in the grand halls of the Brisbane Convention Centre over 4 days and hosted trade stalls, international guests and tournaments. LXG supported the convention with its newly acquired games library; making it available for people to play social games and using multiple copies to run tournaments.

Gencon Oz took the gaming convention to a new level in Australia and had great reviews. It ran in 2008 and 2009 but had to fold due to a lack of international sponsorship for 2010. That was not to say that traders did not value the convention; the global financial crisis was hitting hard and few companies had the budgets to travel to Australia. Ian Houlihan had put a lot of his time and personal money into Gencon Oz and would have finally broken even by 2010 but circumstances caused the event to come to an abrupt end. I will always remember Gencon Oz and thank Ian for making it a reality.

Auscon became the default replacement for Gencon. It was nowhere near the grand scale of the Gencon Oz endeavour but catered more for core miniatures and board game tournaments. The brainchild of Allan Carey and Mark Edwards, Auscon was first held in 2010 at the Royal National Association showgrounds and is still continuing, with the next event planned for May 2013. LXG supported the 2010 and 2011 events in a similar way that the club had assisted with Gencon.

So it’s now 2012 and LXG is growing every month. The club has recently featured as part of an ABC radio national broadcast about a world renaissance in tabletop games. Members enjoy social gaming at our meetings and playing in our new creation “A Game of Games,” as well as organised events. These events have included “Puerto Rico”, “Thunderstone”, “Viewpoint” and (of course) David Kay’s “Magic: the Gathering” grand melee league.

The grand melee has been a permanent fixture of the club since 2007 and continues to be the highlight of the afternoon at every club meeting. If you are a “Magic” player and haven’t tried this format, rock along to LXG and give it a go – it’s really worth it!

After playing games for so long and having a real passion for all things game-like, you attract attention (good or bad) and I have had the privilege of meeting up with a few new people (external to LXG) over the past year who share a similar passion to promote games.

John Farrell and Kevin O’Brien come to mind. Both are involved with Critical Mass, a series of groups who meet regularly at Brisbane libraries to play board games. Several Critical Mass members are also members of LXG. Instead of being ‘rivals’, LXG and Critical Mass have enjoyed a good relationship for many years, often combining people-power and game knowledge to help out at conventions and to assist newbies to get into the hobby of gaming.

This year, I have also been active promoting games at interstate expos. Sean Carroll, the designer of the Australian card game “Viewpoint” flew me down to the Melbourne Toy Expo in May to demo their game on a trade stand. In June I was a volunteer at the Sydney Toy and Game Expo and ran introductory games of “Memoir 44” and “Viewpoint”. I will definitely be back there in 2013.

On reflection, for nearly forty years I have played all kinds of tabletop games and have never lost the devotion that I have for them. I love to open the boxes, pour through the rules, lay out the board and punch out the pieces. If you are a true-gamer you know what I’m talking about! But gaming would not have any attraction without the countless wonderful (and sometimes weird) people that I have played games with.

I can only say that the hobby attracts an audience that I have been proud to associate with; many have become my very good friends, one has become my wife and my children can also be awarded the honourific of ‘gaming-nerd’.

So this brings to a conclusion my little rant about how gaming has affected my life. I hope to spend the rest of this decade writing RPG’s, constructing “Magic” decks and pushing little blocks of wood around boards. High on my agenda is attending an overseas games convention – probably in the USA. Also up there, is releasing some new modules for “Eldoria”. In particular I want to bring out a 30th anniversary version of my first published game, “Mindbane” (yes, folks, it’s been 30 years).

Ultimately, I would like to have a go having a board game published and, if am still here in 2020, I’ll draft a new chapter to the diary and let you know how I got on.

See you at a tabletop someday. I hope you draw the cards you want, roll the dice you need and make all your saving throws!

One Gamer’s Diary, part 3.2

(if you missed it, here’s episode 3.1, or part 1 if you are totally new to this series)

Having designed and run “Mindbane” as an adventure I was delighted when it was published by Chess Sales later that year. I returned to Cancon over the next few years as a player.

In 1989 I ran “Tharlen Manor”, a gothic RPG game, as a tournament at Cancon. This would later be published as “Sanctuary” by Auran.

One of my pet hates when running RPG tournaments at this time was the noise level caused by all gamers being put into one big hall. At Cancon 1989 I brought 12 DMs to run “Tharlen Manor” and petitioned for separate rooms for each group. I was successful and believe that this was the first instance of RPG groups in Australia being run using the one room-one group format.

Here, I must also mention the memorable gaming parties that were run by members of the club in celebration of birthdays and special events. These usually consisted of having a usual party get together until about 11am when everyone would retire to separate parts of the host’s house to settle into playing a DnD game till dawn. In those days it was anything goes and the dungeon designs were wild and woolly.

Nobody cared about the layout, logic, or ecosystems of their dungeon – it was just a place where anything and everything happened. Open a door and you are looking at an ice- field with a dragon sitting there grinning at you!

Make a wrong move and you were cut to ribbons by micro-thin wires (yes, I blundered into that trap). They were over-the-top adventures and I will always remember them with great affection for the shared friendships and laughter spent playing those impossible dungeon crawls.

Between 1983 and 1986 QRP continued to grow but eventually Greg Lane and I left the club within 6 months of each other. Greg had become interested in the emergence of PC games and forging a career in programming. I was finding running the club far too much work and I had some relationship problems at the time. I departed in 1985 but continued to design “Eldoria” and play board games with friends. Anthony McMahon and Greg Lane drifted out of life but new ‘gaming’ friends drifted in – one long-time gamer I shared accommodation with for many years is LXG member Terry Krause. Not only that, the person I ended up marrying in 1988, Michelle (then Dooley), I first met as a player in my DnD group at QRP.

I understand QRP continued on for about another 5 years but it seemed to have run out of steam and the older founding people who began to drift away were never really replaced with people with enough enthusiasm to keep the club going. It went into decline and its members went on to become involved in clubs that were emerging, devoted to board games and miniatures. This was the time of the rise Brisbane Independent Wargamers, Queensland University Gamers and other clubs, often specialising in specific gaming genres.

I eventually was lured back into the club scene as well and founded Club Tanelorn in 1987 with a few key games enthusiasts such as Michael Mulhern, John McDonnel and Robert McCord. The original concept of Tanelorn was to be a fortnightly get together to play games in a ‘club’ environment. This meant alcohol and catering was to be provided at each meeting. The club was conceived as a small group of friends getting together to play games and, to accommodate this, membership fees were high, set at- $100 per year. This format lasted about a year – the club met at QUT and eventually at a night club at the Story Bridge end of Queen Street. Board games I remember playing at Club Tanelorn in the late 80’s included “Talisman”, “Civilization” and “Junta”.

I continued to run DnD tournaments in Brisbane and in interstate conventions such as Cancon, Sydcon and Necromonicon in Melbourne. I established a following at Cancon and had a great time running games there. However, the convention scene seemed to implode by the end of the 80’s. Miniatures gaming was dominated by Ancients and Napoleonics at this time and most miniatures enthusiasts were very conservative by nature.

Role players, on the whole were the complete opposite and the two ‘camps’ began to get involved in politics for control of conventions. This was particularly the case with Cancon, where the rift widened and the role-players ended up going their own way.

I stopped going to Cancon after their committee didn’t accept my tournament submission for the 1990 event. The incredible excuse given was that the tournaments run by Club Tanelorn were too popular and that everyone wanted to play in them. As our games went for an entire day, we were stopping other designers from getting enough players in their events. I parted ways with Cancon and have never been back.

Instead I became involved with Briscon in the late 80’s but I still experienced the same bitter rivalry between gaming groups – miniatures players didn’t want to waste money on individual rooms for role-playing groups and role-players didn’t want to waste money on hiring tabletops for the miniatures players. I’ve always embraced all facets of gaming so it was quite frustrating working with some people who should never have been on convention committees! However, I plodded on and ran two DnD events over successive years “Creatures of the Light” and “Sweet Dreams in Ashfold”. Ancients and Napoleonics remained the dominant tabletop events at this time and board game competitions were unheard of. Warhammer was on the rise though.

As mentioned earlier in this article, I was married to Michelle in 1988 and gaming was taking a back-burner for a little while. But only a little while as Club Tanelorn was about to change its membership format and pricing and explode onto the Brisbane the gaming scene.

Next episode: Free-forms and CCGs (Magic: the Gathering arrives!). Go to part 4.1

One Gamer’s Diary, Part 3.1

The series that began here continues now into the 1980s. Take it away Keith:

ONE GAMER’S DIARY (Part 3)

Of Clubs and Conventions
As the 80s arrived a call to arms had gone out in Brisbane for a Dungeons and Dragons club to form. For two years, Anthony McMahon and myself had been playing one on one role-playing games using Tekumel as our background setting. We had believed we were the only ones playing these types of games and now it was time to find out who else was out there – and who had put the mysterious recruitment poster in Hobbycraft!

So, early on a Sunday morning we loaded my car with our freshly acquired DnD manuals and dice and drove into town to the Police Boy’s Club, where the gathering was to be held. Now we fully expected that there would be about ten or so guys in their late teens gathered at the hall in Caxton Street and we were totally taken aback when we pulled into the car-park to discover over one hundred game-starved people were there! Not only that – there were two girls waiting in the crowd, surrounded by salivating male gamers, doting on their every whim! These gaming females were Joanne Schlitz and Angela Caffrey (the latter is currently an LXG club member – the one who makes all the great cakes.

The main organisers of the club were Greg Lane and a guy I will only call R. The reasons will become obvious as you read on. R became president and Greg vice- president and the club as given the name of the Queensland Science Fiction and Fantasy Society (or QSFFS – which was the most unpronounceable acronym I’ve ever come across!) The club started an umbrella fantasy RPG campaign that was initially driven by Greg. But after a few meetings Greg discovered I had a knack for drawing maps and writing role-playing material and we soon formed a friendship and working relationship that resulted in the very first version of “Eldoria”, which became a fantasy setting that was to consume much of my time over the next 30 years.

Such was the enthusiasm of the club and its members that, soon after forming, the committee was planning Queensland’s first games convention (well the first I am aware of). It was dubbed ‘Suncon” and a club member who was an academic from the University of Queensland kindly offered to provide set-up funds and organise the venue. Life was good – I was pouring my creativity into “Eldoria”, I was meeting many new friends (including LXG member Darren Catton) and I was running and playing in some very memorable dungeon bashes.

However everything threatened to come tumbling down when Greg Lane did a bit of undercover work and discovered that our charismatic president R had put all the club funds in his personal bank account and, when asked to resign and pay the money back, he absconded interstate with the club cash. That was effectively the end of the QSFFS and Suncon. The convention did run but, as R was the main organiser, it was abysmal. It was supposed to run for two days but most people abandoned it after day one. QSFFS was dead after running for just over a year.

Now that could have been the end of gaming in Brisbane for quite awhile but, while drowning our sorrows with a few drinks after Suncon, Greg and I decided to launch another club. We announced a date for a meeting at the Queensland University of Technology (then QIT) and, because of the circumstances that led to the folding of QSFFS, we expected only a small turnout. We were amazed when just about everyone from QSFFS and many more turned up. Queensland Role Players (QRP) was thus formed in 1982. At its height it had around 350 members and I believe it was the biggest gaming club in Australia.

At QRP, the Eldorian Campaign was truly launched and over around twelve DMs were running groups at the club on a fortnightly basis. Initially the club was based in an Arts Building in Edward Street. The building was always being renovated for the 6 months that we met there and club members were constantly under threat of being killed by falling masonry or falling through gaping holes in the floor. Eventually, QRP found its long-term home at the Buffalo Club in Fortitude Valley, where the club met in the large function hall above the main bar.

While the main focus for QRP was principally role-playing, there was also an interest in board games and there titles that were championed by individuals who brought them to the attention of club members. Greg Lane was passionate about “Star Fleet Battles” and I always remember a guy called Michael Conroy and his love for the WWI navel war-game, “Jutland”. Battletech first made its appearance at QRP and there was a plethora of board games based on the popularity of DnD. Titles such as TSR’s “Dungeon” and Ariel games “Sorcerer’s Cave” were forerunners of modern titles such as “Descent” and the latest series of DnD board games.

In addition to providing a place for gamers to get together and play, QRP was very active in organising activities and producing innovative publications. The club rented the Arts cinema in Edward Street and put on a double feature of the “Thunderbirds” movie and Ralph Bashki’s “Lord of the Rings”. The cinema was packed out and the club made $1,000 profit from the event. Between 1983 and 1985 QRP published a magazine called “Behind the DM’s Screen” available free to its members and sold for $1 at local games stores. Stories were written by club members.

Perhaps the biggest thing the club did was organise a trip to Cancon 1983 (I think this was the first
Cancon games convention). A group of twenty die-hard club members travelled by a hired bus and experienced their first ever major games convention. It was a fantastic event, with RPG games, miniatures and our first introduction to free-form role-playing, which later became known as live action role-playing (LARPs).

The most important thing at Cancon, for me personally, occurred when a few games had to be pulled because the designer hadn’t turned up. I had a copy of the draft of a Dnd module called “Mindbane” on me. I had designed this for a QRP tournament and I offered to run this at Cancon as a replacement tournament. It was a hit and I resolved to try and get the module published and to revisit Cancon at a later date with more DnD tournaments.

continue to part 3.2

One Gamer’s Diary: part 2.2

Prevously: Part 1, part 2.1.

About the same time I bought a copy of “Chainmail” from Hobbycraft and experimented with miniatures. Chainamail was written by Jeff Perren and Gary Gygax (who was the founding guru of Dungeons and Dragons). It was a set of rules for medieval combat, complete with a fantasy supplement in the appendices. I had no knowledge that you could buy miniature armies of the scale and type listed in the book. Miniatures were in their infancy in Australia, although Napoleon’s may have been operating in the late 70s and could have been stocking figures at that time.

My solution to sourcing miniatures was to use Crusader and Saracen figures you could buy from a number of hobby stores in the 70s. I think the brand was a UK company called Timpo. The ‘miniatures’ were about 9-10mm tall and to adjust for the scale difference I used the entire floor of our living room as the battlefield. I had a great summer of fun playing battles against my younger brother much to the grumbling of our parents who were trying to watch TV as the Knights Templar charged across the fluro orange shag pile rug (remember this was the 70s).

A few months later I was over at the Gap with a copy of “Kingmaker” to play a few games with the McMahons. For the uninformed, “Kingmaker: is a board game about the War of the Roses (the English Civil War, not the Kathleen Turner movie). It’s not a wargame in the sense of a simulation but a more an abstract strategy game from Avalon Hill. At that session, Anthony informed me that he had worked out Empire of the Petal Throne and we spent the day getting our heads round the GM concept and having to actually design scenarios. The contents of those strange little DnD books I had seen in Hobbycraft began to make sense.

I volunteered to make up a game set in Tekumel and Anthony rolled up a character. The other guys didn’t want to play. They were fine with board games but just couldn’t get the concept of a role playing game after our tenth attempt to explain it to them. Now if you have looked over the original “Empire of the Petal Throne” boxed set, I’m sure you will agree its rich on background but short on rules. Its rules are a rip-off of the very basic DnD combat rules. There are only three character classes – fighter, priest or wizard.

Anthony created a fighter and we proceeded to play a one on one campaign for about a year. We couldn’t get enough of this stuff and it filled most of our spare time. I learned most of the ropes of running a role-playing game during those memorable sessions, from creating rich adventures to running NPCs. After a year, Anthony finally died (in game that is!) and we decided to start a new game. While preparing the new adventure I dropped in to Hobbycraft and there were a number of new glossy hard back books in store. They went under the banner of ‘”Advanced Dungeons and Dragons” and consisted of “The Player’s Handbook”, “The Monster Manual” and the Dungeon Master’s Guide”. I bought them, along with a swag of peculiar shaped dice that the store owner said I must have and returned to the Gap to pour over them with Anthony. The first big thing we loved were the extra characters – Rangers, Paladins, Thieves and Druids. Woo-hoo! Anthony created a Paladin and we started our second marathon campaign as the 70’s came to a close.

As we were living in a world without the internet, we thought we were probably the only people in Brisbane playing role-playing games at this time. We were wrong of course – there were other scattered groups of nerds out there slaying dragons on a regular basis. However, for another few months we honestly thought we were the only ones. Then one fateful day I was wandering around town and came across a hand written A4 piece of paper posted in the window of Hobbycraft bearing the words:

Formation of Dungeon and Dragons Club
Meeting to be held at the Police Boy’s Club, Caxton Street
Date: Sunday 10am 15th March

We were not alone!

Next Time: The 1980’s where I discover that girls play rpgs (shock-horror!) and I visit
Cancon.

PS: In part 2.1 of this article I mention “Empire of the Petal Throne” an rpg that was written by Professor M.A.R Barker. I owe a debt of gratitude to Professor Barker, in that it was his work that inspired me to go on and develop my own fantasy role-playing world of “Eldoria”. I have always been impressed with the rich background or the world he created and, in particular, the details he put into his religious pantheon. In homage to his work I paid attention to the religions in “Eldoria” as well as developing many other peculiarities to make my own world unique. Prof Barker’s world of Tekumel never really became mainstream and I highly recommend it to anyone thinking of writing a fantasy background for their campaign.

Continue to part 3.1

One Gamer’s Diary: Part 2.1

This article outlines my own personal experiences with the tabletop gaming scene in Brisbane from the 1960s to today. I encourage others to contribute similar articles and help fill in the gaps of areas I haven’t really explored (such as miniatures). I will feature a different decade every two weeks. Check out part 1 here.

Part 2: 1970s Wargames and Role-playing

During the 1960s I lived on the outskirts of the Brisbane CBD. There were no large shopping malls in the suburbs like today and going into Brisbane was a rare treat. Any games that I had come across until that age of 12 were those that had been bought for me as presents or those that I had seen in shop windows and saved up my allowance to buy (such as Combined Operations – see part 1). In a nutshell, although I had developed a passion for playing board games, there wasn’t much to choose from!

As I entered my teens, my older brother entered the workforce and was based in the city. He knew I collected Airfix tanks and soldiers and that I liked playing board games and on my 13th birthday he bought me a copy of Avalon Hill’s “Panzer Blitz” from a Brisbane store called Hobbycraft. I was wrapped – a product that combined my interest in games and the Second World War! This was my introduction to wargames. It was full of little cardboard counters with silhouettes of tanks and men and came complete with boards overlaid with a hex grid. This was all new stuff to me. I came to the realisation that this was just like the made up games I had been playing using my Airfix collection but now I had real rules, based on real military data.

Over the next year I got my brother to take me into town to visit Hobbycraft, which was a small store near the corner of Elizabeth and Albert Street. It mainly stocked typical hobby fare – like models, balsa wood, radio-controlled cars 300 varieties of glue etc. However there was a nook down the back of the shop that held shelves of board games that I never knew had existed – being specialty games that were not stocked by departmental stores. Here I discovered and bought the sister game of “Panzer Blitz’ – “Panzer Leader” and later “Arab-Israeli Wars”. I also discovered Strategy Publications Inc (SPI) magazine at Hobbycraft and
collected quite a few in subsequent years.

Each magazine discussed different historical battles and had a feature article that linked to a game that came with each magazine. The game usually consisted of a paper hex grid map and die-cut cardboard pieces plus a a few combat matrices. Most games were famous battles but there were occasional sci-fi, fantasy or alternate history games. For example, there was “Dixie” that was an American Civil War game set in the 1930’s. The background postulated that the original Civil War ended in a stale-mate and eventually boiled over again in the 20th Century.

I played these new-found games with a few close friends who had similar likes – games, military history, sci-fi and fantasy etc. I suppose we were the original emerging nerds. While other teenagers were taking an interest in the opposite sex, we were excitedly waiting to see what was in the next SPI magazine. As the years rolled by I continued to buy wargames and began to notice strange little rule books starting to appear on the shelf. The production looked very amateurish with basic black and white drawings of Conan-like warriors slaying every imaginable beast. They were not clearly written and had no pieces of boards. I wasn’t sure what to make of them and left them alone. Later I was to discover that these were the very first TSR role-playing books.

I eventually graduated from secondary school and ended up in a job in the city. I was able to explore Brisbane for myself at length and discovered a few more stores hidden away, many of them dealing with these strange little books and lots of miniature figures. One of these was Chess Sales, which became the largest and most popular games store in Brisbane by the end of the 70s, when it became known as Leisuretronics.

I was equipped with cash and, as I was still living with my parents, my pay was spent in a rush on music and games. On pay day I would visit Rocking Horse Records, Hobbycraft and Leisuretronics and just have enough left for rent for mum and dad. Unfortunately, during this time, those friends who shared my interest in games all moved interstate with their families and I was left with a lot of games but no-one to play them with. I became a collector and turned to my younger brother (who was ten at this time) teaching him the ropes of the more easier games. During this time I had branched out of historical wargames and bought other titles like, ‘Outdoor Survival” and “The Battle of Five Armies”.

As luck has it my employer posted me and another guy (Greg McMahon) who was a year or two younger than me to a location on Kangaroo Point, under an older supervisor. The supervisor went on long service leave for 6 months leaving me in charge. Greg and I discovered that, by coming in at 7am and working at a furious pace, we could finish all the work for the day by midday. The rest of the day we would read or play chess. Then one day I brought in “Outdoor Survival” and Greg McMahon was hooked. His cousin was studying
at QIT and would drop over to Kangaroo Point to join in. Then when the school holidays hit, Greg’s younger brother, Anthony, joined us. I became good friends with the McMahon family and, when the weekend arrived, I would load up the car with games and head over to their family home at the Gap. During this time, it became obvious that Anthony McMahon was far more interested in board games than the other siblings and I ended up playing more games with him.

One fateful day I ended up buying a copy of “Empire of the Petal Throne” from Hobbycraft. It was in a box and contained a hex map of a city and of a continental land mass, plus a thick rule book. The book described a rule system, the history of the world of Tekumel, its races, creatures and magical items. Being totally ignorant of role-playing games, I thought this was
a board game. I got together with Anthony and tried to play it as such – moving about the board and encountering things on the random encounter table. We had no concept of what a GM was or that you had to write adventures for the game, using the rule set. Naturally, we gave up on EPT. It was a confusing oddity that would have got left on the bottom of the game pile, except Anthony asked to borrow it for a while so he could read the rule book in depth.

Read on to part 2.2!

New Edition of Dungeons and Dragons

It’s been a busy January for gaming, and not just at LXG! Wizards of the Coast recently announced a new edition of their flagship roleplaying product, Dungeons and Dragons.

The current fourth edition, released in 2008 has had a ‘mixed reception’ in the market. New players seem to like it, most existing role players didn’t care for it. With popular new product being released, D&D found itself facing declining sales in a rising market. Never good.

Paizo’s Pathfinder RPG system, built by gamers who preferred the older style of play, now outsells fourth edition. Five years ago, Pathfinder didn’t exist, because it didn’t need to. Also Fantasy Flight Games’ Dark Heresy roleplay system is selling well, based around the Warhammer 40,000 universe.

On the face of it, this is a good year to release a quality RPG system. The market is increasing, even while computer games sales decrease. It seems that people are coming back to the face-to-face interaction offered by RPGs. As the oldest RPG D&D has failed to take advantage of this trend as much as it could have. The fifth edition may well change that. Certainly Wizards of the Coast have committed themselve to extensive playtesting and feedback.

LXG meetings don’t typically involve RPG sessions, even though we have many role players in our membership. The reason is mainly logistical – our current meeting place is one big open hall, a space not conduce to role playing sessions. However December’s trivia contest worked very nicely on the stage area, so it remains a possibility, if any members want to try that out…

The Escapist on Dungeons & Dragons

Escapist Magazine has an interesting three part series on the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons.

The first article looks at the past of D&D, from its beginnings back in the 1970s.

The present of D&D is concerned mainly with the release of 4th edition and how the RPG industry has responded.

The future of D&D strikes an optimistic note that I found out of key with the rest of the article.

RPGs aren’t usually played at the LXG venue, for the logistical reason that we are all in one big hall, and this is not conducive to creating the atmosphere for a RPG session.

The line of D&D based board games have proven popular with club members, and we have copies of Castle Ravenloft and Wrath of Ashardalon, with the Legend of Drizzt game expected to be available for our meeting on January 15.