Category: Roleplaying

A nice thing about those Indie RPG Awards (what I was on about down there) is that they collect in one place links to some curious little free games, like Metal Öpera and Nicotine Girls.

Roll the Bones points out the emperor’s clothes on is unimpressed with Andi Kitkowski’s Indie RPG Awards: Yes, you too can take money that’d be better spent actually buying roleplaying products and throw it at Kitkowski’s little online beauty contest. How thrilling. Umm. Yeah. stupid idea, cult-of-Ron cool-aid, and it didn’t mention Powergame, even though I think it’s one of the few Indie games which saw a major revision, a Hebrew translation and a French translation all in 2002.

Andi Kitkowski graces me with his comments, even though I am a barnacle on a blog. I admit this is a lazy and sloppy entry – like most of my entries, actually – and unfortunately, it was also hurtful.

I’ll point out that his choice of using the phrase “purchase votes” was unfortunate (as he seems to realize): most people won’t read on past it.

I actually did read Andi’s eligibility guidelnes, which is why I didn’t email him about Powergame and settled for snide comments in my weblog. I’ll point out that Powergame 6 is as much a revision of 5 as D&D 3E is a revision of AD&D. Complete rewrite and tidying, significant combat system changes, etc. Yes, it only comes down to 10 pages extra, but it wasn’t much more than 20 pages to begin with.

About the Cult of Ron comment – again I’m parroting a cheap shot, but there’s a point to that slur: I find Ron Edwards’ articles and The Forge contributors’ discussions very helpful to my thinking about roleplaying, but there is a distinctly incestous feel to “the indie gaming scene” as it is reflected in The Forge, and Andi’s awards suffer from that. This impression will probably be eleviated as indie games diversify and the circle of prominent contributors expands further. Second, despite the usefulness of Edwards’ jargon, you do get the sense that as you chase understanding of the finer points, or build your own meta-arguments about the nature of the hobby, you risk losing yourself up your own asshole. Or worse, up someone else’s.

Oh, and thanks to Andi, I fixed my comments a bit.

On Rock Scissors Blog, Bruce Baugh bitches about the abbysmal list of Origin 2002 awards final nominees. On A related note, he plugs Andy Kitkowski’s Indie RPG Awards.

Phillip Reed and Christopher Shy have bought one of the more interesting out-of-print RPGs, converted it to PDF and are offering it for sale online: The Whispering Vault. He’s also brought out an “adventure”:http://www.philipjreed.com/PJR/archives/000188.html, and two supplements, the excellent “Dangerous Prey”:http://www.philipjreed.com/PJR/archives/000194.html and the never-before-printed “Mortal Magic”:http://www.philipjreed.com/PJR/archives/000190.html (the “original cover”:http://www.tombaxa.com/portfolio/illos/jpg_1_mortalmagic.htm was swapped out for legal reasons).

Castle Blackmoor is the home page of Dave Arneson, perhaps the world’s first DM and someone with a justified grudge against TSR and Gary Gygax. Fascinating stuff there about early roleplaying, including the entire Blackmoor supplement for D&D, where a lot of stuff that later showed up in AD&D first appeared (as well as plenty of interesting things that didn’t).