Harvey Relief: A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying (Game of Thrones RPG) Sale

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Our hearts go out to everyone in Harvey’s path. We are shocked by the photos and footage we’ve seen of the flooding in Texas in the wake of the storm, and some of our friends and family have been directly affected. For our latest Charitable Giving Initiative campaign, we have placed all products in our A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying line at 10% off in our Green Ronin Online Store. When you shop the sale, we will donate 20% of proceeds to the Houston Food Bank and Houston Humane Society.

If you want to help Harvey survivors more, you can donate directly to these two organizations, or find another worthy charity to support as well:

ENnie Awards Voting Open and ENnie Awards Sale

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We are pleased and humbled to be nominated for eight ENnie Awards this year. We’ve included a list of our nominations at the bottom of this post.

2017 ENnies voting is now open

In our excitement about the ENnies we placed several products on sale in our Green Ronin Online Store. Please check out our 2017 ENnie Awards Sale.

Our nominations are for:

Best Adventure:
Dragon’s Hoard
Best Art, Cover:
Blue Rose: The AGE RPG of Romantic Fantasy
Best Monster/Adversary:
Atlas of Earth-Prime
Fantasy AGE Bestiary
Best RPG Related Product:
Cinema and Sorcery: The Comprehensive Guide to Fantasy Film
Best Setting:
Atlas of Earth-Prime
Best Supplement:
Cosmic Handbook
Product of the Year:
Atlas of Earth-Prime

As always, sincere congratulations to our fellow nominees, and thank you to all who worked on these products, all who vote, and everyone else we may have forgotten to list.

Charitable Giving: Support the NRDC, Save Money!

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A Song of Ice and Fire RPG: Game of Thrones EditionMost people in Westeros are more concerned about not dying than they are concerned about the planet not dying. Samwell Tarly cares about everything. And there’s also… Well, maybe nobody else in Westeros, but the planet has you!

For a limited time, you can get A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying, A Game of Thrones Edition for just $35 as a full-color hardback, and just $15 in full-color PDF format, through our Green Ronin Online Store. For each of these two products sold at this discount, Green Ronin Publishing will donate $10 to the Natural Resource Defense Council.

NRDC “combine[s] the power of more than two million members and online activists with the expertise of some 500 scientists, lawyers, and policy advocates across the globe to ensure the rights of all people to the air, the water, and the wild.”

Sam Tarly likes nice people, and books, and the world. Be nice like Sam, get books at a discount, and help NRDC save the world!

GM for Green Ronin at Gen Con!

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Happy 50th Anniversary to Gen Con!

Team Ronin is super excited about Gen Con this year, especially with the success of our updated Freebooter GM Program. We decided to focus on our one big event, as we’re kinda small to support events all over the country and beyond. Make with the clicking to read about the program here.

Many folks think Green Ronin is a huge company, but we’re actually very small. The upside to this is that we can work closely with our GMs to grow this program; it wouldn’t be as successful without their spectacular feedback. And since it was our first big push, with setting up GM Badges and hotel reimbursement, it helped us make the 2017 Gen Con program even better.

Last year, we fielded 24 GMs running over 90 games. Some folks ran one or two games, and some ran more. Some folks ran 2-hour games, and some ran 6-hour games. Really, it was great to have so many folks concentrating on Green Ronin games. We were even in our own room in the Convention Center itself, which was WONDERFUL.

For the folks who signed up early, who communicated well with us about their needs and desires, it was super easy to accommodate folks, like subbing out GMs when we had scheduling issues. For folks to get hotel reimbursements, it was super easy! You just had to email me your receipt and we sent you the reimbursement! Almost everyone followed directions well so we were able to take care of just about everyone by the time Gen Con was all finished!

We had a lot of folks GMing for us who had never been to Gen Con before, or GM’d at a convention ever, which meant so much to us. And our experienced Veteran GMs were on hand to help out the new folks. The Freebooters are a small team, but a wonderful team! Heck, a bunch of new folks to our program even got together and split a room together! They held each other together while I was off doing Geek & Sundry and Gen Con Industry Insider stuff!

Many GMs kept things simple, and many of them printed out great color sheets, special hand outs, and whatnot. Some GMs used our published Quick Start adventures, some used their own home brew. Some used adventures which we haven’t yet published, to be the first to run said adventures.

Why am I tell you all this? Because we want you to run our games! Everyone is welcome, no matter your experience, or lack thereof. If you have GM’d a home game, you can GM for us! You can run what you want, when you want. 

And if you want to, we’ll arrange a GM badge for you, so you can get reimbursed by the Gen Con system, and we’ll reimburse you for part of your hotel.

  • For 12-hours of games submitted, we’ll arrange the GM badge.
  • For 16+ hours of games scheduled, we will reimburse your hotel based on ¼ of a regular rate.  As an example, if a room is $200 per night we’ll pick up your part, so $50 per night!
  • Green Ronin must submit your games to count towards the GM Badge reimbursement and hotel room reimbursement.
  • You are still welcome to submit games via your favorite game group or other game companies, but we will only pick up badges/hotel reimburse for our submitted games.

AND! Based on feedback from the 2016 GM Team, we’ll have ribbons and dice for you to give your players, plus a variety of other hand outs. And maybe something cool for YOU, too! We’re still hammering out those details.

If you’re interested in signing up, click here to fill out this quick contact form. Early submissions have started this week, and will run until Feb 19th. Regular Event submissions are due by March 26th, so we want to get your games in the system as soon as possible. I can help!

If you have general questions, you can email me directly! donna@greenronin.com

Ronin Roundtable: New Year’s Message 2017

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New Year’s Message 2017

Welcome to the new year, my friends and fellow gamers! Here at Green Ronin we have been rousing ourselves from our holiday torpor and getting ramped up for 2017. As long time fans know, I traditionally write a message in January to discuss what we have coming up in the new year. And that is true but I’m going to do it a little differently this year. Today I will talk about what we have coming your way through the Spring, then in June I will do a second one of these that covers the rest of the year. So let’s get to it!

New Faces

In December Crystal Frasier came onboard as our new Mutants & Masterminds developer. She introduced herself in a previous Ronin Round Table, which you can read here if you’d like to learn more about her. We are confident that Mutants & Masterminds is in great hands with Crystal.

Today I’d like to welcome another new Ronin to the ranks: Malcolm Sheppard. He is a 17 year veteran of the game industry who has done a boatload of work for White Wolf and Onyx Path, amongst others. Malcolm will be doing design and development work for us on a variety of lines. You can think of him as a sort of developer-at-large. He’ll be working on Adventure Game Engine (AGE) games for sure, as well as some other projects you’ll hear more about later. Please help me welcome Malcolm to Team Ronin!

Atlas of Earth-Prime: Now Pre-OrderingMutants & Masterminds

We are kicking off the year with a major release for Mutants & Masterminds: the Atlas of Earth-Prime. You’ve seen parts of this setting before in Emerald City, the Cosmic Handbook, Hero High, and many other Mutants & Masterminds books, but now Earth-Prime is getting full campaign setting treatment. The Atlas of Earth-Prime releases in just two weeks. You can still get in on the pre-order now if you are quick about it.

In the Spring we’ll be following that up with Freedom City. This was the original campaign setting for the Mutants & Masterminds RPG going back to 2003. The new book brings Freedom City fully into Third Edition, and creates a triumvirate of super power with Emerald City and the Atlas of Earth-Prime!

AGE Games

Blue Rose the AGE RPG of Romantic FantasyThe big Adventure Game Engine excitement for the first half of the year is the release of Blue Rose, our RPG of Romantic Fantasy, in February. Blue Rose was our most successful Kickstarter to date, and we’re delighted to get this book out to backers and then released to the general public. The BackerKit went live over the weekend. While we typically do pre-orders through our online store, with Blue Rose we’re trying out BackerKit for that. If you didn’t back the Kickstarter, you can pre-order now at this link . You’ll note some follow up releases on the BackerKit page. We’re making Blue Rose dice with Q Workshop, Blue Rose conviction Tokens with Campaign Coins, and then an adventure anthology called Six of Swords. Those should all come out in the Spring.

For Fantasy AGE itself we’ve got Titansgrave: The World of Valkana coming in the Spring. This is a full campaign setting book that greatly expands the information in Titansgrave: Ashes of Valkana. A lot of stuff that was only hinted at in the show will be revealed in Titansgrave: The World of Valkana!

In other Fantasy AGE news, we’ll be creating a community content program for the game in conjunction with OneBookShelf (the parent company of RPGNow and DriveThruRPG). People have been asking us if they can publish Fantasy AGE content since the game came out and soon that will be possible. OneBookShelf already runs several of these programs, for games like D&D and the Cypher System. Ours will be similar to these but not identical. For starters the products you can do will be limited to settings and adventures because that is the support Fantasy AGE needs most right now. There will be more info about the program and how it all works when we launch it. That should happen in a couple of months.

Freeport Bestiary for the Pathfinder RPGFreeport and Pathfinder

Our big Pathfinder release this Spring is the Freeport Bestiary. The City of Adventure hasn’t had a monster book since Creatures of Freeport in 2004. The Freeport Bestiary brings together the setting’s many monsters and a bunch of new ones in a beautiful full color hardback. Meanwhile, the Return to Freeport adventure series continues. We’ve released three of these PDFs so far. The remaining three will follow over the next few months and then we’ll collect them all together for a printed book in June.

D&D 5E

You may recall that we worked with Wizards of the Coast to create two D&D books: Out of the Abyss and the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide. Now we’re following those up with D&D books of our own. The first is Book of the Righteous, which presents a fully detailed mythology and pantheon you can use in your campaigns. The original edition of Book of the Righteous was our most critically-acclaimed book in the d20 era. We did a Kickstarter for a new 5E version last year and it should be out in May. As with Blue Rose, Book of the Righteous will have a general release after books ship to Kickstarter backers.

I’m going to make an exception and discuss one Summer release because I know I’d get pilloried if I didn’t mention it. Of course I’m talking about Critical Role! We had originally intended to release this in the Spring but we’ve scheduled it for Gen Con instead. This is Gen Con’s 50th anniversary (and my 28th Gen Con!). We wanted a big marquee release for the show and the Critical Role: Tal’Dorei Campaign Setting book is a perfect fit. We want to make this a real event and hope to have the cast out to Gen Con again.

Love 2 Hate

Towards the end of last year we released Love 2 Hate: Politics, the first expansion for the game. We are following that up in April with Love 2 Hate: Comics. Both expansions have 108 cards. You can mix them in with the core game, or play with them on their own for a more themed experience.

Dragon Age and SIFRP

We have Dragon Age and A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying books in development but licensed game lines require approvals and how long those take can vary quite a bit. It could be one week or three months depending. So don’t worry, books are coming. We’ve just decided to wait until everything is approved before we make formal announcements about their release.

PDF Support

We have a variety of PDF releases planned to support our various lines. We have more Fantasy AGE Encounters and short Titansgrave adventures coming for Fantasy AGE, as well as the Short Cuts series for Pathfinder. We’ll also be continuing our series of Chronicle System PDFs, which provide non-canon rules support for A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying. In the past year we’ve released rules for magic (Chronicle of Sorcery) and gunpowder/firearms (Spark to Powder), for example.

Chronicle System: Spark to Powder (PDF)

Chronicle of Sorcery (PDF)

Conventions

As a company Gen Con is, of course, our biggest show. Last year we had a room dedicated to Green Ronin games for the whole convention and that was great. We’re doing it again this year, so if you’d like to run games for us please contact Donna. If you run enough games, we’ll cover your badge and even subsidize your hotel room.

Donna and Barry also run OrcaCon in Everett, WA (just north of Seattle). OrcaCon is happening this coming weekend, so come on out if you’re in the area. It’s the unofficial Green Ronin convention and most of our staff will be there. We’ve got folks running games and giving seminars, though personally I just want to play some games this year!

Green Ronin is once again a sponsor of the JoCo Cruise and Nicole and I will be on onboard. Haven’t heard of the JoCo Cruise? Well, imagine a convention on a ship and you’ve got a pretty good idea, except it also includes music, comedy, and more. If it’s nerdy, it’s probably happening on the ship! There are still cabins available (the cruise is in March) and this year we have the entire ship to ourselves. Should be a great time.

We’ll also be attending various trade shows, like GTS, the Alliance Open House, and the ACD Gamesday. If you are a game retailer, come see us!

More to Come!

So that’s what we have coming the first half of the year. We also have some exciting news to share in the coming months. We’ll be announcing soon a new card game we’re bringing to Kickstarter in April and a new campaign setting for D&D 5E. We’ve licensed a comic book for RPG treatment. We’ve also got another AGE game in development, as well as Ork, Second Edition. Following us on Twitter (we’re @GreenRoninPub) is probably the best way to keep up with our announcements or just bookmark our website.

This is Green Ronin’s 17th year in business. Thank you for your continued support over the years. I started the company as a side project and it’s become so much more than that thanks to you. Come back in June when I reveal our Summer and Winter plans. Until then, game on!

Chris Pramas

Humble RPG Book Bundle: Fiction Faves

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We’re excited to take part in a new Humble RPG Book Bundle, which just launched today. The Fiction Faves bundle includes multiple titles from our A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying game (the official A Game of Thrones RPG), along with other publishers’ fine literary RPG books from the Atomic Robo, Laundry Files, Mistborn, and Dresden Files product lines.

Pay what you want for these excellent, DRM-free tabletop roleplaying books based on bestselling novels, and support charities at the same time!

Ronin Roundtable: GenCon GMing for Green Ronin

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GR-Gameroom1If you are a publisher, you of course want people to have the opportunity to play your games at GenCon. You can run demos at your booth but the exhibit hall is no place for long form RPG adventures (it’s super loud and booth space is limited). Those are better handled as scheduled events. Finding good and reliable game masters for your RPGs can be challenging though. In past years we’ve had mixed success with our GenCon events. What I really wanted was a dedicated area filled with Green Ronin games. To get that, you have to have a certain number of events. Coordinating that is a job in itself.

Enter Donna Prior, Green Ronin’s events manager. I told her what I wanted and wow, did she deliver. We had over 90 scheduled events this year and GenCon gave us a dedicated room for them on the second floor of the convention center. Going into that room and seeing tables full of gamers playing Fantasy AGE, Dragon Age, Mutants & Masterminds, and A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying was amazing. Read more →

Ronin Round Table: The Price of Success

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“When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die.” — Cersei Lannister

praying-to-old-godsSpoiler Warning: This article references material from Season 6 of Game of Thrones and contains spoilers for viewers who have not watched through at least the fifth episode of the sixth season of the show.

Fans of A Song of Ice and Fire—and players of the roleplaying game—know full well that success often comes at a cost, and it can be a very high cost indeed. Part of the way the Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying game manages this cost is through the use of Destiny Points, which players can spend or “burn” (permanently expend) in order to influence the narrative of the game, helping move things towards a particular outcome at a cost. This is detailed on pages 71–72 of the Game of Thrones edition. Similarly, the rules for injuries and wounds in battle, frustration in intrigues, and yielding in both (see Chapter 8 and Chapter 9 of SIFRP) reflect the notion that success is often achieved through sacrifice and setbacks of various sorts.

What about combining these two elements? If you want to emphasize the notion that success comes at a cost in your Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying chronicles, consider the following options: Read more →

Ronin Roundtable: Dragonpowder in SIFRP

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Screen Shot 2016-06-05 at 10.33.23 PMDisclaimer: This article discusses the concept of gunpowder in the setting of A Song of Ice and Fire, for the sole application of the roleplaying game A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying. To be clear, the existence of gunpowder is wholly non-canon for the book series, and this article is written from a great big “What If?” perspective.

Recently, we at Green Ronin Publishing released a new PDF sourcebook for the Chronicle System, Spark to Powder. This PDF takes a look at pre-modern types of gunpowder technologies, and how to use them in a Chronicle System campaign.

But since the Chronicle System is the “engine” that powers our A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying, even I couldn’t help but imagine what gunpowder introduced to Westeros might look like and how it might change the setting in some capacity. We’re calling it dragonpowder, not just for the flame it births so easily, but also for the devastating effect is has the potential to bring to warfare in Westeros.

So, without further ado, we look at the first hurdle to jump in such a scenario: Where does gunpowder come from? We offer three different answers for the Narrator to use in their campaign, perhaps even mixing and matching from elements as they like. Enjoy! Read more →

Now Pre-Ordering: Dragon’s Hoard

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You can now pre-order Dragon’s Hoard, an epic adventure for A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying (the Game of Thrones RPG)! When you pre-order the hardback book in our Green Ronin Online Store, you’ll be offered the PDF for just $5 at checkout! If you pre-order through your local retailer, make sure they know about our Pre-Order Plus program.

Dragon's Hoard

Dragon’s Hoard

Dragon’s Hoard
A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying Adventure
Authors: Lee Hammock, Scott Holden, Ian Ireland, Lauren Roy, and Neall Raemonn Price
Cover Artist: Slawomir Maniak
Formats: 180 pages, full color hardback / PDF

Even years after the fall of House Targaryen, their legacy is not forgotten. When a band of ruffians bound for the Wall seek shelter for the night, one of them reveals a secret that sparks a quest across Westeros and even the Narrow Sea to Braavos, seeking the clues to reveal the location of untold riches: part of the Targaryen treasury, spirited away in the final days of Robert’s Rebellion! But our heroes are not the only ones seeking the lost dragon’s hoard, and their rivals will stop at nothing to beat them to it and claim it for themselves. In the end will it be riches…or ruin? Dragon’s Hoard is an epic adventure for A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying able to fuel your chronicle for months of game play.

Pre-Order Dragon’s Hoard