DC Adventures Quickstart: Batman vs. Bane

DC Adventures Quickstart: Batman vs. BaneAvailable now for free download, it’s the DC Adventures Quickstart: Batman vs. Bane!

This free Quickstart PDF includes everything you need to use the award-winning Mutants & Masterminds rules to play out a combat encounter between Batman and Bane (other than a twenty-sided die, that is). Try out the game system, use this to introduce new players to DC Adventures or Mutants & Masterminds, or show it to the owner of your local game store, book store, or comic shop. However you want to use it, it’s free, so download it today.

Ronin Round Table: Seeing the World Through Game Design Glasses

There are times when it would be easier to not see the world from the point of view of a gamer and game-designer. Why? Because once you make the language and process of narrative game design a significant part of your vocabulary, it can be difficult to see things without those "game design glasses" on.

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Mutants & Masterminds Power Profile: Teleport Powers

Mutants & Masterminds Power Profile: Teleport Powers"Now you see me…" with Teleport Powers, you can disappear or arrive in the blink of an eye, crossing a room or a world as quickly as stepping through a door. This profile looks at teleportation, summoning, gateways, and powers for bending space to your will. For M&M Third Edition.

Mutants & Masterminds Power Profile: Teleport Powers

The Art of RPGs This August in Seattle

This August we are sponsoring an art in show in Seattle called The Art of Roleplaying Games at Krab Jab Studio. Chris Pramas is co-curating the show with Julie Baroh and the two have teamed up to bring an impressive array of artists together. There is an opening reception on August 11 from 6-9 pm and many of the artists and Chris Pramas will be in attendance. The show will remain open for a month, so you’ll have a chance to see it if you can’t making the reception. 

Artists include Todd Lockwood, Melissa A Benson, Michael Phillippi, Randy Gallegos, Liz Danforth, Mark Tedin, Rob Alexander, Brian Snoddy, Anthony Waters, Heather Hudson, Raven Mimura, Lee Moyer, Samuel Araya, Jeff Menges, RK Post, Mark Smylie, Drew Tucker, Jeremy Jarvis, Aaron McConnell, Jeremy Corff, Julie Baroh, Sarah Otterstatter, plus collections featuring Brom, Jeff Dee, Jeff Easley and more.
Come on down to the Georgetown neighborhood of Seattle and experience The Art of Roleplaying Games!
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ENnies Nomination Sale!

In celebration of our ENnies nominations this year, we’ve placed the print and PDF versions of our nominated products at 20% off in our Green Ronin Online Store. On sale now:

The Dragon Age RPG Quickstart Guide, normally merely free, is now extra-free during the sale.

2012 ENnie Awards Nominations Announced!

2012 ENnies Nominee

We are pleased and humbled to find five of our products nominated for ENnie Awards this year. Congratulations to all our fellow nominees, and good luck! Here are our nominations:

Voting begins on Friday, July 20 and runs to Sunday, July 29.

Ronin Round Table: Super-Setting Remixes by Steve Kenson

I’ve been asked in interviews just how much of the Freedom City setting for Mutants & Masterminds is my "home" game setting. Surprising to many, the answer is "not much at all." I based fairly little of Freedom City on my own superhero games, partly because the setting started out as a project to create a specific "iconic" kind of superhero setting for publication and partially because, for me at least, "homegrown" settings have more of an organic "patchwork" feel to them, where it would be difficult to sift out the parts I created from the parts I borrowed from all over the place (or "sampled" in music parlance).

You see, my longest running superhero setting started out as a Marvel Super-Heroes game (using the old TSR-era Advanced rules) but I borrowed heavily from major superhero games at the time like Champions and Villains & Vigilantes. One of the first adventures I ran was The Coriolis Effect, and Dr. Arcane’s sacrifice became the inspiration for the player characters to form a team. They received his mansion (near Marblehead, Massachusetts, in my setting) as a bequest from his granddaughter and turned it into their headquarters.

In another early adventure, the heroes fought Armadillo from the Champions rulebook, turning him into the "Stilt-Man" joke character of the series (poor guy couldn’t catch a break). They met the Crusaders from the V&V adventure Crisis at Crusader Citadel (based out of New York City in my setting) and the Soviet characters from the crossover adventure Trouble for HAVOC (with stats for V&V, Champions, and Superworld and, yes, "Soviet," it was 1986…). Nightwraith, a background character from Aaron Allston’s The Circle organization for Champions actually became a player character, when an adventure to find the missing Golden Age hero unearthed him in suspended animation and involved a journey into his mind. One of the players really liked Nightwraith and wanted to play him. Both Nightwraith and Paladin (another PC) were former WWII comrades and members of "The Golden Agency", a name I lifted from Mark Gruenwald’s Squadron Supreme. And so on.

Maybe the best example of the "hybrid" nature of the setting was Deathstroke, the most infamous villain team of the game. They were a group of super-powered mercenaries-for-hire who plagued the heroes on a number of occasions. The name comes from the Champions adventure of the same name, but they share no members in common (I just liked the name). Their leader was Metallus, a magnetic controller and transmuter (able to turn people into metal), lifted from the adventure in the Avengers Coast-to-Coast sourcebook for Marvel. His second-in-command was Helm, a "techno-telepath" inspired by Marvel’s Mentallo, DC’s The Thinker, and the cyberpunk craze of the ’80s. There was Jammer, a power-nullifier pretty much borrowed whole-cloth from Scrambler of the Marauders (of Marvel’s "Mutant Massacre") and Temptress, a pheromone-enhanced life-drainer (looks inspired by a number of cat-suited villainesses), plus Incognito, a master of disguise and martial arts, drawing upon Mystique, Wolverine, and Deathstroke the Terminator, amongst others. Lastly, there was the classic Champions villain Ankylosaur (who got taken way more seriously than poor Armadillo, must be the spikey bits). Deathstroke frequently worked for Thomas Frost, a crooked businessman and rival of a PC’s secret identity, very much in the mold of Iron Man’s foe Justin Hammer, or the corporate mogul Lex Luthor of the late 1980s.

Now, I’m not saying no elements of my old superhero games have ever found their way into various things I’ve written. Envoy from the Golden Age Liberty League is heavily based on Paladin, for example, and Incognito wormed his way into the Villainomicon for Icons. And the player characters’ team? They were called "the Paragons", which eventually found a Mutants & Masterminds use (even if it had nothing to do with the original characters or setting).

Personally, I hope many M&M Gamemasters are treating the Freedom City and Emerald City settings, characters, and adventures, in much the same way: mixing and re-mixing elements into their own unique blends of superhero action and adventure. Indeed, I hope Mutants & Masterminds source materials go beyond the game system and find uses in settings and adventures for Champions, Icons, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, Supers! and many other games; my way of "paying forward" for all of the great ideas and fun provided by the superhero RPGs and comics of my youth.

So what’s your style of setting creation: a "canon" published setting like Freedom City or something of your own making? A "remix" from different sources or something drawing primarily from one source? Tell us about your own super-settings (remixed or otherwise) on the Atomic Think Tank forums!

Mutants & Masterminds Power Profile: Light Powers

Mutants & Masterminds Power Profile: Light PowersShed some light on the world: from dazzling displays to hypnotic patterns and laser beams, Light Powers tap into one of the essential energies. Characters can control, manifest, project, and even become light, with a full spectrum of powers at their command. For M&M Third Edition.

Mutants & Masterminds Power Profile: Light Powers.

Update on SIFRP Campaign Guide A Game of Thrones Edition

A couple things we (okay, Evan) forgot to post in yesterday’s announcement about the new A Game of Thrones Edition of the A Song of Ice and Fire Campaign Guide:

1) If you purchased the PDF of the original version in our online store, we’ve replaced your download with the PDF of the A Game of Thrones Edition. You can log in with the same account you used to make your original purchase, and the SIFRP Campaign Guide link on your account page will now download the new edition. It is possible to have more than one user name associated with the same email address, so if you log in but don’t see the download link, revisit the Login page and enter your email address(es) in the Forgot Your User Name? box.

2) There is a possibility that we will have some copies of A Song of Ice and Fire Campaign Guide: A Game of Thrones Edition at Gen Con this August, a week or two before the book appears on store shelves. If you’re planning on going to Gen Con and want the new edition in its print version, feel free to wait until Gen Con instead of pre-ordering. (Pre-ordering will, of course, allow you to get the PDF version for just $5 during checkout, if that’s important to you.)

Thanks!

A Song of Ice and Fire Campaign Guide: A Game of Thrones Edition Pre-Order / PDF

SIFRP Campaign Guide: A Game of Thrones EditionThe A Song of Ice and Fire Campaign Guide: A Game of Thrones Edition is now available for pre-order from our Green Ronin Online Store.

The A Game of Thrones Edition of the Campaign Guide features some new art and incorporates fixes for all known errors (no, really).

When you pre-order the physical book from us, you’ll be offered the PDF version for just $5 during checkout. If you pre-order from a participating Pre-Order Plus retailer, they’ll have a coupon code for you to use to get the same deal on the PDF from our online store. You can, of course, instead order the PDF.