Atlas of Earth-Prime: Canada *and* Out of Strife, Prosperity

It’s Two-fer, uh, Wednesday, here at Green Ronin Publishing, with two PDF releases in our Green Ronin Online Store.

Atlas of Earth-Prime: Canada (PDF)

Visit a world not our own, but strangely familiar, a world of heroes and villains, of wonders and dangers, and limitless adventure! The Atlas of Earth-Prime is a trip around the world of the Freedom City and Emerald City settings for the Mutants & Masterminds Superhero RPG, looking at different regions and their heroes, villains, features, and opportunities, giving you a whole world to explore for your game. All for less than the cost of a new comic book!

This week the Atlas of Earth-Prime goes north to Canada, where the Cathedral of Pain haunts the streets of Quebec and Dominion City hovers high in the air. Learn the secrets of the Centurion’s Sanctum, the mysterious Aerie of the Avians, and the torments of Project Inferno, and go up against the decidedly im-polite Team Canada, who are looking for a good fight, and maybe a chance to be heroes, too. All this and the menace that is…the Mad Maple!

 

Chronicle System: Out of Strife, Prosperity (PDF)

Whether they are a peaceful agrarian House known for their vast fields of grain and fine warhorse bloodlines, or a sinister House notorious for their extravagant wealth and rumors of assassins in their employ, noble Houses are defined by the kinds of Wealth Holdings they invest in. With more than sixty new and updated Wealth Holdings, Out of Strife, Prosperity provides a fantastic resource for detailing out the Houses in your chronicle. Out of Strife, Prosperity is the second of our Chronicle System series of PDFs, for use with the Chronicle System engine that powers our popular A Song of ice & Fire Roleplaying system!

Ronin Round Table: Out of Strife, Prosperity & Community Development

For a while now, we’ve been working at producing some mechanics-focused short products for the Chronicle System, the "engine" that powers A Song of Ice & Fire Roleplaying. The first of these, Woodland Creatures, released a selection of creatures with which to populate the forests of a campaign.

The next is Out of Strife, Prosperity, a rebalancing and dramatic expansion of the Wealth Holding rules. With this product, Narrators and players can flesh out the kinds of resources a House has access to, from different kinds of goods and resources produced by their domains, to important persons who add to a House’s prosperity, or the elements of luxury that only the noble can truly afford.

Because part of this process involved a retooling and balancing of the costs of these Holdings versus the benefits they offered, we decided to do something we haven’t done on a bigger scale before. Though many of our lines use a small collection of fans to give new material a once-over, we decided to turn to a more public Community Development model, actually releasing the pre-edited version of the majority of the material to our Chronicle System Community Development forum to give folks the chance to look it over and comment.

As far as experiments go, this one was definitely a success. The conversation ranged from very specific comparisons of balance to discussing broader questions (such as what exactly constituted a holding, and how did it impact the setting). Its only real flaw, ultimately, was probably the time it took to go over all of the great discussion, noting changes that seemed necessary in light of those conversations. Of course, time is often the one thing we don’t have in abundance, preventing us from doing this with every sourcebook; nonetheless, I’d judge this little experiment a success, and would like to try it again at some point in the future! You’ll soon be able to judge some of the results for yourself by checking out the final version of Out of Strife, Prosperity!

Keep an eye out for more Chronicle System supplements to follow, including the Chronicle of Sorcery, for adding magic rules to Chronicle System games; By Tread of Boot, expanding out the rules for building Warfare units; and Spark to Powder, which adds a whole set of mechanics for incorporating gunpowder weapons to the Chronicle System.

Ronin Round Table: 2014 Origins Awards

By Jack Norris

Hey everyone, Jack here. As we work on final proofreading and approvals for Dragon Age Set 3 I wanted to take a moment during this week’s Ronin Round Table to discuss the Origins Awards and in particular DC Adventures Universe, which I did some small bit of work on.

The Origins Awards are, unsurprisingly, an award show for RPG related projects that takes place at Origins, one of the larger and longest running game conventions in the Midwest. The Academy of Adventure Gaming Arts and Design compiles nominees in various categories, from Best Roleplaying Game to Best Historical Board Game, and reveals the winners at the convention. It’s always a solid list of worthy competitors and this year is no exception. From Pelgrane Press’ 13th Age to Monte Cook’s Numenera to Battle Front Minatures’ Flames of War and Wil Wheaton and Felicia Day’sTable Top, there is a lot of fun impressive and just plain cool stuff up for awards this year. (Here’s the full list of nominees.)

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Ronin Round Table: Convention Season!

As the Events Manager, this is my favourite time of year…convention season! Not only do I love to attend conventions representing Green Ronin, I love to attend for my “day job” in the video game industry. I’ve recently attended the Game Developers Conference (GDC) and the Emerald City Comicon. I attended the GDC as an official volunteer, aka the Conference Associates program. In my week in San Francisco, I had an opportunity to run demos of the upcoming Love2Hate card game and of the Dragon Age RPG. People who make video games are also very passionate about tabletop gaming, and I had no problems finding people who wished to get in a game. I even got to talk to Jennifer Hepler about Dragon Age for a bit! She’s a fan of the tabletop version and was very encouraging.

At ECCC, I had a table all to myself, to showcase Green Ronin games and to run the DARPG and L2H demos. We talked to a LOT of people about Mutants & Masterminds and DC Adventures, this being a comics convention and all. We had lots of good traction on the Song of Ice & Fire materials, too. I was running a 2-hour version of our Dragon Age RPG Quickstart adventure, “An Arl’s Ransom.” It has action, intrigue, and fantastic moral choices, which is one of my favourite things about the game.

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Congratulations, Owen!

Green Ronin’s Pathfinder line developer, Owen Stephens, has accepted a job with Paizo Publishing, who have graciously agreed to keep sharing him with us in his freelance developer capacity. Here’s more about his sweet new day job:

REDMOND, WA (April 3, 2014): Paizo Inc., publisher of the world’s best-selling Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, as well as novels, game accessories, board games, and the wildly popular Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, is pleased to welcome the addition of Developer Owen K.C. Stephens to the Paizo design team.

A lifelong gamer, Owen K.C. Stephens began writing articles for Dragon Magazine in 1990, in the hopes of making enough money to pay for his RPG habit. In the decades since, his career has included work for Adventure-A-Week, Green Ronin, Steve Jackson Games, Super Genius Games, White Wolf, Wizards of the Coast, and Paizo. Stephens will join Paizo to helm the development of the quarterly, 64-page Pathfinder Module line, working with both established Pathfinder authors and RPG Superstar winners.

Says Paizo Editor-in-Chief F. Wesley Schneider, “Owen’s been helping us build adventures, settings, and rules for the Pathfinder RPG since its earliest days–you’d be hard pressed to find a single author who’s worked on more Pathfinder-related projects. Now that the stars have aligned for all of us, we couldn’t be more excited to have him lending his expertise to the everyday work of making Pathfinder even more awesome!”

The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game is the world’s best-selling tabletop RPG, in which players take on the role of brave adventurers fighting to survive in a world beset by magic and evil. The Pathfinder RPG is currently translated into multiple languages, and the vibrant Pathfinder universe has been licensed for comic book series, graphic novels, miniatures, plush toys, apparel, and is being developed into a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game.

Hodor’s Guide to Hodoring (PDF)

HodorIt came down to the wire, but we were just able to finish up the latest product for A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying: Hodor’s Guide to Hodoring. We’ve been working on this for a long time and we think you’re going to appreciate the usefulness and depth of this book. Best of all? It’s free and you can download it now. Hodor!