Super Holiday Sale!

Want to get some holiday shopping done without leaving the house? Looking to save Earth-Prime while saving some money as well? Excited about Wonder Woman? Or Arrow? The Flash? Gotham? We’ve got just the sale for you!

From now through next Friday, select Mutants & Masterminds and DC Adventures products are on sale (30% off!) in our Green Ronin Online Store.

Save some money, save the world!

NOTE: The sale has ended. Thanks for your support, and happy gaming!

Ronin Round Table: Playtesting SIFRP

As I’m finishing up the last round of edits for the very large A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying adventure series titled Dragon’s Hoard, I thought I’d talk a little about our playtesters.

In an ideal world in which tabletop roleplaying games were one of those massively financed entertainment industries, we’d have a crack team of paid testers whose day job is to pick apart the stuff we write and improve on it. Having worked in the video game industry before, I can say it was always kind of great to be able to shoot one of the testers an email, ask them to kick the tires on the latest build and get immediate feedback.

The reality of our industry, of course, is that we don’t quite have the ability to maintain something like that. We’re lucky, though, in that our industry has a consumer base that’s filled with people who love being part of the process, as well as getting the chance to see some of the material that’s coming out for their favorite game ahead of schedule. Hence, our playtesters!

The playtesters for A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying are a pretty diverse lot, with folks in the United States, Canada, Europe, and Australia. They’re not just individuals—when I put my playtesting cadre together, I solicited for entire groups of playtesters. Which of course only makes sense: playtesters aren’t just beta readers, but are people who will take the rules that they’re given and put them through the process of actual game play.

Playtesters look for a couple of things. Rules solidity is of course a big one. We need to make sure the rules we’re using are on-target, whether newly created rules that need to be balanced against the rest of the system, or just making sure we’re using our already-existing rule-set consistently.

But playtesters do more than that: they also play through the material to make sure it’s actually enjoyable to play. At the end of the day, we’re creating games for people to enjoy, and that’s the first and last litmus test of our creative process: Is This Fun? Everything else is secondary to that.

Each playtesting group has its own personality, which is fantastic. Some groups are more interested in consistency of material to the book canon, for instance, while others are very strict rules people. Frankly, having this kind of diversity of gaming interest is to our benefit, and we’re grateful to these volunteers for the work and passion they put into these games.

If you and your group are interested in becoming playtesters, feel free to
drop me a line. It’s a simple process, involving the signing of a Non-Disclosure Agreement, and a little conversation between us. We’ve got plenty of really great upcoming material that’ll need its tires kicked, so if that sounds interesting, drop me a line! I’d love to hear from you.

Ronin Roundtable: Bring on the Bad Guys!

Villains. What would a superhero game be without them? A lot less interesting, that’s for sure. Super-villains are the primary challenge for super-heroes, apart from stopping disasters and nabbing the occasional mugger or bank-robber. Villains and their schemes drive stories and the rivalries they build up with heroes become the stuff of legend. A hero is often defined by his or her "rogues gallery"—dark and twisted reflections of the hero’s own goals.

That’s why the "Foes of Freedom" forms a substantial third of the upcoming new edition of Freedom City. While the setting book still looks at some of Freedom’s heroes (past and present), the focus is on fiendish foes you can use in your own Mutants & Masterminds games, some 118 pages of them altogether!

Read more

Ronin Round Table: We Have a Bestiary. And it’s Advanced!

Over the next few weeks, print copies of the Advanced Bestiary are finally going to be getting into the hands of first, the Kickstarter backers, and then a wider audience. This is the first major d20 release for Green Ronin in a long time, and has been one of two things that have taken up most of my time since being brought on as the developer for Pathfinder-compatible Green Ronin projects almost a year ago. So having the book finished and in distribution represents a major milestone both for me, and for Green Ronin’s plans for Pathfinder-compatible content.

There are still some elements of this project being developed (the Hero Lab files, for example), but with the print book arriving in warehouses, a major stage of work is complete. The original Advanced Bestiary became one of the most popular third-party products for the previous versions of the game, and I have every reason to think the same will be true for our updated version. Now that people are beginning to get a look at the book, I wanted to take a moment to talk about it.

Read more

Atlas of Earth-Prime: The Mediterranean (PDF)

Atlas of Earth-Prime: The MediterraneanOur crack team of Super-Geographers is back from a long research mission, having saved the world a few times along the way. Thanks to their efforts, Earth-Prime still turns and today’s Atlas of Earth-Prime issue for Mutants & Masterminds, The Mediterranean, is available now!

Once the center of the western world, the Mediterranean is still a land rich in history, culture, and opportunities for adventure. From the Straits of Gibraltar and the secrets of the great rock, to the ancient gods of Greece and modern heroes like the cyber-centaur Professor Chiron and Stella d’Argent, the Star of Italy. Nations once part of the communist bloc face new challenges with the aid of their own heroes, while lands once part of ancient myth see the mingling of magic and modernity.

Atlas of Earth-Prime: The Mediterranean

Ronin Round Table: Threats of Thedas

Hey folks, Jack here. I wanted to take my next few Ronin Round Tables to talk about some of the concepts and new content we’ll be seeing the new collected Dragon Age Core Rulebook. In the spirit of the most recent holiday, I wanted to talk about monsters, spirits, and demons, and how they’ll be presented in the book.

Most of the adversaries in the new core book are the same as those in Sets 1–3 of the Dragon Age RPG. Dragons, demons, and other monsters that have already appeared are collected and compiled in their own chapter. However, there are a few new features, creatures, and changes.

The first change is organization. All the adversaries have been reorganized by type. All the demons are together, all the dragons are in one place, and so on. This is in contrast to the Sets, which presented level appropriate threats in each set. It’s not a major change, but it’s one that makes the book more usable in a collected format.

The second change is practical. Without Sets to roughly divide up adversaries we’re including a new statistic for adversaries, a Threat Rating. This divides monsters up into four categories of Threats based on rough level ranges. Note this is a range, so it’s not an exact ranking. For example, Genlocks and Hurlocks are both Minor threats despite Genlocks being a bit weaker than Hurlocks. Adjustments like presenting foes in large numbers or making upgraded (Elite, Heroic, Epic) versions of them can adjust this rating, but it presents a baseline to assist GMs in determining if a given foe is challenging or overpowered for their PCs.

The third change is new content. We will be introducing new monsters from Dragon Age: Inquisition in an upcoming product but we’d realized to bring the bestiary of bad guys up to date with Inquisition we needed to add some particular adversaries, particularly those from Dragon Age: Awakening. Yep, the Mother and her creepy creepy Children will be showing up. So will the Architect and a few other threats.

I’m going to wrap up here with a shoutout: One of our new freelancers, Matt Miller, helped me bring these creatures to life. I’ve known Matt for some time now and worked with him on Trinity Continuum Core for Onyx Path. He’s one of several new freelancers who answered our tryouts and because we had serious time pressures to get this done, having him help was a real boon. We’re going to be seeing work from others who answered our tryouts in upcoming works—I’m still reviewing and putting together lists of other writers to work with and will be contacting more folks soon now that the core book is in layout and approvals.

Anyway, that’s the news of adversaries and threats in the new collected Core Book. I’ll be back soon to talk about some of the other things we’ll see as well as news on some upcoming products.