Ork! The Roleplaying Game, Second Edition: Pre-Order and PDF

Longtime Green Ronin fans will recall that our very first product, released eighteen years ago, was Ork! The Roleplaying Game. This beer ‘n’ pretzels RPG was a blast to play. We’ve had a lot to do since then, however, and Ork! didn’t see additional releases. Until now!

Ork! The Roleplaying Game, Second EditionOrk! The Roleplaying Game, Second Edition is now available to pre-order in our Green Ronin Online Store and through participating brick-and-mortar retailers. And, when you pre-order the physical book, you can get the PDF version right away for just $5! (If your favorite local game or book retailer doesn’t know about the pre-order deal, please point them at our Retailer Support page for details.)

Ork! The Roleplaying Game, Second Edition

Shut up! You am Ork! Enter the bone-cracking World of Orkness with Ork! The Roleplaying Game. This new edition is the standalone, streamlined roleplaying game of orkish mayhem: a “beer and pretzels” game where monstrous, hilarious adventure matters more than rules and tables. Claw your way out of the Gunk Pit, earn your name with acts of spectacular violence, and bring terror to the Squishy Man villages in the name of Almighty Krom. Includes a blood-soaked combat system, other, lesser rules, and a complete series of adventures to take your orks from nameless youth to sharp-toothed, unholy terrors–if you can avoid the wrath of Krom. Being a monster has never been such fun!

Ronin Roundtable: Nisaba Press update!

So, by now, I’m sure you’ve all seen the announcement about Nisaba Press’s first novel, Shadowtide, by Blue Rose’s own, beloved Joe Carriker. Joe turned the final manuscript over to me a couple of months ago, and I worked on the edits while I was in New Orleans for a convention. Readers, this book is lovely. It’s full of intrigue, adventure, and chosen family, led by a smart-talking rhy-crow and a grieving Night Woman.

Shadowtide: A Blue Rose Novel by Joseph D. Carriker Jr.

The book is now in production’s hands, along with the interior art order. It’s going to be pretty amazing, and I couldn’t be happier with the first entry in Nisaba’s novel line.

But now that Joe’s novel is into production, let’s talk about what we can look forward to next. Nisaba’s fiction is currently focused on our three internal settings, Blue Rose, Freeport, and Mutants & Masterminds. With a Blue Rose novel out, what could possibly be next?

How about a Mutants & Masterminds novel, penned by Aaron Rosenberg? Aaron is an experienced novelist who is familiar with tie-in and game fiction, having written for properties including Star Trek, World of Warcraft, Stargate: Atlantis, Star Wars, Warhammer, and Eureka. He’s written for a number of game properties, too, including several supplements for Green Ronin. His combination of game and novel experience made him a great fit for our next Nisaba novel.

Coming in fourth quarter 2018 from Nisaba Press, Height of the Storm is a novel about a teenager who gets caught in a storm, and wakes up with a big choice to make. We’ve been through the first round of edits, and the manuscript is back with Aaron for a final writing pass before the copyedit phase starts. Hal has the cover art notes, and we’re looking forward to initial sketches.

In the meantime, check out our short fiction, and keep an eye out for an announcement of the upcoming Nisaba Journal, our first collection of short fiction. The Journal will be produced bi-monthly, containing 4-6 short stories in the featured settings, and available in our web store. The August issue includes stories from Richard Lee Byers, Tiffany Trent, Michael Matheson, Dylan Birtolo, Rhiannon Louve, and a prequel to Height of the Storm from Aaron Rosenberg!

Thanks for reading, folks. I’m super excited to bring you the next round of fiction set in Green Ronin’s worlds.

Mutants & Masterminds Basic Hero’s Handbook: Pre-Order and PDF

Basic Hero's Handbook for Mutants & Masterminds: Pre-Order and PDFThe Mutants & Masterminds Basic Hero’s Handbook is now available to pre-order in our Green Ronin Online Store and through participating brick-and-mortar retailers. And, when you pre-order the physical book, you can get the PDF version right away for just $5! (If your favorite local game or book retailer doesn’t know about the pre-order deal, please point them at our Retailer Support page for details.)

If you happen to be going to Gen Con this year, you can select the $0 Gen Con Pick-Up “shipping” option. For such orders, folks who bring their order confirmation email by our booth at Gen Con (Indianapolis, IN, August 2–5, 2018, booth #1321) can pick up their pre-ordered books. (Please only pick this shipping method if you can make it to our booth at Gen Con.)

Mutants & Masterminds Basic Hero’s Handbook

Every hero needs an origin story and this can be yours! Written with new gamers in mind, the Basic Hero’s Handbook streamlines and clarifies the flexible, robust third edition rules of Mutants & Masterminds. With simplified character creation and a selection of ready-made adventures, the Mutants & Masterminds Basic Hero’s Handbook lets players jump right into the action. The book is fully compatible with the Deluxe Hero’s Handbook and the entire library of third edition Mutants & Masterminds supplements, instantly expanding your character options and adventure potential. Whether you’re just getting started, or want an extra player-friendly reference at the table, the Mutants & Masterminds Basic Hero’s Handbook is the choice for your world-saving needs!

The Expanse Roleplaying Game Kickstarter: Here Comes the Juice!

The Expanse Roleplaying Game coverSo, if you haven’t heard, on Monday, Green Ronin launched a Kickstarter for the new The Expanse Roleplaying Game using the Adventure Game Engine, and by “launched” we mean in true Expanse fashion, involving some massive acceleration and heavy Gs! The Kickstarter funded fully within the first hour, hit over 300% funding within ten hours, and is still going strong!

The Expanse, of course, is the hugely popular series of science fiction novels by James S.A. Corey, brought to television by SyFy. In fact, the series is so popular that when SyFy decided to stop producing The Expanse series, the online #SaveTheExpanse campaign helped to convince Amazon Prime Video to pick it up and begin producing a fourth season.

Green Ronin Publishing has a license with The Expanse creators (James S.A. Corey is the pen-name of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck) to publish a tabletop roleplaying game based on the books. This is familiar territory for the authors, since The Expanse started out as a concept for a massive multiplayer video game, and was used as a setting for a roleplaying campaign before the novels were written. Now it has come full-circle back to its RPG roots.

You can find lots more information about the forthcoming Expanse Roleplaying Game at the Kickstarter page, and you can also download The Expanse Quickstart: A complete set of scaled-down rules, pre-generated characters, and an initial adventure to get you playing in the universe of The Expanse right away. It’s a great opportunity to “test-drive” the game before you decide to back it.

To those who have already backed this project on Kickstarter…thank you! Everyone at Green Ronin is blown away by your show of support and your interest in the game, and we’re excited about taking the opportunity to come up with even more stretch goals to make The Expanse RPG the very best that it can be and to reward you for the confidence you have shown in us.

The Expanse Backer Badges!

Earth: I backed The Expanse RPG on Kickstarter Mars: I backed The Expanse RPG on Kickstarter Mars: I backed The Expanse RPG on Kickstarter

In the meanwhile, if you want to show your support and help to spread the word, we’ve come up with these backer badges. Choose the faction you most identify with: Earth, Mars, or the Belt, change your various profile pictures to show your support for the project, and hold on for some more juice as The Expanse Roleplaying Game Kickstarter continues to accelerate! This ride has just begun and there are a lot of adventures awaiting us.

Basic Hero’s Handbook preview: THE ARCHETYPES: ANANSI

With the arrival of the Mutants & Masterminds Basic Hero’s Handbook, the world of Earth Prime has a few new heroes illustrating the eight heroic archetypes presented in the books. Four of these characters also appear in the upcoming Mutants & Masterminds Quickstart as pregenerated player character sheets, and so they needed names, personalities, and origins of their own. We turned to RPG industry legend and giant comics nerd, Amber Scott to help flesh out the new Crimefighter, Energy Controller, Gadgeteer, and Paragon of the Mutants & Masterminds Basic Heroes Handbook!

 

———————-

Morowa grew up in the nation of Dakana, a technologically advanced society hidden from the rest of the world. As a child, she always felt confident in her place in the world. With her clever mind and natural talent for athletics, she fit in perfectly as a member of the nation’s defense forces. As she advanced in school, she studied all the courses necessary for her to enter the all-female force comprising Dakana’s greatest defenders.

But her plans for the future derailed as Morowa began having strange dreams. At first, the dreams were  the same. She stood on the edge of a tall building, looking out over an unfamiliar city. It was night, and a moon shone brightly overhead. Below her, thousands of people went about their daily lives, unaware of her watchful presence. The city—like a heart—beat strong, but out beyond the heart poison crept through its veins.

Young and headstrong, she initially dismissed the dreams as a strange quirk of her mind. But the visions continued, and gradually Morowa found herself able to interact with them. She walked around the roof, glancing down from different angles and seeing slices of city life. She witnessed car accidents, assaults, and robberies, but she also saw good-hearted people stepping in to help when they could. And every time a good soul stepped in to help, the poison receded just a little.

Eventually, the young soldier began to notice a tiny spider crouched on the ledge. One night, as she descended again into the dream-city, the spider spoke to her.

“You are destined for more than a life of routine,” the spider said. “The heart you have trained your whole life to protect is strong; it drips with good souls and healthy blood. Your fate lies across the sea. You will help those who need it and strike down those who would harm the innocent. If you love the heart, how can you not love the body it feeds as well?”

After that, the dreams stopped. Morowa resisted, at first. She already had such a clear vision for her future, and it didn’t include traveling to another continent and living among the strange customs of the western world, with its crime and intolerance. But she couldn’t shake the spider’s words out of her head, and after discussing the matter with the shamans and soldiers, she decided to follow the path laid out by her dreams.

The first night in her new city, she dreamed again of the spider. “You have made a wise choice,” the spider said. “Fight with a fearless heart and trust those who come to your aid.”

Morowa fights with her acrobatic skills and with three weapons brought from her homeland. The most obvious are a collapsing staff and spider-shaped throwing disks, but the least obvious is the most deadly: a lifetime raised in a world uncorrupted by petty greed and hate, and the knowledge that such a place can exist where people flourish. Those who have fought her would also add Morowa’s sharp wit to her list of weapons. She calls herself Anansi, after the spider of folk-tales brought to Dakana from distant Ghana. She still knows little of the spider from her visions, but Morowa  knows who she is:  a trickster, and a spider whose bite draws out venom from the veins of the world.

 

Aldis: City of the Blue Rose Pre-Order and PDF

Aldis: City of the Blue RoseAldis: City of the Blue Rose is now available to pre-order in our Green Ronin Online Store and through participating brick-and-mortar retailers.And, when you pre-order the physical book, you can get the PDF version right away for just $5! (If your favorite local game or book retailer doesn’t know about the pre-order deal, please point them at our Retailer Support page for details.)

If you happen to be going to Gen Con this year, you can select the $0 Gen Con Pick-Up “shipping” option. For such orders, folks who bring their order confirmation email by our booth at Gen Con (Indianapolis, IN, August 2-5, 2018, booth #1321) can pick up their pre-ordered books. (Please only pick this shipping method if you can make it to our booth at Gen Con.)

Welcome to Aldis: City of the Blue Rose!

This beautiful, full color sourcebook lavishly details the capital city of the central nation in the Blue Rose RPG, providing players and Narrators alike the tools needed to tell stories using the city as a focus. From the intrigues of nobles in the High Ward to the entertainments in the Middle Ward to the roughest parts of town found in the Outer Ward, this supplement details people, important sites, and historical events of the City of the Blue Rose. Romantic fantasy narratives frequently remain focused around singular locations, giving time and opportunities for heroes to develop friendships, romances, and rivalries with the people to be found there, and this sourcebook provides everything to allow players in a Blue Rose RPG campaign to do just that!

Pre-order Aldis: City of the Blue Rose today!

Ronin Roundtable: Gamemastering Basics

As Mutants & Masterminds developer Crystal Frasier is demonstrating in previews leading up to pre-orders, The Basic Hero’s Handbook has a lot to offer both old and new players interested in the World’s Greatest Superhero RPG.

 

“But what about Gamemasters?” you ask. Fear not! As it happens, The Basic Hero’s Handbook (or M&M Basic for short) has a lot of offer M&M GM’s as well, including those of you who may want to start running your own games. What sorts of things will long-time and new Gamemasters find in the book?

Encounter Archetypes

M&M Basic provides several “encounter archetypes,” looking at a particular encounter or situation in some detail, including how to stage it, what the game mechanics look like, and different variations you can play out with it. The book includes encounter archetypes such as:

The Doom Room: How to run all of those “training exercise” scenes where the heroes cooperate against a fiendish simulation, or compete against each other. The material in this encounter also does double-duty in supplying game mechanics you can use for various villainous traps!

The Heist: The classic robbery scenario, including what the crooks are stealing, the potential for innocent bystanders in harm’s way, and ways the thieves may use to cover their escape when the heroes try to thwart their heist. Variations include how to mix-and-match some supervillains and different kinds of heists.

The Rescue: A falling jetliner, a runaway train, people in danger and heroes to the rescue! How to handle rescuing people endangered by these and similar problems, along with many variations that can turn them into even more complex encounters, such as rescuing a falling passenger jet while also dealing with the villains who damaged it!

Disaster! Looks at a different sort of rescue encounter, heroes saving people in danger from a catastrophe. This can range from a building on fire or damaged in a quake, to a storm or some other disaster, and sets up how to stage rescues and give the heroes challenges that are not necessarily things they can punch their way through.

You can use these encounter archetypes as building blocks for your own superheroic adventures or time-savers in your own adventure design, since the essential work has been laid out for you.

Ready to Use Villains

M&M Basic offers a set of ready-to-run villains with a variety of different power levels, from 8 to 15, complete with easy-to-read character sheets detailing just what the villain’s powers do in clear terms. For example, take a look at the new Luna Moth, a daring, flying thief with gossamer wings and chemical cocoons to challenge your heroes.

 

Other foes described in Basic terms for Gamemasters include the Power Corps, the Battle Brothers, the mentalist Mindfire, the space bounty hunter Loma Slife, Malador the Mystic, and the sinister Overshadow! Plus GMs get a variety of ready-made monsters and minions to round out the villains and to put between them and the heroes.

Shadows of the Past

Plus the Basic Hero’s Handbook includes a complete M&M adventure, Shadows of the Past, making use of the villains and encounter building blocks provided in the book. You can play through this adventure to introduce a group to the game or kick off a new M&M campaign, and use it as an example for building your own exciting adventures.

Combine this with GM advice and reference material and The Basic Hero’s Handbook has everything a group needs to get started playing the World’s Greatest Superhero RPG!

Ronin Roundtable: Ork! Lore and More Gore!

Okay, I’ve been busy talking about Modern AGE but there’s another game I’m developing. It’s nastier, brutisher, and shorter—and stylistically, promotes the use of words like “brutisher.” That’s Ork! The Roleplaying Game, 2nd Edition.

Ork! was Green Ronin’s first release, and its dank, beer-stained roots can be found in Chris Pramas’ NYC games with Ork! mastermind Todd Miller. These games ran on punk mayhem, goofy improvisation and the peculiar interests of their group, including The World’s Most Popular Roleplaying Game, The World’s Most Popular Fantasy Miniatures Game, and The World’s Most Popular Vaguely Depressing Filmmaker Who Fortunately We Can Name, He’s Werner Herzog And He Did That Thing About The Penguin Walking To Its Probable Death (It’s on YouTube). To turn this mash into a semi-coherent game, Chris Pramas devised a system, and out it came in the Year 2000, which back then, was practically the future, man.

So Ork! is special to Chris and Todd, and to Green Ronin as a whole. It’s a funny game, but it’s been designed with the same effort as we put into games like Fantasy AGE and Blue Rose. At times this meant a bit of extra work. I was called in to work on Ork! 2nd after Jon Leitheusser had already done a significant amount of development—more than enough to produce a functional RPG. So, my role was to tune the game into something in tune with the spirit of those early games, and which would fit hand-in-glove with the style of Ork! Game mastering—what we call Orkmastering for the deepest, most story-relevant reasons, I assure you—Todd performs when he runs it at Gen Con and elsewhere. That meant a top-to-bottom review and, where necessary, redesign. This stage got us to Cheats, where orks steal dice from the Orkmaster and each other (and risk the wrath of Krom, the merciless ork god), rules for ork magic (which risks the wrath of Krom) and other elements, all of which risk the wrath of Krom, probably.

For me, one part of the design was key: In Ork!, all dice rolls are opposed! Nowadays we have two basic schools of game design. In one, we figure out how things happen in the game based on some tactical challenge or representation of how the game world works. In the other school, we settle things based on their dramatic importance, how they might contribute to a developing story arc, and so on. Orks never went to school, and live with one boneheaded truth: Krom’s got a lot of wrath to spread around. So, in Ork!, opposed rolls represent how much interest Krom has in making life difficult for characters. Krom made the universe, so for the most part, meets expectations like big mountains being tougher to claim than little ones, but may also make things harder by getting bored, believing an ork is acting in a pathetic, unorkly way, and so on.

And lo, Krom’s wrath was spread around, and Ork! was sent to production, the dominion of a mysterious being called “Hal.” And Hal gave Ork! a perfectly serviceable layout. Truly respectable. Until, exercising the attention to detail that has defined our efforts on this game, decided it needed more rippy, blood-spattery bits. Here’s what it looks like now:

Wotank is not a “starter monster.”

Rippy, spattery—perfect for Ork! I look forward to sharing the product of all this work with you. Ork! The Roleplaying Game, 2nd Edition is scheduled to come out in August 2018. The game includes all the rules you need, things to kill (in a chapter called, “Things to Kill”) and a handful of adventures sufficient to get you through a short campaign. See you then!

Ronin Round Table: Maps of Aldis Preview

The past few months have been some pretty hard work finishing up the upcoming Blue Rose sourcebook Aldis: City of the Blue Rose. As a developer and a cartography nerd, I love a good city-focused setting book, so being able to help detail the wondrous and near-idyllic capital city at the heart of the Blue Rose setting was a dream come true.

 

It’s been a great deal of fun guiding writers through creating places, and then seeing those places turned into beautiful, full color maps that inspire as much as they inform. The amazing Liz Courts has lent her talent and vision to this effort, and the results are – as I hope you’ll agree – simply stunning.

To demonstrate the scope and variety of maps, I’m taking this opportunity to show off the Palace Complex, heart of the Aldin government and home to the Sovereign, Queen Jaellin; the House of the Thousand Ways, a very upscale pillow house where Aldinfolk can find healing and companionship in the arms of the specialists of the House; and the village of Dorwine, a small settlement in the countryside that surrounds the city of Aldis.

 

Aldis: City of the Blue Rose will be available for pre-order later this month!