Ronin Round Table: A Supernatural Opportunity

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It’s the week of Halloween here in the States, which means it’s an opportunity for kids of all ages to put on costumes and do a bit of LARPing! Okay, not quite, but it’s pretty close. Actually, what Halloween means to me as a GM and gamer is that it’s the perfect time of year to run or play in a horror-themed game!

With all the werewolves and goblins walking the streets, scary movies on TV, spookily-decorated houses on every block, and ghost stories on everyone’s minds, your friends are primed to play in a Halloween-themed game.

Fear and horror are difficult to elicit in roleplaying games, but this is the perfect time of year to play a one-shot featuring monsters or other scary fare. Break out the candles (or battery-powered tea lights), some subtle, spooky music, dim the lights, and have your friends over for a game featuring the supernatural. Consider it a self-contained story for your heroes that may or may not take place within the continuity of their normal series. Perhaps they take on some of the Cryptids in the forests around Emerald City, or come face-to-face with Frankenstein’s Monster as he searches for the ancestors of his hated creator on the streets of Freedom City. Maybe the walls between worlds grow thin this time of year and real monsters haunt the city for the day—some of them more dangerous than others—so the player characters get to play "ghostbusters" for a while. Anything is fair game this time of year.

When I was in college, I ran a Halloween game that became a yearly tradition. Everyone played the heroes they usually played, but the villains were both a little scarier and sillier than usual. One of those games featured what’s now a classic line among my gaming friends, "You cannot possibly defeat me, for I am made of straw," spoken by the villainous Scarecrow. Another year’s most memorable moment was when a little girl dropped a trick-or-treat bag next to one of the heroes and before he could do anything, a teddy bear tumbled out of the bag, grew to be a full-sized demonic bear that could fly and mauled the poor hero.

This year, I get to play in a one-shot in which a bunch of us, including Green Ronin president Chris Pramas and freelancers Jason Mical and Seth Johnson, will be facing off against vampires, werewolves, and zombies in a haunted castle. It should make for a tense and fun game of supernatural horror, and I’m looking forward to blasting some monsters to smithereens!

Gaming has always been about being social and having fun with your friends. When you can combine that with a bit of suspense, the laughs are even bigger than usual. It’s the start of the week, so you still have time to set up a game for the weekend. It doesn’t have to be Halloween- or horror-themed, but that certainly seems like a natural fit! Check out the Supernatural Handbook for Mutants & Masterminds: both the PDF and the printed book are on sale for 25% off until Halloween. It’s the perfect book if you’re looking for inspiration for a game, or looking for an excellent book on horror games.

Whatever you do this weekend, stay safe and have fun!

Happy Halloween!
Jon Leitheusser
M&M Line Developer

Ronin Round Table: Chris Pramas on Upcoming Releases

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As the last quarter of 2014 is upon us, I thought this would be a good time to update you all on the status of some of our announced books. Our release schedule has been something of a moving target this year for a variety of reasons, but many long simmering projects are either finished or close to being finished. Here is the most up to date info that I have right now.

Dragon Age, Set 3: This is printed and in our warehouse. Hooray! We had a few sent here to Seattle, so I had the pleasure of holding it in my hand after a long development cycle. Normally, we’d be releasing it to distributors next week, but this is an usual situation. We’ve printed only 2000 copies of Set 3 and will never be reprinting it (because of the forthcoming Dragon Age Core Rulebook). Naturally, after that initial announcement, direct orders for Set 3 were quite robust. That being the case, we are pausing to make sure that the pre-orders go out properly before releasing books to distributors and game stores. We will likely have no extras to fix screw ups so we want to ensure it’s done right. Distributors then get their chance to order. If there are any left over at that point, we’ll make it available on our webstore again.

The contents of Sets 1 to 3 of Dragon Age will, as previously announced, be compiled into a big, hardback Core Rulebook. We had hoped to release this concurrently with Dragon Age: Inquisition, but the printing delays of Set 3 made that untenable. We are now shooting for a January release.

Advanced Bestiary for the Pathfinder RPG: The Advanced Bestiary was originally a critically-acclaimed d20 book we published 10 years ago. We did a Kickstarter to update the book to the Pathfinder RPG and that was quite successful. The new edition is a big, beautiful full color hardback with all new art. It has been at print for a month or so and ought to be hitting our warehouse by the end of the month. Again, we will pause, this time to ship the book to the Kickstarter backers. Then we’ll handle pre-orders from our website, and release it to distributors in mid-November. It’s a hugely useful book for Pathfinder GMs, so if you missed the Kickstarter, do check it out.

Freeport, The City of Adventure for the Pathfinder RPG: Speaking of Kickstarters, we’ve also been hard at work on the new Freeport book. This is a new core book for our classic city setting, and it too has been customized for the Pathfinder RPG. At 512 pages, it will also be the biggest book we’ve ever published! This is in the final stages of production. Very shortly now, we should be releasing the PDF to Kickstarter backers. Then we’ll release that to the public and put the book up for pre-order. After a final errata check, it will go to print. We’ll announce a final release date when we have something from the printer.

Mutants & Masterminds: For M&M fans there is good and bad news. The good news is that the Atlas of Earth-Prime PDF series is resuming after some delays caused by convention season. They will pick up with the Mediterranean Atlas shortly. The bad news is that we’ve decided to delay the Cosmic Handbook to next year. We would have had to rush the production to get it out before Xmas and we didn’t want to do that. As we like to say, a late book is only late until it comes out, but a bad book is bad forever.

That’s all the news for now. We just had our yearly summit last weekend and we made a lot of important decisions there. We’ll be making some additional announcements about our schedule in November, and then in January I’ll do my traditional message about our plans for the coming year.

We hope you have an awesome Halloween. To help with that, we’ve put the Supernatural Handbook for Mutants & Masterminds on sale for 25% off (both the PDF and the printed book). Enjoy!

Ronin Round Table: A Chronicle of Sorcery

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Recently, we launched the Chronicle of Sorcery, a 48-page PDF detailing a system of player-controlled magic for the Chronicle System, the game engine that powers A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying.

Low Fantasy Sorcery
While it would have been easy enough to put together a system of sorcery in which the magician hucks fireballs and similar expressions of arcane pyrotechnics, we decided to hew closely to the low-fantasy feel of the Chronicle System’s inspiration: the world of Westeros. The rest of the mechanics already support a somewhat gritty setting, so it seemed wrong to depart from that.

To that end, the magics in the Chronicle of Sorcery are subtle. They often come in the form of unseen benefits, usually without flashy lights or puffs of smoke. They are often the kind of things that grant the additional edge needed by already-talented characters to accomplish the impossible, and doubters can (and should!) suggest that it was merely luck or simply the encouragement the superstitious receive from farcical magical shenanigans that led to the outcome.

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Ronin Round Table: The Food Trucks of Freedom!

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We take our inspiration from all kinds of places, particularly real life, working events, people, places, and ideas from our own experiences into our fictional work and our games. Take Freedom City for example, in addition to being a love-letter to many of the things I treasure about superhero comics, Freedom City features a number of “Easter eggs” that are essentially bits of my own experience sprinkled throughout. So there’s no reason the new update of the setting wouldn’t feature the same sorts of things.

Food trucks aren’t normally a thing for me, since I live in a suburban town in southern New Hampshire, a bit outside the usual food truck culture, unless I’m at a particular festival or event. On the other hand, the staff of GenCon in Indianapolis very cleverly decided a few years ago to get the local food trucks involved in supporting the convention, and vice versa. So for the week or so that downtown Indianapolis is crowded with thousands of gamers, there’s also a small fleet of food trucks offering all kinds of cuisine to those hungry gamers who might not have time to visit one of the equally crowded restaurants.

That experience got me thinking, and so one of the additions to the Visitor’s Guide section of Freedom City is the “Food Trucks of Freedom”:

Freedom City enthusiastically embraced the food truck trend in urban catering and restaurants: mobile vendors who can set up their business for a day (or just a portion of one) almost anywhere in the city, serving the needs of passers-by and attracting customers via online social networking and word-of-mouth. Food trucks also often gather near or around major event venues. Some of the more popular local food trucks include:

  • Falafel Tower: Owned and run by two brothers (Maurice and Yusef Larrache), Falafel Tower offers French-Middle Eastern influenced cuisine, including their eponymous falafels, shawarma, hummus, and kabobs.
  • The Fatmobile: This food truck embraces “all that makes food good” with a rotating menu of items focusing on fat- and salt-laden savories, including more uses for bacon than one can imagine.
  • Freedom Fries: A truck best known for their delicious french-fried potatoes (and sweet potatoes) with a variety of sides and toppings. Especially popular are the duck-fat fries with poutine (topped with gravy and cheese curds, Canadian-style).
  • The Soul-Van: A truck offering fried chicken and waffles, collard greens, corn-breads, fried green tomatoes, and other traditional soul-food dishes.
  • Sweet Chariot: A successful food truck business with several trucks in the Freedom City metro area offering a variety of freshly made desserts and baked goods, particularly pies, crumbles, and cookies.

Do you use urban fixtures and trends like food trucks in your own Freedom City, Emerald City, or Mutants & Masterminds game? Drop by our forums and share some of them! Meanwhile, I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling like having a snack…

Ronin Round Table: Bringing Your Setting To Life–The Importance of Narrator Characters

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By Joseph Carriker

In a game like A Song of Ice & Fire Roleplaying, the importance of narrator characters cannot be overstated. Looking at George R.R. Martin’s series, one of the things that truly sets it apart from so many other fantasy offerings out there is the richness and breadth of its cast of characters. It isn’t dire prophecies or terrifying monsters or ancient evils or magic weapons that drive the action of A Song of Ice & Fire—it is the people (although, it is notable, that some of those peoples’ motivations are based around prophecies, monsters, evils or magic in some way).

With this in mind, let’s take a look on how to put together a cast of narrator characters who can provide your chronicle with all the allies, villains, sidekicks, rivals, foils, and love interests you could ever want.

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Ronin Round Table: I Can Haz Moar Icons?

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Icons: The Assembled EditionBy the time you read this Ronin Round Table, the "Assembled Edition" of Icons should be available for pre-order on the Green Ronin online store [Editor’s Note: It is!], after a long process of design, playtesting, art direction, layout, and production. I’m sure one of the very next questions, before the book even hits the printing press and gets into the eager hands of Icons players is: "So, what’s next…?"

Honestly, there isn’t an extensive road-map. I have plenty of ideas, but Ad Infinitum Adventures (the publishers of Icons) is just … well, me, along with stalwart freelancers like artist Dan Houser. Green Ronin Publishing is handling the printing and distribution of the Assembled Edition, but any further projects are just Ad Infinitum, unless we come to another agreement. Considering that running Ad Infinitum is just one of my three or four jobs (depending on how you slice it any given week), there isn’t exactly going to be a massive release schedule.

That said, there are some plans, and Icons benefits from a robust and free open license, which allows some great third-party publishers to step up and offer some products to fill the gaps.

On the Ad Infinitum side, the immediate priority now that the Assembled Edition is done is getting back to wrapping up Dan Houser’s "Rise of the Phalanx" series with The Metaskulk Invasion. Primary text is written, and art (also by Dan) is finished, and it just needs to be developed and laid out. After that, chances are good you’ll see a compilation of all of the Phalanx adventures into a complete "mega-adventure" for Icons as well.

On my to-do list is a minor update of the Great Power sourcebook, mainly making sure references in that book now refer to the Assembled Edition and that the two books are as compatible as possible, since they now form the "core" of Icons as a game system: with the main rules in Assembled and expanded power information in Great Power. The update will likely be available for free to anyone who has the PDF via DriveThruRPG/RPGNow.

I’d also like to see an update of the Icons Character Folio software, bringing it fully in-line with Great Power and the Assembled Edition, but that is entirely dependent on programmer Daniel Gallant, so we’ll have to see what his schedule permits. If there’s news on that front, I’ll be sure to share it.

On the third-party side, Fainting Goat Games is already hard at work on a sourcebook with the working title of The Supervillain’s Handbook for Icons. You may be familiar with their Star City setting or Improbable Tales series of Icons adventures. Artist Dan Houser has more Hero Pack content in the works as well.

The big follow-up question is: What do you want to see next for Icons…? Updates of "classic" villains and adventures? Adventure compilations? Source material? Optional rules? Small, regular product releases or larger, less frequent, books? Electronic, print-on-demand, or both? If you have an Icons "wish list," drop me a line at stevekenson [at] gmail [dot] com and let me know about it!

[Editor’s Note #2: If you pre-order Icons: The Assembled Edition in our Green Ronin Online Store, just forward your email receipt to Steve (you read that previous paragraph, right?) and he will send you a coupon code with which you can get the PDF version for just $5!]

Ronin Round Table: Atlas of Earth-Prime–Diversifying the Roster

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With various Dragon Age products in various stages of production but without a lot of news to give folks right now, I’m going to take today’s Ronin Round Table to talk a bit about something else I do a lot: making superheroes and supervillains. Particularly, I want to talk about making superheroes and supervillains from countries that aren’t the US (and to a lesser extent Canada, the UK, and other major Western English-speaking nations).

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Ronin Round Table: New Game Store!

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I live in Renton, Washington. Renton (and the Seattle area in general) is a hotbed of the game industry. Green Ronin, Paizo, Monte Cook Games, Privateer Press, Cheapass Games, Wizards of the Coast, and many more tabletop and computer game companies are in the area. One thing Renton in particular is missing is a game store that does more than run card game tournaments and stock a few board games. Strange, considering how many gamers live in the area.

So, you can imagine my excitement when a new game store, Heroic Knight Games, opened in the next town over (Issaquah, WA), just a short 15-minute drive from my house! I heard about it via someone’s Facebook post, looked them up, and drove over to visit one night a couple of weeks ago.

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Ronin Round Table: The Importance of Play

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By Chris Pramas

"It must be great to get paid to play games all day."

If you work in gaming, you’ve probably heard this line before. Industry folks are quick to point that working on games is, in fact, work. And that’s true. What I want to talk about today though is the importance of keeping your inner gamer alive through play.

It is very easy, particularly when you own your own business, to just work all the time. It’s doubly dangerous when you work at home. There is then no physical difference between being at work and being at home. Weekends cease to have meaning. They are simply additional days you can work into your schedule.

When you work any job too much, your hobbies suffer. For those of us in the industry, the hobby is where we started. We were gamers first and foremost, and it was that love that made us turn our hobby into our career. It is a bitter irony then when you start working so much in gaming that you don’t have time to game for fun anymore (there’s always playtesting, but that’s just a different sort of work). When deadlines loom, it’s easy to make the case. Maybe after that next book ships, you’ll get back to your campaign.

I have been there. About 5 years ago I was doing little regular gaming. My Monday night group was meeting but more often than not we were just having dinner and bullshitting. We had several campaigns start and fizzle quickly. In the summer months, when many of us were traveling a lot on the convention circuit, it was even worse.

At a certain point I made a conscious choice to reverse the trend. I felt I was getting disconnected from the hobby that put me on this path in the first place. My love of gaming came first, and if I lost that, what was the point of designing games and running a game company? Certainly not the money. I could do nearly anything and make a better living.

So I made an effort to play more games for fun. I made time for it because I felt it was important. Certainly professionally, it’s good to try to keep up with what other companies are doing. More than that though, it was good for me personally to keep my inner hobbyist alive, to feel the excitement of great games with friends, and to be reminded of the magic that captured my imagination when I was 10 years old.

Now I keep a robust schedule of regular gaming. Monday night is RPGs at my place. Wednesdays I usually play a miniatures game with my friend Rick. Thursdays it’s RPGs again at M&M developer Jon Leitheusser’s place. Sundays I get together with friends to paint miniatures, and sometimes we get in a game after. It’s a lot of gaming when it all goes off, though it’s actually a rare week when it does so. Life and deadlines still happen, so most weeks I ended up gaming twice. And that’s a good average!

So yes, working in the game industry is work, but you need to make time for play too. It’s good for you and it’ll make you a better designer in the long run too.

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

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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.