Tag Archive for: Ronin Round Table

Ronin Round Table: Cybernetics in Valkana

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lemlee-z_hero-characterWhile working on the outline for Titansgrave: World of Valkana, I’d finally hammered down (with an incredible degree of aid from Ryan Wheaton) the various political structures, historical weirdnesses, and generally rich tapestry of the setting’s major landmass.

Then, I turned my attention to some of the cool stuff that the PCs can and should have access to as heroes in Valkana. Naturally, thought turns to the heroes of the Titansgrave: Ashes of Valkana webseries from Geek & Sundry. In particular, Lemley’s cybernetic arm which, among other things, houses Dr. Lobotomy.

Cybernetics can get problematic in game design sometimes. Obviously, a game that includes them must include a way for player characters to have them – it’s half the fun! But designing cybernetics as pieces of equipment with all sorts of great bonuses usually ends up with characters who are as close to full-body-upgrades as they can get, ending up with groups of nearly complete-replacement cyborgs instead of plucky heroes with a piece of chrome or two.

To some degree, that’s a natural outgrowth of character advancement and equipment rules: player characters want effective characters, and when cybernetics all provide benefits of some sort, the more cybernetics your character has, the better they are. Read more →

Ronin Roundtable: Aza (Fantasy AGE Iconics 1)

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screen-shot-2016-10-14-at-9-40-15-amHey folks, Jack here.  So in coming months we’ll be delving further into various setting elements for Fantasy AGE.  While the game is consciously designed to be used in a variety of fantasy setting and campaigns, we at Green Ronin are working to build and develop our own unique world for the game.  You can see some of this in the fiction and concepts we have introduced to date in products like Fantasy AGE Encounters and the Bestiary.  While you don’t ever need to use our setting materials to have fun with Fantasy AGE and use it in your own games, we do recognize that building such a setting is useful for many customers, as well as for us internally.

One thing we haven’t detailed yet though are any of our iconic characters.  We don’t have big metaplot-heavy characters in Fantasy AGE, but we do have some PC-like heroes who feature into some of our art throughout the books. Chief among them are the three class examples, a trio of characters who also show up on our covers of the core book and Bestiary.  Who are these folks? Well, I’m glad you asked…

We begin with Aza, seen as the brave warrior woman more than willing to tackle ogres, ghouls, and other threats for the right cause or the right price. Here she is presented as a level 5 character. Read more →

Ronin Roundtable: M&M Style

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grr5510e_mutantsandmastermindsthirdeditiondeluxeheroeshandbook_1_1024x1024Our recent yearly Green Ronin summit covers a lot of ground, including plans for all of the company’s current game-lines moving forward into the coming year. The remainder of 2016 and the start of 2017 are a bit of a turning point for Mutants & Masterminds, reflecting the maturity of the third edition line. In particular, by early to mid-2017, we’ll have covered the essential rules and game materials for M&M with the Hero’s Handbook, Power Profiles, Gadget Guides, and the Gamemaster’s Guide, the essential setting material for Earth-Prime with Emerald City, the Cosmic Handbook, the Atlas of Earth-Prime, and the new edition of Freedom City, plus plenty of foes in Threat Report, Rogues Gallery, and the Supernatural Handbook. Add to that a complete and compatible summary of the DC Universe in our four DC Adventures books, and that’s quite a collection!

So, we want to revisit how we present Mutants & Masterminds products in addition to what types of products we’re offering. There’s a lot of material out there for the game (and will be even more in the months to come) so the big question on our agenda is: How do we make M&M easier to use and friendlier to new readers going forward while retaining the great library of material we already have? A lot of the answer to that question is not just what products we do, but how we do them, the style and presentation of the game.

In particular, I’m looking at the stat blocks for M&M and finding ways they can be more user-friendly, informative, and attractive while still conveying everything you need to know about the character in game terms. This goes for our full-size and detailed stat blocks as well as our smaller formats, presented in-line with text. Everything is on the table here: the way things are arranged, the order in which traits are presented, use of color or icons, and so forth. The key limit is that it has to convey essentially the same information and remain compatible with our other third-edition material. Ideally, we also want the presentation to require only the Hero’s Handbook—while we could certainly save space by pulling powers and gadgets wholesale out of supplements, we don’t want you to have to have Power Profiles or Gadget Guides to understand and play the game!

You’ll likely be hearing more about this process as time goes on and ideas percolate but, for now, we’d also like to hear from you. Visit our forums and tell us ways in which M&M products can be more useful, user-friendly, and easy to reference during game-play in your own games, keeping in mind the guidelines that we’re sticking with the current edition and we want the new products we publish in the coming year to be compatible with what we’ve done thus far. You can also drop us an email at custserve@greenronin.com or send us a message via our Facebook page.

I’m looking forward to showing everyone all of the plans we’ve made for Mutants & Masterminds and to giving it the look and style that will last it for years more to come!

Ronin Roundtable: Finding a Gaming Group

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Greetings! I am Barry Wilson and I’m Green Ronin’s Boatswain of the Booth at Gen Con. I talk to quite a few people who come to our booth at Gen Con. One thing that I’ve heard people say over and over to me is: “I really want to play this game, but I can’t find a game group to play with.” I’m here to help. (Note: because Green Ronin primarily sells RPGs that’s what people are talking about when they tell me this. This advice is applicable to every type of game. )

Step One: Define Your Goals

The first thing you need to do is define what you’re looking for, and what you’re willing to accept. Maybe you’re really looking to *run* a Titansgrave campaign. But, you’d be willing to accept *playing* in someone’s Dragon AGE game. Or, maybe you can only find people who really want to play Fantasy AGE but don’t want blasters in their fantasy, thank you very much. Is that acceptable to you? Read more →

Ronin Roundtable: Mutants & Masterminds Actual Play … With Bacon!

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screen-shot-2016-09-12-at-12-26-44-pmSince the release of the new edition of Hero High for Mutants & Masterminds Third Edition, the stalwart gamers of the Bacon Battalion have been playing a teen-hero Mutants & Masterminds game set during the Second World War, under the guidance of Guy Sclanders, who runs the Great GM channel on YouTube.

The Actual Play Series is just getting started, with two episodes (and a couple of teaser videos) released thus far, so it’s easy to get caught up with the group’s adventures. If you enjoy watching online RPG game play in the style of Critical Role, Tabletop, and other shows, or you’ve always wondered how Mutants & Masterminds game play looks, check out the linked playlist above and, to the stalwarts of the 121st Division of the Bacon Battallion…keep em’ flyin’, heroes!

Ronin Roundtable: Heroes of Freeport: Redjak

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Heroes of Freeport present the backstory of some of the characters depicted in art (and sometimes text) in Freeport: City of Adventure, and the Return to Freeport adventure path. They serve as examples of the kinds of characters that may be found in the City of Freeport, and be used as inspiration for PCs or as NPC backgrounds for the GM to draw from.

Art Iconic RogueRedjak was born into the extremely narrow middle class of the Eastern District in Freeport. His parents ran a successful haberdashery, and his earliest memories were of well-dressed patrons speaking kindly to him as his father measured their hat sizes, and his mother offered them tea. As most smart halflings in the Eastern District, his family was officially a member of the Halfling Beneficent Association, but they made sure to distance themselves from its more questionable activities. They were wealthier halflings than most, and could even afford dues to the Golden Pillar Society. His parents assured him that if he worked hard and walked the straight and narrow line, Redjak would have a better life than even his parents. Read more →

Ronin Roundtable: GenCon GMing for Green Ronin

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GR-Gameroom1If you are a publisher, you of course want people to have the opportunity to play your games at GenCon. You can run demos at your booth but the exhibit hall is no place for long form RPG adventures (it’s super loud and booth space is limited). Those are better handled as scheduled events. Finding good and reliable game masters for your RPGs can be challenging though. In past years we’ve had mixed success with our GenCon events. What I really wanted was a dedicated area filled with Green Ronin games. To get that, you have to have a certain number of events. Coordinating that is a job in itself.

Enter Donna Prior, Green Ronin’s events manager. I told her what I wanted and wow, did she deliver. We had over 90 scheduled events this year and GenCon gave us a dedicated room for them on the second floor of the convention center. Going into that room and seeing tables full of gamers playing Fantasy AGE, Dragon Age, Mutants & Masterminds, and A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying was amazing. Read more →

Ronin Round Table: Unexpected Heroes

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Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to run a few games at GenCon. Since I have a novel, Sacred Band, releasing soon, I decided to create a Mutants & Masterminds scenario where the players played the characters who star in that novel. Gimmicky and self-serving, yes, but since creating my protagonists in the Mutants & Masterminds rules set was part of the character design I did as part of writing the novel, it seemed only fitting.

Now, part of my setting postulates occasional natural disaster-level phenomena referred to as “Echo Events.” These are always different, but almost always disastrous in some way. They are also where one of the three kinds of supers in my setting get their powers (these folks are called “Echoes,” for obvious reasons).

The scenario for the convention—titled “Sacred Band: The Indy Event”—has some of the heroes attending a certain gaming convention in the middle of an Indianapolis summer when one of these Echo Events hits. Crazy, unexpected phenomena arise: large metal structures being “floating” skyward, certain people find themselves the center of hive minds of dedicated drone-like followers, animals in the zoo nearby become super-strong and savage, and bodies of water all across the area begin to inexplicably rise. Read more →

Ronin Round Table: Blue Rose Development

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Welcome! No, we haven’t accidentally reposted a previous Ronin Roundtable. This week we return to the development of the new edition of Blue Rose Romantic Fantasy Roleplaying for the AGE (Adventure Game Engine) System rules, following our successful Kickstarter for the game.

Blue Rose is through editing and now in production and layout, with Production Manager Hal Mangold hard at work both on laying out the book and assigning art to various artists to bring new visions of the world of Aldea to life. You can see a small sample of Hal’s design magic in the updated logo to grace the game’s cover above the fantastic new painting by artist Stephanie Pui-Min Law.

In addition to art, we’re working with cartographer Phillip Lienau, who provided the maps for the first edition of Blue Rose (as well as the comprehensive map of Freedom City for Mutants & Masterminds) to update his work for the new edition, particularly for the two-sided poster map for inclusion in the book. We’re eager to be able to present Phillip’s work in full color this time.

In terms of production, the new edition of Blue Rose is going to be sizeable: easily 300 pages (at Green Ronin, we like big books and we cannot lie), not quite as massive as the complete Dragon Age Core Rulebook, but easily the size of the Game of Thrones edition of A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying as a beautiful full-color hardcover book.

Meanwhile, in addition to working with Hal on copyfitting and layout matters, I am working on the collection of pre-generated Blue Rose heroes for the Narrator’s Screen booklet, offering a representative cross-section of novice characters, complete with backgrounds and customization options, usable for quick-start play and great for demo adventures and convention games to introduce new players to Blue Rose and the AGE System

Speaking of adventures, I’m also developing the first drafts of a number of short Blue Rose adventures by an exciting collection of authors, including Jaym Gates, Elsa S. Henry, Steven Jones, Kira Magrann, Alejandro Melchor, and Rebecca Wise. We intend to release these adventures as short, stand-alone PDF products and to collect them into a print edition to provide Blue Rose Narrators and players with a wealth of opportunities to tell stories in the world of Aldea.

As you can see, that’s a lot of Blue Rose in the works! We’ll keep you updated as things progress, perhaps with some additional previews and looks “behind the curtain” as the book finishes production and gets ready for pre-order and PDF release. Naturally, our Kickstarter backers will have the first look at anything new that comes along, but we’re looking forward to making the new edition of Blue Rose available to everyone!