Burning Wheel Gold is Up for Purchase

Yeah, you can buy it now if you weren't at GenCon.  From what I heard, they burned through the copies they had.  Even with the baby coming, I'm going to buy this.  It'll give me something to read to take my mind off of baby-related stress at least.

I'm very curious to see what changes they made.  I personally think of Mouse Guard as Burning Wheel with a lot of the problems fixed.  I wonder if the changes they made were to simplify or to add complexity to a game that already has a vast learning curve, or whether they made the idea that you can layer on levels of complexity as you go more explicit (in the BWR text it is there as a suggestion of doing so, but it is possible to pass over it, as I've noticed other people who read the game sometimes do).

That being said, BW changed both how I play and how I run games.  BW Gold might do it again - we'll see.

More on The One Ring - Designer Interviews

I'm playing GenCon catch-up, and am hunting down what information is coming out about the things that I'm interested in, like Burning Wheel Gold and The One Ring.  On rpggeek.com, I saw that someone had linked a bunch of designer interviews which can be found on YouTube.  Here is the link to the list.

Here's what I'm watching right now, a discussion of the tighter focus for The One Ring than in past games.  You won't be able to play a Rider of Rohan or a Knight of Gondor right off the bat, and I think it may be a good thing, design-wise.  It's definitely a good move, supplement-wise.  Assuming the game takes off, it'll probably be a bit like Dark Heresy leading to Rogue Trader - new settings and options released as semi-new games in themselves.

GenCon 2011 Vampire the Masquerade LARP "The Forgotten"

I've been asked to help with the writing and preparation for a VtM LARP, The Forgotten, which friends will be running at GenCon 2011.

The LARP will be held in the Hyatt Regency Ballrooms A and B Thursday, Friday and Saturday from 6pm to 1am.  I can definitely recommend playing - it looks like an excellent concept with a lot of interesting characters.  It's an official LARP, so you can sign up for it when you register for the con.  And no, I'm not just saying this because I am writing some of them.

But the most interesting ones are mine.

I've also tweeted back and forth with one of the developers for V20, and hopefully some of them will get a chance to come by the LARP and see how it is going.

Not for the last time, like Bilbo missing his Hobbit-hole, I am wishing I could be at GenCon this year.

The Theme is Burial

So much has been going on lately - a possible book deal with Chalice Press; three or four other book ideas with my collaborators over at Two Friars and a Fool; helping friends with a Vampire the Masquerade LARP for GenCon this year; a rough draft of the character sheet for Parsec; continuing work on a rough draft of Reckoning; and that on top of everything else.

Hence the longer-than-usual languishing of this blog.

There's a lot of writing inside me, and it is coming out like one of those old-school lawn sprinklers - in multiple streams and all over the freaking place.  That being said, if I didn't enjoy it, it would be the easiest thing in the world to just...stop.

But that won't happen.

I'll be at Origins this year for at least two days - Friday and Saturday.  I want to make sure I get a good look at the dealer floor, maybe try to awkwardly schmooze with people, and also check out the art room, since that was awesome last year.  Also, you know, Columbus is no slouch as cities go.  I wish I had more time to prep and run a game, but honestly we need a final character sheet for both Parsec and Reckoning before I want to do a full-on convention demo.  I feel like, especially for a convention game where people are paying to play, there should be a baseline of quality, and we're not quite there yet.  It's one thing to hand friends something you laid out yourself in Microsoft Word three years ago.  It's quite another thing to do that with strangers who you want to turn into fans, you know?