Words from Thalcos

To celebrate the launch of RPGGeek, I’ve finished the revised edition of Runeslayers (i.e. RuneQuest: Slayers, the “final” Avalon Hill edition of the game that never quite made it to shelves).The revised edition fixes much of the errata over the past years, adds some additional content, and includes a recreation of the infamous, long-lost Glacier Rifts map.Enjoy!

Though it’s been a while (two kids will do this to you, believe me) I’ve added a new D&D 4th adventure to the Adventure Archives on the site.

 Anyone remember the old Fighting Fantasy book called Scorpion Swamp? That old book, fraught with twisting paths and strange moral dilemmas has always made me want to set at least a couple adventures in every RPG campaign deep in some muddy swamp.

Anyhow, it was a fun learning experience trying to figure out how to write within the constraints of the new system, but everyone had a good time with it. Check it out here.

I recently compiled my time at Avalon Hill via a Geeklist on Boardgamegeek. For those of you interested in the last two years of that old boardgaming dinosaur, check this out:

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist/32613

My brother Ryan came and visited last weekend (last minute fares from NY were really great…) and as always, we played some boardgames that neither of us get to play very much. My quickie reviews:

Vegas Showdown — Sum greater than its parts… but no dice in a casino building game?

Kingsburg — Easy to grasp, hard to judge how much luck plays a role (roll?), scared that there’s a Single Strategy to win, but lots of fun had. Love the art.

Candyland — Okay, Ryan got to play this with my 2-year old Saffron and enjoy her shrieks of “Double Yellow!”. I think he was shocked at how cruel that game can be…

Aquaretto — Love the theme (anyone who doesn’t love polar bear cubs?), thought I had a sound strategy, got squashed bad due to a sore lack of fish. Want to play this with Zooloretto sometime…

Age of Gods — More of a betting and gambling game than Vegas Showdown! Crazy amount of blind guessing, shrugging, and rolling dice, but we had a blast, especially when the God of War and the God of Death tied for victory at the end. Now there’s a moral lesson for us humans.

I just posted the new Explorer cards on the House of Horrors site. There’s mostly just minor aesthetic changes here to bring them in line with the updated Monster cards, though I did add a new ability to the Wisecrack Kid — if you end the game with him as a spoil, you win ties. After all, being the one who finally offs the annoying, wisecracking, kid in the horror movies should be worth something, right?

I was going through some old things today in an effort to clean up my desk at home and I found an old sketchbook which contained the original sketches from Monsters Ravage America, one of the boardgames I worked on at Avalon Hill. (Yes, I know my sketches are amazingly amateurish, especially in these days of Arkham Horror and Pillars of the Earth, but at the time the alternative was no art at all!). In any case, there were two monsters in there that almost made the cut into the original game. The first was Grazorr, the giant ant (who is in a web expansion of MRA), the second was Neptune Zero, a gaunt, bug-like alien who no doubt wants to devour all of human-kind. So, after ten years of never having been seen, here he is!

Anyone have any good stats to give him for either Monsters Ravage America or the updated Monsters Menace America?

My daughter and I have been playing some games lately — it’s certainly fun to see the games she really likes as her reasons seem entirely different from what I’d expect. In any case, here are some of the favorites these days:

• Go Away Monster - A simple, simple game where you draw shapes from a bag and hope it’s a piece of furniture for your room, not a goofy-looking monster. If it’s a monster, you yell “Go away monster!” and toss it on the floor (and lose your turn). My daughter thinks it’s really neat to toss monsters, of course, but she prefers to dig for the teddy bears. She insisted that we play with 2 boards each (nice house rule!) and double our chances for teddy bears. Highly recommended for the young ones, though I can see her outgrowing this before she’s 3.
• Gulo Gulo - I heard about this one on boardgamegeek as a nice alternative to Candyland. The schtick of this game is that you are forced to draw colored wooden eggs from a “nest” with a stick stuck in the middle. If the stick falls… well, you can’t advance. She’s really good at this game (tiny fingers) and had a great time the first time she played, but has since become nervous about it and wants me to always draw the eggs for her. I suspect she’ll like this again with a bit more confidence and age!
• Candyland. Yup, she likes this one. I’ve heard many a rant about this game (all luck, zero choices, tons of frustration) and it’s all true. That said, the game has one strongpoint which I hadn’t considered until now. Drawing that card to see what color you have — to a 2 year old — is like playing a slot machine. My daughter shrieks like she won the jackpot when she draws doubles, and never seems to get bored of that surprise, no matter what color it is.
• Cathedral / Blokus - I find that if I play randomly, we’re pretty much evenly matched in these games. My daughter likes to try to fill up the board and doesn’t grasp the strategy at all, but it’s still fun to cram the plastic pieces on the board.

There it is. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to play some more grown-up games with some grown-ups soon, as I’ve just picked up Kingsburg, E.T.I., and a bunch of Heroscape expansions. And I need to brush up for an upcoming Blood Bowl tournament. Need to decide between the Lizardmen and the Khemri team, but the new mummies (”Tomb Guardians”) confound me…

My two-year old daughter has developed quite an affection for the Gummi Bears — that old Disney cartoon show from the 80’s. While spending some time watching this with her, I’ve decided that this old gem of a show is the ultimate videogame license. Don’t believe me? Let me explain…

For those of you not in-the-know, the whole show takes place in a medieval-fantasy setting: the type that’s home to a hundred games already, so players are quite familiar with it. Castles, forests, caves, and canyon-wastelands are ready made for adventure! Mass market setting? Check.

The gummi world is chock-full of ogres, trolls, gargoyles, dragons, and other baddies of all shapes and sizes. They’re all mostly ruled by the evil Duke Igthorn, a caricature of villainy who wants nothing but to take over the kingdom with his henchmen and his crazy scheming. Igthorn and his baddies are perfect for the videogame world. They’re all stupid, a bit funny, a bit scary, and offer enough graphical variety that players won’t be bored.

Gummi-berry juice. The ultimate powerup, already in potion form. Drink it as a gummi bear and gain access to amazing bouncing powers, perfect for platforming through Prince of Persia-like levels. Jump, double-jump, bounce off walls, bounce off enemy heads — great fun, and perfectly in tune with the license.

Drink it as a human and have super strength. Throw giant boulders (powered by Havok, of course), toss ogres with ease, and launch enemies far into the air. Sure, it’ll wear off, but there’s always more…

(Don’t forget, gummi bears need to make that juice with special berries, hidden in the forest. Collectibles? Oh yes.)

Did I mention that there’s magic too? But even as Zummi Gummi has to slowly learn spells by studying the Great Book of Gummi, players will slowly gain access to these abilities by practicing and using these spells on the various ogres and trolls mentioned above. Level up system with cool abilities? Check and check.

Sound like fun yet?

Wait, there’s more. You see, the gummi bears use “quick tunnels” — rollercoaster-like caves that can jet them from one side of the forest to another. No need for long walks across a dull world, and no need for game designers to try to come up with a justification for Town Portal scrolls! Hey, maybe use this as a sort of vehicle-based minigame for a break between the bouncing and the super-strength pummeling.

Not that you’d ever really want a break between bouncing AND fighting.

Convinced? God of War 3, watch out.

This last holiday season seems to have produced a wave of new people interested in House of Horrors! That’s fantastic… but with new players playing the game it meant that some new issues with the game were found. I’ve made some small updates to the Room cards today which improve the following:

1) The Attic is renamed the Attic Stairs, to avoid confusion with the house level “Attic”

2) Dawn is worth slightly more points

3) Text on the Secret Passage card has been clarified

4) The background art on the cards has been improved!

I’ve got some updates to make soon to the Monster, Item, and Explorer cards, but nothing too major. Stay tuned…

While I’m patiently waiting for the upcoming Nexus Age of Conan boardgame, I Gamefly’d the new Conan game for the Xbox 360. While for the most part it’s a fairly average God of War clone, it does a few things right that I really like.

One, the levels so far don’t leave you any doubts where to go. There’s always screaming natives or pirates or demons in your path, and you can hack through them in fairly short order. So far, the game has a good pace, which is really the most important part of game design (regardless if you’re talking about boardgame or videogame) that many titles miss altogether.

Two, lots of moves (you actually feel fairly powerful), lots of achievements given out for cool things you do with your opponents’ bodies.

Three — press button to pull arrows out of you? Neat. Has any game done this before?

The game’s certainly not perfect, I really wish there was less magic in the game. Conan shouldn’t wield fire-spewing bracers. Ever. They could have played up more of Conan’s thieving, and chunks of levels could have used more polish. Still, it was a nice diversion on an otherwise boring Sunday afternoon.

Back when I worked at Avalon Hill, Christopher Lawrence and I were conspiring to use the Conan license in a card-driven wargame ala Hannibal: Rome v. Carthage or Successors. Obviously, that never happened, but it does keep my hopes really high for Age of Conan.