Comics Corner (Tradeback edition): Welcome Back Frank

Have I mentioned that I love tradebacks?

No? Well I do.

I will always love comics but for the most part I have no time or patience for reading them month to month. First off, Im a freaking adult. Im not going to wait patiently month to month. I have things to do. I'm not going to track a story for 6 months.

Secondly, Im a freaking adult. It takes me about 10 minutes to read a comic. Give me 12 at once and that's a solid 2 hours of entertainment. Give me one and its like half a beer.

But I digress.

Welcome Back Frank, written by Garth Ennis showed me that finally, finally Marvel had found a writer that had a genuine take on the Punisher. He wasn't an avenging angel, nor was he a raving lunatic.

Oh and he was also funny. Darkly funny. Laugh out loud funny.

Here's an example:

I have a .45. He has a submachine gun. My night goes downhill from there.

Warning: This tradeback is not kid safe.

Im not even 100% sure its safe to read it if you're pregnant.

For the rest of you out there, pick this up for some fun that's a bit on the dark and twisted side.

Chuck

From the pages of the Onion, America's finest news source

I love the Onion:

Earth Passed Over For Invasion

April 5, 2006 | Issue 42•14

BETA QUADRANT, ZGYXA—Nearly 200,000 hostile aliens from the planet Zgyxa skipped invading Earth Monday, saying it "does not seem worth the effort." "A planet scan indicates that its resources will be tapped by 2015, its most intelligent life form cannot fly, and it possesses no significant deposits of Tangium," said Supreme Commander Kasha Ak-Bej, the nine-foot serpentine leader of the invasion. "Not to mention that their fleshy exoskeleton would make earthlings unfit slaves for mining Zgyxa's molten core." Representatives from the Council of Earth expressed their disappointment.

America's real fair and balanced news outlet.

Blood and Time: Crunch of Ages

As it stands right now, B&Time is about evenly distributed between fluff (the timeline and section on temporal mechanics discussed here) and crunch.

In terms of crunch, B&Time is light on classes, although it does present three new advanced classes: Anomaly (someone who can manipulate time), the time enforcer (a soldier skilled in weapons of varying time periods) and the temporal historian (a scientist knowledge about the culture and technology of varying time periods).

The meat of the crunch are the weapon and armor lists for the Stone Age (PL 0), Bronze and Iron Age (PL1), Middle Ages (PL 2), the Renaissance (PL 3) and the Industrial Age (PL 4).

In terms of feats what you get are feats to allow characters to be skilled with weapons regardless of progress level. I took the 10 PLs and divided them into three basic periods: Ancient Weapons and Armor cover PL 0-3, Modern PL 4-6 and Futuristic 7-9.

Then there is a specific feat for each PL that represents greater familiarity with a time period, as if you lived there.

Obviously every character will get a period feat and a PL feat as bonus feats.

One thing I like about this system is that its easy to fit existing characters into the current framework with little effort. If a character has the Archaic Weapons feat that can count as Ancient Technology and if he has Personal Firearms that can count as Modern Technology.

Of course this is early in the game, the boss is just starting to look at the draft now, and the playtesters have thrown some additional class ideas my way.

So the crunch might get upped some.

For now though, Im content. I hate writing the same class twice, and since Ive written a lot of classes over the years in my other d20M products, a book like this is going to be relatively class-light.

But since its early in the process, stay tuned for more information as the release gets closer.

Chuck

Star Trek: New Voyages vignette "Center Seat" released

What is New Voyages you ask? Imagine fans with a lot of film savvy and acting chops got together and made a fan film.

Now imagine it was really good, not something the Galaxy Quest kids made in their garage.

Now imagine that it was good enough that they got Gene Roddenberry Jr, Ron Moore (not that one the other one), FX supervisor for Trek for 18 years and DC Fontana to lend a hand behind the camera.

Now imagine they got Walter Koenig and George Takei to appear in episodes.

And its free.

That gives you an idea of what a special and unique fan project New Voyages is. People who used to get paid to make Star Trek but still love it enough that they want one last go with the original ship and crew.

Set in the "lost" final two years of the 5 year mission, with different actors playing most of the parts, New Voyages has two full episodes and one vignette out, with more on the way. The pace of production is slow because all the people involved are working out of pocket. But the results are as good as what you've seen on TV.

Better if you're talking about Enterprise.

Check out their latest vignette, "Center Seat" along with their two previous full-length episodes here.

Chuck

Top 5 computer RPGs of all time

1. Fallout 2

What every RPG (computer, console or P&P) aspires to, or at least should, this game took the excellent fallout game mechanics and moody atmosphere and increased the gameplay time by 300%.

Those of you who read my article on console RPGs will notice I mention playtime as a big factor (along with replay potential) that seperates a good RPG (like Dark Alliance) from a great one. This isn't me being a stingy gamer. RPGs are an immersive experience. The game should give the characters and the world time to simmer in your imagination.

Fallout 2 delivers on that and just about every other criteria for a great game. There are optional quests that only be completed if you have certain skills (such as medicine or science) and almost every situation in the game can be addressed one of three ways: diplomatically, stealth or assault.

Not as well mind you, but you can in fact play the game all the way through as a character who talks his way out of trouble, sneaks past trouble or just kills it and takes its stuff. Even within specialties there are variations of characters, allowing literally dozens of completely distinct stealth, diplomacy or combat characters.

Want to be a melee monster wielding a massive sledgehammer or a sniper? Want to be a martial artist? Want to be a Doctor or a merchant? Not only can each of these characters be played but combinations of most are possible (for instance one of the most fun experiences I ever had was with my sniper who had stealth, lockpick and small guns, allowing him to bypass combats he didnt want and get in a good spot to pick off the ones he did want from a distance).

2. Bard's Tale

Let's begin at the beginning shall we? This is the game that proved a real, immersive RPG was possible on the computer. Almost no animation, most of the town scenes and monster images were jpegs. Still, the town of Skara Brae had so many dungeons to explore as you worked your way to Mangar and the game mechanics were excellent.

This game took almost everything that was good about the P&P experience, being able to make your own characters, picking characters from a wide range of classes and attempting to create a balanced party. Despite the limitations of the old Commodore 64 (like having to store the game on a series of floppies, one for each section of the city and each dungeon) the gameplay was enthralling and holds up even today.

Yes, several people, including me were still playing this game until changes in Windows after Win 95 began to make running DOS games impossible (or at least more of a technical challenge than Im willing to go through). And I know a couple of die-hard BTers who keep an old puter around just to play through these from time to time.

Probably the best way to experience this game today (as well as the most accessible technically) is on the old original Nintendo game system, where the entire game was ported over in near-perfect accuracy. Of course Nintendos are getting harder to come by these days as well but still a great way to play one of the classics.

3. Diablo

In its own way, Diablo was as revolutionary and important as Bard's Tale. This game showed that not all RPGs on the console or the puter needed to be turn-based games centered around a party of characters. Instead, it could be a single character, played in real time, with a heavy emphasis on action.

Diablo was the influence not only for numerous console games that have attempted to emulate its gameplay (Dark Alliance 1&2, Fallout:Brotherhood of Steel, Champions of Norrath 1&2) but it even influenced D&D, showing the folks at WOTC just what it was about D&D that was so appealing.

And despite what certain game reviewers would like you to think, a lot of this game's appeal was the fact that it was a big dungeon where you killed things (in some nicely gory ways) and took their stuff. Its the closest thing to the Temple of Elemental Evil in a computer gameyet.

With a lot of gameplay time needed to beat the game (especially with the Hellfire expansion disc), just enough plot to give the hacking and slashing a framework but with an eye toward replayability (dungeons are random and not all quests appear in every game), Diablo is the perfect blend of action and role-playing.

And when you add in the Battle.net experience, a direct precursor to the MMORPG (which we will discuss below), Diablo is a game whose shadow seems to get longer, influencing games made over a decade after it was released.

4. Everquest

EQ was, like games 2 and 3 a huge step forward in CRPGs. Taking gameplay and mechanics from D&D (or shall we say inspired by? liberally adopted from?), multiplayer and plot cues from text-based MUDs and putting the whole package into the gorgeous, 3-D world of Norrath, EQ was an immersive experience like nothing else.

While some of the elements seen in EQ had been done before, such as the shared virtual economy in Diablo's Battle.net, EQ did a lot that was new (or least done better). First, Norrath is huge, with over 400 zones to visit (and the zones each carry a lot of adventuring material). The graphics are well done as well, making Norrath a world that begs to be explored.

The appeal of Norrath is not to be overlooked in what makes this game great. The Champions of Norrath console RPGs draw heavily on the world, politics and races of Norrath and show again what an interesting, richly realized fantasy world it is.

Secondly EQ was the first real, successful MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online RPG). This meant thousands of players were in the virtual world of each server (and since there were more than one server, there were essentially alternate realities), and could interact, adventuring together or alone, trading, buying and selling items and even challenging one another to the occasional duel.

Diablo really gave you the sense that you were in a dungeon. Sights, sounds, smells, monsters that were alerted to your presence and would chase you, using the dungeon geography to your advantage (like doorways to prevent being surrounded) and this was a huge step up from previous RPGs.

EQ took that an even bigger step further, giving you the sense that Norrath was a living, breathing place.

5. Freedom Force

The first true superhero RPG for the computer (to my knowledge), Freedom Force is moddable, playing in real time or turn based modes and follows the adventures of a team of Silver Age heroes that are lovingly tongue in cheek and heavily (heavily) infulenced by the artistic style of Jack Kirby, one of the twin pillars of the marvel universe along with Stan Lee.

You could make your own characters, design your own powers and variations on powers and recruit characters from the established universe as you went along. Since the game is moddable and addictive, fan communities have worked to keep it alive in much the way that the mod community kept Civ II the best computer strategy game for about a decade (a long reign for any computer game).

Blood and Time: The History of Everything

This is sort of a design diary. Not a true one since, you know, the design part is done, but I never mastered the art of writing about a game and actually writing it at the same time, so this is what you get.

When I decided to do a time travel book, I was determined to do it right. For me that meant making it as much a historical resource as a book about temporal mechanics. Maybe more.

Any GM who wants to run a time travel game has an idea in his head how he wants it to work. Black magic? Psionic loners on the run from the government? Shadowy cabal from the future? Travelers from a post apocalyptic wasteland attempting to prevent their own future?

Well you get the idea.

SO since I knew the time travel part would be the easy part, I set out to do the hard work. That meant a massive timeline, covering the entire world, from its formation through the year 1900.

It was a massive undertaking, involving about 400 hours of research alone over the course of 6 weeks. Websites were consulted. Books were read. Books were listened to while I was in the shower.

All in all the timeline takes up about 40 pages of the book and provides you with, at the very least a good starting point to your own research if you wanted to run an adventure during a time. Despite its size and amount of space it takes up, with so much ground to cover the timeline is still just a guide.

But hey, its a guide loaded with adventure hooks.

Next time we'll talk about the crunch.

Dramatis Personae of the Roaring 20's

As we move into Blood and Time, we're going to be doing more historically themed sourcebooks. You already saw the first of these, Timeline: Roaring 20's.

In addition, we're going to be doing NPC supplements, usually through the dispatch, called "Dramatis Personae".

These books, like the Timeline books, will serve two masters: be great historical sourcebooks for strictly historical play or, when combined with Blood and Time make great resources for visiting that time.

This Dramatis Personae will give you stats, background and adventure hooks for: Frank Abbandando, Al Capone, Jack Dempsey, Nikolai Tesla, Edgar Cayce, Eliot Ness and Charles Lindbergh.

And although we're not quite ready to announce it yet, I'm also happy to say that I've already written a short historical set in the 20's that will have hooks for historical and time travel options.

Stay tuned...

Chuck