Edition Wars!

No, this is not a post about 5E or DND Next or The One Edition to Gather Them All or whatever the hell WotC decides to go with for their next edition. This is something entirely different and entirely unique.

For some time, GM Chris and GM Dave, founders of d20 Radio have been working towards making the foray into publishing games. That time is upon them as they launch a Kickstarter in attempt to get their first game published: Edition Wars – a fast, furious, tongue-in-cheek card game done very much in the style of Munchkin and other similar games.

Each player takes the role of a Gamemaster and attempts to assemble a party of 6 players in order to prove that his edition of the game is the supreme edition. Your role will define the various strategies you will use as you recruit, badger, or outright steal other players to your side, using snark, blogging, swag, ordering pizza, or even breaking out the Banhammer to come out on top.

Edition Wars is designed to support 3-5 players and plays in about 45 minutes to an hour. If they Kickstarter project is funded, they are looking for a release at GenCon 2012 (mid August for those of you that don’t follow the Con schedule).

This game sounds like an absolute riot, and my wife and I have already placed our pledge. Won’t you please consider helping a few geeks-in-arms attain their dreams and give them a pledge?

You can find more information, some sample cards, and make your pledge here.

A Belated Congratulations

I know I’m a bit late to the party, but I just wanted to give a shout out and a big congratulations to Chris and Dave over at the Order 66 Podcast on their win at the ENnies. They took the silver ENnie in the “Best Podcast” category, and they well and truly deserved it.

I would have gotten this post out sooner, but since I never listen to the Order 66 Podcast, I didn’t hear about this news until now.

But wait, there’s more!

While talking with some fellow Saga players over at the d20 Radio message boards about upcoming releases that we would like to see, the subject of the New Jedi Order came up by another poster. After jokingly saying that since we were probably 2 of the 5 people that enjoyed the NJO series and the Vong, we would probably wind up seeing something fan generated long before we see anything official.

So far, we have official announcements through May of next year, included splat books for the Soldier, Noble, and Scout classes, plus one for Droids. Nothing coming down the pipeline over the next year for campaign guides.

Then I got to thinking… why couldn’t I be the fan to generate this content? And so in a whirlwind trip to the book store to pick up the first three novels in the NJO series (I’d listened to most of them on audio book and was disappointed to learn most of them were abridged something fierce). I’m almost through my reread of Vector Prime now and have a few pages of notes including characters to stat out, equipment to write rules for, notes and names for the Yuuzhan Vong deities that have appeared so far, and starships and everything else under the twin suns of Tatooine to stat out.

So yes, that’s one more project I’m throwing myself into for those of you keeping score at home. And who knows? This could be the big score.

The Ghosts of Alderaan

In lieu of putting up a blog topic yesterday, I’m hitting you with a couple of quickies tonight. If you’re like me, I’m sure you too are frustrated with the lack of adventure support for the Star Wars Saga Edition roleplaying game. It is starting to become more and more apparent that Wizards of the Coast (WotC) isn’t going to give us a new rendition of the Living Force campaigns like they did for the RCR days and the most they are going to give us in the books is mini adventures and plot seeds, almost as if daring us – the players – to develop our own content.

The folks over at d20 radio have answered this challenge en masse. With several one shots already up for download a few more on the way, and a couple announced but not written, it’s beginning to become a great resource for GMs looking for adventure content. I’ve already posted my piece over there, but in order to keep more people informed, I will be posting my progress on the one shot I have announced here as well.

Here is the synopsis:

The Ghosts of Alderaan
This will be  a Rebellion Era game, most likely set between Episodes V and VI.
An adventure for PCs of level 8

Rumors abound of malevolent and vengeful spirits haunting the asteroid field where the planet of Alderaan used to occupy, craving revenge for their unwarranted deaths at the hands of the Death Star, and indeed, several ships travelling near the area have disappeared. Is this just a group of enterprising pirates and other outlaws preying on ships that venture too near the asteroid field? Or is there something much darker happening in the darkness where a jewel of bright green and blue used to shine? This is what the PCs are there to find out.

Project Chrono: 4th Edition

A while back while I was playing through Chrono Trigger for the millionth and a half time, I got the idea to try and reconcile it into a pen and paper and quickly settled on the d20 system and quickly moved from basic d20 rules to the Saga rule set. The game was progressing nicely and even featured a free form, skill based magic system designed to let all characters build and cast their own spells, using the same template for the “techs” they developed over the course of their adventuring careers. It made it through it’s alpha test, with very few hiccups on the character spectrum, though I wasn’t quite happy with the way combat worked.

Fast forward to about a week and a half ago. I’m at work catching up on my backlog of podcasts, working my way through some episodes of Radio Free Hommlet (the d20 radio hosted DND 4th Edition podcast) when it hits me. This system is absolutely perfect for a game like Chrono.

Consider this a teaser and an official announcement of one of my many pet projects. I’ll hopefully be looking at dissecting the 4th Edition system and math and working on building classes and abilities to fit the feel of the Chrono Trigger world. I’ll keep you posted here as developments happen.

The polls are open and the race is on