I got this sent to me and figured: oh no, not another attempt at a geek chic d&d song; but this is full on awesome.
Author: littlemute
GenCon 2011
I actually made it to the Con this year, family in tow just off a weekend+ of strep throat for me and the missus as well as my car getting totaled in a t-bone on the way to work. We were crossing our fingers up to the last minute that the one uninfected shorty in the family would stay healthy and she did: in her body at least. After 5-6 hours at Gencon, I will never be sure if she’ll be right again. As any attendee is well aware, some of the things viewed there can never, ever be unseen. There was one moment of almost-regret when, while being dragged through the morass in the dealer hall by her and her cousin, we essayed into a dank waft a malodor the likes of which neither of their young, unblanched olfactory organs had experienced before. While I winced and imagined the sort of lifestyle choices that accompanied such a reek, they just pushed on, dragging me to whatever corner of the dealer hall their fancy took them.
Saturday I was free from the burdens of unprotected sex and I while I missed the Shadowfist world championship by 23 minutes, it gave me ample time to wander around and get some demos and shop. Here are some of the results I can remember.
Ventura: new game by Fantasy Flight dealing with the Condotierre period in Italy. Interesting take on the whole ‘hexes make up the board’ mechanic that Nexus Ops, Kings and Things and Twilight Imperium use. You draw and lay the tiles nearest your own controlled area, so the board builds out form a conflicted center. All and all, an easy, fairly elegant area control game that I would have picked up immediately had the price point not been… drum roll please: 80$ ! That’s what I would expect to pay for a big box hobby game like Descent or Ikusa. While it seemed like a good game, the price point is going to crush it.
Blood Bowl League Manager: An insta-buy when it comes out, this was the belle of the ball for me. I was highly skeptical they would be able to pull this off, and they did! It’s a little deck building a bit of bluffing, some luck and the most important part: they integrated the block dice really well into the whole game mechanic. Essentially, you have a deck of your players and you play them on different games that make up a season. It’s abstracted but essentially represents you pulling out all the stops for a game with a player position for whatever effect in that game. If you have more strength than the opponent for each game, you win and get whatever benefits the game provides. This could be more player cards, some team special abilities or special coaches (or just fan factor). Whoever has the most fan factor at the end of the league wins. Looks like it can scale with players and really easy to play a short game or a really long campaign. Can’t wait to get my hands on this one. FF ran out of their 300 copies on Friday morning, or so I heard. Damn.
Rune Age: Another new one from Fantasy Flight. I half-heartedly tried to get into a demo of this but after looking over someone’s shoulder and seeing how Dominion-esque it was, I took a pass. Some will like this a lot. Unless someone says it’s not like Dominion at all, I’ll take a pass on this one.
Talisman Dragons: it was there, but after the 10 hours worth of games a few weeks back, I was just not ready to pick this up yet. Definite purchase, just later in the Fall.
Shopping. I was tentatively looking for some Dreamblade stuff and it was found only at one booth and fairly expensive. I missed last year’s con, but there was plenty around in 2009 to be had, mostly for a song. It’s a solid area-control miniatures game and with the figures super cheap, no reason not to pick up a bunch. As they ramp up in price; not so much.
AT-43 was also on my list, and I found one booth with a couple of very cheap items I needed, and another booth with a bunch that was half off retail, but still expensive for my tastes. Again in 2009 there was a ton to be had (mostly due to Fantasy Flight’s liquidation) but that well has very much dried up. AT-43 is an excellent game and I’m quite close to having a Therian and Red Block army of some size to meddle with. Along with AT-43 is the old 3.5 Confrontation stuff– amazing minatures for the most part and one booth had a bunch, but they just didn’t have anything I really needed. I may be kicking myself someday for not breaking the bank picking some of it up. The main issue is, I paint so slowly the stuff will sit in boxes for a decade before a brush hits it at all.
Warhammer: I found a booth that had TONS of bits and I will be hitting that every year that they make it. I would literally spend the whole con going through their shit. They didn’t have anything exceptionally old, but had a mess of stuff for any and all of the big box GW games (Necromunda, Blood Bowl, BFG, Man O War, etc).
Sadly, I didn’t buy a single ‘new’ game to say, like most years, “a ha! I got this at Gencon, we must play!” This is due to blood bowl league manager being sold out and Ventura– well 80$ was just too much to spend.
Shadowfist. Though I missed the nationals Saturday morning, I did make it to the invite-only tournament for past tournament winners, which started right after the morning tournament final concluded after a 4 hour final! I was able to pull out the win after getting a tie in my first game, winning my second game after a long slough (thank you petroglyphs!) and winning in short order the three man final. In the final against ascended and architects (least that’s what I saw), I started strong and got a High Noon face off using a foundation character (thank you Yellow Senshi Chamber!) and a ring of gates out (protecting from stuff going back into my hand which my deck hates). The Ascended player laid out bull market (5 power to all players) as a response to the end of my turn, allowing me the power to lay out a site and be at play and take for my next turn. Then he announced that he had gotten all Feng Shui in his draw. Now, getting all Feng Shui at a time like that really sucks, but to announce it in the final of a tournament–it basically said to both myself and the other player that he was pretty much out of denial cards and we needed to go for the win. The Architect player to my right brought out some little stuff, but couldn’t take a site (thank you Final Brawl!) and after gaining 4 power in addition to the 5 from the Bull Market, I was able to lay out a foundation character, a Big Brusier and have a power left for a confucian stability to stop the inevitable zzzzzap (which came in the form of an Op Killdeer). Going for the win, the brusier got redirected onto a 9 body site (he’s only 8 fighting) , but my foundation character’s damage was redirected onto that 9-body site via the yellow senshi chamber, reducing it to a feastable number for the big brusier, for which the table had no answer. All in all, I got real lucky with my draws and was able to capitalize on both the bad luck of the other players as well as some mistakes on their part.
My MVP cards:
Character: Big Bruiser
Event: Blue Meditation
Edge: Shield of Pure Soul
Feng Shui: Petroglyphs
State: none in deck
After winning this and the Wisconsin state championship this year after many years of tournaments of just barely not making it into the finals, I’m looking at a long decade or so of getting my ass handed to me in competitive play as I well deserve. Bring it!
unomoralez
Best of the Master series gets a much needed reprint!
Released yesterday, IKUSA is the new name for Milton Bradley’s master system triumph Shogun (later Samurai Swords) produced now by WOTC. I guess I should have sold my unpunched version of Samurai Swords a few years back eh!? While this is a must have, I feel this game has been somewhat eclipsed by Dirk Henn’s Shogun. To be sure, these are two very different games. Herr Henn’s is a Euro take on the conflict and Samurai Swords/IKUSA is at the absolute apex of Ameritrash goodness. Both are great in their own way, but Ikusa is longer, much more random and it’s objectives are to wipe the other players out as is the way with Ameritrash. One has a cube tower and one has little plastic swords and the backfiring ninja! I can’t help but love both.
Summer Reading: The Unfortunate Traveller
I did my time in college trying to get an English minor and why I don’t know, I knew I sucked real bad at the style of deconstructionist writing that got all sorts of ate up by most of the professors I had. What’s more, lots of the kids in class had been actually exposed to the literary criticism quarterlies in high school while I, thankfully, had not. The quarterlies is where professors from all over the place argue in the most exclusionary language possible outside of a medical journal over minutiae regarding subtextual male marginalism within some unfortunately phrased sentence from Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland. As a student, you have to read stuff that and write about it. You don’t write about the actual original text at all, only about the body of work out of these literary quarterlies surrounding the original text. I turned in at least two papers that got passing grades without ANY familiarity with the original work outside of contextual inference from the quarterlies. Once you start down the deconstructionist path, your brain is always thinking in those modes when reading anything light and especially when plowing over something heavy: and this is madness. My cure right after college was to read everything William S. Burroughs published I could get my hands on as quickly as possible– you cannot possibly deconstruct cut-ups from say Soft Machine or The Ticket that Exploded (there is no illusion of complete understanding to undo). I found that Burroughs stood in absolute defiance of the paradigm of literary criticism I fell into (oh ya know, only as an undergraduate) and just blasted that shit away from my brain forever so as I could go back and read my Thomas Hardy for enjoyment and not to figure out if he was writing out of some cultural paradigm that needs to be studied (which of course he was and it does, but not by me).
However, I don’t regret as it was a good, though ultimately pointless, mental exercise to be sure; the bonus was exposure to original works that I came to love and have gone back to many a time. John Gardner’s Grendel, The Virginian and what I’m eeking through for the third time over the summer: Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller. This is not an easy read, Latin all over the place, extremely archaic language left and right, page upon pages of ‘what the hell is he talking about’ abound, but I believe this is the first picaresque in the English language, and may even be the first novel. The book is about a page named Jack Wilton who is telling his stories to a group of people in a public house. He has a bunch of random adventures, some which applies his cunning (convincing a captain he hates during a siege to surrender to the French and tell them he is trying to kill the King, acts which get the captain instantly hanged) and others he just observes (a peasant religious uprising that is put down harshly in Wittenburg). I compare it most to The Golden Ass by Apuleius (where a guy porks a ‘witch in training’ and gets caught and in trying to turn into an owl to escapte, turns himself into a donkey), except with Jack Wilton, there is no apotheosis, no redemption and in a way, no essential meaning to the stories he experiences– he just sees crazy stuff, rips people off here and there, and gets himself into some bad trouble (almost used as a cadaver in some experiment). That’s it, it’s the stories themselves that hold their own meaning individually, and Nashe goes to town in some of them with scathing social commentary, but no overall point to the whole work exists. If you’ve read The Golden Ass, and leave off the last chapter (which sucked anyway) where Lucius turns back into a human and becomes a priest of isis, that’s about what you’ll get when you finish The Unfortunate Traveller, but the road there is filled with the comedy of pillage and freaks and bloodbaths that only a picaresque can deliver.
top 5 from the wave
Though with Google+ around, it’s tough to see support for Google Wave continuing too long now, and it will be missed. Here’s a set of the top 5 links from the last week from very mraaking wave. Some are NSFW–probably the minecraft one as well because if you start playing it may not be safe for your worklife for a couple weeks.
a collection of henti word bubbles. Another gif that keeps on giving.
Ramona Flowers Vs The Thing
Rocket Raccoon in MvC3 Ultimate(!?)
Lots of strange choices were made in terms of characters for Marvel Vs Capcom 3 (Modok, She-Hulk?!) and the trend continues but it’s strange GOOD instead of strange BAD as the list was leaked for MvC Ultimate. While a fun game, I just could not get past the new style graphics. Instead of growing on me after detesting them as my first impression, I continued to find them shittier and shittier with every play. I don’t know what that style is called making everything look like it’s lit up superbright (yet at night) but whatever it is, it just didn’t do it for me. That said, the addition of Rocket Raccoon to the series roster is quite shocking. As a poster child for obscure (while not indy) Copper age comics, it’s tough for me to imagine anyone but a few people even remembering the character. I imagine there are some people that play fighters that are in their late 30’s– so this might be targeted at those few that do remember (as well as the equally surprising Iron Fist) as you have to be pretty damn old to have picked up the Rocket Raccoon stuff on the comic rack at the drug store (I was in 4th grade).
Summer Gaming Deluge
Well I had a week off and gaming got friggin’ done. A lot of it. Game after game of Shadowfist, two 5 hour + games of Talisman 4th Edition, Dragon Lairds and a weekend of handful after handful of D10’s being thrown for Exalted to top the shit off. Thanks to everyone that suffered through the debauchery, the rump-gasps, rank foists, dank, oppressive basement conditions and cursing as it was probably the most solid week of gaming I’ve had since 2004 or so. To have two days in a row that consisted of waking up at 10AM, stumbling around trying to find food and the preparing for a few hours for another almost all nighter of the ultimate nerdery is really a gift that one at my stolid age and life-choices shouldn’t be allowed to have.
Shadowfist: Some great games were played and beatings delivered (as usual). My only issue is that 4-player is the maximum enjoyable size. Five player just starts to break down, not the game engine at all, but the ability for players to play with the intensity that a multiplayer CCG requires for that long of a time. I’d rather get 2-3 three player games over the same span of time than one big-ass five or six player game. My decks did OK, with the exception of my A-list deck, which did phenomenally well in the hands of some of the less experienced players (I never played the deck myself). One player, we’ll call him STEVE, got Ting Ting, the Golden Gunman and Steven Wu out onto the table at the same time. Even though he didn’t win that game, this was a moral victory forever. The most interesting deck I saw out of the group was a horrific use of Bonechill by Mouth.
Dragon Lairds: Becoming a favorite, though one person, we’ll call him SCOTT, wins every game all the time. While this is derivative of another game (can’t remember the name), I wouldn’t play without the Tom Wham (and friends) art work.
Talisman 4th Edition: Like Shadowfist, if you have more than 4 players, you’re just not going to be able to sustain the intensity over 5 hours of play. Though the two games we got in were fun, I think that’s quite enough Talisman until the Dragon expansion is released this Fall. The new horse deck is great as well as the trinkets and non-item rewards you can get, though I am still wrestling with the ability of players to gain Craft from monster trophies. Overall though with more than 3, I would say this is just not going to be on the menu for a long time to come. Notable is that someone tried to play the Monk (who got awful nerfed in the new version) and failed. This is understandable when your only power is to have +3 to normal Combat.
Exalted: What can I say, I know the issues everyone on the internet has with this game and yet when we play it, it’s hellaciously fun. Not as much combat happened during the sessions we played compared to the last session with these characters, so only a hundred dice hit the table instead of hundreds and hundreds. I’d been planning to run one of the (very few) published adventures (with some tweaks) for the game and it worked out well, inserting some of my own characters in here and there and decreasing the difficulty when an experienced RPG gamer pulled a Steel Reserve fueled newb mistake and wandered off during a dungeon crawl portion only to be jumped and nearly destroyed by one of the most obvious traps ever conceived. While the combat has an awesome amount of crunch, I’m still not totally sold on social combat. It’s interesting, but one of my players mentioned immediately: “if this is dropping my willpower, why wouldn’t I just instantly attack?” Exactly. In two instances of social combat from published adventures, both have antagonists that speak through other mediums so they cannot be instantly attacked (Return to the Tomb of Five Corners and Daughter of Nexus). That’s telling about what players are apt to do during social combat when up against an actual enemy. From reading the interweb tubes over the last year or so, and my shock at antagonists from the Scroll of Exalts with 50+ charms, I was thinking of converting the whole campaign to Feng Shui or FATE, but after these sessions I just don’t see the point. I won’t mince words though that Exalted is a heavy bitch of a game to prep for and run as a GM, and as you get to higher power levels, well nigh impossible.
Realm of the Mad God
I was flipping through Google Chrome apps and saw this bad boy dubbing itself (as far as I can tell) as a MMO fantasy shooter(?!). The first part is bad, but the second parts (the shooter + fantasy bit) was too good not to check out. It plays like Smash TV and has all the generic fantasy tropes you can imagine. Of course it’s free, but you can buy shit in game as is the M.O. for every MMO these days.
After playing for a good 40 minutes or so it descended into tedium for me soloing around–especially since quests are for everyone on the map and can get gobbled up faster than you can get there to even see the enemies. Sure I appreciate the permanent character death when you get shot from all sides, but it started to get tedious. Then, out of nowhere, I got on what I’ve only heard described as a “RAPE TRAIN” and that made all the difference. A rape train is a truly massive conglomerate of players, probably 100 – 200 at a time that run along a road way in a map zone as fast as they can shooting everything everywhere. You can’t even see the enemy mobs that pop up before they are destroyed, let alone grab any loot that drops (you can’t see the ground— there are too many players on scren) unless you get off the train. As there are many high-level characters on the train, the mobs that spawn are superlative and give mass amounts of experience– but if you get off the train you can find yourself totally overmatched weeping all alone as you are surrounded and your 50 pixel character tossed into the permadeath pile.
Overall, an interesting game, it’s skill based and is completely unapologetic if you are fat fingering and get stuck between some rocks and killed. Along with the perma-death, the fact that you can get GOOD at playing the game physically can be appreciated. The game would be completely overlooked if it wasn’t in the browser, but it is, and it makes a pretty cool pick up game.