Archive for the ‘Role-playing games’ Category

1
May

Traveller Revamp

   Posted by: Jim   in Role-playing games

[From Purple Pawn] Mongoose Publishing, current publisher of Paranoia and RuneQuest, has just released a new version of the classic space trading RPG, Traveller. I haven’t taken a look at it myself, but they have previews on their site, including looks at character creation (hopefully you can’t roll a dead character), combat, and world creation. They’re also planning to expand the settings supported to include other space opera, such as Judge Dredd and Starship Troopers.

For those who want to play the original Traveller, QLI/RPGRealms has a single book that reprints the first three “little black books”, plus many other reprints and Classic Traveller-related items. They also have a d20 version of Traveller, but really, why bother…

Link

After an even longer hiatus, I’m back — at least for the moment. This week I have an interview from GDC 2007 with another gaming luminary, Eric Goldberg of Crossover Technologies. We talked for forty-five minutes about his history in the gaming industry — covering wargames, tabletop RPGs, boardgames and briefly about his later work in online and mobile games.
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After a long hiatus, I’m back. This week I have an interview from GDC 2007 with gaming luminary Greg Costikyan of Manifesto Games. We talked for half an hour about his history in the gaming industry — covering wargames, tabletop RPGs, and his later work in online and independent digital games.
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[This is a repost, as my server died this week.]

Despite my earlier and unfounded skepticism, Matt Barton of the blog Armchair Arcade has posted the second of a series about the origins and history of the computer RPG. It’s currently up on Gamasutra, but he’ll be posting it on his own blog in a few weeks.

This installment features games from the time period that he calls the Golden Age of CRPGs: 1984-1993.

Over on Matt Barton’s blog Armchair Arcade, he’s started a series about the origins and history of the computer RPG. The first installment features games from the time period smack dab in the sweet spot of this podcast: 1980-1983.

As someone who wrote a basic RPG for his Zenith computer out of frustration (not a lot of games for that platform) I found this pretty fascinating. I’m looking forward to the next few installments, assuming that he gets to them.

(Yes, this is from last month — still catching up).

This week on The Vintage Gamer, I cover one of the few threats to Dungeons and Dragons in the fantasy role-playing game market — and one of my favorite RPGs from my past: DragonQuest.
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My Origins report show is coming soon, but until then, enjoy this recording that I made of the Saturday podcasting panel, organized by Paul Tevis. The panelists were:

Paul Tevis (Have Games, Will Travel)
Mike Sugarbaker (OgreCave Audio Report)
The Mad Three (Gamer: The Podcasting)
Don Dehm (Pulp Gamer)
Yours truly
Tom Vasel (The Dice Tower)
Mike Stackpole (Podcast Entertainment Network)

Many thanks to Paul Tevis for organizing this — it was fun! But boy, can podcasters talk…

16
Mar

Vintage Gamer #8: Top Secret (RPG)

   Posted by: Jim   in Podcasts, Role-playing games

This week, the espionage roleplaying game Top Secret. Pick your cover carefully, and don’t forget your watch with the sawblade.
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