Recent Arrivals

New Games I am Excited About

Paladin: Warriors of Charlemagne, authored by Ruden In 'T Groen and published by Nocturnal Media, is based on Greg Stafford's King Arthur Pendragon RPG and uses many of the same mechanics. Paladin, like Pendragon, is all about playing a knight in a legendary setting that draws heavily on period literature, in this case the Charlemagne epics such as The Song of Roland and which aims to immerse players into its multi-generational role-playing experience. Pendragon and Mr. Stafford's The Great Pendragon Campaign do an excellent job of just that. Paladin will hopefully do the same for Charlemagne.
The age of Charlemagne may be slightly less well known to American audiences than the romances of King Arthur, but is in fact more directly historical and just as fantastic and full of adventure, drama and entertainment as the legendary King Arthur tales. Charlemagne ruled from about 768 to 814 and these are the years of the Paladin campaign, which takes its inspiration from The Great Pendragon Campaign. In Paladin one plays a knight (or aspiring squire) in the service of the Frankish King, Charlemagne, acquiring Glory and honor and hoping one day to join the ranks of the great Paladins, knights who personally serve the King. 8th Century Europe is a wilderness ripe for adventure. The withdrawal of  the Roman Empire has left a huge power void into which the fledgling Frankish Empire is expanding. Pagans, invading Moors and Saracens, meddling Romans, competing Christian princes, supernatural forces of faerie, nature and the Evil One are all part of the epics and therefore available to the referee as potential fodder for adventure. The scope of material for Charlemagne's era including history and all the myths and legends seems even larger than that present in the Arthurian tales.
As with King Arthur Pendragon, the gaming challenge may be finding players who are interested in confining their role-play to the milieu of chivalry, knightly privilege and responsibility. Playing an honorable knight is a challenge (in my experience) that many Americans can find tedious. The hopeless romantics like myself perhaps welcome the role, but for many it just doesn't make sense to their modern sensibilities that people would behave as they do in the stories.

Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play (WFRP) 4th edition published by Cubicle 7 is perhaps just the opposite role-playing experience. Set in the Old World of a fictional Reich loosely based on a renaissance era Holy Roman Empire (historically what Charlemagne founded) where money, greed and self-interest have largely replaced courtly romance and chivalry, the "Grim World of Perilous Adventure" offered by WFRP seems in many ways more familiar to modern Americans.  Social mobility is more common and behavior is less restricted by birth and class. Players may feel free to openly brawl about in the streets and alleys as is suggested by the cover illustration (which recalls that of the 1e WFRP). Its Warhammer so Chaos is the big threat and cults and demons can be found lurking anywhaer. I have heard WFRP described as a smash-up of Call of Cthulhu and D&D and that rather seems appropriate. The current 4th edition has much in common with the 1st edition by Games Workshop and I see that as a positive. The 4th edition does bring the profession and percentile mechanics into the 21st Century and is a much improved game, very much to my liking.
Of course Games Workshop, the original publisher of WFRP and developer of The Old World has taken that setting forward and into The Age of Sigmar. There is good news ahead for those in the hobby who prefer the newer setting. While Cubicle 7 WFRP 4e retains the older setting for this product, they are promising an Age of Sigmar role-playing game for next year. I have not explored The Age of Sigmar much, but it does look to have its own appeal, enough for me to invest in that version of the game once it is available. Yes, I enjoy the WFRP system that much!

B/X Essentials, published by Necrotic Gnome (author, Gavin Norman), is now a complete game system with the addition of the final two volumes. The Monsters book and Adventures and Treasures book are, much like the first three volumes titled Core Rules, Classes and Equipment and Cleric and Magic-User Spells, a digest sized retro-clone of the Basic and Expert rules reorganized so as to seamlessly combine the two original volumes in a modular format allowing for ease of reference at the table and flexibility if one wants to alter setting/milieu. The modular nature of the system allows for replacing Classes and Equipment or the Cleric and Magic-User Spells or any of the other booklets with something more directly tied to a different setting while retaining the Core Rules and any of the other books.
Necrotic Gnome is one of my favorite OSR publishers at present and has recently given us Dolmanwood and the Wormskin zine in addition to B/X Essentials. With original content, evocative art and very inspiring characters, the Necrotic Gnome products have been among my favorites since I first discovered Wormskin a year or so ago. Moss dwarfs...need I say more? The Dolmanwood and Wormskin setting is a unique and fresh take on an enchanted wood that can easily be the entire setting for its own campaign or dropped into another setting.