Gamma World: Quest for Peace - 6th Grade FanFic

Preface

I'm a bit of a pack rat... So when I moved last year, I tried to reduce (not entirely successfully) some of the detritus I've gathered over the many years. But there was one thing (among many) I could not throw out. I came across a story I had written around 5th or 6th grade (circa 1981 or 1982) based on the many games of Gamma World my pre-teen friends and I played. Gamma World was our go-to game after D&D... and sometimes before it. My memories of the games are a little vague after 35 years but clearly the game made a distinct impression on the nascent writer in me.

This story was originally written for an English Composition class at a Catholic school in Maryland. Written today, it would likely generate a call to a student counselor, a local clergy, and possibly "the authorities." Keep in mind that (to my knowledge), I have not turned out to the a psychopath and my teacher must have seen some promise in my writing as I received a 4.5 out of 5 with a "Nice Job!" note instead of a "Please have your parents call me..." (and I have the pics to prove it -- http://imgur.com/gallery/hmj5P). 

With all that in mind, I present to you, in its reproduced original text, the grammatically uncorrected 6th grade work entitled "Quest for Peace" (you will see the irony in that title shortly). (c) 1982 - 2016.

PS -- I hope Jim Ward gets a kick out of this. He was an inspiration for the 12 year old gamers everywhere.

Royals board game (Origins Preview)

It's good to make friends in high placed.

As I noted in my Origins Post Game Report, my wife and I were able to try out a few pre-release titles, including Royals from Arcane Wonders, an area control game with a card mechanic. Royals supports 2 to 5 players.

Royals is scheduled for official release in August at Gen Con 2016, but they had a few hundred pre-release copies for sale at Origins (and is available for pre-order at Amazon).

Raging Owlbear - 2016 Ennie Nominee

This was a nice feather in my beak to hear about last week...

Raging Owlbear was nominated for an "Ennie" (vote for me) in the Best Blog category by the eminently gracious and delightfully charismatic (I must say) EnWorld judges. This would be all true, I'm certain, if I had ever met them.

This would be even more impressive if there were more than 5 submissions to the category, but alas, they do not report on those submissions (or rather, they do list submissions, but it's hard to easily tell the category from the list)... There appears to be at least 5 blogs, so I beat at least 1 person out... So suck it!  (just kidding).

Vote for me here -- select "1".

I have to say the submission list is quite a treat to browse. I mean, check out AdventureScents.com.

Wow. Talk about a niche product. But, holy f@#%... They have SIXTY different little potpourri packs to simulate your adventure locations. The are the freakin' Glade Plug-Ins of table top gaming.

I honestly don't what to think about that. Is there really a market for sixty different RPG-based scented packets? Your guess is as good as mine, but best of luck to them! I might just have to buy one now out of sheer curiosity.

Anyway, if you've ever read and enjoyed my blog, please vote for me. Even if you didn't enjoy it, vote anyway. It don't cost nuthin'.

WTF AltSpaceVR?

So, I've been meaning to write about this for a few months now... About 6 months ago, there was a social media stir around this new "D&D virtual reality" tool called AltspaceVR.

To sum up, the players (using VR head sets) gather in a Second Life-esque virtual room to play D&D... on a flat surface... with dungeon tiles.

I need a VR headset for this?!?

Seriously, WTF?!?

Tyrants of the Underdark (Origins Preview)

At Oigins last week, I got the opportunity to try out a few games that are debuting this summer/fall. One of them was Tyrants of the Underdark, a deck-building board game scheduled for release on July 12 at $75 (Amazon currently places the release date on July 28). The game was designed by Peter Lee, Rodney Thompson, Andrew Veen and produced by Gale Force 9. Peter Lee and Rodney Thompson were also designers on Lords of Waterdeep.

Origins 2016 Post Game Report

The Eagle has landed.

My wife and I were fortunate enough to attend Origins 2016 in Columbus, OH this past weekend. It was the first time in over 5 years having a vacation without kids (Thank you, Grandma Diane, Papa Frankie and Great Aunt Donna!). To say that the weekend was hotly anticipated would be an understatement... and our expectations were almost entirely met!

Origins did have a registration snafu on Wednesday due to some down computers (people always blame the computers), but we were lucky enough to miss all of that. By Thursday morning, the Registration and Pre-Registration (Will Call) lines were not terribly long and we got our badges and tickets in 15 minutes, tops. They did. however, have a snafu with printing the coupon books, so many of the vendor booth SWAG was not available to a great majority of attendees. That was a pretty bad screw up. I mean, when you pay $55 just to get in the door (no games included), you expect to get some SWAG... or at least a coupon to buy some SWAG at a discount.

I won't bore you with a blow-by-blow, but will hit some of the highlights.

D&D 5e: Giants and Monsters

Wizards of the Coast announced two new books for the fall (and miniatures to go with them).

Storm King's Thunder is the new adventure path coming, revisiting the classic Against the Giants style story line.

It will be interesting to see how different the plot will be from the old G-series modules, and I'm looking forward to browsing this book to see how they handle the plot.

I haven't actually purchased any of the other adventure paths. I was curious about Princes of the Apocalypse but one of my players was already running that in a different group so I passed it by. Curse of Strahd also looks pretty good but I'm not looking to run a horror game at the moment... So Storm King's Thunder is really the first adventure to give me some sense of excited anticipation.

The second announcement was about Volo's Guide to Monsters.

To me, this is an even more intriguing announcement.There is a lot of speculation about this particular offering. From what we can tell from the official announcement, it will add some fluff about iconic monsters already present in the Monster Manual, as well as re-introduce a number of others that have not had 5th Edition stat conversions as of yet.

What makes this book intriguing is that it appears it may borrow ideas from Monster Vault: Threats to the Nentir Vale.

During 4th Edition, Wizards second Monster Vault book took existing iconic monsters, and created "monster groups"... Basically, variants that differ from the typical iconic monster's stat block a bit to provide variety. As an example, you might get new stats for an Orc queen, a war chief, a shaman, Half Ogre and Half Troll variants, etc... Or an NPC faction with stat blocks for the different kinds of faction members (such as the Iron Circle, or Dythan's Legion), or even a special monster NPC, like Calastryx, a red dragon with 3 heads.

Threats to the Nentir Vale was one of the best books ever produced by Wizards of the Coast in that it wasn't just another Monster Manual. Each group entry had a backstory and campaign hooks that could be dropped right into your game as a named NPC or faction. Even though it was set in the Nentir Vale, the hooks were generic enough that any home game could use what was in the book with little modification.

I don't know for certain the Volo book will take a similar approach, but it would be excellent to have a similar book created for 5th Edition with campaign hooks and background fluff. It would be preferable if it were not limited to the Sword Coast, but expanded to other parts of the Realms. Better yet, it would hopefully be generic enough to use in any home game.

Will it present details on more monstrous PC races? Will it add Feats, Backgrounds or other player options?  Hard to say. I actually like that Wizards has stayed away from creating too many player options that can be abused. Splat books almost always created unnecessary power creep in prior editions.

Final Thoughts

Outside of what appears in the official announcements, we don't have much information about what we might be getting, so all of this is just rampant speculation. However, I'm hopeful that Wizards is learning what has worked well in 5th Edition (as well as prior editions) and keeps improving their products using lessons learned from the past.