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A toy company requested a professional résumé from me yesterday, so I took the opportunity to update my résumé and my CV (list of professional credits). I tallied up something north of 265 entries in the CV, which doesn’t include many of the paid magazine and website articles I’ve written over the years.

That sounds like a lot, but over the course of 17 or 18 years you can build up such a list, especially when it features things like editing and developing. During my years with Pinnacle, for instance, I had my hands in dozens of projects every year. These days, I’m still busy, but I can focus on just a few larger things (like novels or collectible games or toy lines) at a time. It makes me tired to think about it—but in a happy way.

The International Association of Media Tie-In Writers (IAMTW) has a new logo on its website, which is pretty snazzy. I joined the group just as co-founders Max Allan Collins and Lee Goldberg got it rolling, and it’s been a good ride so far.

Any other tie-in writers out there, I encourage you to check out the site and join the crew yourself. If you just want a taste of the action, there’s an active mailing list for tie-in writers too. It’s associated with the IAMTW but predates it and is free. If you’re interested (and qualify as a published tie-in writer), drop me a line, and I’ll arrange for an invitation for you.

Games Quarterly Magazine is now available in PDF format through DriveThruRPG.com. Right now, you can pick up issue #8 for only $1.99, half off the retail price for the print edition. I’ve written an article for every issue to date, and in #8 I chronicled my meeting with model, actress, and game designer (how often do you hear those labels together?) Daryl Hannah at a New York Toy Show many years ago. And now you can get it cheap, along with all sorts of other gaming goodness.

I got my first copy of Blood Bowl: Death Match in the mail today as part of the regular shipments I get from the kind and talented folks at the Black Library. The book officially hits stores in April, but it’s currently the top entry on the Black Library website and available for preorders. They’ve also posted a larger version of the cover, which you can get right here by clicking on the image below.

I got a pleasant surprise in the back part of the book. It features an extract of Day of the Daemon, a Warhammer novel written by my pal Aaron Rosenberg. It’s due out in May, and I expect the rest of it will be just as good as the free taste in the back of Death Match. (The book also has an ad for the limited edition Blood Bowl jerseys, although it seems these are already sold out!)

The Black Library has asked me to be a guest at this year’s Games Day Chicago again. I gladly accepted and will be there to flog signed copies of all three novels in the trilogy of Blood Bowl novels I’ve written for them. That’s on July 29, 2006. I hope to see you there.

According to GamingReport.com, Playmates Toys is distributing 250,000 Spider-Man figures and a battle die to 1,000 middle schools across the United States. The report states:

The sampling is focused in the Atlanta, Chicago, Columbus, Dallas, Fort Worth, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, and Sacramento areas.

Very cool, although it perhaps implies that the Spider-Man clone saga got a little out of control.

Over at Cinerati, Christian Johnson posted an excellent rant about my post here yesterday on my Brave New World RPG and Marvel Comics‘ upcoming Civil War event. While I enjoyed the essay (go read it, and then come back here), I want to clarify one of the comments I made on my own post, which Christian quotes. I wrote:

BNW was ahead of its time thematically. I don’t know if AEG would have wanted to pick it up from Pinnacle in the current climate. I recall having to convince a business parter or two that making the cover a burning American flag was the right thing to do. That was provocative back in ‘99. Today, I would have a harder time winning that argument.

As for art and life, I created a world that asked one of the questions that concerned me most back then. It concerns me even more now.

To clarify, I don’t know that I’d have a hard time getting someone to publish Brave New World these days. Heck, I could publish it myself if I hadn’t long ago sold off the rights.

My comment was about the nature of the game’s cover (which shows a burning American flag) and whether or not my then-partners at AEG (who are a bit more politically conservative than me, to say the least) would be willing to release the game today with that cover on it. I argued hard for that cover, as I couldn’t conceive of anything that better represented the themes in the game, and my partners—to their credit—saw that wisdom and went along with it.

Christian is right in that changing the cover would be an act of self-censorship, and I’d be against that. If you have something important to say, I think you should say it. But people do it to themselves all the time, especially when you’re working within a group of people who have different opinions.

Let me reiterate that I have nothing but respect for the folks at AEG. They’ve always been stand-up people, and I don’t begrudge them the right to speak their mind about these sorts of things either. We had an honest conversation about the cover, and we did the right thing—together.

The thing that stuck out at me most about Christian’s post was this bit:

It also reminded me that I am in many ways the type of person who Matt might think wouldn’t buy his game, and that pissed me off too.

Actually, one of the things that made me happiest about Brave New World is how it appealed to people across the political spectrum. The man who was in charge of sales at AEG at the time, Marcelo Figueroa, is as politically conservative as they come, but he loves Brave New World. Of course, he wants to play Delta Prime (the government enforcers) rather than the Defiants (the rebels), but that’s because the game doesn’t specifically espouse one point of view over the other.

My own sympathies may lie with the Defiants, but I wrote the game from many different viewpoints. Just about every book in the series has its own perspective on the problems of the day. Figuring out how to balance civil liberties against security concerns is not an easy question. I wrote Brave New World to help people explore that question and perhaps answer it for themselves.

ICv2.com has an article on the upcoming Civil War event from Marvel Comics. It quotes a New York Times article on the subject (you may have to register to read this). According to the reporter:

The question at the heart of the series is a fundamental one: “Would you give up your civil liberties to feel safer in the world?”

This is exactly (word for word) the theme behind my Brave New World RPG, published way back in the more innocent days of 1999. The metaseries plotline involves a disaster after which all the heroes have to register with the government or become criminals. For those of you familiar with Brave New World, that’s going to sound achingly familiar.

I’m not saying that Marvel’s lifting anything from my game. This is as relevant a topic as there is these days. It’s just great to see one of the Big Two comic publishers tackling those same issues. I’ll be in line to get my copies and see how they handle it.

As an aside, I noticed that Wikipedia now has an entry on Brave New World. If you’re not familiar with the game, the article features an excellent recap of its background.

It seems I can tell you that R.E.V.s stands for Radically Engineered Vehicles (a name I came up with). Also, Figures.com has a gallery of R.E.V.s photos from the Toy Fair, plus an article about the line. (It turns out they covered the line last fall too, with an article and a gallery of early prototypes.) As they write:

The in-house concept revolves around mechanical racers and their sleek machines. In vehicle mode, the robot drivers lock into the frame, creating the chassis. Pull them back and let ‘em rip. For melee combat, each cyber-soldier can be removed and geared up for battle with select pieces of the car. Doors become shoulder pads, hoods become shields. In addition, each R.E.V. features spring loaded firing weapons and their armor is interchangable with other robots in the series.

This is the first non-game toy line I’ve worked on, and it tickles my inner kid silly.

Toy News International has an article about the upcoming DC Battle Dice game I designed for Playmates Toys. (This is the DC Comics version of the Marvel Heroes Battle Dice game, of course.) They also have a gallery up, which features photos of the figures from both lines. This includes a shot of unpainted masters for the DC dice chuckers: Green Lantern and Captain Marvel.

Altered States Magazine has more images of Marvel Heroes Battle Dice from the Toy Fair.

If you want to see something else I’ve been working on with Playmates, click on the links under R.E.V.s. The fantastic designers at Playmates came up with this all-new toy line and drafted me in to help out with developing the characters, the setting, and the storyline that binds it all together. I’ve had a real blast with it all, and I hope to be able to tell you more about it soon.

The Herald Bulletin of Anderson, Indiana, features a story about how Battle Dice came about. It includes quotes from Playmates Toys‘ Pat Linden about how I became involved in the design of the game.

The fine people at Cinerati just posted a review of Marked for Death. It’s a good, solid piece with what I think are fair criticisms of the book.

I met Jeph Loeb several years back, when I was working on the WildStorms Collectible Card Game for WildStorm Productions (which was then part of Image Comics but is now owned by DC). We played in Jim Lee’s annual poker game at Comic-Con International, and I got cleaned out quick. I saw him again at the same convention in 2004, and he told me he’d given up playing in that game. “It’s easier just to hand those guys my money,” he said with a smile.

I don’t know Jeph all that well, but I admire his work as a writer, both in comics and on television. When I read last year that his son Sam had died, I felt horrible for him. As the father of five myself, the thought of a child dying drives a cold spike straight through me.

In an arrangement with DC Comics, Jeph has come up with a special benefit issue of Superman/Batman (#26). Sam was to write the issue, but he died before he could complete it. A roster of 26 of the top artists and writers in the comics industry rallied together to finish it, and each of them has pledged his or her proceeds from the book to the Sam Loeb College Scholarship Fund.

See the Newsarama interview with Jeph for all the details. Then be sure to go out and pick up a copy (or several if you like) this April. And be sure to scroll down to the end of the interview page for a six-page preview sure to tear at your heart.