Forbeck.com

This week, I wrapped up work on The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Drawing Manga, Illustrated: Shojo, the second I’ve written in the how-to series for IDW and Alpha Books. (Third if you count The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Creating Dungeons & Dragons Characters, which is a CIG but not about manga.) This is due sometime in 2008.

No, I’m not a Japanese girl—the people at whom shojo is targeted—nor have I ever been. However, my co-author Tomoko Taniguchi once was, and she’s one heck of a manga-ka of top-shelf shojo to boot.

I’ll be at the Chicago Toy and Game Fair, November 17 & 18. On November 17, as part of the Inventors Forum, I’ll be one of the experts in the “Ask an Expert” event. Sign up to have a private chat with me for 15 minutes between 1 and 3 PM, and I’ll do the best I can to answer your questions in person.

At this year’s Gen Con, I had the privilege of sitting on a couple panels with three giants in game design: Mike Gray (VP of new games acquisition for Hasbro), Reiner Knizia (most prolific board game designer in the world), and Richard Garfield (designer of Magic: The Gathering, among other great games). My friend Rob Stone helpfully took notes during the “10 No-No’s of Game Design.”

A couple hours before the seminar, Mike asked each of us to come up with our own list of 10. During the seminar, we ran through them as fast as we could, with lots of impromptu commentary. From Rob’s notes, we have the list below.

You might notice there are only 33 points coming from four people. Working in parallel, we came up with many of the same points, which reduced the overall number. Then, during the seminar, we came up with some new ones on the fly, which raised the number again. That’s what you get when you toss together four sharp people who each come at games from a different angle.

Note that not all of us agreed with every point either. In fact, we sometimes went exactly against each other, but that ended up being why the seminar worked so well.

(more…)

Earlier this month, I mentioned that the Italian Mutant Chronicles fanzine Doomzine had interviewed me for issue #23. I had some requests for an English version of the interview, and Fabio Dall’Ara kindly provided me his original notes. I’ve finally had a chance to format them and present the results to you here.

(more…)

If you’re a Blood Bowl fan anywhere near Bryn Mawr, PA, on September 29, 2007, be sure to sign up for a special Blood Bowl tournament called Blood Bowl for a Cure. All money raised through the tournament goes to the American Diabetes Association via organizer Joe Forsstrom’s donations page.

It’s a fun time and a great cause. I have a father-in-law, a nephew, and a number of good friends who suffer from this disease, so I’m donating a set of autographed copies of my first three Blood Bowl novels as prizes for the event. If you can make it, please do. Either way, consider making a donation of your own.

In the post-Gen Con madness, I never got around to posting this, so you may already know, but for those yet to hear:

The 2007 Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming has been given to The Great Pendragon Campaign, a role-playing game campaign book by Greg Stafford, published by White Wolf.

The winner was announced at a ceremony packed with games industry professionals, from designers to publishers and distributors, held in Indianapolis at 9 PM Wednesday, August 16, the day before the opening of the Gen Con game convention. Many thanks to our sponsors: Adept Press, Atlas Games, Fantasy Flight Games, FlamesRising.com, Matt Forbeck, GAMA, Gen Con, Hidden City Games, Pelgrane Press, ProFantasy Software, Janice Sellers, Stonehouse Miniatures, Paul Tevis, and Upper Deck Entertainment.

(more…)

InQuest, the tabletop gaming magazine published by Wizard Press, is shutting down. I wrote many articles for InQuest in its early years, enough so that I’m still on the magazine’s comp list to this day. Now, 150 issues later, it’ll be gone.

Ironically, the last issue of InQuest will ship in September, the same month that Dragon and Dungeon magazines end their run. Games Quarterly Magazine ended earlier this year. What does that leave for adventure gaming magazines in print? Between the internet eating their lunches and a rough few years for gaming, there doesn’t seem to be much room for a professionally run consumer magazine that’s not based around some sort of catalog like White Dwarf or Game Trade Magazine.

Someone tell me I’m missing something. Please.

My friend Dale Donovan wrote over the weekend to report that Chuck Crain, one of the founders of Ral Partha, had died. Apparently he suffered a heart attack the Tuesday after Gen Con and died a couple days later. The Miniatures Page has an excellent obituary for him.

I’d known Chuck for many years, since before I became involved in gaming professionally. He could be a gruff guy, but he always had a smile and warm word for his friends. He did a great job running Ral Partha, one of the first fantasy gaming miniatures companies, for years. Even after Partha went away, he helped out with its successor company, Iron Wind, and I still ran into him at conventions from time to time.

It has to be over a year since I’d seen Chuck, and I’ll miss him. To me, he was part of that same crew of early game industry folk that was always happy to fill me in on the real facts of how things started out and how that led to how things work now. I count Dan Matheson, who also passed away a few months back, among that now-poorer crowd.

We were lucky to have Chuck with us for as long as we did, even if that time was far too short.

Just before Gen Con, the fine folks at Paradox announced a new deal with Millennium Films for new Conan films. Congratulations to my compadres at Paradox. I can’t wait to see the fruits of this deal.
(more…)

James Lowder’s Hobby Games: The 100 Best made it to Gen Con, and I picked up my contributor’s copy there. It’s a great book and belongs in the bathroom of every fan of tabletop games. As I’ve mentioned before, it contains 100 essays from 100 of the world’s top tabletop game designers. Each of these is about 1,000 words, just the right amount for a little light reading on the throne of your choice.

My essay in the book concerns my favorite tactical combat game ever: Space Hulk by Richard Halliwell, published by Games Workshop. The book also includes an essay by Dale Donovan about Silent Death: The Next Millennium, a game I developed for ICE, based on Kevin Barrett’s original edition.

Call them hobby games, tabletop games, adventure games, or whatever else you like. If you enjoy them, pick this book up. For the games you’ve yet to play, it will inspire you to track them down, and for your old favorites, it will remind you why you like them so much.

Jared Sorensen and Luke Crane, both men of the brilliant game design kind, have been teasing me for months with hints about their an upcoming game: Project Donut. This is the first game these two have worked on together, and it promises to blast the airlocks off RPGs. Sight unseen, you can sign me up for it.

Here, so far as I know, is the first online clue as to its nature.

A couple weeks back, a copy of The Frodo Franchise by Kristin Thompson arrived in the mail. In it, Kristin describes how The Lord of the Rings went from literary classic to licensing powerhouse. For this, she interviewed 76 people, including me in my capacity as one of the developers of Decipher’s The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying Game.

If you’re interested in the big business behind turning books into blockbusters—using Tolkien’s especially winding road as the example—be sure to pick this up. My contribution only amounts to less than two pages in the 332 pages of actual text, so it’s not a personal plug. I haven’t had time to read much of it yet, but what I’ve seen so far intrigues me, and I’m looking forward to devouring the rest.

It’s that time of the month again, and my latest post is up at Storytellers Unplugged. Given where I’ve spent the past week, I ramble on a bit about the nature of networking at conventions and how I like to view such things.

I rolled in from Gen Con late last night, but I can barely talk about — mostly because I’ve all but lost my voice to the show. In short, I had a wonderful time, saw lots of old friends, and made lots of new ones.

More soon.