Rebecca (R. Sean) Borgstrom (of Nobilis fame) has posted an essay entitled “Structure and Meaning in Roleplaying Game Design.” It’s brilliant (like most of her stuff) and well worth a read if you care about RPGs.
Moving Servers Tonight, Downtime Imminent
My host (BlueHost.com) is moving me to a new server tonight, so the site will be down for about four hours. As part of this, my service gets upgraded from 4G of storage to 10G and my bandwidth goes from 100G to 250G, far more than I ever expect to need. Overall, it’s been a great hosting service and reasonably …
Cool Holiday Cards
It’s always wild to see what the various companies I work with send out as holiday cards or gifts. I already mentioned the holiday cards for Fluxx, from Looney Labs. Today, WizKids sent me their Pirates of the North Pole card for their Pirates series of constructible games. It features the festive ship The Sleigh, run by none other than …
High Stakes Drifter Prizes
WizKids has posted the prizes for the February events for High Stakes Drifter. It’s good to see them supporting the game so strongly, both with tournaments and cool prizes. I also got my designer’s copies of the game in the mail today: a couple displays full of starters and boosters. It looks to me like these might make great gifts …
Holi-Dragons
As fellow Alliterate writer Jeff Grubb notes, he and Jim Ward and Ed Greenwood have a new book out, just in time for the holidays: We Three Dragons. This anthology features three novellas about dragons and Christmas. I have yet to read it myself, but it’s now on my Christmas list.
Mayfair’s High-Ticket Settlers Sells Out
According to ICv2.com, Mayfair Games has essentially sold out of its super-deluxe 3D edition of its best-selling Settlers of Catan board game. That’s 5,000 copies of a game that sells for $380 in a store, or $1.9 million in retail sales. Wow. Congratulations to all my friends at Mayfair!
A Very Alliterative Booklist
The Alliterates (of which I’m a proud member) has posted a list of recommended works of science-fiction and fantasy. If you’re looking for something as a holiday gift or just to read, this is a fine place to start.
Blood Bowl a Bestseller!
My novel Blood Bowl squeaked on to this month’s bestsellers list for gaming-related fiction in Locus Magazine. It comes in at the final spot, behind three R.A. Salvatore Forgotten Realms novels and fellow Alliterate Jess Lebow’s Forgotten Realms novel Master of Chains. Another Alliterate, Troy Denning, made the media-related list with his latest Star Wars novel The Joiner King. That’s …
Road to Death in the House
I just got a FedEx box from Wizards of the Coast, a kind of early Christmas present for me: my author’s copies of The Road to Death. This is the second in The Lost Mark trilogy, which started with Marked for Death, and it should be on shelves nationwide and beyond in January if not earlier. As you may have …
Battle Dice Gallery
If you want to good look at the figures for the Marvel Heroes Battle Dice game, stop by Action-Figure.com and browse their gallery. They’ve posted over 100 photos of the game. These include shots of the figures, the carrying case, the two dice chuckers (the Hulk and the Thing), and the battle arena. Wow. I haven’t seen most of the …