The rulebook for Marvel Battle Dice is now available as a PDF, both in lo-res and hi-res formats. Be sure to check it out!
Once you have the rulebook, you can get away without a starter if you like. All you need to do is to start picking up boosters (at least two for each player) and go!
MarvelBattleDice.com has a report on Playmates Toys‘ appearance at the recent GAMA Trade Show. I only spent a few hours in the booth, but I got to hang out even more than that with the team. They launched the organized play program for the game there, so if you’re interested in learning how to play, ask at your favorite local gaming store soon!
At EmeraldCity.com, novelist Karen Traviss has an excellent essay on what it’s like to be a tie-in writer.
According to an article in ICv2.com, WizKids has decided to end support for High Stakes Drifter.
WizKids also said that it will no longer support its High Stakes Drifter CCG, which did not receive enough support to justify continuing it.
This is no surprise to me. I had breakfast with WizKids’ CEO Jordan Weisman at the GAMA Trade Show last week, and he apologized to me for how the company had stumbled on the launch of the game. It was the first CCG that WizKids published, and there were some growing pains. However, they’ve learned a lot from it, and I suspect that their upcoming Battlestar Galactica CCG will profit from it.
For my part, I bear WizKids no ill will at all. We all wanted the game to sell better, and they risked far more on the venture than I did. Hopefully the game (or at least the best parts of its mechanics) will appear someplace else in the future. Jordan and his crew treated me wonderfully throughout the entire process, and I’d love to work with them again sometime soon.
Over at Cinerati, Christian Johnson explains all the in-jokes (and mistakes) in Stephen Colbert’s recent bit on Dungeons & Dragons Online.
When I was at the GAMA Trade Show last week, Paul Tevis grabbed me, sat me down, and interrogated me about all sorts of things. The recording of this somehow turned up on Paul’s excellent podcast, Have Games, Will Travel. (I suppose the large microphones should have been a clue.)
Give it a listen, and you can hear how I sound after staying up for more than 24 hours, grabbing two hours of sleep, and then holding a seminar on freelancing in the gaming industry. In other words, how you’d find me at most game conventions.
In today’s mail, I got my copy of Winds of the Wild Sea by my pal Jeff Mariotte. This is the second in his Marauders trilogy set in the Age of Conan series from Ace Books. I act as the Conan guru for this line, and it’s amazing how easy authors like Jeff make it to do my job.
The book should be on shelves in a bookstore near you next week.
Playmates Toys is launching an organized play program for Marvel Heroes Battle Dice at the end of the month. As usual, you can get all the details, including which figures will be available for prizes, at MarvelBattleDice.com.
Wolfgang Baur, one of my fellow Alliterates, is taking a shot at using patronage (the ancient model for financing art) as the means of producing a d20 fantasy adventure (read: D&D module). It’s a kick of an idea, and I hope it works out for him.
What differentiates this from Greg Stolze‘s ransom model is that Wolf hasn’t started work on the project yet. Also, the patrons (those who donate to the cause) get to have some say in what he produces–before he types even the first work.
Wolf’s a fantastic adventure writer, so I’m sure the final results will be wonderful. If you’ve ever wanted to feed ideas to a professional game designer–a a cut rate–here’s your chance.
On a recent episode of The Colbert Report, show host (and confessed ex-roleplayer) Stephen Colbert tells us about his D&D character and what impact the advent of D&D Online may have on our society. It’s hilarious.