Bones Kickstarter Update

The Reaper Bones kickstarter is going great guns, and backers have pledged over a million dollars, which easily funds their initial goal of $30,000.  The kickstarter project will run for another five days, and if you haven't done so recently, check out their kickstarter page.  As the stretch goals have been met, Reaper has been adding more and more perks, which are jaw-droppingly fantastic and the rewards at the Vampire Level ($100 pledge) is unbelievable.  If there was any way I could afford it I would be in at this level and have enough miniatures to keep me painting for years to come.  As it is, I've ponied up $15 for the Ghast Level, which still gets me 36 miniatures.

They've also got a number of really cool add-on options available to all contributor levels:

I put in another $25 for the carrying case, which will hold over 100 miniatures, but the paint sets are a great deal, too.

So, if you've been on the fence about contributing, now is a great time to jump in while you still can.

City of the Beast - Against the Giants

Among the trove of Planet Stories books that I recently purchased was Michael Moorcock's City of the Beast.  Originally published in 1965 as Warriors of Mars, under the pen name Edward P. Bradbury, City of the Beast is a tribute to Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom stories.

The premise of the story will be familiar to anyone who has read the adventures of John Carter: the protagonist Michael Kane, physicist, champion fencer, and Viet Nam veteran, tests an experimental matter transporter on himself and finds that instead of being transmitted to a receiver on the other side of his lab, he is sent through time and space to Mars in the distant past.  Almost immediately after his arrival, Kane espies the incomparable Dej... I mean the exquisite Shizala, princess of Varnala, who is clad in nothing but a wispy cloak and a broad leather belt around her waist and, of course, falls instantly in love with her.

Kane accompanies Shizala back to the city of Varnala where he receives a Matrix-style native language upload along with a healthy dose of exposition, including the backstory of how Shizala's father, the leader of Varnala disappeared while chasing off  an invading war band of blue-skinned giants called the Argzoon.

Later, while out riding alone, Kane spies an enormous horde of Argzoon headed toward the city, and he rushes back to warn the Varnalans so that they might prepare for the impending seige.  The city manages to hold off the first wave of attackers - just barely.  The discipline and tactics demonstrated by the Argzoon is uncharacteristic of the normally dim-witted and savage giants and it becomes apparent that they are being directed by some unknown leader.

Does any of this sound vaguely familiar to a D&D adventure you might once have played?

Kane proposes to assassinate this leader, assuming that the Argzoon horde will melt away without this great leader to drive them, and so Shizala pilots an aircraft over the Argzoon command tent and deposits Kane, who slays the war captain within, but disregards any complicity of a beautiful dark-haired woman named Horguhl who was also in the tent.  Because every one knows that beautiful women can't possibly be evil, or lead savage warbands in bids for global conquest.

Somehow, in all the confusion, Kane gets knocked unconcious and Shizala is taken captive and absconded with when the defeated Argzoon army retreats.  So Kane, along with Shizala's brother, Darnad, embark upon a rescue mission, ultimately tracking Shizala to the lair of the Argzoon, a subterranean mountain complex known as The Caves of Darkness.

Kane then sends Darnad for help and proceeds alone into the dungeons of the Argzoon.  Of course he is captured and taken before Horguhl who, unsurprisingly, is revealed to be the unknown mastermind.  It turns out that she is a former slave of the Argzoon who used her latent powers of compulsion to tame the dreaded N'aal Beast that dwelt within the Caves of Darkness, and intimidate the giants into following her.  She also professes to love Kane, and offers herself and kingship to him if he will join her, spiking the offer with some of those gnarly compulsion powers of hers.  Of course Kane, hero that he is, shrugs off the compulsion and spurns Horguhl's offer.  Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and so Horguhl has Kane tossed into the pit as a sacrifice for the N'aal Beast.  Kane slays the beast, whom the Argzoon believed was an avatar of their god, and when they see it die by his hands many of them question Horguhl's leadership.  Kane, meanwhile incites a revolt of the slaves who are led by none other than Shizala's missing father Carnak.  Horguhl's whole conquest plot starts to fall apart and she takes advantage of the confusion to get while the getting is good.

The maiden is rescued, Varnala is saved and Kane and Shizala are to become betrothed.  Just as Kane is about to live happily ever after, his lab assistants figure out how to get him back and he is suddenly whisked back to twentieth century Earth.

While City of the Beast covers no new ground, it is a fun and fast-paced action story that will appeal to fans of Burroughs as a sort extension of the John Carter stories.  What I found most intriguing was the notion of bands of giants harassing the land, led by a sinister overlord, which is much the same premise as we see in the popular G-series of AD&D modules, Against The Giants.

As Warriors of Mars was published in 1965, Gary may very well have read it and might have been influenced by it when writing the Giants adventures.  I also can't help but think that his imagination might have been peaked by the Argzoon's subterranean city in The Caves of Darkness.  It might also be a coincidence, but given Gary's voracious reading habits I find it entirely possible that he read this book and was, at least unconsciously, inspired by it.

The Postman's Hernia

I mentioned last week, that Paizo is selling off most of their Planet Stories books for $3.  Well, my shipment arrived in the mail yesterday! This ought to keep me going for a while.

Is the OSR Running Out of Steam?

If you are a regular OSR blog-follower, you've probably noticed a marked decline in posting frequency throughout the community.  During my first year or so of blogging I had so much to say it was hard to find time to write it all, and I and my peak I was posting a lengthy essay about every two days.  Now that I'm into year three, however, I'm finding it a struggle to make one post per week and only about half of those have any substantial content.  The others are lazy fluff pieces (e.g. my last two posts).

It's easy to make excuses: I'm busy, it's summer time and July's extreme heat sapped my will to live, and so on, but the real reason is that I'm finding it harder and harder to come up with anything interesting to say.  The curious thing is that it isn't just me burning out, this trend is pretty much pandemic across the OSR blogging community.  Once, not so long ago, I had to strictly limit the blogs that I followed and even then, such was the furious pace of posting, I had a hard time keeping up with them and if I didn't check my blog roll at least a couple of times a day, I missed posts.  Now I can skip a couple of days and find only a few new posts.

Even James Maliszewski, the Energizer Bunny of OSR blogging, is slowing down.  Of course, this is a relative observation; he's now 'only' posting at a frequency that equals or exceeds what I achieved at my peak instead of the unbelievably prolific two to three essay-length posts per day that we used to see on Grognardia.  James is also writing about gaming less these days and is more focused on reviews, and discussions of pulp fiction, suggesting that he, too, is running out of steam.  This is hardly surprising, and by no means a criticism.  I am amazed that he was able to sustain his posting rate for as long as he did.

Nonetheless, this community-wide slow-down is an interesting phenomenon.  Have we run out of things to say?  Is our great Renaissance losing momentum?  Or are we merely shifting our creative output to other fora?

My suspicion is that we are shifting our focus away from blogs and onto other media.  First message boards and then blogs were the principle venues of communication in the early years of the OSR, during the 'getting to know you' phase of the relationship, when we were passionately discussing old school gaming, sharing house-rules and posting myriad random tables.  But now we seem to have moved on to more sophisticated projects and blogs really aren't the best format for sharing them.  The honey-moon is over and it's time for this relationship to grow and mature.

There has been a lot of great material posted on people's blogs over the years, but it was read only by people who were following that blog at the time a particular article was posted.  Blogs are great for the immediate dissemination of information, but not for preserving and making material available over the long term.

So, I think - I hope - that much of the energy that the community used to put into blogging is now being directed at bigger projects that are being published as PDF or print products that won't languish in the obscurity of a blog archive.  New 'zines are springing up left and right, such as Tim Short's recent start-up, The Manor, and they contain much of what used to be posted on people's blogs.  This is probably a good thing, because back-issues will be available for a good long time, ensuring that past issues are readily available.  While I certainly miss the exciting hey-day of old school blogging, there is no way that level of output and energy could be sustained indefinitely.

So where does that leave blogs?  In my case it means doing what I originally intended when I first started this blog: posting session reports to create an ongoing history of my campaigns for player reference, posting house rules and, of course, letting off steam with occasional rants and musings, like this one.

I may be wrong, but I think that what we are seeing is not so much a decline or slow-down in the OSR, but rather a shift in how we do things as we mature and grow as a community.

A Couple Items of Interest

I meant to post this earlier, but the heat has made me apathetic and listless.  Anyway, if you haven't already heard, Reaper Miniatures has launched a Kickstarter to increase its line of Bones miniatures.  Because of the expense and time involved in sculpting and casting, miniatures lines tend to grow very slowly.  So they are trying out Kickstarter to well...kickstart bones into high gear.  The contributor perks are very nice, and you get an impressive number of miniatures at the $15 level; 36 goblins, kobolds, and rats - who doesn't need more of those?

I don't normally contribute to crowd-source campaigns, but I'm sorely tempted by this one.




 Also, you may have already heard that Paizo has put its Planet Stories line on hiatus due to poor sales.  This is truly unfortunate since the series has made many of the works of classic pulp authors available in print again.  However, the silver lining of this very dark cloud is that they are selling off their stock at bargain-basement prices.  Most of the books are going for $3.  I just ordered a dozen for a mere $36, which should keeping me in reading material for the rest of the summer and well into autumn.

You can check out the sale by clicking the link above, and stock up on great books.  I don't imagine supplies will last long at this price.

If Chess Had a Shooting Phase...

Game Editions as Marketing Strategies

It's been a while since I've had a good cathartic rant, and I'm about due.  Since we are experiencing a brief respite from the long heat-wave that has gripped Manitoba since the end of June, I can seize the day and finally turn the computer on for more than a few minutes without it melting into a pile of toxic goo.

I had a chance, last week, to play with the new Warhammer 40K 6th edition rules.  And it got me thinking about the nature of game editions and how very differently this term has come to be used by large companies like Wizards of the Coast and Games Workshop.

Games owned by small companies tend only to publish a new edition when enough errata has been accumulated to warrant one, and those new editions only contain revisions that fixed mistakes with the game.  Thus, newer editions are fully compatible with older editions of the game.  But corporations have wormed their way into the gaming hobby, and corporations are not content to run a sustainable business; they have shareholders to satisfy, who demand annual growth.  Thus, corporations depend upon mass-consumption to fuel their lust for increasing profit.  Frequent releases of new editions is one of the ways that they achieve this in hobby publishing.  Hasbro/WotC has thrown out any pretense of making new editions of D&D.  Every few years they create an entirely new game and call it Dungeons & Dragons.  Of course each time they do so they further fracture their customer base.  Each of their "editions" has its own group of enthusiastic supporters  who are happy playing the game they like and have no incentive, whatsoever, to buy the newest iteration of D&D, which is completely unrelated to all other versions that came before it. WotC seems more concerned with attracting new players than retaining existing ones.  In fact, I think that was their strategy with 4E: to blow off existing customers and attract all those MMOG kids.  This strategy appears to have blown up in their faces and so, just a few years later, WotC is working on a new edition to win back all the customers they lost.  Most of us learned as children not to forsake old friends for new ones, and recent studies have proven what should be common sense: it is more cost effective to retain existing customers than to attract new ones, but the message hasn't gotten through to many large businesses, however, which is why we still receive abysmal customer service from many large companies: for every pissed-off customer that walks out the door forever, they reckon three new ones walk in.


Games Workshop, on the other hand, have a much more clever approach; they are the evil geniuses of the gaming world.  In each edition of Warhammer they change the rules just enough to eliminate compatibility but not so much as to alienate existing players by creating an unfamiliar game.  And they produce new editions, like clockwork, every four years with Fantasy and 40K staggered at two-year intervals like the Olympics.  Which means that if, like me, you play both Warhammer Fantasy and 40K you are obliged to shell out $90 every two years to buy a copy of a game you already own.  But that's not all: the crafty buggers change the rules of each edition so that different tactical choices become clearly superior, thus forcing you to change the complement of your army in order to stay competitive (meaning you have to buy a whole bunch of new models, too).  For example, in the 4th edition of 40K, the shooting was very decisive and everyone played 'shooty' armies.  Then in 5th edition, they changed the focus to close combat, forcing everyone to modify their armies to capitalize on this new emphasis.  Now, in 6th edition, the pendulum has swung back to ranged combat, forcing yet another modification.  From a purely objective standpoint, I have to admire this cunning marketing strategy, much as I can admire the brilliance of certain con-artists, even if I find them despicable.

The new 40K 6th edition rules, like the recent Fantasy 8th edition rules are neither good nor bad and they don't really fix anything that was wrong with the game, they are just different for the sake of being different.  Because the powers-that-be dictated that there shall be a new edition, the developers were forced to invent some new rules to justify it, which is really putting the cart before the horse and defies the very nature of what new editions are supposed to be about.  When the Warhammer Fantasy 8th edition rules were released two years ago, veteran GW designer, Jervis Johnson, admitted as much in a White Dwarf article, writing that the designers were happy with the existing rules and there was nothing that they wanted to change, so it was a challenge coming up with rules for a new edition.  If there was nothing they wanted to change why put out a new edition?  To make the company butt-loads of cash, and for no other reason.

Being both a role-player and table-top miniatures gamer, I find myself wanting to apply my role-playing philosophy to miniatures games as well.  I jumped off the D&D merry-go-round years ago and embraced the old-school do-it-yourself mentality.  So why not jump off GW's merry-go-round, too, and just pick an edition that you like and stick with that?  The problem with that is that you need to find a group of like-minded players who are willing to jump off at the same time with you.  And since a lot of people play pick-up games at the local store and play in competitions, they are forced to update to the latest rule-set.  It was easy with D&D; I'm the DM so I can be a table tyrant and force everyone to play what I want to run.  But even though I have a consistent group of people that I play Warhammer with, I seem to be the only one getting motion-sick and asking to get off the ride.  Most everyone is lining up at the register with wheelbarrows full of cash to buy a rule book that will need to be replaced again in just four years.

Why?

It seems that a lot of people have a deep-seated psychological need to conform and play an officially approved game.  It's kind of like wanting to be one of the cool kids and being part of the 'in' crowd.  Even back in the old days of D&D, which was all about doing your own thing and house-ruling your game into uniqueness, you recall that products that were labelled as 'Officially Approved for D&D' tended to sell a lot better than the unofficial products.  And even though I have paid very little attention to the development of the new edition of D&D, whatever they're calling it, I couldn't help but notice that whole bunches of folks in the old-school community started salivating like Pavlov's dog at dinner time as soon as WotC rang the bell and announced a new edition.  Even after having been let down time and time again by WotC's proven lack of understanding of D&D and the role-playing hobby, folks who should know better have expressed the optimistic hope that 'maybe this time they'll get it right,' despite the fact that past performance is the best predictor of future behaviour.  Common sense tells us that D&D 5E/Next/whatever is going to suck just as hard as the edition before it, but many of us still feel that innate need to be wrapped in the warm fuzzy blanket of officialdom.

I haven't been following what's been going on at WotC, because they have absolutely nothing to offer me: I'm happy with my old-school retroclones and the legion of old-school hobby publishers, so I don't need to spend a dime to enrich the Hasbro corporation.  Unfortunately, the same is not true of Games Workshop.  But I have neither the means nor the inclination to buy the same game over and over again, particularly at the ever increasing prices they want to charge.  On the other hand, I'm too heavily invested in the game to walk away from it - nor do I want to.  I still love Warhammer even though I'm not happy with the corporation that owns it.  Where does that leave me if I want to keep playing the game but don't want to keep upgrading to new rules just for the hell of it?  I'd rather just settle on an edition of choice then cherry-pick whatever other rules the group likes and come up with our own house-ruled game set, but that ain't going to happen; everyone still wants to be in the 'in crowd.'  So I'll probably end up as that annoying old fart in the group who will need to be reminded how to play every turn.  So be it.  At least I'll still be painting miniatures and rolling dice, even if I don't know what I'm doing.

But I sure do miss the days when new editions were just compilations of accumulated errata that actually improved the game, and not self-serving marketing strategies designed only to enrich a corporation.