Pathfinder Online Kickstarter Update

The Pathfinder Online Kickstarter campaign is still on fire, almost reaching 3 times it's initial goal and now featuring very lucrative stretch rewards. Should the funding reach $150,000, The Thornkeep book which is being especially published for this campaign and written by Richard Baker, will include a number of levels written by Paizo's best RPG writers.  Currently, Jason Bulmahn and James Jacobs are on board; an extra $10,000 and Eric Mona will be added to the digital version; should the final goal be reached, all of these additions will add to the print copy of book in addition to the PDF!

A $50 contribution would reward this upcoming release in both print and PDF, potential early access to the testing/release phases of the MMORPG and exclusive information on the production of the game itself. $15 will bag you the digital PDF copy. Should any of this appeal to you, now is the time to get involved!

Below is the kickstarter video presented by Ryan Dancey which should fill you in on what the game will be about.

Pathfinder Online being kickstarted!

As an age old fan of MMORPGs, specifically sandbox games, I have followed Pathfinder Online from the moment it was announced. It is being designed by a new Paizo partner company Goblinworks, including people such as Lisa Stevens (CEO Paizo), Ryan Dancey & Mark Halmes from CCP (Eve Online). Goblinworks have recently launched a kickstarter campaign in which to raise funds for a technology demo to show to potential investors. Supporters of $15 or more also get a digital copy of Thornkeep. This will be a 64 page book on how to run a Pathfinder game in the town named by the Pathfinder Online community back in January and a town which will exist in the MMO. $50 bags you the book in print amongst other things.

If your interested then check out the Development Blog over at Goblinworks for more details on the concept of the game itself. I have been largely involved with this project on the community side and can say that now is a good time to get involved if you'd like to see this happen.

A Brief Update

A quick post to say I am still alive and, not as such a sorry (I'm sure you're surviving), but a message to those who were kind enough to follow my blog in it's infancy and welcome me warmly to the blog world.

Life's busy and the opportunities for D&D slim. I will however be back in perhaps a month and breath some serious life into both the hobby and hopefully some interesting blog entries.

Hope you guys are well however and I have and will continue to read your posts, you don't disappoint.

Questioning My Own Creative Licence?

I have recently been engaged in drafting potential new race as class possibilities to effectively 'test' in my first run of Labyrinth Lord. Difficulties have been abound, as expected as I undoubtedly lack the experience to even begin considering homebrewing rules, but sadly, you do not know me very well and I am one prone to attempting to run before I can walk - and often found crawling to the finish line.

Ignoring the above, what's the problem? Why am I even considering creating a new race/class? Creating a setting and the potential for storycraft is the single greatest pull for me; I want to create worlds and incorporating a race in which players may choose to permeate and naturally evolve my creation just strikes me as something magical, something unique - something I really want to do. I'm here for the open creative process of people absorbing what I have created for them, digesting what's happening around them and injecting their own story within my own - just saying it makes me excited. My mind melts with excitement and potential as I have filled page after page with ideas I would one day like to give life to, but only to become immediately lost within my own sense of direction; at what point does something seemingly within the OSR become something totally different?

The OSR is not dislike many other movements which may fall into the category of a simple preference for an activity or way of things long passed - nostalgic preferences in which there are often two distinct groups. In this context, I propose the nostalgia gamer and the retro gamer. The nostalgia gamer I would define as one who is in love with the period, the art, the styles and the themes which define their own individual piece of history which they seek to recreate, or perhaps never stopped playing. This is more often than not the period of a players first encounter with a game, their first high to which no other product is likely to recreate, so why leave? The retrogamer on the hand, simply prefers the brand of gameplay offered in older carnations of roleplaying games as such a period offered a game which is seemingly disconnected from its' contemporary offspring. The nostalgic is drawn by a longing to rekindle or maintain past experiences, the retro gamers' interests on the other hand are systemic and offers greater freedom for the individual to modern age with free licence to innovate.

I ask you to take this feeble stratification lightly as it is not only feeble, but also highlights a characteristic of mine in which I often perceive such choices in equal measures of black or white. Most gamers may place themselves upon the multiple shades of grey where as I strictly feel compelled to place myself at one end of the spectrum as if fully appreciating either would require my outright absolutism; either step exclusively into the institution of the old school or burn it down and begin the slow process of culturing it in your own image.

Somewhere within this rambling my problem may have reared its ugly head. I find myself hopelessly interested in the OSR. From within a hobby I do not know and from past-times that will never be mine, I have felt nothing but an overwhelming resonance with the game, creating for it and communicating with it's people. In contrast, I then flip the coin I find myself heading in a direction which seeks to potentially destroy the fabric and pillars on which - in my mind - the OSR was built to serve.

I guess my fears may be quelled in a question to my 8 followers (you know who you are!). How do you consider your own creative licenses when it comes to modifying your systems? To what degree do you prioritise Gygaxian input to your systems or settings to that of your own? Or to coin my piss poor definitions: Are you a Nostalgic or Retro?

*EDIT* Brendan's Nalfeshnee Hack lies partially to blame for this post as it marginally blew my mind as I -for the first time- considered an OSR rehash of 4e.

The Road is Long

I am in what you could call a state of limbo. I have spent an exorbitant measure of hours in frenzied modes of thought; referencing large amounts of material and sampling various systems in hope of finding the perfect offering of D&D, yet each step towards assertive action is proceeded with extended periods of facepalming and a recurring fear of failure. I have not once played D&D; my proposed group of players aren't even sure what it is; my fear of failure is I think justified. Included in the wealth of material I have consulted, one key occurrence tends to be prevalent in 'introductory' stories concerning roleplaying; the presence of some medium of mentor or guide. I go on with no such luck other than the written word offered in core rulebooks. Luckily teachers are abound in developing my knowledge of storycraft; my current consultation of Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces and sporadic dips into the short stories of H.P Lovecraft and the like have taught me more about my desired style of weird or cult fiction than I could hope to learn in such a brief period.

Anyway, back to the issue, roleplaying. As I tend to do, I shall mark the end to a period of obsessive, irrelevant yet massively productive procrastination with a rejuvenated objectivity , this post, and more importantly, an idea:

Pretending for a moment that I did have a mentor, he would certainly have recommended that I become familiar with my chosen system (Labyrinth Lord) via the running of a relevant commercial adventure. Running a game for a group of first time players, the same metaphorical mentor would however be seriously alarmed by my choice; I give you Death Frost Doom by James Raggi, an adventure to which many fears of a first time DM become key devices: death, confusion, panic, anxiety and failure are to be expected. Raggi draws on the Lovecraftian theme of an unknown and unspeakable horror which upon first reading fell short of inspiring fear but arrived at a pleasant plateau of leaving me immediately quite unsettled. This won't be a review of the piece-not until I have had the pleasure of running it- but I will explain my reason for choosing it and how it could perhaps be a useful starting point for other hopeful DMs.

Combat Light

As is the case with other published adventures by Raggi, the story is in essence one light in combat and rich in atmosphere. I concede that one very likely avenue in which Death Frost Doom hopes to transpire is in the presence of a rather large and incalculable threat, but again this is something which remains quite simple to work with and something I anticipate will remain a matter of tracking movement or declaring the group cornered and thus instantly dead. All other combat is delivered in simple encounters with an interesting variety of creeps to which a new DM should have no trouble.

Atmosphere

Death Frost Doom really shines in this respect. Raggi states in his foreword (or maybe from another of his PDFs?) that when one purchases a commercial adventures one should expect a rich and defined atmosphere. He does not disappoint. Death Frost Doom is far from a traditional dungeon crawl; the meat of the experience I feel is established in the surface area of the cabin and burial ground in which the responsibility lies on the DM to truly evoke a similar atmosphere offered in the text. With first time players in mind, this is a departure from conventional dungeon crawls and can encapsulate flavours of unconventional cult horror which I would argue is a far more effective tool for inspiring interest in a group than the prospect of slaying dragons or slaughtering goblins. Cult horror or the 'weird tale' offers something Skyrim or most other popular vehicles or genres of fiction cannot and Death Frost Doom offers the budding storyteller a great opportunity to develop his skills.

A Mature Challenge

Having become familiar with a number of products geared towards introducing players to the game, I have found most of which to fall under the category of being either orientated towards children, void of any reasonable challenge or being, for lack of a better word, boring (or all 3). Death Frost Doom fits the requirements of the adult gamer whilst maintaining simplicity and one of the most interesting location based adventures I have come across (which is not all that many).

I'll stop here for fear of talking in too greater depth of a game I have not run yet. Forgive the great lack of detail for I would like to save that for the review/gamelog.

I look forward to running the game with my players in the next few days and will give an update on their progress.

How I Got Started In All Of This

It is a reoccurring thought; how did I get here? Unlike most who lived through its inception in 1974, perhaps grew up in and around gaming stores or were maybe ushered in by a friend or family member; how did I come to implicate myself in what is very much niche hobby, particularly one enshrouded in such secrecy? This post will be the symbolic nail in the coffin of my subsequent shift in gamer identity and the subsequent mass deliberation of how to spend my 'me' time. Apologies for the length.

As a teenager I was never exposed to D&D. I never found myself within a games store more than a handful of times, the RPG section of which are often obscured from vision by curtains or hidden in the basement. Given the fact that the role-playing section is hidden away like the 'porn' department of a DVD shop, I find it easy to forgive my own adolescent ignorance. I had several run ins with Games Workshop stores and products, but they never seemed to hold my interest or translated in appropriate terms, my wallet. Going in to a GW always felt more like being fleeced by salesman than having a fun day out and this was when I was 13 or 14 years old.

My young life in respects to gaming took form in online virtual worlds, most notably Sosaria and Ultima Online. Not since my ten or so years of Ultima had I been able to rekindle the accessibilty or availability of a tangible fantasy world. As limited or empty as it may be as a standalone game and social tool, it remains one of the best. Given my relative successes and addiction to UO, taking myself as a gamer heavily implicated in the MMORPG genre I accordingly fancied myself as largely involved in that particular movement and followed it through a wealth of titles to it's fruition in Blizzard's World of Warcraft. WoW's launch and the subsequent months would rival the best there may ever be in online gaming and were exciting times, but short lived. The dawning of a weak yet growing maturity did far from kill gaming for me, but simply reiterated my reason d'etre for participating in online video games and made it clear to me that those goals had long been absent from anything I had been involved in.

The years which followed may be dubbed the 'grumpy' years, years in which I came to loathe many things within the genre for no other reason than misunderstanding my own disenfranchisement from it. This being the case and to use a poor analogy, if you keep digging, soon enough you'll find yourself digging up and out the other side to pastures new. As if through relentlessly seeking and questioning my own objectivity, I came to start second guessing my own thought processes as if becoming a target of my own twisted bitterness and loathing; what did I discover?

I don't like massively multiplayer online roleplaying games. Not at all.

Spending a large chunk of your youth, energy and passion in a single hobby was to me quite literally a ball and chain on my own progressive thinking. It were as if admitting this new found reality had to be avoided at all costs should I wish to avoid a cataclysmic collapse of identity. It may sound silly to speak of gaming this way, but say you have been an artist for many years and one day realise that you've just grown to hate it? It's a slap in the face of your own inner self image; you were internally wrong about something as personal as your own hobby, an activity of self pleasure, a facet and integral feature of your very existence. Shame on you.

The upside of this is of course both obvious and refreshingly limitless; what to do? I began to look back and extract elements of gaming which I truly enjoyed and sought to find a new activity which shared these features. I began going back to older singleplayer games, RPGs specifically, with a fresh perspective and attention to detail I'd never before applied. Mynameisnotlilly's YouTube channel was a real inspiriation for this and I strongly recommend you check out his videos. I think I've previously said, Let's Play videos are a pet hate of mine, but the creative process in making them, paired with the potential for narrative and storytelling, a great deal is offered in producing a new and exciting perspective for gaming. I intend to put out some Lets Play videos of myself playing Baldur's Gate, incorporating fore mentioned aspects of role-play to which I will keep you all informed as to when and where these will surface.

This new angle was the catalyst to a strong revival in past interest in fantasy fiction (Gemmell, Tolkien, Wolfe) and was coincidentally followed with a timely introduction to a show called I Hit It With My Axe. Zak's show had a profound effect of bursting my 'only social misfits play roleplaying games' bubble. In hindsight, I never really thought that of RPG players, yet given a life time total of perhaps 5 seconds of consideration to the hobby, that preconception is a common assumption of those who never posed themselves the question. I also find it somewhat ironic that Zak's show would have the effect of making me consider the reality that normal people play D&D, when in fact his show is about playing D&D with perhaps the least likely group; strippers & porn stars. Following Zak's series and his unique take on playing old school Dungeons & Dragons (I highly recommend his city running kit Vornheim), I dived head first into the blogging community, more specifically those involved in the Old School Renaissance (revival of original or 1st edition Dungeons & Dragons). I learnt very quickly that D&D was not another dislocated wargame or odd hobby, it was many wonderful things.

Exit D&D prejudices, enter uncontrollable excitement. I guess I should explain what the game means to me as, much like my uninformed self, I failed to grasp precisely what D&D and roleplaying games were about. I enjoy fantasy fiction, enormously. Literature, film and video games offers large windows into these worlds and are widely accepted as the delivery systems for this genre of entertainment. Role-playing games simply offer a medium to which one may apply their imagination to tangibly interact with these worlds, including the potential to engage in the creative process of designing, crafting and giving life to such settings. A close friend recently made fun of me asking if I wanted to be a wizard (a mage irl? where did he get that idea!); the question warranted no answer, but were I to answer I would say "of course not"...but do I want to be engaged in a shared creative process of developing an original story in a rich fantasy setting which blows our collective mind? Peter Jackson's Lord of The Rings was epic, I just want more. That is the core of 'my' hobby and that is failing to mention the quality of the written fiction, art and aesthetically stunning books available, not to mention all the other toys and shineys.

In hindsight I still look back and think 'How the hell did I become a role-player?'. The information above offers quite clear indicators that I might enjoy the hobby, yet it still strikes me as odd as I found myself gorging myself on publications and relevant blogs, perhaps before I even knew what it was I was exactly getting into. It simply appealed to me on so many levels that I'd made the jump before I had even seen where I was going to land. The online community for the hobby, be it YouTube, forums, blogs or indie writers/publishers, is phenomenal. I have been welcomed in many circles to what strikes me as a warm and welcoming community of gamers and it certainly feels a lot like home.

I've ticked a box on my personal check-list of 'Things I Should Know About Me', lets hope I was right this time!

Let's Play Videos Are Up - Baldur's Gate TotSC

Given my new found freedom from academic bondage, a friend (term used loosely) and I have recently undertaken the epic task of running through Bioware's Baldur's Gate - Tales of the Sword Coast, a PC game released in 1997 which takes place in the Forgotten Realm setting. We've only done a few hours but, as I have painstakingly discovered, this makes for a wealth of youtube content.

Should anyone be interested in it then by all means subscribe to the Mages IRL Youtube Channel. I personally do not follow lets play videos, I do however adore making them as they can really bring something special to your own enjoyment of a game; this being the case I understand should you decide to ignore this series. It is not as such a roleplay take on the story presented in the game as I would perhaps have liked to do, but more so a dualism of whether myself and Edd can conquer both the game itself and our inherent dislike for one another.