The meta gaming group, WHRPG has outgrown it’s West Hertfordshire borders as we expand further to encompass Hertfordshire from the east to the west.

And so we’ve changed the name to HertsRPG.

We now have five groups either running or getting revved up to run. Watford, Apsley, Tring, Welwyn Garden, and Bishop’s Stortford.

Checkout the new website: http://hertsrpg.com.

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Tags: Apsley, Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, Herts, HertsRPG!, Tring, Watford, Welwyn Garden City, WHRPG

The Secret Fire RPG*, from Secret Fire Games will be released on the opening day of GenCon in PDF and ePub formats. Hard-copies of this refreshing new RPG will be available soon after, possibly even by the end of the weekend.

Everything I’ve read about TSF so far has been good. It sounds old, and yet it sounds new, which is pretty much what’s said about many OGL remakes of old D&D.

TSF though is not an OGL clone, it’s something different. TSF’s developers have taken the best of the old and blended skilfully with modern RPG ideas. A blend I can’t wait to read about and play when I get my hands on the book.

So here’s looking forward to August 4th and the release of The Secret Fire.

* the RPG previously known as Legends & Labyrinths

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Tags: Legends & Labyrinths, Release, The Secret Fire

Legends and Labyrinths, as George Strayton recently revealed, is not actually the name of his new game, but a codename it was developed under.

The production name is “The Secret Fire”, a Tolkien reference if there ever was one! The company producing it is Secret Fire Games and I’m sure you can all spot the reference again in the logo.

I’ve been re-reading Lord of the Rings recently. Also I’ve been out cycling a lot in the countryside surrounding my new home, parts of which seem very shire like.

I’m playing in a Pathfinder game, which is great fun, but it doesn’t capture that spirit of exploration and adventure that D&D was for me in the early 1980s as a young Tolkien fan. The Secret Fire promises to bring back that feeling and I can’t wait to both play and run it.

I looking forward to reading the book when it’s released, it’s going to be an interesting RPG. For more information see the following sites:

http://legendsandlabyrinths.com

http://secretfiregames.com

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Tags: The Secret Fire

Thanks to some incoming posts on my Google+ stream, I’ve spotted a new upcoming RPG recently, by the name of Legends and Labyrinths.

I was directed to a blog post that outlined how L&L is different from other fantasy RPGs and it makes for a very interesting read.

My first reaction was, do we need another old school remake of early D&D? But I was wrong, it’s not an OGL clone but an entirely new creation from the dark mind of George Strayton, screenwriter and game designer.

It’s seems to have a feel of early D&D melded with elements of more modern RPG thinking and I can’t wait to give it a go.

I was so taken with the ideas and game-play possibilities, that I pledged some cash to the L&L Kickstarter Campaign, thereby securing my hardcopy of the book on release. That release date of course will be GenCon next month.

Check out the blog post about how L&L is different and if you it tickles your fancy then why not secure your own copy!?

I’m looking forward to making some helpful little L&L software projects to aid my job as GM.

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Tags: DMing, News, roleplaying, RPG, World Building

Now don’t get me wrong.

I love SLA Industries, it’s a freakin fantastic game, the world it runs in is devastatingly bleak and grey, there’s no hope, it’s totally commercialised and has no soul.

That’s what makes it so good.

Why am I saying this?

Nightfall games have just started a forum for the discussion of SLA Industries, as is only to be expected with Mr Allsop at the artistic helm, it looks bloody great.

The question I ask is, is it too little, too late?

Without a major rewrite of the system, a total update of the art and some serious effort to get releases out to the fans, SLA is as good as dead, sure it clings to life like an octogenarian on full life support, but without some serious regeneration it’s going nowhere.

The Nightfall games guys are great, and I wish them all the best and I am also a total fanboi who will buy whatever they release, but at some point you have to ask the question what do we need to do, and when you figure out the answer, you get on and do it.

The franchise has been dormant for so long it needs a major amount of work without which it is just spitting in the wind.

Nightfall Games I salute the attempt, make sure you follow through.

Glenn.

Comments: 1 comment

Tags: News, SLA

Currently in a public beta period, http://rpg.stackexchange.com, is a very cool place to get answers to your RPG related questions.

On the other side of the coin, if you’ve got answers to contribute then it can be fun and addictive giving answers to peoples questions and watching your rep rise through the ranks.

Quite an appealing feature is that your increasing rep gives you increased abilities on the site, culminating in near moderator prowess, it’s a bit like levelling up!

Check it out today at http://rpg.stackexchange.com!

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Tags: Communities, News

I suspect that’s skewed somewhat by the human tendency to complain and whine! What do you think?

Comments: 8 comments

Tags: Cartoon, DMing, Drawings

For our next campaign, we’re going Sci-Fi. We’ll be using the Alternity ruleset. Written by Bill Slavicsek and Richard Baker it was published by TSR in 1998, it had a short but bright life.

The covers of the two core books butted up nicely to create a single piece of artwork.

There’s stuff in Alternity that worked it’s way into d20, although not the central dice mechanic of course, which is a bit different. Heading in the direction of D&D 3e and d20 were things such as:

• Skills instead of non weapon proficiencies
• Skill points and ranks
• Perks were the same as feats
• A unified mechanic for all conflict resolution

I like Alternity because it’s does for sci-fi what D&D does for fantasy, it’s a generic ruleset rather than a ruleset bundled with an implied setting. For setting purposes we have always based our Alternity games upon the Elite series of games by David Braben, most specifically Frontier First Encounters.

This is great for me as GM, I can fire up FFE on my laptop and use all the gorgeous detail on planets and systems without me having to make anything up or remember anything. Also FFE keeps track of the time and date for me handily, as well as the party’s ship details. Here’s some of the handy info I’ll be using.

A tiny section of the enormous 3d starmap

The star map is huge, this is just a small view of only 9 sectors, there are 67 million sectors in the game, covering the whole of our galaxy. Sol is at sector [0,0], the bottom left sector is [-5192, -5412] and the top right is [2279,2779]! The star map is huge indeed. There are in total exactly 513,982,470 star systems. This is more data on a setting than a GM will ever need!

Details on the Sol system

As you can see from the image of Sol above all the human explored systems have details on their planetary bodies, starports and orbital stations. Major story important systems have a bit of blurb as well. Every explored system has orbital paths as shown below.

Orbits in the Sol system

Of particular use to me if the players start to trade goods between systems is the imports and exports that are available at each inhabited system, as well as things that would be illegal to trade in.

Imports and exports

Overall using the computer game in this way gives me as GM access to a very rich resource of detail and setting fluff. Also since some nice Russian chaps have created a DirectX update of this 15 year old game then I can also generate some nice visuals for handouts.

An Asp class 2 man ship

My players have started to write character backgrounds and I can’t wait to start soon! If you’re in our area (West Herts, UK) then we have open slots for players! For more information see http://whrpg.com.

Comments: 6 comments

Tags: Alternity, Campaign, Sci Fi

The gaming group I belong to is looking for players and DMs.

We are located in and around Watford, Herts, UK.

We’d love some more people to join us, both experienced and beginner players are welcome. We are open and interested in playing and running any type of RPG.

See the West Herts RPG! site
for more info.

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Thanks to Dustin Synder, who you may know as @WolfStar76 on Twitter, we have a nice summary of all the juicy Dark Sun info released at DDXP.

Whilst sitting in the audience Dustin created a Google Docs document live as the action unfolded.

Google Docs Dark Sun

There’s more info available on @geeksdreamgirl’s latest live blog where you can scroll back and catch up on all the info as it happened, with updates from Critical Hits, Matt James, and the WotC brand team @Wizards_DnD.

From all of us that couldn’t be there, thanks to all those that were and kept us updated!

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Tags: #DnD, 4e, Dark Sun