In the wake of a long month, for those who couldn’t tell when they didn’t see me there, I could not make it to GenCon. The Post RWA crud combined with a few other factors and knocked it out of the realm of the possible for me this year. This makes me sad, as I always look forward to reconnecting with my nerd roots and GenCon provides a great opportunity to do so. On the other hand, I was able to knuckle down and make serious progress on my WiP, so I suppose I can’t complain too much.
A reasonable assumption would be that, having missed the ‘Best Four Days in Gaming’, I would be unable to review the events there. Fortunately, thanks to the magic of the Internet and my willingness to pass judgment on things I haven’t seen (ask me about Jonah Hex) I can still sum up the events even though I was completely divorced from them in real life. Without further ado, my Gen Con wrap-up:
- Wizards of the Coast revealed the new D&D setting for 2011. Sadly, it’s Ravenloft. Mind you, I don’t hate Ravenloft as a concept, but it is effectively impossible to convey a horror setting when one of your players can hurl lightning bolts. The standard D&D solution is to make the monsters tougher, which only has the effect of dragging out combat, and forcing a GM interested in Storytelling to manipulate an encounter (since in my experience, players effectively never run from an enemy).
- Green Ronin unveiled DC Adventures – the newest incarnation of the DC Comics universe as a game setting. This time around it’s using an updated version of the award-winning Mutants and Masterminds rules, and frankly, I couldn’t be more excited. I’m a terrible whore for DC – I’ll take the JSA over the X-Men, any day of the week, and don’t get me started on the awesomeness of Hellblazer. I’ll happily dive back into a new game that lets me mine the years my brain has dedicated to keeping those stories straight. Disclaimer – I pre-ordered this, and am reading through the PDF currently. I expect a review will pop up here sometime.
- Fantasy Flight unveiled the latest iteration of their Warhammer 40k rpg – at long last fulfilling the desire of players everywhere to run cybernetic killing machines for their characters with the Space Marine-centric “Deathwatch”. I played more than my fair share of 40k as a miniatures game, and I can see the appeal of this on one hand, on the other given how hard it is to shoot something in their ruleset, I expect they had to do some work to effectively replicate the Astartes’ ability to mow through opponents with bolter fire.
That’s my big three – I know that tons of other stuff happened in / around GenCon, but I figured I ‘d hit the ones I had genuine opinions about. In related news, this is the last week for my Pathfinder Web fiction out at Paizo’s website. The story will stay out there in perpetuity, and there are links in my bibliography, so feel free to check it out.
Tags: Fantasy, gaming, nerdPride, Pathfinder, What I didn't Do This Summer
