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Tolen Mar

02 May

Running List: RPG Quickstarts

This is the running list of all the printed RPG quickstart guides I’ve found. Thanks to FreeRPGDay and eBay for making this possible [grin]. If you have any others that you want to get rid of, drop me a line in the comments.

  1. Alternity: The Future’s Edge (from Dungeon #78)
  2. Alternity: Fast-Play (flip-book)
  3. Alternity: Incident at Exile
  4. Alternity: Dark Matter (from Dragon Annual 4)
  5. Ars Magica: The Stormrider (White Wolf version)
  6. Ars Magica: Return of the Stormrider (Atlas Games version)
  7. Basic Roleplaying, 3rd ed
  8. Basic Roleplaying
  9. Battlestar Galactica Quickstart (Cortex System)
  10. Castlemourn Quickstart (Cortex System)
  11. Castles & Crusades (FreeRPGDay 2007)
  12. Castles & Crusades (FreeRPGDay 2008)
  13. Changeling: The Lost
  14. Cyberpunk 3.0 Flashpak
  15. Demon Hunters: Brotherhood of the Celestial Torch Recruitment Manual (Cortex System)
  16. Dungeons & Dragons: Eye of the Wyvern
  17. Dungeons & Dragons: Ruined Tower (from Dragon 251)
  18. Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of the Minotaur
  19. Exalted (2nd edition): Return to the Tomb of Five Corners
  20. Gear Krieg Tactical
  21. GURPS Lite 4th
  22. HarnWorld: Field of Daisies
  23. Heavy Gear Tactical Dueling
  24. Heirs to Olympia
  25. Hunter: The Vigil
  26. Iron Heroes: Bloodwood (technically a setting guide, not a quickstart)
  27. Jovian Chronicles Lightning Strike
  28. The Legacy of Zorro
  29. Mage: The Awakening
  30. Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game: Wolverine vs. Brood Queen
  31. Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game: Captain America vs Baron Zemo
  32. Marvel Universe Roleplaying Game
  33. The Metabarons
  34. Mutants & Masterminds Beginner’s Guide
  35. Paranoia XP - Little Red Book
  36. King Arthur PENDRAGON: Book of Knights
  37. Rolemaster Express
  38. Septimus
  39. Shadowrun 3rd
  40. Silver Age Sentinels (d20)
  41. Silver Age Sentinels (Tri-Stat)
  42. A Song of Ice and Fire
  43. Sovereign Stone
  44. Spycraft Lite
  45. StarSiege: Event Horizon
  46. Traveller: Book 0 - An Introduction to Traveller
  47. Tribe 8
  48. Trinity
  49. Tunnels & Trolls (2007)
  50. Tunnels & Trolls: Take the Money (2008)
  51. Vampire: The Masquerade

Wishlist

  1. D&D: Cave of Shadows
  2. D&D: Crypt of the Smoke Dragon
  3. D&D: Diablo II Fast-Play
  4. Supernatural (Cortex System)
02 May

Running List: CCG Demo Decks

This is the running list of the CCG demo decks in my collection. If you have any items from my wishlist, please leave a note in the comments.
What makes a CCG demo? A card set distributed specifically to teach the game, contains cards for two players or is available in different decks, and, ideally, contains cards marked as “Demo.”

The Collection

  1. 7th Sea (Brotherhood, Crimson Rogers)
  2. Anachronism (Beowulf vs Miyamoto Musashi)
  3. Battlestar Galactica
  4. Bleach
  5. Blue Dragon
  6. Call of Cthulhu (Arkham Edition)
  7. Cardcaptors
  8. Chaotic (Underworld, Overworld)
  9. City of Heroes (Mynx, Positron, Statesman, Synapse)
  10. DragonBall
  11. DragonBall GT Battle Demo
  12. Dragon Booster
  13. Dune (Atreides, Harkonnen)
  14. Firestorm
  15. A Game of Thrones - 2004 (Stark, Lannister)
  16. A Game of Thrones - 2007 (Stark, Lannister)
  17. Gundam War (2 decks)
  18. HeroCard Legacy
  19. High Stakes Drifter
  20. Humaliens (3 decks)
  21. Initial D (RX-7 FD Type R, Evo III, Trueno 86)
  22. Legend of the Five Rings (Diamond Edition - Mantis, Unicorn)
  23. Legend of the Five Rings (Lion, Crab)
  24. Legend of the Five Rings (TopDeck Demo Booster)
  25. Kingdom Hearts
  26. Magic the Gathering (1999 Retailer Guru demo)
  27. Magic the Gathering (ComicCon 2008 - five colours)
  28. Magic the Gathering (Portal: Lightning Magic)
  29. Magic the Gathering (Portal: Second Age)
  30. Magic the Gathering (8th Edition)
  31. Magi-Nation
  32. Magi-Nation (Arderial, Cald)
  33. Magi-Nation (Orlon, Poad)
  34. MLB Showdown
  35. Munchkin Rigged Demo
  36. Munchkin Cthulhu Cursed Demo
  37. Mystical Empire (Dwarven Rampage; Magi Supremacy) - sold unboxed, as a store demo.
  38. Myths & Legends
  39. NFL Showdown 2002
  40. One Piece
  41. Pokemon
  42. Scooby-Doo (2 decks)
  43. Spycraft (5 decks)
  44. Stargate (2 decks)
  45. Survivor
  46. Teen Titans
  47. UFS (Chun Li, Felicia, Mai, Taki, Tira)
  48. Vampire: The Eternal Struggle (Creamy Jade, Gemini, Iliana)
  49. Vs System (X-Men)
  50. War Cry
  51. Warlord (Gnorrow Yaw, Krun, Logan Ebonwoulfe, Tepheroth)
  52. Warlord - Campaign Edition (Lord Gahid Rellion, Sorcha)
  53. Wars
  54. World of Warcraft
  55. X-Files Gencon deck
  56. Young Jedi
  57. Yu Yu Hakusho Ghost Files
  58. Zatch Bell

Wishlist

  1. 24
  2. Aliens vs Predator (Aliens, Predators, Colonial Marines)
  3. Call of Cthulhu (Eldritch Edition)
  4. Conan (2 decks)
  5. Cyberpunk (2 decks)
  6. Ophidian 2350
  7. Shadowrun
  8. Terminator (2 decks)
  9. World of Warcraft (1 deck)
02 May

Running List: RPG Quickstarts (PDF)

This is the running list of all the rpg quickstart guides for major games (i.e., those that are also in print) that I’ve found online. If you have any leads, please leave a note in the comments.

  1. Alternity (TSR)
  2. Basic Roleplaying (2009)
  3. Blue Rose (Green Ronin)
  4. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Eden Studio)
  5. Call of Cthulhu (Chaosium)
  6. Castles & Crusades (Troll Lord Games)
  7. Changeling: The Lost (White Wolf)
  8. City of Heroes (Eden Studio)
  9. Demon Hunters (Margaret Weis)
  10. Diablo 2 (TSR/WotC)
  11. Dungeons & Dragons: Cave of Shadows (TSR)
  12. Dungeons & Dragons: Crypt of the Smoke Dragon (TSR)
  13. Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition: Test Drive
  14. Eldritch (Goodman Games)
  15. Exalted (White Wolf)
  16. Faery’s Tale (Green Ronin)
  17. Gear Krieg (Dream Pod 9)
  18. GURPS Lite 3rd ed (Steve Jackson Games)
  19. GURPS Lite 4th ed (Steve Jackson Games)
  20. Heavy Gear (Dream Pod 9)
  21. Hellas: Worlds of Sun and Stone
  22. High Adventure Role-Playing (ICE)
  23. Houses of the Blooded (John Wick)
  24. Iridium Lite (Hinterwelt Enterprises)
  25. Jovian Chronicles (Dream Pod 9)
  26. Lejendary Adventures Quickstart (Troll Lord Games)
  27. Lord of the Rings (Decipher)
  28. Mage: The Ascension (White Wolf)
  29. Mage: The Awakening (White Wolf)
  30. Mutants & Masterminds Beginner’s Guide (Green Ronin)
  31. Paranoia XP - Little Red Book (Mongoose)
  32. Promethean: The Created (White Wolf)
  33. Rolemaster Express (ICE)
  34. Savage Worlds Test Drive 3 (Pinnacle)
  35. Savage Worlds Test Drive 4 (Pinnacle)
  36. Savage Worlds Test Drive 5 (Pinnacle)
  37. Scion (White Wolf)
  38. Septimus (West End Games)
  39. Shadowrun 3rd ed (Fasa)
  40. Shadowrun 4th ed
  41. Silver Age Sentinels (Guardians of Order)
  42. Secret of Zir’An
  43. Spycraft Lite (Crafty Games)
  44. Star Trek (Decipher)
  45. Star Wars Fast Play (WotC)
  46. Tribe 8 (Dream Pod 9)
  47. True20 Quickstart (Green Ronin)
  48. Tunnels & Trolls (Flying Buffalo)
  49. Vampire: The Masquerade (White Wolf)
  50. Vampire: The Requiem (White Wolf)
  51. Warhammer 40K (Games Workshop)
  52. Werewolf: The Apocalypse (White Wolf)
  53. Werewolf: The Forsaken (White Wolf)
02 May

Running List: CCG Demo Decks (PDF)

This is the running list of all the CCG demo decks I’ve been able to find online so far. If you know of any others, please leave a note in the comments.

  1. 24
  2. Afterworld
  3. Allegiance
  4. Battlestar Galactica
  5. Bleach
  6. Call of Cthulhu
  7. Chaotic
  8. City of Heroes
  9. Dragonball Z
  10. dotHack
  11. Epic
  12. Eve
  13. Game of Thrones LCG
  14. Geek Wars
  15. High Stakes Drifter
  16. Huntik
  17. InuYasha
  18. Lord of the Rings
  19. Megaman
  20. Spycraft
  21. Star Trek (2nd ed)
  22. The Spoils
  23. Warlord (4th ed)
  24. Wars
  25. World of Warcraft
  26. Yu Yu Hashuko
05 Mar

Quarterly Collection of Links

I’ve been bookmarking lots of interesting sites that I’ve found through Ogre Cave, Random Gnome, and Wonderland, among others.

The Chronicles of Arborell Torchlight Adventure game is an solo gamebook based on the awe-inspiring homebrew fantasy campaign setting. Think of the classic “Choose Your Own Adventure” books, but using cards as the resolution system. Best of all, the game materials are free - just download, print and assemble.

Best 101 Free Games on the Web - 2007 edition If only I had more time, or fewer little hands helping me play… [grin]

Wushu - The Ancient Art of Action Roleplaying - is a funky and long-lived RPG engine by Dan Bayn. I’ve always heard of it, but never looked into too deeply. It’s high time I did.

Pokethulhu RPG - it’s always been funny. I can’t believe that it’s reached a third edition.

TSR Archive - comprehensive collection of all the product covers. Wonderful stuff!

Free RPG Day: June 23rd, 2007 - modelled on Free Comic Book Day, this is a chance to get free new RPG product from your local game store. I love free intro products.

Adventure Game Studio - is a free engine that lets you create point-and-click games.

The Big List of RPG Plots - want to write a game, an adventure, or anything else, really? Check out this great resource.

Game du Jour - as the site says, it features one deeply discounted game each day. Hidden treasures abound!

Ultimate Game Quiz - is a fun challenge, but it’s really slanted to first-person shooters. Still, I managed a respectable 80% despite not knowing/caring much about the FPS genre. (I test well).

25 Jan

X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse

X-Men Legends II: Rise of Apocalypse manages the neat trick of being too easy and too complex all that the same time.

How is this possible? Let’s start with the complexity issue.

This game is one in a long line of Baldur’s Gate-style dungeon-crawling, hack ‘n slash RPGs, where your character starts out at first level and then gains experience, levels and treasure through combat. Every time the character gains a level, you can assign newly acquired attribute points to improve the characters’ skills or give him new special powers. And, of course, there’s lots of treasure to mix and match for maximum effect. You spend as much time customizing your character as you do sending him to fight the baddies in the dungeon.

The trick with the X-Men Legends games (and Marvel Ultimate Alliance and Justice League Heroes) is that you control a team of four characters, each of whom is completely customizable. What’s more, there’s a whole reserve of other characters who can join your team, so you can trick out the individual heroes and then create your ideal team of heroes.

Frankly, that’s far too much character management for me. I’ll dedicate the time to perfecting a single character, but managing 16 characters is a waste of my gaming time. Fortunately, the game allows you to automate the levelling-up process for each character - items are automatically swapped between characters for maximum efficiency, and skill and mutant power points are allocated according to a pre-determined scheme. Sure, you sacrifice the ability to personalize your characters, but at least you’re not taking a break every ten minutes to fix your characters.

Automating the character advancement also makes the game easier. Sure, there’s a nominal difficulty level setting at the start of the game but, compared to the first X-Men Legends game, the sequel is a button-mashing cinch. In the first game, my characters died all the time, and I was having to spend my gold (sorry, “tech bits”) to have them resurrected, or, if I didn’t have enough money, I had to make do with supporting characters, which forced me to play with different team combinations.

I winced every time I had to play Gambit. I really did.

In this game, I was able to run through the entire game with the default team of Wolverine, Storm, Magneto and Cyclops. Occasionally I’d get bored, and throw in Colossus and Nightcrawler to shake things up, but my characters only died when I accidentally walked them over cliffs. There were no levels that forced me to play with pre-determined teams - such as the psychic plane level or the flashback level in the first game - and no reason to build up other characters.

There are only four character classes in the game: The flier (Storm), the bridge-builder (Magneto), the ranged attacker (Cyclops) and the brawler (Wolverine). Once you have the team, you’re set for everything a level can throw at you. If Magneto isn’t available, you can use Jean Grey or Iceman to build bridges; if Storm isn’t there to fly, you can use Sunfire; and Juggernaut bashes through the bad guys just as readily as Wolverine, etc.

So, you can play the game without thinking too much about the characters, which is fine, because the story itself is pretty fun: Apocalypse has attacked the earth, and the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants band together to fight the threat. Your team fetches keys, collects items, rescues other heroes and guides the occasional support character through a level. But mostly you fight. Eventually, you take on a giant-sized Apocalypse.

The appeal of the game is seeing the characters and settings from the comics represented onscreen. While this is fun for a comics fan, it doesn’t mean much to the non-comics fan. Fortunately, there’s a huge overlap between gamers and comic fans.

The villains are taken from the breadth of recent X-Comics history: Apocalypse, Mr. Sinister, Stryfe, Sugar Man, The Living Monolith, and Archangel. The battles range from Genosha to the Savage Land, New York City, a power plant in Ontario and the pyramids of Giza. The supporting NPCs include Ka-Zar, Sebastien Shaw, Banshee and Heather Hudson from Alpha Flight! (Yes, I’m an Alpha Flight fan.)

While you’re fighting, you can pick up extra collectables. There are data discs on each level. When you collect enough, you earn inventory bonuses for your team - usually its an increase to your capacity for health and energy packs. You can also collect homing beacons. When you have all of those, you open a mini-level where your team fights through a group of stronger bad guys to pick up a special artifact: a piece of Iron Man’s armour. Eventually, you rescue Tony Stark and he joins your team.

Now, what Iron Man is doing in an X-Men story is beyond me, but he’s a cool character and it’s fun to see him jetting around and blasting troops with his repulsors.

The game retains some of the other cool extras from the first game, such as the Trivia Game on each level - it’s a fun way to gain fast experience for your characters - and the Danger Room training missions for extra powers. There are Danger Room sessions for specific characters and for general characters, which will give a completist lots to work on.

There’s one huge improvement to the game world navigation: you can teleport to the home base at any time, and you can jump from X-Traction point to X-Traction point across the game, which, gives you a chance to recover some items you may have missed throughout the game. This makes saving your progress much easier.

All in all X-Men Legends II is a solid bit of superheroic entertainment. It’s not a particularly challenging game, but if you’re in the mood to watch mutants fighting for the lives, then you’re in for a good time. It’s light-years ahead of the atrocious X-Men 3 movie!

08 Dec

Legend of the Burning Sands Strategy Articles

Back in 1999, a now-defunct website named Azrael Online published a series of strategy articles for the Legend of the Burning Sands CCG. I kept PDF copies of those articles, just in case the website was lost to the sands of cyberspace.

I did a little Google research, and tried to contact people who were affiliated with the old site to ask their permission to host the articles, but I haven’t heard back. So, I’m going ahead with my plans for preservation, and have posted the PDFs here.

There are some interesting articles on the basics of the game, a discussion of the final Awakenings expansion, and some deck designs. Not all the factions are represented, but they make for interesting reading nonetheless.

Here they are:

LBS Strategy Articles by Azrael Online (collects all the individual articles listed below)

General Discussion
Beginner’s Guide to LBS pt. 1
Beginner’s Guide to LBS pt. 2
Awakenings Guide
Champions Guide

Deck Strategies
General Deck Strategies
Assassins
Celestial Alliance
Houses of Dahab
Moto
Qabal
Senpet

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