Ruins & Ronin... Not Quite Free

Another really short post: Ruins and Ronin is available for a buck at Lulu. Think D&D meets japanese samurai movies and you are on the right track.

This isn’t a game of tea ceremonies, haiku, or accurate historical
depictions of medieval Japan; it’s a game where the fictional world of the samurai movie becomes the basis for swords & sorcery adventure in a mythical, medieval culture that’s almost like Japan.

That is a snipit from the intro. For a buck can you really go wrong?

Spellcraft & Swordplay PDF Free July 8 - 10

From the Elf Lair Games Blog:

No strings, no catches: Wednesday, July 8 through Friday, July 10, head over to the Lulu store, and download the Deluxe edition of S&S for free!

Now, I haven't checked out the ruleset yet myself, but free is a price that can't be beat. I'll be adding this to my DX tomorrow.

What's Old is New that was Old... Sorta

July 4th was a gathering of my old gaming group for a holiday bar-b-cue. As I try to do at all of our gathering over the last few years, I distributed a gaming book to the other four. This time it was paperback copies of OSRIC. Earlier this year it was copies of Swords and Wizardry. Before that, Labyrinth Lord. Dice. Rolemaster Express. Castles and Crusades Player's Handbooks. I give memories packaged in new wrapping but recalling our earlier experiences.

We are married, have kids, stressful jobs, busy lives. We are no longer the high school and college students that could game 7 days a week during the summers. Heck, if it weren't for online games like Warhammer, these guys wouldn't be gaming together at all these days.

So I give re-imagings of our past so we don't forget the games that put us where we are in out lives today. I learned as much in those game sessions as I ever learned in school.

Besides, sooner or later I'll suck them into a VTT game... and then their souls will be MINE!!! heh

The Secret of Ronan Skerry - Capsule Review

I haven't been able to update the blog in the last few days... life has been good but hectic. That being said, I received my dead tree copy of The Secret of Ronan Skerry, a Castles and Crusades adventure from Brave Halfling Publishing. No, I can't tell you how well it plays, because I have GM'ed it. I don't want to give a detailed description because its a module, not a source book or ruleset. What to do?

Physically, it is a professional looking piece of gaming material. It is digest sized (think the old White Box or the C&C Collector's edition for size). It runs at 32 pages, but that is probably closer to 16-20 if it was a full sized module. It adds four new critters to the C&C monster collection. It appears at first read to be a competently written adventure with a small twist.

Price vs quality ratio puts it at a solid 4, $6.99 give you both the dead tree and PDF versions.

DXability is a solid 5, as the digest sized pages reproduce sharply on the DX.

Someone listened...

I had this whole, big assed post planned about the direction iTabletop's developers wanted to take the product and it's all moot as they listen to their lifetime members posts. Not over the course of days, but hours.

Wouldn't it be nice if WotC or other publishers listened to well reasoned thoughts of their customer base?

This was the exception that proves the rule.

BTW, Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) and Virtual Table Top gaming don't seem like a good mix. I could be wrong, and often I am, but call it a hunch, this is one weird combo. (my rant was sooo much longer before)

Paying a commission on referrals isn't a bad thought tho ;)