Printed out the demo dungeon tiles yesterday. I made them in Illustrator (learned a neat little trick to make water for the above tile), but I hope to enlist more prolific genius than my own for actual demo production.
Placing the tiles in a random dungeon configuration works really well and is a lot more enjoyable than I would have thought. I might run an actual full test game soon.
Nice looking minis from right here in North Texas!
Yeah, I post a lot about games and gaming and game design and gamer culture, but I am also a musician. It makes my heart pound with as much (if not more) emotion to be behind a drum kit with a group of really invested musicians and communicate something to an audience. Not necessarily to melt their faces with my prodigious skills, but to make them feel something. If we are good and do our jobs, they feel the same thing we do, and what we feel is a lot like flying.
That said, this trailer makes my case for me. It’s not new, by a long shot, but it’s relevant. It makes me want to shout. I can talk about this all day, but I won’t.
(This is not me.)
I showed the embryonic game to a friend last week. I think that might have been the first taste that keeps me coming back for more. As I explained the general mechanics to him, I saw understanding click in his eyes. To see another mind start working through a system of my own making was rather exhilarating. I still have a long way to go on this thing, but I now really can envision this one coming to some form of completion. Be that a really nice looking demo model that I cut entirely out of card stock or a published game sharing shelf space with the “Coiled All-Father” that is Magic: The Gathering, I can see this at least coming entirely out of my brain into concrete reality.
Hopefully, the sort of concrete that you build a house on, not the kind that bad men make boots out of.
I will be posting more of this concrete here soon.
“I went back to the kitchen yesterday to grab a drink, and hearing the rasp of tearing foil in the next room wandered in to determine its source. Kiko and Gabriel looked up from the table, then, Magic cards spread from hell to breakfast, starter boxes split with the fury of their opening, a mixture of guilt and fear percolating up their faces. They were orchestrating some kind of card draft, frenzied and immediate, like they were bagging a huge mountain of coke in some halogen flooded sub-basement.
I assumed the unmistakable eyebrow crinkle/lip configuration that was like, “Magic, guys? Seriously?”
But Magic it was. They started with Pokemon, ironically I think, moving on to harder stuff like the WoW TCG, ever skirting the form’s coiled All-Father. They are engaged in a perilous sort of business, here, but they’ll never know it; not ‘til ten years hence, looking into their own hollow eyes in the bathroom mirror, trying to scrub tiny flecks of foil which will not come off.”
Tycho - penny-arcade.com
Feeling inspired today. Just finished a conversation with a friend about bringing his 11 year old son into some of our D&D4e games. He was hesitant, thinking that the group might not like bringing someone so young into the games (average age for the group is 30). I told him that he had nothing to worry about, the boy is bright and seems really interested in playing. Of course, those are the obvious reasons.
The not-so-obvious reasons are based in my own experiences of being a boy about that age and being invited to play D&D (2e, baby!) at my older brother’s friend’s house. I remember that game like it was last night. I was raised a young evangelical Christian, so I had seen the scary-as-hell tracts telling me about the evil powers of Dungeons and Dragons. Heck, I had even seen Tom Hanks take LARPing to a new level in Mazes & Monsters. So, maybe I was a little nervous. But that quickly evaporated when I saw the miniatures and character sheets my brother’s friend had prepared for us. They were awesome.
The night is ingrained in my memory. I remember the first frantic fight with the orcs in the entryway to the cave, the weird underground pond populated by carnivorous frogs, and a final that peaked when our Dwarf fighter yanked his spear back out of the hands of a troll. The classic troll: green, lanky, and hard as heck to kill. We all hooted with glee when the Dwarf got his spear back, you could feel the tension ratcheting up when the DM described the troll’s wounds healing as fast as we were making them. It was better than a movie, miles better than a video game.
It’s funny how these memories stayed with me so persistently, but I think it was the first time in my young life that I felt like I was a hero in the company of heroes. We knew it was game, but it was such an exciting game!
This only increased when I got to play with my older brother’s friend’s actual group. They were all older guys, but we were all on the same playing field, and you would have thought that I had entered the vaulted halls of the Justice League of America. This experience really shaped who I am today in a profound way. It really uncovered creative tendencies in my personality that I might not have recognized otherwise, and it turned me into a voracious reader. It was like someone flipped the switch and my imagination came to life in a way I hadn’t experienced before.
So, yeah. Bring your kids. They’ll have more fun than you could imagine.
