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In any other week D&D smashing it’s all time sales records would be headline news. But this week we learned Wesley Snipes is working on an RPG... yep, THE Wesley Snipes!!
Dungeons and Dragons breaks all time sales record
If you’ve been into the gaming corners of Facebook recently you might have noticed frustrations in trying to find a copy of the latest Dungeons and Dragons expansion. It’s called Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, and adds new classes, spells, a backstory generator and plenty more. Well, it turns out there’s a reason this had been hard to buy: it’s become the best selling Dungeons and Dragons volume in the game’s entire history.
Not only that, it reached number one in the Wall Street Journals non-fiction list, and that’s all non-fiction, i.e. beating Christmas cookery book sales. Well done everyone.
Wesley Snipes is working on an RPG. Really.
Grimmerspace is both a sci-fi RPG and a fictional universe where a galaxy filled with advanced technology suddenly finds themselves dealing with wizards. It’s horror in the sense Alien is, and will work with the Starfinder RPG system.
This world meets scenario book will come with (maybe) 12 adventures, as well as the fluff, and here’s the twist: one of the creative directors and writers is Wesley Snipes. Actual Hollywood Wesley Snipes. What more do we need to say. Except we hope he declares all the tax.
CMON’s new game is Kickstarter only because of ‘Mature Themes’
Cool Mini or Not is the undisputed king of the Kickstarter gaming world, so it isn’t a huge surprise that they’d make their new campaign exclusive to KS. The key thing is why? Guillotine Games are again teaming with CMON, following up their Zombicide and Massive Darkness, with a comic book adaption. But the comic is called HATE (all caps), and it’s strong stuff with mature themes which will be reflected in the actions of the game. Gameplay involves issues of ‘savagery and hate’ which allow you to perform “unspeakable violence” in a campaign.
Here’s their quote:
“Our ultimate goal with HATE is to offer a game that remains as true as possible to the source material: Adrian Smith’s graphic novels… As you might guess from the name, the world of HATE is not a happy or peaceful one and includes a lot of mature content. We know not everyone will find this type of experience pleasant, so instead of stripping out the atmosphere, we are going direct to those who will want this type of gaming experience, including our retailers through CMON Play.”
So not one to play with gran then. The Kickstarter launches January 16, 2018.
Dark Souls: The Card Game is coming
The Dark Souls board game was, let’s just say divisive, and now Steamforged are bringing out a card game. It’s billed as a “cooperative deck evolution card game” which will see small teams or just one player soloing attempting to survive a series of encounters, defeat bosses whose strategies you will have to learn and die. Die a lot.
There’ll be 400 plus cards in the base pack but just four end of level bosses, so we smell plenty of expansions. And the blood of many dead adventurers. 2018 is all that’s promised for a release.
Mega Civilisation is being stripped back for two new releases
Few games using the word Mega deserve it more than Mega Civilisation, which was for 18 players over a 12 hour play time tackling the whole of human civilisation. The 2015 edition came with 3000 pieces and a price tag of several hundred quid. Now the team behind are stripping it back into two games, one for the East and one for the West of the original game, to be played alone or combined for a, err, mega game.
Play time is expected to be half, as is player count. Given the premium prices of large Kickstarted games, Mega Civilisation now looks a bargain, and this new edition is definitely more approachable. It might be followed up by a positively casual smaller game for a handful of contestants, but no firm release dates yet.
Uwe Rosenberg’s new game is peak Uwe
Uwe Rosenberg has released details of a new game, and guess what, it’s a worker placement involving farming. No shade there, we love us some Uwe, and Reykholt is named after a real Icelandic Village and sees you growing vegetables like carrots in a greenhouse using geothermal energy, which is basically the most Uwe thing in the world. Culture fact: Reykholt was home to Iceland’s classic writer Snorri Sturluson. Play time is 30 to 60 minutes.
Chaosium just made it much easier to write for Call of Cthulhu
Chaosium have experimented before with ways of getting unofficial expansions out through their doors, and the latest (and possibly greatest) is The Miskatonic Repository. This is a team up with DriveThruRPG, where Chaosium release a series of templates and art packs into the wild so wannabe scenario writers can put together their own expansions, upload them to the DriveThru system and then either sell them for a price, for pay what you want or give away for free and pocket half the money, with Chaosium and DriveThru getting the rest.
Moving to an entirely web based system over their old print one, and allowing anyone to do it instead of putting in place a second tier of writers, as happened before, is a great use of modern technology. In addition, Chaosium have hinted they will be looking hard at submissions to maybe, just maybe, pick out new authors for their official work.