RPG

I barely have time to sleep. I am working late into the night, staying one step ahead of my students. Few months ago Daniel Cho and his wife Michelle, owners of Language Transit, approached me to create an exciting summer program for them. They wanted a program that would set them apart from their competition. I was already doing research on using gamebooks for a college level game design course. As it turns out, my idea works well with younger students as well. Writing is not something that students look forward to, especially during summer vacation. I had to create something compelling that can keep students focused -- something epic, something heroic...

The Hero's Journey: Write and Publish a Branching Path Book class is a one month long, gamified, creative writing class for students, 4th to 9th grade. It is currently in session at Language Transit, an after-school program in Arcadia, California. I am focusing on the game system design, while co-instructor Michelle Cho, an experienced writing instructor, is handling the the academic writing portion.

Dog Eat Dog is a "story game" -- a style of RPG with light rules designed to shape a narrative experience rather than resolve actions in the manner of more traditional RPGs. Its subject is imperialism, and its impacts both on the colonizers and the colonized.

It is played without a gamemaster, per se, although one player (the richest, per the game's rules) plays as "the Colonizers," with more power over the narrative than the others, since by nature the Colonizers are in power and control the military and police forces. Each other player is a Native.

Super Adventure Pals is much like a classic SNES platformer, with a strong debt to Super Mario Bros., but executed not with nostalgia but with freshness, as if the genre were still young.

It has an RPG element as well, with characters you talk with between levels who provide quests, and a level-up system that allows you to increase either your combat skill or health with each level. In a nice touch, increasing combat skill changes the look of your weapon, and increasing health changes the color of your hat. The dialog is light and charming, and the story, such as it is, somewhat absurd -- the villain has stolen your beloved pet rock, which is why you're pursuing him.

Seventh Sense is a gamebook reader by David Olsen of the Project Aon, a Lone Wolf gamebook fan volunteer group. Seventh Sense uses Project Aon's digital depository of Lone Wolf gamebooks and adds rich features such as bookkeeping, savepoints, dice rolling, commentaries, and more. As you recall Lone Wolf is an award winning which-way gamebook series by Joe Dever. After winning the 1982 Advanced Dungeons & Dragons tournament at the Origins Game Fair in Baltimore, Dever left the music business for gamebook design and writing. He wrote Flight from the Dark in 1983, which would become the first out of 28 Lone Wolf gamebooks, spanning more than 14 years. Flight from the Dark sold 100,000 copies in the first month, while the entire Lone Wolf series sold over 9 million copies in 18 languages until it went out print in 1988. However, the entire Lone Wolf series is available online via Project Aon with Dever's blessings, and books 1-17 are being reprinted by Mongoose Publishing with bonus materials.

Vornheim tries to do two things: provide a setting for a D&D campaign in the fantastic city of Vornheim, and provide a set of ideas and heuristics to allow a GM to quickly create and sustain an interesting campaign in a city of their own devising. Vornheim succeeds very well at the first, and if it is not perfectly successful at the second, it is in this area where it is most innovative and interesting.

The city of Vornheim has some of the feel of a Nordic Lankhmar; vast, somewhat forboding, with windy, snowswept streets. A conventional city book would provide a map, with locations keyed to text descriptions. Smith, interestingly, feels this is a bad approach; it means either that the GM must memorize a lot of detail before a game session, or else that play will be slowed by the need to look things up frequently during the game.

Pathfinder Society Organized Play is a mega Pathfinder RPG campaign run by Pathfinder's publisher, Paizo. I played the Voice in the Void, a Pathfinder Society Scenario by Rob McCreary, at the last Strategicon tabletop game convention.

Pathfinder Society Organized Play (PSOP) is designed with game conventions in mind. The Pathfinder Society Scenarios are short, designed to fit the 3-4 hour slots that game conventions use. Pathfinder Society is a global order of heroes run by secret and mysterious people. They are like aggressive database admins who hire heroes to populate their magical database and publish select discoveries as a members' journal, Pathfinder Chronicles.

The amazing thing about Parameters is that it works. By "works," I don't mean that it runs, but that it's surprisingly engaging, given its minimalist approach.

It's a sort of RPG, with level-ups, attack, defense, and health stats, and a set of monsters to slay and missions to accomplish. But "missions" are small rectangles that gradually fill in as you click on them, spawning XP and money with each click; and "monsters" are other small rectangles, with each click being a round of combat, doing damage to the monster, you suffering damage in return. Until you have the stats to slay a monster, you'll eventually run out of health, and the monster will regen quicker than you can do damage to it.

The Party of One series is a third party supplement for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Beginner Box (Beginner's Box). All three gamebooks are mini solo adventures designed to teach the basic Pathfinder RPG system, introducing players new to paper RPGs. Since the Beginner's Box only includes a six-page, 23 section, solo adventure, the Party of One series fill the need of a full Pathfinder RPG tutorial.

The Party of One series comprises of:

• BB1: Kalgor Bloodhammer and the Ghouls through the Breach –- The undead break into the dwarven halls. It's up to you and your warhammer to repel the intruders and find the cause of the breach.
• BB2: Elgar Fletch and the Dark Army –- You must be stealthy, cunning, and sometimes forceful as you travel secretly to warn the capital of an incoming invasion. Can you save your love and the capital?
• BB3: Alosar Emanli and the Creatures from the Fallen Star –- A falling star brings strange creatures into the forest. This is no game but a true rite of passage as a young druid.

Like Spelunky, A Valley Without Wind is a procedurally-generated platformer, meaning levels are algorithmically generated and no two plays will ever be the same. But Valley is more than a platformer; it has elements of crafting, character advancement with a huge number of paths, and an adventure game-like narrative arc.

Once you complete the tutorial, you start in a town surrounded by many available wilderness squares; you select one, and transition to a sidescrolling level, with monsters to fight and with some elements, like trees and rocks, that you can destroy for resources. But within most wildernesses are buildings and dungeons, each a series of levels in their own right, in which you can find resources that provide you with powerups, or that can be used to craft better spells, or to create "guardian powers."

Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Beginner Box is Pazio's clone of Wizards of the Coast's Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set, commonly known as the "Red Box". Pathfinder Roleplaying Game: Beginner Box or simply, the Beginner Box is a complete RPG introduction kit designed to welcome players new to paper RPGs and the Pathfinder system. Like the Red Box, the contents include dice, maps, counters, character sheets, rules for players and GM -- everything you need to run a full campaign in one box. The components are shinier, thicker, more colorful, and generally better than the components of the the Red Box. The cardboard stand-up pawns are awesome. Miniatures make the game so much better, yet painting, collecting, and storing minis is expensive and time consuming. The included thick and colorful cardboard stand-up pawns of heroes and monsters are an excellent substitute for miniatures.