GenCon 2007 and Me—Dirty Secrets

(designed by Seth Ben-Ezra, published by Dark Omen Games)

Like Jason Little, Seth Ben-Ezra and I know each other because of boardgaming. In fact I had no idea that Seth was a RPG designer, let alone an influential one, until about a year ago. Seth was there at the birth of so-called “Forge theory,” and the Forge community itself. He just published his first game, Legends of Alyria, but he developed it in public on the defunct website The Gaming Outpost, and it floated around in various forms for almost a decade. Legend is also a major influence on other, more famous games like Polaris (the tao-games website is undergoing maintenance just now) and Universalis.

He is also one of My Play’s few regular readers

When I stumbled across a playtest report on his blog to a hardboiled detective fiction RPG he was working on, I left some words of encouragement. Within a couple days, Seth e-mailed me, asking if I’d take a look at what he had.

GenCon 2007 and Me—XCrawl Phoenix Open 2007

(GenCon 2007 tournament module designed by Jason Little, to be published later by Pandahead Productions)

XCrawl is a d2o Fantasy (aka Dungeons & Dragons) variant that embraces the dungeon crawl, and pushes it beyond its natural limits. XCrawl is about dungeon crawling as modern mass media sports spectacle!

XCrawl has been a minor hit for Pandahead, and they are trying to raise its profile among hardcore D&D players, so a tournament at GenCon is a natural idea. The Phoenix Open is the dungeon it will be taking place in. There are also plans to publish Phoenix as a part of the XCrawl line later in the year.

GenCon 2007 and Me—Grey Ranks

Howdy.

Sorry for imposing another long delay between posts. I’ve been busy helping some friends out with gaming-related projects, and that has eaten up my desire to think hard about gaming. Those projects are done with now, and I hope to return to a semi-regular posting schedule again.

For someone who is neither attending nor publishing, this will actually be a big GenCon for me. My name will be in the credits of two roleplaying games that are being released there, and in the fine print of one of the tournaments.

I thought I’d take a few posts to fill you in on these projects a bit, since I think they are all very interesting. I suppose I could be a little bit biased