Home Again, Home Again, Jiggety-Jig

It's over.

Summer convention season—the marathon of the games industry, the insanely busy travel-sales-and-schmoozing session that marks the peak of most of our work loads, is finally over.

OK—to be completely honest, it ended almost a month ago, with the curtain falling on GenCon in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. But I just got back to the office, having taken a much-needed vacation (to the annual Pennsic War of the Society for Creative Anachronism) immediately following the show. So now I sit down to the post-convention work-load—largely given over to prepping various freelance assignments garnered at the conventions, and following through with sales and other deals on behalf of my day job with Synister.

So—despite the fact that GenCon itself was nearly a month ago, this week I will inflict upon you my impressions of those products that really struck me, for better or worse, during the summer convention season.

Little Fears, of course, is well known to readers of Gaming Outpost. The premiere product from Jason Blair's Key 20 was unveiled back in July at Origins in Columbus, Ohio, and reviews of the game have appeared on several websites already. Add my voice to the growing chorus of folks praising this game. Pretty damned nifty, both in look and design. As the father of three children, though, I find the subject matter a little too close to home for me to be comfortable—as such, I'll probably never play the game, but I found it a great read, nonetheless.

The best game that I didn't get this summer has to be Crocodile Games' brilliant fantasy-miniatures-by-way-of-Egyptian-myth battle game War Gods of Aegyptus. Too frickin' nifty—each of the animal-headed Egyptian gods has an entire race of followers, all of whom are represented by some seriously ass-kicking miniatures created by an ex-Games Workshop sculptor. Crocodile Games had demos running and miniatures for sale at GenCon, but they didn't have the rulebook (it was on it's way back from the printer, a situation that I am all too familiar with). That simple fact alone saved me from spending an inordinately large amount of money on a complete army of Anubi. At least until the rulebook is available, that is.

Pinnacle's Weird Wars was available at GenCon, and is pretty damned cool—and I'm not just saying that because I've got an adventure for it coming from Pinnacle soon. It manages not only to be a great game in its own right, but also stands as a good example of how D20 can push the envelope of setting and genre to more than just the medieval fantasy we've all cut our teeth on. Any designer looking to stretch the boundaries of D20 needs to have this book on his or her shelf, just to see what can be done.

I managed to get my mitts on a copy of Thyrsus Games' premiere product, FVLMINATA—Armed with Lightning, a cracking good alternate history RPG, set in a Roman empire which discovered gunpowder early on. The designers are obviously serious students of Roman culture and history—the game practically is dripping with it on every page. For an emulative design fan such as myself, there is perhaps no other new release on the market that stands as such a shining example of the process as this. The entire structure of the rules, from dice rolls through character creation and more, is steeped in the feel of imperial Rome. Characters are defined by the classical virtues and humours, and even skills are grouped according to their governing god. Brilliant stuff. I want to see more from this company, and soon.

Mark Rein·Hagen comes charging back into the games industry with his new company, Atomoton, and their premiere release, the Z-G Interaction Figures. Atomoton has taken Rein·Hagen's Exile concept (his announced "next project" from back when he was still with White Wolf), and wrapped it up in an anime style and a phenominal, ground-breaking system that mixes miniatures combat (with poseable action figures) and collectable cards. Synister had the good fortune of having a booth across from Atomoton at Origins, and both companies had such a great time transforming our little corner of the Exhibit Hall into a rave, that we all made the arrangements necessary to duplicate the setting at GenCon. Z-G is a great game—fun to play, pretty to look at, and involving in its backstory. It deserves to be the Next Big Thing.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, however, is NEMESIS-A Perfect World—a game which promised to be a superhero RPG in the mode of "Kingdom Come" or "The Watchmen" (complete with a great genre tag: "Superpunk"), but instead turned out to be a laughable collection of hackneyed design, amateur production values and bad writing. The less said about this one, the better....suffice to say that I actually got this one for free, and yet somehow still feel cheated. Yikes.

Of equally dismal quality (and unfortunately, a product for which I actually forked over hard cash), was Twin Crowns, a D20 product from some basement operation called Living Imagination (I think—I don't have the product in front of me, since I circular-filed it the minute I got home). It professes to be a d20 game of "Nautical Adventure"—an "Age of Exploration Fantasy". The 250-odd page book contains roughly 20 pages of anything "nautical", instead devoting most of the pages to lovingly detailed description of what I can only assume is the lead designer's house D&D campaign. On top of that, the nautical content was apparently written by folks who've never actually been to the ocean, or on a boat—especially annoying to me, since I bought the book to check it for any Open Gaming content that might apply towards the pirate D20 release that Synister has scheduled for February 2002. Speaking of Open Gaming content—this product is also one of the most egregious violators of the OGL/D20 License that forced WotC's hand at GenCon. The geniuses who produced this opus didn't even read the license closely enough to realize that you had to include a copy of the license in the book (I was given a photocopied "errata" page to correct this oversight), or that you couldn't reference the DMG or the Monster Manual by name, or....ah hell, I could go on, but why? It's crap. Stay away.

This week's recommendations-I'm reading HARRY POTTER & THE SORCERER'S STONE by J.K. Rowling (my daughter finally insisted), and I'm listening to ESSENTIAL TRANCE2, a six-CD boxed set.

See ya in 7.