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 I spend all my Wednesdays talks about old comics that I don't get much of a chance to talk about newer things. Here are a couple of recent comics that I have enjoyed and you might too. They all happen to have "world" in the title.

World's Finest: I've mentioned this one before, but Waid's and Mora's classic (Bronze Age-y) stories and characterization with a modern sensibility continue to be really good. There are now a couple of collected editions in the series.

World's Finest: Teen Titans: Spinning out of World's Finest, Waid and Emanuela Lupacchino bring a similar (though not identical. Being about younger characters makes this book feel a bit more modern) to a sort of new version of the 70s Teen Titans. It's like what might have been if X-men style angst and later 80s Deconstruction hadn't intervened.

Worldtr33: Shifting gears, this is a horror comic by James Tynion IV and Fernando Blanco. In 1999, a group of computer nerds discovered the Undernet―a secret underworld/intelligence in internet. They charted their explorations on a message board called W0RLDTR33. They thought they sealed the Undernet away for good. But now, seemingly random killings posted on social media proclaim the arrival of a new age. The world has access to the Undernet again, and, like Cthulhu rising, it will mean a terrible new age dawning for humanity unless they can stop it again.

Are you a fan of online casinos and want to boost your winning potential? Well, you’re in luck! This article is packed with expert tips and strategies designed to help…

The post Video of the Day – Doctor Who: Inferno, 1970 appeared first on Blogtor Who.

Dark Horse Comics presents an exclusive variant of Saint John #1 at Rose City Comic Con CONVENTION EXCLUSIVE COMIC VARIANT Milwaukie, Ore., (September 19, 2023)—Rose City Comic Con 2023 will…

Four hexes southwest, eight northwest of Alakran.

 

Badlands are a region of steep, eroded hills with little soil or sand. In this hex, branching spurs of badland ridges coexist with gentler slopes. There is no vegetation on the crags, and precious little in the low places, vropped up by herds of goats from Ekkhusa as soon as it appears. Not just the famous greenish clay of Ekkhusa pottery, but another, beige clay with the property of growing six times its volume when water is added, can be found at the bottom of these ravines.

The region of badlands west of Targatana is known as the Khepu. This hex is only its northwestern extremity. We have until now seen terrain of this type only close by the Scarp, which provides a convenient landmark of direction. The Khepu, though, stretches for many miles, and travelers not skilled in survival lore (DC 13) risk being lost within its mazy channels as they travel through. If this happens, roll d8 for the direction of travel that, unknown, is actually being followed: 1-6 being the hexsides clockwise from north and 7-8 indicating a circle within the hex. 

One remedy for being lost is to get an higher view, either through magic or by climbing one of the precipices. The latter solution, however, takes time, can be dangerous, and generally will only reveal the way through the present hex.

PORTLAND, Ore. 09/19/2023 — Long time Hellboy collaborator Ben Stenbeck (Baltimore, Frankenstein Underground, Koshchei) will launch an all-new Dystopian tale titled, Our Bones Dust. This four issue miniseries is set to launch this…

PORTLAND, Ore. 09/19/2023 — Image Comics is pleased to reveal an early look at Fishflies #2 ahead of its October release. Interior pages from Jeff Lemire’s the extra-special, extra-length Fishflies #2 give fans…

Learn about Chip Zdarsky and Daniel Acuña’s startling new vision of the Avengers next month at New York Comic Con.

Castillo Xyntillan!I am pleased to draw your attention to the ongoing Kickstarter campaign for Castle Xyntillan, or, as we should say, Castillo Xyntillan! The module has been translated into the Spanish by Outremer Ediciones, and statted for Aventuras en La Marca del Este, a Spanish old-school game whose name translates as Adventures in the Eastern Marches. To quote the campaign,

“Xyntillan Castle is a megadungeon for old-school gaming, but not one like any other. Throughout its pages you will discover a strange, terrifying and absurd world, governed by dream logic and the unusual fantasies of the Malévols, the degenerate and decadent family dynasty that runs it.
In its more than 300 rooms you will find all kinds of curious inhabitants and dangerous challenges: talking paintings, murderous furniture, servants more loyal than death, maniacal vampires, forgetful ghosts, masked murderers, torturers in love, ancient curses, dead soldiers, glitter clouds , terrifying beasts and even the most dangerous trap ever devised, the masterpiece of death. However, most of these challenges do not have to be overcome by force of arms: many will be content with a few good words, some politeness, and asking for a favor from time to time.”
The campaign has already met its goal, so it is safe to say it will happen – the manuscript has been translated, laid out and proofread, and Outremer Ediciones has a proven track record delivering other games, including a very nice-looking translation of the Helvéczia boxed set. The physical qualities were great for Helvéczia, and should be the same here. If the campaign hits €8.000, patrons of the physical version will receive the d20 of Victory, and with that name, I am fairly sure you need one of them. Back early and back often! Foundations of Fantasy Roleplaying Games

In other news, I would also like to draw your interest to a new book series, Foundations of Fantasy Roleplaying Games. Launched by Charybdis Press, this is a series that

“…explores the literature that influenced the modern genres of fantasy, science fiction, and horror, and the roleplaying games they continue to inspire. The series is dedicated to all the hardworking game masters the world round and hopes these books provide more inspiration for their games. But while this series orients itself towards genre fiction and roleplaying games, it is also for general readers desiring quality copies of public domain works.”

These are, in essence, nicely edited, affordable paperback printings of works in the public domain. The titles chosen for the imprint are a bit further afield from the pulp classics; they come from the corpus of adventure stories which indirectly inspired the pulps, but are fairly obscure to the modern reader. As such, they are a great source of reading material that would, paradoxically, feel both familiar and new. The titles now available mostly include works from the picaresque tradition:

• Three Northern Love Stories, and Other Tales: A collection of mediaeval Icelandic stories, from The Story of Gunnlaug the Worm-Tongue and Raven the Skald to The Tale of Thorstein Staff-Smitten.
• The Life and Adventures of Guzman d’Alfarache: One of the classic Spanish picaresque novels from 1599, featuring the misadventures of a low-class anti-hero in a world of thieves and reprobates. As usual in the genre, it is nominally written as a condemnation of sin, while vicariously revelling in it.
• The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane: The classic 1715 French picaresque story (although one set in Spain), following another young fortune-seeker and social climber. Gil Blas is one of my favourite books; it is fast-paced (the events of the first twenty or thirty pages would make for a full novel in lesser hands), funny, and filled with wisdom.
• Told by the Death’s Head: A 19th-century neo-picaresque by Hungarian novelist Mór Jókai, this is also a personal fave. Originally titled An Infamous Adventurer from the 17th Century, it is the unlikely tale of Hugo, a gunner put on trial for twenty-two crimes (“including bigamy, regicide, uxoricide, sorcery, piracy, Satanism, and cannibalism”), each worthy of execution, but each with a story behind it that makes Hugo the hero of the story. As always, Jókai is a master of the romantic adventure; he is smart (and a bit of a smartass), incisive, and fundamentally good-natured about human foibles. A paragon of patriotic liberalism, and always a man with a story to brighten your day.

Sunday, September 24th- Pizza Kick-Off

Engage Young Adults is a group of 18-30 year old’s pursuing God and community together. We have such an exciting year and what better way to start that a FREE pizza lunch. Join us and here about what Engage Young Adults is and how you can get involved.

Location: Youth Room

Time: 12:45PM-2PM See you there.

And don’t forget to follow Engage Young Adults on Facebook and Instagram!

   

The post Pizza Kick-Off- September 24th appeared first on Church of The Rock.

Oni Press Invites You to Choose Your Own Adventure with Acclaimed Writer Stephanie Phillips and Artist Dani Bolinho Features 16 Possible Endings PORTLAND, OR (September 19, 2023) – Next spring,…

BOOM! Direct Reserve Launches a Milestone Cyanide & Happiness Comics Collection LOS ANGELES, CA (September 19, 2023) – To kick off early festivities for Cyanide & Happiness’ upcoming 20th anniversary,…

cnTextContent” valign=”top”>PORTLAND, Ore. 09/19/2023 — Bestselling, creative trailblazer Rick Remender has signed a three-yearexclusive contract with Image Comics, effective immediately. This exclusive gives Remender carte blanche on his upcoming titles and…

Miami, Florida, USA – American Mythology Productions is known for their popular line of classic comedy comicbooks, featuring icons like the Three Stooges, Rocky and Bullwinkle, Pink Panther, and many…

Five hexes southwest, seven northwest from Alakran.

This is a large and prosperous village. Its great herds of black and gray goats have the free grazing of the valley and into the many mazy ways of the badlands whose shade lets moisture linger and hosts the shrubs and thorns that the beasts prize most. Moist clay is also fetched from certain crevices in the badlands at the end of the rainy season, and this is the basis of a kind of gray-green pottery glazed and baked with a secret technique that is highly praised in the region.

Being out of the way and rich enough to afford eccentricities, Ekkhusa has its share, and more, of them. All decisions of families in the town, including who their sons and daughters marry, is decided by a meeting of all the men over forty and women over fifty in the hour around sunset. Straight majority vote prevails, and there must be a quorum of half the eligible people plus one. 

Everyone knows a meeting is in session when, for thirty breaths, the mantra "Let it be accomplished" is chanted in unison by the rough, cracked, eligible voices gathered under the acacia trees by the well. "So it was accomplished" marks the end. Despite the rigid formality, the headwoman, Yesel, a thin and bald-shaven grandmother, conducts the proceedings with a playful touch, listening to each point of view and guiding the votes subtly with her arguments and preferences.

Adventurers might become interested in this otherwise out-of-the-way village when a pot turns up with an apparent map, showing a mazy path among ridges and buttes, leading to a sinister pair of eyes. This is the record of what one of the village clay-gatherers found when digging too deep - shades of Moria! - and recounted to a fellow potter, whose scandalized wife ordered it sold on to the outside world without being shown to the village. Negotiating the village bureaucracy, such as it is, to get help in finding the undoubtedly populated cavern, and making a deal to share whatever is found, will undoubtedly be part of the adventure.

One of the wonderful new yarns I've gotten to try this year is Circulo InLove! And after making the Woven Wheat Tote with this dreamy yarn, I totally get why they named it that. Well, I had two hanks left over and decided it would be fun to share it with all of you! Take...

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19

While the Dungeons & Dragons team developed the game‘s fourth edition for a 2008 release, they faced problems from several directions. Corporate owners Hasbro brought a big corporate cost structure and return on investment expectations set by Magic the Gathering and Pokémon. As third edition sales sagged, the D&D team endured annual Christmas-season layoffs. World of Warcraft debuted in 2004 and experienced surging popularity. By 2008, the WoW community hit more than 11 million players. D&D fans saw fellow players switch their attention to the online game and disappear from tabletop games.

To compete, D&D needed a big advance—a new edition that didn’t just improve the game but an edition capable of winning Warcraft players by matching some of what drew players to online games. “As far as I know, fourth edition was the first set of rules to look to videogames for inspiration,” D&D designer Mike Mearls said. “I wasn’t involved in the initial design meetings for the game, but I believe that MMOs played a role in how the game was shaped. I think there was a feeling that D&D needed to move into the MMO space as quickly as possible.”

So, the new edition focused on the elements that might appeal to fans of online fantasy games. Mearls recalled that the team felt that “building a player character was the real thing that drove people to play the games. You wanted to choose your feats, your prestige classes and whatnot.” Lead designer Rob Heinsoo sought to give the game an irresistible hook that tied the game together and compelled gamers to play. “The solution James Wyatt, Andy Collins, and I were excited about was to give every PC an ongoing series of choices of interesting powers. Most every time you gain a level you select a new power or a feat. Every combat round you have an interesting choice of which power or powers to use.”

The game didn’t just need to be fun to play. It needed to be easy to run online. Casual DMs could simply buy an adventure, read the boxed text, and then run a sequence of skill challenges and combat encounters. In a skill challenge, the DM just had to decide if a skill helped the players—but only when the challenge’s description neglected to list a skill in advance. Ideally, Players could drop into the virtual tabletop at any hour, join any available DM, and feel confident that a stranger could deliver a fun experience. A thriving virtual table would let players join a game 24/7, just like Warcraft. And all those players would pay monthly, just like Warcraft.

Despite the lofty goals, the new edition divided D&D’s existing players and failed to win a generation of new fans.

While the D&D team readied their game for release, magazine and D&D adventure publisher Paizo planned their response. They sent future Pathfinder designer Jason Bulmahn to a convention that offered gamers and chance to preview the new edition. Paizo founder Lisa Stevens recalled, “We had trepidations about many of the changes we were hearing about. Jason’s report confirmed our fears—4th Edition didn’t look like the system we wanted to make products for.” She led her company to create Pathfinder, a game that boasted compatibility with the existing, third edition of D&D.

For gamers who shared the Paizo team’s distaste for the direction of fourth edition, Pathfinder offered an obvious alternative. And plenty of gamers chose the alternative. By 2010, rumors circulated that Pathfinder outsold D&D. The rumors proved false, but Pathfinder seemed to dominate many conventions and game stores. At Gen Con, its players filled the massive Sagamore Ballroom that had once hosted D&D play. Meanwhile, D&D players became exiles in a much smaller space.

“No one at Wizards ever woke up one day and said, ‘Let’s get rid of all our fans and replace them.’ That was never the intent,” Mike Mearls explained later. “With fourth edition, there were good intentions. The game is very solid, there are a lot of people who play it and enjoy it, but you do get those people that say ‘hey, this feels like an MMO, this feels like a board game.’”

From the D&D designers’ perspective, the market’s rejection of fourth edition stemmed from two causes: The game dared to change too much at once and suffered from a lack of design time.

The designers came to regret changing so much so fast. Steve Winter, a designer since D&D’s 2nd edition, wrote, “Fourth Edition was a glorious experiment that succeeded technically. Unfortunately, its breaks from the past were too severe for many fans, who didn’t pick up the new banner.” Rob Heinsoo wrote, “Knowing what I know now, I might have worked for smaller changes in the world, since shifting both the world and the mechanics at the same time proved difficult for some of the D&D faithful to swallow.”

More players might have accepted the change if the developers had gained time to perfect the edition. “We just ran out of runway.” Mearls explained “That’s kind of the story of fourth edition in a lot of ways. We ran out of runway as we were trying to get the plane up in the air.”

Fourth edition never emphasized D&D’s unique strengths. As Mearls put it, “I think what was happening was [fourth edition] was really focusing on really hardcore mechanics, the intricacies of how the rules interact. It really became about the rules and about mastering the rules, rather than about the story, or role-playing, or the interaction between the DM and the players.”

By the end of fourth edition’s run, the designers had perfected a game about building characters and showing them off in dynamic fights. Perhaps they lost some of what makes D&D uniquely compelling.

For the full story, see The Threat that Nearly Killed Dungeons & Dragons—Twice.

Next: Number 3.

 To tell the truth I've been dropping the ball on Horde Wars Basic rpg as of late. Sure we reviewed Horde Wars  here on the blog. And Horde Wars Basic is an excellent game & my only reserve about has been being able to put time aside to spend more time with it. The D12 system is very well defined & Horde Wars itself lays out the rpg rules very nicely. And one of the things I love about Horde WarsNeedleshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/11243274667834930867noreply@blogger.com0

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