Welcome home.
It’s October 4th, and the episode title is “Werewolves or board games?”.
[The following is a transcript of Audio EXP: #303]
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Dark Wizard Games won the RPG Publisher Spotlight. I’m still to get in contact with them, but will, and let them know. You know the score. After that, I politely nag until we get an interview lined up. This week, we’ve been fortunate with interviews, so stay tuned for a few more coming up.
Firstly, who are the candidates for the November Spotlight? They are:
If you’re one of our amazing Patrons, then you can vote for one of those. You can find the voting function through the link in the show notes.
I got a shock visiting Geek Native this week. Honestly, Bronwen had found an Elven Tower one-shot called Ward of the Tyrant to write up.
It’s a 4 bucks adventure suitable for D&D or Shadowdark, and the front cover shows this Clive Barker-style monstrous face in an armoured mask. It was this Hellraiser-like horror that gave me a stir. If you peer closely enough at the visage, you’ll see just one eye glaring back at you, so I think this Cult of the Eye might just be the villains you need for Halloween.
This week, I had the opportunity to speak with Adam Thompson of Battlefield Press about Tales from Whitechapel. You can find this fiction project on Kickstarter.
On offer is a series of short stories, but, as Adam told me, Battlefield Press has more sourcebooks and adventures for Gaslight Victorian Fantasy coming up, and this anthology helps expand the world and provide context ahead of that.
Egg Embry, one of the most renowned TTRPG interviews, also kindly interviewed Brian Colin of Creature Curation. Creature Curation is taking back control of Vast Grimm, a dark sci-fi in which worms are eating everything, and based on the social media responses I’ve seen to this news, I suspect there’s quite a fandom for Vast Grimm.
There’s more, as I also got to talk to Daniel Smith of Mammoth Factory. They’re running a Kickstarter for Dark Descent, a 5e mega campaign.
It’s a 400+ page book with dozens of monsters, spells, and new subclasses, but it was really Daniel’s insights that caught my attention. In the interview, he tells me that much of the monster design draws inspiration from real-world influences of the ancient Near East, and a Sumerian poem in particular is one of the leading influences.
Long-time friend and one of our earliest writers, Paul Wilson of Wally Paints, also wrote up Frostgrave for us, accompanied by a whole batch of detailed photography.
One of the attractions of Frostgave is that you can assemble a collection of spare minis for your mercenaries. That’s perfect for painters like Paul, who therefore have the game as a great way to scratch tactical itches while making sure that old painting projects get some time in the limelight. The deadly limelight.
Let’s stay in the liminal space between TTRPGs and board games for a bit longer.
I was pleased to see that Paizo’s Pathfinder Quest was going great guns at BackerKit and then delighted to see that as part of that, the publisher would donate up to 10,000 meals through the United Nations World Food Programme.
Pathfinder Quest is a GM-free cooperative board game adventure.
The Spanish powerhouse Devir, the board game maker known for games like The White Castle, is going in the opposite direction and entering the tabletop roleplaying games market. They’re also using BackerKit.
Devir will attempt to crowdfund two games simultaneously, both of which are already established in Spain and neither of which has been translated into English before. The two are Dracula versus Hitler and Chaos and Chrome.
In the Dracula game, characters are classic monsters pretending to be 1940s film stars as they hunt down Nazis. Chaos & Chrome casts players as Mad Max-style gang members. Witness me.
Fully into board game news; Monolith has something unusual coming. There’s a Berserk board game which will route by Gamefound and, if successful, will be published with a recommended age rating of 18+.
Berserk is a brutal manga and several brutal anime, so in a way, that 18+ rating is expected, but it’s odd that a board game is considered to be sufficiently adult to have the warning.
In addition to landing some great interviews this week, I also discovered some excellent animations. The first is “The Wolves Are All Gone” by Leslie Pulsifer, which lasts less than 5 minutes and was originally a set of Instagram reels, but comes together as a dark fairy tale and, dare I say it, a modern warning.
I wish I had more wolves in my life.
The second video has been out for barely a week, but has had millions of views. It’s the Knights of Guinevere by Dana Terrace, John Bailey Owen and Zach Marcus. If you’re fans of The Owl House, you might know the names.
For me, it’s my first exposure to the team and Knights of Guinevere is a pilot. I hope it gets made.
It’s been a mixed week for D&D computer game news.
Unfortunately, Swedish developer Starbreeze hasn’t had the success it needed with its last computer game, has had to let some staff go, and it has canned Project Baxter.
Project Baxter was the codename for its D&D heist game. I’ve seen some people who’re not fans of Wizards of the Coast celebrate the failure of Project Baxter on social, but I think it’s worth pointing out that Wizards of the Coast aren’t the people making the game. In fact, the new Starbreeze boss thanked them for being helpful.
In better news for D&D fans, there is an official computer game coming even if it’s the only one this year. The game will be called Battlemarked, and it can be played in virtual reality via the Meta Quest if you want. Behind the scenes are Resolution Games, who are making the game in collaboration with Wizards of the Coast.
There’s one bundle to highlight this week, and that’s a host of 5e treasures from various publishers up at the Bundle of Holding.
One last thing. I wrote a little game for Geek Native called “Which is more deadly? Werewolves or…” which is free to play. Imagine an alternative Earth, a lot like ours, except werewolves are real, kill exactly 666 people every year and then fall to their curse and sleep. Based on our own stats, are werewolves more deadly than elephants? What about lions? And are they more deadly than real-life assassin bugs?
If you think you know, you can give the game a shot. You get 10 seconds for each question, five random questions and then a way to challenge friends to beat your score.
Thanks for listening. Take care and beware those assassin bugs.
