Warhammer Quest for my iPad? Yes, please.

Yay! Rodeo games announced recently that they are developing an iOS version of the classic board game Warhammer Quest. I played the original version during a session in which a local board game collector pulled out a whole bunch of his “classics”; it’s a quirky and fun little game, partly because it’s so hilariously perilous. I’m looking forward to seeing it again in an electronic version, and as always, I’m delighted to see more Warhammer products for iPad. Here’s IGN’s scoop with a bit more info. A detailed description of the original board game can be found here on Board Game Geek.

Looks like the WFRP Scenario Contest is Official

Those sponsoring the Warhammer FRP 3e Scenario Contest (see my entry on it here and the thread on the FFG forums here) have announced a submission date of October 15. I’m hoping that we’ll see some new writers and some fresh ideas. (I even hope for some clever new uses of the standard rules!) As for me, that’s a week before I’m running a half marathon, so if I’m going to get an entry written, it’ll have to be sooner rather than later.

If you’re on the fence, do try to hammer something out. Emirikol has offered to help new writers with editing and formatting their material, so there’s little to lose!

“Ahoy, Matey!” and So On: I Finally Actually Buy the Dreadfleet Captains Expansion

After mouthing off about how the Dreadfleet Captains POD expansion wasn’t stupid or useless back here, I passionately put off buying it for several more months. We recently passed through our favorite gaming store on the way home from vacation, though, and that gaming store has a Seductive Wall of Fantasy Flight Things with FFGTV. Seduced by the Wall, I threw a whole bunch of FFG stuff into our basket that I didn’t need, and the Dreadfleet Captains expansion made its way in. Having now made time to take a look, I thought I’d say a few words about it.

First of all, to its critics: yep. You’re not going to use this one often, so there’s no need to pick it up unless you have a specific idea about how to work it into your campaign or you’re a completist like me. In the box are ten quirky NPCs from the Dreadfleet ships, ten new sailing/pirate-related actions such as “Conjure Wind Spirit” or “Fysh Bite,” six location cards for places on and around a ship, and ten standee cards.

I’m impressed by how much info about the game mechanics FFG crammed onto the playing-sized cards; you have everything you need to run the NPC in a fight right at your fingertips, plus a small portrait. Turn the card over to reveal a slightly larger picture that you can share with your players. Each of the Captains has a couple of special abilities to make him a more challenging combat opponent. The action and location cards are standard stuff, although I’m very fond of the Overboard card with its jaunty octopus tentacles reaching up menacingly from the sea. I am also rather amused by the standee cards. Although I use miniatures, FFG has gone out of its way to ensure that players have a (relatively) inexpensive alternative with the cardboard standups generously provided with each set. Flattening those and providing them in card form cleverly continues this trend.

What’s sorely missing in this set, of course, is the fluff. Who are these guys? What’s their story? What are they like? With the sheer strangeness of the captains and so much existing lore, it’s a shame that you have to go elsewhere to find out, but there’s no lack of material out there. You can pick up the Dreadfleet battle game or read the Black Library Dreadfleet novel. (It’s available on iBooks!) Games Workshop will be delighted to sell you more stuff, have no fear.

Overall, FFG’s Dreadfleet Captains is a vaguely interesting but quirky expansion that nobody needs to play WFRP. If you’ve got some decent reason to feature the captains or would like fifteen location and action cards that have to do with ships and pirates, though, you might find it a good use of your $10.

Anyone Up for a Warhammer Scenario Contest?

Emirikol, one of the most active members of the FFG Warhammer community, recently started a thread to gauge interest in a 3rd edition scenario contest. He’s going to sponsor the prizes himself, and the submissions will likely start a new little library of convention scenario content on the Liber Fanatica site. Although there’s currently some discussion about what the final submission requirements will be, Emirikol’s hoping to give us GMs a choice of convention scenarios that we run at local cons to widen the fanbase–something we’re currently sorely lacking.

I’ll probably enter if the competition goes official. If you’re at all interested, see the proposed details below, then throw your hat in the ring by responding to the thread here.

Proposal: 3rd Edition Convention-Playable Scenario Contest:

PROPOSED Deadline: November 1st, 2012

Assumptions: It is assumed that GMs running the scenario have access to the Core set, Winds of Magic, Signs of Faith and Adventurer’s Toolkit (i.e. everything included in the Player’s Guide and GM’s Guide). References beyond those should be summarized in a sidebar where possible.

Minimum Scenario Content: Scenario must be all-new/original.  Not including pre-generated characters, the length should be from 10-40 pages or between 5000-13,000 words and be playable in 3.5-4 hours. Part-II should be added as a separate entry if scenario is expected to go over this time with additional expected play-time listed (shoot for an additional 4 hours). Adaptations to previous editions may be included in a separate appendix.

Submission Formatting Recommendations: 11 or 12 point readable fonts 2-column except for appendix, maps or handouts, and 1 inch margins maximum.

Pre-Gen Character Formatting: If pre-generated characters are included the following format is recommended: Section 1 – Character sheet, Section 2- summary of cards needed, Section 3 – Attitudes towards other PCs. It is ok to instead reference specific Liber Fanatica 7 pre-gens rather than including new ones, but you may wish to include attitudes towards other PCs section.

Formatting layout: Page 1 – Title Page with Blurb, Author(s), and legal disclaimer.  Other minimum formatting requirements: rank/career minimum expected to play, course of expected play (scenario synopsis), background, content (by Act and Encounter). It does not have to be a railroad, but it does require a “most common course of expected play.”

Stat Block: It is assumed that all GMs have the Core Boxed Set, but not the Creature Guide or Creature Vault. Monsters found in the Core Set may simply be referenced, otherwise more complete information or summary side-bar. NEED STAT BLOCK FORMAT

Judging: Liber Fanatica and anyone who wants to help, including writers who submit (can’t vote for your own).

1e, 2e adaptations: Appendices with 1e, 2e, or Zweihander adaptation stat blocks, etc. do not count towards word count.

Prizes : Each author that meets at least minimum content standards get a copy of DLSS (official print copy, max 1) and hosted on Liber Fanatica website. Runner up gets the printed J2BFP.  Winner gets: Journey to Blackfire Pass (with cardstock pregen’s- official copy) and some gift certificates or dice or something (TBD).

So Much Warhammer Goodness on iBooks!

I’ve been away on vacation, so I haven’t had much time to update–in fact, I’ve been backpacking, so I’ve been away from wifi or 3G range for days at a time. Naturally, as soon as I got back to civilization, I dove into a sea of emails, texts, and Google searches to answer random questions that had popped up during our hikes that we hadn’t been able to solve immediately. (Makes you realize how dependent you are on the internet to answer your “idle questions.”) Once I’d finished with my first internetting frenzy, I decided to grab some new reading material for the last few days away. Just out of curiosity, I typed “Black Library” into the iBookstore to see if there was any Warhammer content.

Quite awhile back, when iBooks were relatively new, I’d looked for BL content on the bookstore, and there hadn’t been much. I went over to the official BL website and ordered some etexts there, and while it wasn’t a terrible pain to import the etexts to my iPad, it was just enough of a hassle that I hadn’t bothered to go back. All that’s changed–significantly. Now there are over thirty-three screens of English BL content on the iBookstore and several more of French language content! Delightful. Now I can satisfy my need for trashy Warhammer reading and expend as little effort as possible.

I also notice that Games Workshop has put up the Codex: Necrons; it does look as though they’re going to make an effort to put all of the Codices onto iBooks. As I said here, I do think the format’s promising, and I’m glad to see they’re continuing. I just hope other RPG publishers decide to go the same route!

Overall, I’m glad to see more of this type of content on the iBookstore. I tend only to buy books I need for work as physical copies. I already have such a huge library from grad school and for work that I don’t need to fill it out with tons of other texts that I’m unlikely to annotate. It’s nice, then, to pick up a few Warhammer books in ebook format, and if it’s easy to do at 2am when I’m already on my iPad, all the better.

Vacation Adventure Hooks (or How to GM from Impossibly Far Away)

This week, my husband and I are vacationing at my in-laws’ place. They live in an area of the Adirondacks that one might describe as “remote.” It’s not quite shack-in-the-woods remote, but the nearest townlet, about fifteen minutes away, consists of a bank, three or four stores, two gas stations, and lots of Burma Shave-style signs with religious slogans along the road. While I enjoy my time here spent hiking, swimming, and boating, it does always confirm that I’m a city girl. On the other hand, I always see some hilarious things that would make awesome adventure hooks. Today, I present you with four things I’ve seen so far that would make stellar Warhammer FRP adventure hooks:

• A man burning the corpse of a horse in the front yard of his house. One of the horse’s legs sticks out of the flames at a jaunty angle.
• A tiny shack with barely enough room for one man to sit suddenly appears in an unowned part of the woods where there was no shack just a few months ago. My husband and I happened upon a charming bench near a pond in a previously uninhabited part of the forest, and just when I was about to sit down, he suddenly whispered, “Stop! There’s a hut behind you.” I thought he was making a Star Wars joke, but the reality was much creepier.
• A live dog strapped to the top of a car, (or in Warhammer, to the top of a carriage.) I could see my PCs stalled for half an hour of hilarious roleplay trying to figure out if they should save the dog, or if they should set the carriage on fire because the dog’s likely a demon and the people in the carriage follow some lord of Chaos.

• A group of stern-looking children striding purposefully towards a stand of trees in the middle of nowhere carrying nothing but a long chain.

And really, there’s the real joy of vacationing: the stories you bring back. Most people want to tell those stories to their families and friends, but some of us twisted souls want to get together and retell slightly more violent versions of our vacation tales as we sit surrounded by piles of dice, stacks of cardboard scenery, and sets of miniatures.

 

I Bought the Space Marines iBook and Will Review It to Prove My Loyalty to the Emperor

Unsurprisingly, I went ahead and coughed up the $42 for the Codex: Space Marines just to see how Games Workshop managed the iBooks format. My willingness to do so is entirely inexplicable, by the way; I don’t play 40K, and I don’t have a Space Marines army. I did enjoy the fluff in the book, though, and if I ever get around to running Rogue Trader, I suppose it will come in handy. Also, it’s almost my birthday, so why not? It’s not my intention to critique the book’s content; instead, I’d like to say a few words about Games Workshop’s use of the format itself.

If you go to iTunes and look up this book, you’ll see more than a hundred reviews that give the book one star. Many of these thoughtful, honest, ethical reviewers haven’t even bought the book–they’re just complaining about the price point. Apparently they feel as though an electronic version of a book shouldn’t cost the same as a print copy, and that’s enough for them to give the book one star. What we’ve learned here is that iTunes shouldn’t allow you to review a book you haven’t bought from them. After having spent some time with the text, I think GW’s implementation of the Codex is a wee bit flawed, but very promising as a whole; it’s not yet five stars, but it’s certainly not one star, either. Many complaints say that much of what the iBooks version accomplishes, a PDF also accomplishes, and that might be true. Still, as far as I can tell, the only PDF versions of the book available are illegal copies, so I’m not wholly swayed by comparing the functionality of a legal copy of an item to the functionality of an illegal copy.

Here’s the scoop on the details of the iBooks implementation:

PROS
Players will likely find the iBooks copy very useful during actual play, and the interactive visuals make it a delight to sit and read.

• The hot-linked sections of the book will make it easy to find the information you need with a click. For instance, long fluff descriptions of individual units in the “Forces of the Space Marines” chapter link to the crunchy details in the “Army List” at the back of the book and vice versa, so you can get from fluff to crunch easily.
• Standard iBooks navigation features allows for you to move from chapter to chapter easily, and GW has made the solid design choice to make each new chapter start with a visually distinctive page so you can quickly navigate to the section you need.
• The searchable glossary has all the game terms you need. If you don’t play a particular army or unit all of the time, you might easily forget how to use a specific skill you’re seeking. It’s faster to do a search for it in a digital glossary than to look it up in a paper copy. I’ve found that it’s also much faster to search the iBooks glossary than to do a search in a whole PDF, but perhaps that’s just me. You can also click on individual special rules within an Army List entry and have the glossary entry for the rule pulled up automatically.
• The iBooks built-in notes feature allows you to include house rules, refinements, and tactical information near the units and/or rules they modify right in your text without ruining the look of the book.
• The high-resolution graphics and pictures of miniatures look great on a Retina screen. For once, I could actually get close enough to see that not every ‘Eavy Metal painter is flawless. That gave me a +15 bonus to my Self Confidence.
• The Citadel 360 (or 360 Citadel?) models are kind of neat, and let you see how the painter has managed all of the details of a particular mini.
• You can re-use the graphics. Games Workshop probably won’t be thrilled that I point this out, but of course, you can take a screen shot of anything you see in iBooks. That means that you can grab included graphics, put them in your own graphics program, and use them for your own scenarios, RPGs, etc. For a GM like me, this may be one of the most valuable things about the Codex.
• You can’t lose or damage this book, since you can always re-download it once you’ve purchased it. Your iPad is also significantly smaller and lighter than an actual hardcover GW Codex.

CONS
GW has made a handful funky, bad, or just weird decisions that detract from the overall experience. I suspect that eventually these things will get ironed out as companies like GW come up with standards for publishing iBooks documents, but I was surprised that a company with such a solid design team would make some of these mistakes, even on their first try.

• The designers use the slideshow function inconsistently throughout the book. It’s not a big problem–or a problem at all from a useability standpoint–but it’s rather offputting. Some galleries have thumbnails of included images at the bottom, while others simply have dots that indicate how many images are in the current slideshow. I found the differences distracting, as I ended up trying to figure out if the logic behind the choices.
• Similarly inconsistent is GW’s use of the Citadel 360 feature; I couldn’t always figure out why they’d decided to allow me to see some of the models in 3D and not others. If, say, they’d done 360 models of every commander and flat images of lesser units, I’d get it, but their choices didn’t seem so straightforward.
• While you can go to full-screen for some of the graphics, allowing you to see an individual item on a plain black background, you can’t zoom in to get a better look at the details of the images in the book. For a company that prides itself on detailed miniatures, I thought this was a weird decision. Some of that may be limited by iBooks; when I’ve played with it, I haven’t had many images that needed zoom functionality, so I’m not sure whether or not it’s possible within the iBooks structure itself.
• GW didn’t use the change page-orientation feature. I realized when creating my own iBooks that it’s kind of a pain in the arse; the engine doesn’t let you look at certain page elements when you have your iPad in portrait orientation that you can see in landscape orientation. Still, it’s often more pleasant to read long blocks of text in portrait orientation, so it would be nice if GW had given readers the choice. On the other hand, perhaps they were thinking that you would primarily use your iPad propped up on its SmartCover in landscape orientation as you played the game itself.

FOR FUTURE TEXTS
Here are some things I’d like to see in future Codices and other RPG/miniatures rulebooks. I realize that these high-tech details can add quite a bit to the digital file size; perhaps companies could release both a bare-bones and a digital Collector’s Edition of their books.

• Sound. I’m a sucker for gimmicks, so I’d like to hear some sound. Have one of the Black Library voice actors read us some of that fluff at the beginnings of chapters.
• More color. Companies cut back on color when printing because it costs so darn much, but it doesn’t cost in a digital copy. Go ahead and color in those little details at the top of the pages. Make it look more like a Fantasy Flight or an old-school White Wolf book.
• Video. Gameplay tactics, miniature painting tips, or fluff delivered as video would take digital manuals a significant step ahead of paper copies.

OVERALL VERDICT: LET’S SEE MORE!
Quite honestly, I’d repurchase most of my RPG/miniatures manuals if they were re-released in this format. I think the search, glossary, and notes functions alone would make them far more useful at the table than a printed copy of the book, and being able to yoink graphics from rulebooks for my own personal use fills me with joy. Further, I’d much rather carry one iPad to my local gaming store or to my friend’s house than a whole stack of hardbacks, especially if I’ve also got to carry a box filled with minis. Let’s face it; I’m probably going to take the iPad anyway, so why not cut back on other stuff I have to carry?

I will give all of the one-star reviewers the fact that there’s some sticker shock; it made my heart skip a beat to push the PURCHASE button on my iPad, since I’ve never bought any single item that expensive before. Yet I think we have to move beyond automatically valuing paper copies over digital copies. When I pay for a digital copy, I consider the unlimited downloads and the green factor, both of which are worth money to me; YMMV. In fact, if GW included video and sound not included in the paper copy, I’d highly support its costing the same as the paper book. At the moment, though, the former isn’t where we are in our cultural assessment of the value of etexts, and the latter isn’t where GW is in its iBooks production values, so they should probably offer a modest discount over the hardcover copy until digital copies become more commonplace.

I can’t tell you if you should purchase this item. If you’re a tech junkie who’s attached at the hip to your iPad like I am, then it’s a no-brainer. If you already own the paper copy of the Codex and happily lug it everywhere, then it might not make sense for you. I can say, though, that I hope other gaming companies leap on the bandwagon and use this technology, since I think it could really take gaming books to a whole new level of useful interactivity.

…and if that doesn’t prove my loyalty to Games Workshop the Emperor, I don’t know what will.

Dioramas Pro. Meh.

After poking around the Profantasy Software site the other day to look at something or other, I noticed the Dioramas Pro module for Campaign Cartographer 3 and picked it up. I’m not a master craftsman of cardstock scenery, by any means. After all, I started this blog by talking about my love-hate relationship with glue. Still, I like to make scenery for my campaigns, as I find that my PCs find it easier to tell the story at hand if they have a shared visual space on which to base the narrative. In my head, I was going to craft highly evocative Warhammery scenery to match the prewritten modules and/or strange and bewitching buildings to match my upcoming Skaven scenario. How cool would it be to have a building for the Garden of Morr that actually had little black rosebushes all around the building? How neat to have buildings that had been heavily “modified” by Skaven engineers (who, of course, don’t exist)?

For full disclosure’s sake, I should say that I only played with DP for one afternoon. Like everything else from Profantasy, DP has a steep learning curve, but it hardly seems impossible; I could easily figure out how to use the tools available, and the quickstart guide helped immensely. I could quickly make a series of different types of buildings that would stand up serviceably when I glued them together. It’s also very easy to change the scale of your building to accommodates different games. What’s less exciting, though, are the visual details provided within the program for decorating the buildings. Bleech. Simple line windows and doors–nothing like the buildings I would want to create. It’s possible to export the skeleton of your building and put it into Photoshop or Pixelmator so that you can do some graphic manipulation there. In fact, I’m pretty sure that’s what I’ll use DP to do. Still, it would be nice if it were easier to export the images, and even nicer still if the graphics sets in DP were a bit more elegant.

I’m not sure I’m pleased with this purchase. I like the flexibility of crafting any kind of structure I want, but honestly, I’m not sure how often I’ll use it. Part of me wishes I’d just bought some blank cardstock building skeleton files that I could manipulate in Pixelmator. (Those must exist, right?) Still, I think that’s more of a failing of my not really considering how the product was designed than a failing of the product itself. DP seems quite powerful if you’re into the “engineering” side of things. It’s just that I’m more on the “put funny visual jokes on the side of the buildings” side of things instead. Lesson learned about rampantly consuming things I don’t need, I guess. At least until the next intriguing thing I don’t really need comes along.

Any Day that Combines Space Marines with iBooks is an Awesome Day

Awesome! I talked awhile back about how RPG scenario writers might put iBooks Author to good use, so I was excited to see the announcement on Twitter today that Games Workshop plans to release a line of iBooks supplements for its wargame. GW plans to release a handful of texts each month, and the company has obviously dumped some real money into making their initial offerings both useful and beautiful. The official video shows some of the etexts’ innovations. 3D images of their models that readers can rotate to view from all sides seem like a good way to get a sense of whether or not you really want a particular miniature, and videos and slideshows that explain how to paint models so that they look like the ones shown in particular scenarios will help those who want to learn good painting techniques. The video also goes out of its to point out that the search functions and the notation functions of iBooks will make using rules from these texts easy mid-game.

I’m really glad to see some gaming companies jumping onto iBooks and using the Author tools. I do wonder how much crossover there is between the GW crowd and the Apple crowd; they wouldn’t have struck me as quite the same people, for the most part, but I’m glad to see gaming companies make use of this technology. I’m going to wait until the Codex: Space Marines hits the virtual shelves, and then I’ll do a review of it. I can’t wait to see what it’s like! In the future, I hope that companies like GW expand their use of the functions of iBooks to some of their fiction offerings, and I’d love to see Fantasy Flight jump on the bandwagon and release some of their WFRP3e materials in this format, too.

BE THE SQUIG.

I have a soft spot for squigs. Squigs represent everything that is awesome about Warhammer, at least as far as I’m concerned: they’re nonsensically made out of fungus, they look silly, they hang out with other humorous monster-types, but they have huge, pointy teeth and can totally kick your ass. That’s why I was excited to see Warhammer Forge’s new Colossal Squig miniature while surfing the web…although I’m not sure you can rightly call that thing a ‘miniature.’

My internal monologue: “A gigantic squig miniature that I will never use in game?! SIGN ME UP! Ooh, plus, it’s big enough that my paint job might look fairly competent. Fifty-five pounds, though. Plus shipping. Steep. Hmm…well, I’d probably have to write an adventure around it.”

I haven’t ordered it yet, because I’m telling myself that I’ll wait until I at least have an adventure idea for it. Of course, what that really means is that I’ll wait until I’ve opened up a Pages document and typed “COLOSSAL SQUIG ADVENTURE” across the top.

I haven’t even gotten that far, though, because I’m getting ready to run a half marathon tomorrow–gotta go pack my special running socks and energy gels and such. Whenever I feel like slacking in my pace, I’m just going to imagine that squig right on my heels…or maybe I’ll imagine that I am that squig. He seems to have a good stride. Rawarr!