RPG of the Week Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes

This week, WOTC announced the release of the next book in the D&D cannon, Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes. Like the previous releases in the series, Volo's Book of Monsters and Xanathar's Guide to Everything, Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes will ship with two different covers, the standard cover which you will find at Barnes and Noble, Amazon and other fine mass retailers, and the direct cover, only available from WPN approved retailers. Both covers will have a MSRP of $49.99 on release.

The direct cover only gets 1-2 print runs before going out of print. Currently, direct cover versions of Xanathar's Guide to Everything sell for $80 to $100. WPN stores, like us, will have both covers for sale on May 18th and you will likely find both on sale from third parties on Amazon and eBay. The mass version will go on sale widely May 29. We are taking deposits on either or both covers now through early May so let us know if you want a copy.

RPG of the Week Dream Park

A precursor to modern MMOGs and LARPs, the 1981 novel Dream Park, postulated a world in which GMs were treated like rock stars as they created virtual/real worlds in which, for a price, real people could adventure. Players adopted the persona of their character and the tech postulated in the novel allowed magic and SF concepts to work. In 199, R Talsorian Games licensed the rights to the novel to produce a RPG in which the players played players who were playing characters in the world that the DM, who also existed as a DM in real life as well as in the game, created. Interesting concept and it did well enough for R. Talsorian to produce two adventures.

RPG of the Week Sentinel Comics

Sentinels of the Multiverse has proved a very popular deckbuilding game over the past few years but we have had a number of people ask "But what about an RPG?" Well, those people now have their question answered as Greater Than Games releases Sentinel Comics:  The Role Playing Game in a $19.99 13 book Starter Set (13 books!). The Starter Set fills in the gap between the end of the deckbuilding game and the full RPG releasing next year. It comes with booklets for each of the main heroes in the deckbuilding game, giving background on the character and explaining the character sheet as well as a Gameplay Guide. Help rebuild Megalopolis and reunite the hero teams of the world while fighting off the villains threatening us all. Sentinel Comics is the first print format RPG to hit the market since MWP released the Marvel Super Hero RPG about 5 years ago.

RPG of the Week: Volo's Guide to Monsters

Almost everyone agrees (except for the odd player killed by one) that you can never had too many monsters in a D&D game. Unfortunately, D&D 5th edition only had one official book of monsters, the Monster Manual, until this one came out last year, chock full of monsters and more monsters. Incidentally, there are two covers to this book, the standard one shown in the photo and the limited edition, which had a single run last year. Copies of the limited version, which only differs from the standard version by the cover, contents are the same, regularly sell for over $100 on eBay.

RPG of the Week: Compact Combat

Remember when I talked about the origins of GURPS last week and how it was based on a couple of stand alone systems, Melee and Wizard? Here is a similar system from Microtactix, a small game company active in the Evansville Indiana area in the early 2000s. Most of the products from Microtactix were print and play miniature figures and terrain, similar to the Cardboard Heroes sets from Steve Jackson Games. Instead of the d6s used by Melee and Wizard, Compact Combat used d10s. Gameplay, otherwise, was uncannily similar.

RPG of the Week GURPS

GURPS is the Steve Jackson Games version of Metagaming's The Fantasy Trip, which was composed of Melee, a combat system, and Wizard, a magic system. I actually started off playing RPGs with The Fantasy Trip, since it was  more "realistic" than D&D, as your dexterity and agility rather than your strength determined if you hit or missed your opponent. Strength determined the amount of damage while your intelligence determined how many spells you could cast but with a spell point system rather than the Dying Earth system of D&D.

Steve Jackson worked for Metagaming during the late 70s and early 80s, coming up with the concepts of Ogre and Car Wars while there as well as much of The Fantasy Trip. When Metagaming went out of business, Jackson took Car Wars and Ogre to his new company, Steve Jackson Games. he attempted to purchase The Fantasy Trip as well but the owner of the company reportedly asked in excess of $100,000 for the rights. Instead, Jackson took the core concepts of TFT and expanded them into GURPS, the Generic Universal Role Playing System.

RPG of the Week Tunnels and Trolls

If you are looking for an easy to learn and easy to play RPG, you cannot do much better than Tunnels and Trolls. T&T, considered by many the second RPG to hit print (it released about 6 months after the original D&D did) and one of the simplest as well. With spell names like "Take That, You Fiend" "Hidey Hole" and "Freeze Pleeze", it is obvious that designer Ken St. Andre  had a sense of humor when it came to spell creation, among other things. Still TnT is a very well designed game and is still in print, just like D&D and unlike so many of the RPGs that debuted in its footsteps.

RPG of the Week Rifts

Rifts has been around since the 1980s, starting out as the Palladium Fantasy RPG, then, as Palladium Games slowly put up more RPGs using the same basic system, gradually developed into the first, and longest lives, multi-genre RPG. Both GURPS and Torg attempted to do something similar but GURPS never managed to make a system that allowed you to take the same character, without modification, from one genre or universe to another, while Torg was an interesting experiment that failed to find an audience.

If you look closely at the underpinnings of Rifts, you can see its roots in the original D&D system, with its character classes and alignment systems, as the creator, Kevin Siembieda, had a hand in many of the early Judges Guild products. However, Rifts has transcended its roots and now stands as its own system, which has developed into a fantasy/high-tech cross over that still has a strong following all these years later.

RPG of the Week OG

This week's RPG is one that does not lend itself to campaign play but rather to one-off sessions, so one off that Scott could be induced to run a game of it if someone approached him properly. Og has been around since the late 1990s in one form or another. The Unearthed Edition dates from 2007 and in the game, everyone plays a stereotypical caveman, or at least as stereotypical a caveman as they can given how much we know about cavemen. Incidentally, these cavemen can, if the GM wishes, co-exist with dinosaurs. Roll with it.

The key thing to remember about Og is the words. Remember how your parents told you to "Use your words" when you were young? Here, you have a maximum of 18 of them and must communicate your actions and wishes to other players using only your known words, such as "You", "Me", "Hairy" and "Bang" and gestures. You may describe what you are doing to the GM using your regular vocabulary but will get penalized should you use that same vocabulary with your fellow players.

RPG of the Week: Dungeon Crawl Classics

Much like Pathfinder and Castles and Crusades, Dungeon Crawl Classics started life as a series of adventures created under D&D 3.0's Open Gaming License. Like the other two, the adventures proved popular enough that Goodman Games is one of the few companies remaining from the 3.0/3.5 Edition era, still publishing modules for the D&D 5th edition game as well as material for what became its house system Dungeon Crawl Classics.

Similar to Troll Lord Games C&C, Dungeon Crawl Classics opts to use its modified 3.0 edition rules and create adventures that have the feel of 1st edition AD and D adventures, with names reminiscent of the early TSR adventures such as "Beyond the Black Gate" and "The Sea Queen Escapes". 

RPG of the Week No Thank You Evil

No Thank You Evil is a RPG system from Monte Cook Games targeted at beginning players. As the cover says "Ages 5 to Infinity" . The system is quite simple and relies on die rolls and tokens. As in almost RPGs, the gamemaster guides the game and creates the adventure. Whenever the players have want to attempt something, the GM sets a "goal" from 0 to 8. A goal of 0 is something the players can easily accomplish, such as walking or talking. Higher goals are set for more difficult activities. The players can spend tokens from their characters to make accomplishing the goals easier.

I had the opportunity to play No Thank You Evil a few weeks ago. It plays well, comes with lots of components and bits and a session can finish in about 30 minutes or extended longer if the players remain interested. If you are a parent looking to introduce your kids to RPGs but think D&D is a bit too complex, No Thank You Evil is a great alternative.