Brian Blume Passes Away

Once of the co-founders of TSR, Brian Blume, passed away last Friday at age 70 from dementia and Parkinson's Disease. Blume met Gary Gygax at one of the early GenCon gaming conventions and together they, along with Donald Kaye, founded TSR (Tactical Studies Rules) with funding from Blume's father.

Blume wrote or contributed to several of TSR's early products including Eldrich Wizardry and Boot Hill. He was also responsible for introducing D&D to Europe when he sent a copy of D&D to Games Workshop, which decided the game was far better than anything produced in Europe at the time and became D&D's European distributor.

Blume was also instrumental in the power struggle within TSR that eventually led to Gary Gygax selling his shares and leaving the company. Blume also left the company about the same time. Most of his subsequent game work involved cartography, most notably with White Wolf

Vampire Playtest

The pre-Alpha playtest for the 5th edition of Vampire the Masquerade closed earlier in August. Will keep an eye out and post if they open it up again.

The History of Role Playing in 4 Volumes

We received a pretty interesting book series this week:  Designers and Dragons  A History of the Roleplaying Game Industry, written by Shannon Appelcline and published by Evil Hat Games.  A four volume set, it covers the role playing industry from 1970 to 2009. Each volume runs about 450 pages and covers one decade with Applelcline discussing the history of the industry through looking at the RPG companies that got their start during that decade. For example, both major companies such as Wizards of the Coast and White Wolf and smaller companies such as Grey Ghost Press and Hogshead Publishing get covered in the volume looking at the industry in the 1990s. The series is very well written, surprisingly comprehensive and one I look forward to reading.

World of Darkness MMOG Cancelled

In case you missed this, CCP pulled the plug on the long in development World of Darkness online game.

CCP purchased White Wolf Game Studio waaay back in 2006 to gain access to the World of Darkness property for development as an MMOG. After that, the focus of White Wolf shifted away from the print RPG towards development of the online game. Production of print supplements for the World of Darkness dwindled to 1-2 a year, then to none. The company did continue to produces PDF supplements for its various RPGs, as those required much less capital to produce than a print version did.

White Wolf appears to have ended production of original material for the World of Darkness world as its website directs visitors to other sites to purchase PDFs of older material and new material produced for the World of Darkness.

From a post on Onyx Path's website, the shutdown will have no effect on the license the company has to produce new material for the WOD. However, Onyx Path's market penetration is a far cry from White Wolf's heyday in the late 90s, when the company challenged TSR/WOTC for domination of the RPG market