The fine folks at Guardians of Order have posted more information about the upcoming The Authority Role-Playing Game, including a release date: April 26. You can find the official buzz here
Back to School
This Friday, February 27, I’ll be at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, appearing on a panel at the annual summit meeting for the Wisconsin Alliance for Arts Education. It’s at 1:30 PM in the Student Union. The topic is “What Do They Know About Learning, Kids, and Games?” Tim Gerritsen, my boss at Human Head Studios, will be there with me, along with Henry Jenkins (the Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT), James Paul Gee (a professor at the UW who wrote What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy), and Kurt Squire (an assistant professors at the UW who co-directs The Education Arcade. Apparently I’ll just be there as the pretty face.
Brave New World After All
I got an e-mail last week that asked if I could start writing a bit about Brave New World (the roleplaying game I designed back in 1999) instead of making people wait indefinitely for the long-promised PDF that would reveal all of the setting’s secrets. It was a great idea, and I’m only sad I didn’t think of it first.
The problem with working on a BNW PDF is that my schedule is packed. The chances of me getting to work on a free product of any length in the near future rapidly approach nil. I have set aside some time for these weekly updates, though, time I can tilt in that direction. And so I will.
I can’t promise I won’t get distracted by other shiny things along the way, but I’m going to make a start at this and keep chipping away at it until it’s done. The brilliant part of doing this here on the website is that I can get direct feedback, including questions, to help me correct mistakes and direct my ramblings. This way, if I ever do manage to collect all this stuff into a PDF, it should be rock solid, tested by all of you as you read along.
So, without further ado, let’s get to it.
Read More
Human Head and Green Ronin
The big news of the week is a deal that I’ve been working on at my day job with Human Head Studios for the past couple months. In short, Green Roninhas agreed to publish the adventure games that Human Head produces. If you’re interested in the full press release, you can find it here.
Read More
Spiritkeeper Release Date Change
Apparently The Secret of the Spiritkeeper is slated for an August release. The date currently on Wizards’ website is from the original plan, before they decided to release the first and second books in the series at once. This is good news, as it should give Wizards more time to rev up the marketing machine. They have plans for a full website and book club to support the line, which should help crank up the interest too.
[Posted with ecto]
Comment Spam
I got my first bits of spam in the comments sections over the past week. Unless, of course, I number Levitra sales reps and online gambling casinos in my readers. I blocked the offending IPs, but I’m told this sort of thing may get bad. Movable Type 3.0 is supposed to have some powerful tools to fix this sort of thing, but it’s in beta right now.
In the meantime, we’ll hold on tight and see what happens. If worse comes to worst, I may have to close down the commentary sections. If that does happen, remember you can always reach me by e-mail.
On the cool side of things, I’m testing out this new posting program for Mac OS X: ecto. So far, it’s pretty darn neat.
[Posted with ecto]
d20 and Me
A while back, Jon Leitheusser (currently of WizKids) asked me to write an essay about my opinion of the d20 System. I did, and he published as the last page of issue #2 of his Campaign Magazine. I edited it a bit to bring it up to date, and “What I Think of the d20 System” is now available in the Downloads section.
Notifications
If you’d like an e-mail to alert you of news items at Forbeck.com, don’t forget to submit your e-mail address in the “Notifications by E-mail” box to the right!
More Awards
The awards season seems to have hit the adventure gaming industry full on. As I mentioned earlier, GameWyrd.com recently opened voting on its Weird GameWyrd Awards. The Redhurst Academy of Magic has been nominated as “The RPG or Supplement Most Likely to Spark the Imagination.”
Also, Pen & Paper just announced that it’s taking votes for its Pen & Paper Awards. Allow me to make some (perhaps not very) humble suggestions:
Read More
Spiritkeeper News
My natural curiosity led me to check out the Wizards of the Coast website to see if they’d posted my bio yet. It turns out they’re quicker than I thought. You can see the bio here.
Better yet, the official product page is here. I was told the book would be released in August, but it says June here, so who am I to argue?
It’s also available for preordering at Amazon.com. Although Amazon lists the book at 256 pages, Wizards claims that it’s 192. I’d go with Wizards on this one. Either way, I encourage you to preorder it through your local game store first if you can.