graphic design and book layout
Our topics for days 8 and 9 of #RPGaDAY are “What is a good RPG to play for sessions of two hours or less?” and “What is a good RPG to play for about ten sessions?” Easy-peasy.
Primetime Adventures.
When I run Primetime Adventures, each episode takes about two hours to run through. A long season of PTA is nine game sessions. Add on one session to bust out the pitch session — where we all make protagonists and decide on the series we are going to create — and we’re at ten sessions.
The #RPGaDAY writing prompt for today is “How do you find out about new roleplaying games?” — a question I don’t have a good answer for. I mean, I used to read message forums and know about cool things that way. I also used to enter the neighborhood bookstore and stumble across something new. This is how I found out about Shadowrun, through a copy of Bug City sitting on a shelf at a Hastings in a slowly-dying mall in Bryan, Texas. It’s also how I found out about 7th Sea. (But that was at a used bookstore, a month or two after I discovered Shadowrun, so my big college era game was more cyberpunky than swashbuckly.)
I guess these days it’s social media.
Well, that and working on layout for books then getting told what’s coming out down the line but I can’t tell anyone about it until the company makes an announcement.
Today on #RPGaDAY: “What is an RPG you would like to see published?”
Probably one based off of Mass Effect.
Nicole Linross of Green Ronin, the company that publishes a roleplaying game based on Bioware’s other big IP, Dragon Age, said that they have been in talks with the Mass Effect team and Bioware’s licensing team over the years, but to no avail. The sticking point comes from the Mass Effect team, it seems. “The most recent time we dusted off our [Mass Effect RPG] proposal for them,” she writes, “licensing asked US why we ‘didn’t want’ to do the game and when we told them we’d be more than happy to do it, they merrily went off to the ME team who wasted no time in telling licensing they were *still* not interested.” This is a good company who has been working with the owners of Dragon Age (which has had its share of problems with approval turnaround times), so they know Green Ronin delivers fantastic good-quality work. But the Mass Effect people are just “not interested in taking Mass Effect to tabletop, it’s as simple as that.”