Category: Avalon Hill

Land of Ninja, Workshop of Games, and Bushido By Other Means

On By ArthurIn Avalon Hill, Basic Roleplaying, Chaosium, Games Workshop, Referee's Bookshelf, RuneQuest, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs9 Comments

I took another look at my copy of Land of Ninja recently, which was the 3rd Edition RuneQuest supplement directed at adapting the system to a “medieval Japan with all the elements of magic and folklore having objective existence” type of setting. My copy is the Games Workshop release, which re-edits the booklets from the Avalon Hill boxed set into a slim hardcover.

In some respects, Games Workshop were really going all-out with their launch of their 3rd Edition RuneQuest line; 1987 would see them mounting a real blitz of releases, which would see them release the core rules (split into RuneQuest and Advanced RuneQuest), the Monsters volume, this, and Griffin Island, all adapted into hardcovers from original Avalon Hill sources. (Monsters incorporated creature from Monster Coliseum but, perhaps well-advisedly, ignored the rather lacklustre arena combat components; Griffin Island was an Avalon Hill repackaging of the classic 2nd Edition release Griffin Mountain with the Gloranthan connections surgically excised, and is considered rather inferior to the original.)

This stands out even in a year when Games Workshop were putting out classic early WFRP material like Shadows Over Bögenhafen, Death On the Reik, and Warhammer City, was actively supporting their own Judge Dredd RPG with the release of its Companion, put out their hardcover version of Paranoia 2nd Edition, and were giving Chaosium more love by putting out their hardcover version of Stormbringer! and their Green and Pleasant Land supplement for Call of Cthulhu (the 3rd edition of which they had put out in hardcover the previous year). By anyone’s measure, that’s an absolutely vintage year for RPG releases from Games Workshop, both in terms of their own homegrown offerings and their licensed products, but even in the context of those impressive offerings, bringing out five RuneQuest hardcovers within a year feels like a big deal, and would have come across as a big deal at the time.

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And Did These Games In Ancient Times Spring From Avalon Hill So Green?

On By ArthurIn Avalon Hill, Core Rules, Lords of Creation, Powers & Perils, Referee's Bookshelf, Tabletop RPGs10 Comments

Before TSR’s rise to prominence and the emergence of the tabletop RPG hobby as a significant new factor in the hobby games market, SPI and Avalon Hill were words to conjure by as the market leaders in the world of tabletop wargames, particularly hex-and-chit stuff. To draw an analogy with tabletop RPGs, imagine American wargames of the 1970s were D&D/Pathfinder, and then SPI and Avalon Hill would be like the Paizo and Wizards of the Coast of that market – both selling products with broad similarities, but with enough of a distinction in their house styles to make room for both in the market (it’s my understanding that SPI’s material tended to be a notch more complex than Avalon Hill’s, for example).

Another commonality between Avalon Hill and SPI is that both companies were caught snoozing by the rise of RPGs. Whilst for the second half of the 1970s the RPG hobby began gathering steam, both attracting customers from outside of the world of wargaming that Arneson and Gygax had emerged from as well as winning converts within that fanbase, it took until the 1980s for the two companies to realise that they were leaving money on the table needlessly. They had the size, the reach, the distribution and production capacity, as well as the overlap in fanbase, to really make a mark in this exciting new market (and revive their fortunes, flagging somewhat with the decline of their style of wargaming), but for the better part of a decade they’d turned their nose up at RPGs, with the result that TSR was able to consolidate its first mover advantage and other small presses and new companies were able to rise up and cater to those wanting alternatives to D&D.

In 1980 SPI made their move with DragonQuest, which managed to get a bit of critical acclaim and a certain level of commercial success. (As well as SPI’s own support line, Judges Guild made some third-party products for it, and Judges Guild generally didn’t bother to do that unless you’d attained a certain level of popularity.) It wasn’t enough to fix SPI’s financial woes, however – which debacles like their other roleplaying effort, the official Dallas RPG, didn’t help.

As I’ve recounted in my article on Arcane‘s old features on what were considered “retro” RPGs back in the mid-1990s, a bit of financial chicanery from TSR – in effect pretending like they were offering SPI a loan to help them survive, only to then pull the rug out from under them, grab all their assets, and hang them out to dry – killed DragonQuest; TSR’s almost-total mothballing of SPI’s intellectual property has only fuelled speculation that this was a cynically anticompetitive gambit to take out either SPI in general – TSR was still competing in the wargame field to an extent at the time – or DragonQuest specifically.

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Games Workshop’s Forgotten RuneQuest

On By ArthurIn Avalon Hill, Basic Roleplaying, Chaosium, Core Rules, Edition Warrior Bullshit, Games Workshop, Referee's Bookshelf, RuneQuest, Supplements, Tabletop RPGs20 Comments

When it comes to discussions of the different versions of RuneQuest, some editions naturally have more advocates than others. 1st Edition doesn’t seem to be widely discussed, I suspect due to a combination of a) it not actually being sold for that long before it got replaced by 2nd Edition and b) 2nd Edition largely being an updated version of it. 2nd Edition has many fans and advocates, particularly Glorantha fans who appreciate how Glorantha was intimately tied into the system, and that’s largely guided the design of the latest edition.

1984’s 3rd Edition is a little divisive; some fans appreciate the extra detail it offers and prefer the fact that it is less tied to Glorantha (though the magic systems are 100% derived from the Gloranthan metaphysic), whilst others feel like it went a bit too deep down the high-crunch rabbithole for too little return. The current powers that be at Chaosium seem to take the latter stance, and indeed have done so for a good long time; Michael O’Brien, current Vice President of Chaosium, expressed such views in an article entitled RuinedQuest on his website and through the Tales of the Reaching Moon fanzine aeons ago back when he was just a regular fan like the rest of us and not one of the Chaosium head honchos. Seeing how the current Chaosium regime is made up of the Moon Design folks, and Moon Design grew out of Tales of the Reaching Moon, and considering how recent statements by Chaosium leadership suggest that they still consider 3rd Edition to have been a bit of a misstep – not least because it meant that Chaosium lost control of the RuneQuest trademark for a long period of time – I don’t see much reason to think that their opinions have changed that much in the intervening time.

Then you have the two Mongoose editions, which don’t seem to have many advocates; the first one seemed thrown together quickly and cheaply and I don’t recall ever seeing anyone seriously claiming it was their favourite version, whilst the second version is generally held to have been butchered by editing; it survives as Legend, but doesn’t seem to have gained much traction, not least because its main designers went to set up the Design Mechanism and publish RuneQuest 6 (now known as Mythras), providing a much stronger version of their vision for the game. (Indeed, they basically talk about it like it’s a “Director’s Cut” of Mongoose RuneQuest II, benefitting from somewhat more playtesting and not getting hamstrung by an unsympathetic edit.) This edition does have its advocates, mainly from folk who are happy with high crunch and appreciate the wide range of combat options it delivers and don’t mind that it isn’t closely tied to Glorantha.

There is, however, another RuneQuest edition which doesn’t get so widely discussed – or when it is considered, it’s lumped in with the standard Avalon Hill presentation of 3rd Edition RuneQuest (whether that be in the form of booklets in a boxed set, as Avalon Hill initially presented it, or as a big fat book compiling the booklets as they shifted to midway through the edition’s run). This would be Games Workshop’s presentation of 3rd Edition, which came out in a set of hardcover volumes in 1987, some 4 years after RuneQuest 3rd Edition debuted.

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Are We Not Doing “Cloning” Any More?

On By ArthurIn Avalon Hill, Classified, Core Rules, Expeditious Retreat Press, Referee's Bookshelf, Tabletop RPGs, Victory Games8 Comments

The retro-clone craze seems to have died down a little recently, which most new OSR games emerging focusing more on providing a novel twist or different focus to the games they emulate rather than providing a more loyal transcription. This is probably at least in part due to most editions of D&D now having a decent corresponding retro-clone, since games with an SRD as expansive as the D&D 3E one are ripe for cloning due to the extensive safe harbour the OGL offers for borrowing text. Whilst game mechanics in the abstract aren’t protected by intellectual property laws, having to rewrite stuff to the extent necessary to avoid a copyright infringement lawsuit is the main barrier to cloning a game which wasn’t released under the OGL. Still, that hasn’t stopped people trying.

The James Bond 007 RPG by Victory Games was a classic of its time, and is believed to be one of the first RPGs (possibly the first) with a hero points mechanic. Unfortunately, it was a licensed RPG, and just like Ghostbusters (the other major 1980s licensed RPG which showcases a bunch of game design innovations) once the licence inevitably died it was shunted out of print.

Classified is Expeditious Retreat’s attempt to do the gaming scene a favour by retro-cloning the James Bond 007 system. It has a distinctly no-frills presentation; whilst it isn’t devoid of examples or detailed explanations, they aren’t exactly thick on the ground either, and the layout is rudimentary but functional. (It isn’t quite “straight into MS Word in Times New Roman, single column, clip art images added here and there as appropriate”, but it’s getting there.) That said, they do make sure important rules which intersect with other rules are repeated where said other rules come up and generally have a good understanding of the fact that reduncancy is not necessarily a bad thing in designing a rulebook if it is done in a way which helps participants find material quickly.

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