Dark Heresy playtest

Playtesters say the greatest things.

Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay: Dark Heresy is being tested at the moment by a wide range of groups. They're basically playing the hell out of the game to see how it plays, how it feels and how clear it is.

We were chatting with one group- The Hegelian dialectic- over lunch about how they were getting on with it all. They certainly weren't shy of quotable quotes...

Ed Morris- "The thing about roleplaying in the 41st millenium is there are so many more ways for you to die..."
Paul Hill- "Explosive decompression"
Ed Morris- "Falling out of a hive"
Paul Hill- "Falling on a hive"
Mal Green- "Getting your gauss rifled"
Paul Hill- "Oooh, sounds painful"
Ed Morris- "You can sue if someone handles your gauss, especially in the workplace"
Kate Flack- "death warrant with a typo on it"
Mal Green- "Accidental war"
Kate Flack- "purposeful war"
Paul Hill- "reversed digestion"
Ed Morris- "psychic prolapse"
Mal Green- "urgh, careful, I'm eating here"

...so we're pretty sure we're getting the 'grim darkness' bit right...

How to settle everything

Blame Owen.

We've discovered Google Fight

It is the answer to everything.

Try typing in the names of people from your roleplaying group.
Try your character names.
Try 'ratcatcher' vs 'noble' or 'Chaos' vs 'Empire'
Battle people in your office one against the other
Type in the names of your ex's for strangely wrong enjoyment.

Enjoy, and remember- we take no responsibility for the weirdly addictive nature of Googlefight.

Bored Games- Far from it!

We had a good couple of goes at train based board game 'Ticket to Ride' yesterday.

In it you attempt to build rail networks across America using little plastic trains, a selection of variously coloured cards and low cunning. It's a mixture of misdirection, card collection, tactical planning and remembering to look at your destination cards. (Other wise you link up the wrong cities...In our case El Paso and Winnepeg)

There's a bit of number scoring mathmatics to do, plus you develop a strange obession with whos got the longest trainline, but dispite that, it's still a very jolly game. Plus you learn where lots of cities are in the USA/Canada (Deluth- who knew?) You also end up making train noises (say "who's a cheeky chuffer chuffer?" three times and you'll see what we mean) cackling as you thwart each other and pretending to be the fat controller

In short, the roleplay type elements make it good fun.

Likewise with our other favourite game at the moment- 'Shadows over Camelot' Another great use of an evening, this game involves everyone playing Knights of the Round Table who are busy defending Camelot from Saxons, Picts, seige engines, the black knight, dragons and so on whilst also questing for the Grail, Excaliber or Lancelot's armour. It's a bit unusual in that rather than all competing against each other, you band together against the game. It's very doom laden, in that you're constantly fighting a loosing battle against your enemies. It can get very messy very quickly. Again you use plastic figures (such as Sir Kay of the Flat Face) and collect suites of cards to complete quests, fight or do special actions.

It could get a little number crunchy after a couple of games, were it not for the one rule that makes this game fabulous. You are forbidden from using game terms- in fact, you must roleplay everything you say to other players. You might want to tell someone to bid a 5 against the Saxons, but you have to find a way to tell them this in character ("Ride out against their strongest flank, and I shall take the center!")

A fantastic use of roleplay to illuminate a set of game mechanics and really make a fun experience.

And of course, a great excuse to drink beer in Bugmans in the name of 'research'...

Today in the office

5 things we have been doing today:

Dealing with 40k RPG playtest

Praising the almighty father of office comfort

Talking about what we should do at GenCon Indy to promote Dark Heresy

Working on an as yet to be announced source book... all 256 pages of it...

Preparing to play 'Ticket to Ride'

Look on that t'internet

We are big fans of the World Wide Web.

Lots of what we do is dependant on email, forums, web pages and the like. T'interweb is what allows us to have writers all over the world creating stuff for WFRP and 40KRP.

From Murfreesboro to Ohio, Nottingham to Japan, Brisbane to Seattle, there are contributors scattered across the four corners of the globe. Even as you read this, there are folk in all sorts of unlikely places creating new stuff for our games. Be it a downtown Starbucks (Dark Heresy) or aboard an oil rig (WFRP Adventure TBC!) computers and ecomms has totally revolutionised what would have once been done in a dark office near a broom cupboard*.

It's not just us who benefits from this of course. Scores of bed rooms and home offices have dedicated fans working on critical hit tables, character creation options, adventures, handouts and more. These guys can share their work with thousands of other folk- reinforcing the community, creating great games and helping them develop their talents.

Speaking of community, that's another thing that the web has altered utterly- now you can communicate with likeminded souls at the stroke of a key. You can pose questions, share tales of your games and debate anything from game design to orc reproductive systems. You can read reviews, order the latest books and even play games with folk you've never met. You can ask the developers questions (and maybe even get an answer) or read their latest thoughts on their blogs.

How does this compare to the world of roleplaying 15, 20 years ago?

What this will do to roleplaying over the next 15, 20 years?

Let's see your comments, folks!

*No, not that. We're talking about writing.

Dall smut vicious bog

Following on from our last post, folks have been asking us what a spoonerism is.

It's basically when you jumble up the letters of a word by mistake, creating entirely new meanings to a sentance- for example "can I sew you to your sheet?" (can I show you to your seat?)

It's named after a chap from Oxford who was particularly prone to it- you can find out more, and have a go at making some here

Spoonerisms and other word/letter jumbles are worth paying attention to if you need to come up with cool titles on a frequent basis. Sometimes a mispoken phrase will come up with something striking that makes for a great name. "Eight Days a Week" and "Hard Day's Night" are just two examples of this...(ok, some of us here know far too much about the Beatles)

Here's just some of gibberish we've been coming out with lately:

Dramasticly (the Lure of the Liche Lord manuscript is dramasticly better)

Decomplify (we need to decomplify the trap rules)

Dynamicism (The mutation tables have a lot of dynamicism)

drog sniffing droogs (The police had drog sniffing droogs)

Questinate (the players will need to Questinate the locals)