 | Party Backstory Generator |
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 | Magazine Madness Results! |
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In this newsletter | Arcane Sword Press | Saltheart RPG | Severed Books | Solarian Games | Tiger Wizard |
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| | | | Party Backstory Generator 2nd Edition and Shadow Delvers Minis Launching Tuesday Feb 10th |
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The Party Backstory Generator is a collaborative storytelling supplement that’s a helluva a lot of fun for you and your players. – LUKE GYGAX
For the first time, the Party Backstory Generator will be printed in a deluxe edition. If you back in the first 48 hours for a physical item, you get a free Small Party wood mini. Sign up here for the Feb 10th launch alert |  | | |
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| | I want to send you a Valentine. |
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 | Oh boy! Hi there, AU! I’m Tiger Wizard. I’m over on Patreon making cool maps, and I want to send you one! It’s like chocolates and flowers, but for gamer nerds.
Here’s an example of what these maps look like. |
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 | Use this button to get a FREE month of my top tier on Patreon! That top tier of “Slugs” gets something physically mailed to them every month! | | | You’ll need to make sure that your mailing address is added to your Patreon account and visible to me; otherwise, all that clicking will be for nothing!
Also, I’ll be streaming live on Thursday, the 12th, at 1 pm EST from the Exalted Funeral YouTube Channel, chatting about the new game I’ve designed for Meow Wolf. |  | | | | | | | Saltheart RPG | The Smurfs and Mech Combat |  | Talk about a misleading headline! For those of you who have been patiently waiting, The Smurfs Roleplaying Game is somewhere between China and the US… The $138,565 Kickstarter will begin fulfillment in April. Maestro Media won’t stop smurfing until everyone gets their pledge. If you are lost and smurfing to yourself, how did I miss this Kickstarter? The official The Smurfs Roleplaying Game (yep, I wrote it) will be hitting retail later this year! You can still pre-order here: | | | Now about those Mechs… My podcast partner Gabe and I had the opportunity to play the Lancer RPG by Massif Press, and I have to say that if you like mech combat that is tactical and you like roleplaying games, Lancer might be your speed… not that you couldn’t have Smurfs in Mechs, nobody is judging you.
Check out this latest episode of Analytic Dice podcast and join in on the conversation.
Smurf you later! Kevin | | | | | | | Magazine Madness – The results Are In! | The pool has closed, and the results are in! I must say, I am surprised by what people are interested in seeing! Having a ranked voting structure allows for some major and minor shifts of the results to create a nice curve to see what people are interested in.
Each vote was weighted based on preferences, with most interested being worth 3 points, next being 2, third place being 1, and least interested being worth -1.
With that said, the results are *drum roll* |  | 1st Place – Dungeon Magazine: I’m not entirely surprised by this! I think this is a magazine that people would be interested in since it’s a companion to The Dragon but was more focused to have modules in it. My bias going into this magazine is that the adventures are meh (with a few outliers), and some industry inside information about TSR’s management of the publication. So I am curious to see how it holds up! Dragon lasted for a long time so I will primarily zoom in on the first year of the publication.
Second place was a three-way tie! So I adjusted the results to factor in the total before applying the “least interested” category to figure out the order from there, which leads us to… |  | 2nd Place – Sorcerer’s Apprentice: Now this one was a surprise! Following the polls, this did not have any first choice votes initially, but it made up for it with some last minute votes! All I know about this publication is that Steve Jackson said it was the best gaming publication in Space Gamer, so I guess we will see! This is also one of the harder magazines to come by, so I will only be able to work with a limited pool of issues.
For third place I will have the two remaining tied votes… |  | 3rd Place – Imagine and Adventure Gaming! Two magazines that both seem to function as alternatives to The Dragon during their prime, with Adventure Gaming lasting from 1981-1983 and Imagine being from 1983-1985. I’m mostly curious to see the difference in presentation and content due to the shift in publication quality from the early 80s to mid-80s as well as the graphical difference between US and UK publications (so far the UK has blown US magazines away with this.)
So what about the remaining publications? Well, I still want to look at those and plan to do so, but I’m really shocked by some of the following rankings! |  | 4th Place – Adventurer Magazine: The other UK magazine on the list that ran for a short amount of time, but looks to give White Dwarf a run for its money!
5th Place – Ares Magazine: The SPI publication that lasted twelve issues before being turned into an editorial in Dragon, then dissolving into nothing. Ares is notable for including a game (including chits) in each issue!
6th Place – Challenge Magazine: I feel like GDW’s work outside of Traveller is overlooked, even by me, so I understand why this one is ranked so low. But i;m excited to give it a shot because the other GDW games are classics in their own right, and it’s high time I dive into them out of my love for Traveller and fascination with Twilight: 2000 (I’m a big fan of the Free League edition)
In the last two rankings, I have some strong opinions about how poorly they did, and I feel like they are misunderstood underdogs of the poll! |  | 7th Place – The General: This one was extremely polarizing. The General was a couple of people’s first choice but was unfortunately many people’s least interested one. Which is a shame because The General covers a totally different side of the hobby that folks overlook or assume to be a small population: Boxed war games, primarily the chit-and-hex variety. I do want to point out that this magazine is the longest running of all of them, lasting from 1964 to 1998!
The General has shown me the impact of Squad Leader and Advanced Squad Leader as being its own gaming community, much like how there are Warhammer folks. On top of that, Avalon Hill continued to publish supporting content for games that were out of print in this magazine! For example, the Dune board game from the 1970s had an expansion published in an issue from 1997 that featured a cover that consisted of a screenshot from Verhoeven’s incredible Starship Troopers film, which Avalon Hill also made a board game of decades prior. So this one I will be very interested in checking out for the two other people who are also interested!
8th Place – The Duelist: Woooooow, this one did so poorly, its score ended up in the negatives (-3 points!) Now I understand that most people reading this might be more RPG-focused, but TCGs are in the venn diagram of tabletop hobby interests. The Duellist has some incredible 90s vibes going on, and is a window into the early days of Magic the Gathering before it became the behemoth that it is now. It focuses on TCG news, deck lists (a big part of modern magic players), and some great graphics; it’s something to behold. I feel like this is a publication that would appear more to pre-modern and Old School format MTG players than the general modern player, but it’s still a piece of gaming history that I think is worth highlighting.
Wow, what a spread! So now that you all know the reading order, please feel free to join me in exploring the publications! I will provide a link to the internet archive for the following week’s magazine issues so you can check them out before I post my opinion. That said, next week I will start with Dungeon Magazine. For those who want to read along, here is a link to an archive of issues! Happy Reading, and until next time!
| | | Ham & Egg Publishing | | |  | Ahoy!
Not much to report these days in Hamlandia. Geo and I are both heads down finishing Children of UMA: Death By Dino for 321RPG.
With that said, after almost six years of creating books and zines, I had an epiphany the other day. Why not make one just for fun?
So Levi Combs and I are putting together a series of zines dedicated to some of our all-time favorite character actors. The best part is that we are doing it with a bunch of our friends. It always makes things so much more fun when you are rockin’ with pals.
Keep your peepers peeled because we will be announcing the first one soon.
-Hambone | | | Solarian Games | ModCon is coming May 30th |  | Game submissions are open now, and badges are on sale for the first ever ModCon. It’s happening May 30th at the beautiful Smith College Conference Center in Northampton, MA. ModCon is a one-day convention dedicated to the modern-era genre of TTRPGs. That includes games like…
321 RPG • Call of Cthulhu • World of Darkness • Cyberpunk • Shadowrun • Marvel Super Heroes Mutants & Masterminds • Delta Green • Savage Worlds • Burn 2d6 • Apocalypse World • Masks Dresden Files • Night’s Black Agents • Twilight 2000 • Kids on Bikes • Troy City Mysteries • Tales from the Loop • Outgunned • Top Secret • Fiasco • Triangle Agency Weird Wars • Neon Lords of the Toxic Wasteland • Weird Heroes of Public Access
It’s going to be a great day of gaming, dedicated to all kinds of settings in the 20th and 21st centuries, in worlds both like our own and very, very different. Sign up below and we’ll see you there! | | |
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Your editor this week has been John Hambone McGuire of Ham & Egg Publishing.
Keep on emailing us at hello@analogunion.com to let us know what you’d like to see more of, less of, or just ideas you’ve got. If you like the Analog Union newsletter, please tell your friends to sign up at AnalogUnion.com. See you next week! -JHM |
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