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Far West: a world of dust and legends; of gunslingers and martial arts masters; of Imperial power and frontier wisdom. Blending the spaghetti western with the tropes of Chinese wuxia and a dash of steampunk, the shared world of Far West will include short story collections, a web series and a pen and paper RPG. More »
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Dungeons & Dragons: Daggerdale, released this week, provides a fun (if somewhat predictable) dose of RPG action based on D&D 4th edition rules. Team up with friends to save the Dalelands from the Zhentarim threat, and see how many times you laugh out loud at the stilted dialogue. More »
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Now that Dungeons & Dragons is going mainstream, it's only a matter of time until everyone has their own Dungeon Master. Watch as Adam Busch (Buffy's Warren) shows you how a collection of aged geeks get back into the game. More »
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Community has continually won us over with their genre episode exploits, from the Right Stuff space spoof to the action flick parody in "Modern Warfare." So when the students of Greendale revealed that their next episode was taking on the world of Dungeons & Dragons, we readied ourselves for a full alternate universe. We expected giant winged Abed monsters, or Jeff sporting a tunic while fighting off sex-starved elf maidens. Thankfully, we were wrong. Once again Community flipped the scales and delivered a stripped down, but glorious, game of D&D. And by doing so exposed a mainstream audience of non-gamers to the lush and deeply imaginative world of role playing. More »
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Community, the show that has lovingly harpooned every genre staple from zombies to superheroes, is taking on Dungeons and Dragons next. Next Thursday NBC will air their fantasy role playing game special episode. Donald Glover is Bing Bong the Archer. More »
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Shock: Human Contact is a hard scifi RPG where the players construct a story around the first meeting between an egalitarian, advanced civilization and the alien cultures they encounter when they travel through wormholes in space. More »
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Did you know they made a Smallville RPG? Ed Grabianowski of Robot Viking recently scoped out this new role-playing game and found that this character-driven title offered a lot for Smallville and RPG aficionados alike. More »
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Can't get enough military mecha fighting scifi battles on distant worlds? Classic game Heavy Gear offers a rich pseudohistorical backdrop for mech-on-mech warfare, and a deep suite of tactical rules. It's sure to please both wargamers and giant robot fans. More »
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Sci-fi RPG Battlelords of the 23rd Century hit its 20th anniversary this year, and publisher SSDC has big plans in store for everyone who enjoys "Roleplaying in a Dangerous Future." More »
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Being a kid is tough. Being a kid with an extra-dimensional shambling gibbering drooling non-Euclidean monster for a pet? That's something else entirely. Welcome to Monsters and Other Childish Things. More »
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You're a hard-working Rep for AwesomeTech Solutions (ATS), a global corporation that values creativity, the future, and nostalgia. Except it doesn't value any of those things, only profit. And they want you to assassinate Mickey Mouse. The skills to pull it off have been uploaded into your brain, but are you really willing to sell your soul for the good of the Brand? Of course you are! You're playing MSG. More »
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It's nearly dusk as you approach the abandoned supermarket, crouching behind a burned out hover-bus. You nearly make a mad dash to the entrance, dreaming of the food and medical supplies you might find inside. Then you notice the mutilated corpse chained up above the door. Raiders! Cautiously, you watch the parking lot...there they are. Heavily armed, too. You'll be able to loot the store if you want to, but there will be blood. In the post-apocalyptic world of Fallout 3, nothing comes easy. More »
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What happens when ancient evils awaken in the year 2085? One seriously f-ed up RPG campaign setting. The world of CthulhuTech revolves around the Aeon War, an ongoing struggle between hideous aliens, otherdimensional horrors, freaky cultists and vast conspiracies. And they all have battle tanks and giant mechs. But the core rulebook wasn't enough to describe this dark future, so Vade Mecum: the CthulhuTech Companion delves even deeper into this world of sanity-destroying rituals and twisted technology. More »
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In the Dark Times between the end of the Clone Wars and the rise of the Rebellion, the Galactic Empire ruled supreme. Jedi were hunted down like dogs, and heroes were few and far between. Star Wars: Force Unleashed, released today, might be an awesome video game, but you can experience this dark, oppressive era of the Star Wars universe from many different points of view with the Star Wars RPG Force Unleashed Campaign Guide. More »
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Click to viewA lot of Star Wars fans first discovered the expanded Star Wars universe via the Knights of the Old Republic video games. Now you too can create your own characters and experience the rich, exciting era that took place thousands of years before the saga of Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader. The Knights of the Old Republic Campaign Guide is a sourcebook for the current edition of the Star Wars role-playing game. It comes out this week, and we've got all the details, plus previews of some awesome interior art. More »
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He's a legendary figure in Star Wars mythology, a brutal military strategist who lead the Mandalorians to galactic infamy in the days of the Old Republic. With his Mandalorian Neo-Crusaders, Mandalore the Ultimate had a hand in shaping the galaxy we all came to know and love. Wizards of the Coast is releasing a pre-painted miniatures set and a campaign handbook for the Star Wars RPG focused on the exciting Old Republic era, and we've got an exclusive sneak preview of the Mandalore the Ultimate mini, as well as his stat card. More »
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You're trying to finish a smuggling run and drop a load of spice in the Taanab system when a heavily armed ship shows up on your tail. Is it that bounty hunter Bossk, a Hutt crime lord, or maybe even a Dark Jedi? Now that your gamemaster owns Threats of the Galaxy, it could be any of them. Crap. More »
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The Calixis Sector is overrun by rogue psykers, heretics and traitors to the Imperium, and Fantasy Flight Games has just handed you all the tools you need to hunt them down. The Inquisitor's Handbook makes it that much cooler to be judge, jury and executioner in the Warhammer 40k game universe. We've got a list of reasons why this supplement for an RPG once feared dead and abandoned by its publisher is getting rave reviews. More »
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This trailer for Star Ocean 4, the latest in the successful line of Japanese-style RPGs, shows us just some of the strange interplanetary phenomena we'll visit, and the spaceships we'll use to visit them. And the game's main character has the awesome name of Edge Maverick. Click through for more details. More »
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Gamma World was role-playing game company TSR's attempt at a post-apocalyptic role-playing system. TSR hit the big time with the mega-successful Dungeons and Dragons franchise, but the company's history is littered with non-starters. Still, when it came out, Gamma World felt like a winner - edgy post-apocalypse adventuring humans, robots and mutated bunnies contend in the ruins of a future Earth. The rules themselves are more or less D&D lite - character stats, melee rounds, and randomized combat mechanics. You can play as a Pure Strain Human, of untainted genome, but the fun is in mutated humans, and even mutated animals with human intelligence - if you want to be a panda toting a Mark VII Blaster Rifle, you've got it. More »
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With Star Wars: The Force Unleashed coming out later this year, it's a perfect time to look at the history of LucasArts video games. Unfortunately, the long road of Star Wars tie-in games hasn't always been pretty. We've come a long way since the old 8-bit games of 1983, and here are some of the high and low points of the past 25 years. More »
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Virtual worlds are driving people to suicide — and making them fall in love. A new documentary, opening this weekend, follows seven people who are devoted to virtual worlds, and finds them struggling with addiction and discovering romance. Second Skin, which debuts at the SXSW Film Festival in Austin, showcases players' devotion to worlds like Second Life, and soon the science fiction wonderment addiction that is Starcraft 2). Click through to view the trailer. More »
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Gary Gygax, co-inventor of Dungeons and Dragons, will probably be best remembered as the man who brought role playing games into the lives of millions of teenagers in the 1970s, and who helped spawn an entire industry. If you've ever rolled an eight-sided dice in a game, it's thanks to him. While his bread and butter was swords and sworcery, he was also an avid science fiction fan (he even designed a scifi D&D module, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, whose artwork is pictured here). He worked on several scifi games, as well as writing several science fiction stories. With the sad news today that Gary passed away in his home, we take a long, triviatastic look at his love for gaming and science fiction. More »
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If you remember your history, you can probably recall Indy pointing a bazooka at Belloq and the Ark of the Covenent in the original Raiders of the Lost Ark. He threatens to blow it up and send them all back to God, but in the end he just can't do it. Does that mean he'll get a second chance in The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? Maybe he's using it as a parenting aid for those moments when Shia gets a bit unruly. At any rate, it looks like Marion drives a car, Indy points (and we hope, shoots) a rocket propelled grenade, and Shia probably says "No, no, no, no!" a lot. [Empire Magazine] More »
]]> http://io9.com/index.php?op=postcommentfeed&postId=350765&view=rss&microfeed=true Ben X, a European movie about an autistic teen who spends most of his time online as a warrior in a World of Warcraft-esque fantasy game, is about to get a U.S. makeover. More »
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