A video from TNT network about the making of the comic book for their TV show “Falling Skies”.

Here’s the link to the web comic:
http://www.tnt.tv/series/fallingskies/webcomic/

I’ve added some new pages to the site that incorporate feeds from DriveThruRPG. One page contains the latest Reviews from that site and one lists the Biggest Sellers on the site. Lest you think that our site is just a front for selling DriveThruRPG products, I’d like to remind you that I’m still developing the site and there will be other content later on. The DriveThruRPG content feeds are available and I think does show some of the current pulse of the gaming hobby.

Speaking of which, I’ve also added a page to start collecting what I’ve grandly called (drum roll quickly builds to a crescendo in the back ground) “Rules of Good Game Design“.

So check out the pages and make some comments, if you please.

I still remember the day I found and purchased “The Traveller Book” by Marc W. Miller, of Game Designers’ Workshop, at my local bookstore in Michigan. It was a bit tattered, and I was tempted not to buy it because of its poor condition, but the concept was so totally new and simple to me that I couldn’t pass it up.

That very same book still sits on my shelf despite all that has happened to me and the places I’ve moved to in life. By today’s standards for printed role playing game tomes it is very basic. But I still like a game that keeps things simple, yet still makes for an adventurous and fun time.

A PDF version of the book is still available through DriveThruRPG. What was it that was so special to me about this book?

Of course I knew about Dungeons & Dragons at that time, which started the whole role playing game genre. D&D seemed pretty clunky to me in organization and I never ended up actually playing it, although I loved the genre and themes that it spoke to. What impressed me about Traveller was the broad scope of what it tried to cover. At the time it was a very richly laid out world to explore. In addition it was a science fiction genre game, a genre I was very much into and one no one else had really developed well. I also thought the artwork in the book was very evocative of sci-fi at the time.

Later on I think Traveller got bogged down with the detail inherent in a sci-fi game, and in its own game system. There were eventually so many tables in such minute detail that you might spend all your time just trying to decipher them. As computer games gained in sophistication all of this detail was inevitably turned over to the computer to handle, although Traveller itself never made it onto computers as a computer game as we know it today, as far as I know. Thus the rise of the computer as a gaming machine.

And therein lies another problem for me as a gamer. With a computer game you’re sitting at a desk with a keyboard and mouse and screen. That’s fine for what it is, and I do non-gaming work at the computer for many hours a day. But computers do not lend themselves well to multiple simultaneous users sitting at one computer, each player has to have their own. With the advent of voice interaction that becomes less of a problem for a group of players to play together. But gone is the main value of an RPG game, the social fun of having a group of friends or family sitting together around a table or in the living room having fun playing a game.

Now that so much of life involves the use of a computer anyway, the need for getting away from it for awhile starts to become more important. Besides, the immediacy of a paper and friends game has its own rewards, unless one of the players is just being a jerk and people start thinking of heading home.

So the ultimate appeal of Traveller for me was that all I needed was one hardback book, something to write on and write with, and a little imagination, and I could go wherever my dreams might happen to take me. I think to this day that is my main goal in the design of a game, keep the technology requirements of the game down to the very minimum necessary.

DriveThru RPG Purchase Link: CT-TTB-The Traveller Book

We finally made the plunge into the world of game design and game fandom with the launch of this site. The site is intended mostly for traditional pen and paper games, commonly referred to as “role playing games”.

As of this writing we’re not quite sure what will be appearing in these pages but we’ll see how it goes.