Gaming Links

Here is our regular mixed bag of roleplaying sites, inspiration and general weirdness.

First, here are a few sites to get you your regular dose of roleplaying news. If you want the information every day then mosey on over to Role-Play News . Here you'll get up to the minute information on what's hot or not.

For the slightly longer view, and delivered weekly to an email of your choice, the one you want is RolePlaying Tips . This week's missive includes a quick look at the nine-element script template, a steal from movie writing.

Finally a new rival, RPGevolution is a new ezine, published in PDF format. Issue #1 weighs in at a hefty 1MB and contains a new d20-based game, Frankenstein 3000, a free card game, fiction and a number of interesting articles. Issue #2 is due out soon. Good luck guys!

Moving into roleplaying inspiration are two daily comics that having both been arounf a while. The first is Sluggy Freelance which covers the sordid lives of a bunch of students as they contend with demons, girlfriends, time travel and vicious dwarf lop-eared rabbits. It's so good I even bought the T-shirt!

A close second is the very Traveller like Freefall following the misadventures of a robot, his ugly chum and their uplifted dog engineer. So far they have just about managed to get their ship repaired. Who hasn't been there?

Next we have some software that I have used to help with my games. First is the Traveller-friendly Heaven and Earth . This generates whole sectors of stars then populates them with stars, planets and people. All this in a UPP format for Traveller or text for other games. It really is quite powerful.

Our second batch of software is a number of products from The Cage , a campaign manager for World of Darkness games and strangely, a fantasy city designer that works out the proportions of the different occupations in your city. This is similar to the Domesday Project featured in our previous links page but runs off-line.

Back to roleplaying pages again with a raft of sites for the new Hero Wars game. I have been running this recently and the system is interesting and does meld well with Glorantha , the world invented by Greg Stafford. However you need a lot more background information to be able to run the game properly. Here are a few of the best:

• Wesley's Glorantha Site III looks wonderful and is dedicated to the Hero Wars game. It has background, scenarios and a contact list for players.
• Nick Brooke's Home Page has some comprehensive background on the Lunar Empire, Carmania and Sartar, much of which is drawn from LARPs that Nick runs.
• Glorindex is the homepage of MOB (Michael O'Brien). If you are tured off by the namby-pamby tree-hugging hippy crap towards which some writers tend then this is a breath of fresh air. MOB has his own Glorantha-lite game called MGF (Maximum Game Fun) with some great scenarios, such as Rune Metal Jacket, the original Live Action Trollball rules and much more.
• David Dunham's site is rather disorded but does have the rules to the Rune Quest variant Pendragon Pass that inspired Hero Wars plus plenty of other information drawn from house campaigns.

If you like your roleplaying slighty more disturbed than this, you could try out a new horror zine called The Awakening. Some of the themes are rather adult so do be careful.

Our final list of links concerns the revitalised convention Dragonmeet (see the Highlights page). This convention in London in November is supported by a number of British roleplaying companies:

• Hogshead, the leading British RPG company who produce Warhmmer FRP, Nobilis and the New Style Games (Baron Munchausen, Viloence, Puppetland, Pantheon ...)
• Profantasy Software who make the top maping programme Campaign Cartographer
• Nightfall Games creators of SLA Industries
• Britannia Games owners of the Chilvary & Sorcery licence
• Pelgrane Press developers of the forthcoming Dying Earth game.

Found a hot new site on the net? Discovered the missing link? Let us know here.