RPG News you can peruse (Jobe Bittman)

Coming after the announcement for Top32, 

Goodman Games announces the winner of the Mystery Map contest, not me...heh

Mystery Map Winner Announced – We are very excited to announce the winner of our Mystery Map Adventure Design Competition. Congratulations to Jobe Bittman for his submission, “The One Who Watches From Below.” Look for it in stores later this year! Thanks to everyone who entered – the submissions were great and the competition was fierce.

Jobe seems to be living the dream, He wins the Mystery Map contest for Goodman Games, and he's an RPG Superstar contender, having made Top 32 with the,

Quiver of Spiderkind Aura moderate conjuration; CL 8th
Slot —; Price 32,000 gp; Weight 2 lbs.
Description This chitinous quiver resembles an elongated spider’s abdomen, and comfortably holds 20 arrows. When placed on the back, thin segmented legs wrap around the wearer to hold it in place. Pedipalps near the quiver’s opening can be commanded to secure a thick strand of spider silk to the end of a drawn arrow 20 times per day. The unnaturally high tensile strength of spider’s thread allows the projectile to be used like a lightweight harpoon. A ranged attack made with the arrow on a target within 50 feet temporarily grants the Grapple special ability (Ultimate Combat) to the firing weapon. When securely anchored, the spider silk can also be used for climbing. The silk can support 500 lbs of weight before snapping. Every 50 feet of silk used for climbing consumes a single daily use of the item’s power.
Construction Requirements Craft Wondrous Item, Web; Cost 16,000 gp

RPG News You Can Peruse

I missed this announcement on Tuesday, what with RPG Superstar and all.

Paizo Publishing and Gen Con Reach Multi-Year Co-Sponsorship AgreementTuesday, 10:00 AMPaizo Publishing®, LLC, publisher of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, has announced an on-going partnership with Gen Con LLC,The Best Four Days In Gaming!™ Starting with Gen Con Indy 2013, August 15-18 at the Indiana Convention Center, Paizo will become a Co-Sponsor, supporting the convention at the highest level of sponsorship available. The deal extends for three years, concluding with Gen Con Indy 2015.
Gen Con's CEO, Adrian Swartout said, "Gen Con is privileged to have such a strong partner. Adventure and storytelling games create lifelong memories, and those unforgettable experiences are what Gen Con and Paizo have committed to create together."
As part of this agreement, Paizo will increase their Exhibit Hall presence (Booth #203) by approximately 30% in 2013. Paizo also will expand their offering of supported events, hosted in the Sagamore Ballroom of the Indiana Convention Center. Paizo joins Mayfair Games as a Gen Con multi-year Co-Sponsor. Badges for this year's show will become available for attendees on January 27 at noon (Eastern) at gencon.com.
Erik Mona, Publisher at Paizo said, "Paizo's new sponsorship of the show is a reflection of Gen Con's importance to our business, to Pathfinder RPG players, and to the greater community of gamers. I haven't missed a Gen Con since my first, in 1995. And I never will. Gen Con is the best game convention in America, a giant gathering of fellow gamers, and the best gaming marketplace you could imagine. Year after year, I come for the great gaming and the new releases, but these days I also go because it's a reunion of all the friends I've made there over the years. It's the year's greatest can't-miss event."About Paizo PublishingPaizo Publishing®, LLC is a leading publisher of fantasy roleplaying games, accessories, board games, and novels. Paizo's Pathfinder® Roleplaying Game, the result of the largest open playtest in the history of tabletop gaming, is currently the best-selling tabletop roleplaying game in hobby stores. Pathfinder Adventure Path is the most popular and best-selling monthly product in the tabletop RPG industry. Paizo.com is the leading online hobby retail store, offering tens of thousands of products from a variety of publishers to customers all over the world. In the nine years since its founding, Paizo Publishing has received more than 50 major awards and has grown to become one of the most influential companies in the hobby games industry.
About Gen ConGen Con, LLC produces the largest consumer hobby, fantasy, science fiction and adventure game convention in North America. Gen Con will return to the Indianapolis Convention Center on August 15-18, 2013. Acquired in 2002 by former CEO and founder of Wizards of the Coast Peter Adkison, the company is headquartered in Seattle, Washington. For more information visit the website at gencon.com. For up-to-the minute details, check out http://www.facebook.com/genconindy.

Speaking of GenCon...Savage Saturday gets more furious!

Gen Con and Origins: Savaging More Than Saturday!As most of you know, Savage Saturday Night has been outrageously successful at both Origins and Gen Con—maybe a trifle too successful. This year we’ll be taking a break from Savage Saturday Nights at Origins and Gen Con to concentrate on making more Savage Worlds games available throughout both conventions.
Savage Saturday Nights have been amazing, and we’ve been thrilled with the turnout and participation. But at conventions like Origins and Gen Con, they just don’t fit well into the scheduling and planning systems. One of the drives behind Savage Saturday Nights has been to make sure folks who want to play (or try) Savage Worlds get the chance, especially since games tend to fill up in the first few hours of registration at these conventions. The popularity of Savage Saturday Night at these two shows, though, collapsed most of the Savage Worlds games together into one slot on Saturday night, which is just too limited to get more people into more Savage games.
This year, we’ll be working with the scheduling systems to get more Savage Worldsgames every day so more people have the opportunity to play and the enjoy themselves, or to try out the system for their very first time.
You’ll be seeing more information about that in the coming days. If you’re a Savage Worlds GM, we’ll have some exciting news for you. If you’re a Savage Worlds player, we think you’ll be pleased as well.

Stay tuned here at the Pinnacle site for updates and the convention game news. Event registration for both Origins and Gen Con is now open! 

RPG News you can Peruse - City of Heroes

Well it is with a heavy nostalgic heart that I bring some sad MMORPG news. City of Heroes will cease to be before the end of the year, so if you want to strap on your cape one last time before it's gone you better do it soon. I think their freeplay model was flawed, I know when I logged on for free play that it was effectively so limited I didn't even want to try. Other free-to-play models have worked, and worked well, when they work they bring in additional players for the paying players to group with, without a community to support it, a game will fail. I played CoH for 3 years, when I trimmed the fat of paying games, City of Heroes was the one game I kept up, until I had to stop payment on all games due to the rough economic times. (AKA, losing my job several times in 3 years).

http://na.cityofheroes.com/en/news/news_archive/thank_you.php

Farewell Paragon City, your memory shall live on.

RPG News you can Peruse - RedBrick stepping out of RPG publishing

Well I have been expecting this after hearing James being interviewed at GenCon.

RedBrick Retiring from Game Publishing

This is an open letter to the game community and to fans of RedBrick.
In a couple of months, RedBrick will be nine years old. We started in 2003 with the Earthdawn license, picking up Fading Suns in 2007, Blue Planet in 2008, and Demonworld in 2011. During this time, the number of people involved waxed and waned. Everyone was part-time (we still are), but we had dozens of talented people contributing in different ways to their favorite games at any one time.

The company was born by accident -- an email sent without my knowledge, in fact -- and it became an opportunity to work with emerging technologies, print-on-demand and e-publishing being key. RedBrick was an early supporter of DriveThruRPG (now OneBookShelf) and an early adopter of Lulu's POD services.

We suffered ups and downs, as all companies do. Some of those were decisions made by myself; others, through the vagaries of real life intervening on members of the RedBrick team. Personally, one life-changing event meant the company relocated from New Zealand to the United States, where it is based today.

But all things have their time. Different opportunities arise and we need to embrace them for what they are. In this case, RedBrick has served its purpose and now it is time for it to become something else.

At Gen Con Indy 2012, RedBrick shared a booth with FASA. There are several interviews on the Internet recorded at Gen Con that summarize the changes and plans going on at present. As is the way of things, there will no doubt be rumor and speculation and all the usual interplay that happens on the Internet. But the reasons for RedBrick's retirement from game publishing are actually very simple, and much of this is just timing:

Business: You could call this lessons learned about people and business. I've made both good decisions and (very) poor decisions; I've been both hands on and (very) uninvolved in how the business runs; I've made many friends along the way, and I've dropped the ball and lost some of those friends also. Overall, I think we had more wins than losses, but it's time for the old ways of doing business to change.

Personal: Part of the reason for setting up RedBrick was to involve my late son in the company (he was a gifted child, very social and intelligent, and crazy about gaming). This isn't going to happen and I need to move on and get some closure.

Opportunity: I was offered an opportunity to work with people far more experienced in this industry than I am. Such opportunities do not come up often, so the answer was yes. To that end, I have accepted a position as President of FASA Games, Inc., working with one of the original founders and owner of FASA Corporation. The upcoming effort and commitment required, however, means that I cannot run multiple game publishing businesses and a day job.

Timing: Well, this is always in the hands of fate. The opportunity came up earlier this year, but the pace of change required to implement it has meant a LOT of work in a very short time, especially with commitments to Gen Con already in hand. So we've had to roll with the punches a lot, sorry.

Here's a summary of what's happening with various game lines previously held by RedBrick:
Earthdawn, Demonworld: These licenses reverted back to FASA Corporation and have been subsequently picked up by FASA Games, Inc.

Fading Suns, Noble Armada, Blue Planet: These licenses reverted back to their licensors and have been subsequently picked up by FASA Games, Inc.

Any future plans that RedBrick had in place or announced are now void or being reviewed. While some RedBrick personnel are working for FASA, not everyone has come across. FASA will be running with Revised Editions of Earthdawn, Blue Planet, and Fading Suns. The Savage Worlds and Pathfinder game lines for Earthdawn are coming across, along with Demonworld. For the most part, it's status quo across the board. "Business as usual."

The RedBrick Forums and Online Store will remain in place, even after the FASA web presence becomes operational in the next month or so. During this transition period, RedBrick is happy to share resources with FASA -- we will sell FASA products on the RedBrick Shop, for instance. Until FASA is fully operational, we will make announcements for new products on the RedBrick web site. In this respect, no change is expected for a while. However, most, if not all, of the ebook products currently sold by RedBrick on OneBookShelf will be going away in the very near future. Many of these will not be coming back.

FASA will make their own announcements in due course, but with the cat out of the bag after Gen Con, it seemed appropriate to let people know what was happening with RedBrick. I do want to be very clear that the decisions to retire RedBrick and the transition to FASA are completely independent and unrelated to recent changes within RedBrick. I do admit, however, that the opportunity to work with FASA did change the timing of RedBrick's retirement, bringing it forward.

So what is happening to RedBrick after this transition is complete? Well, we'll still be around. Many years ago, I promised my late son that he and I would work on some books together. We talked about some ideas and it's time to start getting those down on paper and into print. RedBrick will become an imprint for fiction, no longer publishing games. And at a personal level, I'm hoping it will help achieve the aforementioned closure. "And so to bed."

Lastly, I want to thank the fans and developers who have supported RedBrick over the last nine years. It has been a truly exciting, scary, emotional, sometimes sad, but overall fun journey and everyone who has been a part of it should be proud of being part of the community. You are all a talented bunch and I'm proud that we have collectively been a part of the history of our hobby.
"And so we dim the lights and pour a glass of wine. It is a time for reflection, a time for change."

Thank you all very much.
Kind regards,
James SuttonManaging Partner, RedBrick LLC

James, I'm personally thanking you for keeping Earthdawn alive for the last 10 years, I can only imagine what it would be like to lose my boys, hell I get teary when I think of them moving out. You kept my favorite game alive, and I have watched it improve over the last several years with the Mongoose 3rd edition. With FASA Back in control, I hope to see Earthdawn rise to take its proper place in the gaming industry, High Fantasy done right!

May you find closure with this change...

RPG News You Can Peruse

Geek&Sundry to team up with Target!!!

This is pretty big news, and I'm quite glad it isn't WalMart, could it hurt the Gamer Industry, not likely, I think it could only help, I hope to one day see Pathfinder Beginner Boxes at my local Target soon. Gamers that are already gamers, probably won't be the target (no pun intended), audience, but exposure to tweens and early teens could get lots more people involved in gaming!

So look for the
  starting in August!!!!