Others are better fit to do this post, but don’t have access to other commentators, except for a rather brainy girl I met one day who is constantly learning about new subjects.
She is the love of my life and I want to introduce you all to her. Her name is Wikipe-tan.
Anyway, with Wikipe’s help, I can talk about 4e Blackmoor which is out now. I don’t have it because I’m broke. But maybe you can buy it now and tell me what you think. From what I heard, this product contains 6 new classes, a new power source, a new race, and truckloads of paragon paths. I’m a sucker for 4e mechanics, so I would check it out just for that, even if I’ve felt that some previous 4e GSL products were either too bland or too overpowered.
I’m skeptical as to whether there is any practical purpose for blackmoor fans who don’t play 4e to get this, except maybe as a sort of weird donation to Dave Arneson’s legacy. There seems to be a lot of crunch in these 260 pages, so old school blackmoorians (blackmoorians?) would probably not find a use for it. For the rest of us, it seems like it would be an interesting book.
For those who don’t know what Blackmoor is, I’ll let Wikipe-tan explain.
Blackmoor is a fantasy role-playing game campaign setting generally associated with the game Dungeons & Dragons. It originally evolved in the early 1970s as the personal setting of Dave Arneson, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, first as a setting for Arneson’s miniature wargames, then as an early testing ground for what would become D&D. Blackmoor is the longest continuously played fantasy role-playing campaign in existence.
I’m not much a fan (as you can tell from asking my lovely assistant for help) of it, and D&D settings like it (the whole medieval fantasy europe thing doesn’t do it for me anymore), but I’d be willing to give the book a spin for the 4e mechanics held within. We’ll see if I can– yeah I probably won’t be able to purchase this, but who knows, maybe by the grace of God I can get a copy of it to review sometime. I’m pretty interested in it despite it seeming like a setting in which I would not play in.
I wasn’t aware that Blackmoor was like medieval fantasy Europe. It seemed more like a Swords & Sorcery swampy wilderness region with the occasional odd bit of high-technology to me.
My bad.
“(the whole swampy swords and sorcery old school medieval fantasy pulp fiction europe thing doesn’t do it for me anymore)”
I’ll patch it in later.
I love the Blackmoor setting, especially in its reconstituted version published a few years ago and in the “living” campaign it spawned. Too much D&D and other fantasy RPG can be soooo serious and self-absorbed, and Blackmoor has a lovely balance of heroic fantasy and tongue-in-cheek to it. It’s uber-villain’s name is the Egg of Coot. It’s nasty, but players crack up at the name and the series of puns generated by it. (“That cadre of wizards was fried by the Egg.”)
Mind you, I’m a huge fan of tongue-in-cheek in general (my favorite RPG of all time? Paranoia, baby!) and I’m allergic to the excessively serious (WOD). If you love the serious and deeply-detailed, you’ll hate Blackmoor. If you love RPGs for the escapist fun-factor, Blackmoor may be just your thing.
Avid readers can tell you that I love tongue-in-cheek and whimsical things and inject them into every game I play, but probably not the kinds you like and probably not the kinds I’d find in pre-installed in an RPG book.
Paranoia is indeed pretty humorous to me. Puns, on the other hand, rarely do anything for me.
If Blackmoor made a references to Megaman 2, I guess I’d be all over it.