Steve Jackson's Blog, page 73

November 17, 2023: The (Pathfinder) Revolution Has Begun!

Pathfinder Revolution! is available today at your friendly local game store! This game of gutter statecraft and secret bids for power is based on Revolution! , which was designed by Phillip duBarry and debuted way back in 2009. The setting for that game was a colonial city, which makes sense for a game involving an uprising. However, Pathfinder Revolution! transports the action to the world of Golarion and the city of Korvosa. Why this city for this game? That was a question I had myself when I first heard of the title.

It turns out that Korvosa was a natural fit for a Revolution! reboot. The city is the setting for a Paizo adventure path called Curse of the Crimson Throne . According to Pathfinder lore, Korvosa's Crimson Throne is cursed – the leaders who rule from this seat of power are fated never to die of old age. (True, the legend doesn't specifically state that the ruler will be violently deposed, but the possibility is always there.) Korvosa is also home to groups and characters that would prove "useful" during periods of civil disorder. One name in particular that jumped out at me was the Catsdew Lofties, a group of lady cat burglars who rely on stealth to get what they want. (To me, they immediately call to mind The Forty Elephants, a notorious gang of London shoplifters.) In Pathfinder Revolution! , you can bribe these and other groups and people to join your side using gold, blackmail, and force. But while you're using your resources to gain influence, so are all of the other players at the table – and you won't know what they're planning until the time comes to reveal and resolve everyone's bids. Do you have what it takes to control the city when the revolution finally comes?

You don't need to have any knowledge of Paizo's world of Golarion to enjoy Pathfinder Revolution! At the same time, this game gives Pathfinder fans a new way of exploring a classic setting. Pick up a copy from one of our retail partners or order from Warehouse23.com, and get ready for revolution to come to your gaming table!

– Katie Duffy

Warehouse 23 News: Why Is The Darkness Blinking?

They're trapped between the realm of the living and the dead . . . and they're not too pleased about it. The Book of Unlife adds 44 unliving monsters to your The Fantasy Trip campaigns, along with a complete adventure setting. Live like there's too many tomorrows thanks to Warehouse 23!

November 18, 2023: Explore 3D Printing At Your Local Library

There are a lot of 3D printing hobbyists out there, but many people encounter a significant barrier to entry – cost. Desktop 3D printers can cost anywhere from $250 to $10,000, and that's not including the price of PPE, resin, and other accessories. Fortunately, libraries across the country are offering people a chance to experiment with 3D printing.

Wait, libraries?

Yes. If it's been a while since you've visited your local library branch, you may be surprised to learn that many have gone beyond books, computers, and historical archives and are offering makerspaces as well. In a report from 2020, the last year for which they provided stats, the American Library Association stated that 1 in 5 public libraries across the United States offered 3D printing services. That number is probably even higher now! 

Although more libraries are hosting makerspaces, your library may not have access to a 3D printer just yet. Those that do offer 3D printing may have specific policies in place and may also charge a fee to help cover the cost of resin. Call ahead or stop by your branch to learn more about their services and see if they have 3D printers available for use. You'll be on your way to printing wizards, Foes, and cars in no time!

– Katie Duffy

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

November 16, 2023: Wiz-War STL Bust Collection Now On Warehouse 23!

Did you see the Daily Illuminator item from the other day about how Wiz-War STL Figures & Accessories are now available on Warehouse 23 and think, "Wow! How can they offer so many 3D-printable goodies? That's completely busted!" Well, that offer isn't, but this one is.

Behold! The Wiz-War STL Bust Collection is now also available to download from Warehouse 23! This assortment of busts features the eight wizards from Wiz-War in a beautiful, oversized format. Each one is about 4 inches high, perfect for decorating your gaming room or providing that extra bit of intimidation amid the magical mayhem of Wiz-War .

Just like the figure and accessory set, these STL bust models come in professionally supported formats as well as unsupported versions for those who want to make digital tweaks before firing up the resin printer. These robust models are available to download today, from Warehouse 23!

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

November 15, 2023: Good-Bye, Twitter. We Miss You.

Our website and new games will no longer show the logo of the slowly spinning sack of sewage formerly known as Twitter, nor will we ask you to find us there. This caused a little angst here – because we miss the Twitter that was – but the Twitter that IS has no value to anyone but the producers and consumers of hate speech.

There are lots of other social media sites that have not been thoroughly corrupted; find us there, please!

We'll keep our account open, just to make it slightly less likely that the name gets stolen and used to promote the kind of thing that Twitter has become. But we won't post anything of note, nor are we likely to read anything posted. That well has been poisoned, and we're out of there.

– Steve Jackson

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

November 14, 2023: I Guess This Makes Me A Rail Baron

Not long ago, I rode on the first trip of a renovated railcar originally built in 1948. Behind steam! And that's not even the coolest part.

The coolest part is that Car 1877 (no name – in its former life, it mainly ran under its number, though it was labeled "Linoma" for a while) is my personal project. It's a round-end observation/dome car, built by Budd for the C&O as part of the planned "Chessie" consist.



The picture shows 1877 running behind TVRR 4501, a Mikado steam engine built in 1911. Both car and engine performed flawlessly.

Background: In 2015, Monica and I bought Car 1877 as an investment. It was a very sad dome car at the time. It has spent the intervening 8 years at the Tennessee Valley Railroad Museum, being rebuilt. It is no longer dilapidated. It is transformed . . . wonderful and shiny and first class inside and out.

Why did we do this thing? Because it was TRAINS and because it was cool. Cost equal to a couple of rent houses. Awesomeness value SO much higher. It will not be a "private car" – it will be a revenue-generating luxury passenger car, running on the TVRM's tourist and holiday excursions, and every week more people will ride it and see how things were in the Golden Age of Rail.

And that is why, if you saw me at any time on November 4, I was grinning from ear to ear.

– Steve Jackson

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

November 13, 2023: Roll Early, Roll Often

Here's a tip I've used in RPG campaigns where I – as the GM – expect to do a bunch of tricky rolling and don't want to slow things down: roll ahead of time.

Either with physicall dice or an Excel spreadsheet and a printer, it's super easy to come up with a ready-to-use list of rolls . . . dozens or hundreds, depending on how many you expect to use in the adventure. Do you suddenly need 20 killer robots to make 20 attacks? Just grab the next 20 entries on your list, and start the action faster.

This method isn't recommended for players, because the list of rolls (obviously) makes itself known ahead of time; the temptation is too great to try to manufacture situations to waste less optimal rolls – such as a critical failure on an impromptu "give that roadside goose an interesting name" roll. But it can be a great tool for the GM in certain circumstances.

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

November 12, 2023: Wiz-War STL Figures & Accessories Now On Warehouse 23!

Did you miss the successful Kickstarter for Wiz-War 3D Printable STL Figures & Busts? Do you look wistfully between your Wiz-War game and your resin printer before wiping the corners of your eyes? Discard your tear-soaked tissue! "Regret" is now banished from your life except as a seven-point Scrabble word. Because the Wiz-War STL Figures & Accessories are now available on Warehouse 23!

This kit offers STL files for your Wiz-War game, in both professionally supported or – for you tinkerers – unsupported formats. It contains eight different figures, including their bases and plates. It also comes with tokens, the Granite Cube, the Thornbush, and portals. Once you print these models on your 3D printer, your Wiz-War game will be the envy of all the other martial-minded mages you might meet. Download them today, from Warehouse 23!

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

November 11, 2023: That Was The Year That Was

One challenge of having a large game collection can be trying to come up with a rhyme or reason to play something. If everything is equally valid, then we tend to play the same games over and over. The same applies to movie collections, music, etc.

To get out of my rut, one way I've come up with is to focus on years. Thus I might imagine myself as a time traveler and going, "Hmm; what was my collection like in – say – 2005?" Some quick Internet searches later, and I've got myself a sweet game night of Super Munchkin and SPANC (Space Pirate Amazon Ninja Catgirls) . If our household queues up Batman Begins and Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, we've got a perfect decade-themed night.

To facilitate this research on the Steve Jackson Games side, our own "Previously Shipped" page is quite exhaustive in its by-year breakdowns. For the larger gaming world, BoardGameGeek's advanced search engine should help you narrow down the possibilities. And your trips into the past might even help you discover some new or forgotten game lurking in a back corner of the gaming closet or hiding on Warehouse 23 . . .

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

November 10, 2023: Win Games, Help Kids

Desert Bus For Hope starts on Saturday, November 11. That's tomorrow! Since 2007, the internet sketch comedy group LoadingReadyRun has held this annual fundraiser to help Child's Play in its mission to bring toys, games, and therapeutic play to pediatric patients in hospitals around the world. They accomplish this via a 24/7 livestream marathon of Desert Bus , a legendary game with the dubious distinction of being one of the worst (if not the worst) video games ever made. Along the way, viewers can donate money, bid in live and silent auctions, or enter giveaways. The higher the donation total, the longer the bus stays on the road. And the longer the bus stays on the road, the more ridiculous the livestream becomes! Chaos for a good cause is something we here at Steve Jackson Games can get behind. That's why we've donated four (somewhat rare!) games for this year's broadcast. These games have been divided into two bundles, both of which will be featured in giveaways taking place on November 14:The first bundle is for two games signed by Steve Jackson himself! This bundle includes Munchkin Lite , a slightly slimmed-down version of our classic card game, and Bill and Ted's Excellent Board Game , an out-of-print game based on the Bill and Ted cinematic universe. (Does it qualify as a cinematic universe at this point?) This giveaway starts between 3:00 AM and 9:00 AM Eastern on November 14, so go to bed early and set your alarm!The second bundle is for two out-of-print games featuring two very different holidays. The first game is Ghosts Love Candy , a Halloween-themed game of silly specters and their relentless pursuit of sweets. The second one is the  Munchkin 2010 Holiday Edition , a Barnes & Noble exclusive from 2010. This edition of Munchkin features Christmas coins, a greeting card, and holiday-themed bonuses that add a little holiday magic (and mayhem?) to your next session. This giveaway also begins on November 14, this time between 3:00 PM and 9:00 PM Eastern.The good people at Desert Bus For Hope have published their live auction, silent auction, and giveaway lists – there are some incredible items up for grabs this year. See something you want to bid on? Make sure you create a donor account first, since you can't participate in auctions or giveaways without one. Best of luck! 

– Katie Duffy

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

November 9, 2023: So About That Abandoned Amusement Park...

I recently wrote a brief post about the release of Munchkin Scooby-Doo. In that post, I mentioned that the members of Mystery, Inc. seem to come from two different places. While most incarnations of the Scooby-Doo gang come from the California town of Coolsville, the made-for-TV movie Scooby-Doo! Curse of the Lake Monster places Coolsville in Northeast Ohio. Where in Northeast Ohio, exactly? Well, that's a fun bit of trivia I wanted to share. Whoever plotted the location of this fictional town was either a resident or had done their research, because Coolsville is located in the same place as a town that's home to an abandoned amusement park!

No, I'm not making this up.

While Coolsville, Ohio, doesn't exist, a village called Chippewa Lake does. Located about 45 miles south of Cleveland, Chippewa Lake was home to an amusement park from 1878 to 1978. Many people in my family grew up near Chippewa Lake and have fond memories of summer days spent riding the rides, swimming in the lake, and otherwise enjoying themselves. Unfortunately, my memories of the place are confined to its post-shutdown years. The abandoned buildings and skeletal rides gave the place an unsettling feel, and while my friends and I were warned away from exploring the place, it would have made the perfect setting for a mystery.

There isn't much left of the original park now, but you may be able to walk the grounds soon enough. The county park service purchased the land last year and plans to turn it into a nature preserve with numerous trails. It may be worth a visit if you're a die-hard Scooby-Doo fanatic . . . or if you simply enjoy seeing animals in their natural habitat.

– Katie Duffy

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!