Mantic Games Launches New Dungeon Crawl Game on Kickstarter

Mantic Games was created in 2008 by Ronnie Renton who used his experience as former Global Marketing Director for Games Workshop to create a company dedicated to bringing gamers the best in fantasy and sci-fi miniatures and games at affordable prices. Where Games Workshop recently seems to have shifted its focus into intellectual property development and high end exclusive hobby products, Mantic is very much about getting gamers playable games on a reasonable budget.

I've been a fan of Mantic's Dwarf King's Hold games designed by Jake Thornton who has previously worked on a number of GW products like Circle of Blood and  the Dark Shadows campaign as well as several Warhammer army books back in the day. I find that the price to miniatures ratio in Mantic's products place them in the more affordable side of the hobby, but by no means are the games inexpensive. The rules to their games are simple, but I have always hoped they would beef them up a little and create a more comprehensive dungeon crawl game. My hope - one that they hint might be fulfilled in the Kickstarter video - is that Dungeon Saga, the sequel line to Dwarf King's Hold, will have those rules.



The new Dungeon Saga: The Dwarf King's Quest game that Mantic is launching on Kickstarter has only one pledge level and at $100.00 it comes in as one of the more expensive products Mantic has released to date. That's a similar price to Mantic's Mars Attacks game, but Mars Attacks comes with 39 miniatures, terrain, etc. where Dungeon Saga currently has 22 on offer. That number is likely to increase as stretch goals are reached and more people back the project. If the Mars Attacks Kickstarter that Mantic ran last year is any indication, then Mantic will end up providing a great deal of value to backers by the end of the project.

What is certain is that I will be backing this latest project by Mantic and I look forward to seeing what comes next.

Space Crusade (1990): In the Grim Darkness of Table Top Gaming, There is Only War

I promise to catch up with Eric on the Reverb Gamers posts, but first I have to share a bit of awesome.

Some of my fondest gaming moments are the years I spent playing the various editions of Warhammer (Fantasy and 40k) before moving down to the Los Angeles area.  My friends and I would meet every week to do battle with our half-painted (or at least all "primed") armies for hours on end.  We were devoted fans who not only played the "hard core" miniature battles games, but also most of the "Specialist" games released by Games Workshop in support of their war games.

Games Workshop was, and pretty much still is, on a rotating schedule of providing a new rules edition for their war games every 3 years or so.  During the year prior to a new rules release, they would roll out a Specialist game that covered a related theme.  If a new edition of 40k was coming out, we'd see "Gorkamorka."  If a new edition of Warhammer Fantasy was around the corner, we'd see "Mordheim."  It was great fun.

In the late 80s and early 90s, Games Workshop teamed up with Milton Bradley to create a couple mainstream adaptations of their signature games.  For Fantasy, those games were Heroquest and Battle Masters.  I own both of these games and they are prized possessions that have provided many an hour of entertainment. 

Sadly, as passionate as I was about these games, I somehow missed out on Space Crusade.  Space Crusade is a popular market adaptation of Games Workshop's signature Specialist game Space Hulk.  I say adaptation, but the more I look at it the more it looks like an "improvement."  I desperately would love to get my hands on a copy, but alas and alack they are rare and expensive.  When I see the components, I can see why.  Unlike Space Hulk which focuses solely on the conflict between Space Marines and Tyranids (Genestealers), the Space Crusade game includes Orks, Eldar, and crazed Androids who look suspiciously like Necrons to the mix.

 

Reverb Gamers 2012

Atlas Games is starting a new RPG blogger group called Reverb Gamers 2012. You can follow the results at their website and also on Twitter @ReverbGamers. For each day in January they are posting a prompt for RPG, MMORPG, and LARP players to discuss. I will endeavor to write a response, however brief, to each one.

Prompt for the 1st:

REVERB GAMERS 2012, #1: What was your first roleplaying experience?
Who introduced you to it?
How did that introduction shape the gamer you've become?

How should I answer this one? Do they mean formal roleplaying experience like with rules and stuff? Everyone's first roleplaying experience is when we are little kids and we imagine that we're the 'police' chasing down our 'robber' friends or some similar game. Do I count the Milton Bradley published Hero Quest, which is really a boardgame now that I look back on the experience? You know what? that's it.

Hero Quest 1989



It was designed by Stephen Baker, according to boardgamegeek.com. HeroQuest was developed by GamesWorkshop, you know The Hobby Games guys. It was released in 1990 in North America by MB so I must have first played this game when I was 8 or 9 years old. It was the go to boardgame for me, my brother, and our best friend Chris. We would all imagine we were our characters and take them on each quest in sequence in the game. We'd take turns playing as the evil Zargon. Eventually we upgraded the game and got the two expansions as they game out. Kellar's Keep and Return of the Witch Lord. And when we finished those we started 'hacking' the game. We made up new heroes using the stats for the other characters mixed up. I think one of the characters we made was really weak in dice rolling but had access to Zargon's spell cards. We also made a ranger. And we upgraded some of the characters so we could play the game with fewer heroes and really roleplay one character at a time(in the three player games we usually played two heroes per player for balance reasons).

It is the earliest in my life that I considered game design as a career path. I think I was 10 or 11 at the time. I always dabbled with the idea in middle school and high school. Turn the clock forward 20 years and I'm finally starting a career in game design. Just last week I was looking through some old notebooks and found card designs for MtG from the mid-nineties that I wrote while I was in high school. So I guess the lesson is pay attention to the career dreams of your 10 year old self.

My copy of the game is pretty beaten up. It is not at all like the video I posted above. My heroes and a few goblins are painted but are chipping badly. The box is not holding together and some of the cardboard furniture is missing. This game was a gift from my parents so thanks Mom and Dad for making sure I was a lifelong hobby game enthusiast. It is something of a treasure that I will never think about parting with though.

Author of Fabled Lands Gamebooks Offers Free e-Gamebook

I mentioned in an earlier post that Dave Morris' excellent, and hard to find, Fabled Lands game book series was available in a new edition. I recently purchased the four available books and eagerly await further volumes in the series. One of the intriguing things about the Fabled Lands series is that choices in one book can lead you to paragraphs in other volumes. It makes for a robust experience, and demonstrates the strengths of design in the series.

Morris is making available -- for a very limited time -- an electronic copy of a relatively hard to find Gamebook. The original printing of the gamebook is easier to find if you live in the UK, but for us in the states this is a wonderful opportunity to play an engaging gamebook. It is also a good starter gamebook for those who have never played one before. It uses a simple role playing resolution system and explains the rules clearly.

If you are interested in playing a rare adventure, or interested in finding out what this game book thing is all about, head on over to Dave's Fabled Land blog and download it while you can. It should be noted that the file is in xps format. The format reads well in Explorer, and not so well in Firefox which redownloads the file every time I try to open it, and can be easily converted into a pdf if you have a full version of Acrobat.

You only have until New-Year's Eve to download the book. Do it...NOW!