News — UDON

Ah Exalted… the game that could have been. Today I’m going to take a look at the artwork for Exalted’s Aspect Book: Earth, and I’m going to tell you right off I like it.Why? Hell, I don’t know. Maybe because I’ve watched a good deal of anime in my day, all the way back to trading bootleg copies of Akira and Dirty Pair in college on VHS before the Internet existed. Maybe because I like the work of Eric Vedder who I first found in the pages of an Exalted book years ago. Maybe because every once and a while...

In September 2007 Wizards of the Coast pulled the license for both Dragon and Dungeon magazines from Paizo.  This could have been the death knell for the small company, but instead, WotC ended up creating its biggest rival in the RPG industry as Paizo refocused on the D&D 3.5 audience and created its highly successful Pathfinder brand from the ashes of its Dungeon ‘Adventure Path’ line. Still, gamers themselves might have gained a new RPG, but the end of both long-running print magazines still resonates in the market as nothing has been able to come close to taking their place....

Let me make this very clear before I begin, I’m both a huge fan of George R.R. Martin and also one of his greatest haters.  How can that be, you might ask?  Well, I believe his first three novels in The Song of Fire and Ice may be the greatest pieces of fantasy fiction since Tolkien, but after that, Martin imploded into a kind of literary oblivion that almost fully invalidates what he did in those books.  Bottom line, it should have been a trilogy, and milking this dead and decrepit cow has spoiled everything he was so brilliantly trying...

I often wonder what goes into making a game.  I mean a real game, not some sandbox rules set or home brew Fedex/Kinkos print job, but a real hardcover core book.  As I look at my shelves the myriad of small gaming companies who have produced truly inspired works over the years is astounding, daunting, and in the end sad, as most of them are no more.   For my posting today I’m going to look at one such core rulebook that found its way to my collection at GenCon a few years back from a discount bin. Ex Machina:...

I’m not really sure what to say about Exalted, other than it seemed an intriguing niche market for White Wolf at the time of its creation and that is has launched a successful licensed Kickstarter recently.  The game itself, at least in the incarnation I played, was certainly the most contrived system since Earthdawn hit gaming store shelves in the early 90s. Still, the concept of the game drew me to it, as did the anime-style artwork that broke away from standard ‘Big Eyes, Small Mouths’ in that the story was original to the setting and not ripped from various...