Warlord 4th Edition CCG - the epic fantasy card game

In a previous preview we hinted at the new traits we’ll employ. Here is another preview I gobbled together quickly (yes, the card is definitely in 4E, the flavor text I just made up and the card is a photoshop’ed CE scan):

So what’s up with these traits? As you might have guessed by now, spells can have new bold traits: Air, Earth, Fire, or Water. Only very few reprinted cards will have these additional traits, by the way.

In Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 a system to describe spells is used, that categorizes them by school and subschool as well as adding descriptors to it. The schools include some easily understood ones like Necromancy or Illusion - which we handle through subclasses. Some are less than obvious. The previously spoiled Meteor Swarm, for example, in D&D belongs to the Evocation school and has the Fire descriptor. The Cure line of spells is found in the Healing subschool of the Conjuration school.

Of course that system would have been way to awkward for a fast-playing card game. Therefore we needed a level of abstraction that gave us interesting options. It was easy to assign elemental traits to Wizard cards: Meteor Swarm so obviously is Fire. Many other Wizard spells are quickly assigned as well. Cleric spells are a different matter all together.

In the end we decided to cut through the Gordic knot and align certain Cleric powers to the classic elements. Healing now equates Water, because, well, blood flows like water.

While we were discussing Warlords Gary E. Gygax passed away.

Without him, there wouldn’t be Warlord. In fact, there wouldn’t be WoW. Or roleplaying. Or any of the many fantasy inspired games we all enjoy.

Gary Gygax invented a whole industry by publishing the first rules for Dungeons & Dragons.

My own first contact with D&D was with the Red and Blue boxes, freshly translated into German. We didn’t really know what Role-Playing was back then, but the idea of going out to have adventures, slay Dragons, and live what we previously had only read in books, immensely appealed to my friends and me. I was 14 at the time.

Years - and a huge amount of RPG and fantasy books putting permanent bends in the boards holding them - later I am in charge of trying to give you - the Warlord players - just a fraction of the entertainment Gary Gygax made possible for us. Something to remember.

Thank you, Mr. Gygax!

Gary Gygax passed away on March 4th, 2008 at the age of 69.

It’s over!

From http://www.paizo.com/rpgsuperstar:

In early November Paizo challenged amateur game designers from around the world to show off their skills in a revolutionary online contest called RPG Superstar. From more than 850 submitted wondrous items, celebrity judges Erik Mona (Paizo’s Publisher), Wolfgang Baur (Editor-in-Chief, Kobold Quarterly), and Clark Peterson (President, Necromancer Games) narrowed the field to 32 would-be RPG Superstars, aand further rounds have narrowed that field in the intervening weeks.

The final round asked the four competing finalists to propose a 32-page GameMastery Module for ultimate publication by Paizo as the Grand Prize of RPG Superstar. Contestants Clinton Boomer (Macomb, IL), Rob McCreary (Prague, Czech Republic), Jason Nelson (Seattle, WA), and Christine Schneider (Neu-Isenburg, Germany) responded with four excellent proposals, each worthy of publication in its own way.

But there can be only one RPG Superstar, and in the end after the celebrity judges had a chance to offer comments and criticism and the general public had their final vote, one proposal stood out as the clear winner.

Congratulations to Christine Schneider for her victorious proposal, “Clash of the Kingslayers.”

Congratulations to Christine - and I really look forward to how her great ideas will shape Warlord 4E into the game “lots of D&D® players will really want to play (in addition to the great players we already have)” ;-).

Her work will be to expand the Accordlands setting in order to deliver fresh new vistas that the story team will then be able to explore through their stories, flavor texts and so on. In addition we will work on a “Quest system” that will expand the challenge system into something that more closely resembles the excitement of Dungeons & Dragons® adventuring.