Welcome to Purple Pawn, covering games played around the world by billions of people every day.

Cold War

strait-of-magellan-coverNot that kind. The kind that might have seen Axis fleets battling Allied naval forces in the Strait of Magellan during the Second World War. Avalanche Press’ new supplement for the Second World War at Sea game, aptly named Strait of Magellan, includes ten scenarios for battles that never took place in these waters, but might have.

Dungeon A Day

dungeon a day.jpgMr. D&D, Monte Cooke, has proudly announced the release of a new website under his direction: Dungeon A Day. The concept is pretty neat and is worth the attention of the RPG-minded. Essentially, the main feature of the Dungeon A Day is the daily expansion of an old-school style campaign, taking advantage of the features of the web with many of the modern approaches to presenting dungeons. Per Monte:

Dungeonaday.com describes Dragon’s Delve, a mysterious (mega-)dungeon of vast size, fascinating secrets, and great danger. It includes such locales as the Font of Dreams, the Domain of the Venom Cult, the Prison of the Red Saint, the Aberrant Laboratory, the Sprawl of the Demon Leige, and the Secret City. It offers weird and wild encounters with the Bestial Host, the Insidious Kings, swarm-demon Czarzem the Wicked, and the Prince of Dragons. It holds treasures and secrets like the Twelve Secret Sigils, Sao’s Bones, and the mystical wendways. But the adventure includes much more than just a dungeon. Dungeonaday.com also describes the surrounding area (filled with intriguing ruins), the nearby town of Brindenford (which is far more involved in the goings-on than it first appears), side trips to a mysterious island and an extradimensional tesseract, and forays into strange other planes. And that’s just for starters. Seriously.

Dungeon A Day will also host a new blog by Monte covering various aspects of the roleplaying hobby and the obligatory community functions (forums, comments, etc). The site launches next week and should be worth checking out – if for no other reason than the steady stream of new content from one of the genre’s masters.

hasbro_logoIn 2000, Hasbro sent a C&D letter to Randy Cassingham over his “Get Out of Hell Free” cards, despite the fact that it’s not difficult to see that they would be covered by parody laws. Mind you, Randy was selling them for a meager profit.

After Randy added a statement to the effect that the cards were not endorsed by Hasbro, Hasbro decided to drop the matter.

Which makes one scratch their head in light of this week’s news: Hasbro just sent a C&D letter to Randy Cassingham over his “Get Out of Hell Free” cards, claiming that they had just “recently became aware” of them. And demanding, no less, “information concerning the length of time that you have sold the infringing cards and stickers, the number of units that have been sold, and the total revenue you have received to date. We will then be in a position to discuss monetary compensation for your unauthorized use.”

Hasbro is either desperately in need of cash, or they’ve recently let go of their old bad lawyers (you know, the ones that responsible for the Scrabulous fiasco) and hired a bunch of new, cheaper bad ones. Who don’t know about previously dropped legal actions by Hasbro. Of course, if they’re desperately in need of cash, they shouldn’t be wasting it on frivolous legal action. There goes a few tens of thousands of dollars down the drain.

Wraeththu RPG

wraeththuWraeththu: From Enchantment to Fulfilment is an RPG originally from Immanion Press based on the books of Storm Constantine, one of the first teen goth fantasy horror alternate sexuality writers.

The Wraeththu are a sci-fi post-apocalyptic species which evolved from humanity and have a thirst for hermaphroditic sex using their twin set of male and female flower-like genitalia. Their sexual acts form a basic part of their health, magic, and healing process. While the source material probably includes more than just sex and violence, the RPG pretty much discards all but these elements.

It’s considered a fairly awful game. Skill checks for those with minimal training are more likely to fail than for those with absolutely no training. (source) As for the role playing aspect, the characters themselves are supposed to be nearly incomprehensible sexual predators, thus unplayable. (source)

Witch Doctor

witch-doctorThe final Witch Doctor Player Class has been released by One Bad Egg. At over 40 pages, this supplement for D&D 4E provides new powers, feats, paragon paths, magic items, rituals, and adversaries. But it’s more than just a catalog of chrome. The Witch Doctor enhances both your adventuring options and game setting with an integrated set of features that work to portray the member of a living culture. Helping with this are powers such as Serpent of Fire, which spawns a deadly crawling flame, and artifacts such as the various versions of medicine stick.