Author and game designer Jess Hartley recently gave us a fantastic series of articles on conventions for the aspiring professional. Following up on that success, she’s launching a new advice column titled One Geek to Another—a sort of Miss Manners for gamers. What a great idea! The first two entries address the importance of introductions in social situations and how to deal with romantic breakups in a gaming group. While I find gamers to be among the most sincere and friendly people I meet, a little help with the finer points of implementation is certainly welcome.

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Highmoon Games brings back the Liber Sodalitas line with The Dream Healers for the Pathfinder RPG. The 10 page PDF includes NPCs, a new prestige class, and magic items but in the context of a priestly organization that adds flavor to your game, not just complexity. On the conversion from d20 to Pathfinder, Highmoon’s Daniel Perez said:

Pathfinder represents the new face of the 3.5 fantasy RPG rules system… Pathfinder sleeks out the rules in line with developments seen in both official and 3rd-party releases over this decade, breathing new life to that system… Updating to Pathfinder makes perfect business sense. Fans of the type of game experience 3.5 fantasy delivered now have a new banner under which to rally and that is an exciting development in our opinion. We want to be a part of this new surge, and a quick entry into that wave was the updating of our existing material. We’re actually updating so that the product matches the rules in the Pathfinder Core Rulebook, even if the game is backwards compatible with 3.5 fantasy.

While the company sees conversion of existing products as an important first step, you can also look forward to additional releases in the series, as well as a Pathfinder adventure.

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The first chainmail chess set. Made with 42,256 rings. He’s working on another.

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Vita Vera from artist Mike Leavitt is a hand-crafted Monopoly-clone, currently produced in an edition of 20. You can get it in blue (more waterproof, but less detailed) or black. Each costs around $350.

The currency is souls, the banker is God, you can Go To Hell, and you pay 25% of your savings in taxes when you cross Go. The spaces are corporations, drugs, technologies, ideas, or religions. The game pieces are Faustian demon spawn.

I’m thinking that the board and money look a little too close to the original for Hasbro’s comfort.

(source)

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Game designer, collector, and historian Fred Horn from the Netherlands has donated his 8,000 game private collection to the KHBO-Spellenarchief in Brugge, a Belgian research center devoted to studying and cataloging board and card games. The center is run by Piet Notebaert. The collection adds to the 10,000 games already collected.

Some pictures of the donation.

Dane of War reports on the Guldbrikken, a new board game awards in Denmark, to be handed out at October’s Culture Night. (source)

Speaking of Denmark, Visit Denmark created an online board game to introduce people to the country.

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Those Pesky Humans is a dungeon crawl board game still in the playtest phase but available as a print-and-play for about ten bucks. One person plays the Monster Lord, who constructs the dungeon and manipulates his minions to fight off invading adventurers. One or more other people play the adventurers in search of three legendary gemstones.

By title and description, it seems that this game is styled as a reverse dungeon crawl (“…turns the tables and lets you play the role of the Monsters…”), but with the balance of players on the side of the adventurers, I don’t see how it’s any different than Descent. On the other hand, it looks like the rules will be a lot simpler, and if you decide you’d like the print version, the price of the PDF will be credited against that purchase. Also submitting your play report and comments will enter you in a drawing for a free copy. Hey, does this count?

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