Hot Jobs

To support its fast-growing catalog, Renegade Game Studios seeks a Localization Coordinator (in Europe, to support European partners), a Marketing Coordinator (in North America, to support brand-building and social media), and a Game Producer (in San Diego, to push the development of new products).

In addition to a number of jobs related to its digital products and a few art-related positions (contract and in-house), Wizards of the Coast is recruiting for a Principal Product Designer. This job involves overseeing R&D design for Magic: The Gathering. Responsibilities include managing all aspect of a MtG block, contributing to strategic development and decision-making, and otherwise supporting the MtG brand.

Two positions are open at Paizo. One is for a Game Developer “to take responsibility for the creation, revision, and editing of content for… the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, Starfinder, and associated product lines.” The other is for a Customer Service Representative to answer inquiries and troubleshoot problems.

Pelgrane Press has an opening for an Administrative Assistant but it’s no mere secretarial position. The job involves working with directly with customers, online and in-person, as well as managing supply-chain issues such as print buying and tracking warehouse inventories. Pelgrane is headquartered in the U.K. but remote work is OK. The work is estimated at 25 hours per week for a salary of US$1,500 per month (about $14/hr, no benefits).

Games for Change (G4C), the organization that promotes driving real-world change using games, has three openings: Senior Director (an executive leadership position), Community Manager (a part-time but front-line, point-of-contact between G4C and the whole range of its stakeholders), and Operations Manager (also part-time, and responsible for office and financial management, and maintaining institutional knowledge). All three are based out of New York City.

Ceaco (Gamewright) is looking for a Stock Room Assistant, part-time in Newton, Massachusetts.

At Lost Battalion Publishing in Upperco, Maryland there are openings for a full-time Graphic Designer and a part-time Game Manufacturing Technician.

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Evil Hat: Bubblegumshoe RPG Coming in June

Bubblegumshoe-No-Shadow-For-Website-723x1024Evil Hat Productions announced the publication of Bubblegumshoe, a roleplaying game of “teen girl detectives in the vein of Veronica Mars“, developed by Emily Care Boss, Kenneth Hite, and Lisa Steele. The game, run using a modified version of Pelgrane Press’ GUMSHOE engine, was initially announced in late 2011, when it was described as having the teen’s town be central to the game: “Important game mechanics will focus on defining, revealing, and occasionally reshaping the town by way of its relationship map,” wrote Fred Hicks.

The game’s announcement is that it’s a “teen detective story game” with the cover featuring two females and one male, suggesting it’s no longer a “teen girl” game. (And honestly, Wallace Fennel would have been a player character in a Veronica Mars RPG.)

Bubblegumshoe is expected to be available in June, for $25.

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TrailOfCthulhu-RulebookToday, Pelgrane Press announced a huge sale on the Cthulhu Mythos collection. From today until June 16, you can get 75 percent off of the entire set at Bundle of Holding.

The Cthulhu Mythos is based on Pelgrane Press’s Gumshoe system. Players use clues at hand to figure out how to solve the mystery.

The four items in the starter collection, Trail of Cthulhu rulebook, Stunning Eldritch Tales, Keepers Resource Book and Screen, and Four Shadows MP3 retail for $43, but they are available at Bundle of Holding for only $9.95. Plus, if you pay more than the threshold price of $23.05, you can get six additional supplements, including The Armitage Files, Bookhounds of London, The Book of The Smoke, Arkham Detective Tales, Rough Magicks, and Hideous Creatures: Shoggoth, which retail for $68. That’s a total of $111 worth of materials for only $23.

Ten percent of the money from purchases made during the Bundle of Holding sale will go to Cancer Research UK. You have until June 16 to buy. Purchases will automatically be added to your DriveThruRPG library.

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Using Pelgrane Press’ Gumshoe system for a time-travel roleplaying game, TimeWatch is supposed to be rules-light, provide fast cinematic action, and facilitate improvisational GMing. Lead designer Kevin Kulp also promises that the game will “embrace using paradox and time-travel to your advantage when solving mysteries and battling foes; leave yourself a note from the future, or have your future self clock in to lend a hand when you need it the most.” At the ambitious stretch goal of $1 billion, he also promises to fund an actual time machine.

With Village in a Box, The Game Crafter is “experimenting” at Kickstarter. The company says it’s about building an economy of scale. For an $89 pledge, backers can get eight different games, each one of which has sold or will sell for around $20 on The Game Crafter’s website. However, I’m not convinced. There are nine pledge levels that bundle different combinations of the eight games, and add-on options further increase the number of permutations. When divided among the eight games, the project’s goal of only $1,500 doesn’t strike me as enough to guarantee scale for any one. Thus, I see it as more of a marketing device. Nevertheless, if you’re interested in any of the games and willing to pay up front, The Game Crafter is offering a pretty good discount and as a POD company should be able to deliver in a reasonable time frame.

Mora Games, who also plans to use The Game Crafter for Flip, may have a bigger problem. The game looks quite similar, as well as similarly named, to Flip Out from Gamewright.

Shoshana Kessock is raising funds to support the Living Games Conference at New York University. The conference is about LARPs and Shoshana, who’s running the conference as her graduate student thesis, would like to record its events for future scholarly reference.

Also in the LARP category is Sabertron. The project from Level Up aims to produce foam swords with built-in electronics that can record hits and differentiate them parried strikes.

Sabertron

Fat Dragon Games’ Ravenfell project is for the production of print-and-assemble 28 mm miniature terrain files. Fat Dragon promises a whole village’s worth of buildings that can be folded flat and reassembled, customized with add-on elements, and mixed-and-matched level by level. The thing is, I can’t find any indication of how many model plans the company considers a village’s worth. And while the project has hit a number of stretch goals, only the higher priced donors qualify for the extra rewards attached to them.

Query is a party game based on the auto-complete function of internet search engines. Each round players try to guess which phrase are a true search engine result and which are alternatives submitted by fellow players.

In Livestock Uprising, Dog Might Games looks to be producing a resource-driven war game, gimmicked up with farm animals as factions. For $250, backers can get “From Seed to Harvest”, a 70 page book of “articles, workshops, design tips, drawings, and artwork” about the game, and a hand-made, hardwood game box.

On Indiegogo, Noel and Tye are asking for funds to help them make a Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine costume. [Waiting for the C&D…]

On Ulule, Narrativiste Edition is seeking funds for a French translation of Evil Hat’s Spirit of the Century RPG.

Tasty Minstrel Games’ latest pay-what-you-want project is a western-themed, tile-laying game. This Town Ain’t Big Enough for the 2-4 of Us is worth $3 for the name alone.

Tasty Minstrel Games’ Scoville project stands out for doing a fantastic job of teaching the basics of the game in a 3 minute video. Actual play looks pretty good too. The game is about farming hot peppers, which are represented by wood cubes of various colors. The board represents a shared field for planting peppers, which when harvested peppers can be sold in the market (for various benefits) or used in the making of chili recipes (for victory points). Cross-breeding specialty peppers draws on the color wheel as a mechanism in the game.

Another project that does a good job of introducing game play in its short video is Nika from Eagle Games. Though applied to an ancient Greece theme, Nika is an abstract title where the goal is to move one’s pieces to the other side of the board. The twist—let’s say in comparison to a traditional game like Chess—is that while the pieces are all the same, their relative strength depends on how groups are configured and aligned together—in game terms, the size and shape of a phalanx.

I don’t think that Queen Games is really depending on Kickstarter success to print Tortuga, a game about pirates stealing treasure from each other that’ll come with a bunch of custom dice. But then again, I don’t think that it’s backers really care.

Modiphius Entertainment proposes to bring back the Mutant Chronicles roleplaying game in a 3rd edition with new rules. And it looks like the company is already well underway with an extensive playtesting program and has detailed plans for a full line of supplements. By the way, I have no idea what “dieselpunk sci-fi” means.

Silver Fox is producing a line of Call of Cthulhu 32 mm miniatures.

UPDATED 1/4/2014

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Two New for Trail of Cthulhu

Pelgrane Press has two new products for Trail of Cthulhu, the Lovecraftian horror investigation game using the Gumshoe system. Arkham Detective Tales is a collection of four scenarios set in New York City. And Rough Magicks is a guide to using magic, with warnings about the resulting costs.

Arkham Detective Tales Rough Magicks

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