Current Mood:  contemplative
Current Music: vinyl podcast - 0314vinylpodcast-Placebo (Squid's Redoubt)
Technorati Tags: RPGs, City_of_Heroes, Eden_Studios, games, gaming, superheroes, comicsOr at least somewhere odd. As OgreCave reports: EDEN STUDIOS, NCSOFT AND CRYPTIC STUDIOS
POWER UP THE CITY OF HEROES ROLEPLAYING GAME ALBANY, New York, March 14, 2005 – Eden Studios announces today an agreement with Cryptic Studios™ and NCsoft® Corporation for the design and production of the City of Heroes® table-top roleplaying game (RPG), based on the wildly popular comic book inspired massively multiplayer online roleplaying computer game by the same name. City of Heroes (http://www.cityofheroes.com) computer game released last year to critical acclaim and continues to garner awards for its groundbreaking innovation. The highly anticipated player-versus-player sequel, City of Villains™ is due for release later this year. "We are very excited about getting the opportunity to produce this super-powered game," George Vasilakos, President of Eden Studios, announced. "We worked with Jack Emmert, City of Heroes lead designer, on our first
roleplaying game, Conspiracy X. His imagination and storytelling have always been tremendous. He and his City of Heroes team have created a rocking good game that has been chewing up most of our free time for over a year now. We plan to translate that experience to the table-top while adding the richness of face-to-face roleplaying." "I started my game production career in paper-and-pencil roleplaying," added Emmert. "It’s a great medium for storytelling and a boat load of fun. I’ve worked with the guys at Eden Studios in the past, and they’ve only gotten
better since then with quality licensed games like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Army of Darkness. Their games are great and their production values are second to none. This is a wonderful addition to the City of
Heroes franchise." The City of Heroes roleplaying table-top game will use a special version of CJ Carella’s Unisystem, Eden's inhouse roleplaying game rules, that captures the highlights of the online experience yet remains compatible with other Unisystem games. Players take the role of super-powered heroes with a full array of power choices. They take the fight to numerous villains, including Circle of Thorns mages, Council thugs, Clockwork robots, Vahzilok zombies, and others popularized in the online game. The Registration Manual core book will be authored by Eden insider M. Alexander Jurkat, editor of the majority of Eden’s Unisystem game books, designer of the Army of Darkness card game, and author of GURPS Conspiracy
X. The core book will be followed by the Paragon City source book, the Monitor’s Support Pack, the Super-powered Operative’s Dossier and other supplements. More information is coming soon to www.cohrpg.com.
With due consideration, I'm not sure how I really feel about this. On the one hand, I love the work Eden Studios has done in the marketplace. Buffy is an extremely well-done license with some cutting-edge typography and layout, wonderful production values all around. The Unisystem core mechanics are extremely flexible (as my ongoing fascination with All Flesh attests). They've been generally "good guys" to the folks I'm familiar with in the business who've worked with them, though they still haven't had the perspacity to tap me for some obscure project. On the other hand, I gave up on City of Heroes months ago, because the gameplay designs were taking it in exactly the opposite direction from the kind of play I like in a superheroes RPG. I don't play to work my ass off level grinding to get the next cool power. I play to beat down Nazi ass, see new, crazy stuff that comes and goes in the blink of an eye, and generally feel heroic. The online game lost the ability to make me feel like a superhero. In parallel, the Unisystem mechanics don't seem like they'd particularly amenable to superheroics, one of the reason it wasn't running at the top of the Summer Game list recently. Unisystem is pretty tight human scale and just beyond, while my CoH character hurled ice bolts and leapt over city blocks with ease. I wish Eden the best with this license, but I fear in a market cluttered with special-crafted mechanics, this isn't going to suffice, and the CoH RPG crossover fans very likely already own Silver Age Sentinels or Hero 5th. We shall see. I know I say that a lot, but there are only two constants in life. | 
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predatory
