Many of today's hottest selling games--both non-electronic and electronic--focus on such elements as shooting up as many bad guys as one can (Duke Nuk'em), beating the toughest level (Mortal Kombat), collecting all the cards (Pokemon), and scoring the most points (Tetris). Fantasy role-playing games (Dungeons & Dragons, Rolemaster, GURPS), while they may involve some of those aforementioned elements, rarely focus on them. Instead, playing a fantasy role-playing game is much like acting out a scene from a play, movie or book, only without a predefined script. Players take on such roles as wise wizards, noble knights, roguish sellswords, crafty hobbits, greedy dwarves, and anything else one can imagine and the referee allows. The players don't exactly compete; instead, they interact with each other and with the fantasy setting. The game is played orally with no game board, and although the referee usually has a storyline planned for a game, much of the action is impromptu. Performance is a major part of role-playing, and role-playing games as a performing art is the subject of this book, which attempts to introduce an appreciation for the performance aesthetics of such games. The author provides the framework for a critical model useful in understanding the art--especially in terms of aesthetics--of role-playing games. The book also serves as a contribution to the beginnings of a body of criticism, theory, and aesthetics analysis of a mostly unrecognized and newly developing art form. There are four parts: the cultural structure, the extent to which the game relates to outside cultural elements; the formal structure, or the rules of the game; the social structure, which encompasses the degree and quality of social interaction among players; and the aesthetic structure, concerned with the emergence of role-playing as an art form.

Journey into the world of Peter Pan and its mysterious inhabitants. The book is a feature-length hex crawl campaign, filled with endless adventure, adapted from the tales of Peter Pan, and tailored for an older audience.

Tracing the evolution of fantasy gaming from its origins in tabletop war and collectible card games to contemporary web-based live action and massive multi-player games, this book examines the archetypes and concepts within the fantasy gaming genre alongside the roles and functions of the game players themselves. Other topics include: how The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings helped shape fantasy gaming through Tolkien's obsessive attention to detail and virtual world building; the community-based fellowship embraced by players of both play-by-post and persistent browser-based games, despite the fact that these games are fundamentally solo experiences; the origins of gamebooks and interactive fiction; and the evolution of online gaming in terms of technological capabilities, media richness, narrative structure, coding authority, and participant roles.

In Dragon Age, a pen & paper roleplaying game of dark fantasy adventure, you and your friends take on the personas of warriors, mages, and rogues in the world of Thedas and try to make your names by overcoming sinister foes and deadly challenges. Based on the video game franchise, this Core Rulebook includes the full rules for the Dragon Age RPG under one cover for the first time, including the Adventure Game Engine.

This classic study still provides one of the most acute descriptions available of an often misunderstood subculture: that of fantasy role playing games like Dungeons & Dragons. Gary Alan Fine immerses himself in several different gaming systems, offering insightful details on the nature of the games and the patterns of interaction among players—as well as their reasons for playing.

Music in the Role-Playing Game: Heroes & Harmonies offers the first scholarly approach focusing on music in the broad class of video games known as role-playing games, or RPGs. Known for their narrative sophistication and long playtimes, RPGs have long been celebrated by players for the quality of their cinematic musical scores, which have taken on a life of their own, drawing large audiences to live orchestral performances. The chapters in this volume address the role of music in popular RPGs such as Final Fantasy and World of Warcraft, delving into how music interacts with the gaming environment to shape players’ perceptions and engagement. The contributors apply a range of methodologies to the study of music in this genre, exploring topics such as genre conventions around music, differences between music in Japanese and Western role-playing games, cultural representation, nostalgia, and how music can shape deeply personal game experiences. Music in the Role-Playing Game expands the growing field of studies of music in video games, detailing the considerable role that music plays in this modern storytelling medium, and breaking new ground in considering the role of genre. Combining deep analysis with accessible personal accounts of authors’ experiences as players, it will be of interest to students and scholars of music, gaming, and media studies.

MYFAROG (Mythic Fantasy Role-playing Game) (3rd edition) is a fantasy role-playing game, with a setting based on European mythology, religion and fairy tales. The rules are very modular, meaning you can play the game rules light or rules heavy, as you please. The rules are designed to make sense, and to give the players the ability to immerse themselves in Thulê; a highly credible fantasy world similar to Middle-earth and the European Classical Antiquity (some places touching into the Viking Age or the Bronze Age), but yet different. In Thulê, sorcery and the ancient deities are real, and the world is inhabited by not only humans, but also elves, nymphs, dwarves, orcs, gnomes, halflings, ettins and trolls, as well as other creatures. This art-minimalistic 221 page core rule-book (with black-and-white interior) is an all-in-one rule-book, so it contains all the information you need to play the game (and to make your own adventures and campaigns) indefinitely. A digital high resolution map of Thulê can be found here: www.myfarog.org. Because the setting is based on real world locations (Lofoten and Vesteralen in Northern Norway) you can also use online map services, to get highly detailed and realistic maps of the world of Thulê, in any scale you want. NB! You need a set of polyhedral dice to play the game.

Kin: The Fantasy Tabletop Role-playing Game features a flexible classless character creation system and three modes of gameplay to fit your preferred balance of roleplay and strategy.

Being a Hero is tough. Especially if you're wasting your precious game time fighting silly rules instead of monsters. When it comes to designing characters, no system gives you more control over your character design than Rolemaster. Say goodbye to arbitrary limits and "you can't do that!", because with Rolemaster you can!