Three bloggers have already joined the 2013 NYNG blog carnival! Here they are:
All three are excellent posts, and quite different from each other. “New games” is such a broad topic that there are a lot of ways you can slice it. Thanks for contributing your posts to the carnival!
NYNG is a go! From now through January 28, 2013, you can enter Gnome Stew’s NYNG contest and join the blog carnival.
The contest features almost $200 worth of prizes from Gnome Stew and Engine Publishing, and it’s easy to enter (and hopefully fun, too — that’s the whole point!).
If you’re curious to see how things turned out in 2012, when we ran the first annual NYNG challenge, here are the 57 game ideas (for 39 RPGs) and 15 blog posts that were produced as part of the challenge.
Happy gaming!
The second annual New Year, New Game challenge will run from January 14, 2013, to January 28, 2013.
The site’s been hibernating through the Spring, Summer, and Fall of 2012, waiting for December so we can start sharing news about the upcoming challenge.
As in 2012, NYNG 2013 will be coordinated through Gnome Stew and will feature a contest and a blog carnival. (Here are all of the posts from the 2012 carnival and 57 contest entries from NYNG 2012.)
Between now and the kickoff of the challenge we’ll be coordinating prize support and spreading the word. Here’s to running new games!
With the first annual NYNG challenge now over, the prizes awarded, 15 blog posts about running new games written for our blog carnival, and 57 game ideas archived here to inspire GMs, NYNG 2012 has officially ended.
NewYearNewGame.com exists to promote running new games and to provide inspiration to GMs who want to do just that, so the site won’t be going anywhere. But it will be going into hibernation until the end of the year, when we’ll turn on the lights, crank up the thermostat, and start banging the drum for NYNG 2013.
If you don’t want to miss NYNG 2013, I recommend subscribing to our RSS or email feed. You’ll start seeing new posts in December.
My thanks to everyone who took part in NYNG 2012, and I hope to see you again for NYNG 2013!
Here’s one way that you can tell that our first annual New Year, New Game challenge had some excellent entries: After the first round of secret ballot voting by the judges, there was a three-way tie. We broke that tie with a runoff vote between those three entries.
Because we received over 50 entries in the contest — the threshold for awarding a second prize — we’ll be giving away two awesome prize packages courtesy of our sponsors: DriveThruRPG, Engine Publishing, Obsidian Portal, and Tabletop Adventures. Here they are!
Our two winners both rocked the house with inspiring, entertaining game ideas that made us want to play these games (and of course they followed the contest rules, too).
I’m please to announce that the winner of our second prize goes to Gnome Stew reader BrownBeard, who will be receiving a $30 DriveThruRPG gift certificate, PDF copies of Gnome Stew’s two GMing books, a 6-month Ascendant membership to Obsidian Portal, and two Tabletop Adventures PDFs of their choice. Congratulations!
Here’s BrownBeard’s awesome NYNG entry:
I’m calling my new campaign “Explorers of the Python River Basin.” It already has a fledgeling wiki on Obsidian Portal. The campaign is basically a jungle-crawling Indy-Jones take on Ben Robbins’ seminal West Marches campaign: the players take the roles of your usual D&D fantasy adventurers exploring a ridiculously dangerous tropical rainforest for fortune and glory. They can look forward to fighting all manner of beasts and giant vermin, making first contact with reclusive tribes of goblins and lizardfolk, seeking out the fabled court of the Gorilla King, spelunking vast cavern systems and abandoned mines, and raiding the ruins of a fallen lizardfolk empire.
I want to run this game primarily at my local hobby store’s weekly board game night for a flexible roster of players: whoever shows up that night gets to send their character out with that week’s expedition. Obviously this sort of sandbox campaign, characterized by convention-style pickup groups, is going to stretch my improvisational talents to their limits – it’s difficult to do all but the most general prep when you have no idea who’s going to show up or where they’ll want to go. But I think Kirin Robinson’s Old School Hack game system is up to the challenge. By all accounts it postively thrives on spur-of-the-moment shenanigans. And practically everything that new players will need to learn, rules-wise, is contained on their character sheets and a few other printable visual aids.
The biggest challenge will be recruiting a large enough player pool so that I can count on having a party of at least 2 or 3 PCs for each session. Since the hobby store’s weekly game night only lasts a few hours, I’ll also have to streamline the pacing as much as possible if I want to get the party out into the bush and back to their home base again so I can start a fresh expedition the following week.
Why am I so stoked for this? Ye gods man, it’s freaking Indiana Jones with dwarves and wizards – dungeon fantasy meets pulp archaeology. What more do you want? If this game doesn’t turn into the most hilarious and breathtaking high-octane hurricane of pulp blockbuster tropes seen this side of Exalted, then I’ll eat my GM screen.
With further ado, the grand prize winner of NYNG 2012 is Razjah! Congratulations on your winning entry! Razjah will be receiving a $60 DriveThruRPG gift certificate, print and PDF copies of Gnome Stew’s two GMing books, a 1-year Ascendant membership to Obsidian Portal, and three Tabletop Adventures PDFs of their choice.
Here’s Razjah’s grand-prize-winning NYNG entry:
My upcoming campaign for the spring semester is a fantasy noir campaign styled game using Burning Wheel. This game takes place in a grim, dark city where crime rules, even the best citizens are only out for themselves, and everyone has a past. Picture a fantasy Sin City; you need to take big risks for trivial rewards, crime is nearly in the open, and you can’t turn to the corrupt officials or city watch. The city will be similar to Venice with as many liberties as I need to take. It is a sprawling city with traders, craftsmen, nobility, crime, and vice.
Some major players operate here. The noblesse de ancienne or the royal family, the three noblesse d’epee or duke families, the nine noblesse de chancellerie or the count families, and the twenty seven noblesse de letters or the baron families. Crossing even the weakest noble family is dangerous. Other famed groups are crime related, the five families and fifteen street gangs. While magic is feared and dangerous it is suspected that these groups employ them secretly.
I’m excited to be running this because I am finally getting a group of players who enjoy role playing their characters and a system that encourages it. Burning Wheel is about testing characters. Testing them and watching them grow and evolve through the campaign. Most other systems I have used have the characters level in all abilities, regardless of use. Burning Wheel has much more organic advancement.
The biggest challenge is going to be keeping the role play intensity high. Hopefully the group will help fuel each other and the system will support this. I am going to be making sure that I follow a new year’s resolution to eat before the game, and not junk “gamer food”, to keep my energy up and to help me stay focused on bringing the world to life. The only other major challenge I see before character creation is keeping the genre strong. In other games I have run in a non-traditional fantasy setting the players slowly drifted back to their comfort zones and dragged the campaign with it.
Thank you to everyone who entered our NYNG contest, blogged about NYNG and new games as part of our first-ever blog carnival, spread the word about the NYNG movement, and otherwise helped to make the first annual NYNG challenge such a rousing success!
If you’re in need of inspiration, check out the 57 game ideas (for 39 different RPGs!) that are now posted on the NYNG website, as well as the 15 blog posts about running new games that were written for our blog carnival.
After a couple hours of coding and sorting, I’ve gotten all 57 entries in this year’s challenge posted on our Game Ideas page.
39 different RPGs are represented across those 57 entries, which says a lot about the state of the gaming hobby these days: crazy diverse!
We’ll have one more update — announcing the winner of the contest, which should come shortly — before NewYearNewGame.com goes into hibernation mode for the rest of 2012.
Yesterday marked the end of the first annual New Year, New Game (NYNG) challenge and blog carnival, and today I’m here to share a smorgasbord of excellent blog posts from all over the world about running new games.
A big THANK YOU to everyone who took time out of their January schedule to write a blog post for or about NYNG!
Want tips, ideas, and inspiration about running a new game this year? Check out these posts (appearing in the order they came out):
My New Game for the New Year! — Sinister Forces is the personal blog of Gnome Stew author Patrick Benson, and he used this post to share some details about the approach he’ll be taking when he runs Star Trek later this year.
Secret Lives of Gingerbread Men with Nine Kids — GKR shared a session report about a recent new game: Secret Lives of Gingerbread Men, a kid-oriented RPG run for no less than nine kids!
New Year, New Game — Karen shares her group’s plans to run not just one new game this year, but four: Mouse Guard, Shadowrun, Pathfinder, and a homebrew called Society of Odin.
How do you choose a new game? — Paolo Cecchetto shares advice about how to choose a new game — for him, it’s all about three key features.
New Year, New Game — Robert M. Everson (who, incidentally, worked with us on Masks) looks in his crystal ball and sees the Dresden Files, a D&D 5e playtest, and a one-shot of the new Marvel RPG.
A New Year and My New Game: The Pathfinder RPG Beginner Box With the Kids — GeekDad blogger MJ Harnish talks about running the PFRPG Beginner Box for his son, another dad, and that dad’s two sons.
A simple tip to running a new game with a new system — Liz shares what really is a simple tip, but it’s one that has all sorts of repercussions if you don’t take it seriously (I’ve fallen into that trap myself).
Burning in the New Year — Andy Hauge talks about why he GMs, why you should GM, and his plans to run Burning Wheel this year.
New Year, New Game, New System, New Worries — Michael offers up an in-depth analysis of the potential problems — and opportunities — presented by his NYNG game of choice, Apocalypse Prevention, Inc.
New Year, New Game — Stargazer is planning to run Shadow, Sword & Spell in 2012, and in this post he talks about this game’s build-the-world-as-you-go premise.
New Year, New Games — IronWolf delves into a topic most GMs know well: breaking out of ruts and changing routines, and the motivation to do so.
New Year, New Gamers — rpgadvocate sets a high bar by choosing five games to run in 2012: Macabre Tales, Toypocalypse, Cosmic Patrol, Fiasco, and Lost Days of Memories and Madness.
New Year, New Game — Scot Newbury focuses on running a new campaign (rather than a new RPG), and lays out five challenges that should make it an interesting experience for him as a GM.
New Year, New Game: Dogs in the Vineyard — David Bowers shares what happened when he tried, back in 2011, to run Dogs in the Vineyard set in the Star Wars universe.
How I Prep for the First Session of a New Game — To close things out, I shared my approach to running the first session of a new game on Gnome Stew.
In addition to posts that were part of the blog carnival, NYNG itself also got some press from RPG bloggers. Thanks to these fine folks for spreading the word:
If I missed a NYNG post anywhere, please drop me a comment or an email and I’ll rectify that right away.
I hope you enjoyed reading these articles and taking part in the NYNG challenge. if you have any feedback for next year’s NYNG event, fire away in the comments.
Today is the final day of our first annual NYNG challenge! You can still enter the contest and take part in the blog carnival, but only for a few more hours.
Today also brings three new NYNG carnival posts:
Today brings two more new NYNG posts:
Thanks to IronWolf and rpgadvocate for their carnival posts!
Today we have a new entry in our blog carnival, this one from Stargazer’s World: New Year, New Game. If you’re curious what Michael’s planning with Shadow, Sword & Spell, check it out!
I also got a great email from Robust McManlyPants (of the west side McManlyPantses, and a blog carnival praticipant) that summed up what NYNG is all about so well that I asked him if I could share it with you:
I’m trying to encourage one of my co-player-co-DM peeps to write an entry because it turns out the next thing we’re doing is using a session of Microscope (new to all of us) to develop a steampunk sci-fantasy world and then running a limited-series Burning Wheel game (new to all of us) set in one of the historical periods we define. I’ve also taken an early vow to use that setting and game as at least a launching point for my tenth year of participating in National Novel Writing Month. NYNG has inspired three of the five of us to specific new creative endeavors already. How awesome is that?