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Adapting that idea slightly, one might run a modern HQ2 series with characters drawn from news clippings. To generate your character, find a news story and extract abilities from it as you would from a prose description of your own invention. A GM might want to ward off silliness by disallowing celebrities and other public figures. Or might not: you could run a modern weirdness campaign in which the party consists of Glenn Beck, Sharon Osborne, Diego Maradona, Nigella Lawson and Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger. If you don’t mind dialing the timeline a bit, obituaries would make a fine source of news-drawn characters.

Thus beginneth a new irregular feature here on the blog: names from the news, configured as HeroQuest characters. Given that these are real people, we’ll thinly veil their identities by giving them new fictionalized names.

First up is the American found wandering in Pakistan’s Chitral region, claiming to be on a solo hunt for Osama Bin Laden.

Greg Fitzgerald
American 13
confident 3W
construction worker 15
52 years old 13
prefers solo missions 13
pistol 17
40-inch sword 15
dagger 13
night-vision equipment 13
visited Pakistan seven times 13
book containing Christian verses and teachings 13
“God is with me” 18
hashish 13

But let’s say, to weave a scenario, that it will achieve a penetration similar to the iPhone/iTouch. What does that do for tabletop game design?

A page-sized screen that you can pass around the table makes possible a number of accessory-style apps. We’re used to a D&D tactical map being an inch a square, but it could go page-sized for an app that allows you to drag virtual counters through a battle space, allow the map to scroll with the combatants, figure blast radii and so forth. Like the virtual game table we’ve seen in proof of concept form, but smaller, and not so far in the future.

For GUMSHOE and other investigative games, scenario hand-outs could come as an app package, in gorgeous color. Some documents might be sound files or videos.

For HeroQuest, you could plot a pass/fail map in real time to see your narrative and get appropriate Resistances.

The real paradigm shift comes, however, when the game book becomes, through its transformation into an app, the game itself. I’m not just talking robust hyperlinks within and between rule books, although those alone could be worth the price of the port.

Instead of a rules book telling you what the resolution system is, the app is the resolution system. The app version of Time & Temp would present Epi’s brilliant Sudoku-like paradox grid as a touchable form. Instead of giving you a description of how it works, it just works and gives you the results. 3:16 would, instead of showing you how to arrange figures on the range diagram, include a range diagram you’d move your virtual figures on.

For D&D you’d go to the monster screen, punch in your search parameters, and drag the desired stat blocks onto the battle grid. The app would keep track of power recharges, hits and misses, lost hit points, ad infinitum. It becomes your co-DM, doing all the grunt work for you.

Resolution mechanics, handled by the app, would become invisible, freeing designers from concerns of complexity or the limitations of polyhedral dice. Wickedly involved math could underlie a 21st century answer to The Morrow Project, so long as the app was required to do all of it.

It’s down to the final two competitors, Carole and Diana, in a grueling depression-era tap dance marathon. Carole pits her Pluck (augmented by Tap Dancing) of 19 against Diana’s Endurance (augmented by Chorus Girl) of 18.

The contest then continues…

Personally I consider it a victory that I felt considerably less jet-lagged this time around. Counter-evidence for this claim might yet surface in the photographic form. The fact that I have awoken in the middle of the night local time to type this blog entry might also undermine my overall point.

Seminars were well-attended. I am told the trade hall visibly emptied as various afternoon panels began. A solid turn-out materialized for the HeroQuest panel with Jeff Richard. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that about a third of the room was comprised of interested gamers who were not already part of the hardcore HQ/Glorantha community. Accordingly I ran through the basic ideas behind the design. Jeff, flushed with Orlanthi pride at the successful arrival of the gorgeous and monumental Sartar book, lovingly described its contents and laid out upcoming plans for the revitalized line. Now yet another of the products promised in the pages of RQ2 has finally become a reality. Only a few years late when you look at as part of a great cosmic rhythm, right?

The state of gaming panel, also featuring Paizo’s Erik Mona, IPR’s Brennan Taylor, and the multi-hatted Angus Abranson, filled the room. We covered that most perennial of topics, ways to bring new blood into the hobby. I took the contrarian position that there are still new people entering gaming the same viral way they always have. Much love was extended to the Frank Mentzer red D&D box as the sine qua non of intro products. As usual with this topic we concluded that the hobby was stubbornly refusing to enter the final death spiral we’ve been collectively predicting for ourselves throughout its approximately 40-year history.