Review: Open Game Table – Vol 1.

My complementary copy of Open Game Table: The Anthology of Roleplaying Game Blogs, Volume 1 showed up in the German post just before we left for a four-day Easter holiday and I took along the book to read during the trip. Physically, the book looks terrific: The cover art is excellent and the interior art has a variety of styles with a few pieces that are really outstanding – Crystal Frasier’s contributions in particular really caught my eye. The book opens with a forward by Wolfgang Baur and then jumps right into the articles.

Warning: Pathetic shilling of my own material here: My own article, The Principles of Scene Framing, appears starting on page 12. I was quite surprised that a post of mine had been selected for the first anthology, especially since my blog had only been up and running for a few months prior to me writing that particular feature. The book’s editors really did me a great service in editing and laying out the article – I personally think it looks even better in actual print. )

Okay, back to the regular review:  The book runs the gamut of gaming topics, ranging from the serious to the not-so. To give you a taste of some of the article titles, take a look at just a few of the titles:

• Sandbox Play
• The Most Important Gamemastering Tool
• Give Feedback to Your GM… And Live!
• Advice on Being a Good Player
• Goblins
• The Adventure Funnel
• Action!
• Gygaxian “Naturalism”
• In Defense of Bog Standard Fantasy

While there generally is a slant towards Dungeons & Dragons, much of the advice is applicable to any RPG situation. While a lot of the articles are quite good, two were amongst my favorites:

• Get Your Dice Off My Lawn! by Berin Kinsman which is a tongue-in-cheek remembrance of those shitty plastic dice that came in the original TSR box sets. I had a few of those sets (although I had actual d10′s, not the d20 numbered 0-9) and I recently got a set in one of the vintage D&D boxsets I’ve bought….wow, those dice really were crap.
• Is This How D&D is Supposed to be Played? by James Edward Raggi IV is by far my favorite of the articles in the book. It’s an examination of vintage D&D modules and they way they shaped the playstyle and expectations of generations of D&D players that followed. I could truly identify with the article after re-reading The Temple of Elemental Evil along with some of the other “classic” D&D modules (including the Dragonlance modules) and scratching my head about why people  thought these were such great examples of adventures.  This article is excellent stuff IMHO.

Overall I thought the OGT was an excellent read. My only real quibble was that the 4E monk article was way too long (18 pages) – I would have rather seen this presented as a level 1-3 teaser and directed people to the original article to see it in its full glory (and the amount of effort that went into it is impressive). Otherwise, the book seems to have been paced and laid out in a logical and orderly fashion.

I can’t recommend the book enough – it’s several hours of enjoyable entertainment plus the opportunity to see some of the best of what the RPG blogosphere has to offer.