Garfield's notion of a metagame is, essentially, any aspect of the game outside of the rules themselves. (I'm assuming most everyone is already aware that Garfield is the designer of the insanely successful Magic: The Gathering.) Now this was the first essay that I could really sink my teeth into. Next is Richard Garfield's article entitled Metagames. Maybe you'd find this interesting if you're a big Pendragon fan, but I'm not sure that it's of too much general interest. In enough text to more or less fill up a page, he explains why he based the game Pendragon off of the tales of Sir Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur. Second, we had an amazingly short work by Greg Stafford. Not the meatiest thing around, but I'd say it was decent. The first essay was by Rick Loomis (who published Tunnels and Trolls and Nuclear War.) His is a short piece about cycles in the gaming industry and how we've moved from wargames to roleplaying games to collectible card games. Anyway, since there are only eight essays - and because, from my point of view, the allure of this book is the possibility of acquiring wisdom from established RPG professionals - I'll give a brief run down of what the essays were, and who wrote them. So, if anything, I'd say this gave me something of a positive bias for this book. You might get a whole lot more text, and even a color interior, if you spent your twenty dollars on the D&D Player's Handbook instead, but you certainly wouldn't get the satisfaction of knowing that you participated in an effort with many of the giants of the industry to make a positive contribution to society. All of the essays and art in this book were donated by their creators, and all of the profits from its sale are going to help fight cancer in central Illinois. Out of this spirit, grew Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Then, in 1999 the team decided to again raise money to help fight cancer, but this time donate it to a something where the effects would be local. The next season (1998) the volleyball team raised money and donated it to the American Cancer Society. A few years ago the mother of one of his volleyball players died of cancer. The introduction walks us through a little of Jim Dietz's experience as a gamer and how he got to be what he is currently: a game publisher and a high school volleyball coach. It does take up quite a bit of space - there are a lot of full page pieces (all black and white.) But, the quality of the art is consistently high (I especially like the two full-page pieces by Bradley K McDevitt.) The only exception to this is that a few pieces (all by a single artist) didn't seem to translate well to the book - they ended up looking dirty. On the other hand, there's the matter of the art. And at 96 pages, it seemed a little light for twenty dollars. My first thought was that the text was a tad sparse. When I got out to my car with it I immediately opened it up. Gary Gygax, Richard Garfield, Greg Costikyan, Marc Miller and more. These were essays about RPGs written by some of the biggest names there are in this industry. The back cover informed me that these weren't just essays about RPGs. The book was taped closed in a large comic bag, so I didn't flip through it in the store. But good essays on role-playing, ahhh, now those I can always use. Any RPG I purchase these days has to be sufficiently novel in some way to peak my interest. It immediately appealed to me because, frankly, I already own more game systems then I can use in the near future. I went into a local gaming store this weekend and found this book, Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Essays on Roleplaying, in the new arrivals section.
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