Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

games

Krisis's coverage Dungeons & Dragons and 5e-Compatible supplements, board games, and the occasional video game.

Marvel United: Multiverse makes more mutants, plus Inhumans enter the fray with War of Kings!

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We interrupt this post I had just started writing about the Marvel United: Multiverse Kickstarter campaign to bring you breaking news from the Marvel United: Multiverse Kickstarter campaign! Today, CMON announced their first new expansion box of the campaign, and it’s a massive one: War of Kings, including the entire primary cast of Inhumans and two X-character Shi’ar foes!

Let’s talk about this newly-announced box for a moment, and then I’ll get back to what I was already in the process of writing about – which is the many mutant characters who have been popping up as stretch goals over the past couple of days.

I have a 800+ character wishlist for Marvel United. I’ve ever grouped them into potential boxed sets whenever I could theme a group of them together. I know some of them are far beneath CMON’s threshold for notice. Maybe we could get Wiz-Kid, but we’ll probably never have my beloved Siena Blaze.

The Inhumans are one of those potential boxed sets, but I wasn’t sure if they were popular enough to merit their own expansion. They haven’t had their own ongoing for several years, and they were unceremoniously excised from the Marvel Universe. Casual comic fans likely only know half the royal family at best. CMON has snuck in many niche characters like Cloak & Dagger and the Starjammers via a steady drip of Stretch Goals, and I thought if we were lucky we could score half the royal family that way.

I was far to pessimistic about our chances! We’re getting the full royal family that I selected in my spreadsheet – Black Bolt, Medusa, Crystal, Gorgon, Karnak, & Triton. Plus, a full sculpt and set of cards for Lockjaw! Plus, Gladiator – leader of the Shi’ar Imperial Guard – as a dual-playing Anti-Hero that can be a hero or a villain. And, one fully-evil Vulcan, the lost Summers brother.

ALL IN ONE BOX. For $35, that’s less than $4 per character. The only way this box could be any better is if they made Vulcan a hero (after all, all mutants fight for Krakoa!) – but I can take care of that on my own.

Cue me screaming my head off in Marvel geek delight. Also, all of their figure sculpts look amazing, and their power dynamics sound unique. Crystal can use her earth control to block villains from moving into a location, and Triton gets special advantage in locations marked with water tokens.

Meanwhile, the post I was already working on is this: CMON has really stepped up on filling in mutants they didn’t get to in their X-Men campaign. We’re only on Day 3 and they’ve already completed the entire Starjammers, gotten two characters into Generation X, and added everyone’s favorite good boy – Doug Ramsey!

Let’s take a quick look at which X-Characters have been announced and who remains MIA. [Read more…] about Marvel United: Multiverse makes more mutants, plus Inhumans enter the fray with War of Kings!

CMON’s Marvel United returns to Kickstarter with Marvel United: Multiverse!

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I feel like a kid at Christmas today, even if it will be an unbearable year of waiting before I can open my present. That’s because board game publisher CMON is back on Kickstarter with a third wave of their delightful Marvel United game – and this time, it’s multiversal! Their new campaign is for Marvel United: Multiverse!Marvel United Multiverse Kickstarter Campaign Image

Marvel United is a cooperative game where you play as one or more heroes fighting an iconic Marvel Villain who takes automated turns based on a sinister Master Plan deck. The fight extends to six familiar Marvel locations drawn from a pool of dozens, and each one contains a threat and a number of innocent bystanders and annoying henchmen.

On your turn, your hero plays a card to “the timeline” that contains one or more action symbols that let you fight, move, or save the day. But, you’re not alone – you also get to re-use the symbols from the card of the hero whose turn was before yours. Together, you write the story of your fight to save the world – or maybe just New York City – from your foe’s villainous plot.

I passed on the original Marvel United campaign because I wasn’t attracted to the Chibi-style hero art. Plus, it was heavily focused on the MCU and was completely devoid of mutants. We don’t support anti-mutant discrimination in this household! However, when a campaign entirely comprised of X-Men loomed in 2021 I picked up the core game at retail to see what it was all about and immediately became hooked. It’s a fun solo game, since you don’t need an opponent. The hero mechanic is incredibly simple, but it can lead to intriguing puzzles as you try to plan the perfect combos of actions across multiple turns while staying out of the way of a rampaging villain.

If I had one complaint about the game, it’s that the heroes all felt a bit same-y. Each of them had a deck of twelve cards with different balances of symbols, but for most heroes only three of them were “special moves” that did something unique. After my first two plays, I fired up a spreadsheet and a started to define “Special ability” and “Combo Move” for each hero so they felt more persistently powerful.

For example, here is what I drafted for Black Widow: [Read more…] about CMON’s Marvel United returns to Kickstarter with Marvel United: Multiverse!

The D&D Open Gaming License / The Dangers of Playing with Other People’s Toys

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This week everyone is talking about Dungeons & Dragons, but it’s not for a good reason.

Last week, a revision to the longstanding D&D “Open Gaming License” leaked. I’ve written about the OGL before, but in short it’s the persistent legal agreement that allows independent creators to use the core rules and concepts of D&D to create their own 3rd party material. While that ostensibly exists for people who want to sell their own 3rd-party D&D supplements, it also acts as a safety net for anyone homebrewing their own content.

Many outlets have written at length about the newly-drafted version of the OGL – i09 reporter Linda Codega broke the story at Gizmodo last week. The draft institutes a number of restrictions, including tightening the ability to distribute digital content, enforcing royalty-sharing on big earners, and instituting some potentially-invasive rights to reproduce creator content.

Understandably, both creators and players are in an uproar – after all, every D&D player is also a co-creator of their campaign’s story! Even if they never intend to publish or profit from their storytelling contributions, there’s a pervasive feeling of “this affects all of us” solidarity from the D&D community.

Another reliable leak mentioned that D&D owners Wizards of the Coast (WotC) and Hasbro would be looking at digital DNDBeyond subscription cancellations as an early metric of the community’s response to the OGL changes. A leak coming from within the DNDBeyond team makes a lot of sense. WotC and Hasbro bought DNDBeyond last April from Fandom for $146 million dollars. The DNDBeyond team don’t have a long-term allegiance to the Hasbro corporate overlords and they are watching the stellar good will they’ve amassed as a community platform being quickly eroded by this decision.

As the DNDBeyond team may have feared (but also secretly wished for), this new leak immediately lead to a cascade of hundreds of players posting proof of their subscription cancellations on DNDBeyond forums and on Twitter.

I was one of those players.

Tomorrow is my bi-weekly D&D date with my best friends from the states and I am currently the Dungeon Master of our campaign. That means today ought to be spent finalizing maps and building out potential encounters for my custom campaign that has taken a hard left turn from the official campaign in Storm King’s Thunder.

Instead, I’m spending the day wondering if it’s worth putting in the effort to tell stories in a fictional world that is just another capitalist playground. [Read more…] about The D&D Open Gaming License / The Dangers of Playing with Other People’s Toys

D&D 5e-Compatible Kickstarter Round-Up: ZineQuest 2022, Cute Creatures Compendium, US National Park maps, & more!

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Image by ScalyDragon from Pixabay

It’s time to roll a saving throw against Kickstarting, because I’m back with another weekly review of Dungeons & Dragons and 5e-Compatible projects on Kickstarter – including Kickstarter’s ZineQuest 2022!

There have been twenty-four 5e-Compatible projects launched in the past week, which is double the pace of any weeks I’ve covered in the past month! That’s because we’re in the middle of ZineQuest 2022 – a special Kickstarter-sponsored initiative to encourage creators to create small-scale, zine-sized RPG campaigns.

Just taking a peek at all of these Kickstarter campaigns took a while! From those two dozen projects, I’ve picked nine to cover in this post that tickle my fancy the most or fit my digital-first campaign the best – several of which are part of ZineQuest.

Here are the other 15 projects launched since my last post:

For projects with a scope that extends beyond being a single adventure or specific topic like “wands”, I review them based on the 9-point criteria I established in “What makes a good Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition official release or 5e-Compatible supplement?”

Want to catch up on other currently-running campaigns? Here are all of the other XX campaigns currently-running on Kickstarter, all of which I’ve covered in depth on past posts in this series.

Do you have an upcoming 5e-Compatible Kickstarter project? I’d be happy to check out your sample pages, give you comments on your planned campaign page, or highlight your project in a future post. Just leave me a comment below or reach out to me @CrushingComics on Twitter. [Read more…] about D&D 5e-Compatible Kickstarter Round-Up: ZineQuest 2022, Cute Creatures Compendium, US National Park maps, & more!

D&D 5e-Compatible Kickstarter Round-Up: The Midnight Ball, GrymWyrd Tales, & TheoryCraft character journals!

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Image by ScalyDragon from Pixabay

It’s time to don your armor, because I’m back with another weekly review of Dungeons & Dragons and 5e-Compatible projects on Kickstarter – including the very ooky Midnight Ball and GrymWyrd Tales!

I’ve now covered every D&D project on Kickstarter for a whole month. In that time, I’ve figured out some things – including that it’s no fun to scour a campaign page only to discover it’s poorly-planned, badly-edited, unreadable in layout, or even covertly racist – and to then write about it.

I don’t want to punch down on first-time creators or highlight creators whose work I’d never endorse.

Starting with this post, I’m no longer reviewing every new project on Kickstarter each week – only the ones that look interesting to me or that I think are worth recommending!

This week there’s just five new projects, of which I review three below:

Also new on Kickstarter this week are:

For projects with a scope that extends beyond being a single adventure or specific topic like “wands”, I review them based on the 9-point criteria I established in “What makes a good Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition official release or 5e-Compatible supplement?”

Want to catch up on other currently-running campaigns? Here are all of the other 24 campaigns currently-running on Kickstarter, all of which I’ve covered in depth on past posts in this series.

Do you have an upcoming 5e-Compatible Kickstarter project? I’d be happy to check out your sample pages, give you comments on your planned campaign page, or highlight your project in a future post. Just leave me a comment below or reach out to me @CrushingComics on Twitter. [Read more…] about D&D 5e-Compatible Kickstarter Round-Up: The Midnight Ball, GrymWyrd Tales, & TheoryCraft character journals!