Exclusive Preview: Alliance 2011 Catalog

Through our sources, we’ve managed to obtain a copy of the Alliance Games distributor catalog for the coming year. This catalog is what game retailers use to decide what to order for their store to carry, and we are fortunate enough to get a peek at what the next year in games holds. Here are a few that caught our eye, along with their descriptions from the publishers. This was an April Fool’s joke about fake products, I hope you enjoy them anyway. -Ed

Swords

Grab your sword and ready your blade… the Swords core rules are a “clone” of the original Swords & Wizardry “clone” of the original Gary Gygax 1974 roleplaying game that started it all. With a thriving community on Twitter working on the book in 140 character chunks, we have managed to take the spirit of Swords & Wizardry and condense and streamline it into a compact, 4 page product, including complete character generation rules and combat, as well as 3 pages of tables and charts about the kind of swords you may find and the type of sword swings you perform. Forget rulebooks with page counts in the double and triple digits- with a revolutionary core mechanic of “roll a die and decide what it means,” you are bound only by your imagination and all the charts you have to roll on.

Pathfinder Essentials

For those of you who love Pathfinder but are having a bit of trouble introducing it to new players, we have developed the new Pathfinder Essentials boxed set. Designed as a starter portable product, containing everything you need to get you started, the boxed set contains:

• A slimmed down version of the rulebook, weighing in at only 450 pages and 15 pounds
• Revised Bestiary, containing over 3,000 monsters in 4 3-ring binders for easy removal in encounter planning
• A set of the first 3 Pathfinder adventure paths
• Enough pewter miniatures of size categories tiny through colossal to represent all the monsters you could encounter
• Magic Item Compendiums and Spell Compendiums, meticulously converted to Pathfinder rules from the original 2nd edition D&D tomes
• A Geek Chic Emissary table (some assembly required)
• Original Wayne Reynolds art (including frame)

Look for it premiering at GenCon 2011. Due to the limited nature of this product, it is recommended that buyers line up early to acquire one (special accommodations will be made for those who wish to get in line at GenCon 2010.)

Dudes of Legend

An early PDF release is already available.

Dungeons & Dragons 4.1 Edition

The promise was made that there will be no “4.5 edition”, and that remains true with the announcement that D&D 4.1e will be released in 2011. Features include:

• Revised Combat: Battles are now 200% more strategic, and include enhanced rules for mass, 3 dimensional combats
• Magic Item Cards: Collectible packs of magic items reintroduce random treasure into the game, while streamlining their use and acquisition.
• Upgrades to D&D Insider: Each character you make through the Character Builder automatically gets a profile on PCBook, the social networking site for player characters, which tracks both your XP and number of friends.
• All books will be revised and republished with a helpful .1 to tell which are the current books- so get ready to purchase Player’s Handbook 1.1, Martial Power 2.1, and so on. All new books will include all current errata, and subsequent printings will update each month with the errata, adding an additional .01 to the title.

We’ll be announcing more features through D&D Insider 1.1123348 each month leading up to the 2011 release, so stay tuned!

Advanced World of Synnibar 2.0 Grand Galaxy Plus Edition

The cries of the countless Facebook fans of The World of Synnibar will be silent no longer. In the spirit of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, a brand new system taking what you loved from World of Synnibar is slated for release April 1, 2011. Playtesting is expected to being March 29, 2011. This new system will take all the elements you know and love from the original game such as:

• Cyborgs
• Ninjas
• People that seem to be Jedi but can’t be named that
• Aliens
• Mutants
• Wizards
• Fantastical Technology
• Mind-numbing random character generation
• Completely unbalanced monsters AND characters
• An armor system that defies all sense of fairness

AND, in the spirit of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, it will include all new design and story elements from the very best gaming minds in the world. INCLUDING:

• No longer will you be bound to the hollowed out center of Mars, instead the whole UNIVERSE will be at your fingertips!
• Rules on exceptional endowment (for males) and extreme bust size (for the ladies)!
• A brand new setting: The Larry Notter Synnibar School for PCs!
• New Mind-boggling subsystems with needless complication!
• A NEW dodging mechanic that still makes the best armor completely essential!

GNS RPG

The future of roleplaying is here. Forget the Forge. Forget Story Games. Forget the Indie Press Revolution. The GNS RPG is going to be designed by someone you’ve never heard of, in a secret location, uploaded to the Internet for free, critiqued by anyone with a LiveJournal account who can guess the password.

GNS RPG will change the face of so-called roleplaying forever. It is so cutting-edge that it hasn’t been designed yet. Will you play a team of indie game designers representing various points along the GNS spectrum as they try to dominate narrative control from the others while dealing with secret drug addictions? Will the game be an attempt to emulate the works of Hal Hartley using only d12s and exactly 4 colors of Skittles? Will you be some ghosts dealing with social issues? Nobody knows, and maybe no one will ever know, but if you’re going to look disdainfully on an RPG as “not going far enough,” make it this one.