Role-playing games seemed to appear of nowhere in the early 1970s and have been a quiet but steady presence in American culture ever since. This new look at the hobby searches for the historical origins of role-playing games deep in the imaginative worlds of Western culture. It looks at the earliest fantasy stories from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, at the fans--both readers and writers--who wanted to bring them to life, at the Midwestern landscape and the middle-class households that were the hobby's birthplace, and at the struggle to find meaning and identity amidst cultural conflicts that drove many people into these communities of play. This book also addresses race, religion, gender, fandom, and the place these games have within American capitalism. All the paths of this journey are connected by the very quality that has made fantasy role-playing so powerful: it binds the limitless imagination into a "strict" framework of rules. Far from being an accidental offshoot of marginalized fan communities, role-playing games' ability to hold contradictions in dynamic, creative tension made them a necessary and central product of the twentieth century.

The ferociously talented Hideo Kojima, creator of Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding, shares his perspective on the stories and movies that influence his work! Ever since he was a child, Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding creator Hideo Kojima was a voracious consumer of movies, music, and books. They ignited his passion for stories and storytelling, and the results can be seen in his groundbreaking, iconic video games. Now the head of independent studio Kojima Productions, Kojima's enthusiasm for entertainment media has never waned. This collection of essays explores some of the inspirations behind one of the titans of the video game industry, and offers an exclusive insight into one of the brightest minds in pop culture. Ever since he was a child, Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding creator Hideo Kojima was a voracious consumer of movies, music, and books. They ignited his passion for stories and storytelling, and the results can be seen in his groundbreaking, iconic video games. Now the head of independent studio Kojima Productions, Kojima's enthusiasm for entertainment media has never waned. This collection of essays explores some of the inspirations behind one of the titans of the video game industry, and offers an exclusive insight into one of the brightest minds in pop culture.

The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim is one of the bestselling and most influential video games of the past decade. From the return of world-threatening dragons to an ongoing civil war, the province of Skyrim is rich with adventure, lore, magic, history, and stunning vistas. Beyond its visual spectacle alone, Skyrim is an exemplary gameworld that reproduces out-of-game realities, controversies, and histories for its players. Being Dragonborn, then, comes to signify a host of ethical and ideological choices for the player, both inside and outside the gameworld. These essays show how playing Skyrim, in many ways, is akin to "playing" 21st century America with its various crises, conflicts, divisions, and inequalities. Topics covered include racial inequality and white supremacy, gender construction and misogyny, the politics of modding, rhetorics of gameplay, and narrative features.

Set off with your adventuring party to gather 25 days' worth of gifts from the world of Dungeons & Dragons! Collect dozens of little treasures inspired by the Forgotten Realms in this official Dungeons & Dragons countdown calendar. Your party may have all the weapons they need, but this engaging gift calendar is filled with dozens of items you'd never think to bring on a quest. With mini books, stationery, buttons, tech accessories, and more, you can celebrate your love for the game with this countdown calendar featuring a monstrous assortment of presents!

Video Games in Psychotherapy provides the reader with a practical session-by-session framework for using video games, interactive media, and gaming metaphors to help make the process of psychotherapy more engaging for today's youth. Using concepts from narrative, collaborative, cognitive behavioral, and other evidenced-based approaches to psychotherapy, the book gives examples of possible therapist questions, responses, and activities involving language and concepts that are appealing to young gamers. Addressing issues with psychophysiological self-regulation, anxiety disorders, and autism spectrum disorders, among others, this book uses multiple case examples to demonstrate each idea and is written in a way that is understandable for all mental health providers, regardless of their own familiarity with gaming. A review of over 40 popular video games with specific ideas for their use in psychotherapy is provided, allowing mental health providers to easily individualize therapy based on client goals and gaming preferences. Concepts for individual and group psychotherapy using games and interactive media, ranging from Pac Man to virtual reality, are also covered. Providing the reader with useful templates, worksheets, and other therapy resources, this book is a must-have for mental health providers working with children, adolescents, and transition-age youth.

Video Games in Psychotherapy provides the reader with a practical session-by-session framework for using video games, interactive media, and gaming metaphors to help make the process of psychotherapy more engaging for today's youth. Using concepts from narrative, collaborative, cognitive behavioral, and other evidenced-based approaches to psychotherapy, the book gives examples of possible therapist questions, responses, and activities involving language and concepts that are appealing to young gamers. Addressing issues with psychophysiological self-regulation, anxiety disorders, and autism spectrum disorders, among others, this book uses multiple case examples to demonstrate each idea and is written in a way that is understandable for all mental health providers, regardless of their own familiarity with gaming. A review of over 40 popular video games with specific ideas for their use in psychotherapy is provided, allowing mental health providers to easily individualize therapy based on client goals and gaming preferences. Concepts for individual and group psychotherapy using games and interactive media, ranging from Pac Man to virtual reality, are also covered. Providing the reader with useful templates, worksheets, and other therapy resources, this book is a must-have for mental health providers working with children, adolescents, and transition-age youth.

Level up your Game Master skills with these fun, interactive prompts and activities to help your worldbuilding from RPG expert James D'Amato. Make your next campaign truly unique with the help of this interactive guide to world building! From RPG expert James D'Amato comes a fun new guide that teaches beginner and experienced gamers alike how to build and create their own game elements for customizing existing adventures or creating new stories from scratch. The Ultimate RPG Game Master's Worldbuilding Guide includes dozens of activities for a wide range of genres from fantasy and sci-fi to horror and x-punk. This lively and interactive book helps Game Masters create dynamic destinations, powerful items, shadowy organizations, compelling villains, and more. Make the most of your gaming experience with these unique and personalized ideas for your gaming group's next adventures!

Landscape science tells fascinating stories, whether in fiction or a role-playing game. Earth's varied terrain provides many examples of scene-specific challenges and resources for story characters, with distinctive land features, compelling locations, and intriguing traits. Landslides, floods, coastal erosion, glacier movement, and volcanism can deliver fresh plot points and alter the social character of an imagined region. Characters traveling different river types encounter very different puzzles, opportunities, and combat environments and the same variety awaits within other classic settings, such as caves, mountains, deserts, shorelines, and volcanic zones. Atypical landscapes such as tundra, karst, and vast glacier surfaces can breathe fresh air into any stories. This handbook is a reference source for creative writing and game world building. It delves deeply into many landscape characteristics that help set the tone, shape character behavior, and drive the plot. Chapters are divided into diverse geographic environments, from rivers and shorelines to caves and volcanoes, and show how knowledge of the terrain can deliver plot points, add veracity, pose key problems, establish conflict, and lead into the next scene. Discover how authors and game masters effectively weave land and terrain into their stories.

With annual gross sales surpassing 100 billion U.S. dollars each of the last two years, the digital games industry may one day challenge theatrical-release movies as the highest-grossing entertainment media in the world. In their examination of the tremendous cultural influence of digital games, Daniel Reardon and David Wright analyze three companies that have shaped the industry: Bethesda, located in Rockville, Maryland, USA; BioWare in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada; and CD Projekt Red in Warsaw, Poland. Each company has used social media and technical content in the games to promote players' belief that players control the companies' game narratives. The result has been at times explosive, as empowered players often attempted to co-op the creative processes of games through discussion board forum demands, fund-raising campaigns to persuade companies to change or add game content, and modifications ("modding") of the games through fan-created downloads. The result has changed the way we understand the interactive nature of digital games and the power of fan culture to shape those games.

Today, it seems as if everyone from heroic-yet-angsty teenagers, to giggling schoolgirls, to middle-aged businessmen, to bored moms are finding themselves whisked away to save distant worlds from some kind of unspeakable evil. But how do you prepare for such an amazing adventure? And, more importantly, how do you make it through without getting horribly maimed or killed along the way? Fortunately, this handbook has analyzed the accounts of numerous heroes who have traveled to magical lands and returned to tell the tale in order to create the definitive guide to survival and success no matter where in the fantasyverse your adventures may take you. In these pages, you'll learn how to increase (or, if you prefer, decrease) your chances of successfully being chosen, what types of preparation and training you should undertake beforehand, and how to hit the ground running on arrival and become the legendary hero that you were always destined to be.**Makes no guarantees of destined heroism and cannot be held liable if it turns out that you are instead destined to be eaten by a giant toad.

Constructing a functional system of magic that helps readers suspend disbelief is a crucial part of worldbuilding in the fantasy genres. Yet creating a believable, compelling and original fictional universe can be daunting. To help inspire writers, this guide provides an overview of how magic has been understood in history and used in myth, legend and modern fiction. Different forms of magic are explored and a broad range of stories-from Nordic myths to modern novels-are described and referenced. Discussion explores how magic as a concept shapes, and is shaped by, fictional worlds and societies.

Actual play is a movement within role-playing gaming in which players livestream their gameplay for others to watch and enjoy. This new medium has allowed the playing of games to become a digestible, consumable text for individuals to watch, enjoy, learn from, and analyze. Bridging the gap between the analog and the digital, actual play is changing and challenging our expectations of tabletop role-playing and providing a space for new scholarship. This edited collection of essays focuses on Dungeons and Dragons actual play and examines this phenomenon from a variety of different disciplinary approaches. Authors explore how to define actual play, how fans interact with and affect the narrative and gameplay of actual play, the diversity of gamers (or lack thereof) within actual play media, and how audiences can use actual play media for more than mere entertainment.

The Wildside Gaming System is a flexible, innovative, ultra-realistic role-playing system designed specifically for adult and experienced gamers. Combining realistic and logical character development, realistic combat, and accurate historical elements, the Fantasy Role-Playing Edition is designed especially for Game Masters who like to create their own settings for swashbuckling heroics, magic, and adventure in a complex fantasy world.

A lot of work has been done talking about what masculinity is and what it does within video games, but less has been given to considering how and why this happens, and the processes involved. This book considers the array of daily relationships involved in producing masculinity and how those actions and relationships translate to video games. Moreover, it examines the ways the actual play of the games maps onto the stories to create contradictory moments that show that, while toxic masculinity certainly exists, it is far from inevitable. Topics covered include the nature of masculine apprenticeship and nurturing, labor, fatherhood, the scapegoating of women, and reckoning with mortality, among many others.

The North African Campaign has begun. Take control of the British Army's Long Range Desert Group and operate behind enemy lines or command the formidable Italian forces opposing them. In this standalone sequel to Undaunted: Normandy, players will once again lead their sides through a varied series of missions. As casualties mount, wounded units leave the players' decks, forcing them to adapt in the face of changing tactical circumstances. Use your cards to strengthen your forces, deploy vehicles to advance rapidly across the battlefield, and seize the initiative as you determine the outcome of the North African Theatre. Ages: 14+ Players: 2 Playing Time: 45-60 minutes Contents: 88 cards, 22 large map tiles, 4 dice, tokens, campaign booklet

This collection of essays is devoted to the philosophical examination of the aesthetics of videogames. Videogames represent one of the most significant developments in the modern popular arts, and it is a topic that is attracting much attention among philosophers of art and aestheticians. As a burgeoning medium of artistic expression, videogames raise entirely new aesthetic concerns, particularly concerning their ontology, interactivity, and aesthetic value. The essays in this volume address a number of pressing theoretical issues related to these areas, including but not limited to: the nature of performance and identity in videogames; their status as an interactive form of art; the ethical problems raised by violence in videogames; and the representation of women in videogames and the gaming community. The Aesthetics of Videogames is an important contribution to analytic aesthetics that deals with an important and growing art form.

From the author of The Monsters Know What They're Doing comes a follow-up strategy guide with MOAR! monster tactics for Dungeon Masters playing fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons. Keith Ammann's first book based on his popular blog, The Monsters Know What They're Doing, unpacks strategies, tactics, and motivations for creatures found in the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Now, in MOAR! Monsters Know What They're Doing, he analyzes the likely combat behaviors of more than 100 new enemies found in Volo's Guide to Monsters and Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes. Your campaign will never be the same!

The Art of Ni no Kuni (TM)II: REVENANT KINGDOM is a lavish full-color book showcasing the best art from the highly anticipated roleplaying game. Developed by Level-5 and with collaboration from legendary Studio Ghibli animator Yoshiyuki Momose, Ni no Kuni (TM)II: REVENANT KINGDOM is a beautiful, characterful and exciting game. This book is the ultimate fan resource, showcasing the development of the amazing characters, monsters, vehicles and locations from initial concept sketches through to the finished artworks.