Steve Jackson's Blog

We are thrilled to announce Munchkin Second Edition , coming soon to BackerKit!  Munchkin , the mega-hit card game of backstabbing your way to 10th Level, debuted nearly 25 years ago and took the gaming world by storm. Now, after all these years of kicking down doors and stealing treasures, we're bringing you the revised edition that Steve once said we would only create when pigs fly! So what's new in Munchkin Second Edition ? Lots!Teaching the game is now easier, with setup and gameplay faster than ever.All of the cards have been re-drawn by John Kovalic, Munchkin 's original artist. The gameboard and box art are also new.A new element is introduced – Gold Pieces – an extra way to bribe your friends (and sometimes the monsters). And now you can get change when you sell Items for levels.Reference cards have been added so you don't have to pass the rulebook between players every time there's a question.Rules for using your First Edition cards with the new edition rules!If you have the  Munchkin Big Box, rejoice! An Upgrade Kit will be available, with a sheet of coins, a set of reference cards, the Second Edition rules, and (at current count) 52 cards - some new, some to replace cards that have had important changes. How about stretch goals? We're not ready to share them all just yet, but there will be an updated version of the Munchkin Level Counter and an STL file for printing a Munchkin dice tower!

As we look towards the 25th anniversary next year . . .  The Year of the Munchkin  . . . we'll be creating even more Munchkin -themed goodies. You can look forward toThe awesome Munchkin Critical Role: Vox Machina core set – which, though it is based on First Edition, is completely stand-alone.Rules for playing Munchkin as an RPG using 9th Level Games' Polymorph system.A Munchkin card shuffler made by Urza's Toolbox.An updated and enlarged edition of The Munchkin Book. And, of course, expansions for Second Edition! The crowdfunding campaign for Munchkin Second Edition will launch in early 2026. You can visit the BackerKit page today and sign up to be notified as soon as the project goes live!

– Michelle Richardson

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

Our mega-secret master database which I'm not supposed to talk about lists everything the company has ever done. I'm a data geek at heart – I mean, I'm many kinds of geek, of which "data" is one – so I decided on a whim to poke around and see what I could find.

I like round numbers, so I was curious about what came out 25 years ago, in October 2000. (I had to pause after typing that sentence as I came to grips with "the year 2000" being not just "the future," but actually representing "a quarter century ago" . . .)

We've always strived to make items that withstand the test of time, which means the digital era has been particularly kind to our back catalog. Thus I was expecting some of our items from back then to be available to purchase. However, I was shocked to discover that – not counting T-shirts – every item from October 2000 is still available in some fashion!

Going down the list, we have:

• The Principia Discordia – in its third printing in 2000; you can still get it as a PDF.

• GURPS Steampunk – available as a PDF or On Demand softcover.

• Suppressed Transmission 2 – available as a PDF or On Demand softcover.

• Deluxe Illuminati – available as Illuminati Second Edition .

• Illuminati Y2K – This item has had seven printings over the decades, with the most recent one in 2019. We still have some copies on Warehouse 23!

I know not everything can remain in print forever, but – at least for a few minutes – it's kind of fun to party like it's October 2000.

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

It's the most frightful time of the year! Halloween is coming in two short weeks, and we're having a super sale on dozens of haunted games and accessories on our online store.

Now through November 2, you can save up to 15% when you kick down doors in Munchkin Cthulhu , Munchkin Spell Skool , and more. Z-Shot challenges you to battle zombies, while Zombie Dice Horde Edition will have you eating braaaaaaaains.

If you're looking for scary RPGs, look no further than  GURPS Horror ,  GURPS Zombies , and GURPS Magical Styles: Horror Magic . Also discounted are three exciting RPGs by Possum Creek, including Our Haunt and Sleepaway ! Fill your Cthulhu Dice Bag with the Seven Deadly Sins Die , Glow-in-the-Dark Halloween d6 Dice , and Biohazard d6 Dice . A set of 10 metal Cthulhu Coins will add eldritch horror to your next game, and you can even snuggle a  Halloween Chibithulhu Plush !
 Shop today and let the ghoul times roll!

– Michelle Richardson

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

We were at Costco this past weekend, and we realized that some Advent calendars were already on the shelves. Then I recently heard someone else noting that the cool Advent calendars were probably going to start showing up soon and then rapidly disappearing from Aldi's.

I know there are other fun holidays before we get to December, but it occurs to me that folks may want to be on the lookout for neat limited-edition Advent calendars that might be quick to go. (I stock my entire year's supply of interesting hot sauces by looking for entries from World Market.)

You might also consider looking into building your own daily holiday goodie sets. We've done this in our household as well; for example, my mother-in-law has received a "snack a day" kit in years past. For those whose minds turn toward games – which I suspect is a few of you here – I figured out how to do a search on Warehouse 23 for all physical items, cheapest first. Hmmm . . . I just realized that I can make an awesome "12 Days" calendar for The Fantasy Trip just with the items on the first page of results . . .

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

Not to be a decade late to the acolade party, but the TV series Taskmaster is pretty amazing.

For those of you who are unaware, the core premise of this British game show is that a Taskmaster (comedian Greg Davies) – usually in conjunction with show creator and Taskmaster "assistant" Alex Horne – assigns participants some sort of seemingly illogical or impossible challenge to perform. Examples from the first episode include "paint the best picture of a horse while riding a horse" or "empty a bathtub without pulling the plug or tipping it."

The panelists are all comedians and entertainers themselves, so the joy comes from seeing their lateral-thinking solutions (or failing at them) . . . in generally hilarious ways.

For those seeking a game tie-in, it's a great way to get ideas for difficult scenarios set up by faeries, killer AIs, and the like: "How can we move this key across the dungeon without any of us touching it?"

There are various options for watching Taskmaster, but if you're saving your money for games, then this Pluto TV link should have the first six seasons available. (Be warned that, if you have sensitive ears or co-workers, not all the language is safe for work.)

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

I will be going to Gamehole Con in Madison, accompanied by Irene, this weekend. This is one of my favorite shows! Many games, many many many games. And people to play with. We would have liked to take a bigger crew, but events eventuated. We will hang out with John Kovalic and a lot of other industry friends, play Munchkin and other games, and do a biiiiiig announcement, which I can now admit is Munchkin -related. And another big announcement which is NOT. Just to confuse the issue!

I hope I see you there, and I hope you come to the Munchkin panel, or play in one of my Melee games, or both.

– Steve Jackson

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

As readers of my daily movie-essay Patreon may have seen recently, I'm part of another book of movie analysis currently in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign: Subversive Sci-Fi Evolution .

More importantly, I'll be alongside a bunch of other cool folks, who are offering their own reflections on films they find interesting. For example, if you're a fan of Kenneth Hite's Suppressed Transmission column from the HTML era of Pyramid magazine, then you need to know he's got an essay in the works about the 1981 David Cronenberg classic Scanners.

If you love thinking about movies and reading science fiction film insights, check it out. If you're new to the series, there are four other volumes you can also pick up, covering different topics and focuses. The future awaits!

– Steven Marsh

 

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

I notice sometimes game designers define a mechanic as "fragile" – and I often catch myself doing this as well. I sat down for a little bit today and thought through what exactly that means. The definition I'm thinking about (and I would be happy for people to poke holes in this) is:

A mechanic is fragile when it is both convoluted and hard to repair.

When I'm talking about repair here, I mean in a conversation analysis sense. Players of analog games are constantly using repair techniques to assist each other and ensure the play they're doing reflects as closely as it can the formal mechanics of the game. If you accidentally move your piece five spaces instead of six, I can repair it by pointing that out and we can devise an adjustment.

An example of a hard-to-repair mechanic would be uncovering a hidden role in a board game. If I accidentally flip up the card revealing my hidden role halfway through the game, we can't rewind to an earlier state, we can't replace the role with a different role, and we can't pretend the other players don't possess this knowledge. The game state can't be repaired.

A mechanic may also be hard to repair if the other players can't help repair it. For example, if there's a special rule that only I am supposed to follow (and the other players don't know about) and I mess that rule up, the other players literally don't know and therefore can't help with repair.

Finally, a mechanic could be hard to repair if its outcome impacts many other mechanics. For example, if there's a formula for generating the acceleration of our spaceship in a racing game, and that acceleration is used to calculate velocity, speed, weapon firing, body endurance, etc. and we botch the calculation, it may be impossible to repair even if we realized it quickly – there are just too many other mechanics depending on its outcome.

There are many trivially fragile mechanics. For example, if each player is expected to do some private and complex math equations to determine the starting arrangement of their deck, it's likely they'll mess up the equation. It may take a while to notice, and the entire game is dependent on the results of said equation.

Fragility isn't fundamentally a bad thing in game design, but it does produce challenges for the game designer, especially when they've accidentally created a fragile system that doesn't appear fragile on the surface. Ultimately, games are played with humans, not machines – and we need to design around repair and conversational dynamics, not just optimal code.

- Jay Dragon

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

Remember in happier times last year when the sun disappeared in defiance of all primal reason? Our household had snacks.

Well, it turns out that was quite the event for the birds as well. Since most of them didn't have tiny little solar-eclipse glasses to enjoy the festivities (probably because they don't have ears to perch the glasses stems on), they needed to fall back on their innate instincts and sing. In particular, scientists discovered that – thanks to an app gathering bird-song data from over 10,000 users – about half of bird species sang their usual "Hey, it's dawn now!" song once the eclipse was over, even though "nightfall" wasn't that long.

The journal Science has the story of what they did and what they discovered. The abstract at the beginning was a delightful reminder of that celestial event, but the whole thing's a cute read – especially if you like fine-feathered friends as much as I do.

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

Here's a broad idea for a cinematic "impossible stuff happens"-type roleplaying campaign, based on a balancing trick some GMs use: When devising threats and adversaries (especially for a game with lots of options and power variability such as GURPS ), a GM might run those threats in a quick mock-combat with copies of the heroes' current character sheets.

During the actual scenario, if the heroes perform a fair bit differently than that sample encounter (especially if the duplicates did better), simply have some mastermind comment on it.

"Hmm. It took you 12 seconds to dispatch the One-Ton Automaton? Our assessments using our test replicas did it in seven. Perhaps they were just luckier – although I do believe our version of Laser-Punch Man used his tactical assessment to discern more accurately where to attack . . ."

In broad strokes, I envision a situation where the heroes need to face off against these "better" versions of themselves. Not necessarily in an "evil doppelganger" way, although it's a fine variant ("We made these replicas to hone our forces against you"). However, it would be less clichéd if the opponents were more like a "team of rivals," "emotionless automatons," or the like. In other words, give the heroes something to overcome of near-exact power levels not out of a good/evil divide, but simple professional pride: "I beat the best version of 'me' you guys could come up with!"

Anyway, that's my idea; it may be half-baked, but it's still hot out of the oven . . .

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!