Dystemporalia

Several months ago, Rob Edwards sent me some fan-made cards with American themes. I’ve been terribly, terribly slow about getting them up, but here for your viewing pleasure is Davy Crockett! I’ll share Rob’s other sets with you over the next couple of weeks.

Click here to download Rob’s Davy Crockett virtual warrior pack!

I recently learned of a relatively new Anachronism fan site called “Anchronism Lives.” The site’s main offerings are new fan-created cards from the set; some of the cards started off on the old Coliseum site, and have been lovingly completed by the AL admins. Enjoy!

This post is just a quick shout-out to Andy Wagner, who noticed and reported some broken links on the site. Thanks to Andy, I think they’re fixed!

The “What does Vlad II have to do with the Bible?” contest has been over for some time now, and having too many irons in too many fires has distracted me from revealing the results. I only received three responses, which I will share here in the chronological order in which they were received:

• Robbie: The Lions represent the Tribe of Judah. The symbol dates back to Jacob and can be seen throughout history through sculpture and other various mediums of symbolization. If you need a more in-depth explanation, I’m more than willing to do so.
• Kaonee:I know i’m a little late for the contest but I saw that nobody had posted so I wanted to give it a go. My first thought about the inspiration behind the tribes of israel boarder is that it comes from the Tablets thats the 10 commandments were written on.
• Rob:Well since the contest is over I will offer a stab at it. I’m assuming it has sommething to do with the Book of Daniel. The lions represent the Lions Den from his story and I know there is some speculated connection between the Book of Daniel and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Could the scribings in the center represent the Dead Sea Scrolls?

And the winner is … none of the above.

The framing art on the Tribes of Israel cards is based directly on a mosaic floor from a 4th-century AD synagogue in the city of Hammat Tiberias on the Sea of Galilee. While Robbie’s suggestion that the lions might be symbols of the tribe of Judah is not  unreasonable, there’s no way to actually link the lions in the mosaic to the “lion of the tribe of Judah,” and at least two considerations speak against this connection: (1) the lions flank a set of nine Greek inscriptions that apparently name the patrons or donors who financed the synagogue’s construction, and (2) the dominant motif on the mosaic is not a biblical reference, but the zodiac. This direct “quotation” of an actual synagogue mosaic from the Roman era explains why the Tribes of Israel card frame features Greek inscriptions.

In my judgment, none of the answers submitted were really close enough to be considered “correct,” so I’ll save the Vlad II promo for another giveaway opportunity. I’ll be traveling with my family throughout the latter part of June and into July, and I won’t try to run another contest or promotion until after I return. Look for another chance to win a Vlad II in August!

Well … nothing, really. But I have another Vlad II promo card to give away, and I want to build up interest in Crossroads, and (as they say on the Carl’s Jr. commercials) that’s just the way it is. So, to celebrate our handing over all the necessary materials to the printer for a first short print run of Crossroads, here’s another way for you to win a Vlad II promo!

To be eligible to win a Vlad II promo in this contest, leave a comment on this post correctly identifying the source or inspiration for the card frame that decorates the Tribes of Israel cards in Anachronism (or, you might say, anachronistically). The best answer (as judged by me, the main criterion being completeness of the answer) will win! If multiple people submit answers that are all equally good, I will choose a winner from that group at random. In order to keep the playing field even, I will hold for moderation all comments on this post (actually, this will affect the whole site) until the contest ends at noon PDT on Friday, May 20, 2011. (Note: I will send the card at no cost to the winner if the winner lives in the USA or Canada. If the winner lives outside the USA or Canada, I will ask the winner to pay the postage cost.)

For the last couple of years, Michael Brown (Anachronism’s designer) and I have been working together on a new Bible-themed game called Crossroads. We like to describe Crossroads this way:

Crossroads™ is a game of epic adventure through the stories of the Bible. In Crossroads™, one to four players work collaboratively to chart their own course through the biblical story.The starter set presents four stories, each with its own particular challenges. Each player selects a vocation and a set of prayers to help the group meet the objectives unique to each adventure. Players then work together to build paths to reveal, face, and overcome the challenges of the game. Skill in navigating the maps and adept use of prayer to influence play will determine the group’s success. Which path will you choose?

Crossroads is a collaborative, expandable board game that features tile-laying, role-taking, and delivery of randomized and customized elements via cards and dice. Basically, when you play a game of Crossroads, you control a traveler who builds roads and then moves along them, facing challenges as you try to achieve your group’s overall goal. Your traveler has certain traits with values based on his or her vocation, and can offer prayers to alter gameplay. Crossroads scenarios are based on biblical stories; each story has a definite beginning and end, but the middle sections are randomized and a successful outcome isn’t guaranteed! The Crossroads Starter Set will include four biblical stories. Thereafter, periodic expansion sets and organized play opportunities will expand the library of Crossroads stories until, over the course of seven years, the list has grown to 80 stories available in the starter set and expansion packs plus 20 stories that you can experience in the organized play program.

If this interests you—and I certainly hope that it does—learn more on the Crossroads website and blog, like our Facebook page, and/or follow @CrossroadsGame on Twitter.

I have moved Dystemporalia into a dedicated webspace, and as far as I can tell, the transfer has gone without a hitch. Remember, if you have any links pointing to http://www.heardworld.com/dystemporalia/, replace that string with http://dystemporalia.org/ and everything should work fine. If you have links that currently point to http://dystemporalia.org, they should still work fine without modification.

I posted this one before, but to make sure everyone who needs to see it sees it:

In an effort to better manage my web presence, I’ll soon be moving Dystemporalia into its own separate webspace on my hosting provider’s server. If you have linked to Dystemporalia or any of its resources using URLs with the dystemporalia.org domain name, you should not even notice the change. If you have linked to Dystemporalia or any of its resources using URLs with the heardworld.com domain name, you’ll soon need to change “www.heardworld.com/dystemporalia” to “dystemporalia.org” or the links will be broken.

I’ll be working on this move tonight (Tuesday, December 14) and it should be completed by Thursday.

The deadline for entries in the “guess the sixth card” contest has now passed, and the results are in! I will share them with you … after the next couple of paragraphs.

I’ve enjoyed sharing this series of behind-the-scenes looks at the design process with you, even though it has stretched out longer than I had originally planned. The series name, “the past is prologue,” and my occasional references to “Anachronism 1.0” may have led you to speculate about whether an Anachronism reboot might be in the works. On that score, all Michael has authorized me to say right now is that “history repeats itself.”

In the meantime, Michael and I would like to invite you to check out our new game, releasing shortly before Easter 2011. What do you get when you cross a biblical scholar with a game designer? You get Crossroads, a collaborative, expandable board game that takes you on epic journeys through the stories of the Bible. Certain aspects of Crossroads will feel very familiar to Anachronism players, while others will be all-new. Even some of the artwork will look familiar, since—and you’re the first readers to get this news—Jason Engle (who contributed the Barak sweep to Anachronism and is also one of my favorite D&D artists/cartographers) is the lead artist on the project. We will announce details soon about our volunteer promoter program (analogous to Anachronism Mercenaries), as well as details about how to pre-order a limited edition starter set with premium components. To stay up-to-date on all the latest news, follow CrossroadsGame on Twitter and “like” the Crossroads Facebook page.

Okay, and now that I’ve kept you in suspense this long, I can tell you that all guesses for the content of the sixth card went equally astray. In Michael’s original vision, the sixth card in each warrior pack would have no gameplay value at all! It would be a purely educational card, providing biographical and historical information about the warrior. Since all guesses were equally wrong, I put everybody in the hat for the drawing …and the winner is … greatfenris! (Contact me directly at cheard@pepperdine.edu to coordinate the mailout.)

Now it turns out that I have four or five more Vlad II Dracul promos to give away, so keep Dystemporalia on your RSS feed, keep following d20philia on Twitter, and stay subscribed to the Anachronism Yahoo! group for your next opportunity to win!

In an effort to better manage my web presence, I’ll soon be moving Dystemporalia into its own separate webspace on my hosting provider’s server. If you have linked to Dystemporalia or any of its resources using URLs with the dystemporalia.org domain name, you should not even notice the change. If you have linked to Dystemporalia or any of its resources using URLs with the heardworld.com domain name, you’ll soon need to change “www.heardworld.com/dystemporalia” to “dystemporalia.org” or the links will be broken.

I will implement this move sometime next week, after awarding the prize for the “Past is prologue” series contest.