I had the great pleasure of spending Labor Day weekend in Atlanta, enjoying the great geekery of Dragon*Con. Imagine a 4 day party of amazing costumes, dancing, informative and fun panels, and some slice of pop culture deliciousness for nearly every fandom that exists. I personally did some Marvel comics costuming, some steampunk (I built a hot air balloon backpack!), and a few panels with RPG game designers. Pathfinder’s Mythic Adventures sounds particularly cool, and the Savage Worlds Explorer’s Edition is a fantastic buy for anyone looking to try out a great non-Pathfinder, non-d20 game.

One of the highlights of the weekend was getting to run a semi-official playtest of the Atomic Robo Roleplaying Game. After exchanging a few tweets with Mike Olson, the game’s designer, he graciously let me peak at the playtest materials and we set things into motion. Social media came to the rescue, and I was able to quickly set up a game for 5 complete strangers at Dragon*Con.

If you don’t know, Atomic Robo is a comic from Red 5, written by Brian Clevinger with art by Scott Wegener. It’s fun, funny, action-packed pulpy-sciency goodness. The game is built on the FATE system evolved by Evil Hat Productions (Dresden Files RPG, Spirit of the Century). Play moves fast, and the system is designed to really bring out and encourage roleplaying interesting and exciting characters. Going in, I was already a fan of Atomic Robo and of FATE, but the two together are particularly complimentary.

The game session was a success, everyone had a fantastic time. It was a playtest, so we spent a few minutes at the end discussing what we liked and didn’t like. Lots of positive feedback, and the negative stuff was mostly “could have used an example”— something I’d assume will be in the finished product anyway.

So…

• Dragon*Con – a great time celebrating many forms of geekery!
• Mythic Adventures – Pathfinder supplement for expanding play options. Think “power of the gods”.
• Savage Worlds – a really solid and fun game, with the complete rule set available for $10 in the Explorer’s Edition.
• Atomic Robo RPG – it’s coming in Spring of next year, and it looks to be wonderful, especially if you are fan of Robo, FATE or both.