Don’t worry, I don’t want to write about the British news paper scandal here. But I thought that “News of the World” would be a great title for a column about news from the RPG scene. On an irregular basis I want to publish news posts about things I’ve read or heard about. This is something I haven’t done before. At least not in this format. So please let me know what you think!

Rumor: D&D Next is going to expensive
From what I’ve read on several blogs Wizards of the Coast will sell the D&D Next PHB for $50. Of course this hasn’t been confirmed by Wizards yet, but if it’s true, it could mean that the price to get into the new D&D might be around $150. This is quite a lot.
On the other hand, the PHB for the next D&D might be more complete than previous versions. If it contained everything you needed to play and run D&D Next, it would be a fair price, but I have my doubts. In my opinion it would be a terrible move by Wizards of the Coast. From what I’ve heard so far, a lot of people are underwhelmed by what they have seen from D&D Next so far, and I doubt the ridiculous price tag could win them over.
I still hope that the $50 price tag is just a placeholder.

Mutant Chronicles 3rd Edition Open Beta
While the Mutant Chronicles Kickstarter is still going strong, Modiphius has released a free open beta document on DriveThruRPG. The 47-paged PDF is fully layouted, contains artwork, and even an adventure. Alas there are no rules for character creation, so you have to rely on the four pregenerated characters included in the book. But nevertheless, it’s a nice move by Modiphius and it might help to get some more people interested in the game.
From what I’ve seen so far the system is quite unique and pretty rules-light (which I love). To make checks you roll 2d20 and compare them with your difficulty number. If the result on one of the dice is equal or lower the difficulty number, you scored a success.
I have played Mutant Chronicles a couple of years back and while I enjoyed it a lot, I found that both the rules and the background had some serious issues. But it looks as if the Modiphius team has the rules side of things covered nicely. We won’t know how they fixed the setting until the final book is released though, but I am confident, that they’ll manage to work out the kinks till release.

German Starslayers  website launched
Some of you may have already heard about Starslayers, the SF roleplaying game powered by the Dungeonslayers system. A couple of days the official Starslayers website has opened and Christian Kennig uses it to share a few sneak peeks at his upcoming game.
Starslayers will obviously use almost the same rules and the same open license. What’s different from DS is a new approach when it comes to a setting. While DS included the Caera setting there was never a strong focus on it. Starslayers on the other hand has a deep setting which influences every aspect of the game – even the rules. While it is still possible to set your games into any SF setting, the default mode is to use the included setting.
At the moment Christian Kennig is still conducting “internal playtests”, so don’t expect the release in the next weeks, but it should be out later this year. Alas I have no information about an English version yet, but I’ll try to squeeze some answers out of Christian later.

These are my news for today. Expect more news in the weeks to come!