There’s two things at work here.

First, the Guild has an annual (sort of) tradition, where during our annual (mostly) meeting we have a quiz on roleplaying games. Its generally played in two person teams and whichever team wins the quiz, gets to or has to do it next year. This year Lauri and I won.

Second, in order to become an MtG judge, you need to do practice tests before taking the real one. The questions in these practice tests are the questions that weren’t good enough to make it into the real test.

So, based on that, here’s some questions I made that I didn’t think I really wanted to use in the final quiz. I’m way ahead on schedule on this and the real quiz will happen next may (probably), but I was inspired to do these quite early, so you’ll get to enjoy these now. Maybe (if I remember) you’ll get the real quiz to ponder over.

First, I’ll introduce the questions and then I’ll give you the answers. In some cases I’ll explain some of them, but mostly I won’t bother. This is for fun anyway. No prizes for you. I took out some very Guild- or Finland-centric questions to make this more international, because some of the questions are hard enough as they are.

1. What does Kvein Siembieda mean when he talks about the “Crisis of Treachery”?

2. White Wolf published five historical versions of the World of Darkness line before Dark Ages: Vampire. What were they?

3. In what game did Glorantha first appear in?

4. Which MtG set is based largely on its designers D&D campaigns?

5. What’s the area code of Night City?

6. Cyberpunk 2020 had a sister game, which was about teens in the year 2027, who had superpowers gained from a nanovirus that had accidentally gotten out in to the world at larg. What was the name of that game?

7. To which game did Bruce Campbell write the foreword to?

8. What companies have published Ars Magica?

9. What is the most-funded RPG Kickstarter?

10. Which of the top 10 RPGs on RPGGeek is based on a card game?

11. What year was the Gold Box Pool of Radiance published?

12. Who’s the lead designer on each of the three versions of D&D published by Wizards of the Coast?

13. The Red Box D&D had an introductory solo adventure for the purpose of showing off the world and rules. It was played as a readymade fighter character. What was the name of that character?

14. Which company (descriptions from Wikipedia)?
– American arms manufacturer and mercenary contractor with strong ties to the US Government and its military; its CEO desires to make the US into a superpower again and often competes with Arasaka for influence
– a European conglomerate involved in multiple and diverse industries ranging from consumer products to heavy construction through to corporate finance and insurance
– an information technology corporation headquartered in Germany

15. What was the name of the readymade campaign lead by Wil Wheaton on his Geek & Sundry RPG Show?

16. Feeble, Poor, Typical, Good, Excellent, Remarkable, Incredible, Amazing…. What are the next two?

17. In what year did Wizards of the Coast buy TSR?

18. What was the name of the example rockerboy in Cyberpunk 2020?

19. Margaret Weis Productions publishes mostly RPGs based on licensed products. What’s the name of the system customized for each of those?

Answers…

1. The time Palladium Books was embezzled out of around million’s worth of stock.

2. Vampire: The Dark Ages, Werewolf: The Wild West, The Sorcerer’s Crusade, Wraith: The Great War, Vampire: The Victorian Age, After these all the historical versions were published under the Dark Ages banner, sadly. I think The Sorcerer’s Crusade and The Great War were some of the best stuff they ever did.

3. A board game known as White Bear and Red Moon. Still major components of the world.

4. Legends. Most of the Legends are characters from their games.

5. 666. I think. I couldn’t confirm this, but people within the Guild agree, so I think its right.

6. Cybergeneration. Not that it was any good.

7. Deadlands, second edition if I remember correctly. I didn’t check this, but I believe he also wrote the foreword for the first edition Player’s Handbook.

8. Lion Rampant, White Wolf, Wizards of the Coast and Atlas Games

9. Numenera, “4,658 backers pledged $517,255 to help bring this project to life.”, although there’s a chance I just missed a badly tagged project. Ville does however concur and he’s generally much more up-to-date on this stuff than I am, so its probably right.

10. Legend of the Five Rings.

11. 1988.

12. 3rd ed. was lead designed by Jonathan Tweet, 4th was lead designed by Robert Heinsoo and the 5th was (or is) lead designed by Mike Mearls.

13. Sir Fleetwood

14. Militech, IEC and EBM

15. Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana

16. Monstrous and Unearthly. These are from the Marvel Super Heroes RPG by TSR back in the day. A similar system was used in some of their other games, at least GammaWorld (it was a horrible system).

17. 1997, when WotC had more money then they knew what to do with.

18. Johnny Silverhand

19. Cortex or Cortex Plus, which I actually like quite a bit.