March 17

Bundle of Holding – The Dying Earth

I picked up this excellent bundle of ebooks based upon the works of Jack Vance the last time it was on offer. This wasn’t the first time I had come across the book as Jonny Nexus has shown me the main book after he’d purchased the hardback edition.

After spending some time reading the main book  I was very impressed by the setting and I feel it deserves the title of a forgotten classic.

https://bundleofholding.com/index/current

I tried to inform the world of this bundle the first time it appeared on an internet forum and was shocked to find my post locked and eventually deleted from the site as it broke a rule of that group; no adverts.

Since then I’ve got my own site and I can now pimp what I like 🙂

Category: fantasy, RPG, sf | LEAVE A COMMENT
March 13

Kickstarter – Blades in the Dark

Blades in the Dark is a tabletop RPG about a crew of daring scoundrels building a criminal empire in a haunted city full of thieves.

This looks like a really good idea and setting for a game with a system that lets your crew progress in the great city; what I’m certainly interested is the mechanics that govern how a heist is planned.   We’ve all been there at the table when people start over-thinking things and try planning for every single contingency that may occur.

I remember the time I spent waiting for the players to plan everything before that infamous game of Cyborg Commando and being the polite sort I didn’t want to interrupt them by telling them it was all pointless.

 

Category: fantasy, RPG | LEAVE A COMMENT
February 20

Kickstarter – The Monster Alphabet, with GM Gems

Goodman Games is Kicstarting another project, this time for a pair of system neutral books The Monster Alphabet, with GM Gems described as:

Designing monsters is as easy as A, B, C! Illustrated systems-neutral RPG supplements for creature creation and GM idea generation.

I already own PC Pearls and the Dungeon Alphabet so I’m sure that these two projects will both be first rate.

I’ve backed Goodman Games before and they delivered the goods before so I’m confident that they will make this happen.  As usual, all Kickstarter risks apply so don’t blame me if it doesn’t work 🙂

The deadline for the Kickstarter is 11 March so you have plenty of time to go and become a backer.

Category: fantasy, RPG | LEAVE A COMMENT
January 10

Bundle of Holding – Torg

When I was writing my top 10 list of games I mentioned the excellent cross-genre game Torg.

Now for a limited time you can get a selection of Torg books including the players guide which greatly expands upon character creation and the revised edition of Torg from the good people at Bundle of holding

So if you have ever wondered what is so good about this game you can pick them up for a steal.

September 30

Cartoon RPGs

Being sick seems to have sparked my creativity somewhat and coupled with an email about Cartoon Action Hour Season 3 I thought I’d write a few words about cartoon based roleplaying games.

The great thing about cartoon games is that unlike most games you can throw all the rules out the window and instead rely upon cartoon physics and sensibilities.

As such some gamers tend to look down upon these games as they aren’t really sensible but can be a lot of fun to try.  The shocking thing is that there doesn’t appear to be many games that play with this genre; the great grandaddy of them all Steve Jackson Games Toon, http://www.sjgames.com/toon/ and Cartoon Action Hour http://www.spectrum-games.com/cartoon-action-hour.html .  There is also Big Eyes Small Mouth but this seems more suited to anime gaming than emulating the Saturday morning cartoons of my youth.

Toon.

I first found the original Toon game and its supplements in my friendly local game store Games Unlimited.  I was able to afford the all the books and I was able to read them all on my way home on the bus.  The game was a revelation to me; well that shouldn’t be too much of a suprise as I was new to the hobby and all new games were an eye-opener!

I did try to play it with my group at the time but I didn’t have any takers as none of the players were interested in it.  It wasn’t until I meet up at the Twilight Zone comic shop where two people were trying to start up a games club did I find any takers.  The game proved to be popular as the fast character creation rules made it easy and you could run one-shot adventures in an evening.  I had at this point upgraded the single books into the later books that complied the material into a single volume plus an additional setting book.

Characters are defined by a set of fixed attributes and skills and uses a single d6 for resolution.  This also leads to one of the frequent abuses of the system, in cartoons you can be completely oblivious to a situation until you’re made aware of it; this caused many players to assign a 1 to their intelligence so that they can be oblivious to anything.

Toon has been long out of print but it can still be had a pdf from the e23 webstore.

 

Cartoon Action Hour.

Currently in its third edition this game seeks to continue the tradition of cartoon gaming. The pdf is a riot of colour and is well laid out with plenty of advice given in the body and sidebars of the book.

Rather than having fixed stats characters are defined by their traits and qualities which adds more of a free form nature.  The game seems to be very solid and robust and makes use of the forgotten die in the gamers dicebag, the d12!  To round off the genre simulation of the Saturday morning cartoons of the 1980s there are also rules to cover what happens during a commercial break.

I’m also rather pleased to see that the game is very well supported by supplementary material and other campaign settings.

I’d certainly love to give this a good read through and play with the right group as it looks like a lot of fun.

 

Big Eyes, Small Mouth or BESM

This is a very strange beast of a game, relying upon three stats and either a roll under or roll over mechanism depending on the edition.  You can pretty much create anything you want with this system which seems to emulate the anime genre.  I’d love to comment more on anime but all I’ve really seen is Akira or Ghost in the Shell.  I suppose you could pull off Battle of the Planets using it but the version I have is a rather slim book with just the rules.

I understand that there were supplements produced for it but I heard about the game long after it had ceased printing and trying to find these books on the second hand market is tricky.

September 28

Feng Shui 2

Feng Shui was one of those games I always wanted to play but never had the chance to do so.  It ticked so many boxes for me; a multi-genre war for reality; mixed parties of different genres and a light rules system which sounded perfect.

The book has had a bit of a chequered history as the full colour first edition was supposedly sold at a loss.  So each copy sold cost Daedalus Entertainment money and that’s not the way to run a business.  The second edition was a more reasonable black and white edition but compared to today’s modern games the layout looked a bit dull.

I did eventaully get around to playing this game at Killercon in Runnymede a long time ago and had a lot of fun with it.  Our group was tasked to recover a crystal skull before it fell into the hands of Nazi Germany.  The adventure worked really well and the game hurtled along; just the sort of convention game I like.
I was somewhat surprised to find that there is currently a Kickstarter project under-way to fund a second edition of the game and I am interested to see what it looks like.

You can find the Kickstarter link here : https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/atlasgames/feng-shui-2-action-movie-roleplaying-game-by-robin

August 30

#RPGaDAY Day 8: Favourite character

This post is probably one of the easiest to write as in all my years of gaming one character stands out head and shoulders above them all: Garvine of Shadowdale.

Garvine was a second edition AD&D character created using the excellent Chronomancer source book.  This was back in the day when the game was awash with new character classes and  by TSR it was 100% official and it was a tricky thing for a dungeonmaster to turn down.  If you hadn’t already guessed the Chronomancer was a magic user who could manipulate time, so spells like Haste were available at second level rather than third.

One event irked the DM at the time, we had all fallen a long way down a shaft and while he was calculating falling damage I announced I was casting a spell which enabled me to cancel the previous game round; then as we were about to open the door again into the shaft I declared I had a bad feeling about the move and cast Feather Fall which caused us to descend to the bottom unharmed.

Armed with a Wand of Lightning, Oil of Impact and his battle cry of “swingy-swingy-clonk” before hitting his foes with a quarterstaff I had lots of fun playing him.  His partner in crime was Einar the one-eyed Viking warrior and together they had several exciting adventures.  When Garvine retired from play he was 12th level; I have never had a character reach such a high level since then.

 

Category: fantasy | LEAVE A COMMENT