February 27

Kickstarter – World Wide Wrestling RPG: International Incident

One of my other guilty pleasures is the entertainment sport known as wrestling, I have dabbled in the past with wrestling games but they always seem to lack something; while mechanically sound the atmosphere is missing.

I bought the first season of this game a little while ago and I liked what I saw; a hack of Apocalypse world which captured the excitement of the old Saturday afternoon matches broadcast on ITV.

I’m certainly backing this one, but I’m disappointed that I’m going to miss out on having my likeness captured in the game art 🙂

August 9

#RPGaDAY2015 – Day 7: Favourite Free RPG

I’ll confess to being something of a system hoarder, if I come across a game that is marked as free then I tend to download it so that I can read it or at least be inspired by it.

There are lots of games to download, I would list them all but someone already has a compendium of Free rpgs which can be found here: The Compendium of Free Role Playing Games

My favourite free game would have to be FATE published by Evil Hat , I know it is technically a game system but you can still do a lot with it and it is very easy to build your own game world using this wonderful toolkit.

I did something similar with my Star Trek game, details can be found here and here.

 

Category: FATE, pulp, 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 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

September 10

Top 10 RPG list – number 3 Spirit of the Century

Evil Hat Productions

This game is another example of one of my happy accident purchases.  It all stated when I’d heard a lot of good things online about the upcoming Dresden Files RPG and thought that it may be right up the alley of the gaming group and after seeing the short lived television series of the same name I thought I’d give it a try.

It was only when the game arrived did I realise that it required special Fudge dice to play it and that was something I didn’t have so I visited the website of Leusire Games who had sold me the Dresden Files to see if they had the dice I needed.

As it happens they did have a set of dice, the Fudge Gamesmasters pack which had several sets of dice within and I looked for another game that used them that’s when I saw Spirit of the Century.

I decided to do a little reading on this game and the more I read about it the more I fell in love with it, the whole era of the 1920s which I was a fan of excited me more and more. On top of that it was a pulp genre game, although some critics claim it is a very specific pulp world.

The FATE system is built upon the very flexible but often overlooked FUDGE RPG, which I think is a crying shame.  FUDGE gives you a complete toolkit to make your own game but there is a lot of work involved in setting it up; FATE is FUDGE with some extra house-rules grafted to it.

Character creation is quite easy, just answer a few questions, come up with ties to the other characters, pick skills and stunts and away you go.

Since the release of this excellent game FATE has undergone an evolutionary step going beyond the version here and The Dresden Files into something a little more streamlined. I’m looking forward to seeing the revised Spirit of the Century set in the 1980s when the Evil Hat crew are finished with it.

Honourable mention.

There are a number of pulp themed games on the market and I have several of them which makes picking a runner up hard to do.

Thrilling Tales

Adamant Entertainment

Using the popular Savage Worlds game engine this reasonably priced pulp game has a lot going for it, especially the plot point campaign in the book and the background information on nefarious villains for the PCs to battle.  I’ve never run it just mined it for the background information.

 

Category: pulp, RPG | LEAVE A COMMENT