A few months ago I wrote a survey of Superhero RPGs, and more recently I began looking into the best games from that survey in more detail. Here are links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5; since everything I say here supersedes what I said in my original post, I recommend looking at that one after reading this one, if at all [you probably shouldn’t].
Continue reading Rules-Lite Superhero RPGs Revisited: Part 6 (Conclusion)Category Archives: Editorial
Reviews, opinions, and whatever else strikes our fancy!
Rules-Lite Superhero RPGs Revisited: Part 5
In case you missed them, links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4. This is going to be the final part of this series where I cover new games; in the conclusion, which will go live on the 16th, I will discuss which games I thought were the best. There are a lot of really good ones!
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A Look Back at aethereal FORGE’s Comedy Games
aethereal FORGE was a small independent RPG publisher active during the aughts. While multiple artists, editors, and other contributors were hired by æF, the publisher’s products were largely conceptualized and written by a single person, Michael Fiegel.
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Rules-Lite Superhero RPGs Revisited: Part 4
Here are links to Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 if you missed them. Anyways, this week’s post is going to be a lot shorter than usual.
After finishing 90% of an entry on Prowlers & Paragons I discovered Sean Patrick Fannon, co-author of the “Ultimate Edition”, has an extensive history of sexual harassment. The original version of the game that Fannon did not work on is still available on DriveThruRPG, but I cannot personally comment on its quality.
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Cyberpunk Edgerunners Mission Kit Advance Review
Few tabletop roleplaying games have leveraged other forms of licensed media into improved sales of the original material better than R Talsorian Games’ Cyberpunk. No game has popped back into our weekendly noting of bestsellers more times long after initial release than Cyberpunk RED, and while they’re not the only factor the biggest noticeable spikes were in the wake of first Cyberpunk 2077 and then Studio Trigger’s Cyberpunk: Edgerunners anime. For those who played as V and watched David Martinez chrome up and went looking for more, though, RED could be a bit jarring: it’s still Night City, but a very different one, not 1:1 the setting the players and viewers would have been hooked by. Clearly the bait was good enough, but a certain Fixer got us a look at something that will pull them in ever better ahead of its release: the new Cyberpunk Edgerunners Mission Kit. Wake up, samurai. We’ve got a beginner’s game to review.
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DOGS Review
Vincent Baker’s Dogs in the Vineyard occupies a strange place in TTRPG history. The game’s thematic content relating to Mormonism in the wild west was unusual in itself, and it was the reason the game ultimately was removed from circulation by Baker. Games disappear all the time, but because Vincent Baker was an acclaimed designer even before he created Apocalypse World, Dogs in the Vineyard has gained a certain level of mystique. Of course, we live in the age of the internet. If you really want to find a PDF of Dogs in the Vineyard, you can. But there’s a newer option that divorces the mechanics of Dogs in the Vineyard from its setting.
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Rules-Lite Superhero RPGs Revisited: Part 3
Here are links to Part 1 and Part 2 in case you missed them. To open this part, I’d like to talk about hallmarks of the superhero RPG genre; there are some things I’ve noticed across all of these games that I think are worth highlighting.
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Rules-Lite Superhero RPGs Revisited: Part 2
Here’s a link to Part ,1 in case you missed it. I originally was going to just go straight into talking about the games, but I decided I’d quickly talk about some of my favorite superhero comics here. I’m doing this partially so that you, as a reader, can know what I care about in superhero comics, what I would want to see emulated in a game . . . but it’s mostly so I can create a cool visual motif for this article. You can skip this if you don’t care.
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Deathmatch Island Review
Back in 2020 I reviewed the newest edition of John Harper and Sean Nittner’s Agon. Agon is a fascinating game, taking the characters on an Odyssey-like journey of myth through a number of islands. Like Greek myth, though, the game has a strict structure and, barring a small chance of premature retirement, usually ends in the same way. It’s great for generating stories, but not what I’m typically looking for.
Deathmatch Island is based on Agon’s mechanics, but casts the strict structure differently. The structure of each island is because the characters are contestants in a game show, a twisted game show where physical challenges and loot boxes give way to a literal battle to the death. Survivors make their way from one island to another until they reach the end game with Production, the shadowy administrators of the whole thing, shaping the game based on how many social media followers each contestant gets. The last surviving contestant may win a big prize…or wake up on yet another island with a job offer they never could have imagined.
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Rules-Lite Superhero RPGs Revisited: Part 1
About two months ago I wrote a piece here on rules-lite superhero games. In the piece I talked about a bunch of games, and at the end I made a list of the games that I found most essential.
I recommend reading these Revisited articles first and then circling back to my original piece, because everything I say here supersedes my opinions from the original piece. The important thing to note is that I didn’t actually read the rulebooks for almost all of the games I discussed; I read forums posts and reviews, listened to podcasts, read product descriptions, and studied other sources to get some kind of rough idea about each game.
In this four part series I’m going to go deeper and take a closer look at the handful of games that I said I most wanted to play last time, which is to say I’m going to read the rulebooks and make further observations about the games. I’m also going to look at a small handful of games that I didn’t mention last time, and look at the rulebooks for most of those as well.
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Cannibal Halfling Gaming 