Category Archives: Indie Frontiers

Exploration and analysis of the cutting-edge RPG work happening in the wild. This is the best place to find new games, experimental design, and up-and-coming authors.

Articles, Indie Frontiers

Last Kiss Backerkit Review

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Ever feel like the world is out to get you? It is. Five radical teens with attitude should not be responsible for saving the world. You’re a bunch of god-damned teenagers. You might act like you have it all figured out, but you don’t. How could you when there is a literal evil force making your lives harder? So go ahead, seek out some normal high school goals like dominating on the sports field, kissing the mean girl, or becoming class president. While you play pretend, the darkness will seep in. The darkness colors the world so nothing is quite right. This is a world where disputes can be resolved via duels, where the next town over seems a world away, and where monsters live in secret. Normal doesn’t have a chance. What will you do before it all ends?
Perhaps there’s enough time for one Last Kiss…

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Articles, Indie Frontiers

When The Walls Fall Review – Fallen Cities and Falling Dice

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The ancient city was originally founded as a place of study; a great library was its first building, and it remained ever its heart. However, the city grew to form the core of an unspeakable ritual, powered by harnessing a long forgotten god. Eventually, its distant neighbors could not tolerate the ideas it was spreading, and they attacked. That was when the walls fell, leaving a ruined city with a defaced statue at its heart… and broken roads, spreading corruption, and fanatics of that forgotten god bleeding out of it into the countryside…

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Articles, Indie Frontiers

Ulysses Duckler Interview – Bugs, Changes, and Dr. Moreau

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Ulysses Duckler, also known as usducktape and Duck, has already made a big impact within the handful of years he’s been publishing TTRPGs online. While early releases such as The Quiet Life and Cuticorium were conceptually interesting and novel games about nuns and bugs respectively, his most recent major release, To Change, is a real milestone.

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Articles, Indie Frontiers

Ewen Cluney Interview

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Ewen Cluney [pronounced Aaron Cluney] has worked on many notable games; he translated Maid RPG and Golden Sky Stories, wrote the Ghostbusters retroclone Spooktacular, and has created original games such as Kagegami High, Angel Project, and Pix. Cannibal Halfling contributor Sabrina TVBand sat down with Cluney after writing about Maid RPG and Spooktacular to ask him about his work.

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Articles, Indie Frontiers

Zine Month 2024 Round-Up

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Lock your credit cards, hide your wallet, tell your banks to close early, because it’s February and that means a veritable deluge of new tabletop roleplaying game zines taking their shot at getting created with some crowdfunded help. Down the hall Aaron can be heard trying to keep his head above water with the first wave of ZineQuest projects on Kickstarter (there’s an alarming number of gargling sounds), but as has been tradition I’m taking a look beyond the white-green halls of the original ZQ to see what other excellent projects can be found in the wider Zine Month 2024.

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Articles, Indie Frontiers

Eat the Reich (Backerkit Preview)

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The date: 1943. The location: Nazi occupied Paris. Your assignment: to climb into a pressurized steel coffin. Survive a drop from a few thousand feet. Make your way to the Eiffel tower, where the Fuhrer’s airship is docked and drink all of the party leader’s blood.

Relevant note: you are a vampire.

Sometimes you need a self respecting monster (or six) to take care of the scummier ones.

A backer preview of Eat the Reich released in October 2023 (fittingly on Friday the 13th). It is an RPG written by Grant Howitt (the creator of the Honey Heist), illustrated by Will Kirkvy and published by Rowan, Rook and Decard (the publishers of DIE RPG), and it is a completely, totally and 100% unapologetically anti-fascist joyride.

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Articles, Indie Frontiers

Zine Month 2023 Round Up #2

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A ride or die Filipino adventure where the indigenous magic and monsters still dominate the archipelago. A seaside vacation meant to both help your health and help you find love, provided you can solve the murder. Living a version of your life affected by ADHD. It’s down to the wire, but there’s still time to check out another batch of Zine Month creations!

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Articles, Indie Frontiers

Zine Month 2023 Round Up #1

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A map for every adventure and an adventure for every map. The horror of magical academia. Making sacrifices to a river spirit. Last of Us a la Twin Peaks. Tracking down an entity that consumes time itself.  Another February, another month of roleplaying game zines, and I’m back for more Zine Month spotlights! 

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Tiny Tome Kickstarter Review – 50 Games in 50 Pages

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The single page roleplaying game certainly has a place in the industry. Some of them have become very popular, and some have even won awards. All of them take on the challenge of game design with an eye towards keeping rules lite and tight, trying to do more with less and deliver a focused experience. From a publishing perspective, though, there are problems. If you want a physical version, you’re printing the PDF or whatever out at home. Publishers aren’t going to do a print-run for a game on a single piece of paper, right? Well, maybe they just needed strength in numbers, because the Tiny Tome project is going to bring us 50 single-page roleplaying games in a neat book curated and published by Long Tail Games!

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Articles, Indie Frontiers

Zine Month Round Up #5

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Practicing a new (and literally newer than most) language via a roleplaying game.  The exchange between the distance between two people and the people themselves. A doomed mech pilot trying to help the survivors of their people reach safety. Delving in the darkness, maybe never to return. Saving the Jewish people by masquerading as Queens. We’ve done it once, twice, thrice, and four times before, let’s check out one last batch of Zine Month games and make it five, then have a serious talk about itchfunding!

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