What happens when you throw together gangsters, cowboys, barbarians, samurai, steampunk and wire-fu and set the blender up to 11? Well, the potential for some truly eccentric, quirky or downright insane characters, and the award winning High Plains Samurai from Broken Ruler Games!
Continue reading The Independents: High Plains Samurai Advance Review
For the first time, Elliot found himself pulled through a fairy door. He could tell he was in his homeland, but nowhere he had ever been. But when he called to the laughing voice, she responded. Apparently the party’s fates were now intertwined with this being, and at some point in the future, they’d have to choose between the fairy world and the “concrete world”.
Elliot awoke in a cold sweat. Actually, more of a hot sweat. He was prone on the floor in a room he didn’t recognize, surrounded by wisps of steam that he did not know were Mephit corpses. “How long was I out?”
Continue reading Adventure Log: Dungeons and Dragons, Part 7
A washed out veteran with a knack for pushing his luck at the right moment on high-stakes jobs. An illegitimate noblewoman, using her inherited charm and connections to build a shadow kingdom of her own. A grieving father, who can hold a ship together with duct tape and prayers, but can’t do the same for himself. An ace pilot, disillusioned about the costs of war and desperate to find work after fighting on the losing side.M eet the Party brings you ready-to-play characters, complete with backgrounds and relationships, for use both in your own games and as inspiration for creating characters of your own. Strap on your holster and fire up the engines, it’s time to be space cowboy bad guys!
Last week we went over the recent Forged in the Dark product from Off Guard Games and Evil Hat Productions, Scum and Villainy. There was a small bit of table fiction in the beginning of the review, and it struck a chord. What follows is the groundwork for a group of smugglers, blockade runners, and overall Ne’er-do-wells for profit, the crew of the Freefall.
How did the children from Narnia cope with adulthood? How does a dystopian society rise, and how does it fall? What happens in your village when the heroes are away? What would you sacrifice to save your family? Who protects your home when you’re not looking? What’s it like to voyage into a black hole? What do heroes talk about on the eve of a decisive battle? Seven questions need seven answers, and seven story games provide them. This time out The Independents are going to be exploring a wide range of themes, settings, characters, and framing devices as we check out the story roleplaying game anthology Seven Wonders from Pelgrane Press!
A Cannibal Halfling mainstay since well back into the Mad Adventurers days has been Meet the Party: a collection of ready-made adventurers to get your creative juices flowing for a number of game systems. Today, we’re introducing something different. Nipping at the heels of System Hack but less mechanical, looking for detail like Meet the Party but more broad, we have Meet the Campaign! Cannibal Halfling examples and Level One Wonk playstyle editorials come together in a mashup that might even be useful.
“Easy does it friend.” Ari raises his hands as Marx levels his gun. He raises his voice again across the hanger. “You wouldn’t want to do anything hasty now. I’m sure there’s room to negotiate here. All we want is to get paid, and the artifact is yours.” Already the situation was looking bad. Marx, the supposed buyer they were set up to deal with, chose to bring his own group of thugs, and it seemed like their idea of negotiation involves bullets.
A drunken pilot and Force user. A Trandoshan hired gun. A computer-slicing Jawa. A betrayed Intelligence agent. An addicted thief. A Mando weaponsmith. A bounty-hunting droid. This Meet the Party might be bringing us another crew from a galaxy far, far away but they’re definitely from a long time ago. We’re shipping out with the crew of the Borrowed Time once again, but in an entirely different style: as characters in the d6 System for the Star Wars Roleplaying Game!
Continue reading Meet the Party: Star Wars d6: Borrowed Time
Dungeons and Dragons has a long and storied history, but like all long and storied histories there are some bumpy parts. When Third Edition (3e, and then 3.5e) came out, the first version of the game produced by Wizards of the Coast, many of the old guard were less than pleased. It was this reaction that planted the seeds for the OSR movement, in addition to the Open Gaming License (OGL), which made it easier to use the basic mechanics of existing D&D rulesets. Despite having detractors, 3e was wildly successful, so successful that it too inspired a wave of dissatisfaction when it was replaced by the significantly revised Fourth Edition (4e). The shift in design and the decision to discontinue the OGL at the end of the 3.5e product run not only alienated some players, but left many content producers hung out to dry. One of these was Paizo Publishing, a well-regarded outfit who had made a name for themselves publishing Dungeon and Dragon magazines. When this license expired in 2007, the entire company was in jeopardy. It was then that Paizo made a bold move and developed its own OGL-based game, Pathfinder.
A dark shadow lurks at the edge of town. Bodies with strange markings have been found throughout the city. Strange omens appear in the skies. Who will face these grim threats? A blue collar warlock, pulling out his street smarts as much as his arcane knowledge? A girl once given a “gift” by a faerie godmother, that helps (and compels) her to action? The last member of a defunct Order, sworn to stop Nazi experiments of the same? The roaming hunter, traveling from town to town to find the creature who killed his brother? The government agent who has stumbled into something larger, and can’t look away? Together, they will find out…why all these different monsters always seem to arrive like clockwork on one day of the week. It’s uncanny. This is Monster of the Week!
Star Wars has been around for 41 years, and it’s been in the tabletop roleplaying game market for 31 of them now. There have been many writers, companies, and game systems involved over the course of the far, far away galaxy’s tenure at the table. This System Split is going to do things very differently; rather than compare different games using the same system and genre, we’ll be taking a look at different systems in the same universe: the original D6-based Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game from West End Games and the modern Narrative Dice System-based Star Wars Roleplaying from Fantasy Flight Games!
Continue reading System Split: Star Wars D6 System and Narrative Dice System
Cannibal Halfling Gaming 