The d12 is the best polyhedral die around, no contest. It has a pleasing shape, it rolls well, it can sub in for a d4 and a d6 as needed, Yet the noble dodecahedron is also tragically underutilized. Barbarians and their greataxes, the best/worst dice in FFG/EDGE Narrative Dice games, the odd spell here or there. A random table if it’s lucky. Well, no more! One game has burst onto the scene to give the d12 its due at long last, its starring roll… and what better role to star in than in a good-bad action movie? A good movie, those are easy. But a ‘bad’ action movie that’s still so good? Those stand up to the test of time. Get ready to write your script and delve into your favorite clichés with Action 12 Cinema from The RPG Academy’s Michael K. Ross!
Category Archives: The Independents
Galactic & Going Rogue – Games of Rebellion and Sacrifice
An interstellar empire controls the galaxy with fear, propaganda, and alienation. Only constant aggression, weapons development, and violence keep it propped up, but even with its brittle foundations it can cause untold death and destruction before it could ever collapse on its own. However, heroes both plucky and jaded are building a community beyond the empire’s reach and fighting for the liberation of the galaxy. We’re telling a galactic story of rebellion, relationships, and war among the stars before going rogue and putting it all on the line to pass the torch of hope onwards!
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Back Again from the Broken Land Review – Small Heroes, Heavy Burdens, and Stories
You are small people who walked into a big war. The Doomslord’s forces were gathered in the Broken Land, and your fellowship unexpectedly played a key role in the Doomslord’s fall. Now, laden with stories to tell and burdens to bear, you set off on the journey home. But the Doomslord’s Hunters are still out there, and it’s a long way to walk. Let’s see if you can make it Back Again from the Broken Land with a storytelling game of small adventurers and a journey home from Cloven Pine Games!
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I Have The High Ground Review – Dueling Wits and Flourished Capes
You might be knights or fencers with your blades crossed for sport or mortal combat. But what if you were hackers vying for control of a contested server? A murderer and the aggrieved loved one avenging their victim? What if you’re assassins and ex-girlfriends, or in a boxing match, or a bar fight, or even just a school talent show? So, who will you be? What will you do? There’s only one way to find out. Pick your weapons, push the limits, flourish your capes whenever justifiable, and play through a session of I Have The High Ground from Jess Levine!
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Alchemistresses Advance Review
One of my favorite things about the RPG hobby is that there’s a game for everything. Games which aim for very specific genres, designed by fans of those specific genres, are often incredible showcases of creativity and windows into the love that the designers have for their subjects. Recently, I had a chance to look at one such game, a window into the Magical Girl genre of anime called Alchemistresses. Alchemistresses casts players as high schoolers who begin to discover their link to a former life as a Mistress of one of the Five Elements (though here Mistress, like Magical Girl, is a job description, not a gender). As your campaign progresses through a season of your show, you must balance slice-of-life high school antics with your past life and the villains you must now face. Right now, though, the designers are embarking on a different sort of campaign: Alchemistresses is funding on Kickstarter.
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Good Strong Hands Review
I have to admit, fantasy games come to the plate with two strikes for me. The ubiquity of Dungeons and Dragons, coupled with the large number of single-game players, means that fantasy games generally need to work twice as hard to do something interesting within the existing constraints of the genre. When I first read Good Strong Hands, I saw a game that leaned hard into a very broad, often repeated conceit: A great evil is corrupting the land and you, the heroes, must stop it. Couple this with light, fairly basic mechanics, and I didn’t really know if I was going to find anything interesting in this game.
Luckily, I was wrong. While Good Strong Hands is a rules-light game, and while it absolutely leans on a simplified view of good and evil, it takes this basic struggle and makes it the centerpiece of the game. The mechanics of the Void, Shadow and Corruption, force players to make tough decisions and place the voice of evil with the GM to play with as they wish. The game does want to see its players triumph, but the risk of falling to the Void is very real and a party will likely see at least one character lost to evil in a campaign.
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Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast Review
“Once upon a time, the world was cruel, and there was a witch who knew it well. And so, she sold her heart away and built a house in the woods where the world could never find her.
At first she would let no one into her fortress. But in the long march of days, a strange thing happened: in her own cold and spiteful way, the witch made a friend… and then another… and then several more, until her house was teeming with colorful faces and complicated lives.
The house would come to be known as Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast, and it would last for a very long time.”
Of course, it’s not just a bed and breakfast – it’s a book, and a game, from Possum Creek Games, currently funding on indiegogo! Let’s see if there’s any free rooms (the sign says yes, but there’s a girl sleeping in the laundry room…) and talk to the creators!
Warpland: Anathematic Science and Dawning Magick
The chaos that followed the War has never been properly described by any poet or scribe. There are vague accounts of mountains falling and the ground opening up like a mouth to swallow entire cities. We support our reason on the natural order of things, and this order was disrupted when the very fabric of reality was torn apart. Neither side would ever claim victory. From all this suffering and devastation, the Void grew like a blister until it burst, infecting reality like a disease, stretching its tendrils of darkness across the ruined northern territories, corrupting it all with its nothingness.
As the bewildered Demiurge contemplated how his once proud work crumbled, a solemn silence fell, and then—rising in a crescendo from beyond the limits of possibility—a boundless, terrible wail was felt by all things living and not, shaking the very pillars of creation; and just before retreating forever to unknown sidereal regions, His cosmic finger signaled the broken realm.
Once again, Man was allowed to be. Welcome to Warpland.
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Lands of Legends Review – A Thousand Options For Your Game
Adventuring through an old-school-style sandbox setting, or mapping your way through a sprawling hexcrawl? The biggest challenge of playing a game where the characters can go any direction they want is making sure there’s something worth finding in every direction they can possibly go – even more so if the world is functionally boundless. From vast ancient cities consumed by the forest to a monastery of living mummies, from a desert falling into a black hole serving as the hourglass for the world’s life to a barge-bound casino-temple to the god of luck and gambling, there are plenty of options to be found in the Lands of Legends from Axian Spice!
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The Independents: Dreampunk
Role-playing games can be a perfect venue for the surreal. Exploring a strange world that has its own incomprehensible rules is often better done in games, where players have the opportunity to poke, prod, and learn, rather than being stuck in an author’s or director’s interpretation. That said, most games that embrace surreality these days embrace a designer’s vision, and are still one possible experience in a world that could be a whole lot weirder. Enter Dreampunk, a game currently being funded on Kickstarter. Dreampunk is a game that borrows heavily from the mechanics of Belonging Outside Belonging and, by extension, Powered by the Apocalypse. What makes Dreampunk unique, though, is the use of card drawing mechanics not only to pace the game, but to develop the very reality of the setting.
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Cannibal Halfling Gaming 