Articles, Crowdfunding Carnival

Crowdfunding Carnival: August, 2024

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Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for August! We’re steaming right out of the gate with some big ones this month! There’s an old stalwart getting a new edition, and the next multi-million dollar licensed…thing. Additionally, though, we have some really interesting games, new twists on old systems, small-scale innovations, and even some neat translations. Let’s start with the big stuff though; a new license, an old license, and a new lease on life for the old house system of West End Games.

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Articles, Editorial

itch.io Needs to Introduce Revenue Sharing

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itch.io is, in most ways, a great digital storefront. While it’s mostly associated with videogames, basically any kind of file can be sold there. It has become a popular place to sell ebooks, comics, music, and TTRPGs1. Unlike almost every other online storefront I can think of, I’ve never heard any horror stories about itch.io2 removing NSFW content in order to appease payment processors. Even if the site has received some criticism recently in relation to the speed with which they facilitate the formation of charity bundles, that doesn’t change the fact that itch.io has been used to raise a lot of money for various left-leaning causes.

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Articles, Level One Wonk

Victoriana Third Edition: Last Chance Review

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I’m not going to hide that I have a dim view of games made using D&D Fifth Edition as their base system. D&D has always been a more specific game than Wizards of the Coast makes it out to be; even TSR made separate games instead of a unified ruleset. When I see a game made for 5e my first question is always if the designers had any thought to what rules would best suit the game they’re making rather than what rules more people are already playing.

If there’s a company that has a chance to make me eat my words, though, it’s Cubicle 7. My review of Doctors and Daleks detailed how impressed I was at what they did to make a good Doctor Who RPG out of 5e, including some massive changes to how the game works. Cubicle 7 is now campaigning another 5e game on Kickstarter, the fourth edition to their Steampunk game Victoriana. Victoriana has already seen some ruleset changes over the years; the game started out using Fuzion, a revision of the rules to Cyberpunk 2020 co-developed by R. Talsorian and Hero Games. By the third edition, though, Victoriana is built out using a d6 dice pool system and a wholly custom ruleset.

My questions about 5e Victoriana run rampant. Beyond my ruleset partisanship, this version of the game has been limping along for years, first announced in 2021, re-announced in 2023 using a custom 5e modification that was being called C7d20, and finally making it to Kickstarter earlier this month with the C7d20 nomenclature absent, simply called “Victoriana for 5th Edition”. The campaign is ongoing, and though it’s met its funding goal it’s currently sitting below $75k, a tough number to swallow for a campaign that has stretch goals out to the $200k mark.

What is this new edition of Victoriana going to get us? To attempt to answer that question, I’m going to crack open my copy of Victoriana third edition. Released in 2013, the game has the polish of a title both released by a major design house as well as one from late in the ‘big book’ era of trad games. The question is, given the sort of game Victoriana is, will it work using 5e rules? And in the pantheon of Steampunk RPGs, is it one worth saving, 5e or not?

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Articles, Level One Wonk

The TTRPG Fleet

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If you hang around in bicycle spaces long enough, you’re going to hear someone say ‘n+1’. This is a joke among the cycling community: “The correct amount of bikes to own is n+1, where n is equal to the number of bikes you currently have.” Needless to say the collector’s impulse in the cycling hobby runs strong, and even if you aren’t interested in trying all the brands or vintage frames or anything like that, you still may find yourself in the throes of n+1. After all, you start with a mountain bike, want to try a road bike, then you need a gravel bike, and a cross bike, and an endurance road bike, a climbing bike, a pub bike, a fixie…

It’s no wonder the collector’s impulse is even stronger within RPGs; you can get twenty hardcover sourcebooks for the price of a relatively cheap bike. And yet, collecting RPGs comes with a stronger risk of missing something. There are many, many bikes out there to enjoy, but at the end of the day you’re still going to be riding bikes, and the forty miles you put down on one bike will still help your legs when you pull out the next bike. The TTRPG hobby is a bit different; playing Masks and playing Pathfinder aren’t going to be similar experiences or pull in the same direction.

While RPG reviewers such as myself are often the ones most liable to try and catch all the RPGs like so many Pokemon, there is another way to consider approaching RPGs and actually playing them, and it comes right from bicycling. N+1 may be a joking mantra, but most cyclists have neither the money to acquire a collection of bikes nor the time to ride them. Instead, most cyclists end up with their ‘fleet’, a group of two to eight bicycles that cover the range of disciplines and experiences they want to have. While having twenty Italian road bikes may not amplify your understanding of cycling, having both a road bike and a mountain bike is something that pretty much every cyclist can understand, collector or not.

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Articles, Editorial

Salvage Union Review

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Mecha runs through the history of Cannibal Halfling Gaming; the core contributors would have never met if not for a Gundam play-by-post back in the late aughts. Mecha in RPGs has been popular more broadly as well, though usually best represented by the idiosyncratic and crunchy Robotech and Mekton as well as the more grounded (and also crunchy) Heavy Gear. Salvage Union is the latest in a line of mecha games to aim for the narrative side of the genre, though instead of the high-flying high-drama settings of mecha anime, it’s aiming for a more grounded approach couched in the post-apocalypse.

In Salvage Union your mech pilots are living on the outskirts of a society that has been sequestered in arcologies due to environmental devastation. You make your way through the world by gathering scrap to trade, modify your mechs, and maintain your Union Crawler, a large moving settlement that is your home. Like any good mecha game, Salvage Union is built on interesting decisions: Where to go looking for scrap, what systems to attach your mech, how to manage your energy and heat in mech combat. While the mechanical bones are solid (if light), the supporting setting that explains what happened to the world and what your place is in it are left a bit sketchy for a book with so many specific mech chassis contained within.

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Articles, Editorial

Rules-Lite Superhero RPGs Revisited: Part 6 (Conclusion)

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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].

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