Tag Archives: Genesys

Articles, Meet the Party

Meet the Party: Mecha Wasteland – The Crew of the Ulaid

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Last week we took a look at the creation of a Mecha Wasteland (and getting Baba O’Riley stuck in our heads). This week, we turn to some of the people and machines that might populate it. Sticking with the themes, I went with a crew of freelance operators picking up work in the Free Port of Suez and specializing in quick and discrete operations. This group can take on work from all comers, from desperate Free Cities, pirate lords, or be used as deniable assets by the two great powers as a cold war begins to warm.

Without further ado, let’s meet the crew of the Ulaid.

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Articles, Meet the Campaign

Meet the Campaign: Mecha Wasteland – The Crew of the Ulaid

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Every so often, I get the craving to dive into the mecha genre, and each time I have thought about introducing it to some kind of roleplaying. This has stretched through freeform play by post, play by email and even a brief dabbling with the Mekton Zeta RPG. However, as the years have passed the people who I had played with have moved onto other things. While scratching the itch, I looked up the interview that Seamus did with the team behind Mechasys. It was an inspiration and while it doesn’t do everything, it is broad enough that I can do a lot of things and I would really love to play it at some point. With that said, the old formats I played in don’t exist anymore and realization has dawned that the most likely I am to see it in action is if I have run a game myself. A bit rested from my first completed attempt at GMing I began to bandy about a few “what-ifs”. What started as playing around as character creation led to thinking about how I would frame a game…and from there, I leapfrogged into another idea: showing how a campaign can be built.

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Articles, Editorial

Embers of the Imperium Review

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Genesys was released in late 2017, and supported with four major supplements from 2018 through 2020. At that point, the generic RPG went dark. The Covid pandemic was certainly part of this, but it was first a symptom of the broader issues for the RPG business at Fantasy Flight Games (FFG). In the mid 2010s, Fantasy Flight was (excuse me) flying high; as both the licensor of Star Wars and several enormously popular RPGs based on Games Workshop properties, Fantasy Flight was one of the biggest players in the RPG space, but that turned around quickly and badly. When FFG lost the Games Workshop license in 2017 they had nothing left in the portfolio outside of Star Wars; their biggest other game, Anima: Beyond Fantasy had been discontinued the year before. The company wasn’t ready to give up on RPGs, though. They had bought the rights to Legend of the Five Rings two years before, and whether in an effort to maximize their investment or simply because of the sunk cost fallacy, they also invested in a new game based on the ruleset they used for Star Wars. Genesys came out first, while Legend of the Five Rings was ultimately released over three years after FFG bought the property.

Embers of the Imperium comes into the picture after several upheavals, only one of which was a pandemic. In late 2019 FFG divested themselves of their RPG business, shuttling it over to another division of their parent company, Asmodee. Edge Studios, a Spanish company which originally published The End of the World, was the new brand for Asmodee’s RPG line. How did it work? Hard to say. The company does have two 5e-based games now (Midnight: Legacy of Darkness and Adventures in Rokugan), so they might be making money. That said, they did not give up on Genesys. After being announced in April of 2021, Embers of the Imperium has finally been released.

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Articles, Why You Should Listen

Cold Fires, Jedi Shadows, and Creativity: Why You Should Listen To Force Majeure

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“Unforeseeable circumstances that prevent someone from fulfilling a contract.” That’s one of the legal definitions of force majeure, and I can think of a few examples. Getting discovered by a dark figure known as Tenth Brother might prevent you from fulfilling a work contract, or the ‘contract’ that is your prison sentence. An “irresistible compulsion or greater force” is another definition, and an offer you can’t refuse to retrieve an artifact from a strange wasteland certainly fits the bill. However, that second definition is also a pretty good description of the reasons Why You Should Listen to the podcast known as Force Majeure. You know how it goes: a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…

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Articles, Editorial

Mechasys Review: Mecha-sized Adventures in Genesys

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Sometimes a tank or a fighter jet just won’t do the trick. Sometimes, the best way to deal with a problem is a big, stompy mecha. However, while life is finally returning to Genesys proper with EDGE Studios announcing their upcoming Twilight Imperium supplement,  if you want to be jumping in the cockpit with the Narrative Dice System running the show you’ve been dealing with homegrown material. Now, though, there’s an offering on the Foundry itself which just might turn the tide of your own personal giant robot war. From mecha creation to pilot recruitment, lets head to the hangar to check out Mechasys from Studio 404 Games!

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Articles, Editorial

Factions 1 Review – Organizations in Genesys from Keith Kappel

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Let’s be blunt: things have been very quiet on the Genesys front lately. The switch from Fantasy Flight Games to EDGE Studio has not exactly hit the ground running, although in fairness a lot of that can be attributed to disruption caused by the pandemic. Still,  that means that aside from promises and rumors – good money says Twilight Imperium will be the next IP tapped for the system – there’s been nothing coming out . . . except what’s found in the Genesys Foundry.

Player characters often find themselves interacting with much larger groups, organizations, and factions – but how does a character actually gain prestige and support in such groups? Sure, many games can handle that narratively, but what if you want something crunchier? Out of the Foundry and the mind of FFG-veteran Keith Ryan Kappel comes Factions 1, a Faction Talent Supplement for Genesys!

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Articles, Editorial

Genesys In-Depth

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Back in November of 2017, Fantasy Flight Games released Genesys. Both Seamus and I wanted a fair shake at reviewing it, and in the process we learned why not to do two-part reviews. Still, a lot of people read it and we continued being excited for the generic version of the Star Wars RPG that many of us at Cannibal Halfing had spent a fair amount of time playing. Now, nearly three years later, it’s a perfect time to revisit the system. Asmodee, Fantasy Flight’s parent company, has reorganized their RPG development resources. In the near future new Asmodee-owned RPGs will be released from the new Edge Studio imprint, and based on a panel at GenCon 2020 this will include new Genesys material (the IP referenced there was Twilight Imperium). For now, though, the Asmodee RPG pipeline is on pause, at least until the last couple Legend of the Five Rings supplements enter distribution. On my personal end, I have finally both played and GMed games in Genesys, which means it’s a good time to give Genesys the In-Depth treatment.

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Articles, Editorial

Secrets of the Crucible Review

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In 2018, 25 years after the debut of Magic: The Gathering, Fantasy Flight Games released Keyforge, a game from Magic designer Richard Garfield. Keyforge is a hybrid between a trading card game like Magic and a living card game like Netrunner, which has no trading aspect and includes all the cards needed to play. Keyforge is sold in complete, playable decks, so the card trading and acquisition (and significant financial outlay) aspects are reduced, though not eliminated. In 2020, Fantasy Flight decided the Keyforge setting was strong enough to be the basis for the next setting book for the Genesys RPG. And in June of 2020, my copy of that book, Secrets of the Crucible, showed up on my doorstep. Time to take a look.

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Articles, Editorial

Genesys Expanded Player’s Guide Review

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Every successful RPG must have a strong setting or a strong ruleset. When Fantasy Flight Games hit it out of the park with their trio of Star Wars RPGs, they clearly had a strong setting. As it turned out, though, the system was pretty solid too; the Narrative Dice System had been patched to tone down the excesses of WFRP 3e, resulting in a game that was a good balance between robust and quick, and added a good amount of narrative flair and interesting in-game decisions. It was so good that people were able to overlook the expensive proprietary dice. From Star Wars came Genesys, a generic RPG which truly begs the question of whether the Narrative Dice System can succeed on mechanics alone.

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Articles, System Hack

System Hack: Genesys Mecha: Custom Mecha

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Sure, you could enlist and get issued a giant robot by your space military. Or you could be a traditionalist and just steal fall into the cockpit of the nearest mecha to start your adventure. Why trust some other engineer’s design, though? You’ll be making your own story, why not your own mecha to tell it with? Well if that’s what you want to do then you’re in luck, because that’s what we’re doing for one last G.E.N.E.S.Y.S. Mecha System Hack using the Genesys system from Fantasy Flight Games!

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