It shocked me to learn that it has been six years since I last reviewed an edition of Paranoia; back in 2017 I did a System Split comparison between Paranoia Red Clearance Edition and Paranoia XP, two editions of the game which had significant mechanical departures from each other. At the time, my conclusion was that while Red Clearance Edition was a better game, XP was the better Paranoia. Apparently someone over at Mongoose read my review, because the new edition of Paranoia (called The Perfect Edition while on Kickstarter) takes my conclusions to an unsettling tee: the slicker rules are kept, the setting is rolled back to more reflect a throughline from the older editions, and the cards, which worked way better in theory than in practice, were removed. The result is remarkably close to a version using Red Clearance Edition rules with XP-style fluff, and (unsurprisingly) it turns out that yes, I really do like the version of the game made seemingly in direct response to my critiques. That all said, the new edition of Paranoia is still an edition of Paranoia made in 2023, and that alone has gotten me thinking about this. So let’s set aside the goofy clearance warnings, fake redactions, and admonishments to self-terminate, and talk about how Paranoia, any Paranoia, actually fits into the gaming landscape here in the roaring 2020s.
Continue reading Paranoia The Core Book ReviewTag Archives: Opinion
PLANET FIST Review – Nano-Powered Narrative Wargaming
I toss down a disc of nanobots that quickly assembles itself into a squad beacon, sending its beam of light up from the balcony of the building I’m in and into the sky, before looking through the scope of my sniper rifle. A squadmate, Ultra Rare, is trying to 1v1 an assault trooper using only her knuckleblades, and I sigh wistfully; we used to be an item before I accidentally got her demoted. I fire a shot, miss terribly, and am immediately targeted by the assault trooper’s team and ripped to shreds by machine gun fire.
Reassembled in orbit, switching from a force recon loadout to that of an engineer, I crash onto the balcony in a drop pod next to the beacon and the nanodust that was the smear I left behind. I exchange greetings and a salute with another squadmate – “Butler.” “Setback.” – who walked into the room while I was dead, and I look down into the courtyard. An enemy mech is literally stomping all over an allied squad – what a bunch of blueberries. I raise my anti-materiel rifle and blast off one of its arms – and am splattered across the wall behind me by the weapons in its other one.
I’m considering another drop pod, when suddenly I schlorp back together, on the ground next to Goblin, who apparently got splattered as well at some point. Between us is a spent revive grenade, and standing over us is Butler. More salutes, more greetings. “Setback. Goblin.” “Butler.”
Just another day on PLANET FIST.
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Give us more devastating games
What do you do?
The call to action within a tabletop RPG implies freedom. When all is said and done, when the cards are down, the GM asks the players ‘what do you do?’ and they go forth as they see fit. Not bound by rules or procedures, only by their imagination of the game world; the rules are there to help explain what happens, not to limit what can be done. This is the siren’s song of the roleplaying game, the freedom to do, and to be, whatever and whoever you want. There are many roads to a roleplaying game, and most traditional games (and many popular non-traditional ones) are built around this question. There is another question, though, that a game can ask, and for me, games which ask this second question have been the ones providing the most affecting, engrossing experiences.
How do you feel?
While games don’t literally ask this question outright (with a few exceptions), it is the key to another layer of character development, of narrative, even of mere in-game consequences. Once a game makes you think about how your character is feeling, you’re inhabiting that character on a whole other level. The problem with this should essentially go without saying: Rules can’t make you feel things. Game procedures can’t make you feel things. If a game wants to make you feel things, and more specifically feel the things your character would feel, the designer has to be a lot more inventive in how they go about this task than they would be, say, determining the probability that you hit a target with an arrow. But there are designers who have succeeded in this, delivering gut punches, heart wrenching decisions, and a sprinkling of light trauma. To them, I have only one thing to say: I want more of it.
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Mystery Dice Goblins Review
Ah, yes, the shiny click-clack math rocks. While many games now do great things using playing cards, tarot, tokens, or sheer narrative oomph, there’s still something to be said about rolling the bones. Digital dice rollers may make forgetting your bag at home survivable, and enable playing above board across vast distances, and may even make resolving a roll much easier. The die-loving audience doesn’t take pride and joy in the different apps, discord bots, and VTTs, however. No, they enjoy the physical product, and often claim the moniker of dice goblins gladly. Here’s something a little different for us: a vendor that’s honest about what their clientele want, and who introduces a little mystery to it.
Shared Fantasy Review
The era of the RPG historian started in the 21st century, but that’s not when the RPG history has its roots. In the last decade or so, Jon Peterson, Shannon Appelcline and Ben Riggs, among others, have released volumes about how the tabletop RPG came to be. Though the RPG historians of today have different writing styles and research approaches, they share the perspective of being twenty-first century gamers looking back into the twentieth century through the lens of the hobby’s accumulated history, theory, and perspective. It is the very limitation of this twenty-first century perspective that illuminates the value of the few scholarly texts written about tabletop gaming in the time of its ascendancy. That’s why today I want to discuss Shared Fantasy by Gary Alan Fine.
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Crowdfunding Carnival: November, 2023
Happy day after Halloween! Whether you had too many pumpkin beers, too much candy, or just stayed up too late doing the Monster Mash, it’s time for a little…post-holiday drop, let’s say. Luckily for you, I had no Halloween plans other than finding and cataloging some really phenomenal crowdfunding campaigns to help you start your November. On the big game side we have Southeast Asian tactics, dystopian game shows, and Ninja Turtles. On the indie side, Halloween is clearly sticking around with some witches, ghosts, cute cultists, and a big freaking multiverse to tie it all together.
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DIE the RPG: In-Depth Review
You’re dragged into a treacherous fantasy world made from your own fears, doubts and desires. There’s only one way to escape – but with limitless adventure within your grasp, would you even want to? You might very well have heard our first experience with DIE the RPG, based on the comic of the same name, when we featured it on Cannibal Halfling Radio: Now Playing! Jay, Evelyn, Fitz, and Max came back together to play one more roleplaying game and found themselves in the Fields of the Lost, facing down their own troubles. Well, last weekend I grabbed the d20 of the Master myself and ran a marathon session, ten hours long, and it was just as much of an emotional rollercoaster. With the book in hand and experience on both sides of the screen, let’s dive in for a proper review!
On Modules
My gaming group consists of roughly 10 adults, each able to commit to any given gaming session only when the vagaries of their schedule allows. We run two campaigns at a time, taking into account the availability of two GMs and whichever player has a character who is a ‘hinge’ to the upcoming session. Sometimes, we cannot get a session of either campaign together but still have 3 or 4 players. In the last year or so, I’ve finally acknowledged that the only effective way to pull out some quick gaming when such an attendance squeeze arises is to pick a backup system and pull out a module.
Continue reading On ModulesCrowdfunding Carnival: October, 2023
Welcome to Crowdfunding Carnival for October! We’ve got some horror games this month, appropriate for Halloween. We also have Tarot, Cryptids, and badgers and coyotes! The magic of RPGs only gets more magical with every new and offbeat game I see. As usual, we’ll check in with those major publishers, see what the indies are bringing forth, and then finally take a look back at the Kickstarters from five years ago.
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System Split: Death in Space and Mothership
Most big science fiction properties today err on the side of science fantasy. Star Wars is basically swords and sorcery in space, and Star Trek’s post-scarcity antimatter economy is built to support its storylines, not the laws of physics. In the tabletop RPG world, though, there are a few options for somewhat harder space sci-fi, especially if your definition of hard sci-fi includes horrors man wasn’t meant to know as well as the strong possibility of explosive decompression or straight up getting sucked out an airlock.
Today we’re going to look at two gritty space horror games which, through relatively light rules and strong emphasis on random outcomes, are easy for players but very tough on characters. Death in Space is created by Christian Plogfors and Carl Niblaeus, members of the Stockholm Kartell alongside the creators of Mork Borg and CY_Borg. Mothership is created by Sean McCoy and distributed and developed by Tuesday Knight Games, who are in the process of bringing the new Mothership box set into distribution as of this writing. Both games are about freelancers trying to survive deep in space, and quite often failing to survive deep in space. Despite similar rules and character survivability, each game has a degree of nuance with how it approaches the gameplay loop.
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Cannibal Halfling Gaming 