Spring has sprung! With it, the games are coming up through cracks in the pavement. There was a bumper crop of fresh ideas showing themselves on Kickstarter, and sadly only ten of them can fit in this month’s rundown. Whether you’re looking for old-school Swedish dungeon crawling, 1980s wizards, or a two player game about ‘The Chase’, there are ten solid games here to contemplate as the days get longer and warmer.
Tag Archives: Opinion
Changeling the Lost: Second Edition
The political kingmaker is the fairest of them all, with a designer suit, a killer intellect, and a smile that will make men follow her anywhere. She is a master of the boardroom and has a knack for deal making, even when the terms seem a bit, well, strange. If you agree to them in jest, you may be surprised when you are compelled to follow through. The bartender is a short man, barely noticeable behind the counter. He’s quick with a smile, and a drink, and is always willing to hear a gripe or a complaint, and offer a quick word of comfort to the concerned bar patron. What is odd is the number of filled shot glasses he keeps over the lintel as a marker. The private eye has streaks of grey throughout his raven black hair. His eyes are quick and dart to the sides wildly. His smile, while charming, seems to have a few too many teeth. He’s been following up on a number of abusive husband cases lately. It’s a bit odd how so many have seemed to disappear, but no body, no crime. It might seem as if all of these characters have nothing in common, were it not for their enemy: the beings who took them away to a far off land, and who may come to take them again. And for that, these Changelings will join together to stay alive.
Eberron Random Events: Sharn and the Five Nations
The party is simply minding its own business on the streets of Aundair when they’re accosted by “Maestro Hennedy of Gault”. Seems this troubadour has decided he wants to witness your heroic deeds himself, and then make both you and himself famous with the resulting songs. It’s a nice opportunity . . . if he would just. Stop. Talking. And keep himself out of trouble. This is just one of the many encounters, run-ins, and occasions that your adventuring party could run in to with Eberron Random Events: Sharn and the Five Nations by Michael J Winegar!
Continue reading Eberron Random Events: Sharn and the Five Nations
“Every Game is Good with a Good GM!”
Tabletop RPG design is a young practice, and designers in every genre and format are learning more about how people play games as they go. There is a universal truth, though, that every gaming group is different, and when it comes to facilitated games (i.e. those with a GM), the people who run the game will make a huge difference in the overall experience. On the internet, though, a massive logical leap is often made, leading to a fallacious and all too familiar rallying cry: “Every Game is Good with a Good GM!” A technically true sentence, this phrase has no purpose in discussions of game design other than to shut down criticism.
System Hack: Cyberpunk Chimera Design Goals
Something funny happens when you spend a lot of time reading and reviewing games. At a certain point you reflect on all the games you’ve read and all the mechanics you’ve studied, and say to yourself “I bet I could design a game”. You see it a lot over here. Site founder Seamus is the co-author of the recently released Transit: The Spaceship RPG, and newest contributor Jason wrote Blessed Engines for the Emotional Mecha Jam. There’s design chops floating around in this blogger soup, and I suppose it should be no surprise that on the tails of the first System Hack, Genesys Mecha, I’d be throwing my hat into the ring.
Continue reading System Hack: Cyberpunk Chimera Design Goals
Level One Wonk: Narrative
That’s right, the Wonk is back in the building! Today we’re getting super wonky. While my last foray into RPG theory was an examination of an old universal theory, GNS, today I’m going to be looking at a narrower component of games, and a particular dichotomy which, after some examination, I realized shapes the core of how I want to play and run games, as well as what game systems I enjoy. I’m talking about narrative, but I’m not talking about whether a game is “narrative” or not. Rather, I’m going to talk about the two types of narrative which are generated in the course of playing an RPG: Prescriptive and Emergent narrative.
Kickstarter Wonk: March, 2019
Welcome to a busy and bustling March for Kickstarter! Adding to the tons of projects, Zine Quest, which had submission dates through the month of February, is still going on! Check it out here. There were a couple full games under the Zine Quest banner which I was particularly intrigued by; be sure to check out Dragon and Warrior, Grey Cells, and Be Witching.
Even after taking the Zine Quest projects out of the running, there were still at least a couple dozen games contending for your limited dollars. Among a few heartbreakers and some that just weren’t interesting, there were still more than enough for me to come up with a top ten of intriguing, unique, and worthy RPG projects for March.
The Independents: Comrades: A Revolutionary RPG
The government has turned corrupt, and what should be serving the people now crushes them under the weight of fear and oppression. Secret police hunt for any kind of dissent, and authoritarian goons stalk the streets looking for heads to crack. Whether in public rallies or in secret meetings, with fists and firepower or words and willpower, revolutionaries fight to realize their ideals and create a better world. But how will they make those ideals come true? What are they willing to do, how far are they ready to go, to overthrow their oppressors and build a future? And even if they ‘win’, will that future be one that’s worth the cost, or will it be another nightmare? That’s the kind of story you’ll be telling if you play Comrades: A Revolutionary RPG by W.M. Akers, currently live on Kickstarter. Continue reading The Independents: Comrades: A Revolutionary RPG
The Independents: Emotional Mecha Jam
It probably won’t surprise you to hear that distributing RPGs can be a major pain, especially for independent publishers. Printing physical copies, funding shipping and distribution, dealing with returns, controlling PDF disbursement, combating pirates—the list of issues goes on. Some authors have chosen to sell games through their own websites, but many turn to the monolithic marketplace of RPG sales: DriveThruRPG. Despite some overlap with Kickstarter and Patreon, DriveThru is clearly the leader in both physical and digital RPG fulfillment.
That being said, a curious challenger to DriveThru’s platform has begun to stir up some discussion within the indie RPG scene: itch.io.
Troika Review
Imagine, if you will, that Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett have returned from the dead. They both pile into a Ford Cortina and take a long drive across the American Southwest, pondering the nature of the fantasy genre. Once they arrive in California, they legally acquire several ounces of the finest cannabis sativa and hotbox the Cortina. Then they write an RPG. This, roughly speaking, seems to be what produced Troika, a delightfully simple and delightfully absurd game which recently published a second edition.
Cannibal Halfling Gaming 