DATE: 01/17/3728 Time: 1523
DESIGNATION: 09272024
UNIT: Paladin CHX-01
Today marks my first week in the CHVLR program, and is the day of my first deployment to the field. My SCS was installed three days ago, and I’ve run a few training simulations, but it’s the first time I’ve even been in the cockpit.
The Colonel says there is no other choice. The enemy is here and I have to stop them.
Paladin initializing. Systems green. Forrest McCoy, signing off.
Love is strange. Sometimes it finds you at the office. Sometimes it finds you over a cup of coffee.
Sometimes it finds you with a bomb strapped to your heart and an evil maniac forcing you to perform in a fucked-up romantic comedy.
This is that third kind of love. This is Rom Com Drama Bomb, the explosive romantic comedy roleplaying game for three players by Elliot Davis!
Continue reading Rom Com Drama Bomb Review – Explosive Three Player Romantic Comedy
Welcome to the Crowdfunding Carnival for September! September is a classically thin month, sitting in the shadow of GenCon. It was so thin five years ago that I actually skipped wonking about it to write an editorial. This year, though, is a bit better. Seven campaigns is still thin, yes, but these are all good ones. Also, interestingly, this may mark one of the first months where the majority of campaigns aren’t from Kickstarter! That’s right, four out of seven campaigns are from Backerkit this month. Backerkit was the best contender for second place pretty much since they started doing crowdfunding, but this may indicate a sea change.
Sea change or not, we’ve got some solid games this month. Solo games, Year Zero, and a generic Onyx Path game are all waiting for you to peruse and perhaps pledge. Without further ado, let’s check out some games.
Continue reading Crowdfunding Carnival: September, 2024“In 1920, the coal miners of West Virginia faced shameful living conditions, and even worse working conditions. Miners were paid subsistence wages, despite high profits, or even paid only in scrip which could only be used at the company-owned store. Within the mines themselves, workers experienced frequent cave-ins and other dangerous accidents, as the operators were reluctant to reduce production for the sake of safety. Whispers of unionization began to arise in the mountains. The coal companies responded harshly, employing company gun thugs to violently and cruelly enact the company’s will upon the miners. Events escalated from there, including the declaration of martial law, spiraling into the 1921 assassination of Sid Hatfield, who had by then become a local icon and a leader to the miners throughout the region. Federal troops were dispatched to Blair Mountain, including aerial bombers equipped with leftover gas and explosive bombs from the Great War. Days of guerrilla warfare followed, during which as many as one hundred miners were killed for the crime of wanting a better life.”
This is, in actual real life, The Price of Coal – and for our purposes, it is also a GMless storytelling game for 3-5 players by Jennifer Adcock!
Imagine for a moment that you’re a recent entrant into the tabletop RPG hobby. In all likelihood you entered via D&D; the longest lived brand in the hobby almost certainly holds a majority share of hobby sales and definitely of hobby mindshare. If you wanted to stay in the realm of D&D, that’s easy; the game has the largest community by far, the volume of official supplements is solid, and the third party support is massive. Even if you tire of D&D 5e itself, there are a number of directly comparable games to play; you can go Pathfinder if you want something more granular and more complex, or go to the OSR for something more imagination-and table-driven. But let’s say you want something different. How do you figure out what’s going to appeal to you?
Guide for the Perplexed is going to be a series of articles looking at finding new games outside of D&D. The key angle here is accessibility: These games will be easy to find and it will be easy to find other players. To that end, I’ll be looking at three different approaches to finding new games: Games which have the outright largest player bases, games which are easy to find at your local game store, and games with active communities online. As the series progresses the discussion will not only be about the games, but also about the channels that the games come through. Gaming at your local gaming store isn’t just about what books you can find on the shelf, it’s about the events being offered. The same goes for local gaming cafes or even your local library. Similarly, ‘online community’ can mean a lot of different things, but it’s important to see which ones are welcoming and support gameplay, including subreddits, forums, and living communities.
Continue reading Guide for the Perplexed: Biggest NamesYou probably know the story – a theme park where things go horribly awry, but instead of an accident on a ride or something there are real dinosaurs on the loose and they’re eating everyone. There is a solitary survivor, holed up in the park’s control center, trying to figure out how they’re going to survive and get off of the island. There is also, however, a raptor leading a pack of their fellows in trying to get to the human to avenge themselves upon their former tormenter. The human has chosen to live; can they? The raptor has chosen to embark on a crusade of vengeance; will it destroy them? This is Clever Girl, two-games-in-one by Matthew Gravelyn!
Continue reading Clever Girl Review – Wretched & Together With A Raptor
Invention is a word that most people understand. Inventing is the process of creating something new, and thanks to the patent office we even have broadly accepted standards for what constitutes an invention (novel, unique, non-obvious). Innovation is a bit more difficult to put a finger on, in no small part due to its continual dilution as a popular buzzword. Broadly, though, innovation is the combination of invention and value creation, the ability to make new things useful. I’ve actually talked about the invention/innovation dichotomy before, when I opined on how Most Games Don’t Matter. Indeed, a lot of the gap between invention and innovation in the tabletop RPG world is the gap between the hundreds if not thousands of games that come to market and those which actually make a market impact. That said, I don’t need to retread the grounds of how oversaturated the RPG market is. I want to discuss the innovation that does occur and what it actually means to bring that innovation to market.
Continue reading Invention and Innovation in TTRPGsWelcome 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.
Continue reading Crowdfunding Carnival: August, 2024itch.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.
Continue reading itch.io Needs to Introduce Revenue SharingI’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?
Continue reading Victoriana Third Edition: Last Chance Review
Cannibal Halfling Gaming 