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Archive for RPGG Newscaster 'Zine
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Jolly Roger Games are Kickstarting their new science fiction RPG, Parsec. The game is a rules-light take on hard SF using a d6 dice pool system for resolution. Prep-wise it supports everything from low-complexity story gaming (with templates not only for characters, but for groups of characters) to more involved PC, spaceship, and weapon design.
Blade Runner and Alien are cited as inspiration for the setting, which is presumably grubby as well as futuristic. Although it's mostly confined to our solar system, the setting material is fairly broad and looks to encompass urban cyberpunk, Firefly-esque adventure, and C.J.Cherryh style colonial cold war. There are also a couple of hooks for making FTL travel part of a campaign.
Something that sets Parsec apart and that I think is particularly interesting is its ship-to-ship combat system. Battling spaceships are represented by six-sided dice, with the  face as the nose and the  as the tail. Want to get behind the enemy ship and shoot out its engines with your spinal mount? Make a piloting check to position the  face of your die to point at the face of the bad guy's die. Add in relative range and you have a fully 3-D combat system. Pretty cool, eh? Reminds me of the fun parts of Renegade Legion: Leviathan.
Backers can get the PDF version starting from $5, with softback copies starting at $25. Check it out on Kickstarter (26 days to go).
Within the Devil's Reach is a set of three introductory Dungeon World scenarios. You can read a lot more about them on the designer's RPGgeek blog, Adventures in Dungeon World. If you want to try before you buy, there's a free sample adventure here (2.3 Mb PDF).
The project has reached its goal, but backers who get in quickly can still get the PDF version starting from $10, with softback copies starting at $15 + shipping. Check it out on Kickstarter (2 days left).
Mobile Frame Zero: Rapid Attack is the 10th anniversary release of Mechaton, the Lego miniatures game. It's not an RPG, but I reckon you'll be interested since the designers are D. Vincent Baker and Joshua A. C. Newman. The name change is due to a nastygram from R. Talsorian Games, Inc., who are concerned about possible confusion with their Mekton RPGs.
Mobile Frame Zero will be released as a free Creative Commons PDF, but Kickstarter backers can still obtain print copies, Lego-compatible mecha decals, and even cool bits of Lego (guns, claws etc) suitable for building killer robots. Check it out on Kickstarter (19 days left).
If you want to look at more rad Lego robots, there's a Mobile Frame Zero Flickr pool.
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Ville Vuorela's acclaimed Stalker RPG is now available in English from DriveThruRPG. The game is a licensed adaptation of the Strugatsky brothers' landmark SF novel Roadside Picnic. As well as the Stalker RPG, the book inspired Andre Tarkovsky's excellent Stalker film and the recent video game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. The game hews closely to the book and film, with the PCs as hustlers trying to keep above the poverty line in a future Toulouse where reality has warped.
At the moment the English version is available in PDF format only, but the designer has blogged that a print-on-demand version is forthcoming.
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The first Spirit of the Century novel, Dinocalypse Now, will be launched as a Kickstarter project on March 20th. On a related note, Fred Hicks talks about why an established company like Evil Hat is using Kickstarter on his blog, Deadly Fredly.
The Dinocalypse Now announcement is part of a broader expansion of the Spirit of the Century brand which includes the forthcoming Race to Adventure board game and hints of some more RPG products.
Both the novel and the board game are due out sometime this year.
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An English translation of Yuuyake Koyake: Golden Sky Stories is on its way. Golden Sky Stories is a 2006 RPG from from Ryo Kamiya, designer of Maid: The Role-Playing Game, and is considered his finest work. It's a henge (magical animal spirit) game where players will take the roles of kitsune and the like, but with the ability to temporarily take on human form.
The English version will be sold as a Kickstarter project, with a Maid reprint a likely supporter bonus. The translation is being handled by Ewen Cluney who translated Maid.
Bully Pulpit Games are having a Free Game February celebration. Head over there and grab some free games! The first game on offer is Dungeon Squad 2, a dungeoncrawler for kids. While you're at it, check out some of the older free games including Dulse, Last Train Out of Warsaw, and a historical Lady Blackbird hack, The Bloody Forks of the Ohio.
The stories of Playground Magazine's death were apparently exaggerated. The indie RPG / LARP magazine is making a comeback thanks to new publisher Rollespils Akademiet.
You can read the full press release on Playground's website.
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Evil Hat Productions have announced a licensed RPG version of the Atomic Robo comic. It's due out in 2012, as a standalone FATE game based on the forthcoming FATE Core rulebook. Fred says:
With The Atomic Robo RPG, Evil Hat will build on the legacy of Fate games like Spirit of the Century and The Dresden Files RPG—together with the ideas of Evil Hat’s upcoming Fate Core project and Mike Olson’s Strange Fate work. The stand-alone game will deliver a fast-paced and fast-to-play role-playing experience focused on the themes of Atomic Robo—action-science, robots, angry talking dinosaurs, high weirdness, and more.
Camp Nerdly the US indie RPG convention / getaway is on again in 2012. The dates are May 18-20 2012 in Prince William Forest in Triangle, Virginia, and rego opens in February. If you have ever wanted to play jeepform games in the woods, this is your con.
Ewen Cluney has come up with a Dragon World Hack for those of us who prefer The Slayers to the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. Ewen describes it thusly:
Dragon World is my Apocalypse World hack for stuff inspired by 90s comedy fantasy anime, and to a lesser extent the silly parts of a typical D&D campaign. I was most directly inspired by Dragon Half and Slayers, but quite a bit of other stuff crept in. This is a very silly game, and the MC (or rather the "Dragon Master") section is in part a distillation of what I learned from running Toon and Maid RPG.
Can Ampersand World be far behind?
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AMMO is a new RPG shoot-'em-up where players "fire" Fudge Dice from their hands to blast aliens. Got 17 dice in your bag? You've got a Glock 17 to shoot. You know it makes sense! AMMO is a free download, and there are currently two ultra-shooty scenarios available.
The multi-genre pulp adventure game Other Worlds is now for sale from DriveThru. A free preview version is also available. The system is a trimmed down variant of HeroQuest (1st Edition) with some story game twists like collaborative world building. Hardcopy editions are forthcoming, with PDF buyers getting a $15 discount on the print version.
There's some more information about how the game works in the Other Worlds thread at Story Games.
After winning Lester Ward's $1000 Lark grant last year, Dungeon World designer Sage LaTorra has released his supers RPG Powers for Good as an iOS Universal app. Print and PDF versions are to follow.
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It's been a long time between drinks for Tales from the Floating Vagabond fans, but we're finally starting to see a bit of the forthcoming edition. The publisher, Reality Cheque has posted a preview of the new Bartender Screen artwork by Scott Lincoln.
The Los Angeles 1936 playset for Fiasco is now available as a free download for the holidays. The playset was previously only available to Gencon attendees and Fiasco PDF buyers.
Also, have a merry xmas -- or whatever secular / religious festivity your alignment permits!
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Barbaren! the satirical game of overly-macho barbarians is now available in English. You can get it in print or PDF versions from DriveThru. The designer describes it thusly:
BARBAREN! is a game about fucking and butchering where everybody plays a highly virile barbarian warrior with a ten inch cock, which the back-cover blurb does not fail to mention. The game mechanisms are built in such way that killing an enemy and laying a woman work basically the same way, rules-wise. But you need to lay women in order to get better at fighting, and you need to fight in order to get better at laying women.
D. Vincent Baker has mentioned at Burning Con that the Knife & Candle RPG is no longer happening, or is at least on long-term development hiatus. K&C was to be a tabletop RPG verison of Echo Bazaar, the much loved Choose Your Own Adventure browser game. Baker was working on the game with Elizabeth Shoemaker and John Harper.
Dungeon World Basic Roleplaying Game is now available as an iOS Universal app. The app contains the all the text and art from the PDF, along with audio examples of play from The Walking Eye Podcast. It is priced at $5, same as the PDF.
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Jason Morningstar is working on a new GM-less game called Durance. The setting is a sci-fi penal planet with deliberate echoes of colonial Australia circa 1791. Durance is based on Jason's entry in the 2011 Game Chef competition.
In related news, Bully Pulpit Games are looking for an artist to illustrate Durance, with naturalistic sketches being the preferred style.
Heads of State: Nine Short Games About Tyrants is a bundle of indie RPGs suitable for gaming the Arab Spring. With two weeks to go it's a mere $650 short of its Kickstarter goal, so jump on it. $15 backers get all nine games in PDF form, and $60 backers also get a hardback compilation of the nine games. The designer, Mark Vallianatos, describes his games thusly:
* In As I lay dying, players play brief scenes that represent memories swirling through the dictator’s mind as he lies on his death bed.
* In Coup d’ etat. players take the role of military officers who stage a coup, cooperating to seize power but also competing to rise to the top of the junta.
* In Crimes against Humanity, players act as prosecutors, defense attorneys, witnesses and judges in a war trial for war crimes of a deposed dictator.
* In Disappeared, players are friends and family trying to locate a missing person who has probably been taken by the dictator’s secret police.
* In New Edition, players act as members of a committee who are editing the dictator’s biography, each trying to emphasize a different interpretation of the tyrant’s life and legacy.
* In Palace Gates, players are curious citizens who explore the tyrant’s residence soon after his death, explaining what possessions say about the leader’s life and rule.
* In Rest & Relaxation, players are exiled tyrants commenting on news from home and trying to motivate themselves to reclaim power.
* In Sic Semper Tyrannis, players act as a secret conspiracy plotting against the dictator with messages passed between players being altered to reflect the difficulty and risk of plotting.
* In Subversive Words, players switch back and forth between portraying characters in an artwork a dissident artist is creating about the Tyrant, and guiding the artist as he or she navigates through censorship, the secret police, and other tribulations of life and creativity in a dictatorial state.
You can read session reports of most of the games over on Story Games.
Playground Magazine, the new wave RPG magazine, has announced that it will shut down after releasing issue #4. The magazine was perhaps a tad edgy for the average gamer, with issue #2 being entirely devoted to "fuckery". (Yes, Apocalypse World's sex moves got a mention.)
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Always/Never/Now by Will Hindmarch is a Lady Blackbird variant in the cyberpunk genre. It's reached its Kickstarter target and will be released as a free Creative Commons PDF early next year. There's still a couple of weeks left to chip in money and get cool bonuses like a print copy with a suitably cyberpunk metal cover.
Will describes the game thusly:
Always/Never/Now is a story-game adventure made up of linked scenes, most of which are action-packed missions that the players choose for their characters to undertake in a varying sequence. As they complete missions, they push the story forward, unlocking new missions to choose from. Missions combine Action, Intrigue, and Stealth markers in different ways to create exciting and challenging roleplaying and storytelling situations—many of which include unique dice mechanics for modeling distinctive fight scenes, chases, and escapes.
Greg Stolze (of Reign fame) has a bunch of new crowd-funded fiction available. Emily Speaks is an SF story available as a free PDF or free ePub download. Switchflipped is an urban fantasy novel available as a POD paperback from Lulu and in ebook formats from Amazon and Smashwords. Mask of the Other, a Lovecraftian horror novel set in the first Gulf War is due for eBook release later in the month. Greg previously wrote several tie-in novels for The World of Darkness (nWoD) setting.
Jared A. Sorensen's new Parsely game Z-Ward is now out of Kickstarter mode and available through the usual websites. Also now available to non-backers is the Kickstarter bonus expansion, Z-Ward-X, which adds a third floor to the original game's mental hospital.
Both Z-Ward and the expansion are aimed at experienced Parsely players and feature more difficult puzzles than previous games in the series.
Mon Dec 12, 2011 11:18 pm
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