Tag Archives: RPGs

15 Kickstarter RPGs I Need to Play — Part 1

We are truly in the golden age of RPGs (never mind board and card games, which are having their own renaissance). Since I joined Kickstarter in 2011, the RPG market has fully grasped and exploited the crowdfunding platform, resulting in millions of dollars in funded table-top RPGs. One just needs to look at the recent success of Invisible Sun by Monte Cook to see that not only are RPGs thriving on Kickstarter, but they’re now trying new things and breaking down traditional game mechanics.

However, all these amazing games present something of a problem (a problem which, strangely, Invisible Sun tries to fix). Basically, there are too many games to play. Let’s leave the still growing popularity of D&D off the table for the moment and just look at everything else. Actually, let’s just look at those games that I have backed in the past few years, forgetting all the good materials that are still available after decades.

These are the non-Cthulhu based RPGs that I have backed on Kickstarter, some of which are systems and some just campaign settings. I’ve got a hankering to run each of these for a particular reason:

  • TimeWatch RPG and Behind Enemy Times Campaign — I’ve always loved time travel, and the first RPG I ever wrote was a time travel variation on Gamma World. Kevin Kulp and team wrote extensive materials for this Gumshoe-based system, and I can’t wait to try it out. What’s more, The Book of Changing Years is an amazing in-game resource that posits an anonymous author writing a “official” timeline as a background for the campaign — fantastic and hilarious book.
  • Dracula Dossier Campaign (for Night’s Black Agents) — Pelgrane took its “vampires versus Jason-Bourne” premise for Nights Black Agents and doubled-down to bring us the Dracula Dossier, yet another in-game resources that bases the whole campaign on the idea that Bram Stoker’s Dracula was a highly redacted, factual account of British agents gone bad. The PCs find a marked up copy of Dracula, along with other indicators that something is amiss, and must unravelled the conspyramid before undone themselves. It’s an amazing premis for a game, and the materials (by Ken Hite nonetheless) speak to how Pelgrane seems to keep setting its own bar higher, and then reaching it. Quality game.
  • Night Witches RPG — While we’re on the topic of publishers who keep setting and breaking their own records, Bully Pulpip’s game of WWII women fighter pilots is a unique take on a setting that’s seen its share of cliches — a setting that somehow mixes the visceral thrill of using WWI biplanes to drop railroad ties on German Panzers with the drama found in trying to survive back the drama found at living on the airbase during the war. Driven by the Apocolype World engine, Night Witches shows how an RPG can bring perspective and insight to another world, important in so many different ways.
  • Numenera — This game kinda started a whole thing on its own, and now that it’s out in the published world with a whole bunch of adventures and supplements really speaks to how well Monte Cook understands contemporary RPGs. I was a huge fan of Heavy Metal magazines growing up, and this game world appeals to me greatly. It’s amazing that Cook was able to carve out a whole new unexplored genre to himself. But more importantly is that Cook has used Kickstarter to generate millions of dollars for his company and create his own publishing monster starting from Kickstarter. A great example to my point.
  • Hubris: A World of Visceral Adventure (for Dungeon Crawl Classics) — Not only are we in our own RPG rennaisance, but the fantasy genre itself has undergone its own revival, where gamers want to look back from the flash of the latest D&D/Pathfinder editions to bring back some of the old school aspects found in the early fantasy games of the 1970s. This revival (called, appropriately, OSR or Old School Revival) aims to expand on the early days of Fantasy RPGs by combining modern publishing and game systems with the orginal influences of D&D. This is how you end up with Hubris, a very weird campaign setting for my favorite OSR game, Dungeon Crawl Classics. Just a perusal through the Hubris Kickstarter page should be enough to show you how weird people like to get with their OSR. I would love to run an ultra-weird, down in the dirt DCC campaign using this setting; like some strange mix of Gamma World and D&D.
  • The Complete Roslof Keep Campaign — The other part of the OSR that keeps getting revisited is what’s called the “old school dungeon crawl.” These large scale dungeons were the stuff of legends, and now people are bringing them back in true form. This whole campaign can be used for both 1e and 5e, though I’m sure it could easily be converted to DCC. That I could run this massive dungeon crawl with such beautiful, contemporary design is the sort of opportunity that keeps me up at night. Looks so good.
  • Judge’s Guild Deluxe Collector’s Edition — Or, if 21st century production values aren’t your thing and you really yearn for an RPG experience straight out of the 70s, you could go straight to the source. Recognizing that they formed the OS in OSR, Judge’s Guild went back and reprinted all their original campaign settings in a restored form. When I discovered D&D in 1980, I would go down to Arthur’s Toy Town where, at the back of the store they kept all their RPG materials. Lacking both the funds and understanding of what I was looking at, I would peruse the shrink-wrapped Judge’s Guild books and just imagine that one day I would have the money and friends and understanding to run these games. Well, I do have the money and friends now, just not the time. The Tegel Manor book on its way and I am sure the 10 year old me will be happy to have it finally in his hands.

So these are just the non-Cthulhu games I have backed and don’t have time to play. Some of them I’ve read, some are still on their way to me. After pretty much gaming Cthulhu only for many years, and totally ignoring the fantasy genre altogether, it would be highly remiss of me as an RPG author to ignore all of these amazing books.

Next up, all the Cthulhu gaming books I don’t have time to play.

High Castle Playset for Fiasco Under Development

One of the best parts of living in our Golden Age of RPGs is that the choice of systems to use provides an unprecedented level of game design flexibility. Recently I was watching the Amazon TV show Man in the High Castle thinking how much I liked the story as possible RPG setting. While my first impulse was to develop some system and setting out of whole cloth, I quickly realized that the setting was the perfect candidate for a Fiasco playset.

If you’re not familiar with Fiasco, it’s a GM-less RPG that revolves around high ambition and poor impulse control. Originally seeded as an opportunity to play out a Coen Brother style session, it has evolved into an RPG engine that can provide amazing gaming sessions in myriad different genres, tones and depth of story-telling. The writers of Fiasco have open-sourced the playsets it uses to allow anyone to create a Fiasco session in any really anyway, anytime, with all sorts of interesting gaming levers to pull.
So instead of going and designing a new game based on The Man in the High Castle (both the TV show and novel, both of which I like immensely), I just decided to build my own playset. And, quite frankly, it worked out quite well. This last weekend, at BigBadCon in Walnut Creek, CA, I ran two separate sessions of Return to the High Castle, a Fiasco game set in the world of The Man in the High Castle. My game description was as such:
Canon City, Colorado, 1962: Sixteen years after the Nazis bombed Washington, D.C., the Greater Nazi Reich rules Eastern North America, while the West is governed by the Japanese Pacific States. High in the Rocky Mountains lives the remains of the USA, those unwilling to submit to the will of the totalitarian state, those hiding secrets and their past, and those who are still willing to stand up and fight. The Resistance has a move to make, something to hide and sell, but there are spies, moles, and double agents everywhere. Time for plans to fall apart. Time for a fiasco. Loosely based on the Philip K Dick book and Amazon TV series “The Man in the High Castle.”
I will be writing more on the playset, but for now, I wanted to note some of my thoughts on the two sessions and some give feedback for myself on where to go next with the playsets. Most of my feedback drops into one of two buckets:
1. The Setting Can Be Really Dark… or Not: So just running a game with Nazis and Imperialist Japanese with a modicum of verisimilitude creates problems right out of the gate. Basically, these were horrible fascist regimes that did horrible things to many, many people. The impact of what was done is still being felt today and will be felt for a long, long time. So much so, that there are a lot of stripes to fascism that are still in our public conversation today, in discussions on race relation, immigration, and, oh, I don’t know, the fact that Aleppo, Syria today looks like Berlin in 1945. So yeah, those are still fresh scars.
The first key here is, then, to just talk about it. We had an open conversation at both tables, though one was far more thorough than the other, on where we might cross boundaries and how we were going to talk about it if we did. One observation is that, for both sessions, we limited the action in the game to just the city and area around Canon City, which plays a central part of the TV show. My playset is set there because it represents the perfect arena for plans to come undone, but we also found that no one wanted to play in the either of the occupied parts of the former USA, either the West/Japanese or East/Nazi occupied lands. Not playing in these areas allowed us to stay away from most of the really dark stuff that might come up. We were playing in what was, ostensibly, the remains of the USA, which allowed us freedom that might not be available in the occupied areas. It also kept us at arm’s distance from the fascist regimes that might be able to easily crush the freedom that we, as players, needed to exercise in order to avoid some of the darker topics.
The key component of a good Fiasco game is high stakes in imperfect plans that come tumbling down, usually in a tragic manner. Keeping the action to Canon City, and away from the darker parts of the setting, allowed us to set up some dark comedy and tragic plans without needing to pull in the really, really horrible stuff.
2. Dick’s Split Reality: One of my favorite parts of any Philip K Dick story is his playing with reality and perceptions. All the best PKD stories have characters punching through the veil to realize that things are not really as they seem. It’s very Dickian for the High Castle stories (both novel and TV) to have people realize that their reality, in which the Axis won WWII by dropping a bomb on Washington DC, is not the only reality, and that a reality exists where the Allies won (aka our reality). Not only do the characters realize it, but they travel to that reality at some point, as well as have artifacts (film and book) come from one reality to another. So it’s key to any PKD-inspired story to have shifting realities be a part of the narrative.
Well, in the first game we played, this was only hinted at when one of the PCs (mine) came across a USA flag with 50 stars. Not only is the the flag banned contraband but the USA of the High Castle reality would have never reached 50 states (with Alaska and Hawaii both gaining statehood in 1959). So 50 stars on a USA flag is something strange but not reality shaking. In our second game, as we attempted to raise the stakes, one of the PCs encountered what seemed to be a Nazi listening post (much like the Japanese one in the High Castle TV show), that implied that every place the PCs had been was tapped. This had serious implications for the narrative. Well, we just ran with it, and came up with a very Dickian story with double and triple realities, possible time travel, and maybe even androids posing as PCs. So yeah, Dickian.
Lots of different avenues to investigate then with this playset, and I was amazed and overjoyed with the sessions. Of course, it helps to have high quality players, and I was blessed with eight amazing gamers who jumped in with both feet for this unusual and somewhat risky endeavor. But the session bouyed my intuition that the High Castle is a valid and interesting setting for RPGing, especially in the Fiasco realm. The possibilities and details providing in the playset were more than enough primer to help build a unique, interesting, and most importantly fun Fiasco session.
There is still work to do on the playset, some tweaking and some open questions on organization that need to be answered. I aim to provide this playset free of charge, so we’ll see how that whole thing works out with Intellectual Property and all that. More soon with further developments.

Sun Spots to be Published for Call of Cthulhu

Weird 8 Becomes Chaosium Licensee — Sun Spots to be Published for Call of Cthulhu

Kickstarter Will Launch Thursday Sept 15th and Be Updated for 7th Edition Rules

Sun Spots is now an officially licensed Chaosium Call of Cthulhu® scenario and will be published for the recently released 7th edition of the rules. The Kickstarter for this scenario, originally scheduled for September 13th, will begin two days later on Thursday, September 15th, and will otherwise continue as planned. chaosium_logo

“With our new edition recently released, we need high quality Call of Cthulhu scenarios to meet the pent up demand for new stuff to play. Sun Spots promises to fit that bill nicely, ” Chaosium vice president Michael O’Brien said.

Sun Spots was originally written and designed by Dave Sokolowski as a Call of Cthulhu scenario for Miskatonic River Press, so will require very little effort to publish as a stand-alone CoC scenario. Furthermore, conversion notes for both Cthulhu Dark and Trail of Cthulhu will be published for free on Weird8.com once the scenario is complete.

The updated press release for Sun Spots with details on the scenario, its art, and storied history can be found here.

 

News Sites for Tabletop RPG Kickstarters

I’ve been doing a ton of work to prepare for my upcoming Sun Spots Kickstarter (Sept 12!) and one of the biggest efforts has been around organizing a more concentrated PR campaign. Just getting the word out, sending press releases to more places, and engaging with more people and sites as my Kickstarter project ramps up — it’s a lot of work.

So I wanted to share a list of sites that I’ve discovered and vetted as places you can send press releases for your projects. This list is by no-means complete — please suggest additions!  This list is specific for tabletop RPGs: