Oh nice! I’ve never heard of this, so thanks for the heads up.
Sweeeeeeet!
The group that did Broken Compass and Household last year are back. They split again from CMON and are now on their own. CMON refuses to let go of the BC license so they made an evolution of their core system. While BC was Pulp the new one takes on 80s and 90s action flicks. The Kickstarter is going strong and I wish them the best of luck. The last few months where very uncertain for them and this success is well deserved in my book. It’s also the TTRPG I have been looking forward to the most this year.
Outgunned - Cinematic Action RPG https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2lm/outgunned
I passed on Broken Compass, because I keep wanting to play a pulp game with the Savage Worlds system. But I put down a pledge for Outgunned. Thanks for mentioning it!
I expect Feng Shui 2 covers the same sort of play style, but I’m not as committed to it as I seem to be to Savage Worlds for pulp. It does feel odd, upon reflection, to have locked plans for systems I’ve never played in genres I have no plan to ever get to the table.
Hmm. Tunnels & Trolls is a name I haven’t heard in a long time.
Someone on Qt3 worked with Ken St. Andre before his passing — I think it was charmtrap. [edit] No, it was corsair. Sorry man.
My homies and I never played T&T back in the day, but we met a guy who did, and he laughed at D&D. We switched to TFT and Traveller before long anyway.
Here’s the intro to one of Critical Role’s in-house developed systems:
Critical Role played a one-shot based on The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. The rule system was a custom one made in collaboration with Nintendo.
It was sorta Powered by the Apocalypse with some differences. Each character had three core stats based on the TriForce and there was an initiative process. Of course, people are clamoring for them to release the rules publicly.
Heh, if anything could turn folks away from D&D to PbtA, it might just be that.
Just came across this info that Modiphius is releasing a single player version of their Star Trek RPG, two ideas that get my attention. I’m not familiar with their stuff otherwise, but the book is relatively inexpensive, may need to jump into this:
Some folks really do not like the 2D20 system. I’m not sure how much of that is real grievances or just because it’s not D&D, but I think it works really well for Star Trek. I especially like how starship operations and combat is about the PC officers using the ship and crew to augment their skills and actions and not just shifting to some weird VEHICLE COMBAT MODE ENGAGED.
Ultimately D20 is a terrible system for verisimilitude.
Consider your life and consider if there is literally anything you do in a day that has a 5% chance of failure.
Consider if there is anything you know nothing about that you could attempt that has a 5% chance of success.
In a D&D world everyone is both completely incompetent at simple things and capable of inhuman acts beyond the ken of mortal men.
Your blacksmith is fucking up constantly, but you also can probably hurt a dragon by throwing an empty mug at it.
You can arm wrestle the Mountain and win fairly often, despite not being able to carry a small child up some stairs.
Doesn’t matter because everyone in the “setting” (Ha-ha-ha) have no skills really. Its a mystery how castles get built. I guess they just keep trying until they roll a 20 because they can.
D&D PCs are Daleks!!!???
My friend started a “Scum and Villainy” campaign, enhanced by Starforged: Ironsworn and bits of probably Starfinder and a bunch of other space RPGs. Scum and Villainy is the sci-fi space opera version of Blades In The Dark. Most missions, I think, are heists or heist-adjacent. He gathered a big group of players with complicated schedules. The game should fit the premise and the group of players – not everyone is going to be there for a given session, so if we can get through one scam per session, we actually get to play and progress.
Unlearning our D&D reflexes is kind of tough. The GM isn’t supposed to be calling for skill checks after everything we players do. Instead, the player is supposed to have a goal in mind, and declare what kind of method we are using, and that’s where the skill checks come in.
But we’re still learning. My character and two other guys were able to con about ten prisoners (the other PCs (5 players absent in real life) and a bunch of disposable extra felons that might function as backup PCs) off a prison ship, just by employing a scary story of Rigellian Flu and a sticky red candy.
2d20 is very uneven. Each iteration so different from the first. I think Star Trek Adventures is the best version of 2d20. The other ones I played, Conan and Coriolis where too crunchy for me.
That sounds like a lot of fun!
When I first played a PBTA-style game after having only played semi-modern D&D (4E), it was really hard for me to get in the mindset that I could just start making audacious stuff up and not sweating the details. Like, I could puzzle out how to get across this chasm with the items in my backpack and roll for whether the grappling hook holds. Or I could invent a secret entrance around the side that I knew about because my uncle was the architect for the evil emperor, and my roll might determine whether we’re spotted getting in and whether my uncle is inside being held hostage.
I still dig more traditional games with GMs that love preparing, but I really like the looser and weirder flow of PBTA-ish games.
Same. They basically have three versions of 2D20 they modify for their licensed games now. The super-crunchy Conan build with tons of skills and branching ability trees, the middle of the road Star Trek version that does away with a lot of crunch but still keeps the D6 damage stuff, and the ultra-slim Dune style that only uses D20s and concentrates a lot less on combat.
Of the three, the middle option is the best for me. I love the production values on all their stuff, but Conan 2D20 is too crunchy and table-heavy, while Dune (as good as it is for political machinations and social scenarios) is awful at combat.
Oh well. I actively admit that I hung my GM hat somewhere during the pandemic (and I’ll lie about that fact that it went unused for at least 12 years prior to that…), but I recently came across CY_BORG (which technically came out last year in November, so, yeah).
Now, I’ve read Mörk Borg and was less than impressed - system didn’t do much for me, the flavour of Apocalypse was simply not my style, having stuff centered around a single city felt odd, and the archetypes seemed weirdly specific for what was basically supposed to be generic.
For reasons quite unfathomable to myself, CY_BORG, which has nearly the same premise (apocalyptic, mostly in a single city, weirdly specific “generic” characters) fires on all cylinders. I flipped through the book, saw all of those delicious “shit that happens to you / stuff you find / crap that goes down” tables and was inspired. Hell, I spent an afternoon clicking through the online character generator and thought “yep…that’s “punk”, actually, and I could write novels about these people…well, short stories, since they die so fast…”.
(Obligatory “roll your own punk” link: CY_BORG )
It’s highly unlikely that I’ll ever get around to playing it, but here I sit, waiting for a hardcopy to replace my ancient CP2020 stuff. It’s refreshing to see a game that embraces the “punk” bit and has you actively raging against the machine. It also has the “live fast, die young” part down quite admirably.
Has anyone seen this before?
Picked up a copy this past weekend and have been dragging through a solo play.
It’s very interesting, and flows almost like an MMO. Hiring followers, Quest boards, crafting, etc.