Very eclectic mix this week, including a fantastic and adventure-filled fiction anthology about shotguns and Lovecraftian threats; a masterful critical effects system for Pathfinder; a Dungeon World campaign; a major Strange supplement; and the arrival of Dogs in the Vineyard on DriveThruRPG.
Shotguns v. Cthulhu
Some of the most creative (and twisted) people in RPGs are also great fiction writers, and they’ve contributed to Shotguns v. Cthulhu, a collection of action-oriented tales within Lovecraft’s famous mythos.
Pulse-pounding action meets cosmic horror in this exciting collection from the rising stars of the New Cthulhuiana. Steel your nerves, reach into your weapons locker, and tie tight your running shoes as humanity takes up arms against the monsters and gods of H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Grab your pistols, your knives, your gearpunk grenades. Confront deep ones, mi-go, and flying polyps. Fight in the past, present and future, from the birth of the shotgun to the end of the world. Escape by car, carriage, and hot air balloon. Above all, remember to count your bullets…you may need the last one for yourself.
Relentlessly hurtling you into madness and danger are:
Laying Waste: The Guide to Critical Combat
At the risk of a bit of stereotyping, I feel it’s fair to say the Irish have a history of understanding combat in all its brutality as well as glory. That’s why I figure promoting Laying Waste has a certain rightness for the day.
Besides, it’s 50% off, but only for a while longer yet. You should also check out the “hit list” of creatives involved in this monster of a project!
With 600 critical hit and fumble effects, Laying Waste presents a slick system to maximize the enjoyment of critical hits and fumbles in the Pathfinder RPG or any OGL d20 systems. This system replaces the standard critical hit and fumble rules, adding realism and balance to combat, while still being simple and elegant enough to use with ease.
Players and GM characters are actually rewarded for *all* of their threat rolls and for their level of skill with weapons! Critical hits will add a very fun element to the game now, rather than simply making combat go faster by doing huge amounts of damage. It is even possible to receive lasting wounds from particularly terrible fights, the sort of thing to show off over tavern ales and campsite fires.
The emphasis of this product is fun however, and not sheer destruction. While the possibility exists for horrific maiming and wicked injuries, clerics also have ways to treat such injuries and it will take a very honed and practiced sword hand to deal the most grievous of blows. Within the 166 pages are over 100 feats, 16 new martial archetypes and a plethora of optional combat rules to add to your games.
Plague of Storms
Today’s Pick is for Dungeon World (AKA Apocalypse World Engine) fans – a veritable ton of stuff to provide many, many sessions of game play. Welcome to the Plague of Storms.
Plague of Storms presents two campaign fronts for Dungeon World, half a dozen dungeons, three compendium classes, and a host of NPCs for the player characters to ally with, betray, befriend, antagonise, or murder – or possibly all of the above, in that order or some other. Plague of Storms provides a solid framework for a GM to weave their own story within while still remaining flexible enough to accommodate the swings in fortune of a typical Dungeon World game.
In Translation
The Strange is all about moving from one world to another, and the translation process from place to place means the character shifts with the change of realities. This makes a book like this something of a necessity, or at least really helpful.
Translating to a new recursion? It’s not just about visiting—it’s about becoming a part of it. About changing yourself.
Players want options—especially in The Strange, where their characters’ foci can shift with each new limited world they visit. Character options are what In Translation delivers! This book provides a bounty of new material and new choices to help make character creation—and translation—even more fun, more interesting, and more varied.
In Translation: The Strange Character Options gives you:
Dogs in the Vineyard
It’s hard to come up with something different in media, and there’s some added difficulty in coming up with an RPG experience that veers off of comfortable roads. Dogs in the Vineyard – winner of multiple awards and highly lauded as one of the more divergent roleplaying experiences you’re likely to encounter – is now finally available on DriveThruRPG. Set in the pre-statehood Utah territory with a re-imagined Mormon State of Deseret, you play a kind of Old West-era paladin in conflict with heretics and the US Government.
I’ll let noted RPG journalist/commentator Shannon Appelcline say it like it is –
“A story of God’s Watchdogs, trying to preserve the faithful on the hostile frontier of the 19th century. This was one of the first indies to be notably successful, both financially and sociologically. It introduced the idea of ‘say yes or roll’, where GMs either went along with player suggestions, or gave them opportunity to occur through a die roll. Dogs was also notable for its revolutionary game design and for its existence as both an adventure story and a morality tale, all backed up by those mechanics. It truly captured the imagination of the indie field following its release.”
~~~
We have the lovely and talented Sheena Colbath - she who runs the exceptional Chupacabracon in Austin, TX - visiting us here in Denver, and she'll be guest-starring in tonight's Modern Gods game. I am truly enjoying running this, and I look forward to sharing the world and my rules hacks for ICONS with you all one day soon.
It's Spring for many of us - get outside, breathe some of that stuff they call fresh air, run around a bit. I do hope you get some great gaming in, too.
The Adventure Continues!
~SPF
Shotguns v. Cthulhu
Some of the most creative (and twisted) people in RPGs are also great fiction writers, and they’ve contributed to Shotguns v. Cthulhu, a collection of action-oriented tales within Lovecraft’s famous mythos.
Pulse-pounding action meets cosmic horror in this exciting collection from the rising stars of the New Cthulhuiana. Steel your nerves, reach into your weapons locker, and tie tight your running shoes as humanity takes up arms against the monsters and gods of H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. Grab your pistols, your knives, your gearpunk grenades. Confront deep ones, mi-go, and flying polyps. Fight in the past, present and future, from the birth of the shotgun to the end of the world. Escape by car, carriage, and hot air balloon. Above all, remember to count your bullets…you may need the last one for yourself.
Relentlessly hurtling you into madness and danger are:
Natania BARRON • Steve DEMPSEY • Dennis DETWILLER
Larry DiTILLIO • Chad FIFER • A. Scott GLANCY
Dave GROSS • Dan HARMS • Rob HEINSOO
Kenneth HITE • Chris LACKEY • Robin D. LAWS
Nick MAMATAS • Ekaterina SEDIA • Kyla WARD
Larry DiTILLIO • Chad FIFER • A. Scott GLANCY
Dave GROSS • Dan HARMS • Rob HEINSOO
Kenneth HITE • Chris LACKEY • Robin D. LAWS
Nick MAMATAS • Ekaterina SEDIA • Kyla WARD
Laying Waste: The Guide to Critical Combat
At the risk of a bit of stereotyping, I feel it’s fair to say the Irish have a history of understanding combat in all its brutality as well as glory. That’s why I figure promoting Laying Waste has a certain rightness for the day.
Besides, it’s 50% off, but only for a while longer yet. You should also check out the “hit list” of creatives involved in this monster of a project!
With 600 critical hit and fumble effects, Laying Waste presents a slick system to maximize the enjoyment of critical hits and fumbles in the Pathfinder RPG or any OGL d20 systems. This system replaces the standard critical hit and fumble rules, adding realism and balance to combat, while still being simple and elegant enough to use with ease.
Players and GM characters are actually rewarded for *all* of their threat rolls and for their level of skill with weapons! Critical hits will add a very fun element to the game now, rather than simply making combat go faster by doing huge amounts of damage. It is even possible to receive lasting wounds from particularly terrible fights, the sort of thing to show off over tavern ales and campsite fires.
The emphasis of this product is fun however, and not sheer destruction. While the possibility exists for horrific maiming and wicked injuries, clerics also have ways to treat such injuries and it will take a very honed and practiced sword hand to deal the most grievous of blows. Within the 166 pages are over 100 feats, 16 new martial archetypes and a plethora of optional combat rules to add to your games.
Plague of Storms
Today’s Pick is for Dungeon World (AKA Apocalypse World Engine) fans – a veritable ton of stuff to provide many, many sessions of game play. Welcome to the Plague of Storms.
Plague of Storms presents two campaign fronts for Dungeon World, half a dozen dungeons, three compendium classes, and a host of NPCs for the player characters to ally with, betray, befriend, antagonise, or murder – or possibly all of the above, in that order or some other. Plague of Storms provides a solid framework for a GM to weave their own story within while still remaining flexible enough to accommodate the swings in fortune of a typical Dungeon World game.
In Translation
The Strange is all about moving from one world to another, and the translation process from place to place means the character shifts with the change of realities. This makes a book like this something of a necessity, or at least really helpful.
Translating to a new recursion? It’s not just about visiting—it’s about becoming a part of it. About changing yourself.
Players want options—especially in The Strange, where their characters’ foci can shift with each new limited world they visit. Character options are what In Translation delivers! This book provides a bounty of new material and new choices to help make character creation—and translation—even more fun, more interesting, and more varied.
In Translation: The Strange Character Options gives you:
- More than fifty new abilities for the three character types. Explore new moves for vectors, new revisions for paradoxes, and new twists for spinners.
- New descriptors, bringing the total number to more than thirty. Choose from options like Addicted, Crazy, and Slacker (because sometimes a character is best defined by a negative trait) as well as many standard descriptors like Introverted, Kind, and Jovial.
- Dozens of new foci, bringing the total to more than sixty available as characters translate between recursions. New foci include Builds Robots, Calculates the Incalculable, Casts Spells, Grows to Towering Heights, Pilots Starcraft, and more.
- Options for advancement beyond the sixth tier.
Dogs in the Vineyard
It’s hard to come up with something different in media, and there’s some added difficulty in coming up with an RPG experience that veers off of comfortable roads. Dogs in the Vineyard – winner of multiple awards and highly lauded as one of the more divergent roleplaying experiences you’re likely to encounter – is now finally available on DriveThruRPG. Set in the pre-statehood Utah territory with a re-imagined Mormon State of Deseret, you play a kind of Old West-era paladin in conflict with heretics and the US Government.
I’ll let noted RPG journalist/commentator Shannon Appelcline say it like it is –
“A story of God’s Watchdogs, trying to preserve the faithful on the hostile frontier of the 19th century. This was one of the first indies to be notably successful, both financially and sociologically. It introduced the idea of ‘say yes or roll’, where GMs either went along with player suggestions, or gave them opportunity to occur through a die roll. Dogs was also notable for its revolutionary game design and for its existence as both an adventure story and a morality tale, all backed up by those mechanics. It truly captured the imagination of the indie field following its release.”
~~~
We have the lovely and talented Sheena Colbath - she who runs the exceptional Chupacabracon in Austin, TX - visiting us here in Denver, and she'll be guest-starring in tonight's Modern Gods game. I am truly enjoying running this, and I look forward to sharing the world and my rules hacks for ICONS with you all one day soon.
It's Spring for many of us - get outside, breathe some of that stuff they call fresh air, run around a bit. I do hope you get some great gaming in, too.
The Adventure Continues!
~SPF
