Welcome back to another look at tabletop roleplaying game, and accessories, crowdfunding roundup! There are so many campaigns running on Kickstarter at present that for the next two weeks we'll have two columns! If you have anything you’d like us to cover, or questions about anything we talk about, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment or contact me directly.
7th Sea: Khitai by John Wick
(Campaign Ends : Monday 13th November 2017; 03:00 UTC)
Following on from 2016’s record breaking 7th Sea: Second Edition Kickstarter that raised over $1.3 million John Wick and companions are heading east into previously unchartered territory with 7th Sea: Khitai.
Khitai can be used as a standalone RPG or to expand your 7th Sea game away from the European inspired continent seen in the original game. John Wick is no stranger to exploring eastern flavoured settings as he was part of team behind developing Rokugan for Legend of the Five Rings twenty or so years ago.
The kingdoms of Khitai are rich and diverse and, unlike many games which have ‘The East’ as their inspiration, look at the area beyond the more RPG-familiar Japanese and Chinese flavoured settings.
The Kingdoms of Khitai include:
Agnivarsan Empire: A fertile, dense land made of tiny kingdoms, struggling to hold together among a dozen different courts and mysterious dense jungles.
Fuso: A powerful island nation devoted to military might and domination, standing on the brink of ascension to power—if anyone can agree who ought to be in charge.
Han: Once the cultural and cosmopolitan center of the East, but now little more than a province of Shenzhou, locked in a secret battle to reclaim its liberty..
Kammerra: A wild and deadly land, home to gigantic monsters, colossal animals, and ferocious supernatural threats, hiding a world of spirit as real to the locals as the material one.
The Kiwa Islands: A shifting collection of island nations across the southern Eastern Sea, where voyagers race to explore and claim territory, despite the danger of monsters rising from the turbulent depths..
Nagaja: A mandala of hidden kingdoms oft overlooked, where the ruler—a god-king descended from serpents—battles supernatural threats intent on overthrowing the government and taking it for themselves.
Shenzhou: The largest nation, diverse in geography and people, intent on bringing together all Khitai and then the rest of Terra in a single world nation.
Khazaria: The gateway to Khitai, home of the great Khazar civilization that once controlled more territory than any other power in Terra’s history.
Khitai is not just a land of swords and spears. It is also a land full of mystery and mysticism. Players can take the roles of Heroic diplomats and mystics, hoping to find nonviolent solutions for Khitai’s many problems.
· The stoic monk who uses her ancient wisdom to calm the angry spirits.
· The retired swordsman who only draws his weapon as a last resort.
· The honorable diplomat who is the only honest heart in a den of vipers.
You can play all of these Heroes, plus many more, in the world of Khitai!
Players can also explore the many mysteries of Khitai, including its mystical elements. Instead of sorcery, Heroes of Khitai invoke ancient spirits and ask for their power. Easy to use, but deeply evocative, the Khitai magic system rewards player creativity and roleplaying over everything else. One cannot simply command ancient spirits to do your bidding after all!
You can download a free 36 page Quickstart for Khitai for an overview of the setting, basic rules, and a sample adventure for up to five Heroes.
By the Author of Lady Windermere’s Fan by Ed Turner
(Campaign Ends : Saturday 11th November 2017; 16:23 UTC)
By the Author of Lady Windermere’s Fan is a one-shot GM-less narrative RPG for 3 to 5 players that should take between three or four hours. The digest-sized 126 book is already written and will include authentic black and white illustrations from Victorian-era novels, advertisements and playbills.
The story you'll be telling is an Oscar Wilde pastiche. It's a farce in the vein of The Importance of Being Earnest or An Ideal Husband. That means it's a comedy about self-important people who get into embarrassing situations. The rules of the game are there to promote this tone; the story can't advance until your characters have made lots of avoidable trouble for themselves, and it can't end until you've been exposed as the frauds you are and received the happy ending you don't really deserve.
But the story you'll be telling is also about putting on a play. A play you haven't prepared to put on. That means rules to enforce a frenetic pace, to ensure that nobody knows what's going to happen next, and to make sure there is chaos that you are going to have to weave into the narrative.
It's a story game about desperate improvisation and egregious theatricality.
In By the Author of Lady Windermere’s Fan, the audience is already filing into their seats by the time you actors realize that you’ve got to put on a play. There’s no time to prepare a plot in advance, so you’re just going to have to make it up with what you already have on hand.
Hastily-Assembled Settings: The first step of setup is to have all the players secretly write down some sets, without any sort of initial discussion. That way, you wind up with an eclectic collection of possible locations for the acts of the play. It takes three sets to make a play, so you’re going to have to match up these sets into a plausible setting. How do you create a plausible story out of the deck of a pirate ship, a gladiatorial arena, and the surface of the moon? I certainly don’t know, but it sounds like a play I’d want to watch.
Deeply-Flawed Characters: If you’ve played story games like Fiasco or Kingdom, you will be broadly familiar with the character creation process here: you’ll come up with a character who makes sense in the setting you made, give the character some motivations to define them, and establish relationships between your character and your neighbors’. Most importantly, though, you’ll come up with your character’s Lie. This is the falsehood on which they’ve based their reputation, their livelihood, their very existence. Maybe you’re pretending to be a Duke. Maybe you’ve claimed that you were once a soprano with the Metropolitan Opera. Maybe that story you like to tell about climbing Mount Everest is a complete work of fiction. Regardless of the specific nature of the Lie, it’s become a cornerstone of your character's entire life.
A good Lie is big, impressive, and easily disprovable… it’s the unstable tower upon which your world has been built, and as soon as the play starts, that towers will be nudged until it collapses. It’s a Wilde play, so everyone is lying, and every lie will be exposed by the final curtain.
Broken Legs: Once all the setup business is over with, it’s time to act! Here, things get up to a breakneck pace. There’s no pausing between scenes. There’s no pausing to think about what you want to say. Pausing to breathe is gently frowned upon, but we’ll allow it because we don’t actually want you to pass out. During each act, your characters will bounce off of one another, trade witty one-liners as quickly as you can think of them, and confront one another’s Lies. Usually that doesn’t mean a direct confrontation, but putting the other characters into a position where their Lie is especially unstable. Characters will be forced into situations when the only logical course of action is to admit that they’ve been lying for some time, take their licks, and continue their lives with as much honor as they can muster.
And because this is a Wilde play, nobody will take the logical course of action. Instead, they’ll cover for themselves by spinning a new Lie: bigger, grander, even more easily disprovable than the first. And of course, this next Lie will get confronted as well, and needs to be replaced with an even larger one, all the way to Act III when everything collapses, the truth is exposed, and (because this is an Oscar Wilde farce) everyone somehow ends up with a happy ending they don’t really deserve.
The Harshest Critics: Along the way, you’ll also be contending with the limitations of being an actor on stage. If it makes sense for an NPC to show up, that means someone else has to excuse themselves to change their costumes. You’ve only got a handful of props prepared, and if you need something else you’ll have to wait until intermission to drag it out of the prop closet. If you super need to pee, you can excuse yourself, but everyone else is gonna have to keep vamping until you get back. And if you get lost, call someone by the wrong name, change your accent in the middle of a sentence or otherwise break character, the audience is going to get upset. You’ll have a handful of tokens in front of you to represent the audience’s favor. When you screw up, you lose one.
But when you’re funny (as decided by the other players at the table), you gain a token. This is a comedy, after all, so the audience will forgive a lot if they're laughing. Collecting audience favor tokens isn't really a competition… but after the final curtain, whomever has the most tokens is the audience’s favorite, gets to take the final bow, and has the honor of giving a title to the play you've just cobbled together.
Oscar Wilde’s plays were generally about the upper classes of Victorian England and the embarrassing situations they would find themselves embroiled in because they thought it was somehow easier to maintain a false identity than to have a five-minute-long talk about feelings. But the story you tell doesn’t need to be constrained to London’s sitting rooms and tea houses. It’s supposed to be one of Wilde’s lesser-known plays, after all, and who’s to say he didn’t get experimental from time to time? When you’re coming up with a set, feel free to go as fantastical, historical, or futuristic as you dare.
What matters isn’t the trappings of Victorian London or high society as Wilde would have experienced it, but the fact that the characters are, you know, kind of awful. Self-interested if not outright selfish, overly-concerned with their image and their status, and of course entirely willing to lie straight into the faces of those around them in order to avoid even a moment’s awkward honesty. So… you know… people. And that means you can set a play just about anywhere.
· A combative group of small-business owners in Las Vegas, each convinced that their shoddy, failing theme restaurant is about to go big.
· An group of aliens on an observation mission in 1930s Hollywood, recently discovered by an aspiring starlet.
· The local government of a quaint seaside village, endeavoring to get rid of a giant beached whale before the Summer Fair.
· Incompetent pirates, trying to track down an immense treasure haul that probably never existed in the first place.
· A group of cats (in costumes left over from a production of Cats) doing, you know, silly cat things.
… any setting can make for a farce, so long as you fill it with ridiculous people doing ridiculous things.
Aliens & Asteroids: Sci-fi Horror Roleplaying by Bran Fitzpatrick
(Campaign Ends : Thursday 9th November 2017; 19:00 UTC)
The setting of Aliens & Asteroids is a “future of hope, wonder, expansion, and profit as humankind stretches beyond the cramped borders of our solar system and branches out to other nearby star systems” combined with stories of “ alien encounters, abductions, combats, and horrors, inspired by science-fiction films like Aliens and Starship Troopers, computer games like X-COM: UFO Defense, and television shows like Babylon-5 and The Expanse.”
The Dominion has but two goals: gather power and gather wealth. To that end, they employ billions of men, women, and robots across multiple star systems to do their bidding. And sometimes those minions get into trouble.
That’s where you come in as members of the Dominion Space Forces (DSF). The “suits” who run the Dominion call you soldiers but you know you’re really expendable space marines, sent out to protect their assets across the universe.
Are there aliens? Yes! We’ve come into contact with a number of alien species so far, including the Grey Men, the Skaali, and the Gollus. We are far from alone in the greater universe. Some want us for spare parts. Some just want us to leave them alone. But some almost certainly want us all dead.
And out there, somewhere waiting in the void, is the Dread: an alien species determined to wipe out life where they find it. Unfortunately for us, the Dominion presents a tasty buffet of worlds to choose from these days and Earth would just be the icing on the cake.
Aliens & Asteroids includes the following in the core game:
· Rules for playing as space marines in an outfit sent out to save people and resources from destruction.
· Rules for one referee and a group of players.
· A chapter on creating missions with objectives that affect your space marines.
· Chapters on the universe, human interests, and the aliens who also live there.
· And much more! Expansions and stretch goals will allow you to tell stories of UFO invasions, alien infestations, and saving humankind from its ultimate destruction!
The game has a lot of experienced creatives involved. Such as Brian Fitzpatrick (Moebius Adventures), Alan Bahr (Gallant Knight Games; Nocturnal Media), Elizabeth Chaipraditkul (7th Sea) and Eric Bloat (Dark Places & Demogorgons) and the core book has been fully written and is currently in editing so the fulfilment date of February 2018 shouldn’t be hard to hit!
Don’t Look Back: Paranormal/Conspiracy/Horror Role-Playing by Chuck McGrew
(Campaign Ends : Sunday 12th November 2017; 12:50 UTC)
Don’t Look Back: Terror Is Never Far Behind is a horror RPG that was originally published in 1994 with a better known second edition in 1995. Now Chuck McGrew, the games original designer, is aiming to bring the game back with an updated and expanded edition.
Don’t Look Back: Terror is Never Far Behind is a tabletop role-playing game set in a modern world full of supernatural and paranormal horrors, secret government laboratories, alien abductions, and a master conspiracy trying to cover up the truth. If you're a fan of Stranger Things, The X-Files, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Firestarter, Fringe and other horror stories and shows like I am, you'll be very comfortable playing in the world of Don't Look Back.
Players take the roles of characters who see through the veil of secrets. They could be anything from kids investigating strange lights in the woods, to detectives trying to solve a string of ritualistic murders, to the subjects of mind-altering experiments who escaped from a government lab and are now running for their lives, or even running from the zombie apocalypse. Maybe they are part of a clandestine government agency that investigates the paranormal or maybe they help cover it up.
DLB easily accommodates any modern supernatural and paranormal horror scenario. I like to deviate from the standard tropes to keep it interesting. Seriously, where else are you going to find Giant Psychic Insects From Outer Space and enormous, lactose-intolerant, flesh-eating amoebas?
What even long-time fans don’t know is that the conspiracy was always intended to extend beyond time, space, and realities. Are the puppet masters of Earth merely puppets themselves? With the promise of other dimensions and alien worlds, the adventure possibilities are limitless.
Advanced Death Saves by Josh Trujillo
(Campaign Ends : Thursday 9th November 2017; 15:23 UTC)
Advanced Death Saves: More Games, More Rules, More Deaths is the follow up to the original Death Saves: Fallen Heroes of the Kitchen Table from 2015. Created, and edited, by Josh Trujillo, a lifelong gamer and also a writer on comics such as Adventure Time and Rock and Morty, this comic anthology has an international mix of dozens of contributors. The new book contains over 30 all-new stories that celebrate tabletop gaming and the beloved characters who get killed off during play.
The book will be a fill colour, 200 pages, perfect bound hardcover volume printed in digest format.
New Adventures!
Each story explores the time-honored tradition of killing player characters in a unique -- and often unexpected -- way. While the original volume focused on classic medieval fantasy games, ADVANCED DEATH SAVES opens up the theme of character death to all kinds of tabletop games. This means Horror, Space Opera, Western, War Games, Mech Combat, even Superhero!
Just as every gaming table is different, so are the tales in ADVANCED DEATH SAVES. Some are funny, others are tragic, and yet others are something else entirely! The one constant is that the real relationships between the players at the table can impact a character’s fate as much as the dice.
Double Dragon RPG Dice Set – Roll with the Dragons! By Black Oak Workshop
(Campaign Ends : Sunday 12th November 2017; 01:00 UTC)
Double Dragon Dice are a set of RPG dice with an ‘Old World China’ theme. The set is a standard d4 through to d20 set, but with two d6 designs as well as the 0-9 and 00-90 d10’s. The etched dice are slightly larger than regular polyhedral dice (the d6 is 19mm) and also come with a themed dice bag at certain pledge levels, or as an add-on.
Each die has an individual design that is reflective of Old World China. For most, this design is featured on the maximum result face of the die. We think the set captures the theme perfectly!
Lantern (d4): Light the way for the set with a lantern themed d4!
Double Dragons (d6s): The d6s (pair) each have a dragon to oppose the other. The first dragon occupies the 1 face of its d6 while the other resides on the 6 face of its d6. The dragons are designed to immediately tell the number rolled.
Pagoda (d8): The max value face of the d8 features a Chinese pagoda.
Yin & Yang (d100/d10): Yin (d100) and Yang (d10) occupy the max faces of their respective dice and make a great set of percentile dice!
Rooster (d12): As 2017 is the year of the Rooster, it is a good choice for the max face of the d12.
Buddha (d20): Is anything more peaceful than rolling a natural 20?
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EN Publishing, the publishing branch of EN World, is currently running a Kickstarter for Xenomorphs: The Fall of Somerset Landing – a brand new setting & adventure book for the What’s Old Is New (W.O.I.N.) system. A limited ‘Xeno’ edition of the N.E.W. – Science Fiction Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook is also available through the campaign. Xenomorphs was co-written by Russ Morrissey, Darren Pearce and myself. The campaign is running until Friday 1st December so check it out!
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If you like what we do here at EN World (the Forums, Columns, News, ENnies, etc) and would like to help support us to bring you MORE please consider supporting our Patreon. Even a single dollar helps Thanks!
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If you have a forthcoming Kickstarter, or see one that excites you, please feel free to drop me an email on angus.abranson@gmail.com You can follow me on Twitter @ Angus_A or on Facebook where I often post about gaming.
Until next week, have fun and happy gaming!
Angus Abranson
7th Sea: Khitai by John Wick
(Campaign Ends : Monday 13th November 2017; 03:00 UTC)
Following on from 2016’s record breaking 7th Sea: Second Edition Kickstarter that raised over $1.3 million John Wick and companions are heading east into previously unchartered territory with 7th Sea: Khitai.
Khitai can be used as a standalone RPG or to expand your 7th Sea game away from the European inspired continent seen in the original game. John Wick is no stranger to exploring eastern flavoured settings as he was part of team behind developing Rokugan for Legend of the Five Rings twenty or so years ago.
The kingdoms of Khitai are rich and diverse and, unlike many games which have ‘The East’ as their inspiration, look at the area beyond the more RPG-familiar Japanese and Chinese flavoured settings.
The Kingdoms of Khitai include:
Agnivarsan Empire: A fertile, dense land made of tiny kingdoms, struggling to hold together among a dozen different courts and mysterious dense jungles.
Fuso: A powerful island nation devoted to military might and domination, standing on the brink of ascension to power—if anyone can agree who ought to be in charge.
Han: Once the cultural and cosmopolitan center of the East, but now little more than a province of Shenzhou, locked in a secret battle to reclaim its liberty..
Kammerra: A wild and deadly land, home to gigantic monsters, colossal animals, and ferocious supernatural threats, hiding a world of spirit as real to the locals as the material one.
The Kiwa Islands: A shifting collection of island nations across the southern Eastern Sea, where voyagers race to explore and claim territory, despite the danger of monsters rising from the turbulent depths..
Nagaja: A mandala of hidden kingdoms oft overlooked, where the ruler—a god-king descended from serpents—battles supernatural threats intent on overthrowing the government and taking it for themselves.
Shenzhou: The largest nation, diverse in geography and people, intent on bringing together all Khitai and then the rest of Terra in a single world nation.
Khazaria: The gateway to Khitai, home of the great Khazar civilization that once controlled more territory than any other power in Terra’s history.
Khitai is not just a land of swords and spears. It is also a land full of mystery and mysticism. Players can take the roles of Heroic diplomats and mystics, hoping to find nonviolent solutions for Khitai’s many problems.
· The stoic monk who uses her ancient wisdom to calm the angry spirits.
· The retired swordsman who only draws his weapon as a last resort.
· The honorable diplomat who is the only honest heart in a den of vipers.
You can play all of these Heroes, plus many more, in the world of Khitai!
Players can also explore the many mysteries of Khitai, including its mystical elements. Instead of sorcery, Heroes of Khitai invoke ancient spirits and ask for their power. Easy to use, but deeply evocative, the Khitai magic system rewards player creativity and roleplaying over everything else. One cannot simply command ancient spirits to do your bidding after all!
You can download a free 36 page Quickstart for Khitai for an overview of the setting, basic rules, and a sample adventure for up to five Heroes.
By the Author of Lady Windermere’s Fan by Ed Turner
(Campaign Ends : Saturday 11th November 2017; 16:23 UTC)
By the Author of Lady Windermere’s Fan is a one-shot GM-less narrative RPG for 3 to 5 players that should take between three or four hours. The digest-sized 126 book is already written and will include authentic black and white illustrations from Victorian-era novels, advertisements and playbills.
The story you'll be telling is an Oscar Wilde pastiche. It's a farce in the vein of The Importance of Being Earnest or An Ideal Husband. That means it's a comedy about self-important people who get into embarrassing situations. The rules of the game are there to promote this tone; the story can't advance until your characters have made lots of avoidable trouble for themselves, and it can't end until you've been exposed as the frauds you are and received the happy ending you don't really deserve.
But the story you'll be telling is also about putting on a play. A play you haven't prepared to put on. That means rules to enforce a frenetic pace, to ensure that nobody knows what's going to happen next, and to make sure there is chaos that you are going to have to weave into the narrative.
It's a story game about desperate improvisation and egregious theatricality.
In By the Author of Lady Windermere’s Fan, the audience is already filing into their seats by the time you actors realize that you’ve got to put on a play. There’s no time to prepare a plot in advance, so you’re just going to have to make it up with what you already have on hand.
Hastily-Assembled Settings: The first step of setup is to have all the players secretly write down some sets, without any sort of initial discussion. That way, you wind up with an eclectic collection of possible locations for the acts of the play. It takes three sets to make a play, so you’re going to have to match up these sets into a plausible setting. How do you create a plausible story out of the deck of a pirate ship, a gladiatorial arena, and the surface of the moon? I certainly don’t know, but it sounds like a play I’d want to watch.
Deeply-Flawed Characters: If you’ve played story games like Fiasco or Kingdom, you will be broadly familiar with the character creation process here: you’ll come up with a character who makes sense in the setting you made, give the character some motivations to define them, and establish relationships between your character and your neighbors’. Most importantly, though, you’ll come up with your character’s Lie. This is the falsehood on which they’ve based their reputation, their livelihood, their very existence. Maybe you’re pretending to be a Duke. Maybe you’ve claimed that you were once a soprano with the Metropolitan Opera. Maybe that story you like to tell about climbing Mount Everest is a complete work of fiction. Regardless of the specific nature of the Lie, it’s become a cornerstone of your character's entire life.
A good Lie is big, impressive, and easily disprovable… it’s the unstable tower upon which your world has been built, and as soon as the play starts, that towers will be nudged until it collapses. It’s a Wilde play, so everyone is lying, and every lie will be exposed by the final curtain.
Broken Legs: Once all the setup business is over with, it’s time to act! Here, things get up to a breakneck pace. There’s no pausing between scenes. There’s no pausing to think about what you want to say. Pausing to breathe is gently frowned upon, but we’ll allow it because we don’t actually want you to pass out. During each act, your characters will bounce off of one another, trade witty one-liners as quickly as you can think of them, and confront one another’s Lies. Usually that doesn’t mean a direct confrontation, but putting the other characters into a position where their Lie is especially unstable. Characters will be forced into situations when the only logical course of action is to admit that they’ve been lying for some time, take their licks, and continue their lives with as much honor as they can muster.
And because this is a Wilde play, nobody will take the logical course of action. Instead, they’ll cover for themselves by spinning a new Lie: bigger, grander, even more easily disprovable than the first. And of course, this next Lie will get confronted as well, and needs to be replaced with an even larger one, all the way to Act III when everything collapses, the truth is exposed, and (because this is an Oscar Wilde farce) everyone somehow ends up with a happy ending they don’t really deserve.
The Harshest Critics: Along the way, you’ll also be contending with the limitations of being an actor on stage. If it makes sense for an NPC to show up, that means someone else has to excuse themselves to change their costumes. You’ve only got a handful of props prepared, and if you need something else you’ll have to wait until intermission to drag it out of the prop closet. If you super need to pee, you can excuse yourself, but everyone else is gonna have to keep vamping until you get back. And if you get lost, call someone by the wrong name, change your accent in the middle of a sentence or otherwise break character, the audience is going to get upset. You’ll have a handful of tokens in front of you to represent the audience’s favor. When you screw up, you lose one.
But when you’re funny (as decided by the other players at the table), you gain a token. This is a comedy, after all, so the audience will forgive a lot if they're laughing. Collecting audience favor tokens isn't really a competition… but after the final curtain, whomever has the most tokens is the audience’s favorite, gets to take the final bow, and has the honor of giving a title to the play you've just cobbled together.
Oscar Wilde’s plays were generally about the upper classes of Victorian England and the embarrassing situations they would find themselves embroiled in because they thought it was somehow easier to maintain a false identity than to have a five-minute-long talk about feelings. But the story you tell doesn’t need to be constrained to London’s sitting rooms and tea houses. It’s supposed to be one of Wilde’s lesser-known plays, after all, and who’s to say he didn’t get experimental from time to time? When you’re coming up with a set, feel free to go as fantastical, historical, or futuristic as you dare.
What matters isn’t the trappings of Victorian London or high society as Wilde would have experienced it, but the fact that the characters are, you know, kind of awful. Self-interested if not outright selfish, overly-concerned with their image and their status, and of course entirely willing to lie straight into the faces of those around them in order to avoid even a moment’s awkward honesty. So… you know… people. And that means you can set a play just about anywhere.
· A combative group of small-business owners in Las Vegas, each convinced that their shoddy, failing theme restaurant is about to go big.
· An group of aliens on an observation mission in 1930s Hollywood, recently discovered by an aspiring starlet.
· The local government of a quaint seaside village, endeavoring to get rid of a giant beached whale before the Summer Fair.
· Incompetent pirates, trying to track down an immense treasure haul that probably never existed in the first place.
· A group of cats (in costumes left over from a production of Cats) doing, you know, silly cat things.
… any setting can make for a farce, so long as you fill it with ridiculous people doing ridiculous things.
Aliens & Asteroids: Sci-fi Horror Roleplaying by Bran Fitzpatrick
(Campaign Ends : Thursday 9th November 2017; 19:00 UTC)
The setting of Aliens & Asteroids is a “future of hope, wonder, expansion, and profit as humankind stretches beyond the cramped borders of our solar system and branches out to other nearby star systems” combined with stories of “ alien encounters, abductions, combats, and horrors, inspired by science-fiction films like Aliens and Starship Troopers, computer games like X-COM: UFO Defense, and television shows like Babylon-5 and The Expanse.”
The Dominion has but two goals: gather power and gather wealth. To that end, they employ billions of men, women, and robots across multiple star systems to do their bidding. And sometimes those minions get into trouble.
That’s where you come in as members of the Dominion Space Forces (DSF). The “suits” who run the Dominion call you soldiers but you know you’re really expendable space marines, sent out to protect their assets across the universe.
Are there aliens? Yes! We’ve come into contact with a number of alien species so far, including the Grey Men, the Skaali, and the Gollus. We are far from alone in the greater universe. Some want us for spare parts. Some just want us to leave them alone. But some almost certainly want us all dead.
And out there, somewhere waiting in the void, is the Dread: an alien species determined to wipe out life where they find it. Unfortunately for us, the Dominion presents a tasty buffet of worlds to choose from these days and Earth would just be the icing on the cake.
Aliens & Asteroids includes the following in the core game:
· Rules for playing as space marines in an outfit sent out to save people and resources from destruction.
· Rules for one referee and a group of players.
· A chapter on creating missions with objectives that affect your space marines.
· Chapters on the universe, human interests, and the aliens who also live there.
· And much more! Expansions and stretch goals will allow you to tell stories of UFO invasions, alien infestations, and saving humankind from its ultimate destruction!
The game has a lot of experienced creatives involved. Such as Brian Fitzpatrick (Moebius Adventures), Alan Bahr (Gallant Knight Games; Nocturnal Media), Elizabeth Chaipraditkul (7th Sea) and Eric Bloat (Dark Places & Demogorgons) and the core book has been fully written and is currently in editing so the fulfilment date of February 2018 shouldn’t be hard to hit!
Don’t Look Back: Paranormal/Conspiracy/Horror Role-Playing by Chuck McGrew
(Campaign Ends : Sunday 12th November 2017; 12:50 UTC)
Don’t Look Back: Terror Is Never Far Behind is a horror RPG that was originally published in 1994 with a better known second edition in 1995. Now Chuck McGrew, the games original designer, is aiming to bring the game back with an updated and expanded edition.
Don’t Look Back: Terror is Never Far Behind is a tabletop role-playing game set in a modern world full of supernatural and paranormal horrors, secret government laboratories, alien abductions, and a master conspiracy trying to cover up the truth. If you're a fan of Stranger Things, The X-Files, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Firestarter, Fringe and other horror stories and shows like I am, you'll be very comfortable playing in the world of Don't Look Back.
Players take the roles of characters who see through the veil of secrets. They could be anything from kids investigating strange lights in the woods, to detectives trying to solve a string of ritualistic murders, to the subjects of mind-altering experiments who escaped from a government lab and are now running for their lives, or even running from the zombie apocalypse. Maybe they are part of a clandestine government agency that investigates the paranormal or maybe they help cover it up.
DLB easily accommodates any modern supernatural and paranormal horror scenario. I like to deviate from the standard tropes to keep it interesting. Seriously, where else are you going to find Giant Psychic Insects From Outer Space and enormous, lactose-intolerant, flesh-eating amoebas?
What even long-time fans don’t know is that the conspiracy was always intended to extend beyond time, space, and realities. Are the puppet masters of Earth merely puppets themselves? With the promise of other dimensions and alien worlds, the adventure possibilities are limitless.
Advanced Death Saves by Josh Trujillo
(Campaign Ends : Thursday 9th November 2017; 15:23 UTC)
Advanced Death Saves: More Games, More Rules, More Deaths is the follow up to the original Death Saves: Fallen Heroes of the Kitchen Table from 2015. Created, and edited, by Josh Trujillo, a lifelong gamer and also a writer on comics such as Adventure Time and Rock and Morty, this comic anthology has an international mix of dozens of contributors. The new book contains over 30 all-new stories that celebrate tabletop gaming and the beloved characters who get killed off during play.
The book will be a fill colour, 200 pages, perfect bound hardcover volume printed in digest format.
New Adventures!
Each story explores the time-honored tradition of killing player characters in a unique -- and often unexpected -- way. While the original volume focused on classic medieval fantasy games, ADVANCED DEATH SAVES opens up the theme of character death to all kinds of tabletop games. This means Horror, Space Opera, Western, War Games, Mech Combat, even Superhero!
Just as every gaming table is different, so are the tales in ADVANCED DEATH SAVES. Some are funny, others are tragic, and yet others are something else entirely! The one constant is that the real relationships between the players at the table can impact a character’s fate as much as the dice.
Double Dragon RPG Dice Set – Roll with the Dragons! By Black Oak Workshop
(Campaign Ends : Sunday 12th November 2017; 01:00 UTC)
Double Dragon Dice are a set of RPG dice with an ‘Old World China’ theme. The set is a standard d4 through to d20 set, but with two d6 designs as well as the 0-9 and 00-90 d10’s. The etched dice are slightly larger than regular polyhedral dice (the d6 is 19mm) and also come with a themed dice bag at certain pledge levels, or as an add-on.
Each die has an individual design that is reflective of Old World China. For most, this design is featured on the maximum result face of the die. We think the set captures the theme perfectly!
Lantern (d4): Light the way for the set with a lantern themed d4!
Double Dragons (d6s): The d6s (pair) each have a dragon to oppose the other. The first dragon occupies the 1 face of its d6 while the other resides on the 6 face of its d6. The dragons are designed to immediately tell the number rolled.
Pagoda (d8): The max value face of the d8 features a Chinese pagoda.
Yin & Yang (d100/d10): Yin (d100) and Yang (d10) occupy the max faces of their respective dice and make a great set of percentile dice!
Rooster (d12): As 2017 is the year of the Rooster, it is a good choice for the max face of the d12.
Buddha (d20): Is anything more peaceful than rolling a natural 20?
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EN Publishing, the publishing branch of EN World, is currently running a Kickstarter for Xenomorphs: The Fall of Somerset Landing – a brand new setting & adventure book for the What’s Old Is New (W.O.I.N.) system. A limited ‘Xeno’ edition of the N.E.W. – Science Fiction Roleplaying Game Core Rulebook is also available through the campaign. Xenomorphs was co-written by Russ Morrissey, Darren Pearce and myself. The campaign is running until Friday 1st December so check it out!
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If you like what we do here at EN World (the Forums, Columns, News, ENnies, etc) and would like to help support us to bring you MORE please consider supporting our Patreon. Even a single dollar helps Thanks!
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If you have a forthcoming Kickstarter, or see one that excites you, please feel free to drop me an email on angus.abranson@gmail.com You can follow me on Twitter @ Angus_A or on Facebook where I often post about gaming.
Until next week, have fun and happy gaming!
Angus Abranson
