Welcome back to our weekly look at tabletop roleplaying game, and accessories, crowdfunding roundup! This week we have not one, but TWO, Starfinder campaigns, a post-apocalyptic fantasy Savage Worlds setting, a 5th edition version of a 4th edition ENnie winner, and we finally welcome John Carter of Mars to our gaming tables. 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.
John Carter of Mars – The Roleplaying Game by Chris Birch, Modiphius
(Campaign Ends : Sunday 11th February 2018; 20:00 UTC)
Modiphius announced they had licensed Edgar Rice Burroughs planetary romance novels a couple of years ago. They’ve spent the last two years working on John Carter of Mars – Adventures on The Dying World of Barsoom with the aim of the game landing with backers in the summer, and appearing in retail stores in the fall. Using a pulp-action inspired narrative variant of their house 2d20 system, Momentum, John Carter of Mars allows players to take the role of various adventurers and heroes as they travel, battle, and romance their way across the wondrous and dangerous world known to its natives as Barsoom. The book is being produced in a landscape format, enabling extra long landscape artwork to be used.
Although you can create your own new heroes the game also allows you to play some of the signature characters from the novels – such as the princess Dejah Thoris, Tars Tarkas the fearsome Thark warrior, or even John Carter himself.
Included in the core book are:
· An overview of Burroughs' Barsoom and its peoples, perfect to introduce new players to the wondrous world of John Carter of Mars.
· Detailed chapters on technology, creatures, and various cultures.
· A new skill-less Talent focused narrative variation of the 2d20 system called Momentum, including a step-by-step character generation system designed to create heroes from a variety of backgrounds and concepts.
· Choose a wide variety of characters such as a dashing Red Martian duelist, a brilliant First Born scientist, a savage Beastmaster, a courageous airship officer, a disciplined assassin, or even Earthborn characters, so players can follow in the bounding footsteps of John Carter himself!
· A detailed Narrator's section with information on how to run genre-and-setting appropriate games and campaigns, including information about the great secrets of Barsoom.
· Three eras of play based on the adventures of John Carter himself. Play during the early days of Dotar Sojat, adventure during the time when Carter was a Prince of Helium and in the years after when he was believed dead, or fight alongside Carter and his allies during the later Jeddak of Jeddaks era.
· An introductory adventure, the Mind Merchants of Mars, to get players and Narrators started on their adventures.
In addition to the core rulebook, which is also available in a couple of limited edition in addition to the standard hardcover, the campaign is also raising money for a selection of 32mm (heroic) scale miniatures in a series of boxed sets, The Heroes of Barsoom set (including John Carter, Dejah Thoris, Tats Yarkas and Woola) was available from the outset with additional sets unlocked (some already) as stretch goals, such as Heroes of Helium, Beasts of Barsoom and the Thark Warband.
The Widow’s Tear: Cosmic Horror For Starfinder (Revised) by David Jarvis / Gun Metal Games
(Campaign Ends : Wednesday 31st January 2018; 17:24 UTC)
The Widow’s Tear is a relaunch of a campaign Gun Metal Games ran last year. The original campaign also included miniatures, which have been left out this time round to concentrate on the core Widow’s Tear Starfinder setting material. I backed the first campaign, and am backing this relaunch as I really like the ideas that David and his team have come up with – and also love the artwork I’ve seen so far.
The galaxy in which the Starfinder game is set is a vast, largely unexplored region of space, just waiting for intrepid adventurers to discover it's secrets.
Gun Metal Games brings Starfinder fans new, exotic locations for their characters to visit during a campaign in a new line of Starfinder-compatible products: Descent Engine: The Spacefarers Guide to the Cosmos!
Each product in this game line will reveal new regions filled with a multitude of star systems, strange phenomena, new creatures and much more! The flagship book in this line is The Widow's Tear!
A 160 page, full color, hard cover book, The Widow’s Tear will explore some of the inhabited star systems in the nebula and introduce you to the beings who live there. You’ll learn about their unique histories, their goals for the future and the challenges they face. You’ll read about new technologies, including special weapons and armor, new psionic abilities, magic items, spacecraft, and more!
Many of the creatures you'll find in The Widow's Tear are inspired by the works of H.P Lovecraft, whose Great Old Ones and their spawn are found not only in this book, but are also in the Starfinder pantheon. This book will also provide new, horrific grafts you can easily apply to any creature or race, new hazards for planets and space travel, and rules for insanity. We also have a limited pledge that allows some of you to create your own creatures and hazards!
We’ll introduce new races available for play, including Angarri, the Defiled, Jendova, the Tieflings of the Hellfire Syndicate, and more! Each star system will come with its own map. We even have a limited pledge that will allow some of you to create your own unique star system for inclusion in the nebula!
In addition to the main setting book an introductory adventure is also on offer from the outset. To Save a World is written by Jeff Lee. Faced with an environmental crisis that could destabilize the biosphere of a planet, the system's leaders send a group of adventurers as envoys to a distant world whose advances in bio-engineering could be the solution to halt the catastrophe. However, when their ship arrives at the planet, they find the world abandoned. The population have left aboard great colony ships in the wake of an impending supernova of the system's sun. Now they must follow, searching out one of the colony ships headed for the Widow's Tear nebula to seek out a scientist who may have the answers needed to save a planet and allow them to return home as heroes.
Children of the Apocalypse for Savage Worlds RPG by Scott Marchand Davis
(Campaign Ends : Thursday February 1st 2018; 00:11 UTC)
Children of the Apocalypse is a post-apocalyptic epic fantasy setting for Savage Worlds, including a full Plot Point campaign. The book requires the use of both Pinnacle Entertainments Savage Worlds core rulebook and the Fantasy Companion.
The default setting is an alternate version of New England, but you can easily adapt any local area as a site for adventuring. For the gamemaster, map-making becomes trivial, and for the players, you have the opportunity to repurpose artifacts from our time as magic devices using Weird Science. Toy blaster? Now it has the Bolt power! Use a smartphone for Divination or a French Horn for a sonic Blast.
As you're exploring the ruins of Boston, the undead city of Salem, or the ancient campus of U Mass Lowell, you'll encounter classic fantasy creatures ranging from dragons to chimera, but also hostile warriors of new races like the hideous tannain, scions of the Demon God of Monsters, and the adharca, each one distinct, sharing only one common feature, three horns on their forehead, and their savage cousins, the ogrin.
Adventure isn't limited to ruins, however; plots and politics abound within the new cities that rose after the apocalypse. The city state of Peterborough is beset by the aggressively expansionist Barony of Groton from without, and minions of the dark gods may also lurk within, plotting to acquire forbidden knowledge and perhaps even bring about a new apocalypse.
In the world of Children of the Apocalypse, the Nine Gods exert a daily influence on societies, scheming for the advantage of their followers and the downfall of their enemies. The setting book includes a complete Plot Point campaign in which the players contend with the Gods themselves to determine the future of all humanity.
Players take on the roles of newly-minted adventurers of the city-state of Peterborough, in the service of the Lord Protector. Some might follow the path of the psion, learning the arts of mental power; others might master musketry or fencing; still others could study alchemy or wizardry.
“A Night in Seyvoth Manor” for D&D 5th Edition by Darklight Interactive
(Campaign Ends : Friday 2nd February 2018; 04:28 UTC)
A Night in Seyvoth Manor was originally published for 4th Edition D&D back in 2013, earning itself an ENnie nomination at the time (Best Free Product). Now the team are doing a complete conversion of this Halloween-themed one-shot adventure to release it for 5th Edition. The adventure is for a party of four to six characters of 6th level and is pretty brutal, thus the recommendation to use it as a one-shot with optimized characters that will probably not see the end (but deceased characters will come back so players won’t be sitting around after character death watching everyone else have fun).
Few people in the village of Ravenshire spoke of the manor atop the hill to the north, and even fewer dared approach it. After the horrific events that happened there so many years ago many believe the mansion and the estate grounds to be cursed, haunted by the restless dead, and some of the village residents could swear they have seen movement and lights coming from the seemingly abandoned mansion.
Throughout the years the village has had its share of disappearances; most of them had been blamed on the harsh environment of the surrounding forest and the natural dangers of the world we live in, but recent evidence leads to the doorstep of the Seyvoth estate. And when two young women – Jessi and Lyssa Hawthorne, daughters of a village elder – go missing, the village immediately sent out search parties in to the surrounding area. Two separate groups of scouts passed through the iron gate at the entrance to the estate… and have never returned.
Now a local mystic warns of the danger looming in Seyvoth manor, how the daughters will soon be led towards the darkness and turn against the village they once called home. Are you brave enough to step through the gates and seek out the missing scouts and rescue the two women in distress? Are you willing to unravel the mysteries of the Seyvoth estate, even if it means risking your own life?
From Beyond: Distress Call Sci-fi RPG Adventure by Davide Tramma
(Campaign Ends : Sunday 4th February 2018; 01:02 UTC)
Our second Starfinder Kickstarter this week. This time Episode 1 of a new Adventure Path from Mexican author Davide Tramma. Distress Call is suitable for characters of 1st to 3rd level and the adventure is ready to be delivered in PDF as soon as the campaign finishes.
Imagine you are on an outpost two months far from the closest civilized area in a newly discovered star system. Far from supplies, far from home , relying only on your mates and skills to solve the many problems an isolated outpost has to face. Four alien planets are orbiting around a dim dwarf brown star.
Everything was going fine, and all you had to do was waiting the next shipment with the fresh provisions, until one day you receive an automatic distress call coming from the Sawshark, a hi-tech mining vessel operating in the star system asteroid belt that is supposed to be under your protection.
After the call the ship goes silent and any attempt to hail back the Sawshark fails.
You jump on your rescue shuttle to save the crew with a clear goal in mind fix the problem and be back as soon as possible with the ship and its crewmembers.
What could possibly go wrong?
**********
Want to know what campaigns made the most money on Kickstarter in 2017? The campaigns that had the most backers? Check out my New Years Eve article, “2017’s Highest Grossing English Language Tabletop Roleplaying Crowdfunding Campaigns” here on EN World to find out!
**********
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!
**********
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
John Carter of Mars – The Roleplaying Game by Chris Birch, Modiphius
(Campaign Ends : Sunday 11th February 2018; 20:00 UTC)
Modiphius announced they had licensed Edgar Rice Burroughs planetary romance novels a couple of years ago. They’ve spent the last two years working on John Carter of Mars – Adventures on The Dying World of Barsoom with the aim of the game landing with backers in the summer, and appearing in retail stores in the fall. Using a pulp-action inspired narrative variant of their house 2d20 system, Momentum, John Carter of Mars allows players to take the role of various adventurers and heroes as they travel, battle, and romance their way across the wondrous and dangerous world known to its natives as Barsoom. The book is being produced in a landscape format, enabling extra long landscape artwork to be used.
Although you can create your own new heroes the game also allows you to play some of the signature characters from the novels – such as the princess Dejah Thoris, Tars Tarkas the fearsome Thark warrior, or even John Carter himself.
Included in the core book are:
· An overview of Burroughs' Barsoom and its peoples, perfect to introduce new players to the wondrous world of John Carter of Mars.
· Detailed chapters on technology, creatures, and various cultures.
· A new skill-less Talent focused narrative variation of the 2d20 system called Momentum, including a step-by-step character generation system designed to create heroes from a variety of backgrounds and concepts.
· Choose a wide variety of characters such as a dashing Red Martian duelist, a brilliant First Born scientist, a savage Beastmaster, a courageous airship officer, a disciplined assassin, or even Earthborn characters, so players can follow in the bounding footsteps of John Carter himself!
· A detailed Narrator's section with information on how to run genre-and-setting appropriate games and campaigns, including information about the great secrets of Barsoom.
· Three eras of play based on the adventures of John Carter himself. Play during the early days of Dotar Sojat, adventure during the time when Carter was a Prince of Helium and in the years after when he was believed dead, or fight alongside Carter and his allies during the later Jeddak of Jeddaks era.
· An introductory adventure, the Mind Merchants of Mars, to get players and Narrators started on their adventures.
In addition to the core rulebook, which is also available in a couple of limited edition in addition to the standard hardcover, the campaign is also raising money for a selection of 32mm (heroic) scale miniatures in a series of boxed sets, The Heroes of Barsoom set (including John Carter, Dejah Thoris, Tats Yarkas and Woola) was available from the outset with additional sets unlocked (some already) as stretch goals, such as Heroes of Helium, Beasts of Barsoom and the Thark Warband.
The Widow’s Tear: Cosmic Horror For Starfinder (Revised) by David Jarvis / Gun Metal Games
(Campaign Ends : Wednesday 31st January 2018; 17:24 UTC)
The Widow’s Tear is a relaunch of a campaign Gun Metal Games ran last year. The original campaign also included miniatures, which have been left out this time round to concentrate on the core Widow’s Tear Starfinder setting material. I backed the first campaign, and am backing this relaunch as I really like the ideas that David and his team have come up with – and also love the artwork I’ve seen so far.
The galaxy in which the Starfinder game is set is a vast, largely unexplored region of space, just waiting for intrepid adventurers to discover it's secrets.
Gun Metal Games brings Starfinder fans new, exotic locations for their characters to visit during a campaign in a new line of Starfinder-compatible products: Descent Engine: The Spacefarers Guide to the Cosmos!
Each product in this game line will reveal new regions filled with a multitude of star systems, strange phenomena, new creatures and much more! The flagship book in this line is The Widow's Tear!
A 160 page, full color, hard cover book, The Widow’s Tear will explore some of the inhabited star systems in the nebula and introduce you to the beings who live there. You’ll learn about their unique histories, their goals for the future and the challenges they face. You’ll read about new technologies, including special weapons and armor, new psionic abilities, magic items, spacecraft, and more!
Many of the creatures you'll find in The Widow's Tear are inspired by the works of H.P Lovecraft, whose Great Old Ones and their spawn are found not only in this book, but are also in the Starfinder pantheon. This book will also provide new, horrific grafts you can easily apply to any creature or race, new hazards for planets and space travel, and rules for insanity. We also have a limited pledge that allows some of you to create your own creatures and hazards!
We’ll introduce new races available for play, including Angarri, the Defiled, Jendova, the Tieflings of the Hellfire Syndicate, and more! Each star system will come with its own map. We even have a limited pledge that will allow some of you to create your own unique star system for inclusion in the nebula!
In addition to the main setting book an introductory adventure is also on offer from the outset. To Save a World is written by Jeff Lee. Faced with an environmental crisis that could destabilize the biosphere of a planet, the system's leaders send a group of adventurers as envoys to a distant world whose advances in bio-engineering could be the solution to halt the catastrophe. However, when their ship arrives at the planet, they find the world abandoned. The population have left aboard great colony ships in the wake of an impending supernova of the system's sun. Now they must follow, searching out one of the colony ships headed for the Widow's Tear nebula to seek out a scientist who may have the answers needed to save a planet and allow them to return home as heroes.
Children of the Apocalypse for Savage Worlds RPG by Scott Marchand Davis
(Campaign Ends : Thursday February 1st 2018; 00:11 UTC)
Children of the Apocalypse is a post-apocalyptic epic fantasy setting for Savage Worlds, including a full Plot Point campaign. The book requires the use of both Pinnacle Entertainments Savage Worlds core rulebook and the Fantasy Companion.
The default setting is an alternate version of New England, but you can easily adapt any local area as a site for adventuring. For the gamemaster, map-making becomes trivial, and for the players, you have the opportunity to repurpose artifacts from our time as magic devices using Weird Science. Toy blaster? Now it has the Bolt power! Use a smartphone for Divination or a French Horn for a sonic Blast.
As you're exploring the ruins of Boston, the undead city of Salem, or the ancient campus of U Mass Lowell, you'll encounter classic fantasy creatures ranging from dragons to chimera, but also hostile warriors of new races like the hideous tannain, scions of the Demon God of Monsters, and the adharca, each one distinct, sharing only one common feature, three horns on their forehead, and their savage cousins, the ogrin.
Adventure isn't limited to ruins, however; plots and politics abound within the new cities that rose after the apocalypse. The city state of Peterborough is beset by the aggressively expansionist Barony of Groton from without, and minions of the dark gods may also lurk within, plotting to acquire forbidden knowledge and perhaps even bring about a new apocalypse.
In the world of Children of the Apocalypse, the Nine Gods exert a daily influence on societies, scheming for the advantage of their followers and the downfall of their enemies. The setting book includes a complete Plot Point campaign in which the players contend with the Gods themselves to determine the future of all humanity.
Players take on the roles of newly-minted adventurers of the city-state of Peterborough, in the service of the Lord Protector. Some might follow the path of the psion, learning the arts of mental power; others might master musketry or fencing; still others could study alchemy or wizardry.
“A Night in Seyvoth Manor” for D&D 5th Edition by Darklight Interactive
(Campaign Ends : Friday 2nd February 2018; 04:28 UTC)
A Night in Seyvoth Manor was originally published for 4th Edition D&D back in 2013, earning itself an ENnie nomination at the time (Best Free Product). Now the team are doing a complete conversion of this Halloween-themed one-shot adventure to release it for 5th Edition. The adventure is for a party of four to six characters of 6th level and is pretty brutal, thus the recommendation to use it as a one-shot with optimized characters that will probably not see the end (but deceased characters will come back so players won’t be sitting around after character death watching everyone else have fun).
Few people in the village of Ravenshire spoke of the manor atop the hill to the north, and even fewer dared approach it. After the horrific events that happened there so many years ago many believe the mansion and the estate grounds to be cursed, haunted by the restless dead, and some of the village residents could swear they have seen movement and lights coming from the seemingly abandoned mansion.
Throughout the years the village has had its share of disappearances; most of them had been blamed on the harsh environment of the surrounding forest and the natural dangers of the world we live in, but recent evidence leads to the doorstep of the Seyvoth estate. And when two young women – Jessi and Lyssa Hawthorne, daughters of a village elder – go missing, the village immediately sent out search parties in to the surrounding area. Two separate groups of scouts passed through the iron gate at the entrance to the estate… and have never returned.
Now a local mystic warns of the danger looming in Seyvoth manor, how the daughters will soon be led towards the darkness and turn against the village they once called home. Are you brave enough to step through the gates and seek out the missing scouts and rescue the two women in distress? Are you willing to unravel the mysteries of the Seyvoth estate, even if it means risking your own life?
From Beyond: Distress Call Sci-fi RPG Adventure by Davide Tramma
(Campaign Ends : Sunday 4th February 2018; 01:02 UTC)
Our second Starfinder Kickstarter this week. This time Episode 1 of a new Adventure Path from Mexican author Davide Tramma. Distress Call is suitable for characters of 1st to 3rd level and the adventure is ready to be delivered in PDF as soon as the campaign finishes.
Imagine you are on an outpost two months far from the closest civilized area in a newly discovered star system. Far from supplies, far from home , relying only on your mates and skills to solve the many problems an isolated outpost has to face. Four alien planets are orbiting around a dim dwarf brown star.
Everything was going fine, and all you had to do was waiting the next shipment with the fresh provisions, until one day you receive an automatic distress call coming from the Sawshark, a hi-tech mining vessel operating in the star system asteroid belt that is supposed to be under your protection.
After the call the ship goes silent and any attempt to hail back the Sawshark fails.
You jump on your rescue shuttle to save the crew with a clear goal in mind fix the problem and be back as soon as possible with the ship and its crewmembers.
What could possibly go wrong?
**********
Want to know what campaigns made the most money on Kickstarter in 2017? The campaigns that had the most backers? Check out my New Years Eve article, “2017’s Highest Grossing English Language Tabletop Roleplaying Crowdfunding Campaigns” here on EN World to find out!
**********
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!
**********
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
