Looking for something new

[velkymx]

Thank you everyone for the suggestions. Tiny Dungeon 2e seems to be the winner. Lots of genres to choose from, seems super easy.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

Thank you everyone for the suggestions. Tiny Dungeon 2e seems to be the winner. Lots of genres to choose from, seems super easy.

It is indeed super easy, and generally well-written with distinctive artwork.

If you want some extra content for the Tiny Supers book, there's a writeup for the Syracuse Seven homebrew team over on my blog - which got ported over to the Sentinel Comics RPG with some added content over here when I shifted systems.

 

[Longspeak]

Howard then printed a spiteful little "game" called Fistful of Turkeys that parodied SJG stylings (particularly One-Page Bulge) and was marked as being from a faux company called Some Turkey Games.

Wait, what??

I bought and played that. No idea it was a Thompson spite piece!

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

Wait, what??

I bought and played that. No idea it was a Thompson spite piece!

Oh yeah, the "separation" was still pretty fresh at that point. Thompson was clearly unhappy about everything from losing Ogre/GEV (two of his best sellers, and which he attempted to imitate with Helltank/Helltank Destroyer) to Space Gamer taking off bigtime after it was under Jackson's control (leading to the short-lived Interplay trying to compete after the original sale of SG was because Metagaming didn't want to waste resources on magazines). Post-1980 was not a great period for Metagaming in general, while SJG was a rising star throughout the decade.

There were definitely some bad feelings over The Fantasy Trip (the wiki article has the story right from what I recall hearing in the pre-internet days) that led to both Jackson's departure and Thompson playing dog-in-the-manger with the game for over 35 years until Jackson finally reclaimed the rights. Hard to say who was in the right there - Thompson had the right to make unilateral changes to TFT without even telling Jackson, but it certainly wasn't polite to do so. At the same time, going by GURPS it's possible that Thompson was right and draft TFT was too complex for its own good and his changes might have improved it - but of the two of them as designers, Jackson's track record even stopping back in 1983 is a fair bit more impressive than Thompson's, whose major claim to fame will always be the microgame format rather than any single game (although WarpWar is still really good, and could have been expanded into something that competed with TFG's Starfire).

Jackson also took the mostly-complete One-Page Bulge with him, and used that format for Raid On Iran and Kung Fu 2100 so it was kind of an "SJG thing" for a while before the pocket boxes came along (thank goodness). It's possible that Thompson may have had the idea for that format originally (formats being his thing) and despite never using it saw it as more "theft" by SJG, or he might have just used it with Fistful of Turkeys to make the parody more spot-on (and keep the costs of a spite project down). The Space Gamer (with Jackson as editor) ran a review in issue 41 that flayed the game pretty badly (deservedly so IMO, it sacrificed too much playability to parody no matter how you feel about the company feud) but beyond that SJG has never really said anything about it AFAIK. Worth noting that Space Gamer reviews extensively used the word "turkey" to describe games the reviewer didn't like, which is so 70s/early 80s it's cringeworthy.

 

[CleverNickName]

We're really liking "The Old Gods of Appalachia RPG," from Monte Cook games. (We're fans of the podcast, so we are probably biased.) It uses the Cypher system, which is lightweight and easy to learn.