Recent content by Jeffzilla

I have a difficult time with this premise. It’s difficult to cite specific examples without invoking real-world politics and risking the ire of this site’s fantastic moderation team, so I’ll only say that global cooperation and commitment to international order seem to follow cycles. I think I...

We're really juggling two contradictory ideas in this thread-- how 'real' is our fiction? Science fiction asks a lot of what ifs. It asks us to conjecture, to speculate. Those conjectures may be informed by what we know to be true-- by what is-- but the very concept of science fiction also...

Strategy and tactics are highly situational. If the stakes were high enough; if the strategic objective didn't involve capture, conquest, or occupation; if alternatives were deemed too costly, too difficult, or too impractical; and if consequences didn't seem to outweight benefits, I could very...

This is exactly right. The Expanse RPG is one of my favorite tabletop systems, with all of its Newtonian physics and somewhat realistic premise of combat via missiles, railguns, and belt-fed slugthrowers, each effective at a specific range and pretty much worthless outside of that range...

The only thing I'd add to @tabletopjess' comment is that the system is pretty easy to learn and run, which also makes it pretty easy to adapt to whatever settings or scenarios you want to play in. It's got a very old-school vibe, and I mean that in a good way.

The books were released mostly before, but also during, the run of the show. The show used visual elements not explicitly called out in the books to convey ideas in shorthand which the books explained in detail. For example, the books explain in great detail how a ship's crew only experiences...

Fair point-- not arguing against you-- but my take is that The Expanse's fantasy elements don't negate its attention to real-world physics when it comes to ship design and its depiction of ship-to-ship combat. In general, I think the show did a fair job of remaining somewhat grounded in...

M&M3e's chargen fiddly factor is near-nil if you're making a character which is neatly covered by one of the templates and it dials up gradually from there the further you depart from a template. Where it gets uber fiddly though, unless you're already pretty familiar with character options, is...

Sounds fantastic! I'll pick it up as soon as it's available from someone with better shipping rates. I mean, the Melsonian website lists 'sensual snails' as a product feature, so how could I not??? Thanks for the personal response!

Perfect! I'm looking forward to receiving my copy.

I just ordered Fronds from IndiePressRevolution to avoid Melsonian's horrendous shipping charges. Sadly, Seasons of the Snail isn't available there yet.

Thanks for the review! I completely dig Troika! but passed on Fronds of Benevolence because I figured that between the core rules, Acid Death Fantasy, and Academies of the Arcane I already had more weirdness for the system than I'd ever have a chance to use in an actual campaign. Plus, I'm...

I'd be proud too. Acid Death Fantasy is a personal fave.

Heart is a super-cool game that I wish more people knew about. It sort of takes the Spire setting, which is guaranteed to turn your player characters into hateful violent revolutionaries, and turns it into a tunnel crawl, only the tunnel is a weird transdimensional space.

Seconded. When we were playing M&M3e we started using the Basic Heroes Handbook instead of the 'core' rules because creating characters using archetypes was so much easier. And it looks like maybe M&M4e is going to lean into this method.