I have to say I am pretty excited about this week's Picks, especially the last one (for personal reasons). As well, some fantastic stuff for Pathfinder fans, and something rather amazing for FATE fans and those who loved one of the most influential PC games of all time.
Unwritten: Adventures in the Ages of MYST
For nearly a decade – from 1993 to 2002 – MYST was the highest-selling PC game of all time. Groundbreaking in design and play, it remains a benchmark and an inspiration. FATE seems like a perfect system to bring it to the tabletop. Welcome to the Unwritten parts of MYST story – to be written by you.
From caverns miles beneath the New Mexico desert, the D’ni ruled an empire that lasted ten millennia. They wrote Linking Books that allowed them to span universes, ignoring the primitive humans that infested the surface. But the glory of D’ni was brought low mere centuries ago, and their Ages were left empty and abandoned… until now.
Called to the desert, we have found our way down to D’ni. Its secrets are in our hands, and its future is ours to determine. The next chapter of D’ni is Unwritten.
In 1994 Cyan introduced us to the surreal worlds of MYST™ and the D’ni. Now you can make your own journeys of exploration and adventure through the Ages.
ZEITGEIST: The Gears of Revolution
Something pretty spectacular from EN Publishing – the critically acclaimed ZEITGEIST: The Gears of Revolution – is now available on sale in PDF form for $9.99. This is a huge steampunk-themed campaign for Pathfinder from some very talented people, and it’s a huge project well worth your attention.
Warning, though – they are very clear this is “for experienced GMs only.” Do you have what it takes?
For the next 7 days only* you can get the PDF of the critically acclaimed ZEITGEIST: The Gears of Revolution Act 1 – The Investigation Begins for just $9.99.
This gorgeous full-color book contains the extended players and campaign guides, plus the first five adventures. ZEITGEIST holds the current record for an unbroken string of five-star reviews from prolific Pathfinder reviewer Endzeitgeist, who describes it as a “crowning achievement”.
We designed ZEITGEIST for the experienced GM. This adventure path is complex, with lovingly crafted NPCs and motivations, shades of grey, and full of detail and plot. We know you know what you’re doing, and so we have provided you with an AP designed to let you use the full range of your awesome GMing skills. ZEITGEIST requires effort, but the rewards are immense.
Get the PDF right now for just $9.99*. That’s 560 pages, normally $34.99. The offer lasts only until June 7th, so don’t miss out!
“Steam and soot darken the skies above the city of Flint, and the choking products of its industrial forges sweep from the majestic harbor to the fey rainforests that dot its knife-toothed mountains. The Unseen Court, the Great Hunt, and the many spirits of the land no longer receive tribute, but they cannot enter these new domains of steam and steel to demand their tithe. The impoverished workers who huddle in factory slums fear monsters of a different breed, shadowy children of this bleak urban labyrinth.
Times are turning. The skyseers – Risurs folk prophets since their homeland’s birth – witness omens in the starry wheels of heaven, and they warn that a new era is nigh. But what they cannot foresee, hidden beyond the smog of the night sky, is the face of this coming era, the spirit of the age. The zeitgeist.”
(*) If you find this after that discount is over, please click this link to find the product directly.
Ponyfinder: Heart of Diamonds
I think I am going to have to give in and just watch some of this MLP stuff. It’s clearly eating the brains of almost everyone I know, and this RPG line is obviously going very strong. I give you Ponyfinder: Heart of Diamonds.
Heralds of an ancient time, these ponies are charged by destiny to be a beacon of hope and inspiration for those around them as they make their impression on the world.
New feats, spells, alchemic discoveries, and equipment all designed for gem ponies!
Compatible with Ponyfinder and Pathfinder roleplaying games.
Weird Discoveries
The muse and bane at once for most Game Masters, prepping adventures is all the rage in your mind when you’re starting a new campaign. A few sessions in, with shopping to do, meals to plan, work deadlines to manage, kids to wrangle, and so much else dragging on our daily schedule, adventure prep becomes a real challenge – one that can actually kill campaigns prematurely.
Looks like ol’ Monte Cook has a cure for what ails ya.
What’s the hardest part of running an RPG? It has to be the preparation. Unlike a board game, you can’t just spontaneously decide to play—because someone has to have spent hours preparing an adventure first.
But what if running a great game didn’t require any more time for the game master than it does for the players? What if you could just say, “Let’s play an RPG,” pull a book off the shelf, and be playing five minutes later?
With Weird Discoveries, legendary RPG designer Monte Cook turns his eye to the venerable adventure, a format that hasn’t seen much innovation in four decades, to create something new that makes this all possible. Weird Discoveries makes prepping for an RPG no more difficult or time consuming than setting up a board game, while showcasing the wonder, mystery, and awe of the Ninth World.
These aren’t adventure seeds or sketchy ideas—they’re complete adventures in an innovative format that requires minimal prep. Run them as one-shots, or drop them into your ongoing campaign when you don’t have time to prep your own adventures. You can even string them together as a campaign for months of effortless play!
Weird Discoveries includes:
Explore the ruins beneath the giant, hovering Black Pyramid. Face off against the Spider Knight. Discover the secret of the Mother Machine. Weird Discoveries is a must-have for beginning and veteran Numenera GMs, and anyone who’d like to play RPGs as easily and spontaneously as board games!
Prowlers & Paragons
From the “In Case You Missed It” file comes the game that may finally bring my thus far never-ending search for a supers game I can just dive into, tinker to taste, and run (and, perhaps, release?) my supers settings. With my current massive, eat-all-my-brain project, it would be good to have a game that gets it done, and I am more and more convinced my friend, Len Pimentel, went at least most of the places I was headed with my own system ideas.
Prowlers & Paragons (or P&P) is a tabletop roleplaying game with a narration-driven, rules-light system designed to emulate four-color superhero comics. Let’s break that down so you can see what you’re getting yourself into.
P&P is a narration-driven system. The rules in this game are not effects driven. For the most part, they don’t tell you what happens. Instead, they tell you who gets to describe what happens. And that’s what it’s all about in P&P: describing what happens. Both the players and the gamemaster (GM) take turns narrating events in the game world. This makes P&P feel more like an exercise in collaborative storytelling than a typical roleplaying game. However, P&P isn’t totally freeform and open-ended either.*
P&P is rules light. It’s chock full of gross oversimplifications and blatant inaccuracies that mimic comic book tropes rather than real-world facts. This also makes P&P a simple game with a streamlined set of rules. Once you know what you’re doing, you should be able to play without ever opening the book.
Finally, P&P is designed to emulate four-color superhero comics. This game is about the heroic things the characters do and the heroic burdens they shoulder. Mundane matters get little attention. There aren’t any detailed rules for dealing with money and wealth, but there most definitely is a rule for smashing into a bank vault. Let’s be perfectly clear: This is not a deep and cerebral game. P&P was designed to let you play stories about super heroes who save the world and beat the snot out of villains who richly deserve it. Like so much of the genre, P&P is a gleefully unapologetic exercise in heroic wish fulfillment.
~~~
There's this week's Picks, friends. Tonight, it's board games over at Kim's and Dave's ("The Captain is Dead" among them; very excited about having this one in my possession, along with the expansion); tomorrow, a dear friend's birthday party, wherein my rather massive self will challenge a few waterslides and then party the night away; and on Sunday, our monthly 5th Edition Birthright campaign, masterfully run by my brother-in-arms and partner Ross Watson.
Hope you've got great games and great activities ahead of you, as well, because...
... the Adventure Continues!
~SPF
Unwritten: Adventures in the Ages of MYST
For nearly a decade – from 1993 to 2002 – MYST was the highest-selling PC game of all time. Groundbreaking in design and play, it remains a benchmark and an inspiration. FATE seems like a perfect system to bring it to the tabletop. Welcome to the Unwritten parts of MYST story – to be written by you.
From caverns miles beneath the New Mexico desert, the D’ni ruled an empire that lasted ten millennia. They wrote Linking Books that allowed them to span universes, ignoring the primitive humans that infested the surface. But the glory of D’ni was brought low mere centuries ago, and their Ages were left empty and abandoned… until now.
Called to the desert, we have found our way down to D’ni. Its secrets are in our hands, and its future is ours to determine. The next chapter of D’ni is Unwritten.
In 1994 Cyan introduced us to the surreal worlds of MYST™ and the D’ni. Now you can make your own journeys of exploration and adventure through the Ages.
- Discovery Focused Mechanics
- Play in Modern or Historical D’ni
- Unlimited Possible Environments
ZEITGEIST: The Gears of Revolution
Something pretty spectacular from EN Publishing – the critically acclaimed ZEITGEIST: The Gears of Revolution – is now available on sale in PDF form for $9.99. This is a huge steampunk-themed campaign for Pathfinder from some very talented people, and it’s a huge project well worth your attention.
Warning, though – they are very clear this is “for experienced GMs only.” Do you have what it takes?
For the next 7 days only* you can get the PDF of the critically acclaimed ZEITGEIST: The Gears of Revolution Act 1 – The Investigation Begins for just $9.99.
This gorgeous full-color book contains the extended players and campaign guides, plus the first five adventures. ZEITGEIST holds the current record for an unbroken string of five-star reviews from prolific Pathfinder reviewer Endzeitgeist, who describes it as a “crowning achievement”.
We designed ZEITGEIST for the experienced GM. This adventure path is complex, with lovingly crafted NPCs and motivations, shades of grey, and full of detail and plot. We know you know what you’re doing, and so we have provided you with an AP designed to let you use the full range of your awesome GMing skills. ZEITGEIST requires effort, but the rewards are immense.
Get the PDF right now for just $9.99*. That’s 560 pages, normally $34.99. The offer lasts only until June 7th, so don’t miss out!
“Steam and soot darken the skies above the city of Flint, and the choking products of its industrial forges sweep from the majestic harbor to the fey rainforests that dot its knife-toothed mountains. The Unseen Court, the Great Hunt, and the many spirits of the land no longer receive tribute, but they cannot enter these new domains of steam and steel to demand their tithe. The impoverished workers who huddle in factory slums fear monsters of a different breed, shadowy children of this bleak urban labyrinth.
Times are turning. The skyseers – Risurs folk prophets since their homeland’s birth – witness omens in the starry wheels of heaven, and they warn that a new era is nigh. But what they cannot foresee, hidden beyond the smog of the night sky, is the face of this coming era, the spirit of the age. The zeitgeist.”
(*) If you find this after that discount is over, please click this link to find the product directly.
Ponyfinder: Heart of Diamonds
I think I am going to have to give in and just watch some of this MLP stuff. It’s clearly eating the brains of almost everyone I know, and this RPG line is obviously going very strong. I give you Ponyfinder: Heart of Diamonds.
Heralds of an ancient time, these ponies are charged by destiny to be a beacon of hope and inspiration for those around them as they make their impression on the world.
New feats, spells, alchemic discoveries, and equipment all designed for gem ponies!
Compatible with Ponyfinder and Pathfinder roleplaying games.
Weird Discoveries
The muse and bane at once for most Game Masters, prepping adventures is all the rage in your mind when you’re starting a new campaign. A few sessions in, with shopping to do, meals to plan, work deadlines to manage, kids to wrangle, and so much else dragging on our daily schedule, adventure prep becomes a real challenge – one that can actually kill campaigns prematurely.
Looks like ol’ Monte Cook has a cure for what ails ya.
What’s the hardest part of running an RPG? It has to be the preparation. Unlike a board game, you can’t just spontaneously decide to play—because someone has to have spent hours preparing an adventure first.
But what if running a great game didn’t require any more time for the game master than it does for the players? What if you could just say, “Let’s play an RPG,” pull a book off the shelf, and be playing five minutes later?
With Weird Discoveries, legendary RPG designer Monte Cook turns his eye to the venerable adventure, a format that hasn’t seen much innovation in four decades, to create something new that makes this all possible. Weird Discoveries makes prepping for an RPG no more difficult or time consuming than setting up a board game, while showcasing the wonder, mystery, and awe of the Ninth World.
These aren’t adventure seeds or sketchy ideas—they’re complete adventures in an innovative format that requires minimal prep. Run them as one-shots, or drop them into your ongoing campaign when you don’t have time to prep your own adventures. You can even string them together as a campaign for months of effortless play!
Weird Discoveries includes:
- Ten weird and wondrous adventures, with maps, NPCs, and all the details you expect.
- A whole new format for adventures that addresses the needs of GMs who don’t have time to read the whole thing before sitting down to play.
- A Ninth World serial killer hunt, technological ruins to explore, machines rewriting organic life, ancient mysteries, and much, much more.
- Great advice on running adventures with little or no prep.
- Twenty beautiful, full-color Show ’Em illustrations, to reveal to players during the adventures.
- Six pregenerated, illustrated characters, ready to play.
- A rules cheat sheet to make things run even more smoothly.
Explore the ruins beneath the giant, hovering Black Pyramid. Face off against the Spider Knight. Discover the secret of the Mother Machine. Weird Discoveries is a must-have for beginning and veteran Numenera GMs, and anyone who’d like to play RPGs as easily and spontaneously as board games!
Prowlers & Paragons
From the “In Case You Missed It” file comes the game that may finally bring my thus far never-ending search for a supers game I can just dive into, tinker to taste, and run (and, perhaps, release?) my supers settings. With my current massive, eat-all-my-brain project, it would be good to have a game that gets it done, and I am more and more convinced my friend, Len Pimentel, went at least most of the places I was headed with my own system ideas.
Prowlers & Paragons (or P&P) is a tabletop roleplaying game with a narration-driven, rules-light system designed to emulate four-color superhero comics. Let’s break that down so you can see what you’re getting yourself into.
P&P is a narration-driven system. The rules in this game are not effects driven. For the most part, they don’t tell you what happens. Instead, they tell you who gets to describe what happens. And that’s what it’s all about in P&P: describing what happens. Both the players and the gamemaster (GM) take turns narrating events in the game world. This makes P&P feel more like an exercise in collaborative storytelling than a typical roleplaying game. However, P&P isn’t totally freeform and open-ended either.*
P&P is rules light. It’s chock full of gross oversimplifications and blatant inaccuracies that mimic comic book tropes rather than real-world facts. This also makes P&P a simple game with a streamlined set of rules. Once you know what you’re doing, you should be able to play without ever opening the book.
Finally, P&P is designed to emulate four-color superhero comics. This game is about the heroic things the characters do and the heroic burdens they shoulder. Mundane matters get little attention. There aren’t any detailed rules for dealing with money and wealth, but there most definitely is a rule for smashing into a bank vault. Let’s be perfectly clear: This is not a deep and cerebral game. P&P was designed to let you play stories about super heroes who save the world and beat the snot out of villains who richly deserve it. Like so much of the genre, P&P is a gleefully unapologetic exercise in heroic wish fulfillment.
~~~
There's this week's Picks, friends. Tonight, it's board games over at Kim's and Dave's ("The Captain is Dead" among them; very excited about having this one in my possession, along with the expansion); tomorrow, a dear friend's birthday party, wherein my rather massive self will challenge a few waterslides and then party the night away; and on Sunday, our monthly 5th Edition Birthright campaign, masterfully run by my brother-in-arms and partner Ross Watson.
Hope you've got great games and great activities ahead of you, as well, because...
... the Adventure Continues!
~SPF
