Indie RPGs and other Oddities

General/Looking For Group
14

[quote=“Auburney”]Also, I’ve been writing on an unholy cross-breed between MLWM’s plot mechanic and Dog’s scene resolution mechanic (“raise and see” with pools of dice), using the “masked avengers” genre for a dark urban setting.

Kinda like Revolucion! if you know that one, but with Batman- and the Watchmen-type characters and plots (masked avengers, but without any actual superpowers) instead of Revolucion!'s “underground revolutionaries against an overpowering regime” angle.

Supposed to allow for reskinnings for all kinds of thematically related stuff from Robin Hood or Zorro to Star Wars or OWoD Werewolves just as well. Hasn’t seen playtest yet, though :wink: Still filing around on that…[/quote]

Yeah, that sounds nice : )

I am working on my “Blood & Obsidian”: a narrative fantasy RPG, drawing inspiration from pre-columbian mesoamerica, focusing on teamwork, community-growth and ritual sacrifice :smiling_imp:;

15

[quote=“Alrik”]Fiasco:
i still need to play this: -H- not even one more time? :stuck_out_tongue:[/quote]
Well, maybe. I don’t know - it would probably take some convincing.

The problem I have with Fiasco is one I have with quite a few indie games. One of the primary goals of the indie movement was to increase the narrative aspect of games, right? Yet they do this by … making parts of the narrative not matter?

Take With Great Power (which I liked - thanks again for a great evening!). Yes, you get to choose awesome powers, but that choice is irrelevant. It wouldn’t have made a difference if our characters had the ability to make their farts smell like lemonade instead of the cool powers we actually had, and that feels very odd in a game that’s basically about superpowers and how they affect people.

But anyway, I do like a lot about With Great Power and would happily play another game (hint, hint), but in Fiasco, I have a hard time finding anything that does matter, and that makes for a pretty empty experience.

Again, however, I tend to be grouchier about these things than most people, so do try the game out. A lot of people love it, and I hope you wind up enjoying it more than I do.

16

That sounds interesting! One, pre-european-invasion South/Middle America is a heavily (and shamefully) underused setting anyways, and two, the focus on teamwork and community sounds promising. A bit of sacrifice is also never amiss, I guess :wink:

I’d be up for a playtest when the time comes!

@ Fiasco: now we’ll have to play it, Alrik, if only just to find out about -H-'s misgivings and what there is to them! :smiley:

17

[quote=“Auburney”]That sounds interesting! One, pre-european-invasion South/Middle America is a heavily (and shamefully) underused setting anyways, and two, the focus on teamwork and community sounds promising. A bit of sacrifice is also never amiss, I guess :wink:

I’d be up for a playtest when the time comes! [/quote]
my - current - main problem is the question of how I should handle “Status” *
and I need to do another overhaul of all “Duties” ( ~ Classes) afterwards

  • meaning: should “Status” affect social tests, or be a trait (like in L5R), or something else, etc.

I will send you a pdf, if you want to read it
(2 books - one is setting and one is rules)

(for me) Fiasco felt more like “Let’s tell a story together”, like My Life With Master or the card game Aye Dark Overlord, and not like a roleplaying game

It was fun and I would play it again, but I would play a roleplaying game instead, should I be forced to choose.

18

[size=150]REIGN[/size]

RPG.net Review
Reign Homepage
Reign Wiki

Dice Used: d10s

System:
One Roll Engine (roll several d10s and look for sets)

As (sadly) with many systems the rules favour one-sided character creation [*], but as a plus-side in REIGN this was done for a reason:
You could either use your XP to get rid of your weaknesses, or you could increase the stats of your organisation (very expensive).
So characters who increase only their stats are not stronger per se (well a little bit maybe :wink:) then other characters, but they have less weaknesses.

[*] The “to increase a high stat” : “to increase a low stat” ratio is the same at character creation, but favours the lower stats afterwards (like in the o/n WoD games).

Synopsis:
A fantasy system for Lords & Leaders with a “Anti-Tolkien” Fantasy Setting.

Pros:
Nice rules for organisations
On the Homepage, there is a lot of setting-material.
This was released under the “ransom method”. (I have written X-words for the setting. If I get Y-money, I would post it online to download for free for everyone.)

If your player character dies, you keep her organisation and you play her successor.
(t.m. You do not loose XP you have invested in your organisation, if your character dies.)

Cons:
The physics of this world:
The two continents are a giant man and a giant woman laying next to each other in the water (the sea).
So far so good - but the world has “Directional Gravity”.
t.m. at every!!! coast the sea rises in π/2 (90°) into the air!!!
(the sun & the moon are fixed in the sky, but that did not hurt as much)
-> so we kinda skipped that thing :wink:

Maybe if the setting had been more weird - like Numenera or Planescape or Dungeons the Dragoning - it would have worked for me.
I guess it is a kind of uncanny valley thing in RPG-World-Design Weirdness :laughing:

Two of the players (of the second one-shot [s.b.]) disliked the One Roll Engine System.

What we did with it:
Two One-shots to try out the system:
First a “minister game” written by the creator of REIGN, that only used the organisation-rules. This one was really nice.
Later we played a pirate fleet one-shot (I forgot about that in my earlier post).
We wanted to start a campaign once, but never surpassed the point of character creation.

Conclusion:
It felt really nice, but it was not the “OMG best thing evaaar” feeling I sometimes get, when trying new RPG stuff :smiley:
We wanted to start a campaign once, but we never succeeded in starting that. [**]

I guess it would be very easy to just use the rules and play something different with it. You have to make up you own magic schools (maybe), but there are enough rules to be able to do that.

[**] Typically I plan (2 or 3, sometimes 4) different campaign-ideas at once and then let the players choose, which one they want to play (and which idea I will flesh out). So there are a lot of discarded campaign-ideas laying around waiting to be played … … in the far future (so probably never^^) … …

19

yes, please do so - I’d be interested! PM would be good :wink:

whoa, how much have you written for this? Sounds like quite the page count already :wink: Or is “books” more like “chapters” really? :stuck_out_tongue:

20

I would advice rather not posting your email in a public forum,
unless you are in dire need of spam emails of course :wink:

I will send you a PM with a download link

~ 150 pages

I will send you the Tékumel-Version of the game.
= the the setting is not made by me, but is “The Empire of the Pedal Throne” from M.A.R. Barker
If you familiar with that, you can just skip the “fluff-stuff” :slight_smile:
The “own-unique setting without a name that would stay longer then a month” is too much under construction yet ( = too much updates/month; see the spam problem above :wink:)

@Rules (Version 3.0)
Main inspirations were Scion (although you could hardly can see the influence now), Legend of the 5 Rings, Dresden Files and Houses of the Blooded.
The current version shares similarities with HotB (some, like the Virtues, only accidently), but I twisted the Style Point Mechanic of this PvP-ish game 180° into a teamwork and ritual sacrifice friendly game (but read for your self).

Sorry, that the Rulebook has such a high information-density / sentence ratio and the layout still being pretty bad.
It was written with the intent to be an aid to a GM that already knows the rules & setting (me), so that he could show something to his fellow players, which would make the game, especially character creation, easier.

Please feel free to report/mail/post errors, typos, ideas, etc.
my ego can take that :laughing:

21

Hah, bring it on ye olde intarwebz! I ar’nt afraid of yer measly powers of spamm! Arrr!! :stuck_out_tongue:
(anyways, edited it out now, cause yeah, that makes sense actually :wink: )

The document is an interesting read so far, hope we can maybe playtest it at some point in the future perhaps? I’m only about one-third through the rules as of yet, and haven’t arrived at the chapters about your “problematic” chapters Status and Duties… but perhaps they may get worked out with some actual play…?
Cause there are things in the rules (Narrative Privilege, Raises and Aspects) that sound intriguing, and that I’d like to see in action sometime :slight_smile:

22

It is still a “very morphic” thing. So I tend to make a lot of changes every month or so.
If it is more “stable”, I will start to make one-shots.
I aim at late October.
We will see :wink:

Thanks a lot for reading and for your awesome ideas : )

23

Hi there,

if some of you are interested, since I will be in France next month and then in Switzerland with the authors and illustrators of Shadows of Esteren (best current RPG French product, won 3 ENnies last years, Gold best production value, Gold best art interior, Silver product of the year for the English version), I can get a copy. I only have the french version of it at the moment…
Just let me know :wink:

24

[quote=“Melchior”]Hi there,

if some of you are interested, since I will be in France next month and then in Switzerland with the authors and illustrators of Shadows of Esteren (best current RPG product at the moment, won 3 ENnies last years, Gold best production value, Gold best art interior, Silver product of the year for the English version), I can get a copy. I only have the french version of it at the moment…
Just let me know :wink:[/quote]
ah - I already own the pdfs (no need for a hardcover for the moment)
this is also a game i want to try one day^^

I wish you a good journey :slight_smile:

25

Did you read them ?
I had the plan to buy the hard copy, but since I have the french version, and (at the time I considered it), no english speaking players, I didn’t. So if I see that some players might be interested in giving it a try (as gm or players), I will perhaps invest :wink:

btw, Robin D. Laws, the guy I spoke to you about : en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robin_Laws

26

I believe that there is a copy of the core book at Planet Harry.

27

Oh could save me some space in the bag while traveling… I’ll check it out, thanks !

28

There is. There’s also one on my shelf, should anyone be interested.

I’m not entirely sure about best current RPG product (perhaps a touch of national pride?), but it does look very nice. It’s been on my list of things to try for a while.

29

Yes, actually I skipped the “French” in the sentence about the best RPG product, but meant it :wink: Since I do not know well the international production, I only compare to other French games. And I must say that I was really impressed by the quality of it when bought it when released…

But I guess that few games had the chance to have such a huge team of designers, illustrators & authors… and it’s a long term project also. The linked drawback is that even with quite an important number of copies sold, the guys that worked on it almost worked for free :wink:

BTW : I have absolutely no share in this, some of the authors are friends, and I joined the association which edited the game because I organised an RPG creation contest for them, but did not participated in the game creation :wink:

30

[quote=“Melchior”]Did you read them ?
I had the plan to buy the hard copy, but since I have the french version, and (at the time I considered it), no english speaking players, I didn’t. So if I see that some players might be interested in giving it a try (as gm or players), I will perhaps invest :wink: [/quote]

a little :wink:

If you plan to run a One-Shot in the future, I will be in :smiley:

31

I think -h- is thinking about it, as he said in the weekly session topic… :smiley:

32

[quote=“Darthbinks”]

If you plan to run a One-Shot in the future, I will be in :smiley:[/quote]

Same here. I’d be curious to try it out…

33

[quote=“Simon”][quote=“Darthbinks”]

If you plan to run a One-Shot in the future, I will be in :smiley:[/quote]

Same here. I’d be curious to try it out…[/quote]
Already planning - see you next week?