Category: RPGS

The Bundle of Holding double-barrel-dangerous Champions 4E sale.

‘Double-barrel’ because it’s in two parts. You got your Champions 4E Essentials, which is gonna cost you thirty-three bucks – look, let’s not pretend that you’re going to go minimalist here, OK?  You’re either going to open your wallet wide, or not at all.  No point trying to play the angles here.  – Anyway, that’s going to get you pretty much all the Champions genre books.  And then you got your Champions 4E Universe, which for thirty-seven bucks gets you all the adventures.  All in all, act now and spend seventy bucks and you get the entire Hero System 4E Champions line.

And that’s why ‘dangerous.’  Because that price is only going to go up.  If you’re gonna get ’em, get ’em now.

So, GURPS Mysteries 4E is on CreateSpace.

…hold up, I don’t have this one in print.

I mean. Wow.  It’s not every day that I can pick up a GURPS book that I don’t actually have in print already.  Seriously,  I’ve been waiting for them to put some of their electronic-only stuff up. I’m hoping for GURPS Supers 4E next, not least because I’m not really sure that it ever had a print version in the first place.

Species Seed: Ant-men.

I spent the entire afternoon on this, and I’m not exactly sure why.

Ant-Men – Google Docs

 

Ant-Men

formica xenosapiens ebrios

 

Description: six-limbed sapient species standing about three and a half feet tall, in a fully-upright position.  The head resembles a terrestrial ant’s, only facing forward.  The eyes are segmented, typically blue or green in color; dietary habits typically leave an Ant-Man’s eyes in a condition where the capillaries can be clearly seen.

Continue reading Species Seed: Ant-men.

Also in the mail: Miskatonic University Monograph: Codex Beltrán-Escavy.

The full title is Archaeological Interpretations of Myth Patterns in the Iconography of the Codex Beltran-Escavy (Miskatonic University Press), and at ten bucks it is one of the best Call of Cthulhu RPG props I’ve ever seen that isn’t actually explicitly a Call of Cthulhu RPG prop.  The conceit is that the pamphlet is a scholarly monograph describing and analyzing a pre-Columban Codex depicting a hitherto unknown deity; while the scholars themselves are apparently blissfully ignorant of what is actually being portrayed in the pictographs, any halfway competent Mythos scholar (and/or person who plays Cthulhu Mythos games) will instantly catch on to the Codex’s true meaning.  You can easily craft several adventures around this monograph, with it as the central prop.

The artwork is also very nice. There are color drawings and a fold-out centerpiece.  The HPLHS really worked on this one.

Hero [TL10] [GURPS 4E]

Hero [TL10] – Google Docs

Hero  [TL10]

 

This drug is produced for the ‘primitive’ [TL8 and below] trade, and it’s typically made by those who see nothing wrong with calling members of sentient species ‘primitives’ to their face.  Hero is a variant of the ancient Terran drug heroin that combines blissful pain relief, a boosting of the subject’s general health, and artificially-boosted addictive properties.  Effects: deep euphoria for thirty minutes; +1 to HT rolls, Hard to Kill 1, and Resistance to Disease (+3) for twenty four hours. Multiple doses have no extra effect, but do not result in overdoses.

Continue reading Hero [TL10] [GURPS 4E]

In the Mail: Paranoia: Ultraviolet edition.

There’s no picture because Paranoia: Ultraviolet Edition comes in a white box with white inlay… which means that taking a picture of it would be an exercise in frustration.  Which is, hey, an excellent descriptor for Ultraviolet-clearance citizens generally.  Anyway, if you were in on that Kickstarter then expect your game to show up soon.

One warning, though: the books are a good deal smaller than I was expecting. Something like 6 inches by 9 inches. It’s not bad, merely surprising.

Tweet of the Day, Three (And One More) Skills For GMs edition.

These are good skills, to start with:

Continue reading Tweet of the Day, Three (And One More) Skills For GMs edition.

Creature seed: the Screaming Death Killbot 6000.

Blame this.  Because I sure do.

Screaming Death Killbot 6000 – Google Docs

 

Screaming Death Killbot 6000

 

It’s three feet tall, made of mirror-smooth and polished flexible steel that somehow never shows any sort of seam or joint.  It has a roughly humanoid face, with two alarmingly large glowing eyes and a LCD ‘mouth’ that flashes when it ‘laughs,’ which the Screaming Death Killbot 6000 does often — typically when it’s killing its prey.  The hands and feet all end in alarming-looking blades that shock, stab, serrate at high speed, or otherwise inflict prodigious amounts of blood and pain.  And it talks just the way, while using just the dementedly-cheerful child’s voice, that you’d expect from something called the ‘Screaming Death Killbot 6000.’

Continue reading Creature seed: the Screaming Death Killbot 6000.

Item Seed: Octavian Doom Candles.

Octavian Doom Candles – Google Docs

 

Octavian Doom Candles

 

This somewhat esoteric protective artifact is supposed to not really be ominous, aside from the name. Unless you’re a minor auto-scripted, semi-autonomous post-corporeal soul fragment (or, sure, ‘ghost’), of course.  Then it’s a big, heaping serving of Doom..

 

The Octavian Doom Candle (the origin of the name is slightly obscure) operates as a two-stage incendiary device: lighting the top causes the candle to eventually ‘unfold’ into a rotating wheel of eight large candles (and a second tier of six smaller ones).  In the mundane world, this is mostly used as a gimmick for birthday cakes.  In the esoteric world, the interaction of the flames and the movement is absolutely irresistible to minor ghosts.  They get entranced, get sucked into the center flame, and then get burned up.

Continue reading Item Seed: Octavian Doom Candles.

The mildly depressing Steve Jackson Games 2016 Stakeholders’ Report.

Mildly depressing if you’re a fan of SJG’s roleplaying game lines, at least: essentially, you can pretty much forget about getting anything new in print for GURPS this year. Dungeon Fantasy and Ogre Kickstarter commitments have pretty much hijacked their schedule, which is kind of ironic, no?  And if GURPS is going to be sidelined, you can bet that we’re not going to get even a sniff of an In Nomine 20th Anniversary edition, either. Which saddens me even more than the GURPS news does.

Normally, I’d be hoping for some form of GURPS be made available as Open Access, on the grounds that if they’re only going to be doing PDF publishing of GURPS stuff anyway then they might as well encourage people to sell sourcebooks and thus generate more of a market for buying the main rules books.  But I know that Steve Jackson keeps a pretty close lock on that IP. Which is absolutely his privilege, of course. But still.