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7/30/2021

Gauntlet Video Roundup - July 30, 2021

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[Gauntlet Calendar: Online Tabletop RPG Play]
Greetings, and welcome to the weekly Gauntlet Calendar video roundup! Enjoy these recordings of online games organized through Gauntlet Calendar and the Gauntlet RPG Community. These recorded sessions represent only a portion of the selection of games available every week, and anyone is welcome to join the fun! If you'd like to play or watch more games like these, check out the links and information at the bottom of the post.

Star Wars Saturday

Plutonian Shore (Session 9)
Rich Rogers runs for Bethany H., Keith Stetson, and Mark (they/them)
The crew of the Beldon Mite take a New Republic supply run and smuggle their cargo into a viper's nest!

HyperspaceD6 (Session 4)
Rich Rogers runs for Greg Fulford, Sabine V., and Will H
Caught at a party, the New Republic team steal the guest of honor, and try to nab a cloaked ship to boot!

Gauntlet Quarterly

The Yellow King RPG (Session 4 of 12)
Shane runs for Brandon Brylawski, Nicholas Timperio, and Puckett
Ada Wharton Has Gone To Sea - Our first session in the game's second setting sees a new set of characters: military police investigating mysterious prison escapes near the front lines of an impossible war.

Gauntlet Calendar

Fall of Magic (Session 1 of 2)
Mike Ferdinando facilitates for Adam Oh, Dr. Jason Cox, and Nathan Harrison
Magic is dying and the Magus is dying with it. Caspian, Golem of Ravenhall; Ellamura, Swinherd of Barley Town; Justice, Fugitive of Stormguard; and Vigo, merchant of Istallia accompany the Magus on a journey to the land of Umbra, where magic was born.

The Between: Questions and Opportunities Part Two (Session 3 of 8)
Shane runs for Blake Ryan, Gabe McCormick, and Jamila R. Nedjadi
Theodora Braithewaite's balls are so infamous Queen Victoria herself has tried to stamp them out. Tonight, the hunters are invited.

Monster of the Week: Stuttgart 1970 (Session 4 of 4)
Blake Ryan runs for Clint Smith, Joe A., and Simon Hibbs
Rats in the van, Snakes in the restaurant!

Good Society: Peaks and Peccadillos (Session 5)
David Morrison runs for Anders, David Morrison, David Schultz, and Kieron
Eva confides her brother's secrets to the Reverend, Isaac makes a modest proposal, and Nathaniel and Abigail have a stormy meeting on the moors.

Rebel Crown: Oak (Session 8)
Jesse A. runs for Alexi S., Jason Zanes, Jex Thomas, and Josh H
In which a wraith bends the knee to Queen Siobhan, and we telescope forward in time.

Masks: Days of Shadows Past (Session 3)
Lowell Francis runs for Brandon Brylawski, Francisco Olivera, Kae, and Thomas Manuel
With the group split everyone tries to figure out their place in the superhero world, but team leader Jasmine Knight pushes her limit and faces the world-breaking villain, Aftermath, alone.

They Came To Play Ball!
Shane runs for Adam Oh, Sabine V., and Will H
Humanity ventured into space, slowly finding it was alone in the universe... Until they came from behind physics, and THEY CAME TO PLAY BALL.

Dune: Adventures in the Imperium (Session 6)
Lowell Francis runs for Brandon Brylawski, Danielle B., and Fraser Simons
House Anthier faces down House Perakos and tries to build bridges between them, but new revelations about the Emperor's purpose may throw everything into chaos.

Hearts of Wulin: Numberless Secrets (Session 8 of 8)
Lowell Francis runs for Jamila R. Nedjadi, Patrick Knowles, Sherri, and Tyler Lominack
Our detectives try to draw themselves back together after the combat and emotional turmoil of the previous session. They begin to shift through the clues, uncovering some new facts about the murder. But the final solution is unexpected and another victim will lie dead before the end.

Godbound: Pillars of Heaven (Session 4)
Lowell Francis runs for Dan Brown, Patrick Knowles, Sherri, and Tyler Lominack
Our heroes arrive in the watery city of Bashala and encounter questionable crystal masks and suspicious cats. With academic credentials in hand, they head for the Assassins Library and the promise of a grand ball.

Ex-Capes (Issue #02)
Jim Likes Games runs for Bethany H., Bryan, Chris Newton, and Matthew Arcilla
The Ex-Capes see some Action! as they investigate the best way to take down their first Threat: the Contender! And they get a preview of the next Threat on the horizon, the rogue intelligent supercar called Coupe de Grace!

Ex-Capes (Issue #03)
Jim Likes Games runs for Bethany H., Bryan, Chris Newton, and Matthew Arcilla
The Ex-Capes go into Action! to pursue the Opportunity to take down The Contender! And another threat looms: Synergy, former genetically engineered teen super-team who haven't fared so well as adults.

Rebel Crown: Oak (Session 9 of 9)
Jesse A. runs for Alexi S., Jason Zanes, Jex Thomas, and Josh H
In which the usurper is confronted and the future of Dol determined.

Dune: Adventures in the Imperium (Session 7 of 7)
Lowell Francis runs for Brandon Brylawski, Danielle B., and Harry Coins
The threat from House Zirrat manifests as the murder of a guest leads to House Anthier fighting back to back with House Perakos against a siege which may destroy everything and everyone.

The Between: Questions and Opportunities Part Two (Session 4 of 8)
Shane runs for Blake Ryan, Joel N., and Kyle H.
A special guest star helps the hunters track down the Coven on the brink of apocalypse. Meanwhile, the mastermind keeps busy with plans for an apocalypse of her own.

Anyone Can Wear the Mask
John Glass facilitates for Lloyd and Seán M.
The hero Foresight has to save Metro City from a diabolical villain, but nothing is really as it seems.

You can see all these videos (plus all the ones that have come before) on The Gauntlet YouTube channel playlists, and be sure to subscribe to catch all our great podcasts!

If you'd like to catch these sessions in an audio-only podcast, check out the community-run Hangouts Podcast at http://gauntlet.hellomouth.net/.

If you'd like to play in games like these, check out the calendar of events and the Gauntlet Forums where games are announced, or catch one of our Gauntlet Community Open Gaming online mini-conventions.

To support The Gauntlet, please visit the Gauntlet Patreon. Everyone is welcome to sign up for Gauntlet Calendar games, but Patreon supporters get extra options like priority RSVP for Gauntlet Calendar games and joining the Gauntlet Slack team where special events and pickup games are announced.

Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

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7/27/2021

72 Sci-Fi Heist Challenges (Part 1)

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One of the best resources for Blades in the Dark is Andrew Shields' Heist Deck. It's a print and play collection with obstacles, people, and treasures. When I ran Blades, the deck made it easy to elaborate on a target and generate new jobs for the crew to choose from. 

Since +1 Forward's recently looked at Scum & Villainy, the excellent sci-fi Forged in the Dark rpg, I thought I'd present pieces of a Heist Deck for that genre. This can also be used for other sci-fi games and for some cyberpunk rpgs like The Sprawl and The Veil. This is the first half of the obstacle list. I may work up "treasure" list, but a set of people may be harder as they need to be plugged into the specifics of the setting. 

  1. ​Absolute Secrecy: The task has to be completed without anyone knowing. Perhaps noisy actions will be met with overwhelming force or the team will simply see their pay cut based on the attention they generate.
  2. Adrenal Mutations: When guards or other staff hit a certain level of agitation, their body mutates into a wild, weaponized form. Nearly undetectable before that.
  3. Ambush: The old classic—someone’s been tipped off and now they’re getting jumped. Or was the whole job a set up? Team has to decide whether they want to push through to complete the objectives or bug out.
  4. Animated Coils: Millipede-like bots which can join together into larger creatures. Who knows how big they can get. Able to slip through small spaces—and locations they're guarding are often fitted with these.
  5. Anti-Optics Field: Not exactly invisibility, just an inability to focus or process exactly what’s going on in that space. PCs can see and target where the field is but they don’t know exactly what it is or how it’s reacting.
  6. Assessment Disruptor: While within range of this device, you cannot accurately judge distance or time. Affects balance and movement.
  7. Biomorphic Vegetation: Plants which sense intrusion and biochemically create counter measures like acid sprays, neurotoxins, or caustic webbing.
  8. Body Doubles: The target has a number of body doubles which are nearly impossible to distinguish from the real thing.
  9. Brain Modded Drones: Defenders have been brain-spiked to be fanatical and relentless. Pain and fear centers have been cut off and a singular purpose put in its place. These guards will need to be restrained, knocked out, or killed—or they keep coming.
  10. Change of Objectives: When they get on scene, the situation changes dramatically—now they have to decide if it’s worth it to push through and finish the original job, complete the new job, or just get out.
  11. Change of Route: As they arrive on scene, the situation on the ground changes, compromising their original entryway or path. Is this a trap? Has someone been alerted? Or is this just bad luck?
  12. Chronoclamps: Object to be taken is locked in a sphere of non-time. They have to disarm or remove entirely system.
  13. Coordination: Timing is crucial for getting through certain systems or alarms. Operative must be connected to act at exactly the same split second.
  14. Contaminating Cyberlimbs: Defenders have been outfitted with the lowest quality enhancements, resulting in a danger of nano-virus or hypertensile oxidation when facing them in close quarters.
  15. Countdown to Detonation: The place is going to go up and the crew knows it. They have to get in and out before destruction takes their target and them as well.
  16. Cyber-Weasels: Highly mobile microbots. Often used for cleaning, but also make a nasty defense. Can roll up into an armored form, scuttle along all surfaces, and squeeze through tiny gaps between spaces. Horrible rows of cutting teeth.
  17. Double-Booked: The Client has hired a second team to accomplish the same task, out of distrust or the theory that two teams are better than one. Alternately the second team is simply jumping in to try to close the contract and get paid before the crew.
  18. Drone Swarms: It starts as a small collection, with a tiny buzzing sound. But soon a collection of microdrones appears on the scene. They’re modular, assembling into larger and more weaponized defense systems. They get smarter as they grow in size.
  19. Empath Orphans: Psychic children abducted from care facilities have been turned into living scanners. They can perform psychic sweeps, project their presence, and even create illusionary constructs. If attacking the Orphan’s manifestations causes them feedback, the team will face an even more challenging choice.
  20. Escape Route Compromised: Midway through the mission, the extraction plan falls apart. Someone’s been spotted, a location has been cut off, or a transport has been destroyed. The team has to decide if they can carry on or bug out now. In any case they must come up with another way to get out of the target facility.
  21. Fugue’d Converts: The site employs a kind of cultic brainwashing. To make it easier for them, all of the initiates have been reprogrammed with the mental template of a single fanatical devotee. They all possess the same skills and answer to the same name. When one falls, another’s right there to take their place.
  22. Genocolony Foliage: They look like decorative ornamental plants, but they’re not. Hybridized plants infested with a shape-changing carnivorous parasitic organism. When activated they can rapidly grow, entangle, and consume targets. The worst of these can use victims as fuel to create more defenses.
  23. Gravatic Oscillators: When activated the defense system shift the flow and intensity of the gravity within the facility. While they can’t maintain the shift to, for example, completely immobilize targets, they can disorient and disrupt.
  24. Hostages: The target has uncovered something about the operation and has taken several prisoners of value to the client or to the team itself. The question will be how much does the target actually know?
  25. Hunter-Seeker Assassin Needle: This flying dart senses motion, hanging in the air quietly until activated at which point it fires itself at high velocity to deliver whatever sinister payload has been embedded in it.
  26. Hyper-Dimensional Passcoding: The system uses simple key code entry points, but they’re spatially encrypted. In order to actually punch those codes in, the team needs a means of accessing that higher-level space.
  27. Hyper-Octopi: Jam a basic AI brain box into the body of a cephalopod, give it cybernetic limbs, and let it loose to keep a sector secure. Even small ones of these can be super dangerous, hiding in vents and dropping down from the ceiling.
  28. Incoming Storm/Natural Disaster: The timing couldn’t be worse and now the team has to deal with dangerous fallout from the environment: flooding, collapsing sections, power overload, toxic overflow. While it serves as a distraction, it may overwhelm the unprepared.
  29. Innocents Involved: Contrary to early intelligence the site has a host of innocents and bystanders. They’re potential witnesses, but even more importantly causing too much collateral damage may anger other forces like state security and even the client.
  30. Kelvin Manipulation Chambers: The temperature in this area can rapidly be modulated up or down as a defensive measure. They can even contain the changes to a limited portion. Even more dangerous is the system’s being operated remotely rather than automated.
  31. Linguistic Inhibitors: This system creates a field affecting the language centers of the brain, making it nearly impossible to understand written or spoken speech. Victims can still express themselves but anyone caught with them cannot parse what’s being communicated.
  32. Micropressure Sensor Arrays: Every good facility includes sensors to detect changes in the environment, but this one has been calibrated to the Nth degree. The slightest change can activate defenses and alerts.
  33. Mindraven Flock: Not actual ravens, but the idea of ravens—manifested in flocks of ideoweapons which can target individuals, pecking away memories and conscious thoughts.
  34. Modulating Crowd Overlay: Augmented reality projectors have been calibrated to continually fill sectors with crowds of people, obscuring the scene. In this case these have been combined with additional projectors to mimic heat and other signatures. Some may use brief force field projections to make discerning real people that much harder. 
  35. Molecular Recompositor: This system can increase or reduce the intrinsic strength of materials—solidifying things to make them immobile or distrupting them to make them more fragile. More sophisticated systems can create rapid-fire 3D printed objects.
  36. Monofilament Vampire Wires: These dangerous razor sharp lines are deadly on their own, but this new system combines that with a blood and essence draining sub-system. More cruel than practical, it expresses much about the target’s ethos. 

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7/23/2021

Gauntlet Video Roundup - July 23, 2021

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[Gauntlet Calendar: Online Tabletop RPG Play]
Greetings, and welcome to the weekly Gauntlet Calendar video roundup! Enjoy these recordings of online games organized through Gauntlet Calendar and the Gauntlet RPG Community. These recorded sessions represent only a portion of the selection of games available every week, and anyone is welcome to join the fun! If you'd like to play or watch more games like these, check out the links and information at the bottom of the post.

Star Wars Saturday

Plutonian Shore (Session 8)
Rich Rogers runs for Bethany H., Greg G., Keith Stetson, and Mark (they/them)
The crew of the Beldon Mite returns to the mining colony of Prak to free them from the threat of Keyis Raiders!

HyperspaceD6: July (Session 3)
Rich Rogers runs for Cody Eastlick, Greg Fulford, and Will H
Lt. Trazzik's team is sent on a...Mission to Lianna where they attend a club, sneak into some corporate HQ for industrial espionage, then escape...to the Santhe Mansion!

Gauntlet Quarterly

The Yellow King RPG (Session 3 of 12)
Shane runs for Brandon Brylawski, Matthew Arcilla, and Nicholas Timperio
Cassilda's Song - After Ada vanishes from the Cabaret de Neant, the other students face an array of horrors and opportunities as they try to figure out what is happening to the city around them.

Gauntlet Calendar

Monster of the Week: 1970 Stuttgart (Session 3 of 4)
Blake Ryan runs for Clint Smith, Joe A., Mendel Schmiedekamp, and Simon

Good Society: Peaks and Peccadillos (Session 4)
David Morrison facilitates for Anders, David Schultz, Kieron, and Robbie Boerth
Lady Abigail has a hear-to-heart with Isaac about her future, marriage, and her desire for revenge. At Gracefield House news arrives of a substantial inheritance for Nathaniel, while Eva has difficulties in securing a dowry. Meanwhile rumours begin to spread about the time Isaac and Lempster have been spending together following the brawl. And news from the continent reveals Abigail's father may be close at hand...

Masks: Days of Shadows Past (Session 2)
Lowell Francis runs for Brandon Brylawski, Dr. Jason Cox, Francisco Olivera, Kae, and Thomas Manuel
We get insight into the home lives of the team before they execute a super jailbreak which leads to confessions, revelations, and anger.

A Duet of Steel
Donogh runs for Sabine V.
Valen Tatec and Stinag, two rival Bounty Hunters strive to prove that they are the best (or second best) around, as a Galaxy Far Far Away descends into Imperial control.

Paranormal Minstrels
Mike Ferdinando runs for Adam Oh, Elizabeth M. H., and Michael Pelletier
Three Victorian ghost-hunters use the power of music to calm the frightened spirit contained in a sacred artifact looted by an oblivious Imperialist. [Note: This video is an audio track with a title card.]

Psi*Run (Session 2 of 2)
Donogh runs for Mark, Sabine V., and Will H
Fable, Boots & Ci are still on the run. They catch a train and bring the tunnel down behind them, but realise that Fable has been caught! A strange conversation with a Rook leads them to a rescue attempt, a confrontation in a graveyard and eventually to The Farm...

Godbound: Pillars of Heaven (Session 3)
Lowell Francis runs for Dan Brown, Patrick Knowles, Sherri, and Tyler Lominack
Though they rescue the girl, the Godbound begin to understand the scale of their foe as they face a Parasite God with courage and a cursed hookah.

The Between (Session 3 of 8)
Alun R. runs for Blake Ryan, David Morrison, and Leandro Pondoc
The American, 'Razor' Rose, and the Factotum, Chambers, continue the investigation of 18 St James' Street under different pretexts, while Dr Weiss, the Mother, make a friend in Whitechapel. Then...there's straight razors in the moonlight, a body stuffed with bibles, and a flock of ravens behaving far from naturally. But not all of that's in the video because of a recording issue...

You can see all these videos (plus all the ones that have come before) on The Gauntlet YouTube channel playlists, and be sure to subscribe to catch all our great podcasts!

If you'd like to catch these sessions in an audio-only podcast, check out the community-run Hangouts Podcast at http://gauntlet.hellomouth.net/.

If you'd like to play in games like these, check out the calendar of events and the Gauntlet Forums where games are announced, or catch one of our Gauntlet Community Open Gaming online mini-conventions.

To support The Gauntlet, please visit the Gauntlet Patreon. Everyone is welcome to sign up for Gauntlet Calendar games, but Patreon supporters get extra options like priority RSVP for Gauntlet Calendar games and joining the Gauntlet Slack team where special events and pickup games are announced.

Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

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7/21/2021

Hearts of Wulin: Academy of the Blade

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Hearts of Wulin is now available on DriveThruRPG. We're working on the follow up volume, with stretch goal settings, contributor submissions, and other add-ons. We thought we'd give folks a look at part of one of those settings, a school game heavily influenced by the amazing anime Revolution Girl Utena. This has the alt rules and playbook materials for this campaign. You can also find an online character keeper for this playset here. 

As an added bonus: yes, you can play out a prom using this material. 

ACADEMY OF THE BLADE 
BY ALISON TAM

With additional development by Jamila Nedjadi

Another student disappeared last night.


Her roommate saw her go to bed; in the morning, her side of the room was as empty and pristine as if she had never lived there at all. It didn’t come as a surprise. That’s what happens when you haven’t fought a challenge in months: you go missing. If you don’t duel, you might as well not exist.

At the Academy Passerine, nothing is more important than the duels. Governed by the Academy’s bizarre dream-logic, a single duel can mean the difference between glory and irrelevance. When each fighter enters the arena, they prick their finger with the spindle attached to every student’s uniform belt, their signature weapon forming outward from that single drop of blood, and prepare to attack without restraint. They can’t die in a duel, after all. The Academy doesn’t like letting its children go.

The higher your duelling rank is, the more power you have. If you’re strong enough, you can win yourself a nicer dorm room, a tailored uniform, and the respect or fear that makes freshmen scurry out of your way if you even so much as glance in their direction. There’s a rumor that if the Champion stays undefeated for long enough they can change anything—from the walls of the Academy to their own heart.

Every Champion who stands upon that thorned podium, silver feathers attached like epaulets on their uniform, is granted their heart’s desire for as long as they can keep their throne. Each time a student steps into the arena, they’re shown pale, muddled glimpses of their wishes: watery visions just substantial enough for them to imagine what it’d be like if they won. Common wisdom has it that martial skill isn’t the only thing that matters in a fight. The Academy judges your wish as well, awarding favor to those with the most clarity of purpose.

Most students can only ever dream of being one of the Academy’s elite. They band together in clubs and secret societies for protection. The Academy’s campus reshapes itself to reflect the balance of power between the factions with every duel. For the ordinary students of the Academy Passerine, each day is one where they must battle for survival: against each other, against themselves, and against the Academy itself. 

 Setting Questions
  • What are the most powerful clubs and societies in the school? How do they relate to each other?
  • How important are classes and academics at the Academy? Why would students enroll? 
  • What do the uniforms look like? 
  • Do the students’ magical weapons act like ordinary steel, or do they have supernatural powers of their own?

On Factions 
Factions in Academy of the Blade represent the groups, cliques, clubs, and organizations of the school. The most important people belong to several of these, their status allowing them to rise above the rivalries, battles, and competitions between them. During character creation, each player should define one faction they belong to and one other faction present in the school. The GM will add a few other prominent groups. Examples: Chess Club, School Orchestra, Volleyball Team, Young Debutantes, Gardening Club, School Newspaper, Children of Faculty, Snarky Elites who all went to the same grade school, etc.

Style
Academy characters don’t need to name their Style. Instead they simply choose a favored weapon and an Element which they use when fighting. 

PC vs. PC Duels
Since these will be more likely in Academy of the Blade, use the following variant. 

A duel or challenge happens between two PCs: a Challenger and a Challenged. First, decide who is the Challenger. Generally, the aggressor is the Challenger. If it is not obvious, such as when the school itself arranges a duel, roll a die to assign the role of Challenger. The Challenger says what they’ll offer the Challenged if they accept the loss. The Challenger may offer unspent XP, in-fiction in-character action {or inaction),  use of Bonds, changes to Entanglements, letting the other player narrate the moment, or anything in-game which the GM approves. 

The Challenged may accept, reject, or make a counter-offer. If the Challenged accepts, they lose the duel and mark XP. The Challenger must follow through on their offer. If the Challenged rejects the offer, both PCs mark an Element. The duel ends in a draw. If Challenged makes a counter-offer, the Challenger decides to accept or reject with the same consequences. No further counter-offers may be made.  

Gossip
If you want to deepen the political and social aspects of Academy of the Blade, players may wish to add elements from the Courtly Wuxia material, including Influence, The Game of Court, and Faction Management. 

New Move: Confession
If players want a little more of an anime/shoujo feel to their game, consider this optional move.
Confession
When you finally gather yourself together and confess your love, roll. On a 10+, you don't manage to confess, but through a misunderstanding they invite you along with them to some non-romantic event, reinforcing their cluelessness. On a 7-9, your confession's interrupted by something (a duel challenge, fire drill, charging bull, etc). On a 6- choose: they reject you, they don't remember you, they interrupt to ask advice on confessing to someone else.

Inner Conflict Change
The 7-9 result for Inner Conflict is changed to: “On a 7-9, choose: you flee the scene, overreact awkwardly, or mark an Element (choice) to keep yourself steady.”

Academy of the Blade Playbooks 
The Class Clown
Play this character if: Your dearest wish is to be popular.
Player Agenda: Always be the center of attention.

Class Clown Roles
Pick One:
Flirt
You like charming people, making them feel good about themselves and even better about you, but you don’t like it if they try to stick around after it’s no longer fun. Whenever you interact with a new faction, roll. On a Hit you have an ongoing flirtation with one of its members. gain a Bond with that NPC. On a 10+, they are deeply infatuated with you. On a Miss, a faction member is a bitter ex with a grudge.

Sidekick 
You’re not the hero of anyone’s story, and you don’t want to be. It’s far too much risk to stand on your own, and you don’t think you’re that kind of person anyway. It’s better to support your friend’s cause from the sidelines than risk being alone. When you Comfort & Support, on a Hit you may both create a Bond and clear an Element from your target. 

School Idol 
Everyone knows who you are. Whether through artistic or dramatic talent, a sense of humor and wit, or sheer physical good looks, you’ve earned the adulation of the school. You have a fan club that hangs on your every word. When you call on your fans for help, roll. On a Hit they provide warning, escape, or distraction. On a 10+ they overwhelm someone or something, forcing a complete change of their plans. On a Miss you discover a former fan is behind the scenes and are caught off guard.

Class Clown Moves
Pick Two:
New Best Friend (as Come Drink with Me from Bravo); Oh Mitsuru! (as Midnight Orchid from Bravo), Serenade (As Laughing in the Wind from Bravo but you express yourself through heartfelt karaoke. Pick a song appropriate to the situation, sing a few bars, then roll.); Smooth Operator (as Rage and Passion from Student) 

The Straw Millionaire
You know exactly what everyone wants, and what they’ll give to get it. With enough time, you can make a chain of convoluted deals until you eventually get the item you desire. When you initiate a chain of trades, roll. On a 10+ it comes easily to you. Describe offhandedly three of the odd items or services it took to get it. On a 7-9, you’ll get it if you can complete the last link in the chain. Work with the GM to describe what’s required. On a Miss, choose: what you want cannot be gotten or its in the hands of your deepest rival.

My Friend’s Sister’s Classmate Says
You have a network for distributing gossip: a large circle of friends, the school paper, a pirate radio station, etc. When you manipulate stories circulating in the Academy, roll. On a Hit you may ask for a rumor about a person. You may enhance, change, or reduce that rumor (or another you know). On a 10+ you may declare an entirely new rumor which will take on a life of its own. On a Miss, your efforts create salacious gossip about you or an ally. 

Dress Code Violations
You have a wealth of footwear, outerwear, and accessories that make you distinctive even with the uniform. Others may complain, but you’ll never be punished for your sense of style. At any point, you may declare that you’ve stepped away and returned in an entirely new and pristine outfit. Once per scene you may declare you have a useful item hidden among your ruffles and accessories.

Hopeless Romantic
When you rewrite your Romantic Entanglement at the beginning of a session to include a new object of affection, you may clear all of your marked Elements. 

Class Clown Sample Entanglements
Romantic 
  • I agreed to help [      ] woo their crush, [      ], but now I find myself falling for them instead.
  • I entered into a false relationship with [      ] to make [     ] jealous, but my feelings have swiftly become real.
  • I conspired with [       ] to woo [      ] and toy with their emotions, but find myself unexpectedly enamored.
General
  • I suspect that [      ], one of the few people I can’t get to like me, and [     ], one of the few people I can’t bring myself to like, might be plotting against me together.
  • I’ve made a bet with [      ] that I can train [      ] in popularity and martial arts mastery.
  • Both [     ] and [     ], who are the mortal enemies of each other, consider me their closest friend.

The Club Ace
Play this character if: You want to live in service of an overwhelming passion.
Player Agenda: Be the very best, like no one ever was.

Club Ace Roles
Pick One:
Dedicate 
Nothing is more important than your chosen interest. Your ordinary club activities take precedence over duels, life threatening-danger, and the Academy’s various arcane traditions. When you call on your club duties to evade obligations or burdens, roll. On a Hit, you’re allowed time to attend to your training or preparations in peace. On a 10+, gain a Bond with the person who covers for you. On a Miss, you’re unable to slip free and your mentor or club manager will expect you to make up for your absence from club activities.

Club President 
You’ve vowed to lead your club to glory. Your kouhais and peers expect you to train them and lead them to victory. When your club is threatened or in need of resources, you’re the one who has to step into the dueling ring. Though members of your faction will follow your commands without question, they also expect that you’ll clean up after their messes and save them from peril.  

Faust 
You have made a bargain with a shadowy figure of great power who has offered aid in the school’s duels. You want the supposedly supernatural power of that victory and you’re willing to fight anyone or do anything to get it. When you go to your unknown patron for help, roll. On a Hit, they grant your request. On a 7-9, there’s a distinct catch or a cost which must be paid beforehand. On a 6-, they demand that you act counter to your present course. You may not use this move again until you do so or find some way to make it up to them. As a separate benefit, when you would mark an Element, you may choose to have the blow land on a beloved or trusting NPC. 

Club Ace Moves
Pick Two:
All In This Together (as A Hero Born from Loyal) Human Flesh Search Engine (as Tracing Shadow from Bravo, but you consult your club members), Maybe They Have Some Talent After All (as Ashes of Time from Aware), Those Meddling Kids (as Shadow Boxing from Unorthodox, but it’s your club members assisting without your knowledge)  

Clubhouse
Your club has its own headquarters, the only space in the school where you are completely safe. Describe your territory. When not in the middle of a battle, you may retreat to your clubhouse at any time to regroup and plan your next move. Other characters must be invited into your headquarters before they can enter.

Natural Allies
You have +1 Ongoing when interacting with any club that has a similar focus to yours. Athletic clubs will understand each other, the orchestra and drama club have friendly relations, etc.

Talent Show
You’ve trained hard to be the best at what you do, and you’re going to make sure everyone recognizes it. When you gift an audience with a performance, roll Impress. You gain the following additional options to pick from: recruit a cadre to help with your next performance/event; make someone look foolish for challenging you; or draw attention/attendance away from someone else’s party or performance.

Squad Goals
You are often followed by two sycophants with coordinating outfits who echo your every opinion. Name them and give a short description. In between scenes you may describe a moment of closeness between you and your lackeys. If you do so, take one Bond with them. However, be careful: your followers may betray you if you show any lingering weakness or an undeniable flaw.

Club Ace Sample Entanglements
Romantic
  • Every person I’ve ever loved has instead fallen for my best friend [      ], including my latest crush [       ].
  • I love [       ], but must hide my feelings in order not to hurt [       ].
  • My former lover [      ], who I have a tumultuous love-hate relationship with, is flirting with my new crush, [       ].
General
  • My sworn enemy, [     ], has now become my school-assigned roommate, displacing my best friend [      ].
  • I don’t know if I can trust my ally [      ], especially since it seems like they’ve become close with my enemy [      ].
  • I defeated [      ] in an impersonal duel for my faction, but now their faction’s leader, [      ], has come to challenge me in turn.

The Delinquent
Play this character if: You speak your mind and act without thinking.
Player Agenda: Shirk the rules.

Delinquent Roles
Pick One:
Truant
You’d rather go take a nap on the roof than sit in class. You don’t care for the conventions of the student body, preferring to follow your own capricious whims instead. As a loner, you exist outside the social hierarchy of the school, trading away the security of alliances for the freedom to do as you wish. You have no special relationships with any faction, but any faction that would otherwise be hostile with you sees you as neutral instead.

Boss
Your fellow delinquents look up to you as their leader and the strongest of them all. You rule your social group through a mix of fear, violence, and gruff affection, enlisting misfits who serve you with an almost fanatical devotion to terrorize the rest of the school. Your faction reveres you, but all other factions in the school view you with fear and disdain.

Beast
The other students at the Academy hear rumors that you’re not quite human, that you’ll duel people for looking at you wrong, that you once bit off someone’s ear for no discernable reason. They fall silent when you walk in a room and flee the area when you bare your teeth. As an additional cost to choose from for Duel, Overcome, Inner Conflict, you may choose “frighten a friend.” You create fear and doubt in someone you like. 

Delinquent Moves
Pick Two:
Dirty Fighter (as House of Traps from Outsider), Fists of Fury (as Kid with the Golden Arm from Unorthodox), Lust for Battle (as Fearless Fighters from Unorthodox); Fools Rush In (as His Name is Nobody from Unorthodox)

It’s Not Like I Like You or Anything
When you behave in an aggressive or aggravating way towards the object of your affections, roll. On a Hit, they recognize that your rudeness is the clumsy language of your heart, not a deliberate offense. On a 10+, they see past your facade and convince another NPC to believe in you. On a 7-9+, they suspect your more tender feelings. On a Miss, choose: they flee away in tears, or someone else publicly condemns you.

Hot-Blooded
You’re just so fired up you can’t help yourself. When you Duel a higher Scale enemy without preparation, take +1 Forward.

I’ve Had Worse
Getting roughed up a little is nothing more than a typical Tuesday. Grit your teeth against the pain—if you can stand, you can fight. You have an additional Wounded box and can keep fighting even if grievously injured.

Killing Intent
You can intimidate someone with your mere presence, fixing them with a glare of such rage and malevolence that they feel the pure force of your fury. Take +1 Forward to any Hearts & Minds when you intimidate or threaten another character. 

Delinquent Sample Entanglements
Romantic 
  • I love [     ] but only know how to express it through attempting to bully them. Only [    ] knows of my true feelings.
  • I love [     ], who I consider my rival and only true match in battle, but they are in a relationship with [      ].
  • My heart beats faster every time I see [    ], but my confidant [      ] tells me that I should interpret those feelings as hatred. 
General
  • I consider [    ] the only one able to defeat me in a duel, but they’ve just been defeated by [      ].
  • I used to bully [     ], but they are now under the protection of their senpai, [      ].
  • I offended [      ] with my uncouth ways, and now [     ] is looking to take revenge on me.

The Dropout
Play this character if: You want to be skeptical of the Academy itself. 
Player Agenda: Embrace the ideal and emotional over the practical. 

Dropout Roles
Pick One:
Surrendered
Every morning, you wake disappointed that you haven’t yet disappeared. You’re tired of the endless fighting, the scrabbling to survive. When you lay down your arms and provoke your opponent into responding verbally instead of continuing the fight, roll. On a 10+, your words cut deeper than a blade—ending the conflict. Gain a Bond with them. On a 7-9, this isn’t over. The conflict is delayed but will return soon. On a Miss they lash out at you. Mark an Element and describe something of yours they destroy, injure, or deface. 

Unatoned
You committed a terrible sin in the name of power or love, winning your duel but losing something far more important. You got what you wanted, and it broke you. You are now a shadow of your former self, defined by your greatest regret. When you flash back to an NPC’s secret role in your tragedy, describe it and take +1 Forward in dealing with them. 

When you reveal that secret to them, roll. On a Hit, choose: halt their current action, clear an Element (you or them), make them answer a question, or drive them off. On a 7-9, it is revealed that you manipulated or betrayed them. roll Inner Conflict. On a Miss, they reveal how what you did cut them deeply. They turn fully against you.

Gamebreaker
The Academy broke you, and you’re going to break it back. The rage burning within you cannot be sated by anything less than the Academy’s destruction. Even if you know that your rebellion will lead to your doom, you want to bring as much of the Academy down with you as you can. When you sabotage an institution, activity, or event of the Academy, roll. On a Hit you bring it to a halt or force its closure. On a 10+ choose two; on a 7-9 choose one: the effect is not fleeting; no one knows you did it; you force a change of leadership; or your chosen alternative takes its place. 

Dropout Moves
Pick Two:
Escape Artist (as It Takes a Thief from Bravo); I Work Alone (as Heroes Shed No Tears from Outsider); Slip Out the Back Door (as The Royal Tramp from Outsider); Last Stand (as Legend of the Mountain from Loyal), Wallflower (as The Water Margin from Outsider)

Headphones In 
There’s nothing more conducive to introspection than brooding alone. When you find an appropriately scenic spot (rivers and balconies are ideal), put on some sad music and think about life for a while, take +1 Forward to Study.

Go On Ahead, I’ll Hold Them Off 
When all else fails, you’re willing to sacrifice yourself and take on the enemy alone. Mark Wounded and describe how you seemingly fall. Your allies may escape. You can rejoin the group later, but have to narrate the twist which saved you. 

Silence in the Shadows
After a private conversation between a PC and another character, explain how you were in a place to overhear it and roll. On a 10+, you hear everything and manage to escape without detection. On a 7-9, you hear everything, but one of the involved parties sees you leave or finds evidence of your presence. On a Miss, you hear and see nothing, as an authority figure catches and punishes you. The GM may decide if your presence is reasonable in the fiction.

Secret Passageways
You’ve explored the entire school, enough to have discovered some of its lingering mysteries. Once per session, you declare a secret passageway to the location of your choosing. Mysteriously exiting a seemingly locked location or suddenly appearing somewhere you shouldn’t have been able to is not out of the question. 

Dropout Sample Entanglements
Romantic
  • My vow to never love again ended my burgeoning relationship with [     ], but I’m not happy about them moving on with [     ]. 
  • [    ] has asked me to help them end their relationship with [      ], whom I secretly love.
  • I love [     ], but they are loyal to my enemy, [    ].
General
  • I vowed never to fight again after humiliating [     ] in a duel, but now their friend [     ] wants to take vengeance on me.
  • I have never gotten over my defeat at the hands of [     ], and I feel like [      ] is my best chance to take revenge.
  • [     ] has heard of my reputation as a fighter and has begged me to train them for their fight against [     ].

The Student Council Representative
Play this character if: You want to maintain order and elevate your own status.
Player Agenda: Keep up appearances.

Student Council Representative Roles
Pick One:
Teacher’s Pet
You’re an agent of the administration, connected to the forces that run the school—or one of them, at least. Your patron may not tell you all their secrets, but you’re under their protection as long as you have their favor. Once per session, you may ask them for a favor but their assistance always comes with strings attached.

Class President 
There is nothing you want more than to be on top. You present an outward mask of perfection to the world, but every act and word is completely calculated to maintain your reputation as a model student. Styling yourself as a benevolent tyrant, you work to maintain the admiration of the student body. Neutral NPCs are always susceptible to your use of Hearts & Minds.

Goody Two-Shoes 
You thought that your position would gain you the respect of your peers, but instead your authority is all on paper. Being a student council representative is more work than reward, as other students seem to believe you’re there to serve at their pleasure and take on their responsibilities. When you attempt to flatter an enemy NPC into believing you’ll be their lackey, roll. On a Hit, they buy it. On a 10+ they also reveal a secret of an upcoming scheme. On a 6-, you’re sure you’ve got them, but they lead you into a trap. 

Student Council Representative Moves
Pick Two:
The Little Magistrate (as Strife for Mastery from Loyal); Plans within Plans (as Final Master from Aware); Student Handbook (as Blade Heart from Student); Top Student (as Legend of Awakening from Aware)

Face of an Angel
You have +1 Ongoing when interacting with any authority figure. They know you’ve always followed the rules—why would anything change now?

Working Relationship
You’re intimately familiar with the Academy’s web of power and influence. When you first meet the leader of any faction, you may declare a fact about them. You always can spot these leaders and their lieutenants unless they are in disguise. 

Sterling Reputation
Take +1 Forward when you attempt to Impress subordinate NPCs (younger, lower social background, worse grades, etc). 

Event of the Year
When you put on a party, or gathering, roll. On a Hit, absolutely everyone must attend for fear of being left out. Take +1 Forward on a social move you make during the scene. On a 10+, choose: force someone to show up, make someone a celebrity, gain a favor from someone; or humiliate a rival. On a Miss, something goes catastrophically wrong. Choose: a rival puts on a better event at the same time; your theme offends someone important; someone upstages you there; or a wacky accident causes the event to end early.

Student Council Representative Sample Entanglements
Romantic
  • I’ve been packing delicious home-cooked lunches for [   ] in an attempt to win their heart, but they’ve been passing them along to their friend [    ] instead.
  • I love [    ], but they are beneath me in status, unlike [    ], who everyone thinks suits me better.
  • I’m fascinated by [    ], but [     ] has reminded me that because of my duty and position I must deny my own feelings.
General
  • My sibling [      ] has fallen under the thrall of [     ], whom I despise.
  • [       ] has begged me to counsel their friend [      ] and solve their emotional problems.
  • I know that [      ] is on the verge of challenging me to a duel, I need and according to [      ] to help me train.

The Transfer Student 
Play this character if: You want to be drawn into a new and mysterious world you don’t entirely understand.
Player Agenda: Be constantly surprised.

Transfer Student Roles
Pick One:
Ingenue
Before you came to the Academy, you’d never touched a weapon before in your life. You’re sheltered, naïve and innocent in every way... Or at least that’s how you appear. Your perceived weakness makes it easier for others to be vulnerable around you, which gives you +1 Ongoing to Comfort & Support.

Seeker
Someone you once knew and loved dearly disappeared into the halls of the Academy. You’ve spent the last year trying to find them. Now that you’ve finally entered the Academy, you’re almost at your goal. Take +1 Forward when you try to find out where they are, what happened to them, or why they’ve changed. When you Study someone, you may ask “What do they know about (missing loved one)?” without spending hold. 

Mundane
You have no idea why everyone is taking this dueling thing so seriously. Rich people are scary. Where did everyone’s parents go? Isn’t this illegal? Are those real swords? Your perspective is steeped in conventional reality. When you encounter something unearthly or supernatural, take +1 Forward. When you come up with a rational explanation for it, clear an Element or take a Bond with someone stunned by your hardheadedness.

Transfer Student Moves
Pick Two:
Don’t Leave Me Here (as The Promise from Aware); Private Tutoring (as The Proud Youth from Student); Voice of Reason (as Listening Snow Tower from Student); Write A Friend (as Lawless Kingdom from Loyal)

Defeat Means Friendship
When you win a duel against a foe of equal scale with a 10+, you may make an impassioned speech which turns them to your cause (at least for the moment). On a 7-9, in addition to other results, you plant a seed of doubt in their mind about their plans and allegiances.

Nothing Escapes Me
When you or a fellow PC present in a scene roll a Miss on Study, you may use any bond to instead have a 7-9 result. 

Just the New Kid
When you ask someone a pointed question while feigning ignorance, say what you're hoping they'll reveal and roll. On a Hit, they take you at your word and answer the question honestly. On a 10+ choose one: they let slip a big secret or you gain a Bond with them. On a Miss, they see through your façade and learn something vital about you instead.

Sympathy for the Devil
You want everyone to be okay, no matter how they’ve acted towards you before. You have +1 Forward to Comfort & Support used on anyone who has acted cruelly, rudely, or otherwise poorly to you or in your presence. 

Transfer Student Sample Entanglements
Romance
  1. I’m crushing on both [      ] and [      ], and now they’ve started dating each other.
  2. I’m oblivious to [      ]’s affection to me because I am completely focused on my love for [     ], who doesn’t know that I love them.
  3. I made a childhood marriage promise with someone whose name I’ve forgotten, and either [      ] or [      ] could be the one I’m searching for.
General
  • [      ] has tricked me into offending [      ], who now considers me a sworn enemy.
  • [      ] also transferred here and has spread rumors about my history, rumors which threaten my friendship with [        ].
  • I managed to offend [      ] on my first day here and they have ordered [      ] to stay away from me. ​

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7/16/2021

Gauntlet Video Roundup - July 16, 2021

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[Gauntlet Calendar: Online Tabletop RPG Play]
Greetings, and welcome to the weekly Gauntlet Calendar video roundup! Enjoy these recordings of online games organized through Gauntlet Calendar and the Gauntlet RPG Community. These recorded sessions represent only a portion of the selection of games available every week, and anyone is welcome to join the fun! If you'd like to play or watch more games like these, check out the links and information at the bottom of the post.

Star Wars Saturday

Golgotha (Session 2)
Rich Rogers runs for Jeremy Mahr, Josh H, and Steven Watkins
Our scavengers reach the ancient AI of the War Hive, but will the War Drone protecting it stop them?

HyperspaceD6 July (Session 2)
Rich Rogers runs for Cody Eastlick, Greg Fulford, Sabine V., and Will H
The crew of the (checks notes) Screaming Sunspark play some shockball, then head out on a mission against Rycar Ryjerd and his raiders. And we have the return of....LADY MORA VADER?!?!?!?!

Gauntlet Calendar

The King In Yellow RPG (Session 2 of 12)
Shane runs for Brandon Brylawski, Matthew Arcilla, Nicholas Timperio, and Puckett
Worlds Without Doors - The art students encounter an escalating series of gruesome and impossible events as they hear more about a mysterious play circulating through Paris.

Masks: Days of Shadows Past (Session 1)
Lowell Francis runs for Brandon Brylawski, Dr. Jason Cox, Francisco Olivera, Kae, and Thomas Manuel
Our team finds themselves in a battle, but not the one they expected leading to hard choices, loss of control, and team turmoil.

Sunset Kills
Donogh runs for Adam Oh, Horst Wurst, Seán M., and Will H
The Frankins' family business is monster hunting, but this time someone from their past comes back, threatening everything. Moira, the matriarch has raised a previous Chosen, Stone from the dead. The current Chosen Alva struggles with her destiny - just as her husband Sidney does with just about everything the Franklins consider normal...

Psi*Run (Session 1 of 2)
Donogh runs for Mark, Sabine V., and Will H
Fable, Boots & Ci tumble out of a crashed truck, and are immediately chased by a mysterious motorcycle gang. They are picked up by a small punk rock band and slowly find their feet at a gig in Dallas, Arkansas. They return to the Meat Packing Plant where they uncover clues to their origins, but also lead to a direct confrontation with those who abducted and experimented on them...

Ex-Capes (Issue 01)
Jim Likes Games runs for Bethany H., Bryan, Chris Newton, and Matthew Arcilla
This is a playtest of my reskin of The Between RPG. It's a look at the lives of former heroes who keep getting dragged back into the life they thought they left behind. In our first full issue/episode, we start to learn about the PCs, they take action against their first Threat, and we go over the structure and rules for the other phases of the game.

The Between (Session 2 of 4)
Alun R. runs for Blake Ryan, David Morrison, Leandro Pondoc, and Oli Jeffery
We learn something of London by night when 'Razor' Rose, the American, reveals her penchant for raw meat and Chambers, the Factotum, meets one of their 'Informals'. Meanwhile, Dr Weiss, the Mother, visits St James' Street where Annie Morrish, the Vessel, becomes convinced that she knows which part of the house the haunting is focussed on. There's a boxing librarian, a new 'maid-of-all-work', and a mysterious embossed envelope...then, blood on the floor and a ritual revealing past crimes while Scotland Yard comes calling and Bethlem Hospital beckons...

Godbound: Pillars of Heaven (Session 2)
Lowell Francis runs for Dan Brown, Patrick Knowles, Sherri, and Tyler Lominack
The Godbound pursue a missing girl, uncover secrets of a potent figure controlling two cities, and bust an academic out of prison.

Rebel Crown: Oak (Session 6)
Jesse A. runs for Alexi S., Jason Zanes, Jex Thomas, and Josh H
In which the retinue storms a castle.

Rebel Crown: Oak (Session 7)
Jesse A. runs for Alexi S., Jason Zanes, Jex Thomas, and Josh H
In which Arkina falls in love, Sir Cevyn confronts Vendyn and Lady Siobhan must make some choices.

Dune: Adventures in the Imperium (Session 5)
Lowell Francis runs for Brandon Brylawski, Danielle B., Fraser Simons, and Harry Coins
Our protagonists return to the capital to report and find themselves called out for their choices. But the arrival of a rival Duke's entourage throws everything into turmoil.

The Between: Questions and Opportunities Part Two (Session 2 of 8)
Shane runs for Blake Ryan, Gabe McCormick, and Joel N.
Still battered from a vampire's attack on their home, the hunters learn of a new threat they must face - a family of cannibalistic pie-makers.

You can see all these videos (plus all the ones that have come before) on The Gauntlet YouTube channel playlists, and be sure to subscribe to catch all our great podcasts!

If you'd like to catch these sessions in an audio-only podcast, check out the community-run Hangouts Podcast at http://gauntlet.hellomouth.net/.

If you'd like to play in games like these, check out the calendar of events and the Gauntlet Forums where games are announced, or catch one of our Gauntlet Community Open Gaming online mini-conventions.

To support The Gauntlet, please visit the Gauntlet Patreon. Everyone is welcome to sign up for Gauntlet Calendar games, but Patreon supporters get extra options like priority RSVP for Gauntlet Calendar games and joining the Gauntlet Slack team where special events and pickup games are announced.

Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

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7/9/2021

History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part 21: 2017)

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FORGET THE PAST
Last week we saw a minor twitter beef break out as a designer-- old school and venerable-- claimed that their newly rpg would be the first fantasy post-apocalyptic game. This set off some furor. For my part, I pinned the first fantasy post-apocalyptic games as Sun and Storm and then maybe Wizards, both released in 1992.

Then another twitter said “Yo Dawg” and corrected me that it was Empire of the Petal Throne (1975) and Gamma World (1978). Now there’s some argument for EPT there as  a fantasy world, but it’s a set on a space colony with magic drawn from dimensional nexuses. How much that’s fantasy vs. sci-fi is a reasonable question. Is it the trappings? The backstory? Not sure. But we can dismiss Gamma World out of hand—that’s clearly sci-fi. Did I reply to the commenter? No. Instead I wrote this dumb passive-aggressive intro to this week’s list.

Post-Apocalyptic Media from 2017
  • TV Shows: Blood Drive, Extinct, Future Man, The Handmaid’s Tale, The Mist
  • Films: Aftermath, Blade Runner 2049, Blue World Order, Bokeh, The Girl with All the Gifts, Hostile, Logan, It Comes at Night, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, Stephanie, War for the Planet of the Apes
  • Video Games: AER: Memories of Old, ATOM RPG, Crossout, ELEX, Gunman Taco Truck, Horizon Zero Dawn, Mini DAYZ, Nier: Automata, OPUS: Rocket of Whispers
  • Board Games: Aeon’s End: War Eternal, After the Virus, Anachrony, Attack on Titan: The Last Stand, Edge of Humanity, Endure the Stars, Fallen Land, Fallout, Gaslands, Myth: Dark Frontier, Mythic Battles: Pantheon, Outlive, Pandemic Legacy Season 2, Planet of the Apes, This War of Mine, Wasteland Express Delivery Service

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IGNORE THE FUTURE
I focus on core books for these lists, plus new post-apocalyptic settings for existing rpgs or significant sourcebooks. If a line has several releases, I put those in a single entry. I consolidate zombie sourcebooks and smaller games into one entry and other miscellaneous supplements into another. Revised editions appear when they significantly change a line or present a milestone. I only include published material- print or electronic. If it’s a question, I err in favor of products with a printed version and cut off sourcebooks with a smaller page count. I skip freebie or self-published games. Finally with a few exceptions, I’ve opted to skip modules and adventures going forward.
 
I'm sure I've left something off without adequate reason; feel free to add a comment. Note that I avoid Twitter beefs and instead dwell on them and then write them into the next entry apparently.​

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1. Altais: Age of Ruin
In my other RPG History lists I’ve talked about a few of my pet peeves (some might called them hobgoblins). Those include: dense setting presented before anything else, double mumbo jumbo premises, and a focus on detail which doesn’t actually matter in play. I’ve also talked about the problematic term 'Heartbreaker RPG.' That’s most often where a game feels like an act of love celebrating a home campaign world but poorly presented or thought out. Or perhaps better to say a game which favors self-indulgence over helping the readers and players.

Altais offers a science-fantasy world—but its story doesn’t begin there. Instead tens of thousands of years in the past people fled from Earth to here. They fled horrors known as the Rephaim. Altais had thousands of years of stability, then those old foes returned to shatter the peace. And there’s quantum magic.

The core book starts you out with a lot of backstory and detail: all the kingdoms, factions, alphabets, titles, language constructs, places, and in-setting text. While there’s a three page intro, the game’s info dump is suffocating. Your reaction to this will depend on what kind of setting info you like to read. For example, Nibiru presents tons of backstory you need to read through before the game really explains what you’re doing and who you’ll be playing. But that material feels interesting, coherent, and focused on the big picture. Altais takes the more traditional “Here’s our gazetteer, complete with minutiae that you’ll have a hard time remembering and bringing to the table” opening.

The game uses its own d10 based resolution system. Roll a pool, take the highest result, add a mod and compare to the target number. Character creation has a large range of backgrounds, skills, magic, and blessings. The equipment section’s about 35 pages. It has quite nice artwork and the maps in particular look great. If you’re interested in a pseudo-fantasy world in the aftermath of a cataclysm, this might be your bag.
 
2. Blades in the Dark
The “Dark” in Blades in the Dark isn’t metaphorical. It’s a literal darkness that hangs over the world. That sunless land is the result of a cataclysm a thousand years ago. It broke the sun and opened the gates to death and demons. Now humanity huddles in cities protected by demon blood-fueled lightning shields. Outside the walls ghosts and worse things hold dominion. Rumor has it that this disaster is the results of a PC mess up in a previous campaign. Adventurers, feh.

Blades’ setting offers an interesting study in the presentation of the apocalypse. Its effects on the environment are massive, but in many ways they’re the day-to-day order of business. Folks just have to deal with ghost-evictors on their trains, the high cost of leviathan oil, and the necessity of capturing freshly dead souls to put them into processing plants. And darkness, of course, darkness.

Blade’s designer John Harper’s does an amazing job of balancing the mundane and the fantastic here. There’s some talk of resources and how people survive. It’s enough to satisfy most people and answer questions. But look hard enough and you begin to think about the eco-system here. What about bees? plants? vitamin D? natural selection of animals? These questions aren’t fully answered, but instead they’re left for the individual GM to figure out for their version of the world. That open imaginative space helps make Blades truly great.

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3. Dead Scare
A Kickstarter PbtA Zombies rpg set in 1950’s Americana. The pdf released on 2017.

I feel bad starting in so soon with negativity about a game. I backed the Dead Scare because of the amazing line-up of stretch goal writers and the great premise. The former delivers—they’ve crafted excellent and evocative additional material. It takes place in distinct locations, times, and cultures. That material supporst the game’s evocative premise, that you’re playing the most vulnerable and marginalized persons in a patriarchal society during a zombie outbreak. You play the housewives, teens, persons with disabilities, PoC, elderly. The game examines their plight in the context of a disaster.

Unfortunately the game itself is a total mess. Dead Scare feels like a developmental draft, rather than a finished game. It has mismatched terms, unexplained mechanics, contradictory rules, and bad organization. I ran two sessions from the pdf and desperately tried to make it work. Some things I couldn’t overcome, like the use of a d20 to generate the number of zombies in a horde (and what that implied for the play). I wanted this to be good, but it was rough and unfun.

After some pushback and questions about the game, the Kickstarter went quiet. Some thought the rough pdf would be further playtested and polished, but it wasn’t clear. For a time another company said they would pick up publishing duties. But that fell through. Last year the Kickstarter issued an at-cost print-on-demand coupon, even to those who’d paid for a physical copy. That PoD version is the same text as the earlier pdf version.

It’s a disappointment because of the potential of the premise and the superb work by the stretch goal folks. The need for a PbtA Zombie game would eventually be filled by Zombie World. But that game takes more from The Walking Dead and doesn’t grapple with Dead Scare’s issues.
 
4. Dusk
Dusk offers a world with an uncertain apocalypse, in that people disagree about what actually brought it about. It’s a survival focused game—perhaps aiming to emulate the vibe of things like The Road and The Book of Eli. It has a Storyteller-like rules system, but using exploding d8s. Attribute + Skill tells you how many dice to roll. Any 5+ results count as a success. Compare # of successes to the difficulty.

The core book’s 100 pages long, with a dozen pages of setting. That’s kept deliberately sketchy (describing mostly factions and places). It has a short GM section and a set of pre-gen characters. If you’re looking for a light, easy-to-pick-up PA game, this could work. Dusk isn’t bringing innovations in mechanics or setting, but you can skim it and pick up the basics easily. The openness of the framework makes it easily to expand and collaborate on. As of this writing, Dusk is available PWYW on DTRPG.
 
5. The Frontier
Sometimes you have to let the publisher’s cover copy do the talking, “Burn, slash, cut, incinerate, shoot, maul, vaporise, maim, slaughter, electrocute, rend, blast and disintegrate your way through The Frontier! A Shoot-and Loot Roleplaying Game.” The Frontier takes inspiration from Borderlands, though the cover isn’t nearly as bright and gonzo as anything from that series. The game's background is thin: the collapse of space civilization and then peoples trying to survive on a colony world.

The Frontier uses a d20 + attribute versus difficulty system. Damage can use all the polyhedrals with the added incentive of those rolls exploding. Your character has four attributes with 12 points divided among them. Characters have classes which affect starting stuff and give you an ability with level ups. The Wirehead and Telepath have additional picks to represent their special abilities.

For a game with this premise, you’d expect combat to be fast, dynamic, and novel. It’s actually pretty traditional. Like other games you have six second rounds and roll initiative at the start of each one. In a round you get one action and one move. The rest falls out as you’d expect in a d20 game.

The Looter part of the premise boils down to having a big armor and weapons list. Those are split between a common table of things and a big set of rare gear with descriptions and randomly determined “models” with special abilities. Done on cards (like Mutant Year Zero), that could make for a fun element at a table. But it also feels like just a big equipment list.

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6. Greenscape
A Spanish-language setting book for Savage Worlds. In it humanity abuses the Earth, triggering a response from Mother Nature. It reacts with plagues, earthquakes, and other natural disasters. This forces the the survivors to descend into hiding holes for many years. When they come out the world has been turned into a lush, verdant, and deadly green environment.

It’s a cool concept—more action-oriented than Summerland which shares some features with it. HT Publishers, the Spanish licensees for Savage Worlds, have supported this setting with a couple of supplements: Sevilla Verde, a location sourcebook and Donde Viven los Dioses, a mini-campaign.
 
7. Homeka
A French-language game of yet another colony world isolated from the rest of stellar society by an event. After "The Rupture" the planet Zephyr suffered environmental collapse, turning into a desolate land. This happened both because of corporate exploitation as well as being severed from trade and support.

The twist for this game is a pretty cool one I haven’t seen elsewhere. In Homeka the PCs are the crew of a massive Meka (mecha) moving around the world. The Meka’s your home, how you make money to survive, your means of transport, and more. The Mekanoids once served as war machines but have now become tools for exploration and survival. It’s a great concept (and one adaptable to a bunch of genres and settings).
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Homeka uses its own resolution system, ASPEX. That uses all the die types, but I don’t know more beyond that. The company, JdR Editions, released the core book, a GM screen, two campaign books, and some other accessories.
 
8. Into the Death of Civilisation
A card-based cooperative storytelling post-apocalypse game. It comes from Cakebread & Walton the company behind the OneDice system, Clockwork & Chivalry, Abney Park’s Airship Pirates, and more. It has a pretty dark and grim aesthetic and reminds me of Hope Inhumanity. I’ve hunted around for more details or even reviews but haven’t found anything.​

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9. Libreté
A French rpg with an apocalypse which has killed off all the adults, leaving only children. You play these kids who have gathered together for support and protection. They must avoid the fantastical dangers lurking in the outside world. But threats and tensions within their own communities may be equally dangerous.

Libreté uses a Powered by the Apocalypse system. It adds a number of new tweaks including “Bile” which measures a characters susceptibility to the darkness. Libreté was well received in France. In 2020 GMDK Kickstarted an English-language translation of Vivien Féasson’s game. That added a city supplement, Fleur du Mall with a mapped out fortress and a cast of NPCs.

The entry on legrog suggests that Libreté is a pseudo-sequel to an earlier game, Perdus Sous la Pluie (Lost in the Rain) about children trying to make their way home. 

10. Mutant Bastards: Adventures in the New West
Mutant Bastards offers a fusion of D&D 2e with Gamma World 2e in a post-apocalyptic setting-- with more than a dash of Boot Hill’s flavor. You play survivors in a weird ‘Merican west. Mutant Bastards has everything you’d expect—mutant power generation, cybernetics, artifact examination tables. The book’s art leans more to cartoon gonzo than metal gonzo. Overall it’s a game that seems to do exactly what’s on the label: OSR nostalgia mixed with an easy kitchen sink irradiated wasteland. There was discussion of an expansion book, but as of this writing the publisher’s website has expired.

11. Mutant Crawl Classics
While I arrange these items alphabetically, I don’t write them that way. I bounce around, usually starting with those I’m most familiar with. Then I begin to read and research the others, doing them as they catch my eye. Mutant Crawl Classics, though it falls in the middle here, is the last one I’m writing.

I backed the MCC Kickstarter, I’ll admit, pretty much on pitch, rep, and the pretty art for the campaign. I had fond memories of days playing Gamma World 1e—the first sci-fi rpg I actually got to the table. Gamma World had changed over the years, as you can see from its appearances across these lists. But I imagined MCC, with its old-school aesthetic, would harken back to that.

It does and it doesn’t. Mutant Crawl Classics has a lot of the look and feel, with amazing artwork and a wildly imaginative wasteland. In that regard it captures a lot of what made Gamma World special. But MCC really is Dungeon Crawl Classics with a rich and thorough reskin and new setting. I like DCC OK—I’ve run a couple of funnels for it and had a good time. But the long haul of the rules isn’t my bag.

Mutant Crawl Classics adapts the DCC mechanics, from the funnel to the lethality to the wonky dangers of the ‘magic’ system (invocations to God AIs). It’s really quite cool and if you’re a fan of DCC, it’s a home run. For me, it wasn’t quite what I wanted. Could I say what I wanted? I’m not sure. I bought a PoD copy of the original Gamma World a couple of years ago hunting for that. Reading through was a nostalgia trip, but at the same time a clear realization that, as written, this wasn’t a game I wanted to run.

Goodman Games have continued to support the MCC line with a dozen+ modules and third-party publishers have pitched in as well. If you’re an OSR gamer and especially if you dig DCC, then Mutant Crawl Classics is a must buy for weird, gonzo post-apocalyptic play.

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12. Mythic Battles: Pantheon
A game of Ancient Greece, but one which has been devastated by a second war between the Gods and the Tians. Newly unleashed monsters roam the land in addition to human threats to a shattered Greece. You can play new heroes or ancient icons who have escaped the Underworld to aid humanity.

Mythic Battle: Pantheon is based on a miniatures game of the same name (see also Stygmata below). It uses its own d6 system. It’s a good looking book with high production values. Despite the unique theme, Mythic Battles doesn’t seem to have taken off and the company hasn’t released any addition products for the line.

13. Paranoia: Red Clearance Edition
Paranoia keeps coming back from the dead. It’s interesting how many editions this setting has had: Red Clearance makes it seven. Mongoose Publishing did a big reboot in 2004 with input from the amazing Allen Varney. They followed that with an 25th Anniversary Edition a few years later.

But Red Clearance makes the biggest changes the line has seen. First there’s the issue of format. Rather than a classic 8.5” by 11” booklets, hardcovers, and boxed sets this version is trade paper size. This box has multiple small booklets, laminated sheets, and cards.

Beyond form factor, P: RC has the most massive changes to the mechanics and approach. Everything’s streamlined. Character creation’s fast, long skill trees have been dispatched, resolution’s quick. The whole thing’s designed with pick up and play in mind. It offers an interesting template for taking older games and giving them a modern approach. (Of course cards are a challenge now with more online play, but this would be really cool and tactile face to face).

The ethos and presentation has been brought more up to date. Secret societies have been retooled, terrorism’s now a buzzword, and other details of the modern internet age have been added. It’s cool. Mongoose have supported the line with a ton of supplements and adventures.

I traded away my copy. I can’t say exactly why. I read through the rules a couple of times and chuckled at some of the jokes. I liked the cards and the overall feel of the game, but something about it passed me by. I couldn’t imagine bringing it to any of my f2f tables—where we’d cultivated a sense of cooperation among our players over the years—or to online—where I’d have to manage the pvp competition with strangers.

14. Pathogen: Unclassified
A fairly bog standard zombie apocalypse game in many respects. Pathogen's interesting twist is the idea of the infection being a parasite which takes over the human host and creates a Hive Mind out of them. The undead fall into several types including psychics. As well the infection which caused this seems to have spread elsewhere in the eco-system creating toxic vegetation.

Pathogen uses its own system. The layout’s bare bones and the art’s a mixed bag. Publisher Polyhedral Knights hasn’t followed up on this line, but has released another PA game 2019’s superpowered fallen world Dark Times.
 
15. Post Apocalypse
A solo gamebook rpg. You’re a survivor moving through a world destroyed decades before. It’s a CYOA but with dice, skills, trading, and equipment. Rather than a strict go to X pathing, there’s some randomization to the choices. Penguin Comics has released several of these, though this is the only post-apocalyptic one.

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16. Postapocalyptica: Mundo Roto
A Spanish-language rpg; Mundo Roto means “broken world.” This may be a reworking of an adventure for the Milestones game system from 2014. While that earlier product’s available on Nosolorol Ediciones DTRPG site, this more recent one still isn''t.

I haven’t been able to find more details or reviews, beyond an unboxing video on YouTube in Spanish. It’s a big, beautiful book but falls into the trap of page background textures which obscure the text. The overall aesthetic is gritty fallen world ala Mad Max. The games mechanics seem to be class-based with a d10 resolution system.

17. Red Markets
Subtitle: A Game of Economic Horror. That hits a little close to the bone these days, eh?

I’ve mentioned before my pet peeve of ttrpgs giving massive info dumps before providing a good sense of what it’s all about. Red Markets seems to have this problem. We get a short intro which only hints at what you actually do in the game, followed by two and a half pages of terminology. Then there’s literally 150 pages of backstory, set up, and world info. This usually makes me shake my head—especially when a game hasn’t even given me a compelling reason to go forward.

But reading Red Markets is harrowing. As thin as the intro is, it offers several questions you want answered. Then you plunge into the text. It’s presented as in-game character narration. That’s tricky to pull off; if you get the voice wrong it alienates rather than draws in. Red Markets isn’t perfect. It has a couple of spots where it veers into self-indulgent or seemingly omniscient. But overall it’s dynamite and compelling. I read through most of this info in a single sitting. The information’s organized smartly giving you things you need to know but leaving enough questions unanswered that you have to keep reading.

And as I said, the text and what happens is harrowing. The scenario’s a little close to home and you can see echoes of 2020 in this game history written in 2017.

The basic concept’s this—and I’m massively reducing the complex backstory—in a near future, economic hardship and crises threaten the world, especially the United States. That includes an investment bubble, collapsing infrastructure, exploitative labor practices, and militarized police forces. Then zombie—called Casualties—outbreaks happen globally. People disbelieve it for weeks before there’s an organized response. When the US Government acts they do so desperately, abandoning everything West of the Mississippi, nuking hotspots, giving massive kill orders, and much, much more.

Red Markets takes place five years later. Now the whole of the Western US is called The Loss. Anyone in The Loss is declared legally dead by the new US administration. Communities in the East are called the Recession but many live in refugee camps. Everyone’s subject to martial law and forced labor to survive. The country needs new manufacturing and capital goods, but that’s hard. And there’s a ton of stuff just sitting over in the Loss. So how to get that?

And this is where the real premise of Red Markets comes in. Driven by corporate forces people in the Loss have become scavengers, trading goods and government ident cards for bounties. You’re trying to survive and perhaps even help others as Takers who go out into these dangerous lands. There’s more, much more, but that’s the gist of it.

Red Markets has a fairly simple resolution system using two d10s. A few mechanics add details that make it look like it has more crunch than it does (charges & upkeep for items, hit locations and sectional damage). There’s more complexity in the economic and social mechanisms of the game which take seriously the idea of scarcity. One of the system’s best features are the Boom/Bust built in rules which allow you to make the game less/more challenging respectively. Red Markets wants the system to enforce a sense of scarcity, opportunity costs, and the choke-hold of economic reality. It does, to a point which could be off-putting to players.  

I’m going to admit I wasn’t too keen on Red Markets going in. I’d tried reading through the playtest material before the Kickstarter. I had a hard time getting what was happening. But the final product’s smart, detailed, and compelling—beyond being a strikingly illustrated massive hardback. If you’re at all intrigued, I recommend checking it out.

A small tangent: It’s worth comparing Red Markets to the other recent game of economic horror, #iHunt. Red Markets describes itself as “basically a poverty simulator that uses zombies to keep its theme from getting too real.” It takes a more bird’s eye approach to the economy and while it critiques it, there’s a kind of assumption that it has to be this way, given the present circumstances. On the other hand, #iHunt stays firmly on the ground level and shows how and why the system’s always exploitative and unethical. It doesn’t say “that’s the way it is” and shrug its shoulders. It says “that’s the way it is and fuck that.”

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18. Rockalypse
A game of musicians travelling the wastelands and battling it out with music. Rockalypse uses Fate (Core or Accelerated) to tell more hopeful stories than most other post-apocalyptic games. Because it’s Fate players collaborate to build the story of their world’s fall and what the wasteland looks like. Setting building offers some models: the classic wasteland, a cyberpunk dystopian settlement, alien overlords, hell rising, and RagnaRöck. Players can mix and match aspects from these concepts.

In Rockalypse you play musicians and the game includes elements for building the band as a character. The rules trim the skill list and add a bunch of new musically themed stunts. Rather than the usual conflict and contest resolution procedure, all of these are treated as songs. Song are broken into phrases and theirs a procedure for building it up and playing it out.

Overall this is a fun and easily accessible game. It would make a great introductory campaign for Fate.

19. Scorched Earth
We haven’t seen the same boom as we did during the d20 era, but several companies still specialize in settings and sourcebooks across multiple systems (4e, 5e, SW, SotDL). Scorched Earth is Avalon Games’ presentation of a generic post-nuclear setting for Pathfinder 1e. It adds a layer of new rules, but requires the use of the PF core book.

What you get is eight new origins, eight new classes, some skills & feats, gear, vehicles, threats, and slang. There’s little to nothing in the way of an original or unique setting. The book’s art elevates the material in a couple of places, but that’s pretty sparse. The layout’s dark with thick page borders and an obtrusive page background.

Scorched Earth does the job if you’re just looking for post-apocalyptic rules for Pathfinder. Avalon has supported the line a little with Warriors of Scorched Earth, a collection of seven playable icon characters and American Wastelands which does present info for a Mad Max-like setting as well as a bestiary.

20. Strange Aeon
When a title has Aeon in it, I know I’m heading to Lovecraft Country. (Or maybe Final Fantasy). Strange Aeon has an elder horror cataclysm shake the world in 1978. That breaks out in Midwich. Given the British origin and flavor of the game, it’s no surprise that this timing coincides with Margaret Thatcher’s rise to power (she became Prime Minister in 1979. The actual game world is set seven years later in 1985. It is a landscape covered with a fog called The Morbus. It’s part of the bleed over from this alien realm. There’s a lot more detail to the backstory with a cosmic traveler and a single surviving settlement. Plus time-travel.

Strange Aeon uses d12s and looks particularly rules dense. It may not be, but the presentation and layout make it feel very trad. It reminds me most of the text design of SLA Industries. It has a lot of emphasis on the specifics of survival, resources, and rationing. The 2nd edition core book’s about 360 pages long. Of that a few pages lay out the setting overview, followed by 50 pages of rules and character creation, then another 50 pages of game keeper info. The rest of the book’s given over to special abilities, tomes, a lengthy campaign scenario, and foes. It includes printable flash cards with images of the different adversaries.

Strange Aeon uses portions of the Lovecraft Mythos and embellishes it. It adds a layer of high weird with the time travel aspects. The book’s interesting, if dense. It focuses on a particularly British place and feel, which might make it harder to adapt to other places. It’s setting of 1980s England has the same cultural split with US experience as Things from the Flood’s early ‘90s Sweden.

The first edition of Strange Aeon dropped in 2016, but I kept it on this list because the revised 2nd edition arrived the following year. As of this writing the core book, a player-facing version, and a set of game keeper visual aids are all available PWYW on DTRPG.

21. Stygmata
This rpg is based on a French post-apocalyptic skirmish game released in 2010. It’s set in the Europe of 2260 which has been ravaged and destroyed by a variety of disasters. The survivors have organized into factions for convenient tabletop wargaming. That game did well enough that the publishers decided to do a Kickstarter for it. The end result is a little odd. There’s a core set with rules, tokens, cards, dice, and maps. The set has an introductory campaign, but almost no other presentation of the actual setting. To get that you have to buy a separate set, “Pack A,” which has a GM screen, world booklet, and bestiary. A second release, “Pack B,” just has some creature cards, blank character booklets, and a poster map. 

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22. Toxicity
I’m always a little weirded out when a recent Kickstarted and seemingly high-end rpg vanishes just a few years later. Toxicity’s one of those. The game itself is based on I AM ZOMBIE, a 2015 rpg using Mark Rein•Hagen’s Axion Null system. I covered that game on my 2015 Year in Horror list. It’s a wild, highly produced gaming artifact.

Toxicity likewise has amazing production values but also a meta-pitch. The Kickstarter presented the game as a lost old-school classic from the 1970s, redressed and republished. That gimmick’s purpose isn’t entirely clear. The game’s form factor is a set of booklets made to look like the original D&D woodgrain boxed set. Its pitch is a 1970’s grindhouse toxplotation rpg, which is interesting in that nothing from that era had a look even close to that save for a few Erol Otus illustrations. Toxicity uses the language of Old School RPGs, but also references its gamist backbone. Is the message an appeal to OSR, a parody of that, a poke at storygames, or just window dressing?

In Toxicity a zombie outbreak has ravaged the surface world of the 1970s. You’re a low-class survivor scraping out an existence in the underworld beneath the city. You’re digging deeper into that underworld where all kinds of monsters and foe live. In short, it is a dungeon-crawler in a world that looks like The Warriors or Escape from New York. That’s a clever premise and the art and style are top notch.

But it’s also almost impossible to get now. It isn’t available on the DriveThru page for Make-Believe Games. There’s a Facebook page for the company which has a link to a website which only says “Coming Soon.” Noble Knight has a copy for $60. It feels like there has to be a story behind its absolute vanishing.

23. The Umerican Survival Guide
A third-party post-apocalyptic setting for Dungeon Crawl Classics. Umerica as a concept first appeared in the pages of Crawling Under a Broken Moon, a DCC fanzine. Crawling was “dedicated to adding over-the-top post apocalyptic material in the vein of Thundarr the Barbarian, Mad Max, Gamma World, and Adventure Time.” The zine had 18 issues, as well as a collection and compilation volume. This builds on those ideas but adds more material and system mechanics.

The Survival Guide’s a striking collection which goes in a different direction than Mutant Crawl Classics. Both share a gonzo sensibility, but Umerica offers a more grounded, more classicly post-apocalyptic vision of the world MCC feels much more high weird and science-fantasy. USG’s also more generally useful for OSR GMs exploring this genre. Where MCC builds deeply on its backstory concept, Umerica’s backstory’s rich but more open and adaptable.

Overall it’s a great release with cool art and simply, clean layout. It’s filled with a rich array of tools and ideas for GMs. Shield of Faith Studios has released several supplements for Umerica: The Umerican Road Atlas, a campaign sourcebook; Umerica Unnatural, featuring a ton of new spells, psionics, and classes; the Twisted Menagerie Manual; The Children of the Sun, a Meso-American sourcebook; and two modules.

24. Miscellaneous: Zombies
This time I include both sourcebooks and a couple of core rules.
Devil's Run Nitro Pack: A quickstart for this 2d20 based game of an irradiated wasteland. Actual game released in 2020.
The Living: Core Rulebook: A pdf-only easy-to-learn zombie rpg. Aims to be a customizable experience. Purely skills-driven mechanics. Has discussion of how to tune this to different kinds of zombie incidents (outbreak, apocalypse, last hope) and different sources for the zombies.
Rotted Capes: Survivor's Guide, Vol. I: A collection of add-ons for this superhero zombie game including new power sources, powers, archetypes, skills, and more.
Sine Requie Anno XIII: IV Reich Seconda Edizione: The second edition of a big setting sourcebook for the Fourth Reich in this Italian alt history rpg.
The Zombie Hack: A modification of The Black Hack from the creators of SURVIVE THIS!!

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25. Miscellaneous: Sourcebooks+
2099 Wasteland: An alternate timeline for the Hypercorps 2099 setting. This splits in the mid 20th Century and adds a post-apocalyptic wasteland to this already over-stuffed setting.
Death is the New Pink: A fully developed PA setting for Into the Odd. Mike Evans does a striking job creating a flavorful OSR setting.
Godless: A new PA setting for Shadow of the Demon Lord. Strong emphasis on Road Warrior-esque vehicular mayhem with some fantasy trappings.
Hellscapes: A post-apocalyptic toolkit and setting for use with D&D 5e.
Hope Inhumanity: I covered this card-based rpg on my 2015 list. This year saw the release of a second edition, tweaked and refined. Lost Cause Games also released an expansion set this year, Martial Law which added 80+ new cards to the game. It’s a neat format for a game and I’d love to see more like this.
Into the Outside: Multiversal location sourcebook for Numenera.
Jade Colossus: Ruins of the Prior Worlds: A single detailed ruin location for Numenera
The Killing Game: A rules sourcebook and campaign adventure for DEGENESIS.
Magic & Techno-Sorcery (Second Edition) & The Zombie Plagues Expanded Edition: Two sourcebooks for APOCalypse 2500. The first adds new magic options and the latter digs into zombies.
Ninth World Bestiary 2: As you might guess from the name, a new bestiary for Numenera. You might be saying, “Lowell, sometimes you put Numenera stuff together into its own entry above. Why are these here?” First, look how freaking long this list is already. I mean technically 2099 Wasteland, Godless, and Hellspaces ought to have a larger entry above, but c’mon. Also I’m making more new arbitrary cut-off 3 or more items, 4+ or more if one of them’s just a bestiary.
Valley of the Misery Machine: The final regional sourcebook for Dystopia Rising. I have to say that’s one of the most evocative titles I’ve seen. Makes me want to check it out despite not digging DR. ​

History of Universal RPGs
History of Steampunk & Victoriana RPGs
History of Cyberpunk RPGs
History of Superhero RPGs
History of Horror RPGs
History of Wild West RPGs
​History of Licensed RPGs
Samurai RPGs
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part One: 1976-1984)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part Two: 1985-1987)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part Three: 1988-1990)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part Four: 1991-1993)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part Five: 1994-1996)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part Six: 1997-1999)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part Seven: 2002-2002)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part Eight: 2003)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part Nine: 2004-2005)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part Ten: 2006)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part Eleven: 2007)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part Twelve: 2008)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part 13: 2009)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part 14: 2010)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part 15: 2011)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part 16: 2012)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part 17: 2013)
The Year in Post-Apocalyptic RPGs 2014
The Year in Post Apocalyptic RPGs 2015: Part One 
The Year in Post Apocalyptic RPGs 2015: Part Two
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part 20: 2016)

History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part 21: 2017)
​
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part 22: 2018)

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7/9/2021

Gauntlet Video Roundup - July 9, 2021

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[Gauntlet Calendar: Online Tabletop RPG Play]
Greetings, and welcome to the weekly Gauntlet Calendar video roundup! Enjoy these recordings of online games organized through Gauntlet Calendar and the Gauntlet RPG Community. These recorded sessions represent only a portion of the selection of games available every week, and anyone is welcome to join the fun! If you'd like to play or watch more games like these, check out the links and information at the bottom of the post.

Star Wars Saturday

Golgotha (Session 1)
Rich Rogers runs for Jeremy Mahr, Josh H, and Steven Watkins
The Scavenger crew head into the War Hive in search of the crystalline mind that once controlled it eons ago.

HyperspaceD6 (Session 1)
Rich Rogers runs for Cody Eastlick, Greg Fulford, Sabine V., and Will H
On the Imperial infested world of Belsmuth II, our heroes find a Republic spy and help her retrieve her stolen plans.

Gauntlet Calendar

The Final Girl: "The Mary Kay Killer"
Mike Ferdinando runs for Chuck, Clint Smith, and Harry Coins
CHILL-TV - 11:00 PM - "The Mary Kay Killer" (1993 - horror -TV-MA) The mysterious cosmetics saleswoman Bunny Blonde terrorizes the gated community of Magnolia Groves. "Don't blush!!"

Good Society: Peaks and Peccadillos (Session 3)
David Morrison runs for Anders, David Morrison, David Schultz, Kieron, and Robbie Boerth
Edgar Gracefield holds a poetry reading at Gracefield House, which puts an extra burden onto Eva's already full shoulders, while Nathaniel tries to keep the peace. Lady Abigail is overcome by the poetry reading, but more so by a shocking discovery. And Isaac's encounter with an old schoolmate leads to a brawl between Lempster and Lord Davenport over him.

The Yellow King RPG: Not Upon Us, Oh King (Session 1 of 12)
Shane runs for Brandon Brylawski, Matthew Arcilla, Nicholas Timperio, and Puckett
Four American art students in 1890s Paris interrupt their drinking just long enough to look into some mysterious events and aid a poor unfortunate who has fallen on hard times.

Silver Sorcerer: Making a Scene in South Beach (Session 3 of 4)
Robbie Boerth runs for Greg Fulford, Nicholas Timperio, and Steven S.
Zip's real estate transaction turns out to be much more ominous than meets the eye, but he's bound and determined to make the demon called Kontrakt his own. And Jackson discovers that his partner's new business venture is (unbeknownst to him) being used as a front for drug trafficking.

Silver Sorcerer: Making a Scene in South Beach (Session 4 of 4)
Robbie Boerth runs for Greg Fulford, Nicholas Timperio, and Steven S.
Zip manages to get the demon Kontrakt to rebel against his former master, and Zip immediately binds Kontrakt to himself. But his associates Jackson and Taylor are concerned that Zip has been possessed, and they conduct a ritual to banish Kontrakt back to the abyss. This final session of our run of Sorcerer is filled with hijinks and deliciously wry humor.

Dune: Adventures in the Imperium (Session 3)
Lowell Francis runs for Brandon Brylawski, Danielle B., and Fraser Simons
The agents of House Anthier find themselves the target of an attack by a new force and begin to plan how to enact change on the city.

Masks: Days of Shadows Past (Session Zero)
Lowell Francis runs for Brandon Brylawski, Dr. Jason Cox, Francisco Olivera, Kae, and Thomas Manuel
We learn about our heroes and discover the shadows that hang over this world: government crackdowns, a shattered moon, and two villainous parents.

Ironsworn: Ironsworn + Delve (Session 3 of 4)
Dan Brown facilitates for Blake Ryan, Joel N., and Josh H
Our adventurers confront rival treasure hunters. Emerging victorious but injured, they press on to find the shipwreck, uncovering valuable information about old world healing methods. But to beat back the kraken that seeks to pull them under, they activate the mysterious metal pillars, triggering violent weather across the land.

Ironsworn: Ironsworn + Delve (Session 4 of 4)
Dan Brown facilitates for Bethany H., Blake Ryan, and Joel N.
On their journey back, the haggard adventurers encounter the Varoun, a wolf-like humanoid species. They aid one of these sworn enemies of humanity, but in their haste to retreat lose one of their number as a figure from the distant past re-emerges.

Ex-Capes (Issue Zero)
Jim Likes Games runs for Bethany H., Bryan, Chris Newton, and Matthew Arcilla
Here is the 'Zero Issue' campaign construction, character generation, and rules/concept overview for my reskin of The Between featuring retired superheroes who keep getting dragged back into Cape Life.

The Between (Session 1 of 4)
Alun R. runs for Blake Ryan, David Morrison, Leandro Pondoc, and Oli Jeffery
We meet 'Razor' Rose Roberst, the American who has only been in London for a month or so; Annie Morrish, the Vessel who made contact with dark entities while still in the womb; Dr Victor Weiss, the Mother, and his servant and Factotum, Chambers. While Dr Weiss is busy the other hunters investigate reports of a haunting. There's an overworked cook in search of help, a deception to gain entry, blood...and carnations. Then...strangulation, visions of other places and other times and...a very sinister boy child...

Godbound: Pillars of Heaven (Session 1)
Lowell Francis runs for Dan Brown, Patrick Knowles, Sherri, and Tyler Lominack
We begin to learn of our broken world and our new heroes face the threat of an empire looking to seize the means of magic.

Dune: Adventures in the Imperium (Session 4)
Lowell Francis runs for Brandon Brylawski, Danielle B., Fraser Simons, and Harry Coins
The House finally moves against their enemies in Clan Heyda and one member of the group has a deadly showdown with a familial enemy.

The Between: Questions and Opportunities Part Two (Session 1 of 8)
Shane runs for Gabe McCormick, Jamila R. Nedjadi, and Joel N.
Terrors and temptations as a vampire stalks the immigrant communities of Limehouse.

Candlelight: The Gloaming Mire
Mike Ferdinando runs for Elizabeth M. H., Jim Likes Games, and Leah Libresco Sargeant
The spirits of three slain treasure-hunters seek to escape the haunted swamp after their ill-fated attempt to plunder the legendary Flocculent Cathedral.

You can see all these videos (plus all the ones that have come before) on The Gauntlet YouTube channel playlists, and be sure to subscribe to catch all our great podcasts!

If you'd like to catch these sessions in an audio-only podcast, check out the community-run Hangouts Podcast at http://gauntlet.hellomouth.net/.

If you'd like to play in games like these, check out the calendar of events and the Gauntlet Forums where games are announced, or catch one of our Gauntlet Community Open Gaming online mini-conventions.

To support The Gauntlet, please visit the Gauntlet Patreon. Everyone is welcome to sign up for Gauntlet Calendar games, but Patreon supporters get extra options like priority RSVP for Gauntlet Calendar games and joining the Gauntlet Slack team where special events and pickup games are announced.

Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

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7/7/2021

Paragon System: Glory and Agony

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By Dan Brown (@brownorama) • https://CosmicBeagle.itch.io
Backing Agon on Kickstarter was a no-brainer. The genre -- ancient Greek heroes -- is appealing to me and the group I usually play with. But also, it’s a John Harper game. Harper has a long pedigree before Blades in the Dark, but it was that game that really defined his place in the independent RPG scene. He’s a triple threat -- game design, layout, and illustrations -- and the initial materials for Agon showed the same level of quality and thought.

The final book did not disappoint. My first impression of Agon, besides the overall visual aesthetic, was that it was vastly different from Blades in the Dark. Where Blades has a lot of mechanical complexity, Agon appears streamlined. Where Blades has a robust fantasy setting, Agon relies on existing mythology. Blades’ familiar task resolution mechanic is nowhere to be found in Agon, which instead employs a unique vignette-style approach. At the same time, there are some elements in common between the games. Both use a dice pool and both incorporate a repeatable structure to the game play.

Like many games that introduce a new system, Agon is the foundation for a whole collection of games. Dubbed “the Paragon system,” the publisher opened the door for designing new “playsets” -- that is, games built using the same system. In any other setting you might call these skins. The underlying mechanics of a Paragon playset stay the same. Each playset documents its genre-specific equivalents to the elements of the Agon system. With few exceptions, the playsets -- in particular those released by Harper and his co-author Sean Nittner -- offer very light documentation, relying heavily on the Agon book.

For my two-month run on the Gauntlet, I ran a different playset every two weeks, scheduling four different flavors of Paragon over May and June. It was perhaps a little ambitious, but I was really interested in experiencing the flexibility of the system.

If you’re thinking about running a Paragon game, this article offers a few words of warning. It is, however, largely a celebration of Paragon. I had tremendous fun running this game in all its guises. One of its most distinctive and enjoyable features is the use of vignettes to structure the game. While vignette-style play may not be new or unique to Paragon, it is the system where I learned it first and fell in love with it. So, that is where we will start.

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Contests and Episodes
Every scene in a Paragon game is a contest. String five or so contests together and you have an “island” -- a single, self-contained story arc. In the Agon setting, your group of Greek mythic heroes embarks on an odyssey and find themselves dealing with challenges on a series of islands. Each island is more or less an episode (or string of episodes). Other playsets make use of this structure, too. Chamber (the X-Files-flavored Paragon) and Storm Furies (space battles) both use missions as the episodic unit of measure.

Agon’s book provides a set of 12 different islands, each episode summarized in three pages. The descriptive elements are short, and while there’s an outline of the key scenes and there’s some text offered for flavor, the onus is on the GM to improvise much of the setting. The key scenes include an arrival, a series of challenges, and then a final battle.

Each scene is resolved with a single die roll. That is, after the GM determines the difficulty level, the players each roll a pool of dice to see if they’re successful or not. The results drive how the scene resolves. And then we move on to the next scene.

Compared to most other tabletop roleplaying games, this scene-by-scene approach can feel a little weird. At the same time, this structure aligns with stories we see in media: tightly crafted scenes that come together into an episode. The connective tissue between scenes is hidden away, largely irrelevant or uninteresting to the viewers. Even though it’s unusual for a roleplaying game, it’s not entirely unfamiliar.

Because this structure is well understood, it isn’t difficult to make the transition. Because my style of facilitating games involves lots of improvisation, I love working with the players at the table to establish a scene and place their characters in it. We freeze time momentarily to determine the outcomes of the dice rolls, but then resume our narration of the scene. Depending on the number of players and how much you elaborate, an entire contest from beginning to end is about 20-30 minutes of game play. Because the table isn’t resolving every impactful micro-action via roll, the GM can maintain control of the game’s velocity.

In Surge Protectors, one of the playsets created by Nittner and Harper, the players play giant transforming robots in the vein of the 1980s cartoon. The genre is perfect for this structure of play, where the robots simply go from one fight to the next. At the same time, this playset suggests that each episode should focus on taking down one of the major “bad guy” robots, who are determined to wreak havoc on Earth. In Paragon, adversaries both large and small are defined by sets of dice.

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​Adversaries
Adversaries in the Paragon system -- any character or environmental challenge that the characters might engage in a contest -- are represented by two or more dice. To determine the difficult level of a contest, the GM rolls these dice, taking the highest value and adding the strife level. Strife level is 4, 5, or 6 -- an essentially arbitrary number defining how bad things are. 

Agon suggests that the dice assigned to an adversary reflect different aspects of it. The king’s royal guard captain, for example, may have trained (d10) and loyal (d8). On the surface, this gives the GM a nice way of representing the scale of different threats. On the other hand, there isn’t any guidance for GMs on how to assign dice to these descriptors. 

The Agon book offers numerous examples, but the assignments are at the discretion of the GM. Ultimately, the dice produce a result somewhere in the 9 to 15 range, which makes me wonder why the GM doesn’t just pick one of these values. Perhaps there’s something exciting about rolling for difficulty. Some mechanics allow the GM to add another die to their pool, representing some disadvantage faced by the characters, or some ill-tempered god.

In the play set that I designed -- Rising Tide, about ecoactivists seeking climate justice in a post-collapse world -- players have the option of letting the GM add a die to their pool. This die represents the character’s flaw or complication. In exchange, the character gets some bonus experience points. In play this worked really well, because it allowed players to activate their characters flaws in the fiction.

Earlier I mentioned that the Agon core book describes each island in 3 pages. The island and contest descriptions are evocative, but sparse, and depend on the table elaborating the setting and environment, the adversaries and NPCs, and the actions of the characters. The playsets for Paragon -- Chamber, Storm Furies, and Surge Protectors specifically -- offer even less guidance. Ultimately, the Paragon system tests the ability of the GM to draw fiction out of the players around the table.

Using just the text on the pages would make for short sessions and make the game seem very mechanical. Paragon depends a lot on improvisation and collaborative storytelling, perhaps even more than a run-of-the-mill Powered by the Apocalypse game. Even though PbtA games don’t have much in the way of setting or adversary descriptions, the moves provide leverage for improvisation. In PbtA games, however, the dice rolls resolve the narrative at the action level. In Paragon, the dice rolls resolve the action at the scene level.

Scene Resolution
The limited detail in the island descriptions and on the character sheets can make it difficult to get the improvisation engine going. Unfortunately the dice rolls don’t offer much help. Instead of rolls providing useful levers to provoke improvisation, the dice rolls simply indicate whether a character beats a difficulty score or not. I described the results of the dice pool as success vs. not success, but this isn’t quite right.

The Agon book describes rolling under the difficulty number as “suffering.” I’ve interpreted this to mean that the character “fails forward” or “succeeds with a cost” to use the parlance of collaborative storytelling games. Some contests have mechanical consequences, forcing characters to mark off Pathos (stress) or lose some other currency. The rules are not clear on how much discretion the GM has in doling out these penalties. Personally, I avoid them as the players are afforded minimal opportunities to affect their dice pool as it is. Taking these away from them limits what little control they do have.

Building the dice pool is really the main mechanical thing players need to do. The characters get certain dice based on three key elements of the character sheet. In Agon, these are the character’s Name, their Epithet, and the Domain. If the Epithet isn’t relevant to the character’s action, they do not include that die. The GM determines the Domain. With the first set of dice out of the way, the player has some choices to make, largely whether they are spending currency (in Agon these are divine favors or bonds with other characters) or marking tracks (usually Pathos) to add more dice. 

As many times as I’ve walked players through this process, it always strikes me as a little disjointed. Even players who have been through the process several times struggle to remember it. It’s quirky. Some currencies you spend and some you mark off. One currency adds d4s and one adds other dice. The lack of parallel internal structures means determining the contents of the pool isn’t straightforward. 

And yet despite all the machinations in the procedure, the player’s dice pool usually ends up with the same 4-6 dice. Early in the campaign these are mostly d6s with a d8 or two and a d4. Because of this, it can sometimes feel like the players’ choices -- really the only ones they can make mechanically -- don’t have a lot of bearing on the outcome.

The result of the d4 gets added to the total of the highest two dice. That d4 can make all the difference. Since you’re trying to beat a score of around 10-12 , it’s difficult to get to that on two dice, even if one of them is a d8. That d4 pushes you over the edge. In Agon it represents divine favor, and it fits nicely. That last little bit of success you owe to some higher power (or luck, if you prefer).

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​Competition and Advancement
One aspect new players note right away is that there is a competitive element. In resolving a contest, the player who roles highest is considered the ultimate winner. They literally get all the Glory -- the points distributed at the end of contests. If the roll isn’t the highest but still exceeds the difficulty, they get half the Glory. Even if the character suffers, they get one Glory. There’s still some reward for emerging from the contest, even if you didn’t win.

Glory is one of two experience tracks. As characters complete contests, they earn Glory. As characters suffer Pathos, they also earn Fate. As they earn Glory, the characters start their dice pool with better dice. As they earn Fate, they grow ever closer to “retirement.” I like that these two concepts are disconnected from each other, but neither is particularly relevant for short games. Players need to earn 80 Glory before they can increase their name die to a d8. Since they only accumulate Glory at about 10-15 points per contest, it takes at least two islands before getting there. 

Earning Fate happens a lot faster, and designated spaces on the Fate track trigger an advance. Since most one-shots won’t get players past one advance, I’ve started suggesting that characters take an advance at the start of the game and, if necessary, between missions.

The player who rolls best gets some other advantages in different kinds of contests. During the series of rolls constituting the final battle, the player who rolls best can set the stakes for the adversary or earn an advantage die for a later roll. The other main benefit in regular contests is that the player who rolls highest narrates last. The rationale for this should be clear: If we’re watching a show about Greek heroes, we save the most dramatic action for last.

This competitive aspect is discouraging, especially if your players are used to intensely collaborative fiction. In fact, I didn’t even include this part in the game I ran with my home group, knowing full well that the uneven distribution of Glory would make people dislike the game. On the other hand, I used it when running games on the Gauntlet and it was virtually a non-issue. I even ran Surge Protectors (the Transformers playset) with my kids’ group and they barely noticed. I mean, when you get to play giant transforming robots, everybody wins.

The ranked outcomes of the dice rolls gives the narration a structure, which is a welcome change from other roleplaying game systems. Consider most tables, where the GM is responsible for ensuring everyone has equal time in the spotlight. For me as a GM this is one of the most stressful parts of the job: I want everyone to have the same screen time. In the Paragon system, we are compelled to go around the table to describe the outcome of the scene. We even know what order to go in. 

Characters Helping Characters
All this talk of competition might make you wonder whether characters should help each other. It’s a good time to point out that the characters aren’t really competing with each other: their goals are driven by the fiction and they generally have the same goals. (Some of my games involved some interesting tension between the characters, but they were largely supporting each other.) I suppose in the fiction the “winner” of the roll is the one whose actions are most notable, who people will be talking about the next day.

Because of this ambiguity, I’ve heard that some players aren’t sure whether to help each other or not. That is, the competition of the mechanics worms its way into the fiction. This makes sense: why bother helping someone if all your reward is minimal? The Paragon system has a mechanism for characters to help each other. A player can opt out of the contest and instead give their Domain die to another character in exchange for a point of Glory and a Bond. I dunno. I may be missing something but this doesn’t seem like a fair trade. Perhaps this strategy makes sense if you think you cannot beat the difficulty number with the resources you have available.

On the other hand, having such a mechanic in vignette-style play doesn’t make sense to me. Everyone is playing a role in the scene. A character’s role might be supportive, but they are still participating in the contest in their own way. Some of the most creative storytelling my groups have done involve the characters coming at the problem from different angles and relying on each other in different ways. In short, after trying the support mechanic twice I decided to instead encourage players to find creative ways to participate in the contest. Hanging back? Creating a distraction? Opening an opportunity for another? That’s still participating in the contest. Let’s roll to see how you do.

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​A Love Letter to Paragon
And this is the main impression I want to leave with you. Despite the quirky design choices, Paragon draws the table in. Everyone has a stake in every scene. Everyone has a role to play in dealing with the contest. From the first contest on a new island or new mission, or the building climax of the final battle, everyone has a chance to elaborate and embellish the narrative. Those mechanical quirks are some of the same things that make this game engaging and enjoyable: they draw the entire table in. More than anything else, this is my goal as a GM, to ensure that everyone is fully present even when they’re not speaking.

Some tips to help you GM Paragon, with references to the Agon rule book:

  • Embrace the vignette- or scene-driven approach. Focus on completing about two or three scenes per three-hour session.
  • And then embrace the episodic nature of the game. Give yourself ample time to do the three-contest final battle.
  • Indulge in session zero discussion. Ask about character backgrounds. Delve into their bonds. Imagine their base of operations.
  • Take your time setting up the scene (page 68). Ask players to contribute details.
  • Don’t forget about Advantage dice (page 57) -- this is a mechanical way for you to reward contest success or just great roleplaying.
  • Be patient in helping players assemble their dice pools (page 29). Take it step-by-step and try to do it the same way every time: first the basic dice (name, epithet, domain) and then the currencies to add dice.
  • Let the final battle draw out (page 32). Use each of the three contests to build to a climax, starting with how the characters gain an advantage.
  • Switch up the contest types (page 25), so that players aren’t relying on the same domain again and again.
  • Consider dropping the competitive aspect, such that every player beating the difficulty earns the full Glory and every player missing gets half. It’s better to play than to turn people off because of one rule.

Dan is a regular player and GM on the Gauntlet Gaming Community. By day he runs a boutique UX design firm and by all his other free time, an amateur game designer. Follow him on Twitter @brownorama. Follow his game design work at cosmicbeagle.itch.io.

Thanks to Alun for the nudge to write this.
Thanks to Matthew, Darin, and Joe for slogging through two months of Paragon with me.

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7/2/2021

Gauntlet Video Roundup - July 2, 2021

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[Gauntlet Calendar: Online Tabletop RPG Play]
​Greetings, and welcome to the weekly Gauntlet Calendar video roundup! Enjoy these recordings of online games organized through Gauntlet Calendar and the Gauntlet RPG Community. These recorded sessions represent only a portion of the selection of games available every week, and anyone is welcome to join the fun! If you'd like to play or watch more games like these, check out the links and information at the bottom of the post.

Gauntlet Community Open Gaming

10 Million HP Planet
Mike Ferdinando runs for Diana, Geoff Hunt, Jim Likes Games, and Mike
After planet Ditko-9 gained malevolent sentience and declared war on its inhabitants, our quartet of cosmic-level heroes arrived to give this planet the beat-down it sorely deserved!

The Green Knight RPG
Mike Ferdinando runs for Ben and Gareth
Game warden Lot and her liege Sir Ranulfus set out on a perilous quest to the Green Chapel to fulfill their side of an honor-bound obligation to the mysterious Green Knight.

Hearts of Wulin: Wedding of Jade and Sorrow
Lowell Francis runs for Flavio, Marc Majcher, and Misha Panarin
Our protagonists arrive at the wedding to find their hearts draw them in dangerous directions and betrayal lies ahead.

Trophy Dark: Isle of Water and Blood
Mike Ferdinando runs for Blake Ryan, Daniel T., and Michael Pelletier
In 1902, just off the coast of New England, a group of dilettante occultists attempt to contact a benevolent spirit of enlightenment that promises great arcane power. What could possibly go wrong? This incursion is based on an unpublished scenario for Call of Cthulhu that the GM wrote 25 years ago.

Sunset Kills
Mark (they/them) runs for Brian, Jeffrey, Kae, and Rod Santos

Hit the Nazi - Retrieve the Ark
Alun R. runs for Gareth, Joe A., Jonah, and Rod Santos
In their efforts to protect Democracy, Air Ace 'Bake' Baker, Mesmerist Professor Bodenstein and Hustler 'Chance' Le Chance are transporting an important artefact to the New Gauntlet City Museum. When they have to take a detour to avoid pursuing Nazi agents they find themselves driving through a busy fair and circus where they (literally) bump in to everyone's Friend and High School Teacher Marvin Roy and his mother. There's bystanders to protect, circus strong men to mesmerise, and esoteric candelabra to keep track of...then a surprise villain is revealed, Messerschmitts intervene, and a trader (pirate?) captain helps them reach an archaeological dig at the rumoured site of the garden of Eden...

Hutt Cartel
Rich Rogers runs for Adrian, Bryan, MadJay Brown, and Mario C
The organization under Crime Lord Amara Tavi scheme and betray each other as they seek their own paths to power.

Wolfspell
Donogh runs for Gareth, Kae, and Marc Majcher
A hunter in the wilderness, an assassin in the city and a fur trade magnate are all caught in the Wolfspell. A sorceress tyrant of the north has molded their flesh wolfward to add them to his menagerie. Can they free themselves from the sorcery in time?

Hearts of Wulin: Wedding of Petals and Steel
Lowell Francis runs for Anders, Mark (they/them), Michael, and Rod Santos
Our protagonists work to find their own hearts' paths, but at what cost? A ceremony is shattered and two pairs of friends must draw steel against one another.

Against the Dark Conspiracy
Alun R. runs for Cameron D, Kae, Steve, and Steven Watkins
Marrakesh...the team's Sparks, Hanna, has set up a van's fake break down to enable former NSA Analyst, Eli to keep eye's on both the hotel where their target is staying and the team of local 'watchers' who are also watching it. Meanwhile former Lisky Bratva Burglar, Jan, sips tea while waiting for the right moment to get past the receptionist, and ex-Navy Seal Assassin, Calder, gets the drop on the senior watcher. There's an 'engine fire' with associated smoke screen, a frightened journalist to save, and a smooth exfiltration that leaves someone known to Calder fuming in the van's exhaust fumes...then a suspicious health charity, an archaeological dig at a Transylvanian, and tense intra-team relations before a shadow emerges from the pit...

Team-Up
Dan Brown runs for Donogh and Rod Santos
Heroes 13 and Fortune take down Lord Petrol’s plot to undermine the city’s green energy iniatives.

World of Gamma
Dan Brown runs for Adrian, Dan Pucul, and Geoff Hunt
Mutant fungus, mole, ferret, and cheetah set off to acquire defensive measures for their enclave to protect them from the fabled Sasquatch. Their journey takes them into See Attle, where they must infiltrate the Hom-pot.

Star Wars Saturday

Storm Furies (Session 4 of 4)
Rich Rogers runs for Brandon Brylawski, Greg G., Jo Lene, and Steven Watkins
This is not a drill. This is not a training hop. The pilots of Fury Squadron hunt down and take on Imperial Star Destroyer The Implacable in a glorious finale.

Gauntlet Calendar

The Great American Witch (Session 3 of 3)
Donogh runs for David Morrison and Mark
We see some of Roxane & Miranda's home life, while they surmount Sam's reticence to initiate him into the Craft; and helping out an old student with a serious problem with the Storm Coven.

MOTH-LIGHT (Session 0)
Agatha runs for Chris Newton, Jex Thomas, Matthew Arcilla, and Rich Rogers
The crew comes together to create their Pact and their world, a jungle planet filled with giant bugs, Predator-like aliens, and a dying Sun.

MOTH-LIGHT (Session 1 of 4)
Agatha runs for Chris Newton, Jex Thomas, Matthew Arcilla, and Rich Rogers
The crew figure out what they need to do to save the sun and their planet. Their first task - obtaining fuel!

MOTH-LIGHT (Session 2 of 4)
Agatha runs for Chris Newton, Jex Thomas, Matthew Arcilla, and Rich Rogers
The Pact encounter the Ghosts for the first time as they seek to rescue Fe-Mat, their key engineer!

MOTH-LIGHT (Session 3 of 4)
Agatha runs for Chris Newton, Jex Thomas, Matthew Arcilla, and Rich Rogers
The Pact finally faces the apex predators of this world, looming whale-sized moths, in their attempt to pay off a debt.

MOTH-LIGHT (Session 4 of 4)
Agatha runs for Chris Newton, Jex Thomas, Matthew Arcilla, and Rich Rogers
Doubts and tensions are building within the camp, but there's no looking back for the Pact. It's now or never in their attempt to resurrect the dying sun.

Against the Dark Conspiracy: NBA (Session 4 of 4)
Alun R. runs for Lowell Francis, Paul Rivers, Pawel S., and Will H
Vlad the former GRU Sparks is smuggled into Russia while Eun-Jung, the other Operator on an FSB watch-list due to her wetwork for the US, invests in a solid cover. They meet Lena the ex-Finnish police Handler and Jimmy, the Burglar intimately bound up with MI6 in Moscow, to find 'Site A' before the Conspiracy does. There's an offer to 'come in from the cold' and a a séance, while the suspicious activity of GRU pawns of the Conspiracy leads to a retired doctor with a dark Soviet past. Then...a kidnapped innocent, a car chase, and a water park where a vampire's scheme is revealed...

Paragon System: Rising Tide (Session 2 of 2)
Dan Brown runs for Darin Rebertus, Joe A., and Matthew Arcilla
The crew of the Aegis, having captured the sinister CEO of Atlantico, a fossil fuel conglomerate, must dispense justice. But can they deal with the mercenary team that’s been sent in to rescue him?

Rebel Crown: Oak (Session 5)
Jesse A. runs for Alexi S., Jason Zanes, and Jex Thomas
In which a new vassal is acquired, a party is held, another oath is made, and Queen Siobhan is nowhere to be found.

You can see all these videos (plus all the ones that have come before) on The Gauntlet YouTube channel playlists, and be sure to subscribe to catch all our great podcasts!

If you'd like to catch these sessions in an audio-only podcast, check out the community-run Hangouts Podcast at http://gauntlet.hellomouth.net/.

If you'd like to play in games like these, check out the calendar of events and the Gauntlet Forums where games are announced, or catch one of our Gauntlet Community Open Gaming online mini-conventions.

To support The Gauntlet, please visit the Gauntlet Patreon. Everyone is welcome to sign up for Gauntlet Calendar games, but Patreon supporters get extra options like priority RSVP for Gauntlet Calendar games and joining the Gauntlet Slack team where special events and pickup games are announced.

Enjoy, and have a great weekend!

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7/1/2021

History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part 20: 2016)

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SOMETHING IN THE AIR
So 2016—I wonder why folks would have been thinking about post-apocalyptic games? What could have been in the air? What kind of terrible unmasking of national experience could have occurred that tore the mask away for some and made others hide their eyes.

​Let’s check in with some media arriving in 2016
  • TV Shows: 3%, Aftermath, Colony, Containment, The Shannara Chronicles, Travelers (tangentially), Van Helsing
  • Films: The 5th Wave, 10 Cloverfield Lane, The Bad Batch, Cell, Daylight’s End, Dead Rising: Endgame, Diverge, The Girl with All the Gifts, Here Alone, I Am a Hero, The Northlander, Pandemic, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter, Seoul Station, Train to Busan, The Worthy, X-Men Apocalypse
  • Video Games: Aegis of Earth: Protonovus Assault, Attack on Titan, Dead Rising 4, Dying Light: the Following, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, Fallout Shelter, Gears of War 4, Grim Dawn, Sheltered, Shin Megami Tensai IV: Apocalypse, This War of Mine: The Little Ones, Tom Clancy’s The Division, Toukiden 2, Umbrella Corps, The Walking Dead: Michonne.
  • Board Games: 51st State, Aeons End, Armageddon, Bloodborne: The Card Game, Dawn of the Zeds, Dead of Winter: The Long Night, Defenders of the Last Stand, The Others, Saltlands, Salvation Road, Unknown, The Walking Dead: All Out War​

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TASTES LIKE BURNING
I focus on core books for these lists, plus new post-apocalyptic setting for existing game or significant sourcebooks. If a line has several releases, I put those in a single entry. I consolidate zombie sourcebooks and smaller games into one entry and other miscellaneous supplements into a single entry. I list revised editions which significantly change a line or present a milestone. I only include published material- print or electronic. I err in favor of products with a printed version and cut off sourcebooks with a smaller page count. I skip freebie or self-published games. Finally with a few exceptions, I’ve opted to skip modules and adventures going forward.

I'm sure I've left something off without adequate reason; feel free to add a comment.

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1. Anarchy: The Role-Playing Game
A sandbox game using OpenD6 and set in the United States after a nuclear war. I don’t know if it’s refreshing or crushing that seeing nukes as the cause on of our downfall seems like the return of an old friend. It’s a basic presentation, with stock art illustration. It includes some toolkits and optional zombie rules. Interestingly for an OpenD6 game, it uses all the polyhedral dice. The blurb stresses that this is a labor of love decades in the making.

2. Apes Victorious
Apes Victorious is built on the OSR basics of systems like Labyrinth Lord (the rules include conversions to it, Mutant Future, and Starships & Spacemen 2e). It, as you might imagine, draws heavily on the series from the 1970s. You can play as a human astronaut, ape, degenerated human, or “psi-active underdweller." Planet of the Apes is one of the classic “the apocalypse happened so long ago we forgot” series.

Interestingly this is not the only Ape-driven rpg, though Eden Studios Terra Primate doesn’t have a definite setting, just the concepts that intelligent apes are around. So it might be a better fit to play out the more recent film series (which came out after TP).

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3. Apocalypse World 2nd Edition
This makes me feel old. I remember when AW first came out and some designers (who would later buy into the mechanics) complained about the tone and voice of the rules. But then other games began to adapt, rework, and rethink mechanics from it to create PbtA games—with a new approach to hacking given the lack of SRD or even agreed upon principles.

AW2 coming out just seems like a year or two ago, not five years as of this writing. Any revised edition had a lot to live up to but the Baker’s focused on tuning making Apocalypse World better, rather than trying to adapt other innovations back into the game. So the second edition is tighter in some ways, makes changes to better fit with how the game actually plays at the table, and messes with the economy. It’s also a more straight-forward presentation—it still has a strong, aggressive voice but does a stronger job of showing how the game works.

All the changes to the mechanics feel like fine tuning. The biggest come in the reworking of combat moves—personal, group, and vehicular. It adds a single new playbook, The Maestro’d. The Operator playbook gets cut. There’s changes to harm and the economy of lifestyle has undergone some shifts. The reception to 2e was strongly positive. At least in our circles, GMs moved over to it quickly.

The Bakers would follow up the 2nd edition with two supplements worth noting. The first is Burned Over, which presents a deep reworking of AW. It’s intended to offer a game playable by more age groups and appeal to a general audience. From the blurb copy, “No sex moves, a more reigned-in take on violence, less adult horror in the grotesquerie. In many ways, if we were to create Apocalypse World today, Burned Over is the game we’d create.” The other is the Extended Refbook which collects extra playbooks and more discussion of fronts.

4. Antychrist
This French game takes place in a world which has rebelled against humanity. The earth itself strikes back at them with plagues and disasters, forcing humanity to flee to flying cities powered by divine magic. The setting mixes faith, mysticism, and cybernetic tech together, a return to the kitchen sink apocalyptic settings of years past. Overall fairly crunchy, though the demo rules and two small supplements are short.

5. Belly of the Beast
In this setting, the world was destroyed by a massive skyrock centuries ago. People survived in the wake of that. Then three generations ago, that rock split open and from it emerged a massive, land crushing worm which swallowed nations, cities, fortresses, and civilizations. Think Midgard Serpent or the Stone Thief from 13th Age. It devastated the land.

But some survived inside the maw and inside the belly. You play descendants of those who survived the Devouring. You’re a scavenger living out a wet, gruesome, and dark existence. You will be hunting through the organs and fleshways to recover artifacts from these lost societies and survive.

Belly of the Beast is the first rpg I remember X-Carding when we played it. The GM suggested the currency at play within the beast would be teeth and I noped right out of that. It’s an interesting idea for a game--Mad Max feel inside the belly of a whale. It’s a little too dark for me, but could appeal to others.
​
Belly of the Beast is designed by Ben Dutter and this uses the same Ethos Engine mechanics which power Vow of Honor and Hunt the Wicked. If you know those games, picking up this one should be easy.

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6. Era: Survival
An interesting post-apocalyptic setting. It has zombies but that outbreak happened a hundred years ago. The walking dead exist but have become kind of commonplace. The real thread has begun to emerge from monstrous variants of these creatures. These changes have forced the survivors into a variety of factions.

Era’s a game with a decent amount of support. The ERA d10 system harkens back to World of Darkness. Players roll big fistful of d10s and count up successes against a target number. That system also powers several other Era games, with the first being Era: Consortium I believe. That’s a big sci-fi toolbox. Multiple other settings have been presented in Era d10 Fundamentals sourcebook. So if you’re looking for a game which has other worlds and settings you can bolt on, Era has you covered.

The publisher Shades of Vengeance followed up the core book with both a Quickstart Guide and a Role Book Primer. They supported the line with three sourcebooks: Infected Manual (more mutations for zombies), The Swarm (splatbook for a specific faction), and Tales of the Outlands (adventure seeds). In 2018 they released a Definitive Edition which adds another 100 pages of setting and background material.

7. Hora de Aventuras Juego de Rol
It’s always been a great disappointment to me that we never got an English-language Adventure Time rpg, especially during the heyday of its TV series, graphic novels, and wonderful comics. I have to content myself that Nosolorol Ediciones managed to secure the Spanish-language license and produce this great looking game.

And if you haven’t watched the show: yes, Adventure Time is post-apocalyptic. It takes a few episodes before that becomes unquestionable in the series. But eventually we see tons of ruins, secrets of the ancient world, and even flashback to the days before the apocalypse.
 
From what I can gather it’s a simple d6-based system which allows you to create your own characters for the setting. Status cards represent effects which happen to your character (“¿Congelado? ¿Enamorado? ¿De bajona? ¿Pocho?”). It looks like tremendous fun. The company released a few supplements: a small guide to the Candy Kingdom, a guide to the parallel universe land of Aaa, and a GM screen. Plus they also got cool Adventure Time dice. As of this writing it appears to still be in print and available. And yes, I just paid exorbitant shipping to get a copy and dice. 
 
8. Infected!
The other post-zombie post-apocalypse game to come out this year. Infected! likewise has a world where zombies are only part of the problem, more at the margins than the main issue. General survival and the collapse of civilization present the more immediate threat. There a focus on markets, commodities, and resources in the backstory (though not as deep as Red Markets, see next list). It’s a basic set up without any major twists in the core description.

The system uses 2d10 for resolution and has a chuck of detail to manage. Eight stats, 24 skills, calculated vital stats, circumstance bonuses, advantages and disads. I always know we’re in for crunch when I check out the weapon and armor listings. The former can have an Init Mod, Strike Mod, Damage, Range, Parry Mod, Magazine, and HR. The latter has sectional ratings and modifiers to movement and awareness depending on what you’re wearing.

The game’s decent looking and the core book’s 250+ pages. Immersion Studios has supported this with several releases. There’s a GM screen and five short scenarios available. If you’re interested, a free quick start’s available.

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9. Metamorphosis Alpha
There’s an interesting publishing split that I’m going lump together in this entry. So Metamorphosis Alpha is arguably the first sci-fi rpg, launched in 1976. It has the players on a generational ship where systems have collapsed and things have gone terribly wrong. You can see some of its influence on the latter Gamma World, but they’re distinctly different games. In 1994 TSR released Metamorphosis Alpha to Omega as a setting for their Amazing Engine Game. In 2002 Fast Forward Entertainment released a 25th Anniversary edition. In 2006 Mudpuppy Games released another version, expanding and changing the first edition with a 176 page hardcover. In 2014 Goodman Games released a Deluxe Collector’s Edition of the original game alongside a handful of modules and supplements.

In 2016 Goodman Games released Epsilon City a massive boxed set detailing a major city aboard the MA spaceship. This was to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the game. It included a huge sourcebook, three maps, and two smaller supplements with cyborg rules and adventures. This was an officially approved product from James Ward and used the rules from the first edition.

But also in 2016 we saw another version of Metamorphosis Alpha from another company, Signal Fire Games. When Epsilon City keeps the weird gonzo colors and looks of the original, lovingly translated by Goodman. This (5th?) edition core rulebook goes for a sleeker, more modern look. The game was originally Kickstarted in 2012 and only released publicly this year.

It uses the System 26 system (which is awkward to say) but I don’t think those mechanics appear in any other games. Reviews seem to be meh about this one, that it lacks the spark of the original game. In trying to update to a more modern approach the wildness of the original went away. It isn’t helped by having few illustrations and bad organization. Signal Fire didn’t release anything else for the game.
 
10. Polaris
Polaris is a flooded world setting where humanity has been driven underwater by a cataclysm long forgotten. They've survived and grown into potent factions built on advanced technology and genetic engineering. This is third edition and publisher Black Book Éditions’ second bite at the apple after 2008’s Polaris. The original game came out almost two decades ago in 1997.

This version of Polaris takes huge strides forward in presentation. The base game’s a two volume set in a striking slipcover case. The art’s fantastic, lush, and consistent throughout. The company has supported it with a few supplements, but it hasn’t blown up despite how great it looks.

I actually got a copy of this in a chain of generosity a couple of years ago. I knew I was in trouble when the copy arrived with two laminated pages of dense rules summary. I tried several times to read through this but the trad density of mechanics meant I bounced off. That’s too bad because the setting’s interesting, especially the themes of technological decay and the overall mysteries in play. It offers a level of wild fantastic beyond that of its closest watery sci-fi rival, Blue Planet. Polaris is a more cyberpunk, biopunk wild sci-fi game. It would be cool to see someone hack it into a story game system.
 
11. Pugmire
So I went back and forth on including this on the list. On the surface Pugmire’s a fairly trad fantasy game with canine folk. And it mostly is that. But it’s also a world where thousands of years have passed since the fall of humanity and the evolution of animal folk. We have a world of distant future where both the people and the apocalypse have almost totally been forgotten.

The game has a few interactions with that history. Some folks are guided by the edicts of the Code of Man. Relics and knowledge of the old world are treasures to be sought out. But for the greater part that apocalyptic backstory is stage dressing for the coolness of having an armored schnauzer swinging a magic axe.

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12. The Rad-Hack
It’s interesting to see the explosion across genres which happens around this time as designers take The Black Hack (and other Hacks) in different directions. Some of them feel like jokes and others simply as proof of concept—that it could be done with the system. The Rad Hack seems a little more serious about being a game, even if the concept itself goes gonzo (“Coated in slime!” is a selling point).

It has a clean layout and the art’s really nice. It offers a lot of additional material for the hack—it isn’t a small set of tweaks. It’s a nice game and worth picking up if you want to try old Gamma World modules or even more recent MCC releases.

13. Savage Rifts
This event was, I can say with some certainty, a complete surprise to me. The notoriously protective Palladium Games combining forces with another company, any company to allow its IP to be used with another system. The Kickstarter raised $438K for several books to be released the most important being the Tomorrow Legion’s Player’s Guide and the Game Master’s Handbook. As with many of these big kit rpg Kickstarters (see also 7th Sea), the company would stage releases over the course of a couple of years.

The original Savage Rifts Kickstarter took a smart approach. It focused on a slice of the Rifts setting but offered a set of rules which players could use to rebuild much of the massive and ongoing backlist of material from Palladium. Since then Shane Hensley’s company has followed up with two follow up Kickstarters. The first, 2019’s Rifts for Savage Worlds: American Armageddon offered three new books covering NA for the setting. It raised $230K. The second, Atlantis Rising, took a more modest approach with a single big sourcebook and some related accessories. (as of this writing it's at $126K. Final tbd).
 
14. The Wasted Hack
Technically this releases the following year in 2017, but the precursor to this- Waste-Land Beasts and How to Kill Them- came out this year. The latter’s a bestiary and toolkit for post-apocalyptic foes for use with The Black Hack and similar games. The second edition of this in 2017 reworks the creatures into the format used by The Wasted Hack.

That’s a pretty substantial reworking of The Black Hack. It’s not as gonzo as The Rad Hack. It instead has a feel that’s closer to Fallout or Wastelands than Gamma World. The interior art’s a little cartoony but consistent.

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15. We Are Abandoned
A freeform game about characters caught up in a city which is falling apart. The book mentions 28 Days Later and Escape from New York as touchstones, but there’s also a strong echo of the video game This War of Mine. The game has a light resolution system—d10 with some specific actions spelled out like moves. There’s a play sheet for tracking the group and the book contains premade characters and locations. At first glance this might seem like a thin game, but there’s surprisingly deep material here worth checking out.
 
16. Miscellaneous: Zombies
  • Ancalia: the Broken Towers: A kingdom sourcebook for Godbound. Multiple Night Roads have opened here spilling out the undead to overwhelm the land. The kingdom has been cut off from neighbors and only a few cities survive. 
  • Dead Reign Sourcebook 6: Hell Followed: The second to last of these sourcebooks for Palladium’s zombie rpg (2008). This one adds a cornucopia of loosely connected material, including new zombies, new classes, disasters, conspiracy theories, government enclaves, and more.
  • Morts: A World of Adventure for Fate Core. After a zombie apocalypse, jobbers—called Morticians—get the unpleasant task of keeping things secure and dealing with internal incidents. Has a "worklife" comedy edge, but then veers into lots of material for magic and running supernatural creatures as PCs.
  • No Way Out: An Italian scenario book for playing zombie games with Fate Accelerated.
  • Survive This!! Zombies! Collected Edition: Pulls together the Survivor Guide, Zombie Master’s Guide, and Zombie Manual for this fairly trad, low budget zombie rpg. Also release a few other supplements for it that same year. In 2018 they would release a second edition.

​17. Miscellaneous: Other Sourcebooks
  • Antagonist and Protagonist Archives: Character and NPC resources for Fragged Empire (2015).
  • Apocalypse In Your Hometown: So there’s apparently a Stay Alive! modern survival rpg variant of Tunnels & Trolls 7th Edition. This is a collection of scenarios for that, set all over the globe. The collection includes Stay Alive! Lite’s 33 pages of rules.
  • Asteroid Cybele: The American Wasteland and Asteroid Cybele: Lords of London: It remains a shock to me that people still play and publish stuff for a game which was legendarily complicated in my youth. These two volumes are part of a four book series focusing on an apocalypse kicked off by an asteroid strike. The American Wasteland covers Miami and beyond with the framing device of a race from Miami to Seattle. Lords of London provides a setting book for the city.
  • Il Culto della Torre: (The Cult of the Tower) A sourcebook for the Italian rpg Nameless Land (2013). It seems to be both an adventure and a sourcebook with a diary as the framing device. Takes PCs to what used to be South America.
  • In Thy Blood: A campaign setting and adventure for the DEGENESIS rpg (2014). Original German version came out the previous year.
  • Into the Deep: This was a weirdly light year for Numenera (2013). This is the only hardcover released for the line, this covering all things in the oceans. That was supplemented by the short volume The Octopi of the Ninth World. They also release a Numenera Artifact Deck.
  • Overgrowth of the Undying: Our yearly Dystopia Rising (2011) sourcebook. This one covers the titular Overgrowth region and the Nuclear Family Faith.
  • Post-Cthulhu: Ah, another lovely piece of shovelware from Starbright. As always, has the complete Fate Core rules, and then material for running an after the Mythos rises campaign.
  • Shangri LA: A regional sourcebook for the hybrid rpg/miniatures skirmish game Wreck Age (2013). The company added a couple of other smaller releases this year as well. 

History of Universal RPGs
History of Steampunk & Victoriana RPGs
History of Cyberpunk RPGs
History of Superhero RPGs
History of Horror RPGs
History of Wild West RPGs
​History of Licensed RPGs
Samurai RPGs
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part One: 1976-1984)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part Two: 1985-1987)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part Three: 1988-1990)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part Four: 1991-1993)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part Five: 1994-1996)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part Six: 1997-1999)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part Seven: 2002-2002)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part Eight: 2003)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part Nine: 2004-2005)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part Ten: 2006)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part Eleven: 2007)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part Twelve: 2008)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part 13: 2009)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part 14: 2010)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part 15: 2011)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part 16: 2012)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part 17: 2013)
The Year in Post-Apocalyptic RPGs 2014
The Year in Post Apocalyptic RPGs 2015: Part One 
The Year in Post Apocalyptic RPGs 2015: Part Two
​History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part 20: 2016)
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part 21: 2017)
​
History of Post-Apocalyptic RPGs (Part 22: 2018)


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