Monday, June 8, 2015

Cool Stuff: Random Urban Encounters, Traveller 5, Open Quest 2 Free Edition, Mini-Dungeons for S&W and Blueprint Dungeon Commercial Art Packs

Poking around RPGnow.com can reveal some interesting new and hidden gems. Here's a few I thought I'd share....



Random Urban Encounters

Touted as a 5th edition-compatible supplement and published by Assassin Games, Random Urban Encounters provides 100 short descriptions of possible encounters in a fantasy city. Each description offers a quick paragraph of readable text, a paragraph on what's going on, and some "what if?" type follow-up that can expand on the encounter. It's a really handy little tool and could work for any level of game in a city. The book also includes a weather generator, personality chart for NPCs, tavern name generator and a printer-friendly edition for your table copy. For $2.99 it's a useful little book.


Traveller 5

It's nearly 800 pages now. Some commenters on the page seem to imply its grown since it's formal print release plus CD-ROM copies a few months back. Is that even possible? At $34.95 it's hard to pull the trigger...I'm holding out for a print+PDF option soon, more bang for the buck.

Still....that's a lot of game for a system that I already know can function quite well in about 200 pages in the Mongoose version. Just trying to figure out how T5 got so wildly out of control is vexing me, but the older reviews of its first release are curbing that curiosity a bit. I'll cave eventually.


Open Quest 2 Free Basic Edition

Not only is this free, it's essentially the full game, with an option to print for low cost ($10). If you want a easy-to-learn way to break in to the D100/BRP line of RPGs, this is definitely a viable option. The free version has no art other than the cover (which is a nice rendering from the first OQ book iirc) but some might actually say this makes it better than the full version, which has some subpar full color art (YMMV of course). I may have to pick up a print copy of the free version now.


Mini-Dungeon line of "Dungeons of Dazegoneby" from Creation's Edge Games

There are 8 of these so far, each one a short, sweet and to-the-point mini dungeon for use with S&W. The modules are very basic, and give you all you need for a night's adventuring with brevity....if you have a group like mine you'll find them fine skeletons off of which to dangle lots of extra plot data, since they leave most of that up to you anyway....these are hardcore "here's a quick excuse to dungeon delve, and look there's the entrance" type adventures. Fun stuff. At $1.50 per module the mini-dungeons are hard to resist, and I snagged all of them.

0One's Blueprints Professional Ten Small Dungeons

Each of the aforementioned Mini Dungeons utilizes a single map from 0One Games' "Ten Small Dungeons" line that are available in their commercial art royalty-free "PRO" edition. If you are also a fan of 0One Games then you might like to check out these modules too, as they could work great for personal projects or quick dungeons at the table. 0One also has "Five Dungeons" in the PRO art pack format that are full-page presentations for $10. Note that if you don't want to use them for royalty-free commercial art purposes, there are lower cost $1.95 personal-use versions as well.




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