This Week in RPGs: Remnants, Maschine Zeit, Starships & Spacemen, Beyond Red Crater, and Over the Edge

At long last and after an address snafu (which the customer service at OneBookShelf fixed immediately and to their credit, even though the error was mine) I now have the print versions of Maschine Zeit and Remnants. I've been reading both in electronic format, but not perhaps as dilligently as I would like; for me, games seem to work better in the print medium, and the PDFs are just more effectively useful as quick references, not for reading.

I'll post more about those two soon, but some quick comments:



Remnants is a "post-apocalyptic giant Kaiju vs. relic mecha" adventure setting with a nice ruleset to support it. The book is concise and well-written, with the setting content front-loaded and the rules in back (a popular indie style). It's a tight game, and I really plan to run this soon.

Remnants just got its first expansion book as well: The Broken Lands is $6 in PDF right now and having just downloaded it I shall include details on it as well in my Remnants review, which I'll hopefully get to in a week or two at the most. I can tell you right now, the review's going to be one of those fanboy gushy ones, I really like this game.



Maschine Zeit is inspired by the "haunted space station (or ship)" genre of horror SF. It's heavy on the expository fake clippings and bits of text that string together to form some sort of campaign picture. I am still wading through this one, as the PDF version wasn't quite as optimal as Remnants was for easy reading. The rules, as I've scanned through them so far, are really minimalist. Not sure if this is going to prove to be a better "idea/inspiration" book for a preferred system (i.e GURPS or BRP) or if it will stand on its own legs. I'm not a minimalist storyteller style rules kind of guy....I like a bit of meat on my games. We shall see, as with the print edition I should be able to finish plowing through it.

One oddity: for a future full of haunted space stations there are a lot of old school internet and news clips scattered through the campaign section of Maschine Zeit. I would think that in the next century or two blogs and internet anything, never mind news clips, will all be so quaintly "21st century," archaic relics of a bygone era of simpler communication.

Despite my worries that the system in Maschine Zeit is going to be a bit lean, I still picked up all the modules, and must say its a fine read and interesting premise. More to come on this, of course.



Today I ordered print copies of Mutant Epoch's latest module "Beyond Red Crater" and Goblinoid's revised 2nd edition of Starships & Spacemen. I rather like S&S, it's right at the lower end of the threshold of rules complexity for my tastes, and the homage/spoof of the Star Trek classic universe makes this a rather fun product....anyway, I have all of Goblinoid's other games in print now (except for Time Master) so this will more or less complete the GG collection of retroclones and homages that make for some great retro gaming.



Last but not least I spotted a copy of the 20th Anniversary release of Over the Edge. This is one of the greatest RPGs out there which I somehow never got to play or run when it was actively in print. I need to rectify that....as my old gang would attest, we had some wildly surreal and over-the-edge style adventures back in the day, albeit using Cyberpunk 2020, Dark Conspiracy, Call of Cthulhu, Kult, GURPS and Unknown Armies. How Over the Edge escaped our attention is beyond me.

Anyway, reviews of all of the above as soon as I receive and finish reading them!

RPG Firehose: The Stuff I'll be Reading and Playing in 2013

2013 has so far been better than average in terms of my outlook on the year ahead. I've cleaned out old stuff, and decided its time to bring in some new, fresh and interesting bits to grab my interest. I'm realizing I need to force myself to broaden my RPG habits a bit, move away from overdosing on fantasy as I have been for a few years now (and D&D-likes especially) in favor of a broader range of games. To that end, I just grabbed the following, and will discuss much more about them in the coming weeks:



SciFi20 is Quiklink's reimagining/revision to what was once called Traveller20 (T20), the D20 edition of Traveller that was part of the fantastic glut of D20 era games in the early 00's. I happened to like much about this particular iteration, and was tempted by the lure of a "all purpose" generic D20-based SF system, so I snagged the PDF bundle on RPGNow. I've loaded it on the Nexus for reading (and the Nexus has some very smooth apps for reading PDF files, by the way).





Getting the PDF of Dark Conspiracy is a bit of a cheat; I actually played a lot of Dark Conspiracy back in the early 90's, along with Cyberpunk 2020; together they were my go-to games for a while. I had long since given up my old books, but missed this game; it was well-written, and a lot of fun. By accident I discovered that Game Designers Workshop was mysteriously back in RPGNow and offering up scans of vintage products....including Dark Conspiracy 1st and 2nd edition, for purchase. I went ahead and snagged this in a bundle along with two newly written scenarios and the "collectors guide" PDFs they offer, which is pretty cool of them to do. I will probably get more. Anyway, I plan to revisit this game and will talk about the experience soon, as well. On top of all this, I subsequently discovered that the third edition of the game is already halfway through its release cycle for the core rules with Conspiracy Rules, the mechanics for the newest edition of the game. Sweet.



This one was discovered at random while browsing RPGNow for interesting RPGs, and after reading the description and some reviews I decided to buy the print+PDF package. It looks good on the PDF file, and I eagerly await the print on demand edition (a Birthday present to myself, heh). What's it about? Basically it's abount haunted space stations and scifi survival horror. As I read more I'll report further down the road.



Being on a roll in searching for interesting and random games on RPGNow I also snagged this one, a game about a forlorn land littered with the apocalyptic remnants of giant robots from long ago. The premise was tantalizing, the reviews were all filled with glorious praise, and after ordering the print+PDF bundle I am pleased to see that the PDF is optimized for tablet reading. Looking forward to exploring this one!



I picked up this horror system based on the text description alone, and the graphics also looked good. So far its a bit hard to say if I'm really going to like it or not....I'm a bit of an old crusty sort when it comes to horror RPGs (never recovered from the unholy trinity of CoC, Kult and Unknown Armies, which together define horror RPGs for me). Still, I'm reading through it and its two free scenario packs and will discuss it in the coming weeks.



I actually downloaded Novus a while ago but plan to explore it in more detail as part of my "discover new RPGs" project for the next few months. Novus is written by Tim Dugger and it has some specific roots in HARP (which in turn is a derivation of Rolemaster), but Novus is far enough removed from its inspirational predecessors that it actually looks really fun and interesting to me.



This was a shoe-in...a SIEGE-powered pulp adventure game? Hell yes, sign me up! I've been planning to get it for a while, snagged it via Discount Games (one of my favorite Ebay sellers) and am looking forward to checking it out. My print copy is on the way, but the PDF is also available here. I really hope this game has all the right bells and whistles for the genre, as I think the SIEGE mechanics could make for a great pulp system.

Maybe if Amazing Adventures succeeds it will motivate the Trolls to repackage Star Siege into a similar format...I think Star Siege suffered from its format and style a bit when it first came out, and the Trolls have gotten so much better at layout, design and editing on their products ever since.



Next up, not exactly a "new" system to me, but one I have wandered away from due to the prodigious size of the last couple editions' core rulebooks. Champions Complete is an experiment from Hero Games, apparently, a return to the days when one book could give you the rules and material for an entire genre. I hope this experiment succeeds, and that we can look forward to stand-alone editions of Fantasy Hero Complete and Space Hero Complete in the future. I'm not that up to speed on the 6th edition of Hero System, either, so this will still have some new surprises for me, as well. I picked this one up in print, but it is also available in PDF here.



I bought In Flames and its two sourcebooks a while back in print form but am including them in this as I would really like to finish reading the game and maybe even run it. A strange universe of transhumanism with overtones of voodoo mythology as the premise for a sort of "higher space" from which loa-like transhuman entities are cast out to do penance in the mundane realms of normal human space? Powered by the D6 Engine? Sign me up!


Anyway, I plan to pick up a few more new RPGs in the coming weeks, and will make 2013 my "year of new RPG exploration." Who knows, maybe I'll finally get a chance to play a few, too!