Good Stuff in the Mail, PS4 Announcement and More

Still reading Magic World. It's definitely a good book, and it's got plenty of content to support some robust campaigns. If you've ever played the old Elric! RPG then a lot of the content in here will feel familiar. It's key feature right now is that it works well as a streamlined version of Runequest, so if you're looking for a faster "get into the action" RPG that doesn't deal with as many technical details, MW is a great choice. The fact that it is 100% compatible with the rest of the BRP line just means adding to the system is that much easier. You could easily use this with any of the fantasy settings already out in print for BRP, for example, or pretty much any BRP-compatible product. All of the old out of print Elric! books would work with MW almost as-is.

My numerous beginning-of-year purchases keep rolling in. My copy of Over the Edge 20th Anniversary Edition arrived, a decent ebay score ($50 for the book instead of $75). I love this game, and to this day it still boggles me that I didn't run it back in the day. I drew a lot of inspiration from OTE in my early nineties games, especially Cyberpunk 2020, Dark Conspiracy and GURPS....but OTE was a bit too minimalist in terms of the game engine for my tastes back then. Nowadays I'm a lot more receptive to its brand of mechanics, which feel positively quaint compared to some current popular indie systems out there.

Aside from that, Beyond Red Crater for Mutant Epoch and my print version of Starships & Spacemen 2nd Edition arrived from Lulu. Both great books. Last night during the Wednesday game some of my players brought up Mutant Epoch again, expressing interest in trying it out. I may have to throw it down as the next game to play when the current Pathfinder campaign ends.

I've got mobilized interest in a Tuesday night bi-weekly game now, one which we will host from home so my wife can play (playing from home in theory making child management easier). It looks like the crew who want to play are up for it as an alt-game night, so I'm proposing Magic World to start off with, and will then plan for future games that include Starships & Spacemen, Remnants, Survivors of the Fire and Over the Edge. If time permits I may get even more games in sometime down the road, but I think those are the top dogs I want to focus on right now (assuming Mutant Epoch gets some time on Wednesday night, that is!)

In video game news the Playstation 4 was announced (albeit not shown) yesterday and the top points of interest and contention that video game journalists are bringing up right now seem to be:

1. PS4 is just a consolized PC (so was the Xbox 360)
2. The cloud gaming option is evil
3. Lack of backwards compatibility is evil
4. Sony is evil
5. And it will be out in time for the Holidays this year.

So, business as usual I see!

No price announced for it, but if the thing costs more than $400 I am definitely out (I can stomach paying less than that for day one buy-in, but only barely). I don't care about backwards compatibility at all, which is because I just bought a PS3 so I have that covered (and if I want to play more than is offered on that, I'll find a PS2).

Anyway.....eager to see what Microsoft announces next.

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!