Favorite New Game — #RPGaDay2015, Day 3

So, anyone who’s paying particularly close attention (I know who you are, all … three (?) of you) will have noted that I am slamming through these #RPGaDay2015 entries in fairly fast succession.  The day’s not over yet, and here I am, working on the third entry.

It’s not a huge mystery.  I really hate being late about this, and what with Gen Con and not really paying attention, I’m nigh on a week behind.  I mean, it might be fine with Ironbombs to be a couple of days late, but here in the Library … something.  Either that, or I’m so sick of Ironbombs snagging all of the good games away from me that I’m not going to play catch-up any longer.  (The truth being, with this blog close to a year behind on keeping a real schedule, I’m just glad to have some measure of inspiration at all.  And this is enough to keep me in front of the keyboard for a couple of minutes, all things being equal.)

This one is a weird one, for me at least.  I tend to buy so many games that there isn’t a lot of new stuff that goes into the Library.  More often than not, I tend to buy games to patch holes in my collection, which doesn’t really feel new so much as it feels like an addition to what has previously been established.  That said, I think I can make a good claim.

Favorite New Game (within the last 12 months)

My current favorite game happens to be one that I don’t yet own, technically.  And it’s only been released about a week back.

This honor goes to Fantasy Flight Games’ Force and Destiny RPG, which I have been playing since the Beta ruleset was released a year ago at Gen Con.  Right or wrong, I find Fantasy Flight’s strategy of putting out a hard copy of semi-finished rules to be a fascinating idea.  Paizo does similar with their playtest versions of upcoming character classes (most recently, the Occult Adventures collection, their own version of Psionics), but there’s an attendant murmur within the fan community of whether or not these actually serve as a bed for playtesting Beta rules or not.  FFG does put out incremental updates to specific rules and sich in their Beta versions, so I think there is a fair amount of feedback within the forums.  For whatever that is worth.

For my own part, I enjoy the early access to the material for my own sake.  I haven’t been active on the forums to see what the moods within the community are, nor have I spent much time trying to suss out what changes are needed to make this game into something other than what I familiarized myself with after the last Gen Con.  Really, all I did was get a handle on the specifics that were introduced for the broader Jedi campaign and ran with it.  If there was something that seemed out of place or egregiously overpowered, I checked against the forums as needed or did my own edits as I went along.  I know Star Wars well enough that I didn’t need to reference too much beyond Wookieepedia, and these rules are pretty conducive to kit-bashing as the need arises.

There are a couple of serious contenders to being my new favorite game, and they deserve some mention herein.

First up against the wall would be Anima: Beyond Fantasy, but this doesn’t really rate as being new, so much as it’s new to me.  I picked the entire line up during an online fire sale, where everything was marked down to a mere fraction of what it originally retailed for.  I get the idea that Fantasy Flight is burning all of their extraneous merch lines, of which this one would have been more expensive than its profit margins would have allowed for.  And I can’t blame them for this, since it’s a weird niche product anyway — an English translation of a Spanish game that tries its best to emulate Japanese fantasy.  And it’s pretty crunchy, as well, with an ostensibly percentile based system that goes off the rails almost as soon as complexity and variant power levels are given text.  I’m a huge, huge fan of the detail that I’ve seen in the game, but it’s going to require some serious devotion to crack the code enough to play the damned game.  And let’s not think of how much work it’s going to take to allow me to run it for a new group, let alone explain the rules quickly and simply.

Next, there’s the Cthulhu assortment.  Again, I managed to find an internet fire sale, reducing all of these titles to an much more manageable price point.  I bought all of these on the same shipment, which means that I’ve only skimmed some occasioned bits of text of each, but it gives me some fascinating insight as to which ones I’m more likely to run at a given point.

Working roughly backwards, we start with The Laundry, based on the book series by Charles Stross.  I have yet to read through these, but they come highly recommended by one of my regular gaming group.  The plot concerns an underfunded section of British Intelligence that deals with Mythos threats.  On the surface, this puts it as being a version of Delta Green, with parts of Necroscope and Night Watch, only with more bureaucracy and a slightly tongue-in-cheek outlook on things.  It’s a neat game, from what I’ve looked through thus far, but it suffers from being a standalone game, rather than a Call of Cthulhu supplement.  As such, there are rules from the Cthulhu main book included to allow the game to run without referencing anything else.

Then comes Achtung! Cthulhu, which casts the Cthulhu Mythos against a more or less Pulp version of World War II.  Easily the prettiest game line of the three within my Cthulhu assortment, this game suffers not from being a standalone, but from trying to dual-stat the damned things.  I hated it when games in the Deadlands line did this, and it’s not any better here.  A good portion of my discontent hinges on the fact that I rabidly dislike Savage Worlds, so having to share space on the page with that game means that there’s wasted space in the book for my purposes.

And finally, there’s Cubicle 7’s take on the same material as Achtung! Cthulhu, in the form of World War Cthulhu.  This is good, good stuff,  but where Achtung! would have you mix and match whatever interesting pulp ideas come to mind, this is treated a lot more drily.

The big difference between these two games comes in how the war itself is given treatment beside the in-universe truth of the Mythos.  For Achtung!, there’s no problem coming up with some convoluted plot involving the Thule Gesellschaft and Nyarlathotep.  If it sounds entertaining, throw that shit in!  In comparison, World War Cthulhu goes to great lengths to note that it was actual, human evil that bombed London and set up Auschwitz and Dachau, so involving the Cthulhu Mythos cheapens what they consider the true horror of the setting.  If Himmler was corrupted by whispers from Azathoth, that offers him a ready excuse for his actions.  Instead, the game goes in the direction of setting the two horrors beside each other, forcing a balancing act between a pair of different (yet no less abhorrent) evils.

I can’t say which of these games ranks higher in my estimation, but I have the feeling I would be more likely to run Achtung! on a regular basis.  I’d certainly use elements of WWC, but it comes across as being much more grim and scarring.

So, yeah.  Those are my runners-up for Favorite New Game.  I’m sure, had I read through them and run them after I’d gotten them, they may have displaced Star Wars, but right now, my priorities lie with the bird in the hand.

Memetic Transference — #RPGaDay2015, Day 1

So, funny thing…  Out of the clear blue, I get an update through my feeds, telling me that Ironbombs has done some recent posting, all with this blogger meme from Autocratik (I swear, I love the Sovietization, but I want to put two “k’s” into his web address).  And being Ironbombs, he’s a couple of days late to the party.

Naturally, this means that, if I am to engage in this as a dust-clearing exercise, I’m going to be closer to a week behind.

Oh, well.  No one has ever accused me of being hot on the button on these things.

Day 1 – Forthcoming Game You’re Most Looking Forward To

Had it not already been scooped by Ironbombs, it would probably be Torg Eternity.  I had the chance to talk to several of the developers at Gen Con, and the tweaks that are being made to this system and setting are enough to make me giddy already.  I own several copies of the original run (including the now-rare and inexplicable Revised & Expanded hardcover from the Gibson Era of West End Games), but from the sound of it, those are going to be pleasantly obsolete within a short time.  There are a number of things that I’ve been cautioned not to reveal until the involved parties have made announcements (it’s kind of nice being a known quantity to some of these guys), so I’ll hold off on the juicier aspects.  Suffice to say that, of all people, Greg Gorden is fully in support of the new direction of things, so any lingering doubts have vanished with that.

I will be honest, though.  I didn’t think this day would ever come.  The original incarnation of West End Games went bankrupt in 1998, languished in the hands of a weird French gaming company for a couple of years, and was eventually sold to Purgatory Publishing in 2004.  Torg itself languished until the “Kansas Jim” edition was published in 2005, which had the support of a couple of lackluster PDF modules and little else.  Even at the time, it felt like a quick and dirty way to sell warehouse stock.  This is not to say that it wasn’t a quality book.  It just needed more support than the hand-waved scraps it was given.  And then, in 2010, Ulisses Spiel got hold of the license and little else was heard.

It’s interesting, really.  There wasn’t much press regarding the acquisition of Torg by a German company, and once they’d finalized the sale, there wasn’t anything further on the public side.  Apparently, they had contacted many of the old WEG luminaries some years back, only to be met with a collective shrug.  It wasn’t until some of these same writers (on their own initiative, from what I was to gather) changed their minds and started assembling a stable of interested contributors that it got traction.  And here we are.

So, what is my actual game of interest?

Ryuutama, of course.

I put in post-Kickstarter money to Kotodama when I found out about this game, based on everything I read about the game in the aftermath.  It hasn’t been exactly speedy in its release, but I can hardly blame these guys, being that it is a side job for them.  (I actually talked with Andy Kitkowski at Gen Con one year, along with Atsuhiro Okada.  Nice guys.  The pity was that it was just a chance encounter, rather than something I was more prepared for.  Someday, I would love to have drinks with these guys, just hanging out and talking games.  Preferably somewhere in Tokyo.  But I digress.)

As I’ve said earlier, I am singularly ill-suited to run this game without a lot of prep.  It’s nothing like the sort of games that I would normally find myself putting together, but the challenge that this poses offers me some interesting insights.  It’s not often that I find myself in a gaming situation where I have to give this much thought to how a game should run or what sort of obstacles I should populate it with.  It’s actually sort of refreshing.  (All too often, I tend to tweak a game’s setting to conspiracy and eldritch horror; as one friend said, we only really run one type of game.)

The nice thing is that, apparently the print edition of Ryuutama is going to be showing up at the distributor sometime in the next month.  And unless I utterly borked up my order, I’ll be getting a copy of both the limited and the general release version.  You know, the shelf copy and the play copy.  From that point, I can dedicate myself to learning a new system and figuring out how to run it as it was meant to be run, rather than than how my natural tendencies would have me doing.

Other contenders for this honor:

Blue Rose, the AGE edition.  I put in for this Kickstarter, despite the fact that I have never a) played the original, b) played anything with the Dragon Age RPG rules that this is based on, c) paid any attention to the Titansgrave hoopla, or c) actually had a group for which this game might be appropriate.  The truth is, much like Ryuutama, I want to see things that I otherwise have not been likely to put into my own home games.  I’ve heard great things about the AGE system, outside of the Dragon Age setting, to the effect that it is supposed to be one of the better fantasy engines around.  And trying to put paid to some different gaming tropes would be a fine thing, just to shake things up a bit.  I’ve done the D&D tropes to death over the years, so breathing new life into these games is somewhat necessary.

Force and Destiny.  I don’t know as this counts, precisely.  For one thing, it officially released about a week ago, and I doubt very much that it differs in any substantive way from the Beta that I’ve been running games with over the last year.  That said, it will be nice to finally have my hardcover going up on the wall, to join the ever-growing FFG Star Wars line.  And what the hell, I’m sure that there are enough tweaks to make the new edition shine.

Apocrypha.  This one is a weird one, to be honest.  A card based RPG that might actually have some staying power.  There have been some other attempts at card-based RPG’s in the past, such as Dragon Storm, which had fairly limited success.  The backstory reads like a World of Darkness campaign, which is interesting in its own right, and the game is put together by Mike Selinker’s Lone Shark Games, who are generally responsible for Paizo’s spate of card games.  (Which, to be honest, may well be card-based RPG’s, but since I don’t personally know anyone who’s actually bought and played them, I’m not going to commit 100% to that idea.)

Lone Wolf Adventure Game.  I can’t exactly claim this one anyway, since I managed to pick up my Kickstarter copy at Gen Con.  (Signed by Joe Dever!  Whoo!  Very nice man, who seems mildly nonplussed to be so universally regarded.)  I haven’t perused it as yet, but I want to devote some time to it when I can.  The rest of the KS rewards are coming at some future point, so I guess I could have hinged my entry on that ideal.