Kickstarter - Combat Banes and Boons, Unforgettable Crits in Fantasy RPGs

What is that you say? A new Kickstarter from Phil Reed? Impossible! Heh. Phil is back with his Combat Banes and Boons, Unforgettable Crits in Fantasy RPGs Kickstarter.

Combat Banes and Combat Boons are critical failure and critical success results designed to make your skirmishes a tad more . . . interesting. Presented as a print-on-demand book or as print-on-demand cards, created by Lex Morgan and Philip Reed, these critical results may cause the heroes trouble (Banes) or might give the adventurers an unexpected benefit (Boons).  

NOTE: The project was originally conceived as two 50-card decks. We created the collected book edition for those gamemasters who prefer to use books over cards. Or, if you wish, you could hand the card decks to the players and use the book as a reference.

These rules were created for use with most editions and variants of the classic ampersand fantasy roleplaying game. (You know, the one that includes both the dungeons as well as the many dragons.) Gamemasters will need to apply their best judgment to resolving each entry, and clever GMs can no doubt use these ideas in almost any fantasy game of their choosing.

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. The Tavern DOES NOT do "Paid For" Articles and discloses personal connections to products and creators written about when applicable.

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Free OSR - Cities Without Number: Free Version

I'm a huge fan of Sine Nomine Publishing. Kevin Crawford's work, Starting with Stars Without Numbers, and the rest of his releases over the years, have been nothing short of inspiring and extremely useful, especially to the sandbox and improv-style GMs.

Kevin is also extremely generous, issuing Free versions of his various "Without Number" rulesets that are complete and extremely playable. These aren't quickstarts or light versions of the rules, they are complete without some of the extras supplied in the pay version.

So, what is Kevin's latest release, Cities Without Number: Free Version?

Cities Without Number is a cyberpunk role-playing game built for sandbox adventures in a dystopia of polished chrome and bitter misery. It's both a full-fledged Sine Nomine toolkit for building a cyberpunk world of your own and an Old School Renaissance-inspired game system for playing out the reckless adventures of the desperate men and women who live in it. Whether polished metal or flesh and blood, your operators will risk their lives and more to seize those precious things a merciless world would keep from them.

In its pages, you'll find...

• An old-school inspired game system that's fully compatible with the sci-fi Stars Without Number game and its fantasy sister-game Worlds Without Number
• Cyberware and sophisticated high-tech gear suitable for chroming the most discriminating cyborg and equipping the most refined of street operators
• Playability-focused hacking rules designed to give hacking-focused PCs useful and important things to do without forcing an entire separate mini-game on the GM
• Gear rules for drones and vehicles, to better equip PCs who want to bring a little extra iron on their next mission
• System-neutral Sine Nomine worldbuilding tools for helping a GM create their own custom cyberpunk world or elaborate the details of existing worlds and settings
• Gang, corp, and city district creation tools for fleshing out your world with people and places that fit
• Fifty Mission Tags for adventure creation, plus guidelines and step-by-step procedures for handling facility infiltrations, managing local heat, selling loot, and other activities beloved of corp-hating street scum everywhere
• The default campaign setting of the City, a premade backdrop to help you get into the game as quickly as possible

And that's just in this free version of the game. In the deluxe edition of Cities Without Number, you'll also be getting...

• Cyberware quirks and features for particular megacorp product lines
• Variant gengineered human types for PCs who don't fit the baseline mold
• Optional rules for the psychological strain of Cyber Alienation
• Optional rules for cheap street cyber, for those campaign settings where every goon with a knife has some wire beneath his skin
• Spellcasting, spirit summoning, and magical items for GMs who want to add a dash of magic into their cyberpunk world

For more than a decade, the Without Number games have given GMs and players the tools they need to forge their own sandbox worlds. Cities Without Number adds to that, so get it now and build a dystopia that's all your own.

 

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. The Tavern DOES NOT do "Paid For" Articles and discloses personal connections to products and creators written about when applicable.

DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern.  You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Anchor, YouTube,  or wherever you listen to your podcast collection. - Tenkar    

Bundle of Holding - Atomic Robo

It is no secret that I'm not a huge fan of the FATE system. Sure, I backed the Kickstarter and received oodles of support material, but the system itself just didn't do it for me.

The thing is, I AM a fan of graphic novels, and Atomic Robo looks like a fun one. I guess I can just ignore the included Atomic Robo RPG, or simply use it as a reference source.

Remain calm and trust in Science! We've resurrected our February 2021 Atomic Robo Bundle with nine complete .PDF graphic albums of the Eisner Award-nominated Atomic Robo comic series from Tesladyne LLC, plus the 2014 Atomic Robo RPG tabletop roleplaying game from Evil Hat Productions. In 1923 Nikola Tesla unveils a robot with automatic intelligence: Atomic Robo! Granted full American citizenship in 1938 after a secret military operation, Robo founds Tesladyne, a two-fisted think tank that explores the fringes of scientific inquiry. After decades of high-octane, full-contact hypothesis testing at the edge of human knowledge, Robo and the Action Scientists of Tesladyne are the go-to defense force against the unexplained.

Created in 2007 by Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener, Atomic Robo has been online since 2015 at atomic-robo.com. There's giant monsters, rogue agencies, underground cities, trans-dimensional vampires, one particularly annoying dinosaur, and explosions – lots of explosions. Atomic Robo reads like the Ghostbusters, Indiana Jones, Buckaroo Banzai, and Rocketeer movies crammed into a robot who wears pants. Jump in anywhere – each graphic album in this offer is a self-contained story, so you can read them in any order.

 

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. The Tavern DOES NOT do "Paid For" Articles and discloses personal connections to products and creators written about when applicable.

DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern.  You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Anchor, YouTube,  or wherever you listen to your podcast collection. - Tenkar  

Crowdfunding - Unnatural Selection: A Supplement for use with Shadowdark

I didn't realize Backerkit was its own crowdfunding platform, but now I know :)

Unnatural Selection: A Supplement for use with Shadowdark is funding directly via Backerkit and is "a supplement of classes, ancestries, adventures and more for use with the Shadowdark RPG."  Or, more precisely, "Unnatural Selection is a new digital and physical Supplement to the Shadowdark RPG. It introduces over 120 pages of new classes, ancestries, weapons, spells, untamed beasts, underworld oddities, magic items, adventures, and other enhancements while maintaining and expanding the core of the Old School Renaissance."

There's a ton of content under a single cover.

• 120+ pages in a concise, two-page spread layout
• Rules for all new elements
• 6 New Ancestries
• 4 New Classes
• 70 familiar and brand new spells
• 65+ New Monsters, Animals, and Underworld Oddities
• Backgrounds from the Underworld and Nature
• Nature Spirits & Death Pantheon
• New Support Spell Type
• New Carousing
• New Mishaps
• New Treasure and Magic Items
• Zero Level Gauntlet and Campaign Setting
• Incredible hand drawn black-and-white art

Do I need it? Probably not. Do I want it? Definitely!

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. The Tavern DOES NOT do "Paid For" Articles and discloses personal connections to products and creators written about when applicable.

DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern.  You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Anchor, YouTube,  or wherever you listen to your podcast collection. - Tenkar      

Bundle of Holding - The Nightmares Underneath (Old-school dark-dungeon tabletop fantasy roleplaying)

I do like a heavy dose of "dark" in my fantasy settings. Years later, I still feel that Midnight was one of the best FRPG settings ever. So, of course, I'm finding The Nightmares Underneath Bundle to be very tempting.

Adventurer! This new Nightmares Underneath Bundle presents The Nightmares Underneath, the old-school horror-fantasy tabletop roleplaying game from Chthonstone Games. The physical world faces invasion by deadly "incursions" from the Realm of Nightmares that manifest as dungeons. To destroy the incursion, your fantasy adventurers must risk nightmarish curses, face the dungeon's monsters, and loot its treasures. Use your loot to improve your home community, making it more prosperous and helpful for your expeditions into the ruins from the Age of Chaos, where you may find items of great magical power to banish the nightmares.

The Nightmares Underneath, a standalone game by Johnstone Metzger (Class Warfare, Adventures on Dungeon Planet, Wizard-Spawned Insanities), creatively adapts the systems common to old-school fantasy RPGs, replacing hit points with "Disposition" and introducing new alignment and spellcasting rules. We presented the 2016 First Edition of Nightmares in the November 2017 OSR 5 Bundle. This new offer brings you both editions, plus many incursions, monsters, and hexcrawls, for an unbeatable bargain price.

For just US$9.95 you get all three titles in our Nightmare Starter (retail value $45) as DRM-free ebooks, including the complete The Nightmares Underneath core rulebook in both its First and Second Editions (plus the free edition); the straightforwardly named Dungeon Full of Monsters, written for Labyrinth Lord with conversion notes for Nightmares; and a 36-page book of dungeon incursions, City of Poison.

The Nameless Grimoire for The Nightmares UnderneathAnd if you pay more than the threshold price of $23.12, you'll level up and also get three Bonus Nightmares worth an additional $60, including the Nightmares spellbook The Nameless Grimoire; the large-scale wilderness sandbox setting Only Monsters Here; and The Metamorphica (revised edition), a system-agnostic resource to generate mutations for dark fantasy, horror, transhuman sf, post-apocalypse, and even superhero campaigns.

 

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. The Tavern DOES NOT do "Paid For" Articles and discloses personal connections to products and creators written about when applicable.

DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern.  You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Anchor, YouTube,  or wherever you listen to your podcast collection. - Tenkar      

Kickstarter - DragonSlayer (Greg Gillespie's Old School Clone)

I know what some of you are saying, as I've heard myself ask it many times over - Do we need yet another OSR ruleset? The answer, surprisingly, is yes, so long as the new ruleset has something new to offer. ShadowDark is very much Old School while being built on a 5e rules engine and adding the torchlight gimmick, and it works very well.

Well, earlier today, Greg Gillespie of Barrowmaze fame, launched a new Old School ruleset titled Dragonslayer. So, what does Dragonslayer offer that brings something new to the table? Let's see how Greg states it:

Once upon a time, as kids in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we played the first role-playing game created by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson.

There were options at the time. Some played Basic and some most moved to First Edition (as best they could).

Most of us kept using the Basic Engine (elegantly restated by Tom Moldvay in 1981) and grafted the chrome of First Edition onto our existing style of play. We used First Edition spells, character classes, monsters, and all the adventures. We left behind lame rules that bogged down gameplay and made it feel like actuarial science (for example, counting segments for spells or weapon-speed factors, among others).

This wasn't Moldvay Basic and it wasn't First Edition.

This was the edition we all played. We called it .75 or halfway between BX and 1E.

This is the ruleset that I've played for decades. This is how I play medieval fantasy role-playing games. This is the way...I want to play fantasy role-playing games.

This is the ruleset I used to create and play some of the most popular and evocative megadungeon adventures on the RPG market today:

Barrowmaze, Archaia, HighFell, and Dwarrowdeep.

Both Archaia (2017) and Dwarrowdeep (2022) won the Three Castles Award for Independent Game Design in recent years.

This...is the DragonslayerTM Role-Playing Game.

DragonslayerTM is a 300 page rulebook with cover art by legendary ex-TSR artist Jeff Easley.

The DragonSlayer Kickstarter is about 26 USC in PDF and about 63 USC in Print plus PDF. I say "about" because Greg is Canadian and the prices are converted by Kickstarter into USC. When you read the word "about", you need to read it with a Canadian accent ;)

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. The Tavern DOES NOT do "Paid For" Articles and discloses personal connections to products and creators written about when applicable.

DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern.  You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Anchor, YouTube,  or wherever you listen to your podcast collection. - Tenkar      

Hear Me Out: TTRPG Achievements

 

So this last week I've been playing Minecraft off and on, deciding to go back to a Survival world I'd pretty much abandoned because I was an idiot who let the Wither loose in the Nether. I thought maybe if I let loose a bunch of Iron Golems they'd take care of it, but no....

....after a few (more) character deaths, and loosing a bunch more "leveled" gear, I decided I'd enlist some help, which I haven't done yet, but while I'm waiting for that help I've spent my time screwing around and I was surprised when I was awarded a Diamond Achievement, which means I managed something that less than 10% of players have done.

Cool...cool. While I'm screwing around, why not work towards some more achievements. Some were easier than others, just because the crap I've been doing....like my home base has a huge "aquarium" I built that has a full-up conduit, which means my "character", as it were, is able to breath underwater. Spend an in-game day underwater and ding! another Diamond Achievement (0.78% of players).

This got me to thinking that it'd be cool if we had achievements for table-top RPGs. Now I know darned well that this would be a HUGE ask of our community because I could see this being fractured beyond belief, but at a table/GM level....very doable. If it was actually a community thing then we could get something that looks like a cohesive art style across achievements, but right now....we just got me.

I spent a few hours, probably waaaaay too long, trying to come up with 600dpi 1" .png's for the 20 19 (I accidentally listed one twice) Achievements I came up with. I stopped a little more than halfway because it was more than a Sunday morning's work. Clearly I took some liberties with the graphic ideas, but not all:

(20 points) Designated Survivor: Bravely ran away as the only party survivor from a fight you couldn't win.

(5 points) Flawless Victory: Win a combat encounter without any of your allies taking damage.

(5 points) Resourceful Fighter: Defeat an enemy using improvised weapons or environmental objects.

(10 points) Avenger: In a subsequent battle, defeat an enemy who had previously killed a party member.

(20 points) Revenger: In a subsequent battle, defeat an enemy who had previously killed your PC.

 (10 points) Jester: Successfully stop the game for 1' because you lightened the mood with your witty repertoire.

(20 points) Highlander: There can be only one.....be the lone survivor of the battle.

(5 points) Melee Master: Win a battle using only melee attacks, without an party member relying on ranged attacks or spellcraft.

(5 points) No Mercy: Defeat an enemy while they are incapacitated or at a disadvantage.

(5 points) Lost and Found: Return to a location you've been to more than a month before and discover a hidden treasure.

(10 points) Underground Adventurer: Spend more than a month of in-game time underground.

(20 points) Death's Door: Survive a combat encounter with only 1 hit point remaining.

(20 points) Critical Master: Land three critical hits in a single combat encounter.

(20 points) Living Legend: Have a character make Name Level.

(5 points) Silent Negotiator: Resolve a significant conflict without resorting to combat, using only your words and diplomacy.

(20 points) Take One for the Team: Place yourself in harm's way and take a wound that would've killed another party member.

(20 points) Campaign Chronicler: Keep a detailed in-character journal or diary chronicling the party's adventures for an entire year's time (in or out of game).

(10 points) Divine Inspiration: Role-play a conversation with a deity, and survive the experience.

(10 points) Linguist: Fluently converse in five or more fictional languages during a single game session.

 

Obviously this is just and idea, and only a start, but I'm thinking of these achievements kind of as a counter to the GM Kill Stickers I've made to adorn my GM Shield.