Looking Back to 2014 - Scarlet Heroes (Sine Nomine)

I can't believe Scarlet Heroes was first released in 2014. Now I find myself desperately looking for my physical copy on my unsorded bookshelves. I backed the Scarlet Heroes Kickstarter back in the day and I so wanted to run this, but I never had a small enough group. Now I'm tempted to try this as a solo RPG. Kevin Crawford simply does great stuff.

Scarlet Heroes is an old-school tabletop role-playing game designed to provide classic sword and sorcery gaming for one player and one gamemaster. Unlike most other RPGs, Scarlet Heroes is built to support one-on-one play, with no need for a full-fledged party of adventurers to provide an evening's entertainment. Whether for a spouse, kid, curious friend, or just as an alternative to boardgames for those nights when only one or two friends can make it to the gaming session, Scarlet Heroes gives you the tools for good old-fashioned skull-cracking adventure.

Scarlet Heroes can be used both as a stand-alone RPG and as an overlay over your favorite old-school game to make its adventures playable for single PCs or very small groups. It shares the same classic statistics and basic game mechanisms as these old-school favorites, but by changing the interpretation of these numbers it makes it possible for a single courageous adventurer to dare perils that would otherwise threaten a half-dozen freebooters. With Scarlet Heroes, a GM can pull out a favorite module, grab a convenient friend, and have a full night's adventure with no tweaking, alteration, or adjustment of the material needed.

Inside the pages of this book, you'll find...

• A full stand-alone RPG system that can also be used as an overlay atop most popular old-school games.
• The Red Tide campaign setting as a default for the game, with a full bestiary of Southeast Asian-inspired monsters, suitable new magic items, and a full list of new cleric and magic-user spells for that setting.
• Sixty new adventure tags of the sort beloved in Stars Without Number and the Red Tide Campaign Setting sourcebook. Mix and match to fashion your own perilous circumstance.
• Solo adventure tools for genuine single-player RPG gaming. Mix your own creativity with table results to create a narrative for your own hero's adventure... or use them as inspiration in crafting something for a group.

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Kickstarter - 5E (SRD) RPG Stock Art Illustrations in OSR Style / Make 100

Original fantasy artwork. For use in books, tabletop game material, or elsewhere. Permissively licensed for personal and commercial use.

I'm a huge fan of stock art. I've used it in prior releases, and even the cover of Swords & Wizardry Continual Light is technically stock art. It's an affordable way for small publishers to get quality art made by actual human beings.

The 5E (SRD) RPG Stock Art Illustrations in OSR Style / Make 100 Kickstarter (a long and unwieldy title) showcases stock art by Tara Quinn. I haven't seen Tara's work before, at least not that I know of, and her work is a bit more cartoonish than I'm used to, but I find it surprisingly pleasing. I'll be backing this. It's 25 bucks for 100 pieces of art, quality art, and that's hard to beat.

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 - Axes and Anvils

This was one hell of a surprise when I saw it pop up earlier today on Bundle of Holding. Axes and Anvils has one heck of a history, and the fact that it exists at all is a testament to the tenacity of Andrew Shields. Andrew took a steaming pile of poo and turned it into RPG gold, and I salute him for it.

Adventurer! This all-new Axes and Anvils Bundle presents Axes and Anvils: A Game of Dwarves, the dwarf-clan tabletop fantasy roleplaying game from Andrew Shields at Shields Up! Publishing. In the Kingdom of Stoneshadow, your Fellowship of experienced warriors undertakes missions to help your clan. Axes and Anvils character creation is fast and easy, the setting is strong in flavor and atmosphere, and the clan framework easily supports both one-evening adventures and years-long sandbox campaigns in the open-table "West Marches" style. If you like kickass warriors, player-driven action, and battles against undead warbands in the Shadowmines, Axes and Anvils is your Dynastic Prestige toolkit for crafting mithril-grade adventures.

For just US$9.95 you get all six titles (plus one pay-what-you-want)in our Anvil Collection (retail value $43) as DRM-free ebooks, including the complete Axes and Anvils core rulebook (plus the Clan Record Book, Character Pack, and the pay-what-you-want Quickstart Rules); the Gamemaster rulebook Under the Mountain; and the Starter Deck and Lore Deck that make character generation easy.

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 - The Slumbering City - A Shadowdark RPG Adventure

I'm a huge fan of Thom Wilson (and consider Thom a good friend). Thom understands Old School Gaming. I'm also a huge fan of Shadowdark. It's the only game my game group has played in an actual livestream - actually, we've done so THREE times now :)

The Slumbering City is Thom's latest Kickstarter. PDF is 7 bucks, print plus PDF is 17. 

A tribute to the creator and adventures of the mightiest barbarian in fantasy literature. For the Shadowdark RPG system, 4 to 6 characters of 2nd to 4th level.

A black & white, digest-sized, saddle-stitched (soft-cover) adventure of 38 to 40 pages. Features all-new artwork and maps by renowned creators including Luiz Prado, Jeff Madding, Joey Docil, Jared Binder, Mark Lyons, MonkeyBlood Design, and more.

It is an adventure filled with strange people and supernatural horrors. Players may find some encounters easy, but others so deadly they end up running for the fabled city’s exit.

This is the third Kickstarter for which we are using Lulu to print our saddle-stitched books. The two other Kickstarter books came out great. We prefer saddle-stitched books to perfect-bound in this smaller format, and Lulu does a great job in the print-on-demand market with this binding type.

Lulu charges the publisher an additional $1.50 per drop-ship order (I create the KS reward order on the Lulu site, then have them produce and mail the book to backers). I have to add this cost to the PoD reward (already added to the $17 tier cost). To be clear, this is not charged to the backer after the project, but as part of the initial tier cost.

 

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 

Humble Bundle - Play Pink (Gloomhaven Small World, Arkham Horror, & More)

The Play Pink Bundle (supporting the Breast Cancer Research Foundation, thus "Pink") includes digital versions of MANY top games, including Gloomhaven, Small World, Arkham Horror, Game of Thrones, Carcassonne, and others. The core Gloomhaven game is nearly 35 bucks by itself on Steam, yet the full Play Pink Bundle is only 20 bucks (10 bucks if you DON'T want Gloomhaven).

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 

Computer RPGs Just Aren't a Suitable Sub for TTRPGs.

If you're like me at all, and I'm willing to bet in this regard you probably are, when you explain to "outsiders" that you're a gamer, they immediately think you like to sit around and play video games all day. In my case, I do sometimes, but I don't define myself by console or PC (like "those" gamers usually do.) Still it's far too hard to explain (many times again...) that I mean table-top RPGS. 

Of course it doesn't help that I have the opportunity to fiddle with the Xbox controller far, far more than I get to sling dice. A lot of times it's just a substitute, but it's far from a suitable-sub. First off, I'm usually a completionist. If I can 100% a game, or think I can, I'm going for it. My gamerscore is currently standing at 99,300....but that's probably more a factor of having an Xbox for so many years than my awesomeness of playing. I do have 38 games 100%'d and some of those were a PITA. IIRC one I had to set my calendar and play on a certain anniversary day (couldn't cheese it by changing my system clock), and some have recockulus requirements (one step beyond ridiculous).

Even though there are computer RPGS, they are just so not the same and I FINALLY got to the point with my current game (Starfield) where I 100%'d it and can walk away. I am so effing glad to be done and I'll admit the game stopped being fun maybe last week when I realized I could crank up the difficulty to the maximum and still play easily. 

There is such a wide divide between TTRPGs and Computer RPGs, and I think I was experiencing all of the issues that highlighted this difference:

• Save Scumming: TTRPGs don't allow you to screw up and "go back" to an earlier point and try again. Even worse, you can't save at an opportune time to "rinse & repeat" actions to try and try again for a better loot outcome. The RNG (random number generator) gods aren't always so kind, so at one point I tried for a couple hours to get a better pistol, which I never got (but I did get a kick-ass sniper rifle).
• Cheesing the AI: probably has an actual name, but it's too easy to watch the AI routine do it's thing, establish patterns, or just ...well wait. If I shoot a guy in the head and his buddies see him die, they will only spend a small amount of time looking for you, before just giving up and going back to their routine. I don't think a GM would let the players get away with hiding for a minute......
• Grinding: This is almost the worst thing with computer games, having to just re-do things over and over because you need to get a certain amount of experience to get that skill you need, or a specific number of widgets to be allowed to progress. While TTRPGs have you doing stuff to get XP to level, I cannot think of a single time a GM has let you re-run an encounter or scenario/adventure over and over. With Starfield a lot of "unique" missions (bounties for the most part) were set in different locations that were exactly like others. It got to the point in Starfield where I knew that on the 6th landing of this one facility there would be a dead scientist, and on a certain table would be a hookah (noticeable because the "tobacco" vials looked like something out of Resident Evil).
• Achievements: This probably doesn't sound like a problem, and you'd think after this post I wouldn't see it as a problem, but in-game I did some things that I wouldn't have done otherwise....just so I can get that achievement. I think I would have stopped playing last week if not for "needing" to get to level 100, and the cheesy stuff I needed to do to get from where I would've quit at level 65 to that level 100.
• Bugs: There is a bit of a tie for the actual worst part of a computer RPG, with one part being bugs/glitches in general. Bethesda is kind of known for being buggy as hell, and fixing bugs is something they eventually get around to. On my game there was a power I couldn't use without basically crashing the game, another I just couldn't earn, and so....so much more. In my game there were portions of a city that just....disappeared. I eventually found it. It wasn't so much that it didn't render, just it rendered at an altitude that put in in space. On the plus side one bug kept me from being able to steal spaceships I should be allowed to, but let me get access to a line of starships I was not supposed to be allowed to.
• Solo play: The other tie for worst part is having to play by yourself. A HUGE part of TTRPGs is the social aspect of playing with others. Sure, there are MMORPGS, but they take these computer problems and ramp them up to the Nth degree.

Let's just say I'm looking forward to getting some face-to-face gaming in next weekend with the NTRPG folks.