Cheap Shot Special - Colorado Flood Relief Bundle

It's been a ridiculously busy week here with kid stuff every night and it continues into the weekend. One new thing came out this week that is a screaming deal - the Colorado Flood Relief Bundle on DriveThruRPG

From Fainting Goat's message on this:

And all proceeds go to help the Red Cross' flood relief efforts in Colorado. Please give it a look and spread the word.

The bundle is $20.- see this link for details.

If you're at all interested in Superhero games this is especially intriguing - look at what's included:

• Broken Shield (supers game)
• Bulletproof Blues (supers game)
• Capes, Cowls, and Villains Foul (supers game)
• Hope Prep (teenage supers for ICONS)
• ICONS (supers game)
• Megapolis (super city setting for BASH!)
• Mutants and Masterminds Hero's Handbook (supers game)
• Supers! (supers game)
• Watchguard (a supers setting for M&M3E)

Those are full games and full settings - plus a bunch of adventures, extra hero & villain compilations, and other support material for most of these games. You could run a campaign for a year at least with this stuff with no other material at all.

Beyond this there's some cool stuff for Savage Worlds too - Achtung Cthulu, Kaiser's gate (alternate history WW1), and a Deadlands adventure - that's a really nice bundle of stuff.

Anyway, no, I'm not involved with any of these companies or writers - I just know a good deal when I see it and thought I would share.

Cheap Shots - Two!

Two new worthy ones this week:

"A Role-Playing Game set in the aftermath of the Highlander TM Movie"

Hmmm...

"First of all, please note that this is a game for relatively mature and experienced players looking for more of a role-play than roll-play experience."

Oh boy ...

I have tried not to infringe any copyright. This is a game set in an existing setting created by someone else. I loved the first film and most of the others – and the TV series – so I thank the creators for providing this world for us to imagine our involvement within it. All I’ve done is create an RPG framework to make that possible.  

Where to start with this? I get it, people like Highlander. Heck, I liked the first one too. I suppose "Immortals" has finally drained out of the bargain bins across the country. I never really thought this was a different enough universe to warrant its own RPG - just play an immortal guy in some other game, like Champions. I made one for City of Heroes, gave him regeneration, a sword, long hair, and a kilt and called him "Eternal Scotsman" - this isn't hard.

Also, I thought the whole climax of the first movie was between the last two immortals? One lived and one died and SPOILER ALERT FOR A MOVIE FROM 1986 LOOK AWAY NOW: and the survivor was rewarded with mortality. That doesn't seem to leave much for a game specifically set in the world after this confrontation. From the preview:


These rules advocated personal growth by slaying others of their kind for their Life Force power which ultimately pointed to a future time and place where the final few would fight to the death to gain some powerful benefit. As it transpired, this meeting in New York in the 1980s is now widely believed to have been an elaborate scam of some kind dreamed up by an unknown agent for an unknown reason.

Somebody is scamming immortals now? That's it? That note above about loving the first film ... while I assume the other movies and the TV series spelled out something about this it seems odd to me to choose to set a game so that it deliberately invalidates the climax of the main story people know about this universe.

It's 18 pages and uses its own system and oh hey - that comment about not infringing copyright? Probably less of an issue if you weren't selling it! It's only a $1.99 but still - there's a difference.


Moving on we have this:

Tagline:
 The Assisted Living DEAD!

More:
Grab your Walker and Compression Socks! The Zombie Apocalypse has started...in your Assisted Living Facility! And you're locked in with them!

Alright this might be fun for a con game. It's 50 pages long, it's $5, and it too uses its own system. Hopefully a very_simple_system.

Wasn't this a GURPS supplement? Maybe not. It's probably the closest we will get to Bubba Ho-Tep the RPG so there you go. Kind of the  opposite of New Era in some ways too.

Anyway there are two new ones that caught my eye this week.

Cheap Shots

A few things that caught my eye on DriveThruRPG:

• "Moon Dust Men" - It's Kenneth Hite, it's for Gumshoe and you're chasing aliens in the 1970's for some reason - it's bound to be weird. I've been hearing about Gumshoe for a while now and I couldn't tell if I needed another book or what but I went ahead and spent my $2.95 this one to see. It's not complete - you need one of the other bigger Gumshoe games to get the rules - but it looks like a good enough treatment of the investigating-UFO-crashes-in-1978 genre if that's anyone's thing.

• Monster Hunter International RPG - looking here this is apparently a licensed game based on a book series that is using the Hero System! It's been awhile since I've seen anything licensed or new for Hero so I was kind of pumped. Then I started reading that it has the setting AND complete Hero System rules in a 300 page book ... hmmm ... that seems ... unlikely. Considering Hero 5th editon's core book was 372 pages, how could anyone fit a decent setting plus those rules into that size of a book? Then I checked Champions Complete ... and it's only 240 pages! OK, maybe this is possible. Maybe they finally have Hero moving in a more sane direction than it was going. It's a pleasant surprise. I'm not buying this particular book, but it's a nice thing to see.

• "100 Hungarian Sounding Names" - WTF? Is that a product or a google search? It's only 50 cents, but seriously, you would have to have internet service to get this product, and if you can do that you can type "Hungarian names" into your favorite search engine and have in seconds. Like this page. Beyond that, I can't think of a time I've ever said to myself "I really need a Hungarian-sounding name", although in one of my old Top Secret, James Bond, or Superhero games I might have used a few. It's a free market but this seems like effort that isn't going to see much use.

• "Evil Wizards in a Cave" - Wow, we are really scraping the bottom for adventure titles now aren't we? Not even trying anymore. Look for the sequel "More Evil Wizards in a Different Cave" coming soon. Title aside it's 88 pages long and appears to be a sandbox valley environment for OSR games - it may be fine as far as content. It's clearly no threat to my "Lots of Monsters in Really Small Rooms" megadungeon project.