Posts Tagged With: old school

Kickstarters To Watch: Inverse World

Inverse World is a Dungeon World-based product featuring a unique new setting and many new playbooks. Inverse World has a few design tenets that separate it from common fantasy RPG tropes – for example, flight is not a feared, game-breaking ability, and there is no weird undertone of racial determinism like there is in a lot of other games, where your race will determine what roles you do well in. Instead, the races of Inverse World are all one people but with different appearances, but it doesn’t look as though it will play a role in mechanically pigeonholing you. While the Game was originally for Dungeon World, it’s now also offering a FATE system product that you can also pledge for, if you’re not interesting in Dungeon World.

There’s several levels of rewards you can go for. At the $10 level you get your pick of Dungeon World or Fate Inverse World PDFs, while at $15 level you get both at once. The $30 level is the first physical tier, though it also includes the PDFs. For $50 and $70 you get some physical goodies like post-cards, design commentary, thank-you notes and custom content for your own game. $100 gives you everything plus some artwork. A special $125 bundle intended for a group of four people comes with multiple copies of the game and some of the goodies, and baked-in international shipping, which is a good idea considering how much international shipping can be a bummer for both kickstarter backers and for the creators.

Inverse World is already funded, so you don’t have to worry about whether or not you’ll get it – now it’s all about what you’ll get out of it. The Kickstarter has currently accrued $9000 worth of donations. A number of stretch goals have been reached, such as an additional post-card and new Adventure Locations for the game. The next Stretch Goal at the $10,000 level adds an Instant Islands guide for DMs to quickly create new, interesting places; a $13,000 stretch goal adds vehicles and mounts to the game. Both sound like great values that could vastly improve the play experience.

If you’re a fan of Dungeon World or FATE and want a unique and tasteful new take on fantasy, you’ll want to back this. Already even the smallest tier is looking like a great deal, so give it a look.

Categories: Campaigns, D&D 3.5, D&D 4e, Fluff/Inspiration, Kickstarter, Legacy D&D, News, Other Systems, Products, RPG | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Kickstarters To Watch: Highlights

I normally only cover one product on my Kickstarter posts, and always one that I can write a little bit about or touches me personally in a way that gets me going. There are a lot of kickstarters than interest me and might have gone under people’s radars but that for one reason or another I’m not able to write full posts on each of them, usually because the products are very simple and speak for themselves. So I thought I’d round them all up in one post and write a little bit about them. It’s not that I don’t like them, after all – but I don’t think I could write 500 words on each of them alone! You deserve to know about them nonetheless.

Tavern Cards: Tavern Cards it a product of Chaotic Shiny‘s Hannah Lipsky, long-time maker of Random Generators for RPGs. This time you can help her kickstart a random generator for taverns in the form of a deck of custom playing cards, fully playable in your favorite standard card games like poker, while also containing colorful artwork. By drawing random cards from the deck you can generate a random tavern as explained in the description. $13 gets you a Tavern Deck, $45 gets you a deck and a signed print of one of the cards of your choice by the artist, and for $120 you can be a character on a card! Tavern cards has 14 days to go and is 3/5ths funded, and it’s a simple and interesting idea that I think is quite worth a look.

Thematic Fate Dice: This Kickstarter is essentially for a batch of Fate/Fudge dice that have symbols on the faces instead of just pluses and minuses. I normally use pretty stock dice, but I’ve seen people with all kinds of crazy dice on them that look great. $14 gets you one set of 4 dice, $21 gets you 8 dice, and so on. Most of the pledge levels are different amounts of dice and covering shipping costs. So if you’d like some new dice with colorful faces, you might give this a shot. They’re about halfway funded.

Gnomish Adventurers: I’m not really a Gnome superfan (there is a lot of evidence on twitter of me suggesting gnomes just be thrown out of fantasy games) but even I took notice of these cool-looking Gnome miniatures. The miniatures are already funded, so look to the stretch goals instead: $30 will get you a full set of gnomes, and then some special dice, character sheets and an additional figurine or sprue set. Higher rewards include more sets. Check the page for all the deets.

That’s it for the first batch, if you have any Kickstarters you’d like me to look at, feel free to email me about them. However, I will say that I’ve been getting a lot of requests, and sometimes they really don’t catch my eye. I can’t promise I’ll post about every one, even in these little collections, because sometimes either I’m not interested enough in it, I’d be uncomfortable talking about the project because of my own personal ethics and morals, or I flat out don’t really like it. I try to respond to every email as best as I can, but please take this into consideration before contacting me!

Categories: 13th Age, D&D 3.5, D&D 4e, Fluff/Inspiration, Kickstarter, Legacy D&D, Meta, News, Other Hobby, Other Systems, Products, RPG | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Sources of Challenge In Story Scenes

Most RPGs don’t require explicit challenge in order to be fun, and what exactly constitutes a challenge will vary by the individual. Challenge can be pretty abstract. Some won’t feel challenged until they’re at their wits end, pulling their hair out trying to figure out a solution. Some think that challenge is purely something the rules create while others think the very nature of conflict and resolution will always provide a challenge. I like challenge – but I’ve been thinking about what that entails for me.

Combat is the easiest place most of the time to quantify “challenge.” There’s usually numbers there that are going up and down and make it easy to spot where difficulty is being had. When things start to grind, you notice it. However, in “story scenes,” challenge can be harder to gauge. Yesterday I thought out loud about some of this stuff to a friend, today I’m posting my thoughts. I will definitely have missed something here, so you can add your own thoughts in the comments section.

(I don’t mean to imply combat is inherently devoid of story or that story is always the province of a different kind of scene, but I need a way to quickly differentiate scenes where you interact with the world and NPCs from scenes where you want to hurt them – because a lot of times these two have different game design priorities in RPGs.)

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Categories: Campaigns, D&D 3.5, D&D 4e, Fluff/Inspiration, Legacy D&D, Meta, Other Systems, RPG | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

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