New Arkadenverse Online Supplements: Arkaden Investigations

Hey peoples. I know, I know, I’m horrible at releasing Arkadenverse material at any fast rate. A few hundred pages can take a year or two working all on my own, and even then I end up having errata and typos that get called out.

But what if I told you some Arkaden material was coming to the blog, rather than by PDF? Material with no game rules, but information on the setting nonetheless? Would you be excited?

If you are, don’t worry, this isn’t a tease! It’s a thing I’m actually going to be doing with Arkaden Investigations, an homage to the D&D “Ecology of” articles of yore and Pathfinder’s similar “Monsters Revisited” concept. In Arkaden Investigations, an in-universe dialogue of some sort on the creature at hand, ranging from potentially biased personal diaries to magibiologist manifestos, will provide more information on classic Modern SRD creatures used in the setting as well as the monsters of the Molti Segreti Nascosti Core Rulebook and Supplemental-Cut Creatures. Expect the first installment soon…like, tonight or tomorrow soon.

 

Rappy’s RPG Reviews: 100 Conspirators

Last week, I reviewed Postmortem Studios’ 100 Conspiracies, a system neutral conspiracy theory idea farm for roleplaying games. If you haven’t read that review, go do so, because this is that book’s sister title and I will be referring to it.

What’s the Gist?

While 100 Conspiracies gave the conspiracies themselves, 100 Conspirators gives out the skinny on the people that actually perpetuate these schemes. As with its sister title, this book’s entries are all born out of the ravings of real world conspiracy circles and real world organizations that said conspiracy circles have exacerbated into fictional uber-entities with sinister plans.

 

Rappy’s RPG Reviews: 100 Conspiracies

Well, now this is something I haven’t really tried before. I’m going to be reviewing a book that is indeed a roleplaying game supplement, but one that is system neutral. While any roleplaying game book with a high enough fluff-over-crunch ratio could be used for the purposes of researching for another system – for instance, while I have no real desire to ever play the system, the amount of research and data that goes into GURPS books has ensured that my RPG library has a fairly solid section of said titles – a system neutral sourcebook is tailor-made to create no assumptions based on rules sets or game setting beyond a general idea of what direction the title is going for.

I’d actually been meaning to do a review of such a title for a while, but the logistics of trying to keep such a review in a roleplaying game context and not stray into just a generic book review was somewhat difficult. I think I’ve finally found a generic (if sometimes somewhat brief) system that works for such reviews, however, so let’s get our tinfoil reading caps out to look at the book 100 Conspiracies from Postmortem Studios.

 

Rappy’s RPG Reviews: Mars-A Roleplaying Game of Planetary Romance

Hello audience. With the recent passing of my grandmother and general blah-ness, I haven’t had much oomph to get a blog done before now. But hey, we all move on eventually, so here’s something special just for you.

With a relatively recent film – Disney’s John Carter – made out of A Princess of Mars, the first of Edgar Rice Burrough’s old classical Barsoom series, you might say that a review of a Martian roleplaying game with heavy ties to Barsoom might be making an attack of opportunity. You’d be right in saying that, of course, but I’m doing it anyway. It’s time to review Mars: A Roleplaying Game of Planetary Romance (hereafter referred to as MARG, for Mars: A Roleplaying Game), a d20 Modern campaign toolkit created by Adamant Entertainment.

For Barsoom Alvalia!

While the first Barsoom novels are indeed completely public domain, it is worthy of noting that this book is not specifically a Barsoom setting so much as an amalgamation of tropes gathered from the various reflections of the “planetary romance” genre. And what better company to cover such an amalgamation than Adamant Entertainment? After all, planetary romance is a sub-genre in both Victorian and pulp fiction, and Adamant has covered both – Victorian fiction with its Imperial Age series (the bestiary of which I reviewed back in March of 2009; apologies for the primitive nature of those posts compared to my more modern blog entries) and pulp fiction with its Thrilling Tales series (whose omnibus edition I also reviewed, in January of 2009). The Mars of MARG is pretty much the classical interpretation you’d expect, being a dying, arid world with mysterious ancient ruins, distant polar forests, and those ever-present canals. It is ruled by the Red Men, who are the Red Martians of Barsoom right down to being humans-that-are-actually-monotremes-for-some-reason, with the exotic places of the world being divided up amongst other beings born of the red planet. All of these species are detailed in the character creation chapter right after the introduction to MARG’s Mars, so let’s make haste and look at those.

 

Rappy’s RPG Reviews: Testament, Part 3

Welcome to the third and final piece of the Testament review. Here, we’ll be going in full steam and taking a look at the remaining chapters, from 7 to 25 and reaching our final verdict. Is this title anointed by the Heavenly Host, or cast down into the Pit of Despair? You’ll just have to stick around to find out!

 

Rappy’s RPG Reviews: Testament, Part 2

Alright, after that last tangent, we’re back with part 2 of the Testament review. And with increased font size, I might add, since I got some notes detailing the fact that my normal PDF-writing font size came out – well, odd, to say the least – in WordPress’s blog format.

 

Rappy Reminisces on Zoo Tycoon 2

Greetings, faithful viewers. To take a break from Testament for a moment, I figured I’d take a look at a game that has been on my mind a lot recently: Zoo Tycoon 2. Now, y’all know I don’t go into video game reviews that often, but I figured I’d at least give it a go nonetheless. A fair warning, though: this is less an in-depth review and more me enjoying hearing myself talk, so don’t expect any scoring or such from this post. If you want that, you may want to check Wikipedia’s page for animal lists and such. Sorry!

 

Rappy’s RPG Reviews: Testament, Part 1

Greetings, my viewers. You may notice that the format of this blog post is different than usual. Don’t worry, it’s not your computer screen or a hallucination brought on by the vengeful spirit of Horace Wells come back from the grave to take revenge on you for your last successful trip to the dentist. Instead, the reasoning is quite simple: this isn’t a written-in-WordPress post (dun dun dun)! To cut things short, with how often I’m on the road and out of the house lately, it’s far easier to type up a post in OpenOffice and copy-paste it later than keep waiting until I’m at a good Wi-Fi point before I continue writing. So think of this as a test run of that formatting; if you don’t like it, feel free to give some feedback in the comments, but hopefully it won’t be too abrasive to the eyes.

Moving on to the topic at hand…

 

Arkaden Supplemental-Cut Creatures Released

Yep, there first supplement for the Molti Segreti Nascosti campain setting is out, and can be downloaded here. And with that, I think I may be taking a little break from Arkaden writing again. Maybe get some blog posts done, read some stuff I’ve been neglecting, etc., etc.

 

List of (Eventually) Upcoming Molti Segreti Nascosti Titles

If it wasn’t obvious by the core book, I planned on revisiting the Arkadenverse further. I’ve got plenty of titles in my head to keep it up for a long while…but let’s just focus on the next couple of years or so first, eh? The following are a few titles that are in my “work on before any other writings” lineup.