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Someone get the wet noodle and give him 40 lashes! You'll remember that soggy, starchy back for next time!My bad, I didn't realize there was a Zine thread.
Action Potential is a Forged in the Dark tabletop role-playing game in Zine format. Set in a transhuman, body-swapping dystopian far-future, players create unique characters who form a Crew. Together they must make their way through a hostile and unforgiving universe!
Will you seek infamy and fortune as smugglers running illegal tech? Perhaps you will become highly-paid assassins working for one of the shady Mega-Corps. Or maybe your Crew has a more noble goal, and you will fight against the cruelty and injustices you find.
The Bebop. Serenity. The Millennium Falcon.
You can’t have a good space story without an iconic spaceship. Of course, more often than not, the heroes of the story aren’t flying some shiny new cruiser. Those are for the wealthy, the elites—not our lovable scoundrels. No, they fly the bucket of bolts—the outworn, patched-up junker held together with hope, prayers and duct tape.
The eponymous 'bucket of bolts'
These ships weren’t always hunks of junk though—they have long and storied histories, and might even have been respectable vessels at some point. We only ever see a slice of that story though, a single captain and their motley crew.
This game flips the perspective.
Dang I am loving the resurgence of zines, I feel like they are a perfect vehicle for the creative DIY aspect of our hobby.
Yeah all of chuckdees pics come up as verify as human to me as wellHey guys I am ready to support a bunch of stuff but I can't read the recent posts.
I can see them, so clearly I passed the test.Yeah all of chuckdees pics come up as verify as human to me as well
Against the Dark Conspiracy is a tabletop roleplaying game for 2–5 players and 1 gamemaster (GM) about capable professionals confronting a shadowy supernatural Conspiracy before it comes for them or those they care about.
Against the Dark Conspiracy is a rules light supernatural thriller game with mechanics built out from Cthulhu Dark (by Graham Walmsley). For a free introduction to an earlier iteration of some of the game's core mechanics check out my game Alien Dark.
Players take the role of people who previously made their living in Europe's overlapping crime and espionage communities. That's how they discovered the Conspiracy behind the skein of what passed for their normal lives. The die was cast; they can never unknow what they have discovered; never go back to what they were before.
Doing dubious and dangerous things for their country &/or personal gain has left them with few ties to family or friends, making the ones they have left all the more important. That's why they have to make a stand and take the Conspiracy down one corrupt piece at a time, before it catches up with them and anyone who still cares about them.
With the help of some six-sided dice and a deck of cards, you can tell a story better than any Hollywood war film. You'll create a fresh-faced young recruit and follow them through their military career, celebrating their triumphs and commiserating their defeats. Your character will be indellibly marked by their experiences, growing in unpredictable ways as your story develops.
Your narrative could be a series of letters home, or after action reports. You might record audio snippets on your smartphone, or write an in-character diary.
With nine stage tables, and fifty-two random events, every career promises to be different. The zine also includes two quick-start guards, one covering the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the other throwing you into the jungles of Vietnam with the United States Navy SEALs.
The 13th Fleet is a light-hearted and occasionally co-operative role playing experience. Officers of the Imperial Armada (and especially the 13th Fleet) have traditionally furthered themselves through ruthlessness, deceit, and the needless sacrifice of disposable Redshirts. While they’ll need to occasionally help each other in order to make it home, the Captains will benefit from causing entanglements for one another. The campaign will end with a clear winner, who will be promoted to Admiral and named Fleet Champion upon their successful return to Imperial Space.
Or it’ll end with the remains of the 13th Fleet floating as cold, dead debris through the dark void of space.
. . .
One of the two.
Lowlife is a toolkit for old-school RPGs about delving into tunnels, trenches, and mines.
The zine has:
Critically, Lowlife is not a setting guide or an adventure; there's no preset content here. Rather, it's a toolset for GMs and players, full of rules and content you can slot in at your table when and where you need them.
- Systems and consequences for caving, climbing, and tunneling: all the ways you might interact with (and suffer horrible fates in) caverns and mines.
- Hazards, challenges, and encounters players can grapple with, down in the dark:flammable gases, toxic molds, and mysterious geological phenomena.
- A handful of monsters and beasties that might live in the shallow underground: critters like the dire hellbender, the precognitive mole, and the greater trollworm.
- Items to use in the tunnels: the standard tools and dynamite, yes, but also exciting chemicals (like gelignite) and strange devices (like singing holler-hammers).
- Tables for generating your own warrens and trenchworks from scratch, if you want to build a hellhole dungeon from the ground up (or down, as it were).
- Guidelines for modifying existing dungeons to be denser and tighter, if you already have a dungeon in mind but want to up the level of tension and danger.
- Bits of flavor, aesthetic, and worldbuilding scattered throughout.
Rascals is a science fiction table top role playing game of action and adventure. The game system uses traditional playing cards and poker chips, and is designed to bring the tension, twists of fortune, and calculated gambles of action adventure stories to the fore. Rascals is ideal for 2-5 players, including the GM.
You are Rascals: ex-special forces, spies, or crooks. Hard boiled types who worked together in the hottest zones during the former unpleasantness. You were some of the few who managed to get out, make a new life, but something has changed all that...
Now the old crew is together again, you Rascals who survived the bloody final years of terrible war, have been pulled back. An abominable plot is unfolding in secret...
From high-tech cityscapes to shattered habitation domes, through the heaving corridors of stations in chaos to empty transfer stations and the broken worlds beyond... Where will your path lead, and what awaits at journey’s end?
At long last, the Thawing Kingdom has found its way to becoming more than a series of posts on my blog as a part of this year's annual Zine Quest! Though, you might not be familiar with either. The Thawing Kingdom is a land where an old king cracked open his shrivelled black heart like a rotten walnut, to let a great supernatural frost into his kingdom out of spite. That kingdom was covered in ice for five hundred years, and the setting describes the land when it finally, after centuries, thaws again.
It's a great frosty wetland, filled with melting ice lakes, swamps, ruins and glacial rivers. Half-frozen wights stalk the forests, poisonous drakes have flown in from the sea, and the dead king's dread Glass Knights march in solitude through the night, with no master to serve and swords of frostbite in their hands.
Meanwhile to the south, the smoke stacks of Draailant belch out the fumes of dead gods. They have been awake for those five-hundred years, with dreams of dark, flaming machines...
External Containment Bureau is a game of paranormal investigation and bureaucracy using a lightweight, hackable version of the Forged in the Dark design framework. You play as trained agents of the External Containment Bureau, an organization tasked with the study, identification, and containment of paranormal phenomena. The Bureau authorizes agents to make use of these phenomena to give yourself incredible powers (so long as the proper forms are in order). But take care: using paranormal energies inches you ever closer to joining the ranks of the paranormal yourself. Will you transcend humanity in the line of duty? Play to find out.
If you enjoy media like Control, Fringe, The Magnus Archives, Men in Black, SCP Foundation, or X-Files... you'll love External Containment Bureau!
The Power Words engine is a custom magic spell generation tool designed to replace the spell list of your favorite tabletop system.
Spell lists trivialize the act of wizardry: the supposedly deep and mysterious practice of the arcane is reduced to plucking a phrase from a prescribed list. The engine empowers you as a player or GM to engineer spells from scratch by combining magic Words of Powerwith limitless possibilities.
Neon Blood is an OSR/DIY (we call our work Dirty-OSR) inspired cyberpunk game set in a version of the world in 2035. We don't need to go very far into the future to see how culture, tech, and politics might shape the future of humanity. It is dystopian, but all hope is not lost for ye who enter here.
The goal of this game is to take the OSR-based RPG system and roughen up the edges, throw in some chrome, pump it full of HiCap neon, and light it on fire. The rules start with the d20, but we make a firefight feel like a frenetic two-way range where your decisions and training will be a matter of life and death. And hacking will never be boring or the side gig; it easily occurs in real-time alongside a firefight without disruption to either team.
The combat is brutal and deadly, and death is one bullet or NovaWire away. Zero hit points isn't the end, but neither is it a handful of chances to not experience what comes for everyone. Even hackers aren't safe; play hacking games, win deadly prizes. As awesome as this sounds, combat is full of player-facing choices to keep your character alive and gunning. But everything comes at a cost in Neon Blood.
Dying Hard on Hardlight Station is a new module for the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG. It’s both an open-ended adventure and plug-and-play setting; envisioned as a cyberpunk Xmas mashup of Die Hard and Alien Resurrection. In the adventure, your team of grizzled PCs will be torn between saving friends locked in the Medtech facility or crawling to freedom in the vents of the corporate-controlled Hardlight Station; all while avoiding capture by the brutal Blackshield Mercenary Company. Unbeknownst to all, however, Blackshield’s invasion has caused the containment protocols at the Medtech facility to malfunction. Now, in the bowels of the station, something horrible has awoken, and, after a long, torturous sleep, they hunger to feed.
The Vast in the Dark is an exploration setting for the world’s most popular role-playing game and takes place in a crumbling alien wasteland filled with brutalist mega-structure ruins. It includes tools for generating massive areas to explore as well as unique player options and gameplay changes to keep the focus on player choice and ingenuity over dice-rolling and chance.