Humble Mobile Bundle: RPGS!!! #1 - Adventure Bar Story

Siela and her sister own and operate Kamerina's Bar, but the nefarious Gustav, owner of the most popular restaurant in town, wants to buy them out and shut it down. Siela vows to make her restaurant so popular that Gustav can’t touch them. But that requires the freshest ingredients from all the local monster-infested dungeons. Can she really do it?

( Read more... )

Overall: This is more of a casual/simulation game than a true rpg, but it blends both game styles pretty well. Might be worth a go if you like that sort of thing.

Don't Feed the Trolls by Erica Kudisch

Daphne has just won a major award for her performance in her MMORPG of choice, Eternal Reign. Unfortunately, in doing so, she committed the crime of appearing female on the internet and the wolves descended. It’s “love in a time of GamerGate.” Fortunately, this is a romance novel, so it’s a reasonable assumption that by the end our hero will manage to find love, if nothing else. And that they won’t be arrested for forcibly removing chunks of sensitive bodily tissue from the fedora warriors.

Notes on content: This is hella queer, with pretty much the entire core cast being some flavor of LGBTQ. And as you might guess from the blurb above it includes (in a manner that makes it clear to the reader that they’re terrible) sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia, rape threats, death threats and stalking.

( Read more... )

Overall: Buy and read this book--unless you actually believe that anyone ever cared about ethics in games journalism, in which case feel free to buy forty copies (preferably direct from the publisher at full retail price) and set them on fire.  

Shattered Dreams (Werewolf: The Apocalypse 20th Anniversary)

While the history of the World of Darkness is always a conflicted and mutable thing, I appreciate books that attempt to nail it down in a coherent (and at least self-consistent) fashion. This is one such book, detailing the history of the werewolves and other changing breeds from the prehistoric times through the modern era; and providing plot hooks for major events and points in time.

( Read more... )

Overall: There are some really fun ideas here. Is this the “true” history of the WoD? No, of course not, there is no such thing. But it (or pieces of it) might be for one campaign, and does anything else really matter?