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chuckro8 Links (Puzzle/Casual, PC game) - A very simple game of dragging links with prongs in various directions onto a 4x4 grid and trying to make them connect up. If you get enough connections, you can bank them and remove those tiles, making room for more and giving you points. Another fun little casual game.
Glittermitten Grove (Simulation, PC game) - A game about building a fairy village by cutting down trees, building settlements, gathering food and materials, etc. This game desperately needs a tutorial or some documentation, as the sunlight streaming down clearly plays a big role in what plants grow and what food is available; but I was mostly guessing the effects of everything I did, and then winter game and fairies left my village because we ran out of food (despite my building lots of pantries).
I Have Low Stats But My Class Is "Leader", So I Recruited Everyone I Know To Fight The Dark Lord (Comedy RPG, PC game) - An RPGMaker game that takes the Suikoden idea of recruiting characters to its logical limit: You recruit the entire goddamn town and then have turn-based battles with all 99 of them in your party at once. This is an amusing concept, but just as clunky in practice as you’d actually expect, because you have a hundred characters with their own skills and you need to scroll through them to pick attacks. Even if you knew what sort of abilities you wanted to use, you’d need a goddamn spreadsheet to find them and ten minutes of scrolling to get to them. So I tried it, but I’m not interested in playing much of it.
Little Square Things (Puzzle, PC game) - A collection of sliding/pushable block puzzles with the usual quirks, most notably moving all of your blocks with every button press. I’ve played a number of games with that mechanic, and I’ve found I don’t grok it particularly well. So I played the first group of stages to get a sense of the game (and, to be fair, I do love the early-90s CD-ROM game aesthetic it has going), but I’m not likely to play more.
Image of Perfection (Horror/RPG, PC game) – A psychological horror-themed hybrid visual novel/rpg made with RPGMaker. Sirius (clearly a depressed shut-in) is called to help his friend Hailey, whose house is haunted. I gave it a shot, but the characters and setup really didn’t win me.
The Scarlet Village (Call of Cthulhu adventure) - With the caveat that the conclusion and denouement are rather underwritten, this is a pretty decently set up and detailed CoC adventure that I expect I’ll run at some point. It’s fairly standard rpg horror but looks like it’ll hold together well as a one-shot.
Get In the Robot (Minimalist ttrpg) - This looks like it’s going to be Pacific Rim: The RPG, where you pilot giant robots to fight monsters. It’s not. It’s not even about the leaders of the anti-monster task force who make the hard decisions. It’s about the Pacific Rim assistant support staff, running around behind the scenes to keep the robots functional and the pilots fed. So it’s much more about ridiculous bureaucracy than about the monsters or the robots, really. Credit to them for a card-based randomization mechanic (which I don’t think I’ll actually bother to use) and a lovely random problems table. (I actually got a chance to test this: I used the random problems table for a game of You Have One Ability… and it actually worked really well.)
Dragons of Tirenia (D&D 5E setting and adventure) - This opens with a ten-page introduction to the setting, which is “What If 15th Century Italy, But With Dragons?” That’s a cool idea that Jethrien was interested in, but honestly isn’t so much my thing. (They came up with a whole alternative to Christianity and a mythology that allows for D&D settings and races, plus additional animal-headed people; and the city-states are run by factions of shapeshifting dragons.) Then there’s a 30-page, detailed game module called “Double Cross” which features detective work, a heist, a cart chase and a big battle. I may someday get the impetus to properly run that.
Season of Dreams (standalone ttrpg) – Changeling: The Dreaming with the serial numbers filed off, using Powered By the Apocalypse rules. Which is a terse way to describe a 100-page book that clearly a lot of time and work went into (it’s got everything you need to run a game, including settings, story prompt tables, character cards and full move lists, etc.) but it feels rough in a bunch of places and I don’t have faith in the game balance. If I was running a Changeling campaign and needed some story ideas I might poke around in this, but I don’t feel the need to try to run it.
1400 Sneak (Minimalist ttrpg) - A particularly minimalist fantasy heist system. This ignores the fact that D&D was basically designed to be a fantasy heist system, and honestly, I think the genre demands that level of mechanical complexity. The random jobs table might be useful, though.
The Magus (solo/journaling rpg) - There were actually a lot of solo/journaling games in this bundle; I didn't bother downloading most of them, because I'm not particularly interested in writing prompt games and I don't really have the time and creative energy they require. (I can't imagine what might have happened last year that inspired all these solo games...) I pulled this because, if I did one, it would indeed likely be the tale of a solitary wizard who risked being torn apart by hubris. And I'd have to try to not make it about John Charles, who accidentally became God and messed up reality enough that his college buddies climbed to the Supernal Realms to punch him in the face.*
The NPC With a Thousand Faces (system-neutral supplement) - This is a very useful booklet and I want it as a generator, where I can press a button or hit a couple of toggles and get an NPC.
Timespell (Minimalist ttrpg) - This is an overdone system designed to gamify re-playing your own version of This Is How You Lose the Time War. (Basically, invent your own versions of the two characters, then bounce back and forth through time making up variations of the chapters of the book.) It claims to support more than two players; I’m skeptical the whole thing wouldn’t fall apart. But then, I’m also skeptical that a fan-fic retelling of the events of the book would even work as a game to begin with.
Home Again (standalone ttrpg) – Another Powered By the Apocalypse game, this one using a magical realism base to present the second generation of people magically transported to the modern world trying to reclaim their heritage. (Said people are very clearly intended to be both human and PoC; it’s only mildly magical.) And while I could try to engage with this as a Jew in the Diaspora, this game is not for me, and I’d never feel comfortable running it.
I tried the PC game Dark Hope, but it just crashed and opened the Steam page for the game. (Which was particularly odd, given Steam was not involved in any way.)
* Yes, that's the secret backstory of a two-year-long World of Darkness campaign I ran in 2013-2014.
Glittermitten Grove (Simulation, PC game) - A game about building a fairy village by cutting down trees, building settlements, gathering food and materials, etc. This game desperately needs a tutorial or some documentation, as the sunlight streaming down clearly plays a big role in what plants grow and what food is available; but I was mostly guessing the effects of everything I did, and then winter game and fairies left my village because we ran out of food (despite my building lots of pantries).
I Have Low Stats But My Class Is "Leader", So I Recruited Everyone I Know To Fight The Dark Lord (Comedy RPG, PC game) - An RPGMaker game that takes the Suikoden idea of recruiting characters to its logical limit: You recruit the entire goddamn town and then have turn-based battles with all 99 of them in your party at once. This is an amusing concept, but just as clunky in practice as you’d actually expect, because you have a hundred characters with their own skills and you need to scroll through them to pick attacks. Even if you knew what sort of abilities you wanted to use, you’d need a goddamn spreadsheet to find them and ten minutes of scrolling to get to them. So I tried it, but I’m not interested in playing much of it.
Little Square Things (Puzzle, PC game) - A collection of sliding/pushable block puzzles with the usual quirks, most notably moving all of your blocks with every button press. I’ve played a number of games with that mechanic, and I’ve found I don’t grok it particularly well. So I played the first group of stages to get a sense of the game (and, to be fair, I do love the early-90s CD-ROM game aesthetic it has going), but I’m not likely to play more.
Image of Perfection (Horror/RPG, PC game) – A psychological horror-themed hybrid visual novel/rpg made with RPGMaker. Sirius (clearly a depressed shut-in) is called to help his friend Hailey, whose house is haunted. I gave it a shot, but the characters and setup really didn’t win me.
The Scarlet Village (Call of Cthulhu adventure) - With the caveat that the conclusion and denouement are rather underwritten, this is a pretty decently set up and detailed CoC adventure that I expect I’ll run at some point. It’s fairly standard rpg horror but looks like it’ll hold together well as a one-shot.
Get In the Robot (Minimalist ttrpg) - This looks like it’s going to be Pacific Rim: The RPG, where you pilot giant robots to fight monsters. It’s not. It’s not even about the leaders of the anti-monster task force who make the hard decisions. It’s about the Pacific Rim assistant support staff, running around behind the scenes to keep the robots functional and the pilots fed. So it’s much more about ridiculous bureaucracy than about the monsters or the robots, really. Credit to them for a card-based randomization mechanic (which I don’t think I’ll actually bother to use) and a lovely random problems table. (I actually got a chance to test this: I used the random problems table for a game of You Have One Ability… and it actually worked really well.)
Dragons of Tirenia (D&D 5E setting and adventure) - This opens with a ten-page introduction to the setting, which is “What If 15th Century Italy, But With Dragons?” That’s a cool idea that Jethrien was interested in, but honestly isn’t so much my thing. (They came up with a whole alternative to Christianity and a mythology that allows for D&D settings and races, plus additional animal-headed people; and the city-states are run by factions of shapeshifting dragons.) Then there’s a 30-page, detailed game module called “Double Cross” which features detective work, a heist, a cart chase and a big battle. I may someday get the impetus to properly run that.
Season of Dreams (standalone ttrpg) – Changeling: The Dreaming with the serial numbers filed off, using Powered By the Apocalypse rules. Which is a terse way to describe a 100-page book that clearly a lot of time and work went into (it’s got everything you need to run a game, including settings, story prompt tables, character cards and full move lists, etc.) but it feels rough in a bunch of places and I don’t have faith in the game balance. If I was running a Changeling campaign and needed some story ideas I might poke around in this, but I don’t feel the need to try to run it.
1400 Sneak (Minimalist ttrpg) - A particularly minimalist fantasy heist system. This ignores the fact that D&D was basically designed to be a fantasy heist system, and honestly, I think the genre demands that level of mechanical complexity. The random jobs table might be useful, though.
The Magus (solo/journaling rpg) - There were actually a lot of solo/journaling games in this bundle; I didn't bother downloading most of them, because I'm not particularly interested in writing prompt games and I don't really have the time and creative energy they require. (I can't imagine what might have happened last year that inspired all these solo games...) I pulled this because, if I did one, it would indeed likely be the tale of a solitary wizard who risked being torn apart by hubris. And I'd have to try to not make it about John Charles, who accidentally became God and messed up reality enough that his college buddies climbed to the Supernal Realms to punch him in the face.*
The NPC With a Thousand Faces (system-neutral supplement) - This is a very useful booklet and I want it as a generator, where I can press a button or hit a couple of toggles and get an NPC.
Timespell (Minimalist ttrpg) - This is an overdone system designed to gamify re-playing your own version of This Is How You Lose the Time War. (Basically, invent your own versions of the two characters, then bounce back and forth through time making up variations of the chapters of the book.) It claims to support more than two players; I’m skeptical the whole thing wouldn’t fall apart. But then, I’m also skeptical that a fan-fic retelling of the events of the book would even work as a game to begin with.
Home Again (standalone ttrpg) – Another Powered By the Apocalypse game, this one using a magical realism base to present the second generation of people magically transported to the modern world trying to reclaim their heritage. (Said people are very clearly intended to be both human and PoC; it’s only mildly magical.) And while I could try to engage with this as a Jew in the Diaspora, this game is not for me, and I’d never feel comfortable running it.
I tried the PC game Dark Hope, but it just crashed and opened the Steam page for the game. (Which was particularly odd, given Steam was not involved in any way.)
* Yes, that's the secret backstory of a two-year-long World of Darkness campaign I ran in 2013-2014.
