What’s Cool on Kickstarter

There’s many interesting items to be found on Kickstarter, but these are the coolest ones this week.

Arcana Note 5e Leather Journal
This journal is beautiful. It almost makes me wish I ran 5e so I’d have a reason to use it. This journal has everything you need to go with your game, including a dice tray, cards with useful information, and a GM screen. As a player or a DM, you could put this journal to use for your campaign. Plus it’s in leather! You should really give the Arcana Note a look if you want to make sure your game is organized and stylish.

“Arcana Note is a portable, rugged leather notebook filled with 5E tools such as character sheets, cheat sheets, a collapsing dice tray, a ruler that measures game feet, a mini GM screen, grid paper, condition/spell/item cards, card pages and more. The inside pages contain templates for tracking sessions, NPCs, organizations and locations within your campaign.”
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Review: Icons and Conditions Deck for 13th Age

Eaxamples of each of the condition cards and three of the icon cards

This past year, Dread Unicorn Games released Gods and Icons, which expands the Icons in the game, giving them names, organizations, relationships with over icons, and even variations to make them more unique for your game. Each Icon also has a list of gods associated with them, which I love because 13th Age doesn’t have any named gods. I reviewed this excellent supplement earlier this year, and now Dread Unicorn has released cards to make game play even easier.

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What’s Cool on Kickstarter

There’s many interesting items to be found on Kickstarter, but these are the coolest ones this week.

The Yellow King RPG
Aser and I backed this kickstarter without even looking at all the details of the campaign. The King in Yellow plus Robin D. Laws? You know it’s going to be good. It features four setting books you can wind your campaign through as the effect the Yellow King has on the world is realized and people band together to fight back. The settings are Belle Epoque Paris as the play is first released, an alternate reality 1947 where soldiers fight in the ongoing WWII while the Yellow King and his daughters make things much more complicated, a 2017 that exists in the same reality as the 1947, where people are trying to rebuild their lives after a vicious civil war, and a 2017 more reminiscent to now, though reality isn’t quite as solid. The game uses the Gumshoe system, but expands some of the combat and health systems based on the recently released GUmshoe One-2-One. The books are going to come in a beautiful slip case, part of which will unfold into a GM screen. There are, of course, deluxe versions and even some super limited versions that you can get, as well as a sourcebook, a novel, and a gaming roll.

“Pelgrane Press is terrified to announce The Yellow King Roleplaying Game, an innovative new GUMSHOE core game written and designed by creator of the system Robin D. Laws. YKRPG takes you on a brain-bending spiral through multiple selves and timelines.

Inspired by Robert W. Chambers’ influential cycle of short stories, YKRPG pits the characters against the reality-altering horror of The King in Yellow. This suppressed play, once read, invites madness. Or a visit from its titular character, an alien ruler intent on invading and remolding our world into a colony of their planet, Carcosa. Four books, served up together in a beautiful slipcase, confront your players with an epic journey into reality horror.”
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Borrowing from Other Systems for Fun and (Mechanical) Profit

Pile of translucent polyhedral dice, all in bright colors

While I haven’t been in the RPG community for as long as many, I’ve had the opportunity to play and run a huge variety of systems. I’ve found that most systems have an idea that I always miss when I’m playing any other game. Like spending an XP to reroll my dice when I’m not playing a Cypher Game, or the duel Sanity/Stability system in Trail of Cthulhu. Unfortunately, moving a lot of these mechanics to a new system isn’t possible without re-writing the system, and work instead to be something that makes returning to that system every time we sit down to play. However, I think there are some ideas out there that could be moved to different systems with a little effort.

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Finding a System for Your Next Campaign

Every couple of months around here at TRF, we finish up one of the three or so ongoing campaigns we have running at any given moment. For some people, this might represent an opportunity to pause, bask in the afterglow of a satisfying finale and plot out what comes next. More likely than not though, for us it means it’s time to hit the ground running with our next big idea. When you run this many games, you begin to get a good feel for the best, read easiest, ways to plan for these things and the sorts of factors that make for a good experience.

Bookshelf filled with RPG books

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What’s Cool on Kickstarter

There’s many interesting items to be found on Kickstarter, but these are the coolest ones this week.

The Nightmare Gallery
The Nightmare Gallery is a horror movie written by Rob and Jhan of Orpheus Protocol (look for an interview with Rob later this week!). The movie follows a professor of anthropology who receives some cryptic messages that claim to be from a TA that went missing three years earlier, and the path that pushes her and her wife down. What’s really cool is that this professor is played by Amber Benson, aka Tara from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. One of the goals of this movie is to develop a horror movie with fleshed out LGBTQ characters, and I’m really excited to see a movie that is really thoughtful about this. Plus if you’ve listened to Orpheus Protocol you know the horror is going to be amazing. It’s only $15 to get a digital copy of the movie, and you also get access to a lot of amazing additional material from Seraph Films, including a short film, your name in the credits, and an exclusive episode of Horror Haiku. This is a movie that I never knew was missing from my collection, and I can’t wait to see it!

“Amber Benson stars in The Nightmare Gallery as Professor Rand, an anthropology professor whose life is turned upside-down by the sudden, suspicious disappearance of a star pupil. But when a package of paranormal artifacts arrives on her doorstep three years later, the professor embarks on a nightmarish journey into mystery that will shake her and her wife to their cores. Through a terrifying, Lynchian lens, the film follows Professor Rand’s horrifying loss of self in pursuit of an extra-dimensional truth that could doom the world.”
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What’s Cool on Kickstarter

There’s many interesting items to be found on Kickstarter, but these are the coolest ones this week.

Cthulhu Dark
Cthulhu Dark boasts of only two pages of rules, make it a very compact game for you to bring to your table. The rest of the book gives advice for building and running the mysteries for your scenario, creatures and objects, and four very different settings: London 1851, Arkham 1692, Jaiwo 2017, and Mumbai 2037. Most of the material is already written, and will be ready to head to layout as the kickstarter ends. However, you can also pledge for a Season Pass, which gets you the material as it’s finished so that you don’t have to wait too long to begin your game. Aser especially is a fan of the bleak storytelling style of this sort of game, and the futility of fighting against incomprehensible horrors. If you enjoy the mythos, this game looks like a great place to try something a little different.

“Cthulhu Dark is a tabletop roleplaying game of cosmic horror, in the style of H.P. Lovecraft. It’s about the things we fear, amplified until they are unbearable. It’s about stories that genuinely creep you out, not well-worn tropes and creatures you’ve seen hundreds of times before. And it’s about bleak horror, in which humans are powerless when confronted by hyperintelligent alien horrors. You can’t beat them. You can’t fight them. You can only watch, run, hide and fear.

If you love Cthulhu games already, then this is Lovecraftian horror at its most intense. If you’re new to them, then Cthulhu Dark is a great place to start. You’ll enter a world of stories that are both terrifying and terribly human. The rules are incredibly short: they’re tightly focussed on horror and they drive the game.”
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What’s Cool on Kickstarter

There’s many interesting items to be found on Kickstarter, but these are the coolest ones this week.

Untold: Adventures Await
I got to talk to one of the creators of Untold last week, and I think this looks like a great fun game to play when someone can’t show up for a session. Or with people who are nervous to try RPGs, or even to introduce your kids to them. You use any combination of Story Cubes you want to build a setting, and then develop characters and a narrative. The games are quick and can be different everytime. Michael recommends combing Clues, Mythic, and Voyages story cubes for your investigative horror game.

“Untold: Adventure Awaits is a customisable storytelling game powered by Rory’s Story Cubes where you play the heroes in your own adventure series. Think of it as throwing you and your friends into a favourite TV show, but rather than passively watching, you’re caught up in every scene and make the decisions on which way the plot will go. Each adventure-packed episode takes less than sixty minutes to play from start to finish and requires no preparation – you jump straight into the adventure! All it takes is a copy of Untold, a set of any nine StoryCubes of your choice, and the combined imagination and inquisitiveness of the players. From there on, anything can happen…”
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Interview: Untold: Adventure Awaits Kickstarter

All the components that come in Untold. There's a board, story cubes, cards, character sheets, and tokens.
All the components that come in Untold. There's a board, story cubes, cards, character sheets, and tokens.
I had the chance to talk to Michael Fox from The Creativity Hub about their new game Untold: Adventures Await, which allows you to build an RPG game out of Story Cubes. You can pull in any Story Cubes you want, and there are a lot of options out there already! The variety of cubes will make it easy for me to run the Batman hospital drama I’ve always wanted to try. But seriously, this looks like a great way to have an evening of wacky fun and you should check it out on Kickstarter!

Tell us a little bit about yourself! When did you start getting into games?
So, I’m Michael Fox, I’m a game designer, sometime publisher, podcaster and occasional writer. I’ve run my own site (called The Little Metal Dog Show) and an accompanying podcast for the past eight years or so where I get to interview all manner of folks from the tabletop industry. For now though, I’m currently working with The Creativity Hub over here in Belfast, Northern Ireland, helping them make games that are not only great to play, but also have a bit more meaning under the surface.
I started getting into games as a kid with the classic nerd titles – Hero Quest was a major influence on me. I’d play it myself with solo rules that I ‘developed’ – basically, making stuff up as I went along, stuff that felt right from a story point of view. That morphed into actual rulesets for other games, and then I grew up, discovered music and girls, and forgot about games until around 2000. I stumbled across a tiny game store in Sydney, Australia, saw the kinds of things on offer there, and was kind of hooked. From then on… well, it’s all been cardboard and meeples and dice.

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What’s Cool on Kickstarter

There’s many interesting items to be found on Kickstarter, but these are the coolest ones this week.

The Skirmish Box
Dog Might Games has another beautiful product for offer with the Skirmish Box. It’s available in all the beautiful colors, woods, and carving options we’ve seen before, but this box includes a metal plate to make it magnetic. This makes it a great way to transport your miniatures without worrying about them moving around in transport or being damaged. You can get also get the box with compartments to store dice, pencils, cards, and whatever else you need to take with you.

“Crafted by the insane Lumberjack Vikings at Dog Might Games, the Skirmish Box is the ultimate mini transport for your next head-to-head battle or campaign encounter. The Skirmish box uses an embedded metal plate that allows your minis with added magnets to stand apart from one another, ensuring safe transport. It also offers a variety of wells to hold cards, tokens, dice, or anything else you need for your game and holds up to 25 minis. Every Skirmish Box is available in a variety of woods and interior designs, just choose the one that works for you. We offer over 30 exterior designs which are sculpted directly into the hardwood lid. Each Box is created from hand selected hardwoods and comes with a Lifetime Guarantee.”
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