The Gaming Den

It depends on your definition of post-apocalypse. Shadowrun, Cyberpunk 2020, and Eclipse Phase fit the bill but they aren't defined by Mad Max post-nuclear hellscapes (well Earth is Terminator-land in EP but the colonies are pretty diverse). That said, I do like Dark Sun, as it's a nice departure fr...

The editors of Nextwave and Transmet, both of which I've read three times in full, were a bit too indulgent of Ellis' weird writer tics for me to recommend to anyone.

That said, the Gravel and Scars published by Avatar are the bees' knees. Straight up action-thriller-horror done right.

I met the Hex Games guys at GenCon a few years ago. If I remember the story correctly, 'Laser Ponies' was the result of a drunken bet.

Jem and the Holograms is a completely viable concept for shadowrun! Wasn't there a charismatic rock god like concept back in 1st or 2nd edition of Shadowrun? There was a rocker archetype in the original Big Blue Book but it was tweaked into an espionage-style "face" by third edition. My 1...

I would add "espionage" to that. It's always been man (street level combat) meets magic (urban fantasy) and machine (near future espionage). But while I will admit that tank combat and naval skirmishes has always failed, not every moving goalpost concept has. Shadowbeat had stuff for bein...

the question of who, if anybody, is going to pick it up... Topps still owns the license so I see only two realistic options and two far shots: Realistic 1. Fantasy Flight as they have the capital, marketing and production capacity. 2. FASA. Paying licensing fees for the property he created might be...

CGL seems to be re-positioning itself. Instead of being solely the House of Battletech/Shadowrun (and CthulhuTech & Eclipse Phase before those guys severed ties) they're diversifying their product line to include more non-licensed fare and board games: 1. The Cosmic Patrol RPG, which CGL own in ...

I would be fine with Weisman in a managerial role but he hasn't touched SR as a TTRPG since, what, second edition? It's not 1991 anymore. Coordinating with multiple product lines is a nightmare. SR needs a clean slate both in terms of fictional continuity and game mechanics as well as fewer fingers ...

Given that warfare has evolved from (mostly) bombing/artillery/strafing/dogfighting/trench warfare to (mostly) SWAT style urban encounters there's no genuine need for heavy armor, let alone heavy armor in a humanoid form. Heavy armored vehicles are essential for the current cutting edge of urban wa...

Given that warfare has evolved from (mostly) bombing/artillery/strafing/dogfighting/trench warfare to (mostly) SWAT style urban encounters there's no genuine need for heavy armor, let alone heavy armor in a humanoid form. Some sort of Iron Man/Bubblegum Crisis-style anti-bullet/anti-rocket getup wou...

Yeh, Star Trek is technically at the "big pussy" stage of development. They have all the tech, but crap like Borg and Noonien Soong's super-men scare the crap out of them. Khan , who Berlinghoff Rasmussen compared to Hitler, and the other Augments ruled over 40 nations by 1993 and Khan hi...

The Empire/Republic encourages breeding Nietzschean ubermensch and crushing rebellion through military might.

The United Federation of Planets encourages the power of friendship and cooperation.

Federation FTW.

Despite being a skill-based system with no levels, Cthulhutech nonetheless has no-shit character classes that you get to pick from. The character classes are about as balanced as RIFTS classes - which is to say that some professions come with a giant fucking robot and some of them come with a perso...

Dhoanoid PCs aren't 'allowed' to behave in an altruistic manner even though the powerful mages who founded the good-guy Eldritch Society were cut from dhoanoid cloth. Tagers aren't 'allowed' to be soldiers because they might be discovered and dissected by the United Earth Government. And yet an intr...

When we're talking about Traveler are we referring to the core rule set or the OT Universe? I haven't played Babylon 5, Hammer's Slammers, or Judge Dread, or even the OTU, but 2300AD scales the OTT space opera shenanigans way, way back. Friendly lion aliens aren't a thing and space combat in 2300AD ...

As for CthulhuTech, I was going to play in a game of that years back, never got off the ground, how does that game fair? I recall it being rather badly designed, and maybe something about getting a mecha being impossible, magic taking forever or some such. Also, could you explain the shadowrun bit?...

I'm a big fan of space-based hard science-fiction, specifically of the CJ Cherryh-style of politics, trade, space station life, and combat. Traveller is the only game that I've found that touches on these. However the rules are so incredibly generic that there's a lot of MTP needed to get the right ...

I enjoy Traveller 's 2300AD hard sci-fi setting and am working to get a new game going. I've recently taken up TechNoir which is a cyberpunk/post-modern/detective noir game and Corporation which is a sleeper far-future post-cyberpunk game. I ran a CthulhuTech game last year which is a Cthulhian fant...

I was paid for the three dinky projects I worked on that were actually published. I put quite a bit of time into a Seattle source book PDF for the 'Missions' line - it had some bits about police rivalries and a Jane's-style guide to the UCAS military presence in Seattle including the Metroplex guard...

That's very cool. A local store here in Indy was selling longboxes for pennies on the dollar under a "Rot Their Brains, Not Their Teeth" Halloween comic reading push.

By 3rd ed. (and I think even as early as 2nd) SR had ditched the glam-rock vibe and gone full bore techno. I know people who started playing SR with 4th ed. and find the 1st ed. material to be amazingly hokey and disconcerting. The only people who care about out-of-date visual tropes are in their mi...

Gibson/Sterling-style cyberpunk has been hit with the double whammy of: 1. not aging well as a sci-fi theme and 2. tropes and technologies emerging into our current day, thus losing their luster To be fair, every near-future sci-fi writer at the time was predicting a USSR/European land war so I can ...

After 'Attitude' was released I sold all my SR stuff, some of it going back to my days as a 1st ed. player in junior high school, and used the money to buy an iPad. I knew if I stuck with the game I would be too tempted to give CGL my money to get a 'fix'... even knowing the clusterfuck process of h...

Having read through Transmet two or three times, I think it's a bit overrated. Jamie Delano's 2020 Visions (recommended) covered a lot of the same scary-future-is-today-plus-old-man territory without the obvious Hunter S. Thompson riffs. I prefer the manga Eagle (also recommended) for my journalist ...

hogarth wrote:

Wesley Street wrote:It looks like someone attempted a George Perez-style layout without an understanding of basic composition.

The reason it looks George Perez-style is probably because it's by George Perez.

Then he was probably drunk.