Hey, with the Kickstarter for Mutant Chronicles 3rd edition Winding to a close, They are releasing the rules to Beta Testing on DriveThruRPG for free. I still have my WarZone minis from the last edition, and kicked myself for not being able to afford WarZone - Resurrection,
With around 3 hours remaining, you can still jump in on this Kickstarter!! The final secret goals were revealed including a Kickstarter only adventure!!!
First, the big news: We crossed $100,000. I am
awestruck. You are awesome. This means that the final stretch goal is
unlocked. Everyone who has pledged for $50 or more of hardcopy books
gets all the PDFs - Players Guide, GM's Guide, Companion, Travar, Elven
Nations, Questors, and the GM Screen.
We're tossing in a couple
of extra goodies for the physical-books backers as well. People who
pledged for either softcover or hardcover books will receive an art
preview PDF, multiple pages of art slated for appearance in the books.
You get to see this art well before the books are published. Hardcover
backers will also receive a PDF adventure written specifically for the
KS, that will not be sold or released otherwise.
You can still
upgrade your pledge and get any of these rewards in the next four hours.
We'll send out a survey when the KS closes for address and reward
verification, and that'll give you another chance to upgrade and grab
the extra goodies,. We'll also send out a notification right before we
ship your pledge items, giving you one last chance to add stuff to your
order.
Now, as for international shipping: AstralWanderer pointed
out a clause in Kickstarter and Customs law that allows us to declare
the value of the books at their manufacturing cost rather than their
cover price. This means our EU backers can get softcover or hardcover
books, and the stretch goal goodies, without getting soaked for massive
VAT and customs duties. We'll be working with this for all EU shipping,
not just the low end pledges, but bear in mind that if you have a large
order, even with the value declared at manufacturing cost it may still
put you over the VAT threshold. We'll have more on this as we work out
the details country by country.
Thank you again for your faith and
your trust. Together, we can make Earthdawn the absolute best it can
be. May the Passions be with you!
On the 4th day, the adventurer's said, Let there be knowledge, and knowledge was granted in the form of a Travar Sourcebook.
Here's a copy of the Stretch Goals as the are currently.
Many of you have asked about stretch goals. Here is our plan to both challenge all of our backers and to say thank you for the tremendous support you have shown for Earthdawn 4th Edition. Rank 1: $25,000 - Travar: City of Merchants will be added to the reward offers and as an add on in both PDF and print versions. UNLOCKED! Rank 2: $30,000 - All backers who pledged for PDF or hardcopy editions of the books will receive a Blood Charm button pin (we may expand this to a set of buttons). Rank 3: $40,000 - Elven Nations will be added to the reward offers. Rank 4: $50,000 - All backers who pledged for PDF or hardcopy editions of the books will receive an enamel pin of the 4th Edition Earthdawn logo. Rank 5: $60,000 - The Earthdawn 4th Edition Companion will be added to the reward offers. Rank 6: $70,000 - Questors will be added to the reward offers. Rank 7: $80,000 - All backers who pledged for PDF or hardcopy editions of the books will receive a t-shirt with the 4th Edition Earthdawn logo. Rank 8: $100,000 - All backers who pledged for PDF or hardcopy editions of the books will receive a Kickstarter only 54mm miniature figure.
Earthdawn 4th edition Kickstarter Now what's REALLY exciting for me, with my vested interest in this whole process, is of course that after less than 12 hours, the 4th edition of Earthdawn is nearly funded. It is currently at around $7800 of the $10,000 funding goal.
A classic tabletop RPG returns. Set in the Age of Legend, heroes are needed to bring hope to a damaged world.
What Is Earthdawn?It is the Age of Legend. For hundreds of years, the Horrors ravaged the world, a time of suffering and destruction called the Scourge. People survived, hidden away in magical underground shelters called kaers. Generations lived—and died—locked away from the stars and sky behind their wards.
The Scourge ended a hundred years ago. The survivors, blinking in the light of the sun, opened their kaers and began to rebuild. Much has been lost and forgotten, and dangers await the unwary. There are those that conspire to seize power and dominate their fellows, and some Horrors still lurk in the darker corners of the land.
Heroes have emerged in this new world. Some fight to protect those rebuilding their lives. Others uncover mysteries and treasures lost to the past. And some bring the light of hope to those still hiding from the darkness of the Scourge. In Earthdawn, you take on the role of these heroes.
Play a Swordmaster, whose tongue cuts as deep as his blade. Master the powers of earth, water, and fire as an Elementalist. Use the magic of story and song as a Troubadour, entertaining and inspiring.
Beastmaster. Nethermancer. Weaponsmith. What will the legends say about you?
I finally decided to back it last night, as I knew I would be picking up the core rulebook regardless and effectively I get "ALL THE PDFs" for an additional $20...that's a good deal.
So let's push toward that final Conversion guide, letting you use Numenera and The Strange together through conversion....nice.
Green Ronin Games is bringing back the ADVANCED BESTIARY updated to the Pathfinder RPG Rulese with the Advanced Bestiary Kickstarter
While I'm not actively playing Pathfinder, I'm backing it because it is the BEST book of the d20 era. I own all three of the books that Chris mentions below...great books one and all.
In 2005 Green Ronin Published the Advanced Bestiary for the d20 System. It was a monster book that took the idea of templates and ran with it. The Advanced Bestiary
featured over 100 new templates and sample monsters built using them.
It was a terrific toolkit and added value to every monster book GMs
already owned. For years people have been asking us to do a Pathfinder
version of the Advanced Bestiary and with your help, we are going to do it!
The rules revisions are already well under way. The question is,
what will the book’s final format be? We are starting with the
assumption that the book will be a 264-page hardback with a black and
white interior like the original, and that we’ll keep the book’s
existing art. Really though, we want to give you a full color hardback
with all new art! That’s built into the stretch goals of this
Kickstarter, so the final format is up to you all!
You Can’t Eat Accolades!
The Advanced Bestiary got great reviews as soon as it was
released. This was in the later days of the d20 era, when it was harder
to impress people and much harder to have a hit book. The critics loved
it and sales were solid. Mission accomplished, right?
Well, no, as it turned out. The Advanced Bestiary and two other titles (The Black Company and Egyptian Adventures: Hamunaptra)
had the misfortune of coming out when our fulfillment company (Osseum
Entertainment) was dying and stealing money from our sales to stay
afloat. Those three big, expensive-to-print products all sold pretty
well—and we saw not a dime of that money. We were, of course, still on
the hook for all the associated bills: writing, editing, printing, art,
etc. What should have been a triumph thus turned into a disaster. I
remember figuring out at one point that for every dollar we paid the
designer, Green Ronin lost three dollars. The “Osseum Debacle,” as we
came to call it, nearly killed Green Ronin Publishing. We managed to
survive though and slowly paid down all of our associated debts. The fact that the Advanced Bestiary became a cornerstone book
for Pathfinder development has thus always been bitter sweet. We were
certainly flattered that Paizo used the Advanced Bestiary in so
many of its own books and we were glad players and GMs got so much use
out of it. You can’t eat accolades though, so for years I had hoped we
could bring this book back and actually turn a profit on it. Earlier this year we did a highly successful Pathfinder Kickstarter
for our Freeport city setting. Last month I hired Owen K.C. Stephens to
be our Pathfinder developer for Freeport and more. I believe now that
the Stars are Right for the return of the Advanced Bestiary! Let’s make it happen, Pathfinder fans!
The Stretch Goals
As I mentioned, we want this book to be full color and featuring all
new art. We’ve baked that into the stretch goals and we are revealing
them all so you can see what we ultimately hope to achieve with this
campaign. We are also keeping expansion of the book fairly limited by
design because we want to have the finished product out to backers next
July. The more we might add, the longer this would take, so we are
capping the new material at 32 pages. Note, however, that there were
originally five web enhancements to the Advanced Bestiary and we’ll be
including all of those in the new book. $25,000: We will commission a new piece of cover art for the book.
$30,000: We will add 16 pages of new content to the book. More templates! More monsters! $37,500: We will print the book in full color. $45,000: We will commission all new interior art for the book. $50,000: We will add another 16 pages of new content to the book.
Knights in Shining Armani...Knights of the Round CONFERENCE Table.
This is a pretty unique concept, and it does have a low-end buy-in at $15 for the PDF. But upgrading to Hacker gets you into the playtest as well as additional digital rewards.
What is CORPORIA?
Corporia will be a limited edition, graphic novel-sized, 208-page, full color, signed & numbered hardcover, urban fantasy role-playing game
set in the near future. It’s not based directly on any existing
property or rules set, but if I had to compare it to other themes you
might recognize, it’s what happens when you mix reincarnated Knights of
the Round Table with a spoonful of Torchwood, add a pinch of cyberpunk, a dash of Joss Whedon's Angel season 5, and a sprinkling of a corporate-focused Shadowrun. If you enjoy these, you're going to love Corporia.
In the near future, corporations control the world, and
Order is the rule of the day. New technologies clean the environment and
raise glittering skyscrapers in outwardly utopian cities, but at the
cost of personal freedoms and liberties. Humans toil in wage-slavery to
powerful mega-corporations, pacified by drugs, cheap food, and free
internet access. It is surely the time foretold in legend, when the
Knights of the Round Table would return in the hour of mankind’s
greatest need.
Yet the knights are scattered, their memories
fragmented, and King Arthur nowhere to be found. Worse, the return of
the knights breached the barriers of reality and opened portals to the
extra-dimensional realms of Chaos. Now every day brings new horrors as
magical anomalies bestow either superhuman abilities or horrible
mutations on the populace, monsters lurk in alleys and underground
malls, spirits return as electronic geists, and software becomes
self-aware. The mega-corporations outwardly dismiss these outbreaks as
effects of cosmic 'Flux' radiation (supposedly caused by the former
government's meddling with the ozone layer), even while they wage secret
wars to master this new energy source. Only you and your allies stand
for justice in the struggle between corporate Order and magical Chaos.
Fortunately,
you have powerful benefactors: Sir Lancelot (awakened as a megacorp
CEO) and his allies Sir Percival, the sorceress Nimue, and the
artificial intelligence known as M.E.R.L.I.N. As a member of the
Knightwatch, Lancelot’s secret special operations team, you battle
magical monstrosities and augmented humans, dive into living computer
networks, infiltrate rival mega-corporations, and more. The only limit
is your imagination!
So I heard about this at Kingdom Con, and the KS is doing amazingly well. I don't know about you, but as soon as I see anything Robotech, I instantly hear the music and start playing through battle scenes in my head!!! If only I could block out the Minmei signing!!! ARRRRGH...
Utilizing 40-70mm miniatures, these are gona be pretty big minis (probably so they can't be used for Battletech....heh, only half-joking considering the history of Battletech and Harmony Gold...)
So this is a Robotech RPG miniatures game, I wonder if the rules will use the full Palladium rule set...could be interesting, if done right, but regardless the miniatures are looking gorgeous just in their 3D form...of course I would prefer the Southern Cross or Invid Invasion sets to play, but hey if this goes well enough, perhaps there will be some in the future.
Check out some of the info:
Prepare for invasion! Robotech® RPG Tactics™ is a fast paced strategy
battle game that expands on the popular Palladium role playing game.
Take command of the brave men and women of the United Earth Defense
Force to valiantly defend Earth from annihilation. Or, command the alien
armies of the Zentraedi Armada to recover an alien artifact of immense
power and enslave humankind. Collect your forces from an expanding range
of world class game pieces. Relive the massive battles on your tabletop
at home to enhance your Robotech® RPG adventures or as a stand-alone
game.
Robotech® RPG Tactics™ is a battle game in which players build armies
of multiple squadrons of mecha to fight it out in scenario driven,
objective based game play. Depending on the faction, and their choice of
mecha, a player's army may include anywhere from 2 game pieces to as
many as you desire! The rules are scalable from small skirmishes to mass
combat with hundreds per side. Robotech® RPG Tactics™ uses a
dynamic turn system. Players trade off activating squadrons during each
turn, ensuring that a player never has to sit and wait while his
opponent moves and attacks with his entire army. By using alternating
activation of squadrons, the game's action unfolds at a fast and furious
pace, allowing large scale battles to be easily carried out in a single
evening. The wide variety of mecha in the boxed game bring to
bear the myriad and awesome weapon systems from the Robotech universe to
lay waste to your foes. Even the battlefield itself can alter over the
course of the game, as buildings are leveled by destruction unleashed
during the battle. Each player receives a number of Command Points
each turn based on the number of mecha they have on the field, and the
quality of their officers. Command Points are spent throughout the turn
on maneuvers such as boosted movement, devastating weapon salvos,
breakneck dodging counterattacks, and potent special abilities.
The Earth is under attack by the Zentraedi. Their fleet of gigantic
alien warships is capable of destroying an entire planet in a split
second. The only hope for survival lies in the secrets of
Robotechnology, an advanced alien tech which has given the human race
access to powerful robotics systems and interstellar spacecraft. At
the turn of the millennium, a mysterious unmanned Robotech space battle
fortress crashed into the Earth, containing valuable information which
the scientists of the United Earth Government used to develop their own
Robotech Defense Force. However, unfamiliar with these alien systems,
the crew of this newly reconstructed Super Dimensional Fortress will
face the nearly impossible task of defending not only their own lives,
but the fate of the entire world. In
Robotech® RPG Tactics™ you choose your force from an array of mecha led
by either the heroic United Earth Defense Force or the villainous Zentraedi. You will lead these two mighty forces in a
variety of combat theaters, from skirmishes in space on the Mars Colony to epic battles in Macross City and the rings of Saturn.
What is Short Order Heroes? Well it's easiest to explain by pulling from the Kickstarter information page.
Short Order Heroes
Short Order Heroes is a rules light game designed for easy role-playing. It is a deck of 54 cards that can also be used for spontaneous NPC generation in any RPG. All card art by Eleanor Ferron.
How it Works In a word:fast. Each card has a picture, an adjective, and a number. To create a new character, draw some cards from the deck, depending on how fleshed-out you want the character to be -- we recommend 3 for PCs, down to 1 for throw-away NPCs. The adjectives describe what makes your character unusual. Fill in the details and off you go. To resolve a conflict, first set a target number or draw one randomly from the deck -- higher is harder. Then draw a card. The number on the card tells you whether the action succeeded, the adjective gives some color to how, and the picture provides added inspiration. To enhance other games, the cards can quickly add personality to otherwise bland encounters -- "Thug #2" is now "The unnerving thug", the barmaid is complicated, and more. Great for tavern trawling or adding a bit of local color.
With Short Order Heroes, you spend less time fiddling with the rules and more time telling the story. Character creation and conflict resolution take seconds, and instantly fill your game world with color and flair. Short Order Heroes is an entire role-playing game in a pack of cards. It's perfect for one-shot adventures where you don't want to spend all night making characters and miss playing the game.
I was sent a 54 card promo deck, and let me tell you, I'm fairly impressed with it, and how useful it could be.
Now I doubt I would use it as a low-rules system, but I know for a fact, I will be using it for the italicized use. Nothing is easier for fleshing out an NPC than throwing a card down to determine what their personality is. If they're a random NPC, no reason to have to figure out how they think when you toss a card and bam, instant imagery and play style.
The deck was nice for a promo deck, and if the quality is as good or better than this you'll be getting a deck that will last for quite a while.Since I run a lot of games at conventions, I know I will most likely get lots of play out of this promo deck.
Also, since the kickstarter is already over $4k, the deck is going to be 90 cards, and if it hits over $6k. There will be a 36 card expansion on top of that. So if this sounds like something you want to jump in on, well jump on in.
