Blood Red Sands, by Galileo Games, is an exploration of Competitive RPGs.

I must admit, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game quite like it. When I talked earlier about Competition in RPGs, I focused mainly on the idea of what competition meant in a largely collaborative medium. I talked about how characters might fight each other, but the players themselves never should, and the differences between seeing RPGs as “Non-GM Players vs. GM,” or “Players vs. the Adventure,” or even “Players vs. the Story.”

Now, here comes Blood Red Sands, an RPG that throws out those rules and gives the players Victory Points.

Victory Points!

Bally almost tripped over the mumbling monk. Teek had layed out on the stone hallway, his head ackwardly jammed against the wall as he muttered in his sleep. Bally let out a curse from his lips as he hopped over the recumbant penetant, catching himself expertly just as Teek snorted and coughed.

“Oh my,” he muttered as he opened his eyes. “Bally? Is that you?”

Ars Magica is a bit of an odd duck in RPG land. It was one of the early RPGs, with the first edition released in 1987. The early days of the RPG medium were curious ones, with an interesting mix of experimentation and cloning successes. Games like Atlantis copied D&D, while games like Champions went off in strange new directions.

Ars Magica, despite it’s formulaic pitch (the players being Magic-users in a medieval fantasy setting) is one of the experimental systems.

There is a lot I could talk about with Ars Magica — its magic system is creative and robust, to put it mildly, and the political interplay between magical factions and mundanes plays a huge part in its well developed setting — but what I want to talk about, as you should be able to tell from the title of this piece, is that this is the first system that had a Troupe style of play.

Sunderwald, made by Long Tail Games, is a Legacy RPG.

Legacy, as an RPG term, has come to mean a game that is focused less on individual characters. Legacy RPGs are generally about regions, families, factions, or generations. The stories develop over in-game years, rather than days or weeks. Players may find themselves playing multiple different individuals over the course of a single campaign, if not a single session.

This is not the kind of Legacy game Sunderwald is.

Climbing up the ragged ladder to the old sage’s tower was not easy. It was made easier, thankfully, by the sage having moved down several floors in his tower, after the top had blown off in a sudden and torrential wind. Now three floors sat open to the rain and winds, the sage’s laboratory protected only by a single trapdoor in the ceiling, where once the ladder continued beyond. It was a flimsy door, and it leaked fiercely in the rain, but it was the best the sage could manage.

“Good Sage Ranquin?” Bally called as he climed the rickety ladder, his hands and feet trembling as they tested every rung, ignoring the creaking and groaning of the wood. “Ranquin, are you there?”

Strike! is a tactical wargame SRD, without much in the way of world to justify its system. It’s the same combat used in the marvelous Tailfeathers RPG, full of interesting tactical choices and clever little tricks that keep it fresh, fun, and fast.

It also clearly and proudly supports reskinning.

“Re-what?”

Reskinning. This hobby is full of creative people, and one of the major selling points of role-play is the ability to exert your will on the gamespace in a way rarely supported in other mediums; naturally, players often want to change things to suit them.

Ascendancy, by Gemworks, is a “Sparked by Resistance TTRPG for 3-5 players, set in a cyberpunk city in a distant future, after the empire that ruled the world for centuries has fallen.”

The “Sparked by Resistance” system originated with the Spire and Heart RPGs, and is similar in many ways to “Forged in the Dark” systems. To take action, players roll one to four d10s, and take the highest to decide how successful, or not, their characters were.

As a system, Ascendancy does a lot of other interesting things with the system, all building on the narrative of ex-weapons trying to survive a post-war cyberpunk world.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the system, or at least the thing that is done rarely, is Ascendancy’s dual-class feature. When creating your persona, you choose not one but two classes for your character.

Halfway to the wine, a trumpet sounded from the ramparts. the sound was quiet over the howling winds. The poor watchman. Bally smiled to himself at the thought of the youth gasping and panting into the flimsy funnel. “The Duke arrives,” Bally raised a finger to the air, drawing Illowen’s attention. “The hunt complete, I wonder what meat he has brought for the table?”

“He wasn’t hunting,” Illowen cocked a curious eyebrow. “He was going to fight a battle against the evil Count de’Tras.”

“Ah, of course,” Bally sighed. “Then I must be mistaken.”

Hey folks. I am heading out of town next week to a place with no cell/internet service, so I will not be posting. Regular posts will continue next Tuesday. See you then!

Dungeon Crawl Classics, created by Goodman Games, is an OSR-adjacent game, inspired in part by “Appendix N.”

What is “Appendix N?” It’s the Appendix in the original D&D Dungeon Masters Guide that listed sources of inspiration for GMs. Is there any stronger claim to the OSR name? DCC is inspired by the same fictions that inspired the original D&D. It encourages the same OSR sensibilities that other games champion. It is a game where, quote: “Each adventure is 100% good, solid dungeon crawl, with the monsters you know, the traps you fear, and the secret doors you know are there somewhere.”

Which makes it fascinating how different DCC is from the old-school rulesets.