Saturday, April 4, 2020

Horrors and heroes, hot off the press!

Seems like lots of folks are getting in on the sharing of free stuff to make quarantining at home a little more bearable, or at least trying to shine a light on things that others are doing to help.  While I will point out that everything I've put up on DriveThruRPG is free so far, I'm not plugging anything there today.  Not directly, anyway.  No, there are two RPG releases have caught my eye lately that I wanted to spotlight just in case my post can raise their signals a little.


The first is by awesome gaming blogger and all-around great guy Justin Isaac from Halls of the Nephilim, who has written the horror game Slashers & Survivors - Slashcan Edition as a spiritual successor to his game Slashers & Victims.  While the earlier release was a quick-playing, rules-light game that first appeared as an add-on for Swords & Wizardry Light, this new one is...well, still pretty quick-playing and rules-light, but based on the engine of Bloat Games' dark fantasy RPG The Blackest of Deaths.

He's included a bunch of the trademarks of slasher films to help you craft a bloody horror game just how you like it.  Part of the idea with this new release seems to be that you may want to string together scenarios into a slasher campaign, rather than just run one-shots as Slashers & Victims might have been used most often.  This contrast makes me really enjoy the wording of the games' titles (in addition to "slashcan" being a cool word!).

Also, this is just a preview of sorts...there's a full version on the way!  In addition, Justin is currently statting up horror characters for the game in his April A-Z Blogging Challenge efforts over at the Halls.


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The second game for today's spotlight is something that I'm especially happy to share.  Quite a while back, Justin (the same Justin from above) and I published a series of titles for Light City, a hack of Swords & Wizardry Light for superheroic roleplaying.  One of these publications was The Assembly, designed as a quick-start add-on for the already quick SWL base game.  Well, a somewhat mysterious RPG author I know only as "soner du" from comments on here...so that may or may not be his name AND he may or may not be "he," as I am basing that only on his Blogger avatar...has taken The Assembly, added levels to the classes, thrown in a smattering of other stuff Justin and I produced, added his own original content, and translated the whole thing into French!

Even with the very limited French I remember from eighth grade, I can tell this is an awesome addition to the Light City canon.  It's a complete game in itself, which definitely inspires me to want to produce the same sort of thing in English at some point.  I can also tell that the author is (A) very good with small details...which you can see in moves like reordering the results of the 1d6 roll for The Marksman's specialty weapon so they're still alphabetical in French; and (B) not looking for much attention, since I'm not even sure of his name, and he only lists me, Justin, and Erik from Tenkar's Tavern (who created Swords & Wizardry Light) as authors - even though the new contributions are significant!

You can pick up Light City - L'Assemblée over at DriveThruRPG and on Lulu.  Oh yeah...the most exciting part about it is probably the back cover, which is a teaser for an upcoming book of magic for Light City called La Congrégation.  I can't wait to see this new addition to the Light City Multiverse!


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I hope you're all passing your socially distant time in enjoyable ways...stay safe!

10 comments:

  1. Thank you for the signal boost, my friend. I think it's really cool what's happening with Light City. I need to brush up on my French.

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    1. I think S&S is great! And yes, I've been looking at L'Assemblee bit by bit but need to just do a full web translation to get the big picture. It really is cool seeing so much gathered in one place!

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  2. "La Congrégation" is mostly a translation of previously-published stuff : The Amazon, The Cursed, The Angel, Cleric, Magic-User and their spells from SWCL, Super-pet, Super-butler, Sidekick... Also : Stardust, Lion-Man, monsters from SWCL and Tome of Horrors Light, magic items from SWCL. I'm adding a chapter of advice : alignements, magical characters and magical attacks, and how to adapt magic rules to other concepts (gadgeteers, psionics...).

    WIP : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1SMHCpG7pZGDN4CQpewvm4zfHe1r_mWO-/view?usp=sharing

    I'm publishing most of my stuff free, anonymously and under CC0 (if possible). I need neither money nor glory !

    I may publish truely original stuff someday, maybe a gritty (Watchmen-like) adventure.

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    1. This looks awesome! And...you're keeping a secret identity, which is perfect for the subject matter. :) (Although, y'know, it'd be cool to know who you are at some point.)

      Thanks for keeping it up and keeping us updated!

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  3. It's out ! "Light City - La Congrégation" now on https://osr-vf.itch.io/congregation and https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/395670/Light-City--La-Congregation

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    1. Oh man, I can't believe I missed this comment for so long. My apologies! Just downloaded it and can't wait to give it a good look!

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    2. P.O.D. shall be available at the end of the week, along with a slighlty revised pdf. No big changes.

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    3. Alright...gonna check out the changes and then get my ish together so I can actually post about this. Looks awesome!

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  4. And "Light City - La Cabale" will be out in a few weeks ! It's a translation of all the Light City Foes booklets (except Stardust and Cerebex who are in the first two books). WIP here : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZjZg0zQknSMnRhWf6iByj-jISXjyE312/view?usp=sharing

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    1. Amazing! I have really dropped the ball on talking about this...gonna get caught up and put a post together...!

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