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!

I may have found just the setting for your next horror game...

The wife and I happened upon this place while traveling around the Great Smoky Mountains yesterday.  I can't say I know much of the history of the Teddy Bear Motel, but I found an image on the web of an old business card for the place, which may have been made during its heyday.

Here's the back of said business card:

I have a feeling the place could be a pretty creepy spot anyway.  It has a very Batman-villain feel to it.  This is only enhanced by the fact that by the time we drove by it yesterday, it had fallen to this state:

I don't really know why part of it is taped off...

...and part of it isn't...

...but the fact that it was apparently abandoned recently enough that when I got out to take a few pictures, I could still hear a smoke detector calling for a new battery, added a little touch of the macabre somehow.

Is it standard procedure to just leave most of the doors open when you have a motel sitting around hoping to be sold?

Oh, and here's a great place to stuff some bodies:

Thankfully, Laura picked up enough of a haunted house vibe that she wanted to stop off for some pictures.  There was also an abandoned Teddy Bear Restaurant right next to it.  I kind of regret not getting any shots of that...