#RPG – BLOOD!: Black Mass RELEASED!

Buy it HERE

We live in ‘interesting times’, as they say. There’s a confluence of all kinds of factors along lines of race, gender and politics that haven’t been as important or as visible as they are now since the 1980s. Racism – in all directions – rears its ugly head in part because of increasing poverty, in part because people seem to want things to be bad so that they have something meaningful to fight. Relativism and postmodern thinking appears to hold sway in much academic discourse, even redefining the very meanings of terms like ‘racism’ and ‘sexism’ to excuse the hypocrisy of many who prosecute those agendas.

Horror is often a good place to explore ‘what ifs’ and to challenge dominant paradigms.

What if, for example, there were such a thing as an inferior culture? What if there were such a thing as a primitive culture? What if there was a savagery that wasn’t noble? What if there were people that didn’t give a damn about ‘white saviours’ with social justice degrees. Who did set up their own parallel societies and laws.

What if every idiotic, paranoid fantasy the xenophobic right ever had about immigrants were embodied in one terrifying instance.

This adventure for Blood! is a sort of urban ‘Green Inferno’ or ‘Cannibal Holocaust’ meets ‘The Raid’. Don’t let on to your players however…

This adventure gives you a ‘playground’ for an adventure and a cast of characters. How you play with it is, however, your own decision. A recommended path is also provided to describe how an adventure might be run, but in the end it’s up to you.

Disclaimer

This is a work of fiction. A horror scenario. It contains material of questionable morals and horrible nastiness. Don’t assume writing this is an endorsement of any such views. Like all good horror it’s about playing on and subverting people’s fears and expectations.

Rough as Toast

‘Rough as Toast’ is my imprint for ‘cheap and nasty’ products. Things that are a bit more experimental, silly or “hit and miss” where a lot of money can’t be spent or risked on a bit of an ‘out there’ idea. If you see that marker, you know you’re getting something a little ‘wacky’ or uncertain, but you will probably get some fun out of it.

Schlocktoberfest

The Pulps were churned out at a massive rate of knots. Strange and silly ideas thrown at the wall to see what stuck. Occasionally some of those ideas turned out to have legs – legs that are still carrying them nearly a hundred years later. My intent with Schlocktoberfest (previously just a sale some years back) is to just throw a bunch of monsters, ideas and other bits and pieces at the ‘wall’ and see what sticks. Maybe something will.

#RPG – I’d do what I Whilt, but you Won’t let me

I’ve been seeing some regressive attitudes toward making and selling rpgs recently! “Too many games dilute the industry,” “you shouldn’t sell a game below a certain level of production,” whatever. Butts to that. Pep talk.

You make a game, you get together with your friends, you sell your games to each other, you sell them online, you give them away, you play them, you don’t play them, it’s a fun time. It’s a perfectly good social leisure activity and I’d recommend it to anybody who thinks they might enjoy it.

There’s no boss of it. You don’t need a license, you don’t need to submit an application, you don’t need to join a league. You are the president of the united states of making and selling your games! You ran unopposed and won in a landslide.

You’ll find, though, even so, that sometimes someone will try to tell you what you should and shouldn’t create, and what you should and shouldn’t sell. They’re wrong. They don’t know what you should do! That’s just what they want you to do.

They’re asking you for a favor and they aren’t even gracious or self-aware enough to say please.

Vincent Baker recently posted this on social media. The part I’ve highlighted makes me livid. Not Vincent, to the best of my recollection, but a great many of the people commenting and re-sharing approvingly have been people that have made great effort to censor and remove games and content made by myself and others.

To see those words in their mouths is enraging and I’m going to quote them back at them at every opportunity.

I will create what I want. Get the fuck out of my way and stop being such hypocrites.

#RPG Sexbots for Machinations of the Space Princess RELEASED!

Buy it HERE.

There’s any amount of sex-bots in science fiction, from Freya in Saturn’s Children to Gigolo Joe in AI. There’s everything from Cherry 2000 to the pierced grey sexbot in Heavy Metal 2000. There’s the sex-recordings from Day Million to the holodeck creepery of Barclay in Star Trek.

Technology and sex have always gone hand in hand. Sex has driven technology and technology has driven sex and this has been true in the real world as much as in fiction. The latex condom and, later, the pill allowed for the sexual revolution – along with safer, cheaper abortion. The VHS cassette and video camera democratised pornography, as did the Polaroid, a process that was later brought to an even greater, higher degree with web-cams and the internet.

Now we’re at the beginnings of new revolutions. Virtual reality porn is now in the hands of early adopters, as are ‘dumb’ robots in the forms of things like Real Dolls – not all of which are designed to be ‘realistic’. Newspapers are already bemoaning a future that isn’t here yet, of sexbots luring men away from real women (and more rarely bemoaning the opposite).
Machinations of the Space Princess isn’t – by default – a very ‘deep’ game and sexbots are likely just to make interesting characters or to provide colour and background to up the sleaze factor in a game. Still, that doesn’t mean you can’t throw a bit of deeper meaning into things, explore the social science fiction implications and the boundaries of the possible.

Push a few limits. Ask a few questions. That’s what fiction is for.

Rough as Toast
‘Rough as Toast’ is my imprint for ‘cheap and nasty’ products. Things that are a bit more experimental, silly or “hit and miss” where a lot of money can’t be spent or risked on a bit of an ‘out there’ idea. If you see that marker, you know you’re getting something a little ‘wacky’ or uncertain, but you will probably get some fun out of it.

Schlocktoberfest
The Pulps were churned out at a massive rate of knots. Strange and silly ideas thrown at the wall to see what stuck. Occasionally some of those ideas turned out to have legs – legs that are still carrying them nearly a hundred years later. My intent with Schlocktoberfest (previously just a sale some years back) is to just throw a bunch of monsters, ideas and other bits and pieces at the ‘wall’ and see what sticks. Maybe something will.

#RPG Foul Humours for the OSR RELEASED! – Schlocktoberfest

BUY IT HERE

The OSR has become something of a home for the grotesque, the strange, the disgusting and the horrible. Whether that be the deadly oddities and horrors of Lamentations of the Flame Princess or the pecularities of Carcosa – not the mention the many other fringe products – there seems to be a home for the vile, unsettling and surreal.

Some of the things that cause the most visceral disgust and reaction in people are bodily fluids – spit, blood, urine and more. Slimes and oozes have always been a big part of fantasy gaming and combining these with the wilder, darker sides of magic and the compulsion to shock and disgust players who come under attack by these things can combine to create some potentially powerful monsters and dark spells.

Enjoy these ‘Foul Humours’, created from human excresence.

Rough as Toast
‘Rough as Toast’ is my imprint for ‘cheap and nasty’ products. Things that are a bit more experimental, silly or ‘hit and miss’ where a lot of money can’t be spent or risked on a bit of an ‘out there’ idea. If you see that marker, you know you’re getting something a little ‘whacky’ or uncertain, but you will probably get some fun out of it.

Schlocktoberfest
The Pulps were churned out at a massive rate of knots. Strange and silly ideas thrown at the wall to see what stuck. Occasionally some of those ideas turned out to have legs – legs that are still carrying them nearly a hundred years later. My intent with Schlocktoberfest (prevously just a sale some years back) is to just throw a bunch of monsters, ideas and other bits and pieces at the ‘wall’ and see what sticks. Maybe something will.

#RPG – Powder Monkeys RELEASED! SCHLOCKTOBERFEST

BUY IT HERE

Adventure gaming ideas have moved on a great deal. Our concept of what’s acceptable in fantasy has moved on from the medieval period more into the renaissance and restoration eras. That means firearms, which have often been eschewed in traditional fantasy for one reason or another, but in many ways firearms make a great deal of sense. Magic has already affected the changes that firearms did in the real world, reducing the effectiveness of armour and fortification, allowing ships to project force at great distance – even from off shore.

Like crossbows supplanting longbows, firearms democratised firepower. They didn’t require a huge amount of skill – despite being more technical and fiddly in many ways – and a man could be armed and fire en masse with other to devastating effect very swiftly.

Besides, guns are just fucking cool. Loud noises, clouds of smoke, devastating musketballs, the potential for new kinds of magic and explosives.

The mistake that seems to occur in a lot of games is making the guns too powerful, too close to modernity. Guns start to stop being appropriate to fantasy once you get to revolvers (discounting the Barsoomian influence) and the best balance seems to be guns no more advanced than those found in the sixteen and seventeenth centuries.

Rough as Toast
‘Rough as Toast’ is my imprint for ‘cheap and nasty’ products. Things that are a bit more experimental, silly or ‘hit and miss’ where a lot of money can’t be spent or risked on a bit of an ‘out there’ idea. If you see that marker, you know you’re getting something a little ‘whacky’ or uncertain, but you will probably get some fun out of it.
Schlocktoberfest
The Pulps were churned out at a massive rate of knots. Strange and silly ideas thrown at the wall to see what stuck. Occasionally some of those ideas turned out to have legs – legs that are still carrying them nearly a hundred years later. My intent with Schlocktoberfest (prevously just a sale some years back) is to just throw a bunch of monsters, ideas and other bits and pieces at the ‘wall’ and see what sticks. Maybe something will.