The vast bulk of these come from Kickstarters resolving, and arriving on the doorstep. So I may comment on the process as well as the product.
Let's start.
Ryder's Intergalactic Guide to Robots by Jake Parker, JP Creative, 128-page landscape-formatted softbound, 2024, Kickstarter. Jake Parker did Kepler's Guide to Spaceships last year, and I thought well enough of it to get the next volume. Parker wraps a story around a collection of autonomous robots, worker mechs, AI-guided vehicles, and warbots. I love the variety, and am sure there is a full universe in here somewhere, just waiting to come out.
Sentai & Sensibility, by Bug Boll, 9th Level Games, 108-page digest-sized softbound, 2024, Kickstarter. This is one of the stranger games I've picked up, but I'm glad I have. It's a combination of Japanese tokusatsu (live action with extensive special effects) with Regency Romance, in Boll's words, "Power Rangers as written by Jane Austen". You are one of the Gentlefolk (gentry), who can become a heroic Ranger when danger threatens, and with the rest of your allies (sentai) you combine to form a colossus (Voltron) to battle kaiju (giant monsters). The rule system is interesting in that your class (Station) determines the die you roll, and different type of challenges (Dance Moves) require different results, such that the physically weakest class is also the best at social interactions. The challenge is that all of this is buried under a mass of unique terminology set for the Regency era, so you're learning new terms to go with new mechanics. The Kickstarter comes with a deck of cards (characters, classes, and rules) and some standups, which are very nice, but now I have to make sure they don't get separated in my mess of an office.
The Electrum Archives Issues 1 & 2 By Emiel Boven and Ava Islam, Cult of the Lizard King, 70-page and 78-page Digest-sized softbound books w/ four-panel paper maps, 2024, Kickstarter. This is a game system masquerading as a campaign setting. It is set in Orn, a desertified world that has seen several rulers and conquerors (and their ruins) over its long history. It is alien in many ways, and its magic runs off of ancient ink, which is also the coinage. Five attributes, three character classes, and a whole lot of weirdness which really tickles my Tekumel-based biases. The rules are presented cleanly and clearly, and while the players need a bit more investment (Spell names are random-rolled, and you get to figure out what they mean with your GM/Seer), it looks absolutely fascinating. My only gripe? I saw it for sale at GenCon a month before I got it in my hands. Yeah, it would be nice for the original funders to get their copies.
Historica Arcanum: Era of the Crusades, Sarp Duyar & Doga Can Sayilkan (Project Leads), Meta Creative 272 page hardback, and Historica Arcanum: The Sigil of Jerusalem, 240-page hardback, two full-color maps, slipcased, 2024, Kickstarter. Meta Creative, out of Istanbul, rates up there with Free League for producing beautiful-looking books. They've concentrated on historical fantasy, expanding out the 5E system into Cairo and Jerusalem in the 13th century. There are new classes, the the system is growing outwards with new Professions, and a Deck of the Damned to make combat more stressful (with the stress mechanic developing in a similar fashion to CoC's Sanity Rules). Sigil of Jerusalem repeats some of the player-facing material, and launches into a conspiracy in Jerusalem itself. Metis does itself a great favor in its release schedule, as this showed up on my doorstep JUST as they were launching their new Kickstarter.
Campaign Builder: Castles & Crowns, by Richard Green, Tim Hitchcock, Brian Suskind (Lead Designers), Kobold Press, 272-page hardbound,2024, Kickstarter. Kobold hews closer to 5E than a lot of the other D&D Descendants listed here. This is the second volume of their Campaign Builder series, and deals with the elites - nobility and the court. And it is a toybox of new heritages, subclasses, settings, factions, kingdom types and monsters. It works closer to traditional Western European D&D, but has a lot of good foundational material for kingdom building. Yes, I Kickstarted this, even though I could have mooched a copy off chief Kobold Wolfgang Baur, but I wanted to see what was in it.
Never Going Home by Braden Aten and Matthew Orr, Wet Ink Games, 118-page softbound, 2019, Purchased from Grandcon (Grand Rapids) from Pete Petrusha, who had a booth there, This was originally Kickstarted, but I don't know why I didn't go in for it at the time. It is an original system using both dice and cards for resolution and resources. The setting in 1916 in the trenches of WWI. In the Battle of the Somme, a tear between worlds has unleashed a horde of nastiness on the battlefield. Where your unit is. Your squad has to deal the the atrocities of the battlefield as well as horrible things that crawling into our reality.
Sol System by a small host of talented people, Green Ronin Publishing, 112-page softbound, 2024, Midgard Comics. Designed for The Expanse RPG, this is very much an old-school sourcebook, with tons of subject matter and just a smattering of RPG rules. It handles a lot of the factions, corporations, religions, and criminal operations in the sol system, an expansion of the trade rules from the original book. This is much more in the "readable" column than the must use to play column, but given that the company is upgrading the core rulebook to handle the current situation in the universe, it's pretty cool.
Astro Inferno by Andreas Ruu, Haxan Studios, 384-page hardbound, 2024, Kickstarter. Astro Inferno is the most recent arrival here, and requires a bit more thought. It is both stylish and convoluted. Set in a post-apocalyptic demonic SF universe, it uses a lot of unique mechanics and, like Sentai & Sensibility, buries them under a mass of setting-related names and descriptions. It is a beautiful art-game, with excellent production qualities, and a variety of hard-to-read fonts, including that jagged-lightning typography favored by heavy metal bands. Long ago, at TSR, we received a copy of Wraith, from White Wolf, which used this iconography for its cover, and could not decide what the title was - we finally settled on "Noseroids". It's the same thing here. Yeah, this one's going to be a tough climb to wrap my brain around.
And that's it for the moment. I will be at Gamehole Con later in the week, and will probably find some more cool stuff there.
So definitely More later. Noseroids.
