Freebies and Pay What You Want

Note: While “Pay What You Want” downloads are available for free, please support the creators if you are able!

Green Ronin Publishing released the Fantasy Age Quickstart for the second edition of the fast-paced Adventure Game Engine RPG. The quickstart features a streamlined intro version of the AGE rules, pre-generated characters, and the adventure “Terror o the Ghost Ship”.

• Price: Free

Downsized Press has the third issue of their Downsides Dungeons with The Ziggurat of the Lizard People. This fully-stated mini-dungeon is ready to run for Old-School Essentials with hand-drawn maps for the old-school feel.

• Price: Pay What You Want (Suggested: $1.99)

Geek Rampage released Crystal City Chronicles, an anthology of six Sci-fi/Western adventures for Stars Without Number. Explore the lawless frontier mining planet Zephyrus-2 and meet the inhabitants of Crystal City as you stop off here for a one-shot or start a new campaign.

• Price: Pay What You Want (Suggested: $2.00)

In an interesting OSR Retroclone, Dank Dungeons released Spectral Exterminators: A Hilariously Horrifying Roleplaying Game, a “legally distinct” version of the old 1980s West End Games Ghostbusters RPG. This has the full open license version of the game free of any licensed material for your paranormal investigation and elimination RPG news.

• Price: Pay What You Want (Suggested: $1.00)

RPGuPolaka has a system-neutral sci-fi adventure These Aren’t the Alpacas You’re Looking For as part of the One Page Derelict Jam 2024. Investigate what happened to the ship of merchant Amir Al-Fayed and why this herd of a dozen alpacas ended in disaster for his ship.

• Price: Pay What You Want (Suggested: $1.00)

If you want a more OSR take on the classic post-nuclear apocalypse setting, Bombland in Bad Decline from Operant Game Lab draws inspiration from Knave, The Red Hack, and the classic Fallout games.

• Price: Pay What You Want (Suggested: $5.00)

Alexander Nachaj released The Mask of the Black Sun: A Taggart Agency Mystery, a 1920s module for Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition. The investigators are in the Canadian city of Salem Falls, New Brunswick, seeking out a stolen ancient mask and unraveling the mystery behind it and those who seek it out.

• Price: Pay What You Want (Suggested: $4.99)

Over on Dungeonmasters Guild, Rashid Clark has a massive adventure for Level 1-3 characters, The Fade Lands. This over 180-page adventure includes new magic items, new playable species, new monsters, a new campaign setting, and a lot more.

• Price: Pay What You Want (Suggested: $0.00)

Death Pits of Brightshire from Nathan Ashley is an adventure for 5th to 7th level characters where the adventurers are sent to track a lost Merchant’s Guild caravan and find themselves entangled in the diabolic secrets of the town of Brightshire.

• Price: Pay What You Want (Suggested: $1.00)

So, you’re all in a tavern. The barbarian starts running their mouth about who is the strongest when a mysterious patron calls them out on their boasts. How do you determine who is the strongest without resorting to a barroom fight? Bas Klein has an answer with Armwrestling – A Game for In-Game Taverns with over the top rules for arm wrestling.

• Price: Pay What You Want (Suggested: $1.09)

Over on Storytellers Vault, Sky Bradley and Henry Langdon have an update to a classic sourcebook with Clanbook: Gangrel 5th Edition. This 59-page book includes 7 new archetypes, 13 new Discipline powers, 4 new Loresheets, 4 new Gangrel Bloodlines, 5 new predator, types, and more.

• Price: Pay What You Want (Suggested: $0.00)

Combat has always been downplayed in the various Storyteller games, but even then it’s an inevitability that physical conflict will happen between Kindred. Eric M. Souza wants to make running the combat easier with The Quick Combat Book, a new streamlined combat system for Vampire: The Masquerade and other World of Darkness titles including 1st, 2nd, Revised, and 20th Anniversary editions.

• Price: Pay What You Want (Suggested: $0.99)

The first Lightning Round this week features gamemaster/DM resources like monsters, maps, random generators, one-page adventures, drop-in encounters, and more. All products are Free or pay-what-you-want.
The second Lightning Round features player resources like classes, subclasses, backgrounds, feats, races/species, and more. All products are Free or pay what you want with the suggested price in parentheses.

Bundles and Sales

Note: I have included end dates when listed for the following sales, but please be warned that those without published end dates may end suddenly so be sure to plan purchases accordingly.

If you’re looking for maps for your VTT, this week’s sales are for you. Starting off, Tellest has the 50 Maps of Tellest Volume 1 bundle with over 50 battlemaps for a variety of environments including campsites, cliffsides, keeps, forests, bayous, savannas, taverns, sewers, and more

• Price: $29.91 (83% off)

Next up for the sci-fi fans is the Maps In Space! Map Pack from Alpha Strike Games Limited with eight maps from spaceships to asteroid bases to colonies to orbital facilities and more.

• Price: $4.99 (50% off)

Gabriel Pickard has the perfect bundle for an unsettling encounter with the Bio Builder Blistering Bundle with a collection of map elements to create a living landscape of flesh and body parts capable of creeping out even the most hardened space marine or stalwart fantasy adventurer. I’d throw in horror investigators, but they’re a nervous bunch already.

• Price: $11.98 (20% off)

Over on Storytellers Vault, Ugo Leão released the adventure and setting pack Living and Burning Gods Bundle. The bundle includes the Vampire: Age of the Living Gods setting covering the Sumerian Empire in 2350 BCE along with the three-part adventure Burning Gods. Also available in Portuguese.

• Price: $24.99 (29% off) in English
• $14.99 (25% off) in Portuguese

Charity Bundles and Sales

Goodman Games released Dungeon Crawl Classics #105: By Mitra’s Bones, Meet Thy Doom! This 2nd level adventure by Stephen Newton is a tribute to designer Jennell Jaquays and inspired by her Dark Tower adventure, playable either as a stand-alone adventure or as a prelude to more explorations of the Dark Tower.

• Price: $19.99
• Charity: Jennell Jaquays medical expenses (50%)

Veteran game designer Owen K.C. Stephens has posted a GoFundMe to cover the costs of his medical treatment as he fights cancer. Owen’s list of credits is more of a list of popular RPGs as he has worked on Dungeons & Dragons, Pathfinder, Starfinder, d20 Modern, Star Wars, d20 Modern, Dragon Age, and that’s just the start.

• Charity: Owen K.C. Stephens Medical Expenses (all proceeds)

For another way to help Owen, Echelon Game Design collected so, so many titles for the Owen KC Stephens is RAD! Bundle. This bundle includes titles for Pathfinder (both editions), Starfinder, Savage Worlds, Icons, Call of Cthulhu, Song of Ice and Fire, Thieves World, Wheel of Time, D20 Modern, Dragon Age, Gamma World, and a lot, lot, lot more.

• Price: $29.99 (97% off, total value of the bundle is over $1000)
• Charity: Owen K.C. Stephens Medical Expenses (90% of sale price)

Over on Bundle of Holding, Modphius has the John Carter of Mars bundle for the pulp sci-fi/adventure 2d20 System game. The Starter Collection includes the core rules, narrator screen and kit, and maps of both Barsoom and Korad, while the Bonus Collection adds on the Phantoms of Mars campaign, three sourcebooks, and two card decks.

• Price: $7.95 (78% off) with variable-cost Level Up option
• Charity: RollVsEvil (10%)
• End Date: April 1, 2024

Goodman Games is here in the charity section for the second time this week (and won’t be the last either) with the Goodman D20 Monster Guides bundle. This bundle of D20 system/3.x sourcebooks have rules for expanding several monstrous races and rules on how to play them as player characters as well. The Minor Threats collection includes the books for Doppelgangers, Dragonkin, T-Rex, Treants, Velociraptors, and Wererats while the Major Threats collection adds on Beholders, Drow, Fey, Liches, Rakshasas, Vampires, and Werewolves.

• Price: $9.95 (78% off) with variable-cost Level Up option
• Charity: San Francisco-Marin Food Bank (10%)
• End Date: April 7, 2024

Over on Humble Bundle, the Pathfinder 2nd Edition Guns of Alkenstar bundle looks to throw you into the Outlaws of Alkenstar Adventure Path and other gunslinging adventures in Golarion. The base level includes the digital version of the Pathfinder 2nd Edition Beginner Box, the Outlaws of Alkenstar Player’s Guide, the first adventure in the adventure path Punks in a Powder Keg, and the one-shot Head Shot the Rat. The second tier adds on the Pathfinder 2nd Edition Core Rulebook and Bestiary (the original OGL versions and not the new updated versions), the Lost Omens World Guide and Character Guide, plus the second adventure path adventure Cradles of Quarts. The third tier adds the third and final adventure The Smoking Gun, the sourcebook Guns & Gears, the setting book Impossible Lands, and the rulebooks Advanced Players Guide and GameMastery Guide plus all three adventure path adventures in VTT format for Foundry. The top tier adds on top of all that a physical copy of the Pathfinder Guns & Gears equipment book (shipping & handling additional).

• Price: $5/$15/$30/$40 (90% off at top tier)
• Charity: Worldbuilders Inc. (user-defined, default 5%)
• End Date: April 11, 2024

Magpie Games has an impressive bundle this week with the Best of Magpie Games Bundle. The base tier includes six games from Magpie Games plus the trio of Fate Codex Anthology titles, the second tier adds on four books for the superhero RPG Masks: A New Generation, the telenovela RPG Pasion de las Pasiones, and three other titles, while the top tier has the big ones: the dark fairy tale series Bluebeard’s Bride, the licensed RPG based on the board game of woodland critters at war Root, and the powerhouse licensed title Avatar Legends with the core rulebook, Wan Shi Tong’s Adventure Guide sourcebook, the adventure An Urgent Request set during the Roku Era, and the Avatar Legends Starter Set not just in digital format but also the physical boxed set (shipping not included)

• Price: $5/$15/$25 (94% off at top tier)
• Charity: Child’s Play (user-defined, default 5%)
• End Date: April 13, 2024

Cubicle 7 has the Warhammer Fantasy Role Play Bundle. The base level includes the Warhammer Fantasyt Role Play Starter Set plus two adventures and a 20% off coupon to the Cubicle 7 store. The second tier adds on the core rulebook and six more adventures, while the top tier gets you eight more adventures with the full bundle having the entire Enemy Within campaign.

• Price: $1/$15/$25 (91% off at top tier)
• Charity: Children’s Health Ireland
• End Date: April 4, 2024

Goodman Games has the Dungeon Crawl Classics & Mutant Crawl Classics Megabundle 2. This bundle has four tiers with the first tier featuring the core rules for Dungeon Crawl Classics, two adventures, and a 20% off coupon for the Goodman Games store. The second tier adds on the core rules for Mutant Crawl Classics along with the DCC Reference booklet, two zines, and four more adventures. The third tier adds on so much more with a total of 79 products including sourcebooks, adventures, zines, genre expansions, and a whole lot more. The highest tier ads on a physical softcover of the Mutant Crawl Classics Core Rulebook (shipping and handling extra).

• Price: $1/$15/$25/$40 (95% off at top tier)
• Charity: No Kid Hungry (user-defined, default 5%)
• End Date: March 28, 2024

Modiphius has a bundle for Dune: Adventures in the Imperium ready to send you on adventures on Arrakis and beyond. The base level includes the Quickstart and Agents of Dune Deluxe Starter Set along with character sheets and a 50% off coupon for select physical Dune products. The second tier adds on the standard edition core rulebook, the Gamemaster’s Toolkit, the campaign book Masters of Dune, and the introductory adventure Desertfall Adventure. The top tier adds on enough for a full library of books for 18 total including setting books, campaigns, adventures, NPC collections, rules expansions, and more.

• Price: $1/$10/$18 (91% off at top tier)
• Charity: charity:water (user-defined, default 5%)
• End Date: March 21, 2024

That’s all for this week! If you know of any bundles or sales starting soon, please contact me on the EN World Discord, tag me on Mastodon, or send me a message here on EN World. Discount percentages have been rounded to the nearest whole number and are based on the standard retail price provided by the site. Note: Links to Amazon, Humble Store, Humble Bundle, Fantasy Grounds, and/or DriveThruRPG may contain affiliate links with the proceeds going to the author of this column.

Andrew Peregrine (AP): Before we get into the game, can we talk a little about Studio Hermitage? While it might be new, there seems to be a lot of experience on the team. Can you tell me something about who is behind Studio Hermitage and what talent you have working on the project?
Paxton Galvanek (PG): Studio Hermitage was founded by Paxton Galvanek (CEO), Justin Achilli (CCO), and Andy Foltz (Studio Art Director) and is fully funded by Amplifier Game Invest. Before forming Studio Hermitage, I was the General Manager/ Board Member at Funcom for 5+ years where I had the pleasure of working with Justin on an unreleased Sci-Fi Shooter project and the new upcoming survival game Dune: Awakening. Before Funcom, I worked as a Business Consultant for many years with several AAA/ AA/ Mobile studios including Activision, Take-Two Interactive, Tripwire, Gameloft, and many others. Justin and Andy worked together for years at Red Storm Entertainment on various projects including Werewolves Within and Star Trek Bridge Crew. Justin has a long history in game development, starting his entertainment career with White Wolf Publishing, about 30 years ago, where he helped to develop the World of Darkness IP. Justin was also with CCP, Ubisoft/ Red Storm, and Paradox Interactive to name a few. Andy worked with Red Storm Entertainment/ Ubisoft for 18 years as an artist and ultimately became an Art Director. He’s also worked with IBM, IRock, and several other companies. Between the three of us, we have upwards of 70+ years of combined experience in the games/ entertainment industry. We founded Studio Hermitage as a transmedia company, and we’re calling on our talent and experience, plus the skills and experience of the brand team, to develop Our Brilliant Ruin as our first intellectual property. Our next step is introducing Our Brilliant Ruin to audiences through various media platforms including print, audio, comics, video games, and more.

AP: That’s certainly a lot of experience! Moving on to Our Brilliant Ruin, can you sum up what the game is about?
Justin Achilli (JA): We describe it as “roleplaying in a gilded age in which upstairs-downstairs personal and sociological drama meets existential horror.” Class conflict, an invasive, world-threatening crisis that contorts people into monsters, and industrial-automation-sized machines gone rogue that draws heavily on Art Nouveau and Edwardian aesthetics. Dramark society has split into a number of factions based on whether you’re aristocratic, a worker, or someone who’s set themselves apart from the prevailing social order, so there are numerous families, guilds, and other archetypes to choose from. These are all generally in some amount of tension, but then the outside forces of the Ruin and the syllokinetics throw a wrench into everything. The Ruin is a corrosive starlight from a distant, dead star, eating away at the edges of the world and making monsters of humankind. And the syllokinetics are those machines that once held the promise of a less laborious life for people, but fell into disrepair as the Ruin set in, upending society.

AP: I certainly love a Victorian twist, and it sounds like there is a lot for the player characters to do. What about the rules system? Are you using an existing one or have you developed something new? If so, how does it work?
JA: It’s an original dice pool system, so if you know how to play World of Darkness games or Shadowrun, you’ll pick it right up. It’s also very straightforward for new players. A Personality attribute + a Skill gives you a dice pool, and you roll that many dice to accomplish things. You want more brills (6s) than glooms (1s), and you also have “push your luck” options that give you more dice and expand your success range. You’re most successful when you engage your Passion, but eventually calling on your Passion puts you at higher risk of catastrophe. There are separate features for long-term Schemes, managing the estate or other property your group shares, and systems that allies and antagonists use.

AP: How does the system reflect the way you envisage Our Brilliant Ruin being played? What sort of scenes and encounters is the system best at dealing with?
JA: The system is significantly driven by the characters’ (and often players’) motivations and emotional impetus. For example, there aren’t any attributes that measure your raw physical power or quantify your intellect. Instead, the Personality attributes model whether you’re acting selfishly, or out of duty, with cleverness, etc. So, obviously, it lends itself to human drama and the question of what people will do with their remaining time as the world’s ending around them. For many people, particularly aristocrats, they revel and intrigue to pretend the end isn’t nigh. The truefolk, on the other hand, keep the world running and maintain a (probably misplaced) hope in the traditional social order. The unbonded see everything falling apart and want to change society, but there’s little consistency in changing it into what. So you have all of that class- and faction-based goal-setting and intrigue, but the external threats of the world force humanity into cooperation. Of course, you can choose whether your group favours backstabbing and intra-party subterfuge, or you can all go it together, leaning on the various factions’ capacities. You probably all want to stop that marauding chimera or undermine that rival family, for example, and then throw yourselves a party to commemorate it.
Rachel J Wilkinson (RJW): Our Brilliant Ruin is about the choices people make at the end of the world. So, the system is more concerned about why your character is acting in a certain way (and the passion that motivates them) than about what they’re doing. A character’s core attributes reflect their personality, not their physiological prowess. And since we’re telling stories about the lives of regular people, I wasn’t interested in who had the biggest muscles or the biggest brain. You can find a thousand other games to play the most amazing or least impressive character. In our system, you get to be human with all the quirks, challenges, and fears that entails while grappling with a worldwide existential crisis. The stories you play often have to do with the problems of other people. How do you pursue your character’s ambition in the face of a rival? What relationship drama and sweeping romances do you experience when you may never see a loved one again? What do you do when you discover your mother is afflicted with Ruin? And yes, don’t worry, there is still monster hunting. But because the system focuses on motivation, you don’t have to plug in fighter stats to do that, and therefore, the number of stories your character can participate in is unlimited.

AP: So, very much a character driven rules system. Moving back to the setting, what aspects of it stand out in Our Brilliant Ruin?
JA: Personally, I enjoy games and worlds with factions, because I like to see the movements of this group and that group in conflict with another group, and so on. Worlds where you can match a character concept to a faction that’s having an effect on the world, and in so doing, you inherit a social element or community that’s part of the faction. It helps you find allies within the group, the politics become part of the gameplay, and it also gives you a way to play against type if you choose.
RJW: I’m obsessed with the question, “What would you do with the time you have left?” And, in my opinion, one of the most unique aspects of the setting is that you can’t save the world. The Dramark will end. Now, where you position your story on that timeline can shift, and the flexibility that provides is also unique to Our Brilliant Ruin. Maybe it’s still early days, and your characters discover a strange blight. Or your characters use the last estate in existence as a bunker while a horde of gothic monstrosities lumber toward you. You get to decide where in the timeline your story fits best and is most fun for you.

AP: Can you tell me what your favourite aspect of the game is? What makes you enjoy playing it the most?
JA: Personally, I love the factions and the societal drama. That’s probably no surprise, given my history developing World of Darkness. I love groups that players can identify with, with built-in conflicts and alliances among the other groups. Everyone should be able to find a faction that speaks to them, from the Valgreave family as stewards of the land and beasts to the construction-and-creation-oriented Rivet and Bellows Union to the rebels, homesteaders, and fallen Royals of the unbonded. And the Ruin touching off the powderkeg of those societal tensions makes for never-ending story opportunities.
Danny Ryba (DR): I am also a huge fan of factions, but the existential horror of the setting is a big draw for me. The visual design of the Ruin never ceases to amaze me. The art team got very creative with the world’s grotesque flourishes. However, the existential elements of the horror are some of the most fascinating aspects. Seeing a loved one or family member afflicted by Ruin adds to the emotional stakes and drama of a narrative that players can engage with.
RJW: For me, it’s the aesthetic. If I could chuck my cellphone in favour of sitting in a petticoat at my rotary dial phone, I would. Modernity exhausts me. Also, because this isn’t an alt-earth or alternate-history world, but instead, an entirely different planet on an entirely different timeline, I don’t have to think about things like, “Okay, how is my character going to find a husband so she can eat.” We’ve tried to do the best we can to create a world where anyone can enjoy the fashion, art, and vibes of historical fiction without also feeling weighed down by the societal expectations and oppression of Earth’s timeline.

AP: With the Kickstarter running at the moment (and already hit its target) what are your plans for stretch goals and backer exclusives?
DR: As of this interview, we have achieved all our early stretch goals, which include a gazetteer section of the book, a digital art book (exclusively for backers), a virtual tabletop version of the game developed by Alchemy (free for all backers), improved dice packaging for dice add-ons, and an extra digital publication that will expand on the world of Our Brilliant Ruin. We’ve revealed the next round of stretch goals, which backers are quickly unlocking as well. Our approach with stretch goals is to develop great supplemental material and products we can provide to backers without impacting our delivery timeline. Some stretch goals may be backer-exclusive, while others will be available after the campaign ends. Some goals, like the Alchemy virtual tabletop, will be a paid product for non-backers, but backers will get it bundled with their pledge level at no extra cost.

AP: What is next for Our Brilliant Ruin once the Corebook is out? Do you have plans for supplements and will they focus on more setting, adventures or rules expansions?
JA: We’d like to support Our Brilliant Ruin by expanding the world and its offerings to players. One of the things I know I’d like to do more with is the Community Property system, broadening the estates, institutes, homesteads, etc, that the players construct for their group and offering more customizable options there. I can see room to offer more character customization options, as well. And of course, we want to keep the tension high by exploring more of the Ruin — more antagonists, more advantages, more conflicts, more ways the players can run afoul of the crisis in the world.

AP: You’ve stated Our Brilliant Ruin is a transmedia story-world, can you elaborate on that more? What future media avenues will involve Our Brilliant Ruin?
PG: As a transmedia company, the plan and strategy at Studio Hermitage is to create a rich new world with unlimited stories to tell and experience. Those stories can be told in linear and also non-linear mediums. The first few products that Studio Hermitage intends to release for Our Brilliant Ruin include a tabletop roleplaying game, a comic book series with Dark Horse Comics, a 10-episode audio drama series, and a video game, which is being developed internally. Studio Hermitage is planning several other future projects for Our Brilliant Ruin, but our intention is for players, customers, creators, and enthusiasts to tell their own stories and discover new details about the world. We’ve spent the last year detailing (at times) scary environments, beautiful estates, rich guilds and factions, multiple threats, and hundreds of characters. Now it’s time to bring the audience in to help us tell the Dramark’s stories.

You can find out more about Studio Hermitage and Our Brilliant Ruin at https://www.studio-hermitage.com Our Brilliant Ruin is live on Kickstarter now and running until the 28th of March.

Explore one of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay’s greatest campaigns ever with a single Humble Bundle that gets you all five parts and more.

One of the greatest campaigns in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay’s history is The Enemy Within. It was one of the first campaigns, back in the glory days, and it is still in the current edition. Cubicle 7 has remastered the campaign into a five-part epic that takes you from Altdorf to Middenheim and beyond. Chaos lurks around every corner, in every heart. But only a true hero can stand up to its corrupting influence.

A new Enemy Within Humble Bundle opens the doors to a wider audience while also raising money for charity. In this case, a portion of the proceeds goes to support Children’s Health Ireland. So, not only will you get an epic campaign, but you’ll also help children in need. Here’s what’s in the bundle.

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay – The Enemy Within Humble Bundle

Bring the stirring legacy and grim, neverending conflict of the Old World to your table with this jam-packed library, and treat your players to the Director’s Cut of The Enemy Within, the revered five-part campaign that inspired a generation of gamers. On top of the core rulebook and starter set, you’ll get everything you need to get into the beloved Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay system.

Dive into this storied setting with books like Middenheim: City of the White Wolf and Altdorf: Crown of the Empire, along with a host of sourcebooks and adventures to enable countless epic sessions for your group. Pay what you want for this amazing bundle of 18 books and help support Children’s Health Ireland with your purchase.

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There are nineteen items in the bundle all in all. For $25, you’ll unlock the entire set, though, as always with these Humble Bundles, you can pay less to unlock less. Here’s a look at everything in the set valued at $288:

• Middenheim: City of the White Wolf
• Altdorf: Crown of the Empire
• Enemy Within Volume 1: Enemy in Shadows
  • Enemy in Shadows Companion
• Ubersreik Adventures: The Guilty Party
• WFRP Starter Set
• WFRP Core Rulebook
• Buildings of the Reikland
• Old World Adventures: night of Blood
• Ubersreik Adventures: If Looks Could Kill
• Enemy Within Volume 2: Death on the Reik
  • Death on the Reik Companion
• Enemy Within Volume 3: Power Behind the Throne
  • Power Behind the Throne Companion
• Enemy Within Volume 4: The Horned Rat
  • The Horned Rat Companion
• Enemy Within Volume 5: The Empire in Ruins
  • The Empire in Ruins Companion

The Old World Beckons!

Bell of Lost Souls Staff Writer and DM, J.R. covers RPGs of all stripes and on occasion eats sandwiches. You can ask him about either at [email protected]

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Get your blackest trenchcoat and/or sluttiest corset/PVC gear ready, the Vampire LARP book Laws of the Night is out for pre-order.

Vampire: the Masquerade and LARPing go way way back, to darkened college campuses and other multiuse facilities where your favorite goths, nerds, and gothy nerds found reason to convene to portray children of the night. And oh, what music they’d make. If by music, you mean, dressing up in varying shades of vampire chic and playing rock paper scissors to figure out who’s winning this epic conflict between Draculas.

Now, Renegade Game Studios has put up the latest version of the Vampire LARP rules. Laws of the Night for Vampire: the Masquerade 5E (not the D&D 5E, just Vampire’s 5th Edition), is out for pre-order, with an expected June 2024 release date. Check it out!

Vampire: The Masquerade 5E LARP – Laws of the Night

Mature Advisory: contains graphic and written content of a mature nature, including violence, sexual themes, and strong language. Reader discretion is advised.

Can you thrive in the night?

The V5 setting of Vampire: The Masquerade evolves the storyline into the modern nights. A world where the Anarchs have wrestled for domination of the cities from the Camarilla, where mortal and other hunters have gained a technological edge, where Gehenna is no longer coming but is upon us.

The Laws of the Night include all of the core mechanics necessary to play the Live Action Roleplaying game – Vampire the Masquerade.

Features

• • All of the clans, disciplines, and abilities you have come to enjoy as part of the newest version of Vampire: the Masquerade.
  • A new, cinematic, and mathematically-balanced rules system was developed specifically to support the story and style of a live-action environment for Vampire: The Masquerade.
  • A streamlined character creation system that is both a comprehensive and efficient translation to live action.
  • Detailed settings for Camarilla and Anarch games, with updated rules and material designed to enhance the story of each setting.
  • Support, guidance, and materials for both Storytellers and players
  • A detailed guide to character progression through a live-action chronicle to assist both players and storytellers
  • Incredible artwork in full color and high-definition

Pre-order Laws of the Night 5E now!

Bell of Lost Souls Staff Writer and DM, J.R. covers RPGs of all stripes and on occasion eats sandwiches. You can ask him about either at [email protected]

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Renegade Game Studios has placed Laws of the Night, for Vampire: The Masquerade 5E, onto preorder. This book will hit stores in June 2024.

The new edition of Laws of the Night includes the core rules needed to Vampire: The Masquerade 5E live-action roleplaying sessions (LARP). This book contains all of the clans, their disciplines, and their abilities as well as a balanced rules system specific to LARP. It also has rules for a streamlined character creation system as well as support materials for Storytellers and players such as setting background for Camarilla and Anarch games and a character progression guide. The 5.5″ by 8″ softcover also showcases full-color artwork.

Laws of the Night will come as a standard edition for $39.99 and a deluxe edition for $59.99.

Renegade Game Studios recently released The Book of Nod Deluxe Artifact Edition, for Vampire: The Masquerade 5E (see “$300 ‘Vampire: The Masquerade 5E: The Book of Nod’“).

Click on Gallery for full-size images!

Attend ballroom dances, engage in secretive romances and fend off monstrous creatures as the world crumbles outside your mansion’s windows in Our Brilliant Ruin, a new RPG that mixes the social drama of Downton Abbey with the bleak apocalypse of Arkham Horror.

Our Brilliant Ruin’s setting, the Dramark, is a fictional world of Edwardian-influenced aesthetic, Franco-British Art Nouveau and Art Deco inspirations with existential horror at its edges. The Dramark itself is doomed to inevitable consumption by an “unnatural law” known as The Ruin. With the world’s fate already sealed, players’ characters aren’t tasked with somehow saving it from the inevitable, but instead making the most of the short time they have left.

Our Brilliant Ruin is Coming to Kickstarter!

How characters spend the apocalypse may come down to which of three factions they associate with in Dramark society. Aristocrats may party away the days and dance the endless night-long in their swanky mansions as they try to maintain their grip over those without the money or social clout to spend their last days living quite so fancy-free. Those may be the truefolk, everyday proles whose work continues to hold things together during the collapse of society just as they did before. Aiming to blur and then entirely erase the class divide between the two are unbonded, revolutionary activists looking to accelerate the disintegration of the rigid class structure fractured by the end of the world.

Those three overarching factions then divide further into ten groups that span from rich families and academic alumni to industrial or political organisations. A character’s social standing and connections will influence with whom they rub shoulders, butt heads or even knock boots, depending on how the players navigate their way through the echelons of Dramark’s high-and-mighty or on-the-street.

Characters’ backgrounds will play into their emotions and motivations, steering the outcome of dice rolls made by the players during their sessions. Our Brilliant Ruin uses an original gameplay system allowing players to assemble a pool of six-sided dice by combining their character’s personality traits and skills together to resolve tests, possibly drawing on their intuition or benevolence, falling prey to their obsession, or harnessing raw ferocity in a fight. As well as their personality and skill attributes, characters can make use of their social advantages – whether that’s simply how much money you have to hand, who you can call upon for a favour or the influence you hold over someone.

To succeed in your aims, you’ll need to roll more ‘brills’ – on sixes – than ‘glooms’ on ones. Desperate times might call for you to risk more, with the option to use a limited amount of ‘passion’ to add two dice able to succeed on a five or six, but with the knowledge that pushing yourself too often can lead to increased chance of failure later on.

While much of Our Brilliant Ruin’s conflict is ‘civilised’ – sharp tongues are more likely to appear than blades – the danger posed by The Ruin can only be ignored for so long. The creeping shadow will cause plants and animals to twist into strange and monstrous forms, with unlucky humans unable to escape its affliction as they become terrifying creatures wreaking havoc. While characters might find themselves faced with battling The Ruin directly at times, there’s no way to stop it entirely – leading most to hole themselves away and live life in excess before the blight inevitably claims what’s left.

Writers Justin Achilli, Rachel J. Wilkinson and Pam Punzalan boast credits across Vampire: The Masquerade and the World of Darkness series, Assassin’s Creed, Dune RPG Adventures in the Imperium, and Dungeons & Dragons’ Journeys through the Radiant Citadel. Art director Andy Foltz and concept artist Efrem Palacios bring their own experience illustrating the likes of Magic: The Gathering, Star Wars, Hearthstone and Far Cry 4 to envisioning the bleak world.

The team at Studio Hermitage have ambitious plans for the setting of Dramark and threat of The Ruin introduced with Our Brilliant Ruin, outlining the tabletop RPG as the first piece in a wider universe that hopes to include video games, graphic novels and audio dramas. The Kickstarter campaign for the Our Brilliant Ruin RPG is live now, with a comic-book series and audio drama planned to launch later in 2024 and a video game in development for the future.

The Nexus app for Alien: The Roleplaying Game is the latest RPG to jump onto the online toolkit, following the likes of Pathfinder, the World of Darkness series – including Vampire: The Masquerade – the Marvel Multiverse RPG and Avatar Legends.

In 2021, Alien RPG publisher Free League revealed its plans to launch a Free League Nexus supporting the Swedish studio’s various titles. Alien RPG joins Mutant: Year Zero as the first two games from the publisher to get Nexus support, with gothic folklore RPG Vaesen, sci-fi series Coriolis and throwback fantasy adventure Forbidden Lands also being teased for future addition in the announcement trailer.

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Alien: The RPG’s standalone Nexus app will include the core rules for the tabletop adaptation of the seminal sci-fi horror film, originally released in 2019 and pretty darn good by all accounts. The tool will also offer an interactive character sheet assembled via a character creation system, letting players create their characters and keep track of their progression (or inevitable death-by-facehugger) across sessions.

On top of the basic rules, the app features a searchable digital compendium of the game’s available careers – its stand-in for classes, ranging from gung-ho Colonial Marines to Newt-like children – the spacecraft on which they might find themselves trapped and the Alien species pursuing them through vents and corridors.

The app lets players roll digital dice and add digital artefacts while playing, too, allowing games to be run fully online over video, voice and text chat, or simply be used as a handy reference while playing in person.

Alien RPG Nexus will be available from February 27th, when it exits its current early access state. You’ll need to cough up $30 for the core rulebook, with other supplements costing from $10 for standalone adventure Chariot of the Gods to $25 for the bigger campaign modules.

This is the premise of Our Brilliant Ruin, a new tabletop RPG from World of Darkness writer Justin Achilli, Vampire: the Masquerade and Dune RPG veteran Rachel J. Wilkinson and Journeys through the Radiant Citadel contributor Pam Punzalan. The design team will launch a Kickstarter campaign later in February to fund their scathing take on a doomed world first with a tabletop game, but they already have plans for graphic novels, serial audio shows and video games in cooperation with Studio Hermitage.

Players will wend their paths through Dramark’s gilded dance halls and smoking lounges, rubbing elbows with a class of filthy rich doomed souls who are desperately trying to drown the reality of the apocalypse with wine, dance and excess. Outside their mansions and palaces, an unstoppable wave of darkness known as The Ruin twists land, creatures and people into horrifying monstrosities. But never mind all that, darling – your glass is empty!

The group must contend with three ruling factions and the myriad houses and clans within them who squabble for social clout and political power, helping them solve problems that might feel trivial against the backdrop of a fallen world but are nonetheless paramount to gaining access into the highest reaches of society. The genteel are always looking for audacious climbers willing to venture beyond the false safety of the gardens, or keep any rude reminders of the world’s fate from interrupting their courtly games. It balances that upstairs-downstairs class split from shows such as Downton Abbey with the constant political shuffling and scheming that stuck Game of Thrones in peoples’ minds for so long.

Our Brilliant Ruin’s system uses a pool of six-sided dice derived from player characters’ skills and personality to overcome challenges. It’s very similar to other d6 dice pools, except that here players can combine two skills to represent the complicated and nuanced way one must approach most situations in Dramark. Use both obsession and fight to strike down a rival to your paramour, or deploy a combination of intuition and grace when helping a friend conceal their frightening true nature.

Player characters can also leverage their personal portfolios of resources, connections and gossip to tip the advantage in their favour, whether locked in a duel of words, wit or well-oiled steel. Like other systems in this vein, Our Brilliant Ruin allows players to push themselves to achieve a better outcome – or avoid a disaster. Leaning on your passions might make all the difference, but is it worth the risk?

Our Brilliant Disaster’s Kickstarter campaign will launch on February 27th to fund a core rulebook – as far as we know all of Studio Hermitage’s multimedia aspirations will bloom out of this tabletop RPG’s success. The key art certainly showcases a striking world contrasted between lavish decadence and a dreary and hopeless backdrop. I mean, the moon seems to be falling apart. That’s never a good sign.

Studio Hermitage announced Our Brilliant Ruin, a new transmedia IP, which will launch on Kickstarter with a debut TTRPG project on February 27, 2024.

Our Brilliant Ruin is a new horror drama IP brought to market by Studio Hermitage, an Embracer Group studio that is headed up by industry veterans CEO Paxton Galvanek, Art Director Andy Foltz, and CCO Justin Achilli (see “‘World of Darkness’“). The IP kicks off with a TTRPG that tells the story of Dramark. The tale features an elitist society that comes up against a catastrophe that unleashes its living victims as contorted horrors upon humanity. Players assume the roles of a character from one of three factions within the society as tell their story in the class-based Dramark society.

The mechanics for the TTRPG offer players an original dice-based engine that utilizes a character’s emotions and motivations to influence die rolls. It revolves around pools of D6 dice, and rolls are based on personality traits and skills. There is also a Portfolios mechanic that allows players to use their social leverage gain advantages in certain situations, and a Passions mechanic that boosts die rolls, if a player is will to push their luck.

Beyond the initial TTRPG, Studio Hermitage will also bring Our Brilliant Ruin to other media formats. They have slated this IP to as spawn graphic novels, audio dramas, and video games.

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While D&D’s ongoing rise means that creators Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson are now more likely than ever to be familiar names outside of the hardest of hardcore fans, another late icon of fantasy roleplaying’s early days still remains lesser-known outside of dedicated hobbyists – despite arguably deserving just as much recognition for his visionary and influential contributions to tabletop roleplaying over the last 40-plus years. An upcoming new edition of Greg Stafford’s King Arthur Pendragon, the definitive version of the designer’s magnum opus, may help change that.

Even those who do recognise Stafford’s name may not know Pendragon. Stafford is typically widely recognised for co-creating RuneQuest, the mythological fantasy RPG released a handful of years after Dungeons & Dragons and set in his grand world of Glorantha. With its first edition second only to Advanced D&D in the sales charts before its decline in the mid-eighties, RuneQuest has seen several new editions since the turn of the millennium, most recently seeing an update in 2018’s RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha.

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While RuneQuest is Stafford’s best-known work, however, it’s King Arthur Pendragon that many – including the designer himself – consider to be his best work.

“In the past, I have designed or co-designed seven published roleplaying games, five published board games, and one computer game, as well as innumerable supplements, adventures, and scenarios, and without a doubt King Arthur Pendragon is my favourite. I consider it my masterpiece,” Stafford wrote plainly in the designer’s notes to Pendragon’s fifth edition, released in 2005.

I have designed or co-designed seven published roleplaying games, five published board games and one computer game, and without a doubt King Arthur Pendragon is my favourite. I consider it my masterpiece.

Pendragon took Arthurian legend as its springboard for epic, character-centric roleplaying. Players were glory-seeking knights, but battled as much with their morals and motivations as with evil sorcerers or dragons. At the heart of the game were characters’ traits and passions, Stafford’s innovative way of creating complex and individual personalities. Traits pulled knights between contrasting characteristics – merciful or cruel, modest or proud, trusting or suspicious – while passions guided the characters’ behaviour according to deep-set beliefs and emotions, whether loyalty, love, hatred or something else entirely. The pioneering system was later introduced to RuneQuest, still largely unequalled almost four decades after it envisioned a new way of creating richly-detailed and humanly multifaceted characters.

“As I see it, Pendragon was so far ahead of its time the hobby is just now catching up to Greg’s innovations from nearly 40 years ago, so there really wasn’t much need to change things mechanically in any significant way,” says David Larkins, the line editor for Pendragon’s upcoming sixth edition.

The depth of Pendragon’s characters is matched by the scope of their stories, which – in true Arthurian fashion – can span many generations. In keeping with Stafford’s vision of a literary RPG, ongoing campaigns veer from the epic to the everyday as knights return between quests, pursuing romance, maintaining their home and eventually having a family with an heir to whom they can pass down their sword once they are too old to adventure.

“The game began as an imitation of a mythic genre, and I take great pride in how well it presents the literary and medieval world, warts and all,” Stafford writes in the sixth-edition Player’s Handbook. “In the literature, there is a struggle between the harsh reality of the medieval world and the bright idealism of the Round Table. That conflict is central to the game.”

For a game about embarking on decades-long quests, Pendragon has been on its own epic and eventful journey. The game’s first edition was released by Stafford’s publishing label Chaosium in 1985, which had followed RuneQuest with seminal horror RPG Call of Cthulhu. A planned second edition, split into three separate books, was cancelled before release (despite rumours of existing copies that Stafford himself denied) as the company shifted away from boxed products. Instead, a third edition followed in 1990, with a fourth edition in 1993.

Third Edition would be Chaosium’s last release for the game in almost two decades as Pendragon changed hands multiple times in the intervening years, leading to a stripped-back fifth edition – the game’s last major revision – just over a decade later from Vampire: The Masquerade maker White Wolf. After two incremental updates to Fifth Edition and another brief change of hands to Nocturnal Media, Pendragon finally returned home to Chaosium in late 2018, shortly after Stafford’s death that October. In 2020, the studio announced its plans to release Pendragon’s sixth edition, which Stafford had been working on for the decade before his passing and considered the “Ultimate” form of his masterpiece. (“It will be my last version, simply because my age requires me to work on new material, not to revise the old,” the designer writes with tragic foresight in the book’s notes.)

“One of the things I love most about Greg Stafford’s work is his commitment to the maxim of making the kind of game he wanted to play. Then you put it out there and see how many folks feel the same way,” Larkins says. “That’s why we call Sixth Edition Greg’s ‘Ultimate’ edition – actually a term he coined.

“I remember discussing bringing in mechanics from other games during the early development phases, but he wanted to tweak what was already there rather than make any significant changes. The system does what he wants it to, and it’s simply been a matter of adjustments and tweaks.”

When Stafford passed away, he left behind a draft of Sixth Edition totalling more than 500 pages. The “nearly complete” outline included minor reworks of many existing rules and lore, alongside brand new systems for battles and sieges. While the Chaosium team ‘polished’ the final books from the draft, Larkins assures that preserving Stafford’s distinctive voice was paramount.

“Everything you’ll read in the core books is fundamentally Greg’s writing,” Larkins says. “A great example of Staffordian prose, for example, is Greg’s definition of Knightly Skills: ‘Certain Skills are required for the office of knighthood. Few knights master them all. They mostly deal with finding, identifying, and killing people in a variety of ways, as politely as possible.’”

Playing Pendragon can feel quite different from a typical RPG.

Many of the biggest changes address how the rules are presented, rather than the rules themselves, aiming to provide a less intimidating first experience for newcomers. This resulted in the sixth edition’s core rules being broken into three separate books focused on distinct elements: a Player’s Handbook, Gamemaster’s Handbook and Noble’s Handbook. The core books follow a set of quickstart rules released in 2020, including the first printing of The Adventure of the Great Hunt, a scenario originally outlined by Stafford in 1991, and a starter set released last year. Classic adventures, such as Stafford’s acclaimed The Great Pendragon Campaign, which spans close to a century of in-game time where each year can form its own lengthy quest, will similarly be condensed into more easily-digestible volumes.

“Pendragon is quite simple, mechanically speaking, but the deep lore and high concepts can potentially be off-putting to someone unfamiliar with the Arthurian tales or the type of narrative tension and drama which the Traits and Passions system creates,” Larkins acknowledges. “Playing Pendragon can feel quite different from a typical RPG sometimes.

“Before [becoming line editor], as a fan and contributor to the line, too often I saw people start their Pendragon journey by jumping into The Great Pendragon Campaign with the intention of running the whole thing, only for things to fizzle before they even got to Arthur drawing the sword from the stone!”

Other changes in sixth edition look to modernise the game without departing from its setting’s dedication to a medieval experience. While non-male knights had been included as playable characters and NPCs from the start, the new edition increases representation for non-male characters and makes adjustments to rules for aspects such as inheritance and childbirth. (Stafford cites Sixth Edition’s expanded representation of women-at-arms in historical and literary sources to head off any questions over historical “purity”.)

“Non-male knights have been acknowledged as a character and setting option since first edition. But the thing is, they weren’t well represented in the art or scenarios, and things like inheritance tended to default to an assumption everyone would be playing men,” Larkins says, adding that Sixth Edition was developed with a team of designers, writers and artists representing “a diverse range of gender identities, sexualities, and cultural and religious backgrounds”. “So a lot of that kind of work on Sixth Edition was simply making sure the stated option of playing non-male knights had some actual support in the text and the art.”

Tragedy, an ever-present theme in the game, is now foregrounded.

Pendragon re-emerges into a fantasy landscape vastly different from that of 1985, or even its last full edition. With so much of modern fantasy – and pop-culture as a whole – seemingly undercut with a more cynical edge than the shining armour and pure-hearted aims of old, Pendragon’s sixth edition likewise leans further into the darker elements of its traditional inspirations.

“If you look at the first-edition box cover, the subtitle is ‘The Game of Quest, Romance, & Adventure’. Greg changed that for Sixth Edition; it is now ‘The Role-playing Game of Valor, Honor, and Tragedy’,” Larkins points out.

“I’m not saying 1985 was any kind of golden age, but it’s pretty undeniable that things can seem pretty dark these days in comparison, including in fantasy media. Everything is murky earth tones, every story has an undercurrent of evil on the brink of triumph. And so we see that subtle shift even in Greg’s description of the game – tragedy, an ever-present theme in the game, is now foregrounded.”

While Pendragon is no stranger to tragedy – the legends of King Arthur that it emulates end with many of the Round Table dead, Arthur mortally wounded in battle with Mordred and his kingdom doomed to ruin – the RPG balances its darkness with the hope that goodness will ultimately prevail.

“One of my favourite pieces of Greg’s writing in Sixth Edition is a short essay called ‘Bringing the Light’,” Larkins says. “In it, he talks about the dark, cruel world of Medieval Europe, and how Pendragon allows us to play in a world that is like that, but with the very real possibility of change for the better.”

Finding light in dark times may strike a chord with many people in 2024, amidst war, genocide, economic instability, environmental anxiety and in the lasting shadow of a deadly global plague. In many ways, the confident return of Pendragon after decades finding itself feels like the mythical resurrection of King Arthur himself.

We need something to feed our imaginations and our souls. I have striven to offer this food for the spirit through roleplaying games.

“There are so many themes in Pendragon that are more relevant now than ever, but fundamentally: who wouldn’t want to be a Big Damn Hero if given the chance?” Larkins says. “That’s why I play, and I think a lot of folks are looking for that sort of fun escapism.”

Just as his vision for what a roleplaying game could be was ahead of its time 40 years ago, Stafford himself seems blessed with the foresight of knowing his greatest work would always have something to offer its players: goodness.

“We are not just creatures of the brain, but also of the heart and soul,” the designer writes of humanity in his sixth edition notes. “We still need something to feed our imaginations and our souls. I have striven to offer this food for the spirit through roleplaying games. The game is for the sake of that magic. Conscious fantasy is good for gaming. It is good for people. It is good for the world.”