My friend Peter Petrusha (Imagining Games) has a cool new game coming out called Rest in Pieces, and it’s on Kickstarter now (but ending soon). Pete also enlisted me to write one of the game’s expansions!
Rest in Pieces is a cool roleplaying game that uses a Jenga tower as a resolution mechanic (and does some new things with this idea). Here’s a brief summary:
“You play fed-up deadbeat roommates that happen to share a “pad” with none other than the Grim Reaper! What can go wrong, does go wrong in this ridiculous game about bad days and difficult friendships. Imagine playing out dark comedy stories like in The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy, The Regular Show, Rick & Morty, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Rest in Pieces is a dark comedy RPG that plays with a two-color jenga tower and a unique deck of cards.”
–Rest in Pieces Kickstarter
My expansion puts you in a leaky flophouse with Great Cthulhu instead of the Grim Reaper, and includes other cards to support a Lovecraftian theme.
The Kickstarter for Rest in Pieces is fully funded and ends on October 29, 2020.
A project I contributed to is now on Kickstarter! It’s for Paranoia, one of my favorite games ever, and this one is a full boxed set focusing on R&D. From the Kickstarter page:
Project Infinite Hole is the first service group supplement for the latest edition of Paranoia. Here, you will find three books that can make your players weep for joy, and occasionally, panicked fear.
The R&D Happy Testing Catalogue: 64 lovingly crafted pages describing 40 experimental devices fresh from the R&D labs! Fluffy Safety Armour, Jaws of Death, iEye and more are sure to delight your players! Wait, that’s not right. Oh, it will delight sadistic Paranoia GMs. That makes more sense.
The Gamemasters R&D Service Book: 80 pages that explore this service group in detail, including how R&D works, how it does not work, new locations, new NPCs and the thrilling Troubleshooter In-field R&D Adjunct system (TIRDA) that lets players combine equipment cards to create what’s sure to be a complete and utter cock-up. (That is not a dirty word! Get your mind out of the gutter, Troubleshooter!)
The R&D Mission Book: 128 pages giving a busy GM two missions that start the first ever (we think) Paranoia campaign! You also get the Top 10 Best R&D Experiments (filled with three-act structured mission hooks) and advice on adding a trip to R&D into every Troubleshooter mission. Yes, players really will be thankful for that!
You also get the R&D Deck with 120 new cards: 18 R&D-themed Action Cards, 15 Armour and Defensive Devices, 5 Bot Modules, 25 Coretech Apps, 25 Surveillance Devices and 32 Weapons. (These include the 40 devices in the R&D Happy Testing Catalogue, but also a lot more!) All equipment is experimental, meaning there are different effects depending on whether the Troubleshooter was barely competent or suspiciously incompetent. (Remember, equipment failure is a choice and will be punished accordingly.) No longer will you say, ‘Uh, you miss with laser pistol. Next!’ Instead, you can say, ‘Your Duct Tape Gun misses and hits an air duct, which is suddenly pulled down on top of you. Next!’
You can download the draft of the first mission, Filling an Infinite Hole, right HERE!
That first mission draft is one of the things I wrote for this. I got to contribute to all three books–writing missions, NPCs, gadgets, and essays.
I wrote the following as a guestarticle on Gnome Stew.I’m including it here for you regular readers!
Following the widespread protests kicked off by the death of George Floyd, an unarmed black man who was killed by police while in their custody, a number of tabletop game companies have responded by speaking out against such injustice. In the best cases, they’ve also taken steps to help. While it’s becoming less rare for this industry to unite and stand up for a cause, this occasion feels especially noteworthy. Here are some examples of such companies rallying to support racial equality earlier this month.
Paizo made the following statement, pledging (among other things) to start a new charity to help black communities:
Magpie Games posted a Tweet standing with Black Lives Matter and sharing a list of black leaders in gaming to follow.
All of us at Magpie Games stand with the protestors fighting against police brutality. Black lives matter. Power w/o accountability always leads to injustice.
Schwalb Entertainment donated $1,022 to the Bail Project, explaining that “saying something without doing anything is uesless.”
Since founding this company, I have made it a point to keep my personal politics and my company separate, believing that my customers generally don’t care for whom I vote or what causes I support. But the time for my silence is over. #BlackLivesMatter.https://t.co/eN0PzZagHapic.twitter.com/Io6H0VdMEh
— SchwalbEntertainment (@schwalb_ent) June 7, 2020
Arc Dream Publishing donated to the Northwest Community Bail Fund in Seattle, and the publishers of Delta Green put their extensive research into criminal justice into perspective:
It's long past time for America to treat criminal suspects with humanity. For the next three days Arc Dream Publishing (@ArcDreamLLC) will match donations to Seattle's Northwest Community Bail Fund (@NWComBailFund), up to $846 a day. We hope you'll join us. pic.twitter.com/xsdclKznhV
— Shane Ivey does Delta Green & stuff (@shaneivey) June 3, 2020
Monte Cook Games has made the following offer on their recent Cypher System adventure Heist on Miracle IV: “Now through June 30th, all proceeds from sales of Heist on Miracle IV will be donated to blacklivesmatter.com. Monte Cook Games will make a matching donation for the first 500 copies sold during this period.”
NEW RELEASE: Heist on Miracle IV—aliens, synths, and a caper aboard a space station!
In response to the murder of George Floyd, the latest in a long list of Black people unjustly killed by police, we are donating $1000 and 10% of all our webstore sales in June to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Read our full statement here: https://t.co/eFNTRXuc19
R. Talsorian Games made $2,000 donation to the Bail Project, which provides bail assistance to protestors. The company announced this with a statement; the full version is in a blog post, but the short version fit in the Tweet below…
We couldn't fit our statement on an Instagram-friendly graphic so we wrote a blog post. Here's the tl;dr if you don't want to click the link.
— R. Talsorian Games Making Cyberpunk and Witcher (@RTalsorianGames) June 5, 2020
Did you spot any game companies speaking out (or taking action) on behalf of racial equality recently? We probably missed some, so let us know in the comments!
Hi, all…just a quick note to mention that I’ve given the site a new look and feel. I hope you like it! Please let me know if you have any issues, or any other feedback about the design. We now have a “Contact Me” page where you can reach me by email, and of course you can still comment on individual posts. Like this one!
