Keith

Product Release: “Project Infinite Hole” for Paranoia

Project Infinite Hole

Available in print now! I was part of the writing team on this massive Paranoia sourcebox, and now you can experience our R&D gadgets, NPCs, weapons, armor, GM advice, and multiple adventures (including one and a half by me!).

From the Mongoose Publishing product page:

Troubleshooters! Do you like weird, risky experiments? (Yes!) Do you like testing devices that could leave behind a smoking crater if you use it wrong? (Uh, yes?) Do you like taking the blame for design mistakes, production errors, structural damage and enough deaths that genocide-ish is now a term? (Can I say anything other than yes? Ah, that laser pistol answered my question. Very yes!)

Project Infinite Hole brings the wonder, broken laws of physics and lapse safety standards of Research & Design back to Paranoia! Instead of simply sending Troubleshooters to their much-deserved deaths, you can also send experimental devices with them that help their much-deserved deaths happen more often! Inside, you will find:

The Happy Testing Catalogue: New Paranoia GMs will see 40 new experimental devices such as Fluffy Safety Armour and the Jaws of Death. Experienced Paranoia GMs will see many splendid ways to make players weep. With joy? Sure, why not.  

The GM R&D Service Book: Several fine articles explaining how to use R&D in your missions that definitely are not filler so we could charge more for this sourcebox. Need an NPC? Here they are! Need a Research & Design room? We got those! Need a way to help Troubleshooters survive? Sorry, fresh out.

The R&D Mission Book: But what about those lazy GMs who want the work done for them? If they can put the imitation cheese-powdered snacks down long enough, they will find two full missions that start the Project Infinite Hole campaign! Oh, and there’s a black hole destroying all you know and love (In the missions, not this sourcebox. Apparently, governments frown on selling singularities in cardboard boxes.)

The R&D Deck: You want cards? Tough, here are 120 of ‘em, ready to be handed out to players who think they’re all clever. Watch their faces go from devilish glee to abject fright as they realise how the device can backfire. Literally.

R&D stands for many things: Rebar & Dust, Radiation & Debacles or even Rannygazoo & Deprehend. (What? Famous Game Designers have good vocabularies.) But mostly, it stands for one of the most infamous Alpha Complex service groups: Research & Design. With this sourcebox, GMs have everything needed to bring R&D back into the Troubleshooters’ lives. Yes, they will be grateful – or they get to test the Angry Beebots again.

Paranoia: Project Infinite Hole is available now in print or PDF.

Kickstarting Now: Rest in Pieces

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.

Rest in Pieces Kickstarter

Kickstarting Now: Project Infinite Hole for Paranoia

Source: Mongoose Publishing

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.

Bucket list achieved!

See more details (and back this sucker) at the Project Infinite Hole Kickstarter page.

Game Companies Say: Black Lives Matter

I wrote the following as a guest article 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:

Wizards of the Coast donated to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, My Brother’s Keeper Alliance, and Black Girls Code, and released the following statement:

Steve Jackson Games donated to four charities in Austin, Texas: Austin Area Urban League, Austin Justice Coalition, Project ROAR, and 400+1 Bail Fund. They posted this statement:

Goodman Games posted this inspirational image:

Green Ronin Publishing‘s Facebook account went silent for a day to make room for other voices.

Tomorrow, this social media account will go silent so that other voices can be heard. We support justice, equity, and human rights. #BlackLivesMatter

Posted by Green Ronin Publishing on Monday, June 1, 2020

Magpie Games posted a Tweet standing with Black Lives Matter and sharing a list of black leaders in gaming to follow.

Evil Hat Productions donated to Black Lives Matter and released the following statement:

Chaosium is donating a portion of the proceeds from their latest Call of Cthulhu book to National Bail Out.

Schwalb Entertainment donated $1,022 to the Bail Project, explaining that “saying something without doing anything is uesless.”

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:

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.”

Pelgrane Press donated $1,000 and 10% of their June web store sales to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. They also released a longer statement on their website.

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…

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!

Renovation

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!