Indie +2 Bundle In Its Last Hours At The Bundle of Holding

Over at the Bundle of Holding they are in the last hours of a bundle full of great indie female game designers. At the time of this post (18 hours to go!) they had only sold 554 bundles. This is criminally negligent on the part of the tabletop gaming community. Click through on that convenient link and get some great DRM-free gaming PDFs for your gaming collections.

For the base price of $9.95 (US dollars, of course) you get three great games: Awesome Adventures by Willow Palecek (a streamlined hack of the Spirit of the Century SRD), Cogs, Cakes and Swordsticks by Lynne Hardy (a game of Steampunk adventure in Jolly Old England) and Tragedy In Five Parts by Michelle Lyons-McFarland (a Shakespearean role-playing game). The retail value on these PDFs would be $30, but through the Bundle of Holding, you can get them for a third of that.

But! The fun comes in when you sweeten the pot and go over the base price. If you bid over the threshold amount (just over $20 at the time of this post) you will get an exciting variety of other RPGs as well. Another Fine Mess by Ann Dupuis is a classic adventure for the Fudge RPG that allows to you play animal characters. Blade & Crown by Rachel Kronick combines the faux realism of 80s fantasy adventure RPGs with the narrativist sensibilities of indie RPG design. Cartoon Action Hour by Cynthia Celeste Miller takes you back to the days of your favorite Saturday Morning Cartoons of the 80s. Monsters & Magic by Sarah Newton combines old school gaming with new school approaches into a fast and fun fantasy roleplaying game. Shelter In Place by J. R. Blackwell is a live action role-playing game of zombie fun. Steal Away Jordan by Julia Bond Ellingboe is an exploration of slavery. Not for everyone, but it is still an intriguing game.

Why should you support a bundle like this? Two reasons. First, the games are cool, interesting and fun. Second, diversity is always a good thing. Gamers can get locked in their ways and only play the same games, sometimes for decades. Consider getting exposed to new outlooks like the Five Year Mission of the Enterprise and "explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations." You might find your next favorite game if you look around.

Ptolus In The Bundle of Holding

It is a good thing that a Bundle of Holding is so big, because it takes a lot of space to hold Monte Cook's Ptolus: City By The Spire. Arguably the biggest single shot setting for gaming (I don't really consider World's Largest Dungeon a setting), Ptolus comes in at more than 800 pages. For $19.95 you get the core book AND all of the following: the Chaostech supplement, the Banewardens and Night of Dissolution adventures, the first issue of the Ptolus comic and a couple of character journals.

With the new edition of D&D rolling out, a lot of people are looking for settings for their games. Why not go for Ptolus? The conversion between 3rd and 5th editions look to be fairly minimal and you get a top flight setting that embraces the paradigms of 5th edition D&D, primarily exploration.

You should get all of the setting you will need for a hundred campaigns out of this book.

If you want to level up for the bonus material (which while cool isn't as compatible with the 5th edition rules), you only need to pay a few more dollars ($26.53 at the time of this post) you can also get the Complete Book of Eldritch Might, Books of Experimental Might I and II and Books of Hallowed Might I and II. You will also receive another adventure that you can adapt to your 5th edition games (Dark Tidings) and Secrets of the Delver's Guild, a series of articles originally written by Monte Cook to explore the world of Ptolus.

So, for less than the cost of a copy of the Player's Handbook you can purchase the last setting that you may ever need and use it for your 5th edition games.

This Bundle expires on September 16, 2014.

Meanwhile At The Bundle Of Holding - A One-Roll Engine

It is the last day for the One-Roll Engine Bundle of Holding. You're not familiar with the One-Roll Engine?

The One-Roll Engine (ORE) system resolves initiative, success/failure, and damage in one quick roll. Designed by Greg Stolze (Unknown Armies) and Dennis Detwiller (Delta Green), this d10 dice-pool system is fast and easy to learn, yet has enough crunch and options to satisfy veteran players and GMs. Though technically a generic system, ORE really shines in superheroic action. 

I'll say right now, that this probably isn't going to be a game for everyone, and that's all right. But with the One-Roll Engine, and its accompanying suite of games, you have a game that is tightly designed around a specific idea: gritty super-heroic action.

That's something that is a sort of holy grail for super-hero gamers. A lot of super-hero RPGs do an excellent job at the "higher end" of the super-hero spectrum, but a lot of these start to fall apart when you get to the "lower end" or more street level types of games. With Godlike, Dennis Detwiller and Greg Stolze changed this. I have the original edition of Godlike in my gaming collection and I've played it a few times. It did have some mechanical quirks to it, but those were outweighed by a system that did a good job of handling the previously unhandleable. (Yeah, I know that's a made up word. Sue me.)

If you haven't played Godlike, I can describe it as being akin in tone to the Liberty Files graphic novels put out by DC Comics. If you don't know what those are, then shame on you. After you check out the Bundle of Holding you need to track down these comics as well.

A lot of these kinks were ironed out with the more generic version of the rules from Godlike, released as the game Wild Talents. Designed from the basis of a number of hours and months of play of the engine of the rules, Wild Talents expanded the scope of the rules to handle super-heroic action in a number of different eras, outside of the World War II action of the original Godlike rules.

In addition to a fine-tuning of the rules, Wild Talents has some additional material that would be of interest to super-hero gamers. The book has valuable campaign creation/design material from super star game designer Kenneth Hite, If you feel that your skill as a game master isn't up to describing the world that you want to game in, the section and advice written by Hite will help you over that hill.

The bundle also includes settings and expansions for the One-Roll Engine's rules. eCollapse and Better Angels are built around some interesting setting ideas from Greg Stolze, the creator of the rules.

Also, if the One-Roll Engine isn't your thing, Godlike features a conversion of the super power rules from that game into a d20 structure. That conversion was done by a designer who's name you may have heard of: Mike Mearls. I've always been surprised that these rules never went viral into the open content landscape. They should have been a part of open gaming for a long time now.

If you're not a fan of super-heroes, there is also a fantasy game that you can find in the Bundle. Reign, also designed by Stolze, is a demonstration of how well the One-Roll Engine rules can be used as the backbone of a fantasy game. Reign also features one of the more interesting and unique fantasy probably since Greg Stafford's Glorantha.

The game may not be to the tastes of those who only want to play D&D and the derivatives thereof, but for those people looking for something different in their fantasy gaming, Reign just might be that game that they are looking for.

And in addition to getting some good gaming material in DRM-free PDF form, you are also doing a good thing. Ten percent of the monies raised by each Bundle goes to charities of the designer/publisher's choice. For this Bundle, the charities of choice are Doctors Without Borders and Action Against Hunger. Check this bundle out soon, because tonight will will be done.