Review: Brozer - Island of War and Winter

Review: Brozer - Island of War and Winter

In the online TTRPG discussion circles, you may hear the term “Braunstein” being thrown around. You may have heard that Braunstein was the precursor to D&D and tabletop RPGs in general, and that Blackmoor was first labeled “a fantasy Braunstein.” However, it’s much more difficult to understand what it is and how to run one. At least, it was until last year there was a very important release – Brozer: Island of War and Winter. I believe that it deserves much more publicity than it did, so I’d like to give you a quick rundown and review. For the most part, my ramblings are pointless because Brozer is free, and you can simply download it and read it yourself.

Review: How to Be a GURPS GM: Improvising

Review: How to Be a GURPS GM: Improvising

Since I haven’t been following the GURPS news and upcoming releases in quite a while, the new book caught me by surprise. Yesterday, How to be a GURPS GM: Improvising got released, written by Sean Punch a.k.a. Dr. Kromm. The How to be a GURPS GM series of books is a mixed bag with some good ones and some not so good ones, so I decided to check this one out. After all, improvisation is indeed a skill and I wondered how one could even explain in text how to improvise better. These days, when many players seem to try their hardest to avoid reading the rulebooks and GMs learn how to GM from questionable actual plays and numerous even more questionable YouTube videos, there is a shortage of good written material to learn the art of being a GM from. And then people complain about the GM shortage!

Review: ACKS Imperial Imprint

Review: ACKS Imperial Imprint

All right, I don’t really know how to go about this review, but I will do my best. If you’re in the TTRPG hobby, you are probably aware of the new major release - ACKS II, which stands for Adventurer Conqueror King System Imperial Imprint. I am primarily a GURPS player, and I admit that most other systems do not interest me, and even most of the recent GURPS releases didn’t pique my interest. This is less of a problem of low quality even though there is a visible decline, but the fact that I find GURPS to be a complete system (aside from lacking GURPS Vehicles). So, why did ACKS II grab my attention and didn’t let it go still? Because it made me feel that there are still people that genuinely care about the hobby; that there are people who go against the modern flow of OSR PDF slop that tells you to Rule Zero everything; that there are people who have the perseverance and work ethics to streamline and perfect the classical concepts. It’s genuinely inspiring and, as people say nowadays, whitepilling.

Reading AD&D Player's Handbook

Reading AD&D Player's Handbook

AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide is considered by many an essential book for every DM/GM to read, and while I have skimmed it and found that indeed it's a treasure trove of useful stuff even for my GURPS games, I'm yet to thoroughly read it from cover to cover. So, that's my plan. However, before I do that, I have to read the AD&D Player's Handbook, because parts of the DMG rely on the concepts from the PHB, and I have to be familiar with the PHB to get a more complete understanding. I started playing D&D with D&D 3.0, so whatever I know about AD&D has mostly been picked up via osmosis, as I have no first-hand experience with that edition. Thus, this post will be a directionless stream of observations and comments about the book and possibly the system in general with no real point or goal - I just want to give it a read and point out stuff that I find interesting.

Review: GURPS Thaumatology: Chinese Elemental Powers

Review: GURPS Thaumatology: Chinese Elemental Powers

In my opinion, “magic-as-powers” is the best way to represent supernatural powers in GURPS and also is the most GURPS way. GURPS Powers is an essential book that discusses this topic in great detail. Despite this, GURPS doesn’t have many worked examples for some reason. You only have two – GURPS Psionic Powers and GUPRS Thaumatology: Chinese Elemental Powers. I already made a video/post about why I do not even consider Sorcery a magic system, and much of the same applies to Divine Favor. There’s also GURPS Powers: Totems and Nature Spirits, but it feels… undercooked. It has some nice bits, but I consider it a very weak book overall. GURPS Thaumatology: Chinese Elemental Powers is a book that people rarely even mention, but it has been on my to-do list for quite a while. I was postponing it despite the requests I was getting because I was afraid I won’t be able to do it justice. So, let’s finally talk about it.

Addendum to GURPS Meta-Tech Review

Addendum to GURPS Meta-Tech Review

Earlier this morning, a wrote a review of GURPS Meta-Tech with my first impressions. Almost all my free time today was spent thinking about the book and reading some parts more thoroughly. And you know what? My opinion actually worsened.

Review: GURPS Meta-Tech

Review: GURPS Meta-Tech

GURPS Meta-Tech is finally out! I was excited for this book, but I did have my worries. In short, I’m both pleasantly surprised and disappointed. The book was written by Christopher Rice who has a broad range of writing quality – he wrote some of the best Pyramid articles but he also wrote GURPS Realm Management. The book also had the same questionable “marketing strategy” as GURPS Realm Management, which was one of my reasons to start worrying – I’ve already got burned once. So, let’s actually open the book and see what it is about.

Review: Empire (by AEG)

Review: Empire (by AEG)

You probably noticed that lately I’ve been in the mood for some domain management rules. Today, I’d like to briefly review a third-party supplement for D&D 3.0 titled Empire. This book was published by AEG – Alderac Entertainment Group – I already talked about one of their books before titled Evil. I remember saying that AEG produced poor books in terms of D&D mechanics and character options, but good books for ideas and generic advice. The book was written by Mike Mearls, who later became one of the lead designers of D&D 5e, and I can say that his writing definitely degraded with time. So, let’s see what Empire is all about.

Review: GURPS Realm Management

Review: GURPS Realm Management

Back in the day, when a D&D adventurer reached a certain level, he would begin to attract followers, and then would build a stronghold or a tower, and become a ruler of a domain. This aspect of the game was deprecated in D&D 3.0 because… I don’t know why, just because. Still, even D&D 3.0 had the vestigial Stronghold Builder’s Guidebook that is actually a pretty damn good book. However, the actual domain management didn’t exist. There were some third-party supplements that tackled this, and one of the better ones, in my opinion, is Empire by Alderac Entertainment Group (EDIT: I take that back). Domain management always has been on my mind, especially when I was reading rulesets for various PBEM strategy games over the years. But let me stop blabbing about D&D and talk about GURPS – what’s the situation with domain management gameplay in GURPS? It’s not very good.

Review: Dynasties & Demagogues

Review: Dynasties & Demagogues

How many times have you seen a GM go “I want to run a political intrigue game with lots of social interactions instead of a dungeon crawl?” How many times did the GM actually follow through with this suggestion? How many times did the game survive past the first session and not fizzle out along with the enthusiasm of both the GM and the players? I bet you’ve seen that sort of stuff, and I bet that the GM insisted on using D&D or Pathfinder. I believe that even though you can run such games in D&D or Pathfinder, these systems were not made for that. The problem, however, lies not even in the system, but in the fact that few people really know how to run such games. And can you blame them? D&D Dungeon Master’s Guides only tell you about running the traditional dungeon crawl games, and, as far as I know, the more recent editions do a poor job explaining that as well, assuming that the GM already knows how to do that.

Review: GURPS Underground Adventures

Review: GURPS Underground Adventures

In the previous review, I mentioned that GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3 has two pages on excavation and mining, but it was pointed out to me that I forgot about GURPS Underground Adventures. And that’s right, I did forget about that book. I often do, despite using certain rules from it relatively often. Still, this book often just escapes my mind, just like such books as GURPS Future Histories. So, let’s have a short review of GURPS Underground Adventures to give it some spotlight!

Review: The Quintessential Dwarf

Review: The Quintessential Dwarf

Many times before, I said that I love GURPS because any RPG book is a GURPS book. Back in the D&D 3.0 days, when the OGL was reigning supreme, and many third-party publishers were churning out tons of books of dubious quality, I haven’t really found any use for these books in my D&D games. Sure, some of the stuff there looked nice, but it was awful from the game balance perspective. Today, I’d like to talk about The Quintessential Dwarf, part of the Quintessential series by Mongoose Publishing. Mongoose Publishing is no small player in the RPG scene, and they produced tons of D&D content. The Quintessential series is quite large, with each book detailing a particular class or race, with some classes or races even getting two books.

Review: SpaceMaster Armored Assault

Review: SpaceMaster Armored Assault

This is something of a digression from my usual topics, where I talk about GURPS or D&D. I want to talk about a book that fascinates me but the one that I haven’t even tried in a game yet. Aside from tabletop RPGs, I’ve always been interested in tabletop wargaming. Of course, the most popular thing is Warhammer 40k, but I’m not a big fan of it. I played it with friends through VASSAL and Tabletop Simulator, and it just… doesn’t play that well; it feels that the game is decided not on the table, but on army roster creation. I do find the concept of collecting, building, and painting miniatures, but without this aspect, the game feels absolutely hollow to me. A few years ago, I decided to search for a generic and reasonably crunchy sci-fi wargame. I scoured an incredibly long list of games on BoardGamesGeek, but most of the games were either too specialized or too light on the rules. There was a couple of exceptions, however, and one of them was Spacemaster Armored Assault.

Review: GURPS Tactical Shooting: Extreme Conditions

Review: GURPS Tactical Shooting: Extreme Conditions

We got a new GURPS book out – GURPS Tactical Shooting: Extreme Conditions. If you are new to GURPS, you probably haven’t heard about it, but if you are a GURPS veteran, then this title isn’t new to you. Tactical Shooting: Extreme Conditions was in development for, I believe, five years, despite not being a 300-pages-long tome. I still remember its announcement, and being excited, but then, after some time, the author simply disappeared without a trace for a few years, hence the delay. However, he has reemerged and actually finished the book, so big props for that.

Review: Garden of Evil (or how to write a good monster)

Review: Garden of Evil (or how to write a good monster)

Not that long ago, Gaming Ballistic held the Nightmare Fuel kickstarter campaign for three bestiaries for DFRPG. So, I would like to review one of them – Garden of Evil. I do not know if or when the books will be available for purchase outside of the backing campaign, but I hope that they will be. Anyway, this is going to be not just a review, but also a rant on how to make a good monster.

Review: Shields Up!

Review: Shields Up!

A new GURPS book just dropped out of nowhere – Shields Up! from Gaming Ballistic. While it is written with DFRPG in mind, it has many options that work in normal GURPS games. Not long ago, I recorded a comprehensive video guide on shields in GURPS, and this book made it less comprehensive. So, let’s take a look at this book and see what’s in there. I’ll say in advance, that this is an excellent book that is very much worth its price, and I do not say that very often.

Review: GURPS Fantasy Folk: Elves

Review: GURPS Fantasy Folk: Elves

I have never written a book review in my blogging "career," but it's as good time as any to try. A new GURPS book came out today - GURPS Fantasy Folk: Elves, and it was an instant buy for me, as I was looking forward for this.