Holy frickin’ smackerel on toast! It’s nearly November, for goodness’ sake, and there they are, still sitting there on the shelf. Nagging me. Taunting me. Haunting me. Yes, it’s the massive pile of game products I picked up all the way back in late August, at the GenCon edition of the Gaming Gurus Pick the Goods panel, and have ever since then promised to write up here. Now we’ve reached the end of the 90-day sales window that dogs most new products these days and what have I written? Nada. Well, uh, it’s all my scheme to extend those sales windows. To breathe fresh new life in these promising products. Yeah, it was all on purpose. Procrastination is good. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.

For an explanation of the basic concept and criteria, go here.

For an indication of why deserving products might have failed to qualify, see this. (At least one of you regular readers designed a product which would have made it to the pile had I gotten a decent lowdown on what made it different and interesting. But I was given a crummy pitch by your booth weasel, and didn’t hear of its noteworthy features until after the show.)

For a review of my top pick of the show, Cthulhu 500, go here.

Titles are arranged not by preference, but in the order they now appear in my pile. Which is to say, by size, from small to big.

Primetime Adventures by Matt Wilson: Meta-RPG allowing you to simulate episodic TV shows. Designed to emulate a certain current spy series starring a certain appealing actress, but exportable to other genres, even non-adventure ones. (This was actually given to me after the panel, but I thought I’d plug it here.)

Meddling Kids by Allyson Brooks. The game you use to teach young kids to roleplay. Scooby-Doo with the serial numbers filed off.

Run Robot Red by Annie Rush. RPG where you play cute robots attempting to escape the gigantic starship they were designed to maintain. Cool mechanic: since especially adept robots are the most likely to attract the attention of master control, you want your rolls to be as mediocre as possible, ideally hitting just above the threshold for success.

Lacuna by Jared Sorenson. Chapbook-format RPG in which you play slab-conked patients exploring a surreal artificial reality. Or do you?

Monster Burner, by Luke Crane. Subtly attractive monster supplement for the Burning Wheel game. Got picked because it includes full rules for monster creation along with the expected bestiary entries.

Dogs In the Vineyard by D. Vincent Baker. Roleplay religious heroes in an old West setting, laying the smackdown on the unrighteous — Mormonism with the serial numbers filed off. Jonathan Tweet made it his pick of the show.
 

Enemy Gods by John Wick. Mythological roleplaying where you play two PCs: one questing hero, one god. In god mode, you build the consensus reality for your world.

Camelot Legends, by Andrew Parks. Very purty standalone mission-completion card game with Arthurian theme. Essentially a proxy recommendation made via my compadre, Rob Heinsoo, who liked its exception-based rules. And Rob knows exception-based rules.

The Authority RPG, by Scoble, Chambers, Snead and Forbeck. To go a little more mainstream for a moment, Guardians Of Order’s presentation of the iconoclastic Wildstorm comics series scored a mention, as did their tasty-looking Ex Machina cyberpunk supplement.

Also getting a nod for gorgeous presentation of a hip comics license is Green Ronin’s The Red Star, by T. S. Luikart and Ian Sturrock.

Still in the realm of comic licenses, we find Albedo by Pieter van Hiel, Jason Holmgren et al. A new adaptation of the anthropomorphics in space series with brand new mechanics in which the ability to do things is treated as a resource. You may call me biased, as the creators credit the Dying Earth system as an inspiration for this approach. Well, go ahead. Call me biased.

The No Press Anthology collects 8, count ‘em, 8 hipster mini-RPGs otherwise destined for chapbook format into a traditional full-size supplement format. From mod spies to Asian fantasy to prison drama to less condensable premises, this has gotta be a sure bet for fanciers of the bleeding edge.

Foes of Freedom, an NPC sourcebook for Mutants and Masterminds by Steve Kenson and Steve Schend, looks like a fetching and necessary support book for a popular game line. And it has a robot gorilla on the cover. Can’t go wrong with a robot gorilla.

I saw and rejected a number of new RPGs with offbeat concepts because they weren’t clear enough about who you are and what you do. No such problem with Casey C. Clark and Gabe Ivan’s Battledragons. Who are you? Dragons! What do you do? Battle! Stat out characters based on the qualities of any dragon miniature you choose. Engage in intrigue, or just kick the crap out of your fellow dragons. The page of breath weapon attacks should warm the cockles of anybody’s inner child.

From the new Hogshead, we have the latest entries in their research-rich d20 line, Crime Scene: Feds and Yakuza, both by Ian Hunt. Crammed with info suitable to import into any contemporary action game.

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