Sunday 18 October 2009

recession-proof gaming VI: the undiscovered toys

The financiapocalpyse is dragging it's feet.  So if you've used up all the other materials, here's some more stuff for you to peruse and play with.

Free games
For those of you who fancy a bit of sci-fi goodness, there's steampunk alt.history courtesy of Broken Gears (which uses a d12 resolution system).  As it's Hallowe'en soon, the classic Witchcraft RPG is an intriguing one-shot or go for 44: A Game of Automatic Fear - a fast game of robot replicants and 1950s paranoia. 

If you need a system to hang your setting from, try the Tri-Stat dX system or the PDQ Core System while story gamers wanting something different may try the No Dice RPG PDF that uses cards in various ways to power a system limited only by your imagination.

Generators
Scaldcrow Games have a page of random generators (I like the abominations and town details) that can provide rapid inspiration. RPGInspiration provide another page of random generators (from Greek city-state names to orcish hunting parties and sci-fi soldiers).  Dingle Games has a 3.x edition NPC generator that will save plenty of time for the harried DM.

Web Tools
For no frills building mapping, Small Blue Printer is good as it can do isometric and 3D perspectives but if you want full layout use Autodesk's Project Dragonfly.  Both are intuitive interfaces and easy to print out.

Re:Subj is an e-mail-based group discussion tool almost perfect for play-by-email.  It uses public, threaded e-mail conversations to structure the information provided, works with any e-mail client and doesn't need any registration.  Information is sent by invitation and there's some healthy development in the works.

And if you need a fire & forget web page, then take a look at DinkyPage - create a one-shot page which you can customise to your heart's content.  Abusive content, malware and phishing is not welcome but if you need to put something out quickly you could do much worse.

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