Hulks and Horrors: Come on Spanky! Let's put on a show!

Remember those ancient Our Gang (aka The Little Rascals) shorts? In many of them Spanky, Alfalfa, Frogie, Buckwheat, et al would have to raise the money for some worthwhile, tear-jerking cause (i.e. help pay off some old granny's mortgage or keep a lovable stray dog from being gassed at the pound) with some sappy, kiddy, stage show that always seemed to rake in enough money to save the day. Well, that's sort of what I'm trying to do tonight... only without a show. Hey! Child labor laws are tougher now than they were in the 1940s!  At least I won't be featuring any horrific racist stereotypes or future wife-murderers in the cast.

P.Z. Myers would have an orgasm if he saw this.

No, what I need you to do is help out Hulks & Horrors, a new sci-fi OSR game in the works by John Berry. At this time, his crowdsourcing effort on IndieGoGo has only brought in about half of the $5000 he needs to launch this cool looking project and he only has 50 hours to go. To quote the IndieGoGo page:

Hulks and Horrors is a game of space exploration, treasure hunting, and horrific peril, set in the abandoned places of space. 

Centuries before mankind and its new allies reached the stars, a great galactic plague wiped out all sentient life, leaving the galaxy littered with the ruins and wealth of entire civilizations. But the plague also left behind the plague horrors, terrifying creatures twisted by the mutagenic plague into atavistic monsters that crave only the flesh of other life.

Characters take on the role of one of seven classes: the battle-hardened Soldier, the brash and dextrous Pilot, the clever genius Scientist, the meditative master Psyker, and their alien allies, the tribal Bearmen, the brilliant ameoboid Omega Reticulans, and the nimble Hovering Squid.

COME ON! IT'S GOT "HOVERING SQUID" WITH RAY GUNS!!! What more do you want? A game where you can play a floating cephlopod HAS to be worth a few bucks! So what if your cat goes without food for a week, or you put off that kidney dialysis for a few days? The flying space squid are well worth the inconvenience!

So what do you say OSR community? Surely we can raise $2500 in two days! Otherwise, we just might have to let Alfalfa perform:

I'm an atheist/materialist, but if I believed there was a Hell, then I'd hope that Hal Roach would be burning its darkest depths.

UPDATE: I guess really, really wanting it just wasn't enough. 

Kickstarter: Wild Card Creator

Now this is an AWESOME idea. I've used other character creation tools like MetaCreator and HeroLab in the past. They're great for keeping track of PCs and creating legible record sheets and most of them suffer from the same problem: adding new content. You either have to wait until the manufacturer or a third party programmer puts one out, our have the coding chops to make one yourself.



Wild Card Creator would make adding a new Savage Setting easy. All you need is the .PDF of whatever game setting you want to add and import it into Wild Card Creator. It will scan the text and upload all of new campaign-specific Edges, Hindrances, Gear, etc. will be added to the program! Cool, huh?

 So far the Kickstart is off to a good start. They're a couple days in and they're already a quarter of the way into their goal. Stretch Goals include getting Pincacle artist Storn Cook to create character portraits, adding a Showdowns army builder, and a copy of an upcoming iOS/Android tablet edition! If you got the bucks, why not help out?

Noir is GO...and something else is a comin'

The Deadlands Noir KickStarter is over. The original goal for the $8000 was not only met in one day, but doubled (or nearly enough). By the end of the campaign, Pinnacle raised over $117,000 to fund this project. Sensational!

In an update that was released after the campaign's triumphant completion, Shane Hensley revealed a few more Deadlands related projects that are in the works, including one scheduled for this August (which most likely means a GenCon release)...

That's right! Hell on Earth Reloaded is now just a few short months away! Express elevator to You-Know-Where GOIN' DOWN!!!

Is he back?

I just swung by Ix with the desperate hope that maybe--just maybe--The Drune has made a triumphant return to the blogsphere to finish Humanspace Empires and entertain us with more of his weird, wild, RPGs ideas. While there were no new posts, he did change his banner!

Is he back? Is he really back???

Chthonian Stars... SAVAGED

It's a nice, warm. late-Spring night. Right now, I'm sitting out on my patio, drinking a root beer, listening to HLPS's audio-drama of At The Mountains Of Madness, and working on a Savage Worlds/Realms Of Cthulhu conversion of WildFire's Lovecraftian hard science fiction setting for Mongoose's Traveller: Chthonian Stars.

While I've certainly dabbled in conversions in the past, this is the first time I've really been serious enough to commit to one that I intend to make available online. At this time, I'm working on character creation and not hitting any snags... yet. Most of the Advantages/Disadvantages found in the original rules already translate well into existing Edges and Hindrances. I need to figure out if any new Skills would be needed. (Yes, Guts will be an available--and recommended--Skill.)

After that I'm going to have to start converting weapons and equipment into their Savage Worlds equivalents. Then I'm going to have to gen-up stats for the various new creatures NOT found in Realms. The hardest part will be trying to convert the various spaceships from their ori stats (if you've ever played Traveller, you know what I'm going up against) to SW. Fortunately, I've got the old Sci-Fi Gear Toolkit to help me. Once I got that done, I'll layout everything out on my Mac into a nice .PDF and post it... somewhere.

Stay tuned, Savages.

"And then SHE walked in..."

Just in case you don't religiously visit their website every Tuesday to see what new savagery they're cooking up for us, today Pinnacle announced it's newest Savage Setting: Deadlands Noir.

Now hold on thar pardner!  Ain't Deadlands supposed to one them rootin'-tootin' Western-type games. Even the sequels Hell on Earth and Lost Colony had obvious Western tropes mixed into these respective post-apocalypse and sci-fi settings and they seem to work well. However, Westerns and Film Noir ain't what y'all would call corn-patible. Right?

I was skeptical myself. Then I watched this at the Kickstarter site:

(Yeah, I recognized Cheyenne Wright's voice, too.)

OK, I'm sold.

Thats right ya' palookas. Every two-bit gunsel and gumshoe from here to the Windy City will be polishing up their heaters for a piece of the action. So cool your jets, ya' ugly mug and throw some sawbucks into the hat and get some of that hot merchandise, pally. I'm just a busted joe, myself, but I put in for the $75 package.

So whadda ya waitin' for? An engraved invitation?

Yeah, You Hell-Bound Blasphemers! Get It Right!

I wonder... Can Christian clerics turn Jesus?