In role-playing games there’s something about a contemporary or near-future setting that has grabbed me over the past few years. “It’s our world, but different.” Now, there’s an Urban Fantasy setting for the Savage Worlds game system up on IndieGoGo with an interesting twist: the Greek Gods and Titans do battle in a game that seems part Jason Bourne, part Shadowrun. Olympus Inc. is a licensed Savage Worlds product with reward tiers beginning at $15. Pop on over to their IndieGoGo page and download a sample chapter.

More roleplaying goodness! With just a few days to go, Infinitas DM looks like everything I wanted a roleplaying game app to be. It’s a tabletop game platform somewhat similar to Roll20, plus intergrated campaign management. Right now, Atom Switch Inc. is coming down to the wire: just over $4000 left to make their modest funding goal. A pledge of $5 (five bucks?) gets you the finished app, hopefully at the end of the year. (Honestly, I think they underpriced their pledge tiers.)

Ghostbusters: The Board Game II? What? Didn’t the Ghostbusters board game just get released? Anyway, if you liked that and have $125 to blow on a Ghostbusters board game based on the not-so-great movie Ghostbusters II, um. Go ahead, ’cause apparently nearly 3000 people liked Ghostbusters II enough to pony up the cash, so yeah, it’s funded already.

Speaking of the 80’s, It’s The Goonies Adventure Card Game! In this game by Albino Dragon, you’re just a bunch’a rag-tag kids trying to find the treasure of legendary pirate One-Eyed Willy while evading the Fratelli criminal — you know what, it’s The Goonies. Just get it already. It’s funded nearly five times over which is even more amazing than the time you ate your weight in Godfather’s pizza, right?

This week in Popular Card Game Coattail Riding/Parody/Marketplace Confusion, our Cards Against Humanity winner is Cards Against Technology, where a Canadian (!) ran out of Cards Against Humanity cards so he made his own. “Imagine playing Cards Against Humanity, but with unlimited possibilities to choose from making the game almost different every time, and funnier, and less boring as time passes depending on who you play with.” Typos and Arial instead of Helvetica on these cards. Plenty of ® and ™ symbols in the text so these guys don’t get sued. Only $273 of $1500 CAD pledged.  Runner-up: Deck a Celebrity, where the judge pulls out a topic card (“AIDS!” she cries out.) and players have eight quotes from celebrities to best match the topic. (“If he invited you out, he’s got to pay.” -Beyonce was the winning card. Tee-hee.) It’s more Apples to Apples than CAH. They’ve pulled in $2,462 in pledges, but they wanted $15k. Nice KS intro video and better card design, though.

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Quadrupedly-funded only five days into the Kickstarter: It’s the Conan RPG a/k/a Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Adventures In An Age Undreamed Of. Journey to the savage pulp adventure action of the Hyborian Age with this all-new roleplaying game. There’s a bewildering matrix of reward levels and what you can get with the stretch goals, but it looks like at about $58 you can get everything that’s unlocked as PDFs or the same pledge amount gets you only the core book (physical and PDF) plus an art book (as PDF) and map (physical) or maybe $44 plus shipping for just the core book or maybe $87 for both things but not the art book or… Anyway, delve into the madness of Conan’s reward tiers and see for yourself.

Pinnacle Entertainment Group is bringing the Weird War I setting to the Savage Worlds game system. This is a very short funding drive for the game: only ten days left. In this fourth installment of the Weird War series (WW2, Rome, and Vietnam), it’s crazy horror plus war action in the trenches of Europe. Get the player’s guide and the digital stretch goals as low as $15; GMs will want to pony up $35 for the player’s guide, plus GM handbook, GM screen inserts, a full adventure, and all the digital stretch goals.

Over on Patreon, Guillaume Tavernier is creating amazing location-based map artwork for fantasy roleplaying games. The city of Tahala is inspired by oriental and Indian architecture. Each month, Guillaume will be producing a new building or area, complete with setting and story hooks with the end goal of creating the entire city, building by building. He’s suggesting a $5 patronage pledge per illustration PDF.

Oh, hey, Argo is back! Flatlined Games brings Argo back to Kickstarter with a more-reasonably attained goal (which it already met!). It’s a Bruno Faidutti and Serge Laget-designed game of astronauts waking up from suspended animation to find the ship is overrun with aliens and they’ve got to get to the escape pods. And just like in the movie Alien, there’s simply not enough space in the escape pods for everybody. Ah, cutbacks! 30 Euros for a copy of the game, which is around $33. Canadian, American, and European-friendly shipping options.

Van Ryder Games has Saloon Tycoon, a 3d tile laying game set in the wild west. As you play the game, you’ll be building a saloon by placing cubes and stacking floors, higher and higher, or expanding out along the road. It physically looks a bit like the setup in Rampage (a/k/a Terror in Meeple City), but here the game is all about creating the best saloon, not about knocking down the buildings with armed bands of outlaws (or irradiated giant lizards). It looks pretty darn cool and you can get a copy by pledging $40.

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Number 1 in this week’s Highlights isn’t a game. I’m not even sure the campaign is thinking about games rather than just toys. But it’s a cause worthy of our support. And that cause is #ToyLikeMe, an effort to have better representation of people with disabilities in children’s toys. The #ToyLikeMe campaign has already brought Playmobil around to the idea of producing figures with disabilities. And just today, Lego revealed a minifigure in a wheelchair. To help keep the campaign growing, though, its organizers are asking for £16,000 to develop a professional website and associated resources. Drop a little in the hat, will you?

Crowdfunding campaign number 2 this week is for a card game version of Manhattan Project, Minion Games’ title about developing and building nuclear weapons. I love the original and Manhattan Project: Chain Reaction looks to be a great translation. Of course all elements of the game—workers, resources, buildings, etc.—are now represented by cards. A more interesting difference, however, lies in the fact that at the end of each turn, a player has to discard every factory, every university, everything that’s not a resource or a bomb. This means that the industrial engines that players chain together will now constantly need to be refreshed.

Thief’s Market from Tasty Minstrel Games is about dividing and spending loot. The loot is represented by dice, which the players take turns either selecting from the center or grabbing from one of their fellow thieves. Then when the dice are all split up, they can be spent on finery, useful items, or henchmen, each of which confers some later benefit. At the end, the thief with the most notoriety wins. That is campaign number 3.

Number 4 is Fabulous Beasts. This one, at first, looks like a typical stacking game. Three-dimensional animal figures are placed on top of each other until something gives and everything falls. But that’s not actually the whole deal. Fabulous Beasts also integrates a sensor platform, such that as the animals are stacked a unique virtual world and story unfolds in a linked tablet app.

Finally, at number 5 is Olympus Inc, an urban fantasy setting book for the Savage Worlds roleplaying game. Olympus Inc is the story of a magical war between Titans and Olympians taking place in, but hidden from, modern society. With Olympians developing their power through corporate intrigue and the magical war hidden from the perception of ordinary people, Olympus Inc has a distinct cyberpunk element as well.

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Savage Tales of Horror is a three-volume anthology of frightful adventures for the Savage Worlds roleplaying game. The books include selections for various Savage Worlds settings, including Solomon Kane, Deadlands, The Last Parsec, Slipstream, and others, as well as a number of generic adventures. This one in volume 2 sounds fascinating:

As players in a roleplaying game you love to fight demons and monsters as wizards and warriors. But what about when the LARP of Horror becomes all too real?

The Savage Tales of Horror series releases in PDF form one volume per week for the rest of September. They’ll be available in print next March.

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So much licensed game news has crossed my desk recently…

R. Talsorian Games has reached an agreement with CD Projekt Red for The Witcher Role-Playing Game. It’ll be based on the same rules system as Cyberpunk 2020 and is planned for mid-2016.

Two Dark Horse Comics series, The Goon and Fear Agent, are getting the Savage Worlds treatment from Pinnacle Entertainment. Also expect to see an official Savage Worlds Flash Gordon.

Star Trek board games are coming from Gale Force 9 next summer.

There’s going to be anniversary editions of Thunderbirds Monopoly and Back to the Future Monopoly.

From Upper Deck expect in 2016 a Big Trouble in Little China Legendary game. It’s the film’s 30th anniversary.

MegaCon Games is making The Banner Saga: Warbands, a cooperative miniatures game based on the computer RPG from Stoic.

The 1960s era Captain Action Card Game is making a return.

Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment is getting a board game adaptation. Unfortunately, it’s planned just as a roll-and-move trivia game.

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The land of Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar series of novels has gotten the Savage Worlds treatment. Direct from Pinnacle Entertainment (now in PDF, later in print) there’s Lankhmar: City of Thieves, which features details on Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, other personages, monsters, and greater Nehwon. Included in the book are also setting-specific guidelines for characters, gear, and magic. Along with the book, two poster maps are available: one for Nehwon and one for the city of Lankhmar.

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Fans of Rifts will soon have an officially supported but simpler roleplaying system with which to explore Palladium’s classic game. Pinnacle Entertainment announced today that it has secured a license to develop Rifts for Savage Worlds.

Rifts is a multi-genre post-apocalyptic setting that includes elements of fantasy, science-fiction, horror, cyberpunk, mythology, mecha, and more.

According to Pinnacle, Rifts for Savage Worlds will be available by December.

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The Last Parsec is a new campaign setting being developed by Pinnacle Entertainment for the Savage Worlds roleplaying game. As the name implies, it’s a science fiction setting. Yet besides that, The Last Parsec is bit difficult to pin down. It has a little bit of everything. As lead project manager, Timothy Brian Brown, explained to Purple Pawn:

The Last Parsec uses the Savage Worlds core rules and the Science Fiction Companion, which gives Game Masters the key sci-fi elements that we feel introduce the most exotica into galaxy-spanning roleplaying fun. Then, rather than focus on just a few central conflicts or themes and funnel everybody into those, we created a vast panoply of possibilities where GMs and players can engage in whatever sort of sci-fi fun they choose. It’s a big universe, and The Last Parsec reflects that.

Pinnacle’s approach to product roll-out for The Last Parsec is also a little different. Instead of starting off with a core book, Pinnacle’s initial release will be three campaign books. Six short-fiction works are already available.

In short, our goal is maximum adventurous fun at launch. We’re providing a Primer free as a PDF download to anyone and everyone, which gives all the information on The Last Parsec’s Known Worlds to get everyone started, including the GM. The Plot Point Campaigns and Savage Tales in each of the first three adventure books should keep players plenty involved until we publish the setting book—which will open up every aspect of The Last Parsec for limitless campaigning.

The Last Parsec is up on Kickstarter for another 3 days but has already funded over eight-times over. Pinnacle estimates delivering PDF versions of the books in November, print versions in May.

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The Ultimate Mongol Empire Guide is a setting book for the Savage Worlds roleplaying game. With sections on Mongol leaders, battles, military tactics, and equipment, as well as edges, hindrances, and other character options, the book is useful for games in either historical or alternate history settings.

The Ultimate Mongol Empire Guide is available standalone in both ebook and printed formats, and bundled with other of Mystical Throne Entertainment’s Savage Worlds supplements.

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Highly anticipated among Savage Worlds players, both the Super Powers Companion and Science Fiction Companion were released by Pinnacle Entertainment this week. Available now as ebooks at $15 each, the two volumes can also be preordered in print ($20 softback, $25 hardback). Unfortunately, while at a discounted price of $5, Pinnacle still charges extra to add a PDF copy to a print order.

The new Companion books expand Savage Worlds Deluxe in two popular genres. As Shane Hensley of Pinnacle explained to Purple Pawn:

I think we’ve done so much with horror—particularly historical horror with Deadlands, Solomon Kane, Weird War Two and Weird Wars Rome—that [science fiction] is really just a niche we haven’t served. We released Slipstream several years back, but that was space opera and a very defined setting. A lot of folks want to play Star Frontiers, Traveller, Star Wars, and games in those veins, and the tools to do so have so far been scattered and inconsistent.

We were fortunate to be able to do both Super Powers and Science Fiction at the same time to make the underlying “math” make sense. We do a *ton* of work behind the scenes to make things flow, and if the math isn’t solid…at least within a narrative framework like our chase rules…it won’t work.

I think the updated Super Powers Companion was so anticipated because super heroes are so hot right now. Most every convention I go to has Savage X-Men, Savage Avengers, or Savage Dark Knight. And they’re *really* fun. The new edition adds even more options and streamlines things even more, so I suspect we’ll see LOTS of super hero games this year.

The Savage Worlds Super Powers Companion is a second edition that features a new “graphic novel format” and includes a powers construction system, thematic hindrances, setting-specific options for death and defeat, HQ construction guidelines, and an extensive rogues gallery.

A new book (though it does draw on earlier Toolkits), the Savage Worlds Science Fiction Companion gives special attention to refined rules for creating new species, while of course also addressing cyberware, power armor, starships, vehicles, and walkers.

With the Science Fiction Companion, [my favorite part] was probably the running huge space fleet battles with the Chase rules. I ran about 20 of them and had a *blast* every time. They work quite well, I’m happy to say, and provided a lot of drama in the playtests as ships would make a killing blow just as their last shields gave out or they were down to their last wound.

I’m looking forward to running an integrated military sci-fi game where some of the heroes are defending a ground defense battery in power armor while other player characters are duking it out in space fighters above to keep the bombers off their backs.

And maybe…with groups who are into that kind of thing…throwing in giant walkers for the bad guys and some super-powered reinforcements for the heroes, something like DC Comics’ “Green Lantern Corps.”

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