Thursday, April 30, 2015

Hmm, cool-sounding RPG from France (mais oui!)

So over at ICV2 ("The Business of Geek Culture") a little while ago I was surprised to see an item about Paizo getting ready to distribute an RPG from France:

"Paizo Publishing has inked a distribution deal with French company Gob In Tux Publishing to release the company's tabletop RPGs, boardgames, and novels in North America. The first title will be the sci-fi roleplaying game Polaris, which will be the only 2015 release under the new arrangement.

Polaris is an RPG set in a post-apocalyptic undersea world. Mankind has been forced to abandon the world of sunlight and is now dwelling at the bottom of the oceans, where human nations continue their endless wars. Sea monsters and looters harass mankind, along with the mysterious Polaris effect. The 400-page Core Rulebook is planned for October release.  MSRP is $50.00.

Additional Polaris RPG products will include a Game Master's Screen and sourcebooks:  Bestiary, Technology Guide, Hegemony, Priates, Surface, Coral Republic, Polar Alliance, Mediterranean Union, Amazonia, and Secrets. "

There's not a lot of information about Polaris that I could find, but the artwork looks great and I like the ideas.  It's a bit like the Cerulean Seas books from Alluria Publishing.  I've always been interested in RPGs from non-English speaking countries but they are hard to find (for me, anyway).  I'm seriously thinking of buying this when it's available.

Friday, April 10, 2015

So, how about a Star Wars version of Battlestar Galactica?

Okay, so I haven't been posting much lately.  It's been due to a combination of lots of other stuff going on and only having big post ideas which are entire projects.  But I saw this fantastic piece of art in my Google+ feeds just now:

On Patrol by nova1701dms (deviantart.com)
...and I immediately thought about a story/game where an imperial star destroyer ends up fleeing with a small fleet being hunted by the Yuuzhan Vong--sort of a Star Wars version of Battlestar Galactica.

I like the idea of a "Star Destroyer Galactica" (or "Battlestar Tatooine") game.  I usually have trouble coming up with workable concepts for science fiction campaigns but the Galactica model is easy to adapt.  Since they are refugees, you can have any and every type of Star Wars character in the fleet somewhere.  The imperials, jedi, random people, and bounty hunter scum are all thrown in together to survive.  The fleet can have any sort of ship you need for a good story, since each ship is a space-going plot device.  And, since they're wandering beyond the fringe somewhere, you can have them run into anything.