Read
Coriolis The Great Dark - I am loving this. Far more focused that the previous Coriolis, this is basically a perfectly crafted excuse to do dungeon delves in the remains of ancient civilisations in frigid dead star systems. The more I read the more excited I am to run it.
Mutant Year Zero - I've been reading through this whole line, two sandbox campaigns and four stand alone RPGs covering the different peoples who live in this post apocalypse (mutated humans, mutated animals, unmutated human fascists and newly sentient robots). Each book contains a campaign to run too so there is a lot of immediately usable material. I want to run a bunch of it. Or just smoosh it all together into a massive sandbox.
Play
DragonBane - I played a game! It was good fun.
GM
Reach of the Roach God - Still going with this. I was hoping to get it finished this year but that isn't looking likely. Actually, I figure we have at least twelve sessions left so it isn't looking possible! Still we are all having fun and it is going places none of us expected. For example, we had our first PC death a couple weeks back…
First up the entire party unwittingly let themselves get murdered by a back street fortune teller so that they could visit a ghost city. Then the demon PC couldn't get back into his body. I assumed he would find a way back into his body next session, instead he got distracted by haunting/being a dick to various NPCs. The other players found a group of demon reformer cultists who claimed they could help, although in the process they tried to excise his demon-hunger for capitalism, splitting him in two. I gave the player the choice, are you the evil demon of consumption, or are you the persona you have created since coming to the mortal realm? He chose the demon so the other players annihilated him by summoning his nemesis, an angel of compassion and sharing who took the form of the half-ghost con artist who tricked him into getting murdered in the first place.
Read
I've also been skimming Coriolis: The Great Dark, but I'm not entirely certain how it works in play; I'm kinda waiting for the starter adventure set to arrive to get more of a sense of its structure. Having a kinda-similar issue with Inevitable, which is very thematic but I feel like the book is twice the size it needs to be—the lack of clarity would be easier to excuse or feel more intentional in a lighter volume. It feels like something's missing, rather than space deliberately left blank. The "knights against impending doom" angle reminds me a lot of Mythic Bastionland and its Myths, but Mythic's sketched-out structure seems much more purposeful, to me.
Play
cries in Forever GM
GM
My Land of Eem games continue apace—the grown-ups burnt down a police station after feeding the commanding officer to their pet slurpworm, but the kids are at least trying to help people—though I might take a break from the adults' game for a week to run a playtest of my own dumb little d6 spies-on-the-run game, if the group is up for it.
I'll be honest I think Inevitable is rubbish. Same with Orbital Blues. They both like to talk a lot about their vibes without actually giving you any tools or advice to achieve that. Like you say, if they were 50 page zines, that would be fine but when they are 200 page hardbacks you expect a little more actual useful content. In the case of Orbital Blues I think the adventures fill in the gaps fairly well but in Inevitable you are just supposed to be moody edgelord cowboy knights some more.
Ouch. I like both of those games. :(
Read
Many things, though not much in any depth.
ALIEN Evolved Edition put its final PDFs out, though not much has changed from BETA 2. There are some things I'm going to houserule or homebrew, I think, but will try running it RAW first, just to see how it shakes out in practice.
I've also been skimming Blade Runner, and actually like it a lot more than I expected. I have Some Ideas, but whether or not they ever get anywhere near a table remains to be seen.
Play
Avernus is still on hiatus, so I'm only behind the screen for now.
GM
I finally ran Vaesen! Abandoned my initial plan to run an overcomplicated homebrew adventure, in favour of a (very slightly) truncated version of Old Meg from Mythic Britain & Ireland as a pre-Hallowe'en spook-em-up. I think it went well - it's a much slower burn than a lot of games I've run, especially since my only previous YZE experience was with ALIEN.
The One Ring continues, with the party now in Lond Daer to speak to a soothsayer who's had similar dreams to one of the adventuring company. I think everyone's having fun, though the Hobbit player seems a little confused some of the time, having never read or seen any Tolkien.
Free League takeover!
I liked Blade Runner. I ran ten sessions of it last year and it was both better and easier than I expected.. The setting works well for an RPG and I didn't find it difficult to get everyone in the mood. I'm not a fan of BR 2049 and I found some of the elements from that film needed a little work to make them fit in play.
Yeah, I don't know the Blade Runner setting that well, but the book seems to give a decent enough grounding of L.A. 2037 to be able to run it.
One thing I do find a little frustrating is that there's hardly any information on anything outside of L.A., like it's the only place left on Earth. The Starter Set adventure is an interesting enough mystery, but somewhat disappointingly set across a guided tour of Places From The Films.
I didn't get the starter set but touring the film locations sounds awful. I have no problem with the game being set entirely within LA, but I would have needed the city to be more fleshed out if I was going to keep running, there just isn't enough of it.
Major locations in the Starter Set are: the police station, the Snake Pit club, and Animoid Row (the shopping street) from Blade Runner; then a specific shop, the Wallace Corp, and the memory lab from BR2049.
The only places that I think aren't from the movies are two apartments, the Hollywood sign, and a bus.
