Hello and welcome to the Weekly Scroll Podcast.
My name is Ryan. And I'm just happy to be here.
And this is kind of episode 200 here on the Weekly Scroll
podcast. Yeah, so, so we're doing
something a little different, I guess.
And so, so, So what? So, so, so how's it going,
buddy? How a happy 200, kind of.
Happy 200 our fun like little four week break we had before
our 200th episode. When you were doing a little bit
of a little shuffle. Shuffle.
I did I I switched a bunch of jobs.
Everyone knows I have more than one job and I was working
several at once while there was like a carryover and then I
immediately got very sick. So I feel 70% today, 75%
actually. I'm feeling I'm way on the up
and up. But yeah, yeah.
So life's calming down. I hope there you.
Go I hope so well and the jobs you have now are better than the
jobs you had. Oh they're way better and
they're more fun and I did get yelled at at work by not yelled
at. I had a Co worker snap at me and
raise their voice at me the day. It was really crazy.
Were they valid? Was it a valid raise of the
words? You know, I think that they were
incredibly stressed out and I made a comment that was like,
damn, you didn't have to do that.
That's literally what I said. Or maybe I didn't say, damn,
maybe I said you didn't need to crank it that far.
I was talking about the grinder and they flipped on me and you
know, we're Co workers and equals and we're allowed to
disagree with each other. And I think that's fine.
I didn't, I wasn't like overly serious or like angry when I
said it, but they flipped on me. But they've been really stressed
out. We've been incredibly busy
because in I live in Eugene, OR if you want to come kill me,
which is a college town. So for the past week we've had
graduation, but on top of that, there's a massive track meet
like an annual in town. So the people flying in like
college students flying in from colleges all across the country.
So we have been fucking non-stop slam.
So I think they're still fairly just overwhelmed.
And I think they just took that out on me, which isn't cool.
And also like, I'm also the type of dude.
It's just like, hey, if I say something that's like makes that
makes you sound like a Dick or I'm pissing you off, you should
just tell me because I'll believe you, you know, and I'll
apologize. There's no need to kind of snap
at me and like kind of start to raise your voice.
I also don't really respond positively to that, but yeah.
But other than that, the job's been great.
But the second job is cool, too. I only do it two days a week.
It's just a little bartending gig.
But yeah, thanks. You're thanks.
You're fucking sick, dude. What?
Are jobs that pay more than you work less hours?
I know. Yeah, I work.
I work way less hours now. This week's actually kind of my
first week of because I took some extra shifts last week too,
which also may have added to me getting sick.
But it's my first week of my like regular schedule.
So I'm like, yeah, I'm fucking cool and man.
Fucking cool and that's cool. That's cool.
I mean, how are you buddy gets I mean literally the same as
always. Nothing has changed at all, but
our show is going to how about that segue?
So So what are we what the so episode 200.
So we've decided So what the fuck are we doing today?
Right? We're going to talk about how
we're going to switch up the show a little bit.
We're going to change up some of the format.
We're going to change up some of the content and then we're going
to talk about just some of the games we've gone over in the
past, what we consider to be the best slash, our favorite games.
We can really decide on which one of those and and what we
consider some of those underrated games that we've
looked at. And considering our entire show
is basically about like underrated indie games, it's
kind of hard to pick. That's kind of what we do all
the time, but we're going to pick like the tops in our
opinion that really flew under the radar.
That should be played by a lot more people and talked about by
a lot more people. We're going to go over those.
We have about like 3 or 4 each of our like best slash favorite
and then we have I think like 3 or 4 each of our underrated.
But do you want to do talk about the changes first for the people
that actually listen to the first like 30 minutes before
they turn us off or what? Yeah.
Yeah, we should. Yeah, we should do that.
Yeah, so people. Put us on for their cats.
But that when they leave them alone, you know?
Yeah. Or half listen at work.
Yeah, so we're going to be switching up the show a little
bit. So what we do now what our what
our normal thing is as we bullshit for a little bit, we
intro a game, then we then we read through the entire game
together, myself and Hunter, like really just picking through
it. And then afterwards we, we rate
it based on some metrics. And for a long time I really
like that. And I understood, we both
understood that, that doing 2 hour episodes where we just read
through a book isn't everyone's cup of tea.
But we also didn't give a fuck because this is a hobby and it's
what we enjoy doing. But without without getting too
deep into it, man the indie space is chalked as fuck right
now in my opinion. Probably one of the worst it's
been since I got into teach RBGS.
Probably over a decade. I'm just like, not on blue sky
anymore. Like I just stopped getting on
blue sky. Yeah.
I'm like, I don't want to see what you guys are talking about.
Yeah, so if you want, if you really want to hear my opinions
on why, hop into our Discord and ask me.
But realistically I'm the kind of person who loves something
like 110% and will will defend it way longer than it needs to
be defended. But then as soon as like I
really see it for what it is, I hate it 150% right?
And I don't want to do that with TTRPGS.
I really enjoy TTRPGS. I'm just getting burnt out on
the culture of the indie space right now, which is terrible in
my opinion. The only one that I really give
on screen right now is that there's not really a hobby space
in TTRPGS anymore. And I want to remind people that
hobbies are things that you do for fun and enjoyment when
you're not at work. So feeling that you need to
monetize every single bit of your enjoyment is a detriment to
your life and a detriment to the TRPG space.
You don't have to charge money for everything.
If you get enjoyment just making it and then sharing that with
other people, that is a valid way to exist in the space.
And don't don't like you're like, we can have a whole
conversation on if you make a game, Are you a game designer?
Not here or not now, But if you enjoy making games, you're
allowed to share them without feeling that you have to have a
Kickstarter every two months or or that you have to like put a
value on it because people are encouraging you to to charge
money for your game so they can charge more money for their
games, right? You're allowed to just be a
hobbyist. Yeah, I do love, I do love the
post that was like, you should charge money for your games
because you giving them away for free means that it's harder for
me to sell my games. It's like, well, that's the
really, that's really a shit take honestly.
Yeah, that's how really fucking turtle take this is.
Shit take like listen if you want charge money for your
games, that's absolutely a personal decision.
And I think my issue is that like the space, it was like part
hobby and then part like trying to do the thing and like get
Kickstarters up and running. And now everything is just the
Kickstarter up and running part. And there's no very first.
Yeah, people. 'S very first thing they ever
created. They're popping out like a
$10,000 Kickstarter and it's like bro, nobody knows you and
you're doing like the 80th I'm sorry, the 800th Borg hack and
you want a $10,000 thing for it? It's just like, come on, man,
like you're, you're allowed to put on Ashkins, you're allowed
to just enjoy the things you make.
Like it's, it's OK, like you don't have to like, you know,
participate in capitalism in order to enjoy a hobby, you
know, anyway, anyway, and this is a hobby for us.
That's why we can say whatever the fuck we want about anything
with no obligations or anything We don't like this real we're.
AI so. Well, we're definitely fuck AI,
but we like this costs US money. This stream and, and buying
things to do and everything, it costs US money.
We definitely don't make any money off of this because it's a
hobby for us and that's what we're going to continue to do.
So basically how we're going to switch it up though is that we
are going to, we're just basically going to have more fun
with it because I think for a while now we haven't really been
having a ton of fun with it. We're going to stop doing read
throughs on the show. We're going to read through on
our own and we're going to have more discussion.
We're going to do more like we did with what episode we did
recently, like with I mean, we did do a read through of
violence, but it's gonna be kind of more like that where we can.
We didn't read all of it, we just jumped.
Around we actually did, but it's like only three pages long or
whatever. So, but the actual game system,
I mean, we're gonna stop doing read throughs.
We're going to read through on our own, take notes and discuss
it more. We are still going to do
ratings. We do tabletop games or tabletop
role-playing games. But, but this is going to change
and I should remember to change it.
It said the Weekly Scroll TTRPG podcast.
For any of you eagle eyed listeners out there, if you've
noticed any of our profile pictures, it has changed a while
ago. We are going to be the Weekly
Scroll Tabletop podcast, and that means we are going to not
only do tabletop role-playing games, we're gonna start doing
war games and skirmish games and board games and in even in table
tops, we don't really do solo games.
We haven't for a long time because our format didn't really
fit. We're gonna start doing solo
games. We're gonna start doing
adventures, even though I don't fuck with adventures.
I mean, because honestly if you haven't written 10 you're a
piece of shit anyway but. People won't understand that
reference, so like. Plenty of people will understand
the reference, but I'm just like. 30 people who hear you say
that and think they're like, well that's a really shitty
take. And you're right, it is a really
shitty take. Sarcasm.
I don't use them, I know you do. So we're going to start talking
about adventures. I play a ton of adventures and I
have a lot of opinions on them, yeah.
Yeah. And yeah, we're actually going
to start talking, talking about tables, oak versus cherry, you
know, like which is the right table?
Because there's a right answer, right?
Tables matter. But maybe we'll talk about,
maybe we'll bring up some dead discourse and have whole
conversations about it. But what we also want to do is
bring on guests. Again, we haven't done guests
for a while, but that's because I we don't really want to do
guests where like just people hit us up and then we like promo
their games, whatever. We want to have like discussions
about stuff. So like if we want to talk about
like why like roll under is the best or whatever, you know what
I mean? Or like we want to talk about
like specific topics within within the space.
Like let's talk about Mex for example, we're going to bring on
someone who's maybe written a MEC game and we're going to
discuss like Mexan popular culture and Mexan Tabletop and
Mexan teach RPGs and have discussions around things.
And at the end, if that happens to me, a little bit of
promotion, it's going to be like The Tonight Show where they like
just bullshit with somebody for 30 minutes and that 5 minutes,
you know, they play a clip or whatever.
We're going to do a little bit more stuff like that.
I've been really getting into skirmish and war games, you
know, a lot of the Ink 28 scene and stuff.
So definitely going to start talking about that.
We're going to start doing streams on the show that don't
end up in any podcast format. Like if we want to start video
gaming on the show, especially late in the evening, we want to
start hobbying on the show where we we talked about like kit
bashing war bands live on the show and then actually hopping
on and playing the games we can bring on.
Like, you know, I've talked to some guests on the side, some
people we've talked to before that might come back and, and
specifically to talk about like the stuff that we're doing.
So and maybe we'll even play some last war here on the
stream, whether that ends up in pod or not, so people can have
more. I'll bring back the for those
that actually ever saw it, the the TWS after dark episodes that
never existed because I would delete the VOD after you got to
be there or, or you weren't there.
So we're just going to have a lot more fun with what we're
doing. We're going to expand the scope
of what we're doing. We're going to talk a lot about
the things that we haven't really talked about before
because the format didn't fit. We also want to really start
going over old fun games, you know, stuff from the 70s and 80s
that we didn't really want to read through but would really
like to discuss. You know, obviously we're going
to talk about things like traveler, you know, fucking boot
Hill, like whatever we're just going to we're going to we're
going to talk about that. We're going to bring people on
that enjoy those games and if maybe made more modern hacks of
them so we can discuss those a little bit more in depth.
So that's that's what else we what else?
I feel like there's other stuff that we talked about was that
was that kind of it. That's kind of what we're doing.
We're we're we're cutting out the read through episodes are
going to get shorter. We're going to have more fun
discussion and we're going to really expand the scope of of
the things that we look at outside of the TGRPG space and
even within the TGRPG space. Like I said, we talked about
solo games where we actually, you know, we will individually
play the game and then come on and talk about it.
Oh, we're also maybe going to start being meaner.
We don't review games we don't like.
Maybe we will. Maybe.
We'll start. Maybe we'll just be like, hey,
it's fine and good on you for making something, but I don't
like it. We'll see.
But yeah, solo games, adventures.
For people that have asked for adventures forever, you're going
to get some fucking adventures. And for people that asked for
solo games. I was asking for adventures,
honestly. So so.
That's what's going to change. Oh, the question I wanted to ask
you, right? So this is episode #200 it's
actually episode #266 which is crazy. 2. 166 but So what I've
done and what is fucking annoying to me the way that I
have to like output it through like Spotify for creators or
whatever, which is what I I, I put the episodes out on and then
it shoots at two other platforms in order to like kind of
delineate those things. It has eyes put it as like
season 1, season 2, season 3. Then I have to go back and find
which one was last season 3 to put, you know, not cat chats
episode 13 is actually season 3 episode like 27.
You know what I mean? Because we have, I paid, I, I
numbered side quests differently, not cat chats
differently. TWS plays differently.
I'm going to stop doing that. Yeah.
That's a really good idea. You should stop doing that.
Yeah, so. But the question then is, is our
next episode #201 or is it #267? I think this is episode 200 and
next episode is 277. 67. 67, yeah.
That's the question I wanted to ask.
I was like, I think we should just like make the number the
real number. And I'll just put like a little
thing that says you didn't miss it.
That's just everything else. And now we're just numbering
everything the same. So episode if #267 is an actual
play. It's called episode 261.
Actual play of whatever the fuck, you know what I mean?
Like. Yeah, I'm fine with that.
So. Yeah.
So that's also going to be the changes you're going to notice
number go up, but that's kind of what's going to happen.
Like I said, the biggest change I think that people are going to
notice is we're not going to do the read through anymore.
We're going to we're going to cut that in half.
We're going to fill that up with more discussion and but we're
still going to do the ratings. I love the ratings.
I think they're good. We'll.
Give visual like we do go through our regular rating
system, we'll be like, oh, this is kind of what we're talking
about and we'll show examples on the screen, but we're.
Getting, you know, yeah, because I mean, I'm definitely going to
take notes with like using our metric as like the guide to
like, OK, we'll talk about art. This is the part I like when we
talk about the rule set. This is the part that I want to
discuss. You know, things like that.
We're just not going to nitpick through every page anymore.
If there's if there's a bunch of stuff I want to get nitpicky
with, I'll point it out. But we're not going to read
through the entire thing because a you know how to read most of
you, I hope. I mean, it's America, so it's a
it's a shot in the dark there. But and also we just want to
have like just talk about the games more than read the games,
which again, is something we could have been doing for a long
time, but we didn't want to. And now we do.
And then again, the second biggest change is we're going to
start talking more tabletop, tabletop like board games and
skirmish and board games. Most mostly, I still want to
lean into the indie side of of that scene.
So don't expect like Warhammer 10th edition or Horace hair, say
3 point O1 here. Night Lord's best boys, by the
way. Yeah, but you know, expect
things that are kind of like in 28 we might look at, we might
discuss Inquisitor, we're going to bring people on and talk
about the, you know, Snack 28 and and and stuff like that.
So, you know, and I have some guests in mind for that kind of
side of the space too, so. We're also really going to start
pumping out the 5 E content, you know, or sorry, it's what's the
new version called? I never remember one DND.
Who gives a number? One brother.
I can't even begin to to pretend to make a joke about that
garbage bullshit. Yeah, dude, it's going to be
sick so. I don't even remember.
What is it? This.
Yeah, a couple other things are going to change.
Listen, I'm done fighting it. We've said forever, we are.
We are hobbyists again. We make no money off of this.
I'm tired of review copies in my fucking inbox.
Even though every possible way to contact us says no review
copies. I'm done fighting it.
If you want to send us shit, send us shit.
We we'll read it. Maybe don't send us your 5 E
shit. Honestly, I'm not gonna do
nothing. It's 5 E sheet.
We will not look at it at all. It will immediately leave it.
Yeah. But if you want to send us
review copies of stuff, we'll take a look at it if we like it.
Well, at least again, since we're not doing like 2 hour read
throughs of games anymore, we can discuss stuff.
We might even have episodes where we just like do quick 5
minute stuff through like a bunch of things.
But if you want to send us review copies of things, I'll
take the tags off, e-mail us, send us whatever.
But as we've always said, and the one of the the biggest
reasons we didn't do review copies is I own all of it
already. And if you were going to come on
and we were going to talk about your game, I buy it because to
US, supporting creators means also financially supporting
creators. Yeah, I mean, frankly, we're
still probably going to buy the game so.
And that's The thing is that if you send us a review copy and we
decide to actually like in depth discuss on the show, I'm going
to send money like I need a way to be able to like also purchase
the PDF or something, you know what I mean?
Because I think that is something that's important to
us. Again, like if we have the means
in order to help financially, which I am, you know, privileged
enough to have those means, we're going to make sure we
support financially the the creators of the stuff that we,
we talk about. But I'm, I'm just done fighting
it because it's fucking annoying.
I'm tired of like basically copy paste in this e-mail that says,
thank you so much for sending us you the drive through RPG link.
But sorry, we don't take, you know, review copies or whatever.
I'm tired of it. If you want us to look at your
stuff, we're going to be brutally honest about it, but
send it, you know, go for it. Go now on to the.
Episode. Yeah, is are those all the big
changes? That's what we got.
Yeah, any more that come, you'll figure it out when you see it.
So. Yeah.
So that's that's it. So expect, expect some changes
here on the show. Yeah, starting starting next
week. We're we're going to be doing a
tabletop game, a tabletop role-playing game next week, but
with a new format, you know? Also get ready for our bikini
and hot tub streams so. Yes, we'll put that.
We'll put that category up, bro. I can blow up a kiddie pull in
here, you know? That's nice.
Do they still allow it on twitch?
Yeah. Oh, OK.
Yeah, it has its own category. I thought they like banned it
for some reason I don't know. No, they banned a lot of weird
stuff, but you know, a lot of people haven't really been
pushing the metas super hard anymore.
Yeah, well, IRL is the new Twitch meta, so we got to start
doing some IRL streams, you know?
Yeah, you start walking around Tokyo and bothering people and.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Japan specifically really loves
Taurus right now. They're yeah, I'm sure they.
Really love it. I would fucking murder somebody
to go watch the fucking sumo basho.
The grand basho over there. The next one starts next month,
baby. Fucking Ono Sato Yoko.
Dude. Dude you don't even know what
the fuck I'm talking about bro. The drama since January with
Yoko Zunas and and and now with Hosh and Ono Sato.
You are missing out so fucking much.
Anyway, so the next thing we're going to do is we're going to
talk about best slash favorite games that we have looked at
from the beginning. From the very fucking beginning.
I don't remember how many games we've actually reviewed.
I was going to count it because remember when we weren't giving
Zen score? So we would do like 2 in
Episode. I remember that, yeah.
So that was really dominant, annoying of us, but the rough
count of a number of games we've looked at is take off double S.
Riveting television right now. About 118 games we have reviewed
here on the show. Still, it's more than that. 118
games. For 200 episodes.
Bro I literally have a folder that has the score like image of
every game we've ever reviewed and I just counted.
Really. Is that in your Dropbox?
It can be. Can can it be?
Thanks. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, So I, I, it says 117, but there's some
double S because remember, we changed some scores and then
some of them have two tags on it.
It's about 118 games. Wow.
That we've reviewed here on the show.
Well, hey, congratulations to us out of two. 166 episodes.
We've done 118 games. I mean, we did a lot of a lot of
interview episodes, which was weird.
We never were going to be a interview podcast.
First interview though, Johannor.
I blame you, Johann, honestly. Yeah, I blame you, motherfucker.
No, it was awesome. That's really cool because I did
reach out to you. I was like, you want to come on?
Yeah, and it was awesome. Johan's awesome.
I've got to meet them in person a couple of Times Now and and
they're great and. They were so nice when we met
them. They were like, they really
treated us like. Tall as fuck.
I don't know why every motherfucker in the TTRBG space
is like 6-5 but yeah I mean we're like 6 foot but they're
just like way taller than. That.
Yeah, totally. Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely. 6 and a quarter, I want you to know we,
we at work there then we actually measured ourselves and
I'm like, damn, that's short bro.
Yeah, You think we have that big Dick energy though?
You know what? I mean me bro, it's tiny I can't
even find it so. I, I do so, so next we're going
to do best. So what we, what we kind of try
to do is basically say do your favorite slash best three and my
favorite slash best three and any double s we'll get rid of.
But we've said this since we reviewed it and it's the thing
that we're always going to say forever the best game we've ever
reviewed. I think I is it technically the
highest score we've ever given or it's it's one of only two
games we've ever given a 10/2 for rule set and yeah.
Actually hard pause. Where is it?
I mean mine are right there. I could pull out the entire
collectors box at too, but. How you doing?
I mean, I'm not getting up. I'm just gonna show the, but
since I have the scores here, I can actually pull it up.
So the first one we're going to look at is Kingdoms from
Sovietini. We've said this over and over
and over again. It's the first ten we ever gave
out. We did retroactively go back and
give, We've only given two 10s for rule set in 118 games.
And, and this is #1 it's, it's amazing.
So we gave Kingdoms a 40 and the only thing we get we knocked it
down to get a nine for art and style, A6 for layout and
function. This is back when we were doing
layout and function. Bro this is like episode 16 or
something like. That.
Crazy. Oh, this is one of the ones that
we went back and we originally gave it a nine and then almost
immediately were like Nah bro, that's a 10. 9 for art and
style, 6 for layout and function, 9 for rule set and
crunch, 9 for originality and A7 on value.
So it got 40. I just love like the two
different like the zoomed in and zoomed out like like kind of
zones of play. Like there is this like monster
slang exploring tabletop RPG, but when you zoom out, it's just
like legacy RPG as you play through a family, like multiple
generations of of royalty, they're dealing with the things
that royal, the intrigue of court and such, you know?
There's there's 3 levels of play because actually, right, Because
actually you start you, you have like the actual character you
make, which are the potentially these like basically like your
bloodlines, right and then it's it's A and at its courts and
into the odd game, which is crazy because I also think this
could easily be one of the most probably the most underrated
game ever written like it's insane We're.
Just not more popular. But Chris McDowell actually
referenced it in the front of Mythic Bastion Land as like an
inspiration. Really.
That's very funny. Yeah, because it's fucking
amazing. Well, yeah, because it's.
Great. So basically you start as like a
low blood, a high blood or a God blooded character.
You roll up all of these traits and then yeah, basically the
core game is like the best souls like combat ever made in ATTRPG
because the the monsters literally have like combat
loops, literally called the loop and it has an attack pattern and
players can learn the attack pattern and fight them.
It's easily the most souls like of like teach RPG combat ever.
But you start as that and then you level up to the next.
You know, it's not level up. The next kind of like level of
play is like you said, this generational family, right, But
the next level up from that is you literally start in what's
barely more than the fucking like dark, like not dark age is
like like almost you're you're in caves with like a single
life, barely able to make swords and you can literally go through
eras to get to like a modern technological times.
So like it zooms out and zooms out and zooms out in this insane
way. The book is gorgeous.
The stuff that's in it is like fucked up and awesome, But also
when you are doing the generational combat and or the
generational stuff, it's super PvP where you can send like like
political, like basically Wormwood to like another group.
You could like assassinate people's families, kill their
kids so that they can like not have the next generation and
shit. It's it's crazy and it's all
built on a chassis of of into the odd.
It's unquestionably, in my opinion, the best game we've
ever reviewed on the show. I believe for you it's.
Really a tremendously good game. Like it really is unbelievably
good. And also, I think we we didn't
even talk about it, but probably also the most underrated game
here. Like most people, I've never met
someone organically that's ever heard of this game and that's
insane to me. No, listen, if you're listening
to this right now and you pick up anything that we talked
about, like you should pick this game up, especially if you have
a good humored table that wouldn't flip the table itself
for stabbing each other in the back in the fun way.
Like this is an amazing system. It's a lot of fun.
The rules are simple, there's a lot of like easy depth to it,
like you can create like like artifact weapons to pass down
through generations and like it's so interesting.
Also, we didn't talk about the lore though.
This world has no sun, so it's literally like a Dark World
you're exploring with very little light and like fighting
these monsters. I once again, like I know you
already talked about the loop, but I love the loop.
It's such a good use of like a video game mechanic to help
teach your players how to respond to an enemy.
Instead of it just being like I as the GM just decide what
action it takes every round. It makes it feel more boss body.
But yeah, and because it's into the odd, the enemy always hits
so and the enemies there aren't any like small bad guys,
everything, all the enemies you fight are like boss boss bad
guys. Yeah, every single one.
So if you don't figure out the loop and play the game
effectively, you will fucking die like immediately.
So it's it's so fucking the life step.
That's what it was. You return from the dark corpse
of extinguished hate in tow. Now your people call to you
instead of violence leadership. They plead for the light of the
God kings to guide them. You take seed upon your throne
and live a life of simplicity as a quiet years fall as fast as
your hair. So that's that is the thing.
And then you, you, you do the whole life stuff thing where you
literally roll to like if you have kids and like you pass the
shit down and stuff. It's crazy.
It's so fucking good. So infant child, young adult,
adult, elder. And then there's literally
genetics because you could have like one of the options here is
the the genetics Possibilities are one through 6/1 is tragic
delivery. Mother dies, baby survives #2 is
difficult pregnancy. The baby is lost #3 is
complications. Baby suffers random injury or
trauma. Four are 5 as success and six as
twins. So you have 1/2 option of just
being fucked on your genetic life path and like as you like
pass on like into the next part of the game.
It's ridiculous. I I also like, you know, I like
that this game is a little adversarial between the players,
but not so much so that it's purely PDP.
Like, you do need to decide when to work together because you
want help fighting that monster, but also you do want to kind of
fuck each other over because only one of you can be the God
king when that comes up. So yeah.
It's, it's such an incredible game.
It's an incredible game. Again, Sophia, Tenney Kingdoms
don't even know where you can find it anymore.
I know that there was a gum Rd. I think at one point that you
could get some stuff on. We should probably have found
all the links to this stuff in the I'll if I remember I'll put
it down in the show notes. A link to all of these games so
you can find them. So that's kingdoms.
So that's that's just both of our number ones period.
Find it I'm. Gonna drop it in chat.
OK drop it in discord 2 so I have it for for when I actually
do the episode. So what do you want to do next?
Do you want to do 1 of yours or one of mine?
Let's do one of yours first. OK, let's go with the the the
the only other game we've given a tend to and that is going to
be. Yeah, what a great game.
Yeah, that's going to be Necronautilus from World Champ,
Gameco from Adam Vas. We have we have for a very long
time. We have said almost from the
beginning of the show that we are an Adam Vast and podcast.
And the coolest thing about that, the coolest fucking thing
about that is we started out as just like especially me, like a
die hard Adam Vast fan. I have pretty much everything
they've ever made. If you somehow have the extra
bits to babes in the dark, like the like the pumpkin stuff or
anything like that, babes in what's babes in the dark?
But. I'm saying.
We just became I was just a die hard fan of of Adam Vass.
And the craziest part is from being just some schmuck to we
actually had Adam on the show and not only we had Adam on the
show, we we went to PAX pax you and ran the world champ Gameco
booth because Adam couldn't make it.
That's how far we've come as an Adam Vast and podcast.
So funny, Adam Lilly sent us a message and was like, hey, I
can't make it and I don't know anyone who knows my products
better than you 2. I'm like that's, that's
appropriate. We do know them pretty well.
Yeah, so we've gone from being like die hard fans to still
being die hard fans, but actually homies with with Adam
and that's incredible. That's, that's one of the
coolest things about the show that we've done.
You know, all all to be completely honest, we've met a
lot of really great people on the show.
We've also met a lot of shitty people.
They have actually. There's a lot of people in this
space that you think are cool. That really sucks.
They really are not. Cool.
And that's why they don't come back on this show.
So Necro Nautilus is the only other game we've ever given a 10
to in Rule set in Rule set. The score that we gave Necro
Nautilus originally on the show, again with like two versions of
our metrics ago was PPP, a 43. Cool.
NO44A4444. It's the it's tied for the
highest we've ever given out. It is.
It got a 10 in Rule set, a 10 in originality, A9 in art and
style, and eight in layout and function, which is our old
usability score and A7 in value. It's interesting because like a
lot of the stuff that we did really early on, because we did
this game very early on, a lot of the other stuff we did, I
would be down to go back and re review and change the scores and
stuff. But Necronalist, I wouldn't
change the score. Like, what amazing game with a
cool, like, step away from a traditional, like, tabletop
game, like to manipulate language and memory to create
this character and these very odd experiences in this universe
of death and like, a really great use of a 2D6 system.
Yeah, Yeah. And, and like you said that that
is, that is, that is what this game is.
You. You act as souls bound to clouds
of noxious gas called death agents.
They will explore planets inhabited by creatures who have
all died in the universe outside of time, using their words of
power. They will act on behalf of the
blind God deaf to maintain order in the Galaxy.
Their powers will grow and splinter as they learn about and
explore the corporeal life they left behind.
So yeah, the, the 2D6 system is fantastic.
The, the core mechanic is really great.
It uses 2D6, but in a really interesting way.
It's not, it's not like a mixed success game or anything like
that. But yeah, you're, you're,
you're. The abilities that you have are
literally words that you have to use.
And, and it's also part of the kind of like there's like a
through line of death agents through a lot of atoms games.
And that kind of started with this.
But yeah, you, you're an incorporeal like, like soul
bound to a basically like a gas cloud that's running around like
solving problems in a a universe of everything that's ever died
for death. You know, it's fucking crazy.
Fucking crazy. Yeah, it's actually just and
also just insane, so. Yeah, it's just, it's an
incredible game. And and as as Hunter said, like
actually using words as powers. And like if you succeed or fail,
like the words can adapt and change.
And like, one of my favorite things about the game too, is
that you kind of start in the middle, right?
Because as you gain or lose too many words and things like that,
you you gain and lose memories and things.
And if you lose too much, you become nothing because there's
not enough of you left. But if you gain too much back,
you actually can no longer be a death agent because you become
too corporeal and remember too much of your former life.
So like you, you have to ride like a middle path of not going
too high or too low in it, which is super fucking interesting.
Or don't and discover who your character was and what they did
before they died and then retire them.
You know I can start a new. It's, it's incredible.
And and and you know, as with most of Adam's works, the the
art throughout the layout through art is is all Adam and,
and every page looks different. There is no standard 2 column.
It's every page is laid out as if it's, you know, individual
page the entire time. It's just an incredible book.
You know, I have, you know, both copies.
The the the silver foiled special edition cover 1 is like
one of my prize teach RPG possessions.
I. Don't have that one.
That's a really cool 1 I had. Yeah, I have it.
It's great. But but yeah, that's
Necronautilus from Adam Vass. That is one of my favorite, one
of the best games in my opinion, that we that we've ever looked
at here on the show. And again, only one of two games
we've ever going to attend to, in our opinion, for a rule set
score we would consider to be like a peak rule set.
And and yeah, so that's that's one of mine.
So which one do you want to look at for one of yours?
I don't know. Mine are really really in no
order. So let's do let's do my
Kobayashi pick first. I guess the.
Kobayashi pick? All right, what's your Kobayashi
pick? Yeah, so one of my favorite
games we've ever gone over is going to be Black Sword Hack, a
very swords and sorcery tabletop RPG by Kobayashi.
I actually don't have the scores pulled up like Ryan because I
don't, I'm not prepared like Ryan and I also.
You don't have I mean, I'm the one that makes all of them, so I
have access to all of them in a folder.
So black sword hack top to bottom.
That's after we did Flayo right it.
Was after Flayo? It is.
It is like Flayo and B and BSH share a lot of DNA.
Yeah. I mean, you can tell like Flayo,
like BSH exists because Flayo existed, you know, and Flayo's
lost one incredible game just in and of itself.
It is but but Black Sword Heck is definitely all of the best
ideas from Flayo kind of distilled down into really
fucking good. So Black Sword Heck got a 40 on
our score set. And of course, I moved to the
two different windows, so the size of the window changed.
So I lost it in here. But so art and style was an 8,
layout was an 8. So this is our second, our
second iteration of our of our metric.
So art and style 8 Layout eight rule set 8 Originality 8 value 8
for a for a 40. Yeah, this is this all all the
way through it. It's a mechanically a great
game. I love the use of usage dice in
this, which I always love when I see it everywhere.
I think it's an amazing mechanic, but I love the doom
mechanic in this which can really aid you until you were
doomed I which is the usage die runs out and then you're totally
fucked. Character creation.
This lets you start with this like very interesting and
possibly kind of complicated story wise, not mechanic wise
character. I think this is just like I love
swords and sorceries, a genre. And I think this game captures
what I love about swords and sorcery.
I've run it a couple times. I've run the adventure in the
book, and I've run the adventure in the Chaos crier #0 Zine,
which they actually just released.
Chaos Crier number one, I think like last month.
Yeah. Which I actually, you know,
maybe I'll buy that today because I didn't get it yet and
I would like to run it. Although my group specifically
said can we not do fantasy RPGs in the next couple of sessions,
which, whatever. Yeah, that's.
An interesting Oh, keep going, no.
No go what we say. Well, that brings up an
interesting thing we've talked about numerous times on the show
about fantasy and how I think that when I was a kid.
Man, I love Lord of the Rings so much, and the older I get, the
less I like Lord of the Rings. Not.
Me brother. Yeah, yeah.
Well, so we've talked about this before, like sword and sorcery
and what I call sword and wizardry are very different.
And I think Lord of the Rings and I don't know enough about
fiction and stuff, but I feel like fantasy post Lord of the
Rings really leaned much harder into sword and wizardry versus
sword and sorcery. Sword and sorcery to me is very
much like Barbarians and and sorcerers casting weird esoteric
like plane hopping like. Deals with spirits to cast
spells, you know, drawing on, like dark spirits and the ether
and demons and yeah, and that's all in.
That's all in this, you know. Entering dreams and like I said,
opening up riffs in time and portals to other dimensions and
shit. And sword and wizardry is very
much like Eastern Europe with swords and Shields and dudes
with pointy hats. And I feel like a lot of like
the time portal jumping stuff went away.
And a lot of like the yeah, making deals with demons and
like strange Barbarians with different cultures and stuff
like all went away to just be this like very white European
coated, you know, Lord of the Rings, you know, So direction a
lot of fantasy went. I'm really glad things that like
Old Moon Quarterly and things like that are really bringing
back sword and sorcery style fiction and not that it ever
completely went away, but like re popularizing it.
And I think that's really, really great.
And Black Sword Hack is a really, really great version of
that in the Teach RPG space where if you don't know what
sword and sorcery is, this is a really good intro to the kind of
like that genre of fiction. I also really liked the guide in
this to building your own like little setting in the world to
play in. I thought it was really good and
very valuable. They they gave you like an
example one they built and the art in this the art in this is
all the way through is just tremendous.
Like it. It's really looks very good.
I think some of my favorite artists towards the end, there's
a page near the end that gives a bunch of panels that are like
like book covers or like posters that of like like the son of
orcas and like adventures and shit.
This. One right here, yeah.
Yeah. Beard quest, Son of Orcas.
Titania. Yeah.
Great, I love. I wish I could get those four as
just posters from my room. Get out.
Yeah, I mean, but if you look at a lot of those old books from
that time period, these are these are what book covers used
to look like, not these like super fucking weird overproduced
character art bullshit. You know that that is on a lot
of covers now. Like I don't like, like I like
4th wing. Like, come on, let's bring some
character back to, to our fucking shit.
Let's actually have illustrators and and you know, and stuff.
But but yeah, and and like, probably like an incredible
version of Black Hack. We've said this over and over
again, Black Hack is an incredible system.
Black Hack 2 EE was just very unnecessary, like attempt at a
game, but the system of black hack is incredible.
It's a great thing to hack with and and the usage I is just it's
a genius mechanic like it's fantastic.
Yeah, so that's black sword hack.
Let's look at one of I need to just bring up to fucking
different windows so I can be on the scores and I forget that
sometimes that like when you actually go into like your file
windows and shit, you can just pull up multiples of those.
Absolutely. There's sometimes you can I I
like I used to like copy and then back, back, back and then
go to a different folder and paste and it was like, oh, I can
just drag it from one to the other if I'm not a fucking idiot
about it. So my next one that I'm going to
go over, I'll do I'll do this one.
I'll save one that is arguably favorite instead of best for
last, but mouse reader, the sword and whiskers role-playing
game. This game just fucks super
fucking hard. And one of my favorite things
about it is it's all ages Ness, right?
Like you could have kids play this game easily, or you could
have like 40 year old dudes play this game. 40 year old anybody's
play this game and and have the same kind of enjoyment out of
it. Like there's no there's no
differentiation. It's an incredible I think it I
think it won the any positive won the any for like best family
game, but just as a core, it's just an incredible game.
It isn't into the odd game, which which is interesting.
A lot of the best games in on ER into the odd games, but we'll
we'll talk about that eventually.
But my favorite thing about this game other than that, not
mechanically, just like conceptually, is the the feeling
of size and scope that it brings back to the fiction, right?
Because there are so many fucking stories of like one
night defeating a dragon or whatever that when you're
playing like whatever fucking version of the dragon game that
you're playing, people don't really fear Dragons.
Like if a green dragon rolls up, they're going to try to fight
it, right? Which is a fucking ridiculous
thing to do because realistically, and it's not
simulationist or whatever, look, come on, calm the fuck down.
A dragon will smoke you. A dragon will smoke you into
fucking nothing. And what I one of the things
that I describe about this all the time, and someone said it or
it's in the book or or whatever, it is not a unique thought to me
at all. But the idea of like a human
fighting a dragon. People like, oh, yeah.
And then you go, OK, well, how about a mouse fighting a cat and
people like, oh, no. And you're like.
That's that is how it should. Feel when you fight a dragon.
And that's the fear that this game brings back.
The the idea that you are a little bitty mouse in a human
sized world and all of the things that you're facing is
like you can imagine being a mouse and thinking how scary
you'd be to just go across a 5 foot open ground because who the
fuck knows what bird or cat or person or whatever is going to
come fucking snatch you. It brings the fear back into the
game and makes the open world feel.
I completely agree. Yeah, in a very approachable way
because like little kids for it too.
But honestly, like also, I mean, obviously we've talked about
into the odd, which is great. The, the, you know, one of the
best things about this game is the, is the imaginative system
where it's actually like the, the like punch card slots that
you can actually physically put. So you could hold a little card
that says backpack and stick it where your backpack goes on your
card on your character sheet. And that is, that is just an
incredible thing. And so, so, So what is this
game? It's, it's, it's a, it's a very
family friendly OSR game where you can and will die as tiny
little mouse in a human sized world in a, in the, in, in the
actual human world. So your swords are needles and
your Shields are buttons and your helmets are fucking
thimbles and shit. Like it's super fucking cute,
but also deadly as fuck. The mechanic system is great.
The magic system is great. I'm sorry, the inventory system
is great. The magic system is great.
It's super clean, it's super consistent.
The layout is incredible, but like, the game itself is just so
clean all the way through. Everything fits so well
together. Everything is explained so well.
It's one of the best written games we've ever looked at.
It's free. It is completely fucking free.
And like, you know, for those listening like you can be, if
you're like, well, family friendly, I kind of want to have
like dark adventures. Oh, you absolutely can't.
We had a dark adventure. We turned an adventure very dark
by the end and I got stabbed in the back.
And. You did.
We became like, like Ryan became like a dark magic Lord.
And I think the Canon was that my character survived that and
became like a like a like a Lieutenant under you, but is now
like an angry, like vengeful Lieutenant.
Became like my right hand man. It's like, very, it was a very
cool, like, Dark Lord ending, you know?
So yeah. Because there was like a, there
was like a, there was like a lightning bottled up with like
a, like a bird skull or something.
And like, yeah, we had to break it out.
And like, as you were reaching for it, I stabbed you in the
back and took it. And then I had already like,
didn't I? Like I had something attached to
me so that I could control like zombie mice or something.
So I. Was literally like a necromancer
lightning Lord that had stabbed you in the back and you're like,
I'll leave your armies motherfucker.
Yeah, it was great. So it's super.
Yeah. It's an incredible game.
And again, one of the other things that's great about it and
a reminder to a lot of people in the hobby space, right.
This game is completely free. It is completely free.
You can go to the website now, download it.
Not only that, there is a whole compendium of hundreds of
adventures that are all mostly free.
They, the little tokens we were talking about, you can download
character sheets. There's literally a free token
maker on their website. So you can make any inventory
piece that you need. You can make, export, and then
actually be able to drop onto character sheets.
It's incredible, everything about it.
And the box after this game is sold out like 6 times.
So a reminder to people on the first thing that you made, yeah,
like you deserve a, a, a, a for the things you create.
You're allowed to just be a hobbyist.
And if the hobby that you do and the thing that you make
generates a community and people that like making stuff for your
game, that's how you get like $250,000 Kickstarters like Karen
and things like that. Like you're allowed to just make
a thing and enjoy making it and it could end up being wildly
successful. And then you can still support
your community by again, making it free forever and people will
still pay for it. I've paid, I have bought this
box set twice. I have bought the the the estate
box set for the adventures twice.
Like I have literally given hundreds of dollars for this
game on top of all the adventures.
Like I don't think I have the 8 box set, I just have the regular
box set. Oh, I have two of them, so you
know, I get all. You you have two of something.
Well, what's funny is I bought 1 and then, you know, they sold
out so fucking fast, right? And when I saw there was like 2
left on the website, I just bought another one because I'm
like, I'm sure someone will want 1 and I can just send it to them
if they are like, oh I, I couldn't have it.
I'm like 60 bucks. I'll go send it to you, you
know? But I bought 2 of the regular
box sets because there's no fucking way I'm going to punch
out the pieces, so I have a second one that I can actually
punch the pieces out of. I have mine in plastic bags, all
the punched out pieces, they're in the box set so.
That's number another. Oh, oh, oh, I also have the
original 1st edition box set there too, which is which is
quite rare. Thank you so much, Andre.
So. Yeah, shout out Andre.
Andre has hooked me up so much. I mean, I've paid for
everything. Let me pay for things that
weren't on the store. Let me pay.
For things that weren't in the store, like, yeah, like the
yellow, the yellow version of the insect area is something I
wanted forever. And I was like, hey, are you
ever gonna reprint that? He's like, oh, I got one.
Just like, send me 5 bucks, I'll shoot you tea.
I was like, yes, Andre. Anyway.
And for those that don't know, Mouse Ritter.
First of all 2 of 1000 doors is finally shipping from from the
homie manner manner Matt Morris man of dawn you.
Still want to ramp, Matt? Matt yeah, but apparently later
this year, I don't remember. I think it's November.
Backer kid I believe is doing an
entire mother mouse rider month much like the mother that they
did. So I want to run more mouse
riders, so that would be good for mouse riders so.
I want to run Mouse Rider. I was trying to get everyone.
I was trying to get people at work that are kind of into
TTRBGS to play Mouse Rider with me.
But like everyone keeps getting fucking pregnant and have babies
and shit, but you know, keep your jeans in your jeans, kids.
But this is the game that I always convinced him to play
because I was like, you don't want to play 5 E fucking trust
me. Play a better game.
Mouse Rider. There's two games at this point
that I've decided, Three games that I've decided are the three
best intro games in my opinion that I will always use from now
on forever to intro people to teach RPGs.
Shadow. Yeah, Shadow Dark, the OSR.
No, it is Mouse Rider and no Order.
Mouse Rider, Perils and Princess.
And here's a Cerulea. And if I was going to pick a
fourth one, it would be tunnel goons into advanced Dungeon
goons. Yeah, as a way to kind of, if
they want to get more into like the kind of like D&D ish, do
advanced dungeon goons to give them those concepts.
But those are the five games that in my opinion are the best
intro games that tabletop role-playing games in no order.
Tunnel Goons, Advanced dungeon goons kind of as a pair, Mouse
rider, pearls and princesses and and heroes of Cerulean.
I can love tunnel goons. Tunnel goons is I I we talked
about this before. The only reason it's not in the
best games we've ever reviewed or anything like that is because
we had we never reviewed it. We had an old Nate dream
episode, but we didn't go over it.
We just advanced advanced dungeon goons from.
Imagine we gave it a bunch of 10s.
Just imagine that. So.
And it is, it is the game that broke my brain.
It is a game that made me go oh wait, what?
Like not so little do so much you know it's.
It's incredible. It just like everything Nate
Dream does. Like honestly, Nate Dream, Nate
Dream just just make shit that he wants to make and then does
whatever the fuck he wants with his like awesome family.
Like they're like, if you've never heard of them, trust me,
they're your favorite game designers, favorite game
designer. Their adventures are the best
adventures out there period. And everything they make is
gorgeous. The art is gorgeous, the design
is gorgeous. They're just like peak peak
TTRPG person. I will say as someone who runs a
lot of adventures at my table, like pre written ones, I have a
lot of opinions and I have a lot of issues with a lot of
ventures. Never really have them with a
Nate Trame adventure though. They all been like, Yep, they're
they run really well. There is no if this happens,
then this happens. You know what I mean?
Like that's the whole point. You said this today.
I was like, that's so true. There's none of that.
It's like, here's what's here and how they interact with it is
beyond to. Them, that's the thing to them,
Nate, Nate, they've already had. My my favorite like Tavern
location in location ever, the moldy Unicorn.
It's amazing. And it has like a detour or I
think it's just maybe a detour table for things that are
happening when you walk into the Tavern.
And it's it's fantastic. And it created like a bunch of
like emergent like stories that happened because we'd walk into
the Tavern and a random thing would be happening and my
players would be like, cool, let's fucking go with this.
What's happening? You know, like celebrating in
the retirement of somebody who works there.
They join the party and cause a ruckus.
Yeah, we're no longer talking about Mouse, Mouse Runner.
Apparently we're not talking. About change in forever.
But anyway, because nature is fucking again, their shit is
some of the best shit out there. I mean, I Nate treatment out of
ass, in my opinion, are the best people that do this, especially
if you like emergent style of play.
And Nate's adventures are exactly that.
We talked about it. They they've put out this kind
of like little like ethos kind of thing before, and it's all
about emerging gameplay. And then they they live up to
it. And that's one of my issues with
the people in this space and we'll say it right now is you
motherfuckers that talk shit and then don't live it like, oh, why
are there dice in games? And then you have 10 dice games
that you've created. Shut the fuck up.
Like it's. So anyway it's.
So funny that you were now like, leaning into talking about stuff
because it's yourself and like, fuck people and you've been
like, no, let's not do it on the show.
I don't. Give a fuck anymore, like talk
shit and if you actually live up to it, you know, go for it.
But if you're going to talk shit and then literally be like, oh,
like no one makes adventures anymore.
And then like you don't have like adventures, like shut the
fuck up. Like if you like, there's some
people that. Are talking to me about Chief
Keef again. It's so dumb.
There's people that are just contrarian dumbasses.
Like it's just so asinine in this space and whatever.
And I'm not talking about the person who who who said the
adventure thing. It's completely different person
who is in asinine whatever. But the point is neat dream
stuff is amazing and it's because it allows emergent
things like go into the room, describe what's in the room,
describe who's in the room, and then let the players make the
story. Like that's it anyway.
Was that one of mine? Was the one of yours?
Which one do you want to do? You're muted.
Oh no. So that let's do that one last
because remember we said that that was the the one that was
like, is it is it not? You're still muted.
No, I'm not. I know what you're talking
about. I'm just very quiet.
OK then let's do let's do a solo game by one of our best buddies.
Yep, All right. OK, so.
My next pick is obviously going to be the amazing.
This is probably not a surprise because I constantly This is my
favorite games. 12 years by the glorious Max Moon of Max Moon
Games Max. Moon Games now an imprint of
Flaming Hand. Is that what it is now?
Are you unaware of this black odds kiss like they emerged and
now Max Moon is an imprint of of a bigger company?
Yeah, wow, yeah, 12 years a a solo game, one of the only solo
games we've ever talked about because this is a solo exploring
and dungeon crawling game with R&G generation of where you what
you will come across and what happens.
I have this a beautiful limited edition 12 year hardcover.
How many of those exist? There's only two of this
version. They're the weekly scroll
edition one and two. I think this is the weekly
scroll edition two, yeah. I have weekly scroll edition one
of two. Yeah, and then I also have next
to me, I have the box set for the Demon Lord expansion.
Do you? Want me to grab my stack of 12
years? I officially and the the owner
of more 12 years than anyone in the world because I own stuff
that Max doesn't even own anymore.
Yeah, I just think that this game, you know, I love playing
at the table, but I I love like exploration and I love dungeon
crawling and sometimes there's not anybody else around but me.
And I think that the mechanics for doing.
Those things and this game are like unparalleled.
First off, the the way they're written is they're obviously
been tested to hell so they Max knows what's going to happen or
has has accounted for many like edge case scenarios.
You can play this adventure and it's like rudely difficult and I
think I've I've only succeeded. No, I don't think I've succeeded
one time in and placing the crown on the on the lich.
I'm I'm bad at stuff. I've never beaten Demon Lord,
but I I've never. Beaten Lord, I've I've fucked up
so many times, although I make bad decisions too.
But yeah, I just think it's a endlessly fun game that like you
can play on your own. Like for a while we were me and
Abigail were going to coffee shops in Dallas before we moved
and I just bring my little green 12 year yeah, that so of year,
like little mini books I can fill out and I'd play while we
were like sitting and having coffee.
It's just such a fun game. I also really love Max has this
like is very inspired by like Faye legends like like Faye
folklore and not in like the Tolkien esque elf way but like
the actual like weird and fucked up Faye that will like kidnap.
You from don't make a deal with the Faye.
Don't. Make a deal with Faye.
Yeah. Listen, if the Faye Lord ever
asks you to to come dance for them, say no, because you'll
dance forever. Don't.
Say anything, just leave, please.
Yeah. Just leave.
Don't make eye contact. Just leave yeah, I think this
game is great. I think the the random
generation is fun. I think when you get locked into
it, you can really get the mechanics down and you and you
can move fairly quickly, you know, but I just love this game.
It's it's my favorite solo game. I mean, it's obviously not like
a journal entry solo game, which I do also like, but I love this
game. We've talked about like I'm not,
I can appreciate the solo journaling games, but I like
solo adventure games. Like I just, I don't have the
the thing. So this is my this is my travel,
my travel journal. This is what like when I have, I
know I'm going to go for an appointment.
I take this to work sometimes and this is what I've created.
So this is literally just all 12 years.
What it is, is a notebook so I can take notes and then I have
oh, let me get on. Let me, oh, let me get back to
here. So I have a notebook for taking
notes and then in here is 12 years and then in here is the
Demon Lord expansion and then here is my campaign notebook.
Yeah, campaign notebook. There we go.
That's the word I could think of.
And then what's also in here is the the printed out quick rules
so you don't have to flip through the entire book and then
series of character sheets that are like filled out from playing
and then a couple action notebooks in the back for if I
like want to draw or like take notes while I'm doing it.
So my travel notebook to like just go exist in the world is
the 12 years plus notebooks. So that's.
Yeah, I agree. I'm just like, oh, I'll just,
I'm bored. I'm going to play some 12 years,
you know, but it's incredible. And for those that aren't aware,
there's a new 12 years coming out because so far there is 12
years or the demon Lord expansion, There's a village, a
village expansion. But this is going to be the
first one that isn't really like an expansion.
Like it's a whole new thing. It's 12 years at sea, which is
dropping next week. So maybe new format you might
hear from somebody sometime. Maybe we need to talk to you
about. No, I think we did.
We're good, right? We did.
Yeah, we did. We have, we have, we have a
scheduled so. We have a schedule, so.
So yeah, so that's 12 years. Seriously, like on top of 12
years being like the best solo game out there period.
In our opinions. Max is also probably like the
coolest person ever. Like like one of the best.
Friends of the show. Yeah.
Just an incredible, awesome, intelligent human being that is
just like both kind and and weird and awesome and in all in
equal measures, you know, and love them to death.
Just a just a just a genuine and wonderful human being.
So. Yeah.
So that's 12 years. All right.
It got a 38. My next best.
This is my last one. Best slash favorite trophy.
Dark. Unsurprising to anyone that
knows my. Eyes load.
Ass yeah, Trophy dark is is incredible and I'll say this
flat out, I don't like trophy gold.
It's fine, but I think that it subverts all the best parts of
trophy dark for those. So trophy Dark is like a 2D6
game built on Fords in the Dark and Cthulhu dark where you lose
in the end and it's basically you adventuring into deep dark
woods and slowly going crazy and dying or, or anything like deep
dark woods, right? And you know from the beginning
that you're not going to make it out, so you can just embrace the
descent, right? And it's fucking incredible.
First of all, the art is gorgeous.
The mechanics are amazing. The way that the mechanics work
on top of like the story building aspect of being able to
be like people can like offer you a deal for you to be like,
oh, risk this. And if it goes, you know, you,
you'll get this. But this bad thing happens is an
incredible way to bring everybody into the storytelling.
It was originally kind of built as a Simba Room in the world of
Simba Room like way back in the day.
So, and you can kind of tell that even in like the modern
version of of like just if you look at this versus you look at
like Simba Room, you can tell a little bit, but it's just an
incredible dark, fucked up game where again, like you, you play
to lose. So you can just embrace, embrace
that. And it's incredible.
We review this together, which kind of sucks because I do think
that trophy dark and is in my opinion, better than trophy
gold. What trophy gold does is
basically in trophy dark, you can't fight the bad guys.
Like you just can't. You will die like because
fighting big bad monsters, you will die, right?
Trophy gold adds in like a hunt mechanic, adds in like a
currency, adds in the ability to fight monsters and stuff and
really kind of turns it into more of like just a dark
adventure game, not like the what I think trophy does best,
which is again, like the play to lose aspect of the game.
And and and yeah, and that's trophy dark I again, I like it.
I've never not said that. I'm just a very predictable
edgelord piece of shit and. We actually did play this on the
show too. On Side Quest episode 7, we
played a warm and pleasant hum. Yeah.
Michael Van Vleet, right? Yeah, which, yeah, it was.
It was great. We had a great time.
Our characters were terrible and I think I turned into a were
rabbit at the end and and aware Jack Rabbit and that.
Was I think I made it out, didn't I abandoned you guys and
make it out Oh, I. Think you did?
Yeah. Which was very trophy dark to
like abandoned your comrades to survive, you know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I keep. I'm looking through this again,
man. I should not give them just
episode number. I should give them the
searchable OH trophy. So we did trophy golden dark
together and it got a 41 but it should be higher.
I don't know how the fuck we gave an offer.
Art A7. The art in this is incredible
and the layout is incredible. Well, we have a new format.
Maybe we'll revisit this one. Yeah.
But anything that gets 40 or higher is in like the like the
top 10 game we've ever done. So 41 for this, when the art and
style should probably at least be an 8.
Probably a 42 for this. Easy.
And again, the high score we've ever given out is a 44.
So not that our opinion fucking matters to, but nice to.
Me. Yeah, to me too.
So anyway, so that's trophy dark.
An incredible game. Jesse Ross the Gauntlet you can
get like the box sets. I have the whole box set with
gold dark and loom and then in the living room.
I have like the card set that they put out too that's still in
the plastic and I've never even opened it, but a bunch of cool
dice, you know, with it too. It's it's incredible.
Trophy Dark is easily one of my favorite games and I wish more
games played to lose. You know, it really lets you
kind of like dive into that instead of like the just the
natural. Doesn't matter how hard you
tried. There's like a natural
inclination to like want to win and want to survive.
But knowing you're going to not make it out really makes it fun
to to kind of wallow in that, you know, sometimes it's nice to
wallow. Yeah, I do wallow.
You be wallowing. What's your last 1 is when we've
looked at a little bit and then and then we'll do the other one.
My last 1 is when we played recently.
So yeah, that's right. Shocking.
No one who's ever heard me talk on this channel.
My last game that for me that we'll talk about, I think
there's one more technically we'll talk about is like an
overview kind of 1 is Vaults of Varn by Leo Hunt, who was just
on last week playing this with us, which was a delightful treat
because I actually didn't know that was what that episode was.
Ryan surprised me because I love Vaults of Varn.
I love this game. It is a fantastic like from a
narrative standpoint, it takes place in a very bizarro wheel
weird world that I can really sink my teeth into and it's like
a science fantasy ultra far future.
The sun is red and slowly burning out.
You're in a blue desert ruled by an uncaring government that
isn't even really in the desert that just kind of claims it as
part of their. There are, you know, many lands
and you play as a bunch of fucking weirdos trying to
survive and find odd like techno magic items and, and become
better and make it through every day in VAR.
And I just think this game is, first of all, I love the blue
motif and the omnibus. I think the scenes are great and
I'd love to look at them more. I don't own them.
I have #4 actually, because that one came out more recently, but
yeah, I think. I can't believe you didn't buy
them. Eco.
Eco over at Lost Bay had like whole bundles of like all of it
together. I.
Don't know if. He still does.
You might be able to. You might be able to grab all
three I think. I think Leo might even have all
three back up on a shop too. Yeah, maybe I maybe I'll do that
then. But yeah, we, yeah, I, I think
that this game is like tremendous.
I think there's enough mechanics in this for me to be, to enjoy
it, but not so many that I'm over.
I mean like inundated by like technical shit to do.
And it has the best map making procedure that anyone's put in
anything at any point in time. I have also used the second
edition map making procedure, which is very similar.
It just adds a little bit to it. I'm really excited for the
second edition. I think there's a lot of new
cool stuff that doesn't add mechanics, but just builds on
what's already there. I I just love this, you know,
and I'm, I don't follow like a ton of Patreons.
I follow Leo's Patreon. I love everything that comes out
for this game, in this world, for this lore.
I'm really in love with it. Barnes Labs we got, yeah, we
didn't really announce that was coming out because, again, I,
that was a surprise for a Hunter.
I've been talking to Leo for quite a while, got it all
scheduled. And me and Hunter were just like
chilling in a Zoom call when Leo popped in.
So it was fun that I got to do that for a hunter.
But we are going to, we didn't finish that adventure that Leo
wrote for Baltimore 2 E, which is coming out believe end of
July. But me and Leo, Oh, remind me to
talk to you about this. We, we've been chatting about we
were all talking about doing a session 2 of that.
So a little bit closer to when the campaign drops, we're going
to try to set up a session 2 to continue with that adventure.
I lost my sticky notes, I think, but I took pictures of them.
So we'll be able to continue my adventure with my little guy.
Yeah. So that's Walter Barn.
So yeah, let's talk about your last one.
That was like, Oh yeah, kind of the last one, but not the last
one. It's kind of the last one for
our favorites. And I think this one like, yeah,
it's I couldn't find my Zine. I have the original Zine
somewhere in my bookshelf of other zines.
But the hard thing about zines is that you can't really tell
what they are from the side. But yeah.
Into the Odd by Chris McDowell, you know, it's just such like a
foundational game for like the Indies part of the scene.
And I have really attached, I'm really attached to and I've
really enjoyed. I love into the odd.
I love the mechanics of it. I mean, I think specifically
like into the odd itself in the remastered.
I really love the setting as well of Bastion.
This kind of like like a horrific like turn of the
century pseudo England where it's like industrial horror
surrounded by like a cosmic horror world.
It just really grabs me. I also think that this the
remastered book is beautiful. It's simple.
It's the arts amazing. Shout out Johan.
I I bought this game. I I've run the adventure in the
book as I often do. Yeah, that's right.
If you're if you're putting books out, I'm I'm the guy who's
running the adventures. I enjoyed the adventure in the
book. It's just like almost mega
dungeon, you know, it's got so many layers that you can leave
and come back and leave and come back and things will kind of
change. What's?
What is it? The iron, the iron the.
Iron coral, yeah. Iron coral, yeah, we we played
into the auto on stream too when we did a wheat makers wheat
maker fingers. We did, and that was great.
Yeah, I got the, I got the the finger, finger the finger thing.
I want to get like AI want to get like a like a plaque here
that has like a finger thing or finger thing like right there.
But yeah, because the creator of that does, does art, does a
little physical art and they oh maximum games.
They they crafted this and and I I got it as an add on on the
Kickstarter for that. So, so we have got to play that.
And it was it was incredible and the adventure was incredible.
So, so yeah. So I think that's the end of our
what we consider to be the best slash favorite games that we've
ever we've looked at here on the show.
A little recap of that. It is in our really shitty
opinions. It is into the Odds from Chris
McDowell, Vaults of ARN from the O Hunt, Black Sword Hat from
Kobayashi and 12 years from Max Moon and then Mouse Shredder
from Isaac. Why I'm I'm going to be terrible
with this. I thought it was Isaac Williams.
Isaac Williams from losing games and you know, put out my games.
Omnivorous Necronalus from Adam Bass and Trophy Dark from Jesse
Ross and the Gauntlet. So those are in our opinions.
Like we said, the top like 6 or 7 best slash our favorite games
we've looked at here on the show.
We couldn't make up our minds because if I if we said best, it
might be a different 3 for me. And if we said favorite, it
might be a different 3 for me. But because we kind of like met
in the middle. These are the three that I think
are that. So the next we're going to talk
about is what we consider to be some of the most underrated
games that we've looked at here on the show.
And let's qualify this with that we are like specifically a
tabletop game like review channel that really only talks
about like Indian underrated games.
So listen, if it's on their channel, it's probably not the
most popular thing that's ever been released of all time.
But these are our our picks for most underrated.
These are. Ones that I would say we think
are like the best games we've looked at that like more people
should be playing, you know what I mean?
Like and which one you want to start with?
Do you want to start with the C1?
Oh yeah, we should definitely start with the C1.
Yeah, here we go. First one, we're going to talk
about Cyber Metal 2012. Why the fuck aren't you playing
this game? Why are you not playing this
game? This game is easily one of the
best like Cyberpunk games out there, but does it in a very
very different way. It's like definitely not
cyberpunk in like a dystopian way.
It is. It is.
It's cyberpunk in an almost like a narco.
Like like it's like it's whatever, not dystopian is it's
it's weird. So basically it's.
An anarchist utopian like. Utopia.
Utopian dystopia. Yeah.
So what is this? Cyber Metal 2012 Long story
short you play as a citizen of Pentagram city.
Pentagram city is walled off metropolis ravaged by crumbling
technology past war in the after effects of satanic rituals.
Long story short like Reagan gets murdered on stage and a pit
to hell opens up and the city of Grand Rapids, MI is is enclosed
in like a basically like a portal.
It's kind of like it's kind of like blood blockade battlefront.
If you've ever seen that extremely underrated manga or
anime where it's like a bubble. It's like a hell bubble on one
specific spot. And but as we were saying, there
like there's a a also Reagan dies in it, which man, if only
if only we could have got Reagan and spared your AFK.
But it's just weird kind of dystopia because like, hell
powers everything, so you don't really need to worry about an
electric bill. Like basically you don't need to
worry about a lot of like life issues.
So if you just kind of chill and are OK with demons and mutants
and shit, you can kind of live fine.
But also if you die you just get like re sleeved and spit back
out, Yeah. You can make a little save point
so that you know and. One of the coolest things too is
like the game lets you go from as big or small as you want.
Like if you just want to run like a punk show on a local in a
local, like broken down garage or something, that can be a
whole adventure for if you want to try to like close the portal
to hell, you can like try to make that as an adventure and
you can go through any kind of scope within the city to do
that. The book itself is absolutely
stunning. All the art was done like in
person with like weird stuff like I remember seeing seeing
Adam paint this and he literally like use like broken computer
parts dipped in ink and shit and then scanned it in and and then
did it up. And and it's also it's like a 5
foot sideways which more books need to do.
Like it fits. Like you can definitely tell
that's on your shelf because it's different than all the
other ones. But yeah, Cyber metals 2012 Adam
Vass. It's a cyberpunk and narco
utopia with it's just incredible.
It's an incredible fucking game. I think that this one kind of
kind of got the shit into the stick where it it came out when
Kickstarter was dropping. It's like we're moving to the
blockchain bullshit. So a lot of people put stuff out
on like backer kit or or various sources Before backer kit was
really like as big it is now this one.
Game found. Yeah.
Yeah, this one on Game Found and Game Found is very much more
about like board games and skirmish games and stuff like
that. Also yeah, now no one a couple
people put stuff out on game found and I've now I've noticed
now that. Now no one does anymore.
But what? But what does is board games and
scrimmage games are extremely good on game found, but backer
kit has found its feet and you can really make obviously
millions of dollars on on backer kit now, and it's only going to
get better and better. I don't know if you noticed that
Kickstarter is now releasing its own pledge manager now too,
finally realizing that backer kit's coming for him, which
good, but I think this suffered from being on game found, not
getting the exposure that it really deserved, that it really
still deserves. The game is incredible.
Like if I was going to play a Cyberpunk game, I would play
this and then I would do probably Cyborg and then maybe a
more. Traditional dystopian cyberpunk
cyber metal. More of like a punk anarchist
and a weird, a weird like past future tech world, you know,
like there's technology there. It's weirdly like archaic and
futuristic, you know? Yeah, which is awesome.
I mean for for Cyberpunk I definitely pay this because it
really leans more into like punk as in more like, you know, like
the Ramones and shit kind of punk, where Cyborg definitely
leans warrants like the metal side of punk, you know what I
mean? Like, but but yeah, incredible
fucking game. I mean, you could basically say
this about everyone of Adam's games that they all deserve to
be way fucking bigger than they are.
But cyber metal especially, I think is an incredible fucking
game that I again, I think a big part of it was being put out on
a on a less than beneficial crowdfunder crowdfunding, you
know, push that it really didn't get the the the the scope that
would be would be better. Next one we're going to look at
is is 17th century minimalist classic.
A classic unknown game. A classic unknown.
This is a historical low fantasy OSR rule book.
This is Andre Navoa. This is games omnivorous and one
of only I think 2 two games that Andre themselves put out I
believe. I could be wrong but they also
did the job which recently became a box set with Exalted
Funeral. But 17th century minimalist is a
a very rare hard to find. This cost me more than it should
have and I did get all of it. But basically this is a low, a
low fantasy historical setting, you know, it's it's Europe
somewhere in the 17th century and all the things that come
from that. It is it is early modern Europe
with lowlife vagrants and vagabonds and stuff.
And the following games influence the game.
The black hack Lamentations, which, you know, Troika sharp
shorten the center to spells, DCC and mothership.
So, so that's it. It's incredible.
The A lot of the mechanics in it we've talked about are just
like, man, people should really steal the way armor works in
this, you know, but also the. Conflict I I, I love the
conflict rule in this cause like it very much takes away from
like, oh, conflict is combat. Like, yeah, it can be, but it
could also be like you could have, you could have a fucking
skate off with somebody. You could do a Battle of the
bands, you know, like it's, it's a yeah, it's a very open format
for how you interpret conflict. Yeah, and I also like that it's
like it's it's just there's not a lot of games that are just low
fantasy historical games, like because every everyone that does
kind of goes. But hey, there's also magic,
like, you know what I mean? Like.
I'm I'm tripping. I was talking conflict from I
was. Just saying.
Are you? Are you?
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm still
sorry the the medicine for my cold is kicking in and I'm I'm
in weird headspace now, so. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So it's a little bit different here in 17th century.
I was scrolling down the combat to build.
Sorry, did I miss something? No, I'm I'm dumb.
No, but but it's it, I really love that it is just a low
fantasy historical game because like I said, very rarely do you
just get that because no matter what someone always is like, but
it's it's got Dragons. Oh, but it's got magic.
Oh, it's baroque, but it has like face spells in it.
You know what I mean? Like there's always a little bit
whatever. And it's like, no, this is
literally just low fantasy historical 17th century Europe.
So it's incredible. It's hard to find.
I think you can still get the PDFs maybe from from games
Omnivorous, but it's a it's a it's a wonderful, wonderful game
from Andre and again, an extremely underrated game that
is mechanically extremely interesting and setting wise
doesn't really have one, but like gives you all the touch
points for it. Yeah.
But like, like for this game, if there's a historical like
happening that you find very interesting, like you could play
that out in this. It's really interesting.
We actually played one of a 17th century minimalist adventure in
Helm with John. Yes, Yeah, yeah, we did the the
in like the where people just kept coming in.
It was such a good. Adventure these people any
faster. But yeah, I mean, yeah, John
introduced me to the system. Like when we did Helm, I had no
idea what this was. Then I read it and I was like,
oh, my God, this is incredible. I need it.
And then I spent way too much money on eBay.
But. But yeah, so let's cruise
through some of these last ones. I mean, let's just get this one,
get it out of the way. But like, we talked about Adam's
stuff. So let's talk about another one
of Adam's stuff. Soul Burner.
In my opinion, Yeah. In my opinion, the best Borg
outside of Mark Borg Soul Burner is a.
Meaningful Borg hack? Yeah.
It's a meaningful Borg hack, unlike mini Borg hacks, let's be
honest. No, I'm not going to be honest.
I like I like Mark Borg and I love the people that make it so.
Anyway, so Soul Burner is basically a mashup of Mark Borg
and Necronautilus, which to the literally the two highest scores
we've ever given out are 40 fours for Merkborg and Necron
Nautilus. This one also was crowdfunded
differently. I think Adam went through his
website for this one. So it also didn't really kind of
get the stretch that it deserves.
I think a lot of people in the Borg Borg space, if they would
latch on to this, it would get way fucking bigger.
It's incredibly dark, it's incredibly fucked up, It's
incredibly interesting, and it definitely adds enough like
Necronautilus into the Borg base.
Absolutely really make it sing in an interesting way.
Because Merck Borg, however much I love it, like the vibe of
Merck Borg is always going to be better than the mechanics and
Merck Borg. Merck Borg is a great, simple
game, and that's why it's super easy to hack and super easy to
run and play and super fun because it's not difficult.
It can get out of the way of the adventure and things like that,
but this really adds so much more into it.
So. So what is Soul Burner?
Consumed by fire, your skin melted, blood evaporated,
brittle bones dissolved. Your once graceful body now
reduced to dust. Your spirit has been violently
detached from your mortal coil and cleansed of your
experiences. Short of a few profound memories
and glimpses into reality itself, you are dead.
Death does not want you, but fate surely does.
Your soul is rejected by the forces of the afterlife, but by
means mysterious and magical. Your energy lives on now,
contained in an ashen heap that warps to your will.
Your cinder corpse tingles and twitches, constituting some
makeshift a form ever mutating. You've been given a rare
opportunity to scour the planet in search of answers, personal
and cosmic writing and writing the timeline with every vicious
encounter and shaping the future itself and brutal brush strokes
of blood and burns. So basically your body is just a
a burnt pile of ash that has come back from the dead kind of
as a revenant to right wrongs and figure out what the fuck
happened to you. It's incredible.
It definitely gives me, I mean, obviously like it's hard not to
think of fire punch when when I that's all I imagine when I
think of this is just fire punch I.
Don't know what fire punch is. You know fire punch.
You know, Chainsaw Man. Yeah.
Chainsaw man or fire punch was his like manga before chainsaw
man. It's about a dude who has the
ability to like heal super fast but then because people have
like abilities but another guy's ability was just to like once he
set something on fire it was always on fire.
So he gets set on fire by that ability, but also heals really
fast. So he burns forever in permanent
torture, burning alive forever. Yeah.
And it's just this weird. And fuck that Fire Punch man.
It, it's it fucks super hard. It's really incredible.
Super dark, Yeah. OK, yeah.
So anyway if I can leave it up for later?
Yeah, I can't believe you don't know Fire Punch, Man, Fire Punch
is so good. But anyway, that's that's it.
And it uses dice and tarot cards and stuff like it's just such a
good fucking Borg. It's an incredible hack of
again, Merck Borg is the highest score we've ever given out.
It's a 44 and Necronalis is a 44 out of 50.
They're both incredible and this smashes them together and adds
tarot cards and shit. It's it's an incredible game
again, much like Adam stuff, like just incredible shit that
more people need to be talking about and more people need to be
playing. And this is easily one of them.
I think they recently put all of their stuff out on what, what,
what, what, what's it called? Table, table, tabletop
bookshelf, a cool like newer ish, like distributor that's
doing a lot of really, really great stuff.
And Soul Burner is one of them. That's that's over there.
So anyway, so Soul Burner and all of Adam's stuff, go fucking
grab that next one. Let's do.
Let's do this one. This is one of the ones that you
picked Gym games, Yeah. Yes, high magic, low lives.
It's so funny, I want to talk about this game for so long and
it's extra dark in my room suddenly, Oh, 'cause it started
raining here, let's do this real quick.
Secondary light source. There we go.
I look like a human. It's I'm not in The Cave guys.
Yeah, I want to talk about this for so long.
And we finally went through it and Ryan's like, oh, this is
great. So high magical lives, another
great like 2D6 system. Very much a a a different take
on the mix success and of Pbta, you know.
Pbta made using the Black Hack Forged in the Dark.
Yeah. I Brave our favorite book.
Yeah, Yeah. 2, two. Yeah, three of my favorite
books. One of those I'm really into.
Yeah. You play as, like, magic school
dropouts essentially in a world ruled by like, a magic
aristocracy And the original conceived.
This game is like, why would you work for the rich people to
pull, like, squeeze more money out of the poor?
We should just rob the rich people.
It is a very interesting game. It is in a modern esque 7, which
I I think is very interesting for playing a bunch of Wizards,
Wizards having cars and cell phones.
I think it's like deeply interesting, but there there is
like a like interacting with like a form of social media on
this. You are trying to steal from the
rich. You can create these very
interesting characters. And the way that the magic works
is very open format, which also, if you've ever watched me talk
this show and heard me talk about magic, I love like, an
open format magic system that, like, Wally is, you know, kind
of, you know, like stats. Do you have something to do with
it? Like, also the school of magic
that you pick or the type of magic you pick really does
affect how the game will play for you.
I think the example in here is that, like, you know, if you're
a Wizard of turnip magic, melting down the door might be
nearly impossible versus somebody who's like, a Wizard
of, like, fire magic. Yeah.
I think that this is like a fun, great game.
I love the setting. I believe that they're going to
do like an actual like. They've talked about it.
I mean, there's a. Lot of doing another.
Version they've put out for it yeah, God, we've talked about
this. This is like in our top three of
please make another version of this.
You know what I mean? Like right up there with blood
beam Badlands. But we're going to eventually
get a blood beam Badlands so you know God, I would I would love
this. But right now Jim room is
working on Gorm, which is a just a damn it's really out there
skirmish game that I I've I've read through and either I'd sit
down and read through again because there's a lot.
All right, let's talk about this one.
So naked naked. Yeah, we talked about this.
I think on it was this last year's I think it it it got it
was near the top the entire time.
Naked is a radioactive nave hack.
This basically is a a post apocalyptic as in like the
Fallout style post apocalypse, you know, like rad mutants and
shit. But it is a mashup.
Yeah, it's a mashup of nave and Black Hack.
And we said it over and over and over again.
My biggest beef with this was a layout.
I really just genuinely dislike this.
The whole like a lot of the layout stuff but system wise in
my opinion one of the most successful hacks ever.
It is so clean the way it matches up nave and black hack.
It is like this is not like I pretty much would never play a
Mad Max fallout style post apocalypse game.
It's just not the genre I enjoy in any kind of media
realistically. And after reading this I was
like I want to fucking play that right fucking now.
The game is incredible, the hack is incredible.
Not going to dig too deep in the mechanics by the fucking game
right? But it's just something just.
If you ever want to mix 2 games together, read this one and see
how well they put everything together and they take the best
parts of both the Black hack and nave and make it something
original that still you can tell where it's lineage came from,
but makes it something unique and incredibly interesting and
incredibly well written. And I think this game is super
underrated and again, one of if not the best like hacks that
we've ever looked at like mechanically it's just so clever
and so clean and so well done. Really, really, really
incredible game. This is from Mack and non dairy
giant. They did put out another like
like crowdfunder for this where there's like more adventures and
things like that and, and it's great.
So there's more stuff for it like in like better art, better,
better everything for it. And but yeah, nuked nuked is
incredible. Highly, highly recommend.
You should snag, you should snag nuked if you get a chance, even
if you're just like a systems person, because system matters.
And just to read how well something can be hacked.
I this is this is one that mechanically like scratches my
system itch. All right, let's talk about this
one because the last couple you, I don't know if you were there,
so himbos. Himbos.
Himbos of Myth and Metal from the wonderful Maxwell Lander
over at the The Read the Fucking Manual podcast with Aaron
motherfucking King. My favorite teacher RBG podcast
including ours Himbos of myth and Metal.
So. So what's a himbo?
What's a himbo? Anyone can be a himbo.
Himbo is what's in the heart,
right? But lore wise, I guess setting
wise in the game, himbos are big beautiful dummies with hearts of
gold, right? But, and that's basically the
game, you can be a big beautiful dummy with a heart of gold,
right? Like the best one ever when
everyone asks whenever I bring this up is crunk from from.
Emperor's New Groove. The best Disney movie ever,
second best Lion King, and then Emperor's New Groove.
What about Treasure Planet Man? I like Treasure Planet, I think
it's great. It does not beat Emperor's New
Groove though. What?
About Atlantis bro still. I mean, if we're talking about
Disney princesses, but but but Crunk is a, is a fucking himbo,
absolutely incredible. But the way that the mechanics
in the game are incredible, like absolutely fucking incredible
because first of all, Max is one of the best.
Max is like just intellectually like one of the best thinkers in
the in this scene that also doesn't just talk out their ass
all the fucking time, right? And they practice what they
preach and make the things that they talk about, which is
really, really fantastic. One of my favorites mechanics
here is the window of error. It's this D20.
It basically adds a little bit of that like quote UN quote
mixed success to D20 system so that your system is not just a
strict packs fail system, but mechanically like based on your
stat score, like it changes the window of error.
So whether you're going to get like whether if you need an 18,
you get 17 or if you need an 18 and you get like a 14, that
changes. So like it's just it's just it's
this widening window mathematically, statistically.
So intellectually that's incredibly interesting to add
some a little bit of that nothing never happens Ness to
D20 rolls. And then mechanically it's it's
clean, it's clever, it's really smart mathematically.
So absolutely love that. And then also the stats for the
game also the whole thing is like purple, which is really
beautiful. Yeah, but the stats for the game
are breast, lips, thighs and hands.
And that can mean anything you want it to mean, which is
incredible. And I also think one of the one
of the incredible things about it too is the life pest system.
And kind of like how you like, you don't die, right?
But when you take wounds, it really you take you basically
like the way it works is like you're as a himbo, you're just
kind of like dumb to the world and you just have like a heart
of gold and everything is great. And you stop being a himbo when
you get too many like physical or mental scars that basically
like bring you down out of that happy dumb cloud and realize the
world is just as shitty as everyone says it is.
And so you stop being a himbo when you basically become like
too physically or mentally burdened.
Yeah, if you watch, it's an experience in the world
essentially. And then failure.
You're like, you can't be stop. Becoming a Himbo, which is
incredible, incredible. I love this game.
We talked about do we play this game?
I think we talked to Max numerous times about having them
come on and I. Don't know if we did, I don't.
Think we ever did but we talked to them numerous times about
them coming on and playing this running this for us and I just
don't think it ever happened but would would still love that man
we're we're encroaching we just said we're not going to do 2
hour episodes anymore yeah we're going.
To hit 2. This is our last long episode,
so gear up. We're going to actually stick to
it this time. Let's cruise through these last
couple. There's one that you didn't go
over that I have said numerous times that you should read, and
it's incredible. It is Deadholt from Xalmware.
Yeah, Deadholt is an incredible, incredible, incredible fucking
game. Like.
So many people have I need this is one that will actually get up
and grab and show people for multiple reasons.
Because the crazy thing about this game is it's like a tech
game where it it it has its own like very weird crazy website
and stuff like that. And somehow the game wasn't
paper linked. So let me find my original.
So I eventually like I had I bought this as we were reviewing
it because they didn't have it physically and I found it on
their itch page and they obviously knew who I was when I
bought it and sketched into the cover.
Now with hyperlinks, because this is one of the like 15 games
that we've reviewed that said why the fuck out there
hyperlinks and people went back in hyperlinked.
And that's one of my favorite things is like our only impact
in the space is like a random backer kit comment that says
like the weekly. Sure, all guys will be pissed if
you don't hyperlink this and the people like yeah we know, but
Deadholt is an. That's the impact we make.
That's fine. Yeah, that's totally fine.
It's an incredible game. Deadholt is a role-playing game
Set 1996. Gather a crew and try to survive
in the megalithic hotel. There's a module for it called
Happy New Year. And if you look at these, these
are like screen printed gold and they're absolutely stunning.
I have this version and then they put out a new, a new like
project. So I I got them again just in
case you didn't have them, but I think you said you do have
these. I have just just the jet Hall
scene, not the SO. Yeah.
And then but the next one that they did, and this is
incredible, is there's a bunch of adventures, they put them on
floppy disks. So in order to actually access
the content, you have to buy or have a floppy disk reader just
so you can access the content to the different adventure.
I also got like AT shirt, which I haven't worn in a while and to
find. And also I got like two of these
patches. So if you don't have a patch,
I'll send you a patch. I actually have one of those
patches, yeah. Yeah, so I just, I just love it.
And if you find the website, it's super weird, but it's this
really crazy. It's yeah.
You make a crew and you go into this hotel the way that like the
inventory system and stuff works, there's like a gotcha
machine. So you actually like have to
roll on like what you get out of the gotcha machine and stuff
like that. Layout wise, it's absolutely
stunning. It reminds me a little bit of
like a dye sugars layout. It's just very clean.
I love the way that they do things in bold when it needs to
be bold, not when it needs to be bold.
And then they have these like big black bars.
The beginning of every chapter is a, it looks like a, it looks
like a floppy disk and stuff. The hyperlinks are are are
fantastic throughout the entire adventure Because at the
beginning of each chapter, if I remember this correctly, maybe
I'm talking about my ass, but at the beginning of each chapter,
there's like a list of what's in the chapter and you can click
on, oh, maybe I was wrong. Oh, maybe this is the one that's
not hyperlinked. Yeah, the unhyperlinked version.
I, I downloaded the unhyperlinked version, but now
with hyperlinks because it's funny, like the, the next update
they had on this page was like, Hey, I was pointed out that
there's enough hyperlinks and I have hyperlinked everything,
which is incredible. But it's just a really, it's,
it's a, it's a this hotel and you get in an elevator and the
elevator could open up on any floor.
So you you can basically use this game to play any game you
want because if you want to play in like fucking Forgotten Realms
or whatever, that elevator could open up in the Forgotten Realms.
You know, it's just a really fun, interesting game.
The mechanics are incredible. I've never heard anyone talk
about it, which is a fucking shame because it's absolutely
gorgeous. It's a stunning game.
Mechanically, it's really fun and interesting.
This is Zonware Dead Halt. It's it's great.
And again, if you can find the physicals I love, like the
screen printed gold, Yeah. It's a really nice scene.
It's really, really, really nice scene.
And then again, like the fucking floppy disks.
So yes, I did go on Amazon to buy a floppy disk reader.
We did this one, we did this one, we did this one, we did
this one. We did.
Did we just have one left? Is that it?
I think so. So the.
Last one we're going to talk about is Gangs of Titan City.
This is from Enable Scrolling. This is from SOMA and
Publishing. This is from, I think at least
two of the people from Besliff Barrier in here.
Go away, you son of a bitch. But it's Nick's Ben, Ben Brown
and Zachary Cox, and it's basically Necromunda the game.
Yeah. And it's funny because at the
time when I read this, it's, it's an incredible game.
I love the mechanics of this game.
Like the game that I was working on at the time changed because
of this game. Mechanically, it's really,
really great. The wound system is great where
you don't have like HP, you just get like scratches or wounds and
like it builds up and stuff. The way that it like you hit and
then the things hit back is really incredible.
But I didn't really, I wasn't like a big Warhammer head at the
time and I hadn't really read any Necramunda or really knew a
whole lot about Necramunda. And now I'm like a big die hard
like Warhammer. I've gotten very far away from
that. So you're in the, you're now
deep in it. I am so deep it's crazy.
Yes, Warhammer is my new personality happened for a while
now, but now I know much more about not only Necramunda, like
the fiction, but Necramunda the game.
And as much as I loved this game before, I love it even more now
because I get it and it makes sense.
But the hive cities and and and all of the different aspects of
it, like the rules for the gang is the Titan city guide, all of
that stuff. It's it's it's an incredible
game. This actually is a dye sugars
layout. The art is great throughout.
It's the same artist that did best of Barry.
I think that has been brown and it's just it's great.
It is. I mean, so Muppet just finished
mad as hell. I'm very excited for the next
game coming out. I think it's called Doom Spiral,
which I mean just the name. You know that again, my edge
lass is unsurprisingly yeah, gonna love that.
But this I kind of thing is like one of their I don't know,
probably their second most kind of under the radar game that
they put out. I think the first one that's the
the least, the one that I think not many people have really
heard of a ton is orbital Blues. Obviously Orbital Blues.
No, it's the one where the loss
in the jammed. It's like the they ride
creatures and shoot guns and stuff.
Yeah. Oh, by the way, I need to send
this picture to to Zach, but just off screen here I have
every Soul Muppet thing. It's one entire shelf.
So sorry, Soul Muppet, you can't make any more games because the
shelf is full. So cancel mad as hell, stop your
stuff. You got you got to be done now.
But but yeah, gangs of Titan city, an incredible game.
It's also one of the games in the kind of like soul Muppet
catalog that doesn't use the soul Muppet system.
You know, kind of like because Orbital Blues best left buried
mad as hell. They all use the same kind of
like 3D6 pick the two best beat an 8 or whatever, and then you
pick the two that are your damage.
Like the same cord ice mechanic, obviously like adapted to fit
the different systems. This one uses an entirely
different system, which is really great, really incredible.
So gangs Titan city, the other underrated game.
So quick recap here of all of the underrated games that we
talked about today in our opinions, 17th century
minimalist, cyber metal 2012, dead halt, gangs of Titan City,
High magic, Low lives, Himbos of myth and metal nuked and Soul
Burner. Those are the ones that if
you're going to get eight games, get those.
Get those, you know. So we talked about what 4567816
games today that are in our opinion, what we consider to be
like the best slash, our favorite slash underrated games
we've done out of like the 100 almost 120 we've looked at here
on the show and that's that's it.
And this is our last two hour episode ever, so unless we play
something, obviously we're going to play.
Yeah, unless we play something or really get deep in a
discussion, I don't give a fuck if you listen or not.
Again, we are. This is a hobby for us.
It's going to stay a hobby for us.
We don't make any money off of this.
The only reason we're affiliated on Twitch is because it gives us
more stuff to be able to do when we stream.
We don't make. I think we get like it has to
hit 50 bucks to get a payout and I think that happens like every
four months because a couple people just won't cancel their
subscription or stop using their fucking prime.
But that's going to continue to be how it is.
You don't expect a Patreon. Again, I'm I've given up on
stopping you guys from sending us review shit.
If you want us to look at your stuff, send it to us.
Send it to theweeklyscrollpodcast@gmail.com.
Our links are are everywhere. We'll take a peek at it.
If you want to send us free shit, go for it.
I'll find a way to pay you somehow whether you want me to
or not. And again, expect, expect this
to say Tabletop Podcast as soon as I remember to change all of
our fucking layouts. But we are expanding our
content, shortening our content, switching up what we're doing,
and decided we're going to have more fun with it and expand out
of the TGRBG space because the space kind of sucks right now.
That's the recap. Do we want to say what we're
going to do next week? The two episodes planned for
next week. No.
No, watch the fucking show. Bye.