Simian Saturday!

Check your local movies listings! In select theaters across the U.S. Planet of the Apes will be showing July 24th and 27th!  Woo Hoo!

Pathfinder Worldscape!

While, I haven't played Pathfinder in a bit, I am rather excited about the announcement of this upcoming comic series featuring the Pathfinder Iconics meeting up with such classic characters as Red Sonja, Tars Tarkas, Tarzan and others! Due out in October, I will definitely be picking this one up!  I've always loved mixing and matching characters and settings in my RPG's so this sounds like it will be right up my alley!

Simian Saturday (Kamandi & Mutant Crawl Classics!)

Happy Simian Saturday to everyone!
The above picture is from Kamandi, The Last Boy on Earth Issue 7 from back in 1973.
I'm excited to see that the Mutant Crawl Classics Kickstarter continues to blow through its many awesome stretch goals. There are still 3 days left to get in on the action.  I personally can't wait for this to come out. The game draws heavily from P.A. sources from my youth, including one of my favorite comics from back in the day Kamandi!  A recent podcast by Sanctum Secorum delves heavily into the strong influence that this comic series, and Jack Kirby has had on the MCC RPG.
I hope everyone has a great Simian Saturday and I hope you manage to get some gaming in this weekend!

The Black Hack!

I remember seeing the Black Hack RPG mentioned when it was first up on Kickstarter, even though the price was great at the time I had made the decision to hold off on backing anymore kickstarters until some of the ones I had invested in had produced product (still waiting on a few of them...*sigh* lessons learned).  I scanned some reviews of the game, and to be honest my first impression was that this was simply another rules-lite OSR product. Having a shelf, well OK SHELVES full of OSR clones and retro-clones and such, I again decided I didn't really need another RPG. Then I kept seeing all of the posts about this game and how fun it was, followed by a plethora of follow-up Hacks to the game and posts about how easy it was to play and "hack". However, I couldn't get my head around the whole concept of the players performing all of the dice rolls...for this ancient-school DM that seemed somehow strange to me. However, the more I thought about it the more I came around to understanding the idea and how it could work and let me focus on other stuff. Then I decided I didn't care for the limits on armor and how armor worked in the game (see how I kept trying to talk myself out of liking this system?), recently the game's designer posted some optional rules on handling armor and some other features of the game (Guns!) which addressed my concerns regarding armor and provided some other options. Several expansion hacks to the system are out or soon will be out (including some for Space and Post Apocalyptic Gaming!). So for $2 I figured what the heck and downloaded the darn thing.  I have to say that this game is a blast! I have found my creative gaming muse inspired in ways that hasn't happened in quite awhile.  Is the game perfect? no, but it is fast, intuitive has some cool features and for me allows the rules to fade into the background with ease, and any rules that don't work for me, I can easily change without feeling like I have wrecked the system or should be playing something else. The Black Hack incorporates the Advantage/Disadvantage Mechanic from 5E (my favorite mechanic from the latest edition of D&D), and the way The Black Hack handles limited use items (ammo, torches, etc.) via the Usage Dice is really cool!  Well I think I have carried on enough about The Black Hack, off to work on some gaming stuff! For a comprehensive list of current products for The Black Hack check out Sophia Brandt's RPG Blog!