Another RPG Bundle - Wicked Ones
Jan. 2nd, 2023 06:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ffutureshttps://bundleofholding.com/presents/WickedOnes
This new Wicked Ones Bundle presents Ben Nielson's Wicked Ones, the FRPG from Bandit Camp about building dungeons, making nefarious plans, and slaying adventurers who seek to stop you. Wicked Ones uses the Forged in the Dark rules, based on John Harper's Blades in the Dark, to bring to your tabletop the experience of Dungeon Keeper, Dungeons, and similar video games: Construct your dungeon's rooms, recruit hench-things, use Monster Science to craft traps and alchemical concoctions, discover underground treasures, and stave off an onslaught of greedy and powerful "heroic" invaders. Bah! Witless minions, attack! Funded in a June 2019 Kickstarter campaign, Wicked Ones is a slick implementation of the Forged rules. Player characters – iconic bad-guy types like orcs, goblins, serpent folk, bugbears, et al, with Callings (playbooks) like Brute, Conniver, Marauder, Warlock, and Zealot – jointly build and manage a dungeon as part of a villainous master plan developed by the players. The rulebook advises against cartoonish evil. Maybe the monsters want to conquer a nearby town, or they're collecting items to use for a summoning ritual. Maybe the players figure out their goal as they go.
The master plan centers around dungeon-building. The players collaborate in founding and expanding a hideout, stronghold, forge, or temple in a sandbox setting like a quiet valley, a warzone, or even a city's sewers. Nonplayer factions control specific locations, and anything you do to improve your dungeon annoys one or another faction. The cycle of dungeon life proceeds in four fixed phases: lurking (downtime), calamity (random dungeon-related setbacks, including invasion by troublesome heroes), raiding (missions, similar to Blades heists), and blowback (consequences of the raid). As they carry out their malign plan, the players literally draw new parts of the dungeon, design its traps and defenses, supervise its monsters, and administer its hoard (resources). Over time, as characters arrive and depart (usually violently), the dungeon itself grows to become the campaign's main character.
This new Wicked Ones Bundle gathers the entire game line for a bargain price that won't dent even a measly Tier 1 hoard. We provide each title complete in .PDF. Like all Bundle of Holding titles, these ebooks have NO DRM (Digital Restrictions Management), and our customers are entitled to move them freely among all their devices.
Ten percent of each purchase (after gateway fees) goes to this Wicked Ones offer's designated charity, the Diana Jones Award Emerging Designer Program. Each year, the Diana Jones Award for Excellence in Gaming, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, amplifies the voices of up-and-coming game designers by featuring them during an expenses-paid visit to Gen Con. The global Emerging Designer Program focuses on creators from marginalized communities.
The total retail value of the titles in this offer is US$55. Customers who pay just US$12.95 get all five titles in our Wicked Collection (retail value $55) as DRM-free ebooks, including the complete Wicked Ones Deluxe Edition (retail price $20) and its Toolkit Deck (retail $5), both previously in the December 2021 Forged in the Dark Bundle; and three supplements new to the Bundle of Holding: the recent standalone expansion Undead Awakening (retail $15); War for the Overworld (retail $10); and the Sandbox Map Pack (retail $5).
Wicked Ones at-cost print discount codes: Publisher Bandit Camp has kindly provided a set of DriveThruRPG and DriveThruCards discount codes, good through March 1, 2023, for at-cost print-on-demand softcover copies of all the books and all the card decks in this offer. We include the Wicked Ones discount codes in a text document on the customer's Wizard's Cabinet download page, under the entry for the main Wicked Ones rulebook.
The basic idea here is interesting, though not entirely new - there are plenty of predecessors such as the computer games mentioned above and the venerable Monsters! Monsters! RPG, a Tunnels and Trolls spinoff - but it's pretty cheap and ought to be adaptable to other settings; for example, designing supervillain bases for superhero and espionage games. If you're already using Blades in the Dark it's probably a useful add-on.
