Another RPG Bundle - Flying Circus

[ffutures]

This is a bundle of material for Flying Circus, an RPG which combines aviation (mostly inspired by WW1) and fantasy in a world inspired by multiple sources including Porco Rosso and Laputa, but also horror including Doyle's Horror of the Heights.

https://bundleofholding.com/quick/FlyingCircus

This Flying Circus Bundle offer presents Flying Circus, the Apocalypse Engine aviation-fantasy RPG from Newstand Press.

In Flying Circus you're a fantasy adventurer, but instead of a sword and spells, you have an overworked biplane with rusty machine-guns – and you might still have to fight a dragon. Above the sprawling industrial-fantasy land of Himmelgard, daring pilots – heroes, knights errant, and scoundrels for hire – protect small rural communities beset by monsters, bandits, and tyrants. You can play not only a Soldier but a Fisher or Farmer, a Believer or Skyborn, minor nobles or workers – or a Witch. Groups of Flying Circus mercenaries take their ramshackle aeroplanes into battle, earn triumph or defeat, find ways to pay for it all, and maybe even learn who they are and where they belong – if they don't crash and burn.

The Flying Circus setting will charm fans of anime classics like Porco Rosso and Laputa. "Picture a world from a Hayao Miyazaki film," reads the introduction. "There are peaceful little towns and vast beautiful landscapes, a warmth to everything even when things are grim. Everything is rustic and worn and lived-in, and most folks are decent, more or less. Aeroplanes are beautifully rendered dreams, the detritus of a long-ago war litters the landscape, and in the shadows lurk things difficult to understand."

Flying Circus optimizes the Apocalypse Engine system to support highly detailed aircraft construction rules and an authentic (and authentically dangerous) flight experience. You can do anything you can imagine in an airplane, but air combat is still summed up with Moves like Altitude Adjustment, Pull Up, Extend, Overstrain, Overspeed, Cool Off, Open Fire, and (uh oh) Bail Out. Dogfighting centers around a printable Instrument Panel that focuses air combat on what matters. You don't track your flight path or check your turn radius; instead, you just keep an eye on your speed and altitude gauges while you describe your actions in freeform. When you make combat maneuvers, it costs you speed. To get more speed, you accelerate or dive, which costs fuel or altitude respectively. If you run out of speed, you stall. If you run out of fuel, your engine dies. If you run out of altitude, splat.

Flying Circus also has systems for battles and daring escapes on foot, for pilots to blow off steam between missions, and for the financial and social aspects of running the company. Pilots always live between excess and stress, between riches and ruin, between victory in the skies and impact with the ground.

The Flying Circus core rulebook appeared previously in the November 2020 Indie Cornucopia 8. The corebook included more than 50 aircraft both historical and fictional, and since then Newstand Press has released several "Plane Packs" and expansions that enlarge the armada to more than 100 aircraft both historical and fantastic: the von Morgen Vampyr, Mammut Smuggler, Skyborn Dhow, Kreuzer Skorpion, Tejas Interceptor, Dryad of Hanriot, Marut Raider, and dozens more, plus the all-metal "Hugo's Metallisches Jagdflugzeug!" This new Flying Circus Bundle brings back the corebook and adds two Plane Packs plus the expansion Horrors of the Heights, which enlarges the bestiary of monsters that dwell above the Himmelgard clouds.

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. (By publisher request, the DriveThruRPG versions of these files are inobtrusively watermarked.)

The total retail value of the titles in this new Flying Circus Bundle is US$75. Customers who pay just US$12.95 get all four titles in our Circus Collection as DRM-free ebooks, including the complete Flying Circus Core Rulebook (retail price $35), plus the free Aircraft Catalogue Core, along with the expansions Horrors of the Heights (retail $20), Flights of Fancy (retail $10), and First Flights (retail $10).

Note: The version of Horrors of the Heights in this offer has been newly updated for compatibility with the forthcoming Flying Circus ground combat expansion Chariots of Steel.

 

This is an interesting idea but I think it's aimed at a niche market - people who like the sources of inspiration and want to spend a lot of their time simulating dogfighting and other airborne activities. I have  to admit that I'm probably not the sort of player they have in mind - While I've written an RPG with a setting where most activities centre on airships, and enjoy an occasional game of Red Baron and other fighter variants, I really can't see building a role playing campaign around these rules, it looks like there isn't a lot to do if you don't want to take off and blast monsters with your trusty Lewis gun. But on this, as with many other things, tastes differ.

One thing to bear in mind is that the core material was in a 2020 bundle - if you already own that you may need to decide if you want all of the extras.