Meme-Free Zone

Another revival, the July 2022 Eclipse Phase 2E Bundle, featuring the 2019 Second Edition of thetranshuman survival SFRPG:

 https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Eclipse2025


  

The last time around my comments mostly quoted my comments on a previous and somewhat different bundle:

'"I'll be honest - these look like good deals, they're just not where I want to be right now with role playing. As usual with these bundles you get a shedload of stuff for your money, and they do look like pretty good deals. I'll probably download a couple of the supplements because they address areas that interest me - most notably Panopticon - but I'm not going to try to get my head around another new (to me) RPG at this stage in my increasing decrepitude. But I think I can recommend them, subject of course to all the usual YMMV disclaimers."

This time the offer is a bit different, with fewer supplements, but it's a good starting point if you're interested, and all of the supplements from the earlier offers are still compatible.'

Unfortunately Panopticon didn't make it into the bundle, but the rest is a pretty good horror / SF setting - unfortunately still not something I want to run at present, but you get a lot for my money and if you are in the mood for a primarily SF horror setting it's worth a look.

As expected, these bundles will mostly be horror of some sort from now to the end of the month - I have no idea what else is coming as yet.

Two bundles for Mongoose's editions of the venerable SF RPG Traveller, one a repeat and the other new




In 2021 I said This feels like a return to the roots of Traveller; without a lot of the grimdark elements that predominated in later editions, and with rules that are much closer to the versions that the game began with. There are a lot of new careers and options, but it ought to be possible to get up and running fast if you're familiar with the original game. This isn't to say that it's perfect - I found the explanation of character generation a little confusing, even though I actually know pretty much how it works. There's a flow chart that helps considerably but more of a simplified "these are the things you need to do in this order" explanation might help. Presentation is very good, and avoids some of the pitfalls by minimizing illustrations where they aren't really needed - for example, there is only one illustration of a player character, a spotty nerd just entering college, in the first fifty pages, and sexual balance seems fairly even in later pictures, with zero gratuitous nakedness, at least for pictures of humans.

I'm personally not so interested in Mercenaries, since I tend not to run military campaigns, but the 1978 version was one of the most popular supplements for the original rules, and at a quick glance this is a good updating of it.

The bottom line is that Traveller has been around nearly as long as D&D, and as a result there's a vast range of material in print for it: Supplements, campaigns, space sectors, alternative universes with variant history, and anything else you could possibly want for an SF game, and publishers like Mongoose have kept it up to the standards people expect from modern RPGs. If you're even slightly interested in running an SF campaign it should be high on your list of systems to check out.