Free RPG Day – Geist

June 20, 2009 in Roleplaying | 4 comments

For those of you into RPGs, this is a friendly reminder: it’s Free RPG Day! Of particular interest to me are two things: the Geist: the Sin-Eaters quickstart and the D&D 4e module Khyber’s Harvest.

Needless to say, I cracked open Geist first. I’m on a few pages in but it’s really cool so far. For those of you familiar with the old World of Darkness, imagine something like Risen except designed to be sustainable. That’s my initial impression so far, at any rate.

I’ve got a friend in town, and perhaps enough people around that I could actually run again of it tonight. We’ll see, won’t we? It’d be a challenge for me, but if there’s enough diggity demand, I’d do it.

Oh also I got my hands on a copy of Spirit of the Century. My friend Alex talked it up, and since my local store had 10% off, the price was right.

Tags: , , ,

  1. Adam Drew on June 20, 2009 at 10:42 pm

    I picked up Geist and Khyber’s Harvest, too. I really dig the surface-level read of Geist. I like the bits of Mummy and Demon and Wraith and Orpheus all stirred together, and that cover is breathtaking.

    As far as KH goes, I like that it comes with a custom dungeon tile, even though a printed map would’ve been better. I guess the idea is that the tile is more reusable.

    SotC is awesome, but the trick with it is that they bill it as a “pickup” game and I can’t imagine trying to run it pickup.

  2. Matthew on June 21, 2009 at 12:53 pm

    I’m totally with you on Geist. I didn’t get a chance to run it last night, but that’s all right. I’ll try to do it the next time my friend comes from out of town.

    As for SotC, I’ll have to flip through it. I was skeptical about it being a pick-up game, too, but it occurs to me that in order to play a pick-up game of such as basketball, you need to know the rules. So as long as everybody knows the rules, I can’t imagine it’d be that hard to design a pick-up RPG. Of course, proof, pudding, eating, etc.

  3. Adam Drew on June 21, 2009 at 3:44 pm

    My concern with trying to run it pickup is that the gamemaster needs to be WAY prepared. To use your analogy, in order to play pickup basketball, you need a court to play on. SotC is written in such a way as to make it less-than-ideal to try and just find a court/pull a game out of a hat. It really rewards prep, which doesn’t scream “pickup” to me.

    A pickup RPG, in my eyes, needs to be something where you can have 3 or 4 people sitting around a table and someone can say “hey, who wants to play this game?” and you can be up and running in 5.

  4. Matthew on June 21, 2009 at 5:00 pm

    Fair enough!

    I’ll give it a read and try to report back on my thoughts.

Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong> <pre lang="" line="" escaped="" highlight="">