A few days ago I received some chilling and frankly angering news. We’d been distributed through Key20 for the last 18 months (and previous to that as well) and we’d sent them the vast majority of our stock. As of last week, they couldn’t pay so they’re sending back the remaining books and the only…
Category: LateGaming
This is the category for LateGaming (and Crucible Design) books.
Fonts, fonts, my kingdom….
I’m having trouble identifying a font I used for the original printing of ZOMBI and this is the replacement I have come up with. The original was quite clean and had a name like ‘corroded’ or ‘corrupted’. The potential new one is CM Corruged by Charly Masci (link is down). I think it’s actually an…
zombi
I’ve spent the last week working on the PDF version of zombi. I’ve been updating bits and pieces as well, adding in references for “Fast Zombies” and other things which have been popular in the years since the book was released. Hard to believe that it’s nearly ten years since it was first published.
Zombi – out of stock at Key20!
I’m somewhat incredulous that Zombi is now out of stock at Key20 and will be preparing another shipment in the next week or so. I’m also going to work on providing a PDF version so people can download it from Key20. Watch this space!
COPS – Japan Stylee
Eamon, a technologist in the area of Cybernetics I know[1], posted this: “If you peruse Japanese foreign-resident forums you’ll read a depressing amount of stories about foreigners being told to sign kanji-laden papers ‘so you can go’, only to find they’ve signed a confession – which the courts accept as totally truthful. That acceptance of…
23rd Letter: Projects Campaigns
A Project-based campaign is as flexible as the players want. The G.M. may choose themes as he or she wants. PCs working for a Project are relieved of many of the worries of Network members or other independent espers. Usually they are not on the run, living out of safehouses or mobile homes, lack of…
The 23rd Letter
Balbinus on RPG.net responds to someone asking for sourcebooks about running a campaign about the whole concept of PSI powers: “IMO the best is a game called 23rd Letter, it’s basically Firestarter (the Stephen King book/movie) the rpg. Probably OOP but available I would have thought on ebay.” Thanks, Balbinus! It’s not out of print!…
New Downloads
Some people were looking for them so I’ve put some downloads on the books page: Wildtalents fanzine 1 60K PDF Wildtalents 3 fanzine 1.5MB PDF Wildtalents 5 fanzine 373K PDF 23rd letter character sheet 22K PDF zombi character sheet 86K PDF If there’s anything else in particular that people are looking for, please mention it…
Crucible Design’s Games on Sale at Key20.
After what seems an age, the first roleplaying games I wrote are on sale again at Key20 SpaceNinjaCyberCrisis XDO The 23rd Letter ( RPG.net Review ) Zombi: The Earth Won’t Hold The Dead ( Review by Jeff Rients ) I’ve linked to reviews before but they’re easily searchable anyway.
Diddlysquat is dead
Mark notes that Diddlysquat is dead. I didn’t know much about it, to be honest but reading the testimony of specky I’m reminded of lots of the silliness that went on within Crucible Design. In the end, projects like this are fuelled by a small core of people (usefully termed schemers and collaborators.). Everyone else…
Riffing off The 23rd Letter.
Ghost Whistler on RPG.net came up with a23rd Planet idea. He was riffing off the name of the game but it made me think tonight about: The 23rd Century Fast forward events in The 23rd Letter by two hundred years and you might have an idea of a micro-setting. Making psychics essential for space travel…
r-Maps (and being ahead of the curve)
There’s a lot of talk of relationship maps. I’ve been playing with the idea of an r-map for gaming for use as a player aid for a while. It really started to surface when playing superhero games in order to try and keep up with the number of NPCs and subplots that were going on….
Systems
A posting on RPGnet asks us to describe our homebrew systems. I ended up describing mine thusly. Maths-easy 2d6 comedy with either a manga/anime/mecha or zombie holocaust backdrop Qualitative success using 0-3d10 to create a crunchy yet narrative system which can be considered both rules-lite and “a gun game” with a backdrop of psychic powers…
Zombie Links
This isn’t a link blog, but these are very fun. Zombie World News “ZombieWorldNews.com is , as far as we can tell, a departure from other Zombie sites. Instead of the reader being a spectator, we hope to draw you in through a dynamic, ever changing scenario, that you can just read and enjoy, or…
Zombi Review
Jeff Rients writes about 5 old games he feels were overlooked. While I can agree with the ancient (James Bond, Lords of Creation) and the venerable (SpaceMaster) and perhaps even the weird (SenZar – though I always thought it was an internet joke-meme) I was shocked and surprised to see number 5 on his list…
TTN: Zombi
Tonight at TableTopNorth, I decided to eschew my plans of running 2300AD because, simply, the setup is massive and I don’t know my players very well. They seemed to want an action game so I dug out a copy of Zombi, one of my own games, and decided to force them into some hot undead…
Origins of The 23rd Letter
Syndicate… As mentioned earlier, it started out as a psionics ruleset for a sci-fi corporate espionage game called Syndicate which was masterminded by John. Syndicate was never published and indeed never went beyond a couple of dozen pages of brainstorming materials. I adapted some material from some of my earlier attempts at game backgrounds, mainly…
Crucible Design….looking back
When we started out, we thought of several names for the company. One was Aes Dana Publications and another was Apocryphal Games. We played with FarTooReal, considered LeannanSidhe and with a group vote, settled on Crucible Design. We had a list of games (and supplements) we were going to produce: Syndicate (plus ‘World Conquest’ and…