For the first time, we have managed to secure a range of unique Indie Roleplaying Game titles. These titles are not typically available to Australian retailers, but were able to find a good supplier and bring them in. Some of these titles are known darlings of the roleplaying world, and it is incredibly gratifying to finally have these titles in store. All of these items are in limited quantities.
These items will be in store Thursday afternoon (17th September)
Monsters and Other Childish Things
Monsters are real.You know because you have one. He's more fun and way tougher than all the other kids' monsters. Try not to let him eat your friends. "Monsters and Other Childish Things" is a distressingly fun and funny roleplaying game about kids and the relationship-devouring horrors from beyond time and space who love them. Players take the roles of kids and the vicious monsters who are their best friends in all the world -- and the source of all kinds of otherworldly trouble. "Monsters and Other Childish Things" is perfect for new gamers young and old, and for all gamers who like a little humor with their horror and a few scares with their laughs. Players take the roles of ordinary kids whose best friends are slavering monstrosities from beyond time and space -- and that's already enough to get them in all kinds of trouble with parents, school principals, friends, the Monster Investigation Bureau, mad science teachers, wannabe wizards, you name it. Can you make it through a school day without having to explain why your monster ate the substitute teacher? We'll soon find out.
At the Hands of an Angry Gods: a Game of Utopias
At the Hands of an Angry God mixes storytelling-roleplaying and civilization-building mechanics to help you and your friends to create the epic stories of brave souls willing to risk everything to establish their version of a perfect world... and what happens when 'reality' challenges those ideals.
Players represent factions attempting to establish a self-contained, Utopian community. Any type of society is possible, from a theocracy to a plutocracy to whatever-ocracy you can imagine!
Any type of setting is possible, from Puritan settlers in the New World to a space-faring community surviving planetary devastation, or modern religious zealots.
Play can be cooperative, competitive, or a mix of both. The rules allow for as many settings as you can imagine! Perfect as a filler for single-session games, or adaptable to a series of game sessions following each Era of the civilization.
Dream Askew / Dream Apart
Dream Askew gives us ruined buildings and wet tarps, nervous faces in the campire glow, strange new psychic powers, fierce queer love, and turbulent skies above a fledgling community, asking “What do you do next?”
Dream Apart gives us demons and wedding jesters; betrothals and pogroms; mystical ascensions and accusations of murder; the sounds of the shofar ringing through cramped and muddy streets, of cannon fire, of the wolf’s footfalls in the snowy pine forest; asking “What do you do next?”
This book contains two games of belonging outside belonging. Dream Askew explores the story of a queer enclave amid the collapse of civilization. Dream Apart explores the story of a Jewish shtetl in a fantastical version of nineteenth-century Eastern Europe.
Both games use a simple no dice, no masters system that puts the focus on relationships, community struggles, and player choice.
Build a community together, and then make trouble within it!
Monsterhearts
By the time they hit adolescence, most people have gotten over their fear of the dark. They spend their midnight hour on gushy phone calls, diary ramblings, and wet dreams. They fall asleep peacefully, assured that the shadows hold no monsters.
But the shadows do hold monsters. You know because you’re one of them. Wickedness dwells within your heart, hunger courses through your veins. High school weighs on you and teen drama puts you on edge, but you have power. What do you do next?
Monsterhearts 2 lets you and your friends create stories about sexy monsters, teenage angst, personal horror, and secret love triangles. When you play, you explore the terror and confusion of having a body that is changing without your permission.
This game is powered by the Apocalypse World engine. It draws inspiration from Twilight, Buffy, Ginger Snaps, The Vampire Diaries, and The Craft.
Mythos World
Cosmic Horror Powered by the Apocalypse!
The universe is more terrifying than mankind can possibly imagine, but you've seen things, you know things, and you've begun to understand. Can you find a way to stop the evil always lurking in the shadows, waiting to enslave or destroy the human race? Can you survive with your sanity intact?
Mythos World is a roleplaying game of cosmic horror using the Apocalypse World engine. Players investigate bizarre events in a classic 1920s setting inspired by authors like H.P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, Robert W. Chambers, and Robert E. Howard.
Exilium
Something has awoken.
What you know...
Increasingly you feel you are not in your own body. Dreams have come that shake your belief in yourself. Your sleeping mind is full of incredible hints at higher realities, snatches of a heavenly existence, and the pain of a terrible fall from grace. Now this place where you live no longer feels like home. And the Dreams are getting stronger, and stranger…
What you have been told...
The thing that calls itself the Envoy has told you that something has awakened inside of you. And with that awakening comes a realisation that you were once something more than human; you were a god, a post-human, one of the Numina.
Your world was called Elysium – a paradise beyond this reality. Separated from the material realm, your kind found delight in watching and manipulating the lesser beings trapped in a material existence on the Flame Worlds, playthings created for your pleasure. You called it Dreaming, an endless source of entertainment and intrigue.
But times change. You committed a crime. And for that you were thrown out, ejected, named an Exile. Now even in your awakened state Elysium seems little more than a vague memory.
Summerland 2nd edition
Welcome to Summerland, a role-playing game of desolation and redemption beneath the Sea of Leaves.
The time is now. The world has changed. The Event brought the Sea of Leaves into our world, an immense forest that choked cities and drowned civilisation overnight. From the trees came the Call, a lure to the weak that decimated the population. In the aftermath only pockets of humanity remain, resisting the woods' siren song. In the endless forests lurk the Lost - whose wills were drowned by the Call - and the Wild, who have forgotten they were ever human.
You are one of a select few who can resist the Call. A Drifter, hardened to the lure of the woods by the scars of the past, you cannot let go. Your torment shields you, but drives your isolation. More than anything you crave welcome in a community, but can never be truly accepted without leaving behind your past. To do that, you must confront and defeat the demons that haunt you.
Microscope
Humanity spreads to the stars and forges a galactic civilization...
Fledgling nations arise from the ruins of the empire...
An ancient line of dragon-kings dies out as magic fades from the realm...
These are all examples of Microscope games. Want to explore an epic history of your own creation, hundreds or thousands of years long, all in an afternoon? That's Microscope.
You won't play the game in chronological order. You can defy the limits of time and space, jumping backward or forward to explore the parts of the history that interest you. Want to leap a thousand years into the future and see how an institution shaped society? Want to jump back to the childhood of the king you just saw assassinated and find out what made him such a hated ruler? That’s normal in Microscope.
You have vast power to create... and to destroy. Build beautiful, tranquil jewels of civilization and then consume them with nuclear fire. Zoom out to watch the majestic tide of history wash across empires, then zoom in and explore the lives of the people who endured it.
Bluebeard's Bride (restock)
WILL YOU OPEN THE FINAL DOOR?
A young bride is wed to an ugly, but powerful man with a blue beard. He invites her to explore the house...but one room is forbidden. Eventually, the young bride falls prey to her curiosity and opens it, discovering the gruesome display of former brides murdered...
Explore Bluebeard's mansion and create your own beautifully tragic version of the dark fairy tale with Bluebeard's Bride. Experience the nightmarish memories that haunt the rooms of this broken place and discover the truth of what happened here. But it is up to you and your friends to decide whether or not you are a faithful or disloyal bride.
Hack the Planet
As our climate became radicalized, it resulted in more than just heavy weather — earthquakes, tornadoes, rising sea water, and the changes in rainfall, to name a few. This shift resulted in destabilized governments and banks, and the halting of technological progress on a massive scale. The Internet was destroyed, causing huge amounts of data loss. The landscape was altered irrevocably and continues to be reshaped by nature, creating a future where technological progress was stymied.
In the darkest hour Shelter 1, a superstructure with cutting edge technology was constructed with funds from corporations. Most climate refugees flocked to this Shelter. Now, years later, a massive Corporate City ruled by a corporatocracy is segregated from the 'Zone, where all of the climate refugees live and work. Cut off from the wealth and excess the superrich enjoy.
You play a character who has had enough of this status quo. Rather than labor to make ends meet, you choose to live outside of corporate law, becoming Glitches in the system that serves only those in the city proper.
Dread
Explore hostile worlds of your own creation with Dread, a game carved from the intense emotions buried in your favorite horror stories. Through individually crafted questionnaires, players are coaxed into revealing their characters' abilities, shortcomings, personalities, and fears. These characters are plunged into macabre tales devised by the host. When moments of conflict and peril arise in the story, it is the players' nerves, rather than the whims of dice, that determine the fates of their characters.
This book, a few friends, your own sick imagination, and one set of Jenga blocks is all you need.
Sign: A Game About Being Understood
Nicaragua in the 1970s had no form of sign language. In 1977, something happened. Fifty deaf children from across the country were brought together to an experimental school in Managua. Without a shared language to express themselves, the children did the only thing they could -- they created one. In Sign, we follow a small piece of their journey.
Turn
Turn is a slice-of-life supernatural roleplaying game about shapeshifters in small, rural towns who struggle between their beast and human sides in a quiet drama, while trying to find balance and community.
Turn is made for two to four players plus a facilitator in the Town Manager role, and is designed for multiple session play. Each session should take about 3-4 hours. Play is open-ended, and can continue as long as players find new elements to explore in their town and in themselves. While this RPG is designed for long-form play, the project released a convention play packet to help you create memorable one-shot play experiences.
Turn includes interlocking character sheets to represent your human roles and beast archetypes. You will also create your town map together at the table on the template we provide. The Town Manager will have their own checklists, references, and records sheets to make facilitating the game easier.
Threadbare: Stitchpunk RPG
With careful stitches and meticulous work, a ragdoll carefully sews back a torn limb on a panda who is crying out his troubles (girl troubles… isn’t it always a girl?) while he sips from a daintily painted teacup filled with brandy.
In another room in the shoebox house she calls home, the ragdoll’s other patients wait patiently for her craft. A Mekka bulldozer, metal with chipping yellow paint, is missing his front left wheel. He holds a vinyl doll’s head, waiting for it to be glued into the empty wheel well. It won’t roll quite the same, he knows, but he can live with the handicap until he scavenges a better part.
The ragdoll finishes with her panda patient and wishes him a cheery farewell, tucking his payment (2 buttons and a tiny watch gear) into her skirt pocket. She quickly schools her face to hide her sly, greedy smile when she steps across the threshold to the waiting bulldozer. His repair is going to need glue, and glue is a costly resource, my friend…
Threadbare RPG is a role-playing game in which you play a jury-rigged toy in a broken world. Caught in a world where Entropy is a constant danger, you’ll patch yourself up, invent new devices, and maybe make new friends along the way.
Variations on Your Body
Finding girlhood through witchcraft and bravery through stray feathers. Reaching back to ancient magics and forward to alien encounters. This collection contains four games, loosely defined – each straddles the line between poetry, roleplay, self-help, and magical invitation. They’re all solo pervasive games, meant to be played in the margins of your life.
I’ve had a complicated relationship with my body. These four games draw on my life as a queer trans woman, as someone living with chronic pain and mental illness, and as someone healing through trauma. They together ask the question: what if escapism can help us to return to our body more whole?