Current mood:

excited

The Year Ahead in RPG Releases: 2006
Here's some info I dug up on RPGs coming out this year. These entries are all sell text straight from various publishers.

Printer - the Profiting 3rd Edition: You didn't buy the first edition. You didn't buy the second edition. You can still find both of them on store shelves and distributor warehouses. Now comes the third edition! We've changed the art again, but the mechanics are still as pointless as you would remember them if anyone had actually bought or read the first two editions. We're bleeding trust fund money, but our printer has never been more profitable! The game itself is probably about Jesus or hidden powers that lurk amongst modern society. We can't remember. Look for our deserted booth at GenCon!

The Eighties RPG, 2006 Edition: Remember that game from the 80s? It's back! Again! We changed the rules for ducking behind a platypus to avoid detection by an incoming torpedo. And you'll buy it, suckahs! We even went in and screwed up some functional rules to set the stage for the 2007 edition. Eat it, fanboi.

Pointless Licensed RPG Number Eight: We took a generic rules set, filed off the interesting bits, and then bought the RPG rights to a 30 year old IP that the scary homeless guy who lives in the alley behind our office had his hands on. Even if you've heard of this IP, you haven't thought about it for 20 years. The mere mention of it reminds you that you need to throw out those paperbacks that are taking up way too much room in the attic. Bonus points if you never realized that this is actually a licensed game!

It's Another Game About Angst!: If mom refuses to buy you that Limp Bizkit album, if dad and his "how was school today" is just a stupid face, then this is the RPG for you. You are an outcast with great powers, but should you use those powers to do anything the suffocating world of mundanity will destroy. Yours is a dance at the edge of oblivion. Guaranteed to reinforce every damaging, self-defeating, and ego boosting falsity that you cling to! That pointless, trained monkey job you have, the one that requires minimal skills that are still beyond your talents, won't be so soul crushing once you play this game.

Smarter Than Them - Limited Edition Bootleg POD Version 6.4 (Exclusive Print Run of 20,000): Buy, you consumerist whore. Buy and show them who's smarter, hipper, edgier, more alternative. Who cares what the game is about? All that matters is that you can brag about owning it on the Internet. Muddled, incomprehensible rules allow you to create your own, vague understanding of how the game works, and then argue endlessly on the Internet that this game is the greatest RPG ever written, playability be damned.

We Will Kill Stuff Because That's What We Like 8th Edition: 979 more ways to kill things! 372 more things to kill! 439 more things to take off the corpses of dead things! Are we having fun yet?

I'm a Game Designer!: Generic, pointless rules set comes with blank, white cover and an assortment of little stickers with letters on them that you can use to put your title of choice and your name on the cover. Congratulations, you're now a game designer! Yours is the power to lord over fanboys, whine on the Internet with someone maybe paying attention, and bore dozens of people to death at convention panels. Best of all, you don't need to know anything about games to design them. Just like real life game designers! Just like you! The Indy Cred supplement allows you to add a task resolution system to your game that uses tiddlywinks, live snails, or dried mud. The Bickering supplement allows you to strike up a rivalry with someone as equally talentless and pointless as you!

Bankruptcy Quest: We took tired, pointless mechanics, tied them to a genre that gamers have repeatedly rejected since 1974 (it's either pulp or westerns; we forget!), found the worst artists in the business, and combined them with a specially, hand-picked team of random people chosen from an Internet forum. This game will be our biggest push of the year, a mad, furious charge at our own personal goal: bankruptcy and the right to completely hand wave away all the money we owe writers and artists.