And so began my journey into indie RPGs….
It started simply enough, with a review of the game Dead Inside that was posted over on 20×20 Room. After reading the review, and then the material over on the official Dead Inside page, I decided to head on over to RPGNow and buy myself a copy.
Eventually Dead Inside showed up in my mailbox (as I’d bought the POD version), and I liked what I saw. It was different from anything I’d seen in an RPG before, and I realized that there were probably other gems out there in the indie RPG world. This realization led me to head back to The Forge, a site I’d visited only briefly once before, and read some of the reviews posted there.
As a result, yesterday I ended up buying a PDF copy of kill puppies for satan, which seems to be a brilliant, dark, funny little game with a scary title, and now I’m thinking of buying Dust Devils, and maybe Le Mon Mouri or InSpectres too. It’s just so easy to drop $5 or $10 on the PDF of a game that sounds interesting, especially after seeing people praise it on some online forum.
Hopefully at some point in the future I’ll actually end up running or playing in one of these games myself, but for now I’m just enjoying exploring a part of the RPG hobby that I barely even knew existed.
February 24th, 2004 at 7:23 am
Dust Devils is quite impressive, IMO. A good study of flawed, damaged characters (your standard revisionist western “hero”) with some very clever game-mechanical narrative tricks. Most interesting is that one player becomes semi-GM at the end of every action round, describing the results of the various actions (and, potentially, setting up their own future actions somewhat). This may or may not be one of the characters who succeeded at their chosen action, as success is based on creating the best poker hand and the narrator role is simply whoever played the highest card.
The rotating narration role is something I don’t recall seeing many places other than the very silly TSR Rocky and Bullwinkle game and as an optional feature of the Prince Valiant RPG, but it has a lot of value. It increases the interactiveness and collaboration in the story creation, though it does require more from each player than the standard RPG.
As with many of the experimental games, DD is more focused on short, intense storytelling than on extended campaigns, but the ideas in it are quite good and are well developed.
February 25th, 2004 at 1:50 pm
Hi. I wrote that Dead Inside review. I’m glad to hear we’ve made another convert to the world of indie RPGs. Buying PDFs is a slippery little addiction, thanks to the instant gratification factor, but I do highly recommend both Dust Devils and InSpectres. InSpectres in particular is really easy and fun to play, yet playing it overturns all sorts of ideas about how RPGs are supposed to “work”.
Enjoy!
March 12th, 2004 at 11:25 am
Thanks for buying DI! I’m glad you enjoyed it!
There’s a new freebie up at RPGNow that you might not have seen: the Imago Deck. It’s usable in just about any RPG, and somewhat similiar to the old Whimsy or Drama Decks.
Feel free to check it out!
CU