I was initially very lukewarm about the game when I just heard about it, but after both playing it a few times during the playtest and running my own game of it I am completely sold. This has very quickly become one of my favourite games, and I can't wait until the kickstarter when we get the full rules to it.

Paint the Town Red is an exemplary example of the themes of a game reflecting its mechanics, and vice versa. Its use of procedures, bonds, and locations make it among the easiest games I've ever run- I've never had to prep a session.

A seriously great example of narrative design in a game that is so intentional in its tone, mechanical basis, adventure writing and trust in its players and GM. I sincerely recommend it.

I admit in advance I'm a huge fan of the Dark Tower series and Pendragon and the Arthurian mythos. This game feels like a love story to both but is completely it's own thing. It's beautifully written and conceived. I normally don't like super rules-lite games but the system for this seems solid.

I originally backed this on Kickstarter and have had a game running this system for nearly a year, and just received my physical rewards and they are perfect! The system is great, it perfectly matches the concept I had for a campaign, and we've enjyoed it tremendously. Huge huge thanks to Matt who helped with a lost package, cannot possibly express how much I appreciate all he had to do to get me things to me!!

What is Gangs of Titan City? Plutogia, the Titan City, is a massive hive-city a far future Sci-Fi setting remincent of 40k's Necromunda or Judge Dread's Mega-City One. Your players will play Gutters, members of an upstart gang vying for conrol of your corner of this impossibly vast city. You will fight rival gangs over territory and the assets they contain, managing your character's Desperation and your gang's Debt while trying to deal with the inevitable consequences of your illicit deeds. Ancient, arcane technology mixes with more mundane machinery on this corroding industrial behemoth. Gutters will use high tech guns, low tech melee weapons, pharma-serums, cybernetics and gene-mods to find whatever edge they can. Some will even use Psionics, if they can stay one step ahead of the Psi Squads that hunts them.

What Do You Get? Two PDFs, the GOTC Quickstart Rules (a third of the full book, specifically rules of play for the personal and orginizational scale) which is the primary focus of my review, and Gangs Playtest which provide the materials necessary to play a short campaign (pregenerated characters, rival factions, and city sectors to fight over). The full book will allow you to create your own PC gangs, procedurally generate city sectors, and fill your Titan City with rivals factions from a list of dozens.

What is the Game Like? The core dice mechanic uses 2d6 plus modifiers (1-6 Fails, 7-9 Partial Success, 10+ Full Success) in a player facing system (players roll all dice in conflicts, attacking and resisting). The bulk of the rules you'll see here are the tools the Narrator needs to run a campaign. These tools are needed becuase the game is largely Player directed. The Narrator places the world at the Players feet, and the Players roam their greedy eyes over the world picking targets and formulating grand plans. The Narrator will then keep track of the inevitable trouble this will cause, as everything the Players take belonged to someone else, and they will not be happy. They can ignore these problems or take them head on, make new contacts or burn old ones, play it safe or devil-may-care. The books says you play to find out; the campaign system mechanics will push your game forward in response to player choices. This isn't a game for auteur gamemasters to tell sweeping epics of their own design, rather its an ingenius machine for gamemasters to input player choices and churn out drama and consequences to great effect. This machine can be a lot for the Narrator to keep track of, so you'll be thankful for the core mechanics being as simple and player facing as they are. The players will feel empowered to make big choices, and the Narrator will have lots of tools at their desposal to make those choices have meaning.

Should I Get It? Absolutely. The grim dark world is evocative, the dice mechanics are intuitive, and the campaign mechanics are very robust. My players and I are extremely excited to see the full product. Check out the Kickstarter, as of writing this the full PDF is ready and will be released soon after funding is reached.

It was unexpected. For a quick start it hold lots of information one pdf for the setting/rules and one for the pregens (can't give it all away!). Overwall Titan City is decaying and grimdark, bursting with personality, finding inspiration from several well known franchises (Fallout, 40k, Akira and much more!). Corps and other factions move as you try to grow you're own territory. Take command of your PC known as a "Gutter" and your GM, known as a "Narrator" to create a gang to stand above all gangs, to fight or hide from the horrible enforcers, cults, psionica and other dangers!

For Gutters and the Narrator this game is made to keep a steady flow, make you feel kickass, and have a free narrative based story. There is lots of inspiration in the book but it encorages collabarrive story so throw put your ideas. Keeping it simple with only a few d6 and broadstroke abilities. Your imagination is the limit (and whatever the Narrator says).

So go big, plan a daring heist, destroy your enemies, go out in memorable blaze of glory because every moment is to be spent in action or Titan City will suffocate you. So try it out, join their discord, play the quickstart with us! :)

Oozes style, packs a wallop of flavor, and punches your pretty mouth silly! One of the finest, most well laid out books I own, with "easy-enough" mechanics that highlight the backbone of this genre. Not only is the spin fresh, but it encapsulates and, respectfully, amplifies everything a fan might know & love about such inspirational works as Firefly & Cowboy Bebop. The execution is clean, precise, and provides all the tools for one to work with without all the excess to trim. No inch of the page is spared, with every ample illustration striking the spark to feed that fire you might need to get this ship off the ground. In short, I can't compliment it enough; simply, one of the coolest RPGs I own. Proud backer! Get that hardback in your hand and you won't regret it.

Excellent mini campaign setting. Chock full of great ideas. Love the idea of a mini apocalyptic event impacting the players and their world. How did an entire sea disappear? How does this affect the environment, ecosystem, monsters, scavengers, disease etc. Will the party solve the mystery, profit from the disaster or even restore the missing sea? Easy to adapt to any D20 type game. Took my 2e D&D crew through this over several sessions. Well worth the purchase.

First and foremost I want to say that in the state this is currently in it is not worth the $14 they are charging. No where on this page is it made clear that as of now this is a first round proofing version of this product and it doesn’t take long to realize it. It is rife with typos, errors, and artifacts from earlier versions. So much so that SoulMuppet has opened a room on their Discord to try and remedy it. I really hope the fixes they’ve gotten in the Discord are implemented into the print version. If they’re not, that is going to be a great disappointment. All in all this book comes off as an alpha as rusty and unpolished as the aesthetic they’re selling. Once this is remedied in a few weeks then I will revisit my two star rating.

The writing of Orbital Blues comes off as very tell, don’t show. Instead of giving examples of how the “gig economy” or “late stage capitalism” has really affected this setting they’d rather just hit you over the head with those terms again and again. The reason for that is there is no setting here. Instead of fleshing out a universe or building a world based off of all the inspiration Orbital Blues pulls from; what you get is a skeletal framework with an OSR foundation. That in and of itself isn’t bad; but when you were expecting much more, it leaves a lot to be desired.

There is also the fact that this rule book is rife with quotes from movies, television, and music, but absent are any citations or attributions. Now I am not a legal expert and this might be 100% legal. In fact, there is a post on the Discord saying that all of this has been taken care of. But I still feel a bit off seeing all these quotes and blatant references in here without any form of reference back to where they came from.

All in all Orbital Blues is a passable game that can be used to run a great Cowboy Bebop game. The Troubles and Gambits mechanics look to be interesting and at least add something interesting to this book. And the art is really good. But outside of a skeleton for a space western it feels like it really doesn’t have much of its own to say. I do not regret supporting it, but I’d be disingenuous if I didn’t say I expected a bit more.

***Edit Upped to 3 stars: Errata has been added. There are still some typos present but it's at an acceptable level.

EDIT 8/12/21 Errata fixes and rule clarifications are now in the latest version!

Orbital Blues is a narrative focused OSR Space Western with a rock ‘n roll / retro kitsch aesthetic. It’s a game of “sad space cowboys” drawing inspiration from the likes of Cowboy Bebop and Firefly/Serenity. You play as a motely crew of outlaws aboard an independent space ship looking for whatever work that can keep the debt collectors at bay. Each player character is haunted by something from their past or present that forms the primary focus of their development as the game progresses. If you have players who love to make tragic backstories, this game mechanically rewards those kinds of characters.

Game mechanics are based on Soul Muppet’s OSR horror fantasy RPG Best Left Buried, which itself owes much to Questing Beast’s Maze Rats. Most rolls use 2d6 + Stat to hit an 8+ while individual rolls can gain advantage or disadvantage (roll 3d6, take highest or lowest two rolls respectively). Characters gain experience by acquiring Blues points, gained by enduring traumatic events and roleplaying their character’s hinderances (known as Troubles). Credit and Debt loom large over the crew, as they scramble to stay in business in a system designed to keep them broke and desperate.

Despite the narrative focus of this game, it is still very much an OSR RPG. Combat, both personal and vehicular, can turn deadly in short order. Combat feels tense, and space combat has plenty for the non-pilot crew to do without bogging things down too much. I especially like the “Swansong” mechanic for PCs certain to die: this is their last scene of the game, crank up the music, roll with advantage and ignore injury until a suitably epic moment when they breathe their last.

Art and layout are gorgeous. Route 66 Americana, rock and roll, 70s magazine ads, retrofuture rocket ships all come together beautifully. Text remains legible throughout, which is more than I can say about some other art focused OSR RPGs that have come out lately.

There’s an excellent GM section with advice on running the game, as well as a star system full of intrigue and adventure for the players to explore out of the box. There’s a specific melancholy vibe the authors are going for here: they want to tell tales of hungry desperados struggling to make ends meat while trying to keep their souls intact. The “sad space cowboy” theme suffuses the whole book. These are your character’s Orbital Blues.

Originally offered as stretch goal and addon during the Kickstarter campaign after so many people asked for an art book based on the gorgeous art shown during the campaign. Wayward Stars doesn't only showcase art from the RPG, but also shows the process followed by the artist with an accompanying explanation for almost every piece. So if you like the art pieces and art direction forun in Orbital Blues, this book will provide a better look at them, an insight into the process of creating them and could very well serve to mine some inspiration.

If I was to use a single word to describe Orbital Blues it would be 'evocative'. With a superb art direction and design, Orbtial Blues really shines and manages to quickly set the mood and transport your mind to a low sci-fi galaxy that has seen better days, with space cowboys and bounty hunters minding their business amidst americana rusting under the suns.

The rules are simple, easy to learn, easy to teach but that perfectly convey the mood and the spirit of the game. The setting is implied, rather than fully explained and detailed, so it will give you plenty of ideas and certainly transmit a certain flavour while, at the same time, giving you full control to imagine and define the specifics to your group's liking. This may not work for everyone; if you prefer something with a rich setting, pages and pages of history, long detailed descriptions, then this is not the game for you. Also, the rules are so lite yet so flexible, that you will probably need to house rule a lot of things, depening on your group playstyle.

Perhaps you want something that reminds you of Cowboy Bebop? Perhaps Firefly is more to your liking? Maybe you want to recreate something similar to Outland? The game has you covered.

If you would like to roleplay a group of misfits living their lives job by job, jumping from system to system in search of the next hit or the next bounty while running from their own demons and their own pasts, Orbital Blues is the game for you. So gather your crew, board your spaceship and look for the nearest bounty board.

Just picked up Orbital Blues? Taken in by the piles of fantastic artwork in that book but want more? Or maybe you're interested in how the art came together, or the thought process of the artist behind all that work? This book is for you!

Wayward Stars is an artbook examining the primary pieces of art in the Orbital Blues RPG corebook and both how they were made, and the thinking behind them. The book is laid out in the same minimalist style as Orbital Blues, giving each piece of art its own room to breathe, and never crowding the text.

The book not only presents its art with all the care you'd expect after seeing Orbital Blues, it is also interlaced with little lore snippets from the Orbital Blues world itself. An excerpt here describing a city, some fictionalized ad copy for a weapon or vehicle there, the book is an excellent secondary source of inspiration for any Orbital Blues game you might run, and helps to lend yet more weight to the world the authors have so finely crafted.

If you like Orbital Blues, you'll like this book, and you owe it yourself to pick it up. Just like with the corebook, come for the art, but stay for the game.

Orbital Blues is, quite possibly, the most stylish, most gorgeous RPG corebook you'll ever read. Following a recent trend in RPG books of presenting eminently readable rulesbooks, it's one of the few books I've read cover to cover a couple of times and never once did I feel bored or zoned out. Forget having beautiful artwork, every two-page spread is beautiful artwork; the entire book just drips with evocative art that not only sells you on the intended tone/genre of the game, but also helps to effortlessly transport you into the game's world itself. Each piece of art is genuine, and offers so much authenticity to the game itself that you'll inadvertently imagine scenarios, story beats, and entire campaigns just from their viewing.

Beyond the presentation lies a game that is simple in its execution. This is not a crunchy game, and eschews massive skills list and endless math for a clean and simple 2d6-based system. The stats lend themselves to proper character development; your numbers and bars won't just go up, your character will grow and change as a consequence of the events happening around them. It's also got the coolest death mechanic I've ever seen in a game. And just as easy as it is for players to get into playing this game, the book's section for GMs - or "Storyteller" as the game calls the game runner - is superb. It not only walks you through what being a GM means for the game, it immediately points out some common pitfalls your typical new GM might fall into, and then goes on to describe in simple terms what sorts of stories might work well in the system. There is never a feeling of hand-holding though, just good advice.

In all, I cannot wait to run this game for my friends. You'd do yourself a favour picking it up. It's a smart game wrapped in absolutely gorgeous artwork, with an amazing layout, and it's sure to please anyone with even a passing interest in the media that inspired Orbital Blues, such as Firefly and Cowboy Bebop.

Come for the art, stay for the game.

Orbital Blues is a science fiction RPG Quickstart with 31 pages. There are six characters provided. They fall into the category of thieves, smugglers, and bounty hunters. There are some interesting rules for dealing with the “blues”. Most of the time you will be rolling two six-sided dice, but sometimes three. About half of the pages are about setting up a campaign and the adventure hooks that come with it. I soloed this with a solo system I have been testing out. I used five of the characters provided and added a scientist. The adventure I used was Antioch Station (DriveThruRPG/pay what you want). On the first day they did rescue a tour ship (musicians who know how to party). On the second day they continued on their quest to the space station. They did survive the mission and accomplished the three goals. And they made a profit! Give this unique game system a try!