A great module for mucking about with hairy time travel. It's 95% sandbox, very little narrative, players have freedom to do anything, and everything they do will affect the situation unfolding.

It requires some improv from the GM as descriptions are short and sweet, but this is a flexibility (after all the players might change how people act, the events or the places via time travel) rather than a hinderance.

This is a good synthesis of the field & practices, and nice adaptation to 5e mechanics that seems mathematically sound, but like so much that falls into the 5e house style it's overwritten - they wouldn't have the frequent complaints about tiny font size if they'd cut 25% of the material, which feels like what an editor should have done. The art is broadly nice but there's more than is necessary; the layout is good, particularly the use of three flavours of coloured callout boxes.

The reflection & discussion in the worked examples in Appendix II are excellent, but then the example in Appendix III loses all that, spending a dozen pages on something that should have been 4 or maybe 6, without showing the same kind of explanation of development.

Good random tables are great for this kind of sprawling worldbuilding, and some of theirs are quite good - the scope of Titles & Epithets, and maybe the combinatorial complexity of Generic Lore. But Landforms & Structures is tiny? Region Modifiers is ... off-kilter?

A few of their sections don't quite connect for me, and I don't know if it's because they didn't get some kernel of an idea across, or our setting assumptions don't align. What's up with Town Types & Town Buildings? Magical Services seems like a tiny but important section, and maybe more would have been good. We get a warning box that crafting is complicated, and lots of talk about the meta concerns of whether or not to have a crafting system & how to parameterise it. (There are no examples that land for me how complicated it is, but I'd probably grumpily complain if there were that they didn't line up well enough with my sense of verisimilitude, so maybe that's a reasonable choice.)

This book is solely responsible for helping to create the single most successful DnD 5e campaign that I have ever run. My roommate and I were inspired by Matt Colville's video on West Marches-style play (https://youtu.be/oGAC-gBoX9k) and this book has been a huge assist in helping us flesh out survival mechanics and make the exploration pillar of DnD meatier and more fun. The book has been helpful with creating an emergent narrative and a beautiful map and building a solid player base that is hungry to explore our world and uncover the secrets we've hidden. West Marches play pushes DnD games to their absolute limits (in a good way) with encouraging use of items, mechanics, and smart roleplay to solve problems and really conquer a world and learn everything about it. The travel rules are invaluable for exploring both new and old territory. Making players take into account the area where they are resting, the conditions of the weather, their food and water situation, really makes them think more. The tables of weather affecting play are a stroke of genius. The worldbuilding chapter is really valuable for fleshing the starting town. The factions and encounter information and ideas are interesting and help keep the world far more varied from just, "cultists want to take over the world and summon a demon!" All in all, this book is freaking awesome. If you're gonna run a West Marches campaign, this is an essential tool. I bought the PDF and a physical copy and I'm still waiting on my print version to come in. Will update when I get it.

This is such a fantastic book! I got hooked listening to Brandes and Sam talk about it on the Edition Wars podcast. I love what it adds to the exploration pillar of play. I love that it actually offers decent guidance for giving non-combat XP in a way that isn't just "whatever feels good". I love the additional rules about resting in the wilderness and gear. I love the guidance it offers on building lore and using indexical storytelling to communicate that lore.

It's a beautiful and beautifully written book. I got the print-on-demand hardcover and it is worth every penny.

I received this product after the Kickstarter. I think it is simply superb. It is packed with all the tools, advice and options that a GM may need to run a sandbox campaign, or a West Marches campaign more specifically. It is very clear, well-organized, well-written and well-illustrated. There are many optional new systems in this book that can be easily used in non-sandbox games as well; in particular I really liked the crafting rules and using monster parts and scavenged parts - it was crunchy enough to be interesting but wasn't too complex like some other systems I've seen floating around. If I have any (very minor gripes) about this products it's that the DCs for certain survival-based tasks seem inconsistent (too low or too high), and that I almost wish it was a little bit more generic so I could use it more easily with OSR games (like Worlds Without Number does for example). The other very minor gripe is that while I really like the art in the book it didn't particularly invoke in me a sense of a D&D fantasy campaign. It's really good art, but tonally it didn't quite fit. Otherwise this is an amazing product and every DM should get it and use it extensively.

Super well made book on creating and running a campaign inspired by the the West Marches (summarized as a sandboxy, dynamic and dangerous dnd setting). There's an emphasis on survival, emergent storytelling, and cohesive worldbuilding. The book is nicely laid out with tons of beautiful art.

An awesome resource for anyone interested in running a West Marches style campaign, or really for creating any sandboxy campaign in a wild setting.

I love it! It's an in depth, detailed, and overall very well made wilderness guide for D&D 5e which can pretty easily be converted I would imagine. it has the rules and guidelines for anything Wilds, and has examples and walkthroughs as well to help make sure you really know what you're doing! Would recommend to anyone who wants a more detailed look at the dangers of the wilderness in RPGs.

Awesome! Amazing! Finally, the game that will get me over the bump towards MCing a PbtA game. After reading and tinkering with so many of this ilk over the years, along comes a rulebook that is easy to read with its conversational tone, easy to understand with pages of narrative and mechanical examples, and if Rich Rogers and his Star Wars reskin is to be believed ... easy (and fun) to run! Check it out! First, listen to the +1 Forward podcast interview of Mr. Sorensen, then listen (or watch) Mr. Roger's Star Wars reskin actual play (via Youtube or on the Gauntlet Hangout podcast). Finally, buy it and then demand more from Mr. Sorensen, share what you create, and above all, have fun with your family and friends.

Here's the Skinny on Rust Hulks: If I wanted to play PBTA Firefly, Cowboy Beebop, Killjoys, Dark Matter, or The Expanse, I'd play it in Rust Hulks

If I wanted to play Star Trek? Probably not. It's too clean and optimistic.

Star Wars? It depends on the Era. Stick to the Empire, it would be fine, But if you're looking some sweet Jedi on Jedi action, you're gonna have a bad time. There aren't really mechanics for emulating mystic stuff like the Force. The lack of any kind of 'mystic-space-magician playbook is kind of a drag.

If I wanted to play Alien, I'd do it in Rust Hulk. Which is odd to say, since there no aliens in Rust Hulk. Its humans only - no playbooks/moves for aliens.

I can't speak to the hardcover, but the PDF is built for ease of use. It's in a single colunm format with easy to read black text on a white background (this contributes to the books 270+ page count). and the page numbers of the document match the page number sin the TOC and Index. It's perfect for consuming on a tablet. The only art is in the playbooks.

In general, each new PBTA game has a 'secret' sauce' that sets it apart from those that came before. In Rust Hulks the 'secret sauce' is a realtionship matrix. Where Apocalyple World has Hx, and the Sprawl has Links, Rust Hulks has 'Chains and Heat'. To crudely simplfy the mechanic: Characters assist each other which results in relationships getting tested - If things get 'tested' enough, the Captain ends up throwing Jayne out the airlock.

If I had to compare it to any other PBTA Game, I'd say it is most strongly influenced by The Sprawl. It's has a strong mission based feel to it. It's got 'Get a Job'. It's got 'Get Paid'. If you liked the Sprawl, you'll like this too.

The Good:

• Mission Based.
• Chains and Heat.
• Simple PDF Format.

The Bad:

• Missing a 'jedi/mystic' playbook. How can you do Mass Effect without Adepts? Or Outlaw Star without Psychics? Or Staw Wars without Jedi? It's not possible.
• Where's the aliens? How can you do Mass Effect without bird men, frog men, talking dinosaurs, and gender-fluid tentacle-headed space vampires???
• The default setting is our solar system...which is boring.
• The Rules want the group to draw their Ship as part of world building in session 0. The people I game with really can't draw. We skipped that step.

My Verdict:

• I like it.

Make sure the download the 1.0.3 version of the PDF. The author initially dorked out and uploaded a versioon withoug hyperlinks. It's fixed now, but the cursed 1.0.2 version is still in my library begging me to dowload it by mistake.

Blood Chrome Neon is simple and flexible enough to play most cyberpunk settings, the task resolution is not revolutionary but works perfectly, I also appreciate the ‘’familly” skill which can give you a good character concept even if the system doesn't rely only on archetypical or classes.

The rules can be read in 2 hours, character might ask 10 - 30 minutes to be created, and even without a setting you can run a cyberpunk adventure almost immediately and it is also simple enough to get TTRPG newcomers, I also like the hacking rules are barebone and not a sort of side “dungeon” mini game, as in Cyberpunk 2020, Shadowrun and The Black Hack - Cyberpunked (or Mirrorshade), to me those netrunning rules are a bit too confusing for my primal brain. The combats could be played on a grid or narratively (I prefer the latter). Everything else from the gears to the augmentations are a guideline to fit the needs of the GM and players, and as described in the book, it's quite easy to hack BCN, maybe someone will make a netrunning hack after all.

EDIT : i forgot to mention something about the augmentations ; it s quite easy to use, instead to use humanity or essence pool, it feels a bit like video game system with slots for each part of the body, so there is no sanity loss or anything like that if you want to enhance your character with augs.

I would recommend to get in addition the Augmented Reality PDF to use with BCN and for my part, I will certainly use as well the tables from Mirrorshade to create stuff on the go.

If i had to give a mark on a scale of 10 : i would give a solid 7.5 out of 10.

I have only two problems, one with the character sheet, there is no dedicated slot to write down the family skills, my other issue is really minor, the font used isn't dyslexic friendly, the a and o look really similar.

Here is a quick hack, in the europa zone, we would use the écu (or eku) roughly based on the Euro with the same symbol : €. The exchange rate is 1 nuyen is equal to 1 ecu.

My other quick hack is to invert the contact creation and the gear creation, once you created your contacts, you convert the remaining building points for your gears.