This is an incredibly evocative village to plunk into the woods. As the forward indicates, the place should feel hallucinogenic, like the cover art. It succeeds wildly. I am working this into a setting with some of Nate Treme's work (Viridia's Garden) and it is like peanut butter and jelly. Spirits, dream-fog, high strangeness.

This is an amazing and flavorful resource for running space opera games. You can create aliens species, nebula, planets, outposts / spacestations, and interesting NPCs. I've only started to use this to run a campaign, but my players are having a great time with this. I've used it to create a not-hard scifi setting, an outpost of slums and fancy high-rises, on a planet covered in toxic gas and acid pools, and crystal-horned crocodile-looking things that, when domesticated, are used as mounts. The PCs need to kidnap a muscician whose consciousness is stored inside his robot 'butler', but the NPC generator has given me someone else to try to foil their plans.

The tables are great, and the ART is FANTASTIC! Crescent-moon-headed aliens with energy two-handed swords??? YES. Crescent-moon-headed mecha? YES. There's not a ton of art within but what there is has been a great inspiration to make fantastical science fiction content.

This is a great little supplement for adding cars, convenience stores, drag-racing, and the like to a Traditional Fantasy Setting. Why? Why not! It is very much upfront about not caring about how Big and Serious your setting is, or at least, how it's better to value having Mad Max motorcycle gangs, Thelma and Louise or Dukes of Hazard jumps, and high-speed automobile accidents.

There are a lot of random tables: weird engines, weird vehicles, NPCs, Clearance Rack Items, Nudie Mags and/or Chips. Probably not all universally useful, but there's probably something you could use.

Seems like a great lil ship supplement, with some sample PCs and other things. Unfortunately the scan quality is quite bad - at 100% the page is too zoomed out to read, and at 200% the text is blurry. You can highlight the text and copy-paste it to a text file to make it legible, but given that other Classic Traveller supplements are considerably more readable, it seems like this pdf ought to be fixed.

If legible, would probably be about 4-5 stars.

This is my favorite Black Hack hack. It just oozes character, and mutagenic glowing fluids. Seriously, the illustrations in this book are fantastic and really make it seem real, or at least, really fun!

The four classes have different ways of generating their stats, which seems very apt. Robots are a point-buy system, humans roll 4d6 and drop lowest, mutants really roll the dice - 1d20 per stat, reroll 1s and 20s. And then psychics get 4d6 drop lowest for mental attributes and 2d6+2 for physical stats. Each class has different added-on powers - humans have Professions where they can get advantages on relevant rolls, mutants have their mutations, robots have modules, psychics get their psionics. So there's random tables and 20 results for each class, which is great. Lets players rapidly differentiate themselves from other PCs with the same class, as a Profession: Driver is going to have some different starting gear and desires than a Farmer.

Then rules for guns, radiation, drugs, figuring out high-tech, and vehicles getting wrecked - an Out of the Action table for vehicles. There's a 2-page wastelands bestiary, 7 sample vehicles (and stats for the trailer part of a semi-trailer) and high-tech gear. A hex map and a beautiful non-hex map end the PDF and make me want to grab this, a bunch of random tables, and run some irradiated PCs through a vibrant, insane apocalyptic wasteland.

Troika is free and awesome. Why are you reading this? Just get it!

OK FINE. The osr fighting and fantasy-based system is easy to understand, only requires d6s, uses skills and 3 stats. There is a base Skill number, your natural affinity for doing things without training, Stamina, which is basically HP, and Luck, which can be used as a sort of Save Against X and for other purposes. Skills range from Running to Jousting to Gambling to Axe Fighting, Etiquette and Trapping. In general the skills are descriptive enough you know exactly how they should be used without looking things up.

So Troika can be used to run the same kinds of games you'd run with OSR DnD. So why use it over DnD? Well, I'd say it's even easier to grok than B/X for a newcomer, and quite easy for an experience GM or player to adapt to. NPC stats are easy to improv up for GMs who, like me, don't want to have to carefully create every idiot who will waylay, oppose, or aid the PCs. The system might not supplant all other OSR systems, but that's fine - it's easy enough to learn that it won't be a burden.

But the genius isn't just the system, it's what else you get: the implied setting that you can see through PC backgrounds, the spell list, gear, and NPCs.

The setting is outstanding. There is a mix of science fiction and fantasy, though the world is more fantastical and magical than science fictiony. It's not like Numenera, where all 'magic' is really science. You have demon hunters and skeptical lammasu and androids (all PC backgrounds). Wizards of various stripe, priests, dwarves, gremlin hunters, and lost invaders from other spheres. It is evocative and unique. It is a world I want to explore.

The writing is also quite funny. The Poorly Made Dwarf pc background, the flavor text for the Troll npc, many of the spells, the Tower Wizard... Sell's sense of humor is sprinkled throughout. He hasn't written a parody of OSR settings or the like; I think that what he has is perfectly playable and can portray Serious Important Things. But I can't wait to see a wizard cast Banish Spirit by explaining 'clearly, sternly, why it is impossible that the spirit could be here at this time.'

So, a cool implicit setting, good writing, and a simple system, which means you're not going to spend a lot of time memorizing or learning odd or obscure rules for various things. It's free. Get it.

This game is fantastic. Your characters will be immersed in a sprawl which provides missions, gives them enough room to try to prepare, and then relentlessly goes after them with consequences and countdown clocks.

It's Powered By The Apocalypse, but with a strong push towards running missions in a cyberpunk dystopia. So you get a unique framing device, and rules to make things work. The players are pretty much either doing Legwork to prepare for a mission, or are in the Action portion where the mission plays out. Countdown clocks for the Legwork phase impact the mission, as they represent noise the PCs make as they gear up, talk to player-generated contacts, and try to work through vague or contradictory job information. The Action clock shows the players how close their are to hosing the mission. Threats get their own clocks, as do the corporations which crouch above all this, giving the PCs jobs, hunting them, owning them. It's very easy to build in new threats from prior missions and have them haunt the PCs.

It's also a system which doesn't require a ton of preparation, even though things are a bit more structured than Apocalypse World. The playbooks are wonderful nods to various important characters in the genre (via both moves and even thanks to the list of names each one comes with). The cyberwear is useful and a great addition to the *World Engine. The game uses harm clocks and a harm move reminiscient of AW more than Dungeon World, which I think is appropriate - hit point inflation doesn't really fit the genre very well, I'd argue. And some cyberwear definitely can help take the sting out of getting hurt.

I wrote a review a while ago here and stand by that thoroughly. Basically if you want an awesome cyberpunk game, you have found one that I've gotten a lot of mileage out of. I tend not to run a mission in a single session, as the Legwork my players do becomes an adventure unto itself, but I've gotten through almost 5 missions across about 13 sessions so far. The world has been built up over time as things become interesting to people, and we're getting to the point where there are a number of hunting corporations and threats jostling for position against the players. I'm excited to find out what happens.