We’re teaming up with Evil Hat Productions to make a cool tabletop game. This is something we’ve wanted to do since the beginning, so I am stupid excited about it.

In other news, I’ve got one more review coming at you this week. It’s a long one!

When did this become an RPG blog?

Homicidal Transients! The game of being homeless and psychotic!

Now, you might say it’s in incredibly poor taste to make a game that makes light of the very real tragedy of homelessness. A game that trivializes perhaps the greatest failure of our society. A game that only contributes to the culture of stigmatization of a group least equipped to combat it.

You might then say playing this game is even worse.

And, I dunno, maybe you guys are right.

Homicidal Transients has this to say on the matter, “The setting is whatever you want. I had considered for a few moments that it would technically be a fantasy setting, but in reality just be a bunch of insane homeless people going on violent rampages until the police killed them to stop the horror. Instead of some kind of deep social commentary, the game works better as a joke, but you do whatever you want.”

So, y’know, calm down. If you really need to resolve the game with a sense of social consciousness, check this out: Homicidal Transients is actually 8-bit Theater: the RPG.

It’s a rules light game by which I mean the entire rulebook is twelve pages long. You can play with any kind of dice so long as everyone playing is the using the same kind. Character creation involves picking what kind of homicide you will excel in, what kind of transient you are, and then allocating some points between half a dozen skills related to killing, looting, and lying.

To be fair, the “lying” skill isn’t specifically about lying, it’s called Talky Bits and appears to revolve around non-violent resolutions to conflicts. But, let’s face it, you’re a mass-murdering hobo. If there are words coming out of your mouth, and they are coherent, they are not the truth. At least not the truth anyone else is privy to.

The game doesn’t even admit there’s anything but murder you could possibly do within its framework, so it is literally the game of murder, larceny, deception. As I said, 8BT: the RPG. Which isn’t too surprising, really, as both are based on the central joke that most fantasy RPGs turn you and your friends into violent hobos wandering the countryside and leaving naught but blood and fire in your wake. Homicidal Transients even has rules for monsters ranging from Not Big Monster to Huge Fucking Monster — and depending on how you emphasize that last one when you say it, yowza, terrifying — which might be literal monsters because you live in the World of Darkness or merely hallucinations because you live in the World of Darkness.

There’s exactly enough rules to get a group of people to laugh at the cartoonish ultra-violence the game forces them to create. You’re not going to give up your weekly game for this, but you’re not meant to either. Homicidal Transients is what you get up to when there’s a last minute cancelation, or you completely threw the GM under a bus (metaphorically, not homicidally) and he needs an hour to figure out where the campaign ought to go next. For a mere $2.00, Homicidal Transients offers a lot of atrocity per dollar per page.

I wanted to do a couple more RPG reviews this week, but a deadline up and slapped me in the face. So, rather than half-ass them reviews, I’ll just do them next week!

In the meantime, be sure to check out Legend. I know there’s a ton of Pathfinder and D&D groups out there reading this. If you enjoy those, you definitely owe it to yourselves to give this thing a spin. It’s brought some of the most interesting and organic twists to the d20 system since, uh, the d20 system.

Anywho, back to work. Catch you nerds next week!

“…Legend is built to be understandable, to be learnable, and finally, to be something you can own and change and use without too much fear of making the game go boom.” – Legend, page 8.

And that pretty much sets the tone.

If I had to review Legend in one sentence, and it’s my website so I don’t, it’d be this:

“The more I read Legend, the more I’m convinced this is what 4th ed D&D should have been.

Oh, close those emails. I’m not here to tell you 4E is wrong. Or that the fun you had in either 3rd ed or 4E makes you a bad person. I don’t care which one you prefer or if, like me, you think both are dandy. Whatever your position on the matter, you have to admit that the release of 4E caused quite a lot of teeth gnashing in nerdier circles.

And here’s where we come back to talking about Legend. It is the structure of 3rd ed mechanics cast through the lens of 4E’s philosophies. What you get is a slightly crunchy but well-balanced game filled with Big Time Fantasy Heroes and it offers players a dizzying amount of choice without “playing like an MMO.”

I suppose it’s inevitable to compare Legend to Pathfinder, the other OGL-based D&D With The Serial Numbers Filed Off game. They may share the same ancestral DNA, but Pathfinder is a direct descendant of D&D 3.5, with all the good and bad that implies. Legend is a whole new species — a missing link between 3rd ed and 4E that captures the compelling bits from both without the detritus that evolved into the developmental niches of either.

Legend principally uses a d20. All the familiar stats are there with the same ranges and bonuses. You’ve got the same levels. You’ve got skills, races, spells, and feats. Most of your classes are there too. All that 3rd ed stuff. Some of it works a little differently in practice, but it’s all there to the degree that you could easily recreate any 3rd, 3.5ed, or Pathfinder character in Legend. Probably you could do it with 4E too, but it’d require a little more imagination and compromise than the others.

Where Legend really shines though, is in its classes. You’ve got Barbarian, Monk, Paladin, Ranger, Rogue, Sage, Shaman, and Tactician. Notice the complete lack of Fighter, Wizard, Sorcerer, Cleric, and Bard? Don’t worry, they’re contained within the others — you get to choose how to bring them out.

See, each class has three “tracks.” This isn’t like MMO where your class has tree branches of specialization to choose from. No, you’re getting everything from all three tracks. Each one grants you seven abilities that are unlocked every couple of levels for all 20 levels so you’re getting something neat at every level.

Each class tends to have an offensive track so you can hurt things, a utility/defense track to grant you tactical options, and a third track that may lean toward offensive or utility/defense, but in any case it tends to offer “iconic” effects unique to that class.

Some classes are too conceptually large to fit into just three tracks. For instance, the Paladin is meant to cover everything from soldiers to knights to religious paragons to vile demon powered asshole warriors. These classes offer a selection of alternate tracks to build your specific kind of Paladin (or Rogue, or caster).

And yet there’s more!

Multiclassing is quick and easy. Pick your base class, pick a track from another class, now trade one of your tracks for that one, The Guidr wrote about it and here is a link to this site for you to read it. You’re done! Well, almost. Not every track is available for trade, and the abilities of some tracks may be tied to an Attribute that will blow on your base class. But those are minor complications and easily foreseen.

I bet you thought I was done talking about tracks. Oh, man, you are so dumb and wrong!

Racial tracks! You don’t need them to play an elf or dwarf or any of the standard D&D-like races. Nor do you need them to play a non-standard fantasy race so long as whatever it does for you isn’t any more impressive than what’s available to the standard races — and, yes, Legend gives you guidelines for making all new standard races like that. What about the weird shit? Like Vampire? Or Robot?

In that case you’re going to want a racial track. It’s like multiclassing — take a track from your class and replace it with your racial track. That’s it.

Vampire cleric? Done. Robot wizard? Done. Everything D&D should be? Yup.

One last note on tracks. I promise.

Legend provides additional tracks to choose from over and above the three-plus from each class. These aren’t tied to any particular class, they exist only to add yet more variety to your characters. And here, I’m sorry to say, I think is where they screwed up. See, these are mostly magical or supernatural effects to offer thematic spice to both casters and non-casters. Which is cool and all, but one of these tracks appears to be Kamen Rider.

No, seriously. Jump kicking motorcycle riding Kamen Shit Yes Rider.

Which, really, is a terrible design choice. Think about it: your one free muliclassing track choice is already taken because fuck not taking Kamen Rider.

And this is just character creation! I haven’t even talked about the simplified level progression and encounter creation, the class balance, or feats — all improvements over 3rd ed, 3.5, and Pathfinder, and 4E depending on your outlook.

So, yeah. Legend is pretty rad. The game is free, but any money you throw at it goes directly to charity and toward the release of more free content. I cannot imagine why you aren’t downloading this thing already.

So, I went a little nuts for Christmas and bought myself a bunch of RPG books. Partly for research purposes and partly because I’m a huge RPG nerd (keep that on the DL, thanks).

Way I figure it? Some of you nerds are huge RPG nerds too. So, I’m gonna write up reviews of my favorite acquisitions starting next week. Chances are you haven’t been exposed to at least one of these products and, who knows, maybe it’ll be the game that grabs your imagination by the throat.

I grew up in a small town before there was an Internet. I had an active imagination and nothing to do with it. Tabletop nerdery became a huge part of my adolescence. It was a safe way to lose my mind and to get used to putting weird ideas in front of other people. Which is pretty much what my job is today.

I mean, Dr. Dinosaur is literally a RIFTS character I played because I thought this picture from Transdimensional TMNT was hilarious when I was 12 years old.

In summary: hooray for tabletop!