Quote from: danskmacabre;840881I think making the sandbox style rpg material with all the various tables has been an advantage for him,  as it can be used for other rpgs,  so people might buy his rpgs just for the tables,  even if they don't actually  run it.

Aiming for utility for everyone, even people who don't have any use for the system, is crucial to a small indie publisher like me. Without attachment to a major system like D&D, Pathfinder, or Fate, any product that isn't cross-compatible with a lot of other material is going to be fighting tooth and nail to get any attention.

Whenever somebody looks at a book, they have to be able to tell themselves a story of how they're going to use it. They have to be able to envision how this book is actually going to do something for them. It's easy to tell a story like "I'll use this book to generate Lovecraftiana for Call of Cthulhu or to spice up my D&D game." It's very hard to tell a story like "I'll stop playing my favorite games so I can use this specific book." Casting your net widely as a publisher costs you something in the kind of intricate effects you can get from a tightly-coupled rule system, but intricate effects that all of eight people experience isn't much of a trade for the hope of wider enthusiasm.

Quote from: RPGPundit;840605It sounds extremely interesting.

Ask Kevin for a review copy!

Silent Legions is good stuff. He's taken apart the CoC Mythos into its component parts, looked at what made what tick and created new options so when you roll up your own pantheon, there's both fresh originality, random weirdness and a strong Lovecraftian flavor.

Also, Kevin has a great sense of story elements. He gets how a GM can use broad strokes and cool bits, tailor them to the individual GM's story, setting and world and whammo! The players get a something fresh, but strongly connected to the genre.

I was reading SL again this afternoon, musing about how to combine it with SWN and whether or not I use the SWN/SL system or just use Traveller, either way my next Dark Heresy campaign will be far better for me having SineNomine's works as GM reference.

Quote from: danskmacabre;840001Stars Without Number: (Scifi in the style of Traveller)
Other Dust: (Post Apocalyptic)
Scarlet heroes: ( A one DM/player fantasy RPG set in the Red tide world).

How inter-compatible are they?  I thought Stars without Number was a very good science fiction game (a genre that I love but never gets anywhere as much love as fantasy).  Can you use the other books to enhance SWN?

While I haven't tested it in actual play, they are all, with the exception of Scarlet Heroes, intended to be directly compatible with one another. Scarlet Heroes has a different skill system, and few other small differences aside from rules that allow for it to be used to run a one player game.

Also most of the other games will at least devote some paragraphs to how to use that game with SWN, and other games.

Quote from: AxesnOrcs;841195While I haven't tested it in actual play, they are all, with the exception of Scarlet Heroes, intended to be directly compatible with one another. Scarlet Heroes has a different skill system, and few other small differences aside from rules that allow for it to be used to run a one player game.

Also most of the other games will at least devote some paragraphs to how to use that game with SWN, and other games.

Thanks.  This may be worth a closer look, then.

Quote from: Votan;841194How inter-compatible are they?  I thought Stars without Number was a very good science fiction game (a genre that I love but never gets anywhere as much love as fantasy).  Can you use the other books to enhance SWN?

Yeah SWN is the most supported of the games and it's very good.
The game mechanics are very simple, but there's a hell of a lot of supporting expanded material for it.

All the main mechanics work together absolutely fine, although each has their own stuff as well.
For example, Other Dust has the addition of Mutations, but you could just use them with SWN or Silent legions if you really wanted to.

Other Dust has a few supplements, but far less than SWN and SL, as it's new has only the core rules.

Silent legions has a madness mechanic, which you could easily just slot into OD or SWN, there's even guidelines in SL to do so.
SL also has an addition to combat called "Slaughter dice" which you roll on and if you hit a certain target, you do triple damage, but that's specific to SL , as it's horror based and I think it's there to make combat far more deadly, which is it.
But then in SL, as in Call of Cthulhu, you don't want to get into combat, as the monsters in will be very nasty.

Also, all the various RPGs for these systems have lots of Sandbox random determination for factions, quests, events and many many other things, which COULD be used with each other, depending on your campaign style.

For example, if you wanted to run a Horror style SWN, then importing madness into SWN is very easy and you might want to use some of the SL tables for horror stuff.

If you like the level, class based type RPG where damage is all done with HPs damage and doesn't have hit locations and so on and want LOTS of support for sandbox gaming then this is your game.

If you like super detailed and realistic descriptive combat (think Rolemaster critical tables, or Runequest combat maneuvers and all that), then it's not for you.
Still, even if you don't use the core systems, it's worth it just for the sandbox random tables.

I personally DO like Rolemaster, Runequest (Legend etc) for what they are, but they're very unwieldy for online play or just bringing people into RPGs.
And really, you can get the PDFs for the price of a pizza, so for me, it's a bargain.

These days I find RM and RQ just too much to remember, so I like these systems as you CAN extrapolate a a sort of realism with combat damage and the circumstances of the damage..

I thought about getting the pdf, but when i saw the price (IMO too high compared to the other games) at drivethru i changed my mind given the fact i have got CoC as well as Realms of Cthulhu on the shelves already.

Quote from: Phantom Black;841229I thought about getting the pdf, but when i saw the price (IMO too high compared to the other games) at drivethru i changed my mind given the fact i have got CoC as well as Realms of Cthulhu on the shelves already.

The Sine Nomine games have been on a few Humble bundles in the past.
I expect they'll appear again sometime. It's certainly a lot cheaper that way.

Quote from: danskmacabre;841310The Sine Nomine games have been on a few Humble bundles in the past.
I expect they'll appear again sometime. It's certainly a lot cheaper that way.

  Not to mention that we're probably only a week or two away from DriveThruRPG's annual Christmas in July sale.

Quote from: Spinachcat;841159Ask Kevin for a review copy!

I figure he'll get around to sending me one, since he's pretty regularly sent me his stuff.

Quote from: Armchair Gamer;841311Not to mention that we're probably only a week or two away from DriveThruRPG's annual Christmas in July sale.

Hmm. Hope that coincides with the Dark Albion PoD showing up on DTRPG.