(Feel free to read that subject in Jerry Seinfeld's voice)
Ok, so a while back someone here recommended me a game called Syma, a game which bills itself as "Incense & Iron Dungeoncrawling", inspired by the style of fantasy you get in Berserk, Dark Souls, etc. It looked interesting, but I never got around to buying it because it uses a system from the "Breathless" RPG, which just didn't sound good to me.
Today I was in a Half-Priced Books, and saw what I thought was that. It was only $7, so I thought "what the hell, I'll pick it up and have a look." Imagine my surprise then, when I read it and found out it was a different game. I bought a copy of "Sacrifice: Incense and Iron Roleplaying". I'd forgotten the name and just remembered the tagline. I'm not annoyed by my purchase. Sacrifice actually looks like being quite a good game. I'll post a review here once I finish reading it.
But I am confused. Related games? Different editions of the same game? Apparently not. Different authors, different publishers; even different underlying systems (Sacrifice is OSR). Just wondering if there's a story here I don't know about. Is someone copying someone else's homework? Was there a copyright dispute? Is "incense and iron" some kind of weird niche genre label I was unaware of? Very curious.
There's this. I have no idea if it has anything to do with anything beyond the phrase incense and iron.
This version of Sacrifice is also supposed to be inspired by Berserk.
Haven't looked at Sacrifice but I have played a couple of other games the same guy wrote - Ker Nethalas is pretty good and Across a Thousand Dead Worlds is really cool.
Under Ashen Skies has my interest too - survival horror solo RPG inspired by Hellraiser and Silent Hill and Junji Ito.