Troopers from five warring factions stranded on the barren world of Tundari, cut off from your mother ships - will you survive? Can you regroup? Will you forge a truce with troopers from the other factions who are trapped on this planet with you? And what of the ancient secrets of the Xen race which once inhabited Tundari? This exciting new RPG from the creator of traditional fantasy RPG Omnifray uses a simple mix-and-match character generation system, five core stats and a d10+stat v. d10+stat core mechanic. Don your all-environments carapace and your hover pack, adjust your energy shield settings, pick up your plasma blast rifle, stride forth, explore and do battle!

Arion Games is pleased to announce two Paper Miniature releases just before Christmas.

The first is a set of Post-Apocalyptic figures, with road warriors, cops and other strange denizens of a future wasteland. In addition, this set also includes 8 vehicles that travel, and fight on, the long open roads.

The second set is a SciFi Artillery set. Packed with Heavy cannon, tanks, assault aircraft, turrets etc, and complete with 15 engineers to operate them, this set will really beef up the destructive power of your Futuristic army.

Available from our online store, YGN, RPGNow, E23 and Fantasy Download, both are priced at only $3.

The SKETCH system, a game designed to be adapated to any genre and setting, is now available as a free download from www.farsightgames.com. SKETCH games are designed for one-off, single night adventures, for when gaming groups are taking a break between campaigns, or if a few players want to do a fast off-the-cuff adventure with no intention of getting involved in a long campaign. The simplicity of the rules and character creation is such that a game can be set up in minutes. The rules are easy to use, requiring only the use of a single six-sided dice for all aspects of the game.

Postmortem Studios are having a Christmas sale over at RPGNow.com A special winter-holiday discount of 50% on everything with particular attention to Clipart Critters, the 100th of which was posted for sale today. The sale runs from now until New Year.
http://www.rpgnow.com/index.php?manufacturers_id=384?affiliate_id=50144

Out now is issue 4 of ODDS E-magazine, available for FREE from www.farsightgames.com. Download it now from stores.lulu.com/FarsightGames. In this issue:

THE SCEAPTUNE GAMES RUNEQUEST COMPETITION
AN INTERVIEW WITH TIM BANCROFT
LET ME DO IT!
CREATING INTERESTING NPCs
MACABRE

Yes, it’s that time of year when you can order your UK Role Players clothing - well, t-shirts and polo shirts. This year I’m working it a little differently (to save time for all concerned - mainly me though). Rather than everyone send me their details and me make a combined order, which is then sent to me for me to forward on to everyone, I’ve decided to cut out the middle-man… i.e., me! I’ve arranged it so you can order direct from the supplier (Pektek - the same company I’ve used for all my embroided clothing needs).

Yes, you heard right: you can get a paperback of the Collective Endeavour Journal for a mere £6 by following this link here: www.lulu.com/content/4703368. You can also download the PDF for free from RPGNow.

Hurry, while stocks last!*

* OK, the book is printed on demand so it’ll never be out of stock, but Collective Endeavour can’t guarantee how long we can offer this for £6.

Kithran spoted a nice little video on the BBC news website that might interest some people - from watching it it looks like it was all filmed at Gen Con UK so you could try the old game of trying to spot yourself.

news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7732438.stm

darrell has also spotted a more in-depth report on the BBC here news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7729189.stm

Farsight Games, the people behind the ODDS ezine, have released their free roleplaying game, MACABRE. Utilising the SKETCH roleplaying system and only a single d6, MACABRE is a game about witchcraft.

Collective Endeavour have announced the release, at Dragonmeet, of an 88 page trade paperback Journal costing £6. This short collection contains a selection of excellent and exciting articles, relating to a variety of games. There are new rules, new setting elements, new characters, and above all, new ideas for use with some of the games they publish.

It took a lot longer than I expected (4.5 hours rather than 2 hours) but the changeover is finally finished! Aside from, what I think is, a nicer and easier on the eyes design, I’ve also created a group on Flickr for us all to share our photographs. Anyone can join, but I ask that only relevant pictures are added to the group. Basically, keep them role playing oriented. You can see that last four to be added in the sidebar - hurry up and add some or you’ll be stuck with looking at four pictures of me! The group can be found at http://www.flickr.com/groups/ukroleplayers.

So, I’m almost done with the changes. The forum is back up and running and I’m working away at putting everything in the right place here in the front-end. Let me know what you think

I’m going to be taking the website offline for a period tomorrow night (starting at around 7.30pm) while I make some changes. It shouldn’t take too long (a couple of hours or so I hope) and you should, hopefully, like the changes

Out now for free is issue 3 of ODDS – The Tabletop Roleplaying E-magazine. It can be downloaded by clicking on the link below:
http://stores.lulu.com/store.php?fAcctID=2780215
In this month’s Science Fiction Special we have:
THE ERIC GIBSON INTERVIEW - where he talks about his history with roleplaying games and what happened with West End Games.
BOBA FETT - PORTRAIT OF [...]

Not directly related to roleplaying, but an important announcement nonetheless from Topps, the company that owns WizKids:
The Topps Company announced today that WizKids will immediately cease operations and discontinue its product lines.
Scott Silverstein, CEO of Topps, said “This was an extremely difficult decision. While the company will still actively pursue gaming initiatives, we feel it [...]

pedr reports that D&D Insider went subscription-only today and gave us the bad news that VAT is charged at 15% on the subscription prices (due to the EU Digital VAT Directive). The US$ prices are (with UK£ prices in brackets) are:
$9.14 (£5.36) per month for a month-to-month subscription
$22.94 (£13.46, or £4.49 per month) for a [...]

Talisman Studios is celebrating the anniversary of Suzerain, our Origins Award Nominee RPG. And we’re celebrating in style, with a couple of great bits of news for roleplay fans everywhere:
Suzerain is now free from our online shop! That’s $0.00 for the Suzerain rule book. The economy’s getting tougher and none of us has much money [...]

Talisman Studios has completed its project to bring all its roleplay books to print. All the main books of the Origins Award nominated Suzerain and Shaintar game lines are available as both PDF and print books via the website at www.talisman-studios.com with immediate effect.
“This is a great day for fans of Suzerain and Shaintar” said [...]

Jonathan Hicks, owner of Farsight Games, publishes a free mostly-monthly e-zine called ODDS and is looking for contributors.
ODDS is a home for those old articles you never finished, or never published, or had published a long time ago. So if you have any old work then send it to him - he can’t pay you, [...]

Duty & Honour is now available. Designed by Neil Gow and illustrated by Peter Frain, Duty & Honour is a game of adventure and romance in Wellington’s army during the Peninsular War. Inspired by the adventures of Richard Sharpe and Matthew Hervey amongst others, you take the role of soldiers and officers, fighting their way [...]

Furnace 2008. The Garrison Hotel, Sheffield. UK
Saturday 18th - Sunday 19th October 2008.
rpgfurnace.com
Furance is a small two day convention for 70 attendees held in a former gaolhouse of Hillsborough Barracks in Sheffield, UK.
Call of Cthulhu, HeroQuest, RuneQuest, Savage Worlds, and plenty of other game systems will be played at this convention.
A colour Convention Book [...]

Saturday, October 18th sees Mongoose Publishing holding its second Babylon 5 Open Day at its offices in Swindon. In attendance will be Miss Claudia Christian (Commander Susan Ivanova), available to sign books, chat about her time filming Babylon 5, and even playing the odd game!
We will have events running throughout the day, including;
BABYLON 5 RPG [...]

Daring Tales of Adventure #05: Sky Pirates of the Caribbean
Deep in the Bermuda Triangle trouble awaits our heroes!
In recent months a large number of cargo planes and ships have gone missing whilst traveling through the mysterious area now known as the Bermuda Triangle.
Reports of these disappearances have been kept secret from the wider populace in [...]

Bloodsucker: The Juice is the player’s guide and companion for Bloodsucker: The Angst, written by newcomer Ian Warner. It contains new cliques, new professions, new powers and an assortment of other goodies to enhance your Bloodsucker: The Angst games and take them away from the original intentions of the game, just as happened with A [...]

EvilGaz brought up GM Toolkits in a thread about winging games and I felt it deserved a thread to itself. So why not pop across here and let us all know if you have one yourself and, if you do, what you have in it. Likewise, if you don’t have one, let us know why.
Perhaps [...]