Three from BTRC

I'm a fan of the stuff coming out of BTRC, and that's a problem, given that I have a limited monthly budget for game purchases that will be reduce further when my son begins schooling.

Despite this, Greg Porter still manages to come out with intriguing settings statted out with his own universal role-playing system EABA. Let me share a few of the ones I'm hankering to play.

Steampunk

The newest release is the long awaited Verne! Let's take a look at the description blurb:

Men of steel in the age of steam. Victorian science fiction and steampunk for EABA. Battle dirigibles, Cavorite, steamtroops, dinosaurs, Martians, Selenites, mad scientists, clacking Babbage engines, the works. Verne starts off with the historical Victorian Era and then merges it with the fiction of Jules Verne, H.G.Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs and others to create a seamless alternate history that the adventurers get to shape and be part of. Verne can be as stiff-upper-lip fictional or Victorian Era grimy as you like, with detailed historical and cultural information, half a dozen adventures and numerous plot-centered NPC's and gadgets.

Ooh, a steampunk must have. Especially with the free Verne character creation software.

Sideways in Time

Timelords is a fascinating time travel setting in the vein of both Doctor Who and Sliders.

The Designers invented time travel to escape the fading of the Milky Way some billions of years from now...only to find their extinction in the distant past. As the unwitting inheritors of their unfathomable technology, humanity can now travel through time and dimension, shaping not only history, but histories to suit their whim.

Your adventurers possess the key genetic sequences needed to activate Designer technology. This would normally be a good thing, but the temporal fugitive using you as bait for his unrelenting pursuer didn't tell you this ahead of time. He just dumped you into an alternate dimension and disappeared in a flash of light.

Now, you have to figure out how to Jump and how to survive in order to get home again.

But when you learn to Jump timelines and dimensions, will you even want to go home again?

Establishing a campaign is probably a headache, but most game sessions will probably deal with alternate pasts, presents and futures being battled over by the various Timelords and their offspring. Also, I like the rationale of dealing with the grandfather paradox and how conflicting timelines can be handled by factions.

Space Opera

Mentioned this one before, but Fires of Heaven is one I'm still hoping to get it soon. Should be fun to loot for material for a Stars Without Number campaign as well.

A fragile peace. A decade ago, the United Worlds and Vorn were at war. Just as we never knew why they attacked, we never knew why they withdrew from U.W. space, but given the losses suffered, we were glad they did.

The Vorn remain a weight on the minds of U.W. military planners, but life goes on for everyone else. From the domes covering the frozen wastes of Tawhirimatea to the lush jungles of Yewel, humans the other races of the U.W. live, work and squabble on dozens of inhabited worlds, deal with the ever-changing Jodoni demenses, wonder about the aloof, cryptically prescient Ethereans, and worry about what was important enough to the Vorn to have them retreat when their victory was nearly certain.

And that's it for this weekend!