So far we’ve explored lots of exciting games that have been launched into the world from Aotearoa. Look at them all! So shiny! Now, to bring our tour of the game design side of KiwiRPG to a close, we just need to look over our shoulder – yes! You see it now! I know, it’s big, isn’t it? That’s right, it’s heaps and heaps of Kiwi-made material for other games!
As Chief Brody might say, we’re going to need a bigger blog tour series. Well tough nuggins Chief Brody! You’re gonna compare scars and fight that shark in the one blogpost remaining to you, and you’re gonna like it!
The Dargons and the Dungons
Into the 5th edition of D&D? It’s only the biggest game in the world. If you like the 5e-ness of it all, KiwiRPG has a few things for you to check out:
- Paul Bimler has been releasing a series of incredibly well-received Solo Gamebooks on DM’s Guild.
- Also on DM’s Guild, you’ll find work by DM Challenge finalist Brad Thompson (Cutting Words) , and YouTube phenom AJ Pickett, and Rollan Schott, and *self-promo alert* me.
- You can find Sam Mannell‘s contributions in Matt Colville’s MCDM products, including the Arcadia magazine!
- And Apothecary Press has a busy site full of advice and also a storefront for 5E material
- gothHoblin has an adventure and a Bard subclass (find it also in the itch bundle!)
- Kelly Whyte has a gothic horror adventure (find it also in the itch bundle!)
Away from 5th edition, in the broader dungeon-type dragon-ish scene:
- David Schwartz has amassed a very long list of credits for his work on Pathfinder. Like, loooong.
- Scrap Princess is a hugely respected creator in the old-school scene, perhaps best known for iconic releases Deep Carbon Observatory and Veins of the Earth but with lots and lots of other credits as well…
- Simon Carryer just dropped a “fan remix” of a legendary D&D adventure module, grab it free from his website! And while you’re there check out his other adventures, his compendium of rules, and a random dungeon generator, which is I think the smartest and most sophisticated and successful random dungeon generator ever made. (And there have been a lot of attempts over the years!)
- Karl Zone has a patreon for maps suitable for any edition
There! Lots of dungons for your dargons!!
Every other heckin’ thing
SF game Mothership is one of the hottest things in gaming right now, and making epic contributions to it (the one at that link is just the start) is Liam Stevens a.k.a. Toa Tabletop! (Also Mothershipping it up: that very same Scrap Princess who was just mentioned a few paragraphs ago!)
Malcolm Harbrow has been steadily releasing amazing stuff for science fiction game Uncharted Worlds
Marcus Bone! Where to even start on Marcus – years of highest-quality free content you can just go and download and use right now! Call of Cthulhu and Conspiracy X and Open D6 and The Esoterrorists and so much more!
Grant Robinson has been knocking out Shadowrun material for a long time, contributing to loads of books, chummer! (ED: Do Shadowrun people still say “Chummer”? Check before publishing – NO DON’T NO TIME KEEP GOING)
Tim Denee’s mapping for Blades in the Dark (in the DriveThru bundle!) is legendary and that’s just a kind of iceberg-tip of what he’s contributed to the RPG scene.
Who’s that in the contributor list for the Brindlewood Bay Kickstarter, currently cruising past the quarter-million mark with weeks to go? Why it’s Donna Giltrap, another veteran of the Kapcon SDC discussed in the last games post!
*second self-promo alert* I wrote some books for the Doctor Who RPG, good stuff if you like Doctor Who. (I like Doctor Who.) But hey lets do a REAL deep cut and link to these articles by Kelly Buchanan for Time Lord (the 1990s Doctor Who RPG from Virgin Publishing), published in legendary DW fanzine TSV.
*final self-promo alert* The biggest thing I’ve been working on is a|state 2nd edition, for Handiwork Games. This is a reboot & reworking of early-2000s cult hit a|state, about hardscrabble troublemakers in a sprawling and haunted sci-fi cityscape, and honestly it is an incredible project.
Do they even go to this school?
Paul Cockburn was there at the ground floor of Warhammer FRP, and has his mitts all over iconic 80s RPG mag IMAGINE, among other contributions. He’s been in New Zealand for years and years so does that make the Old World part of KiwiRPG? No? How about the D&D world of Pelinore then? Maybe a little bit? It’s in the blogpost now, too late, hahaha!
Colin Chapman, best known for free RPG Atomic Highway. has a long list of RPG freelance credits on amazing games you know. He’s now in New Zealand too! What does that signify exactly? I dunno! But he’s in the blogpost now too!
Malcolm Craig wrote Hot War in the cafes of Wellington! Ha ha, he’s in the blogpost too! You can’t stop me! Nothing can stop anything! It’s the climactic action sequence, the shark is eating the boat, no time for details now!
Wait, that’s it?
Is it really time to stop?
Yes definitely time to stop you are out of control plus it’s the last day
ok ok fine
But only with this final note: that’s definitely not all. There are gonna be other people out there making stuff and getting it out into the world, and they are going to be from Aotearoa, and I don’t know about them yet. Kiwis connect out to the global creative scene in all kinds of ways and, because we often don’t do much shouting about it to each other, their fellow Kiwis might not even know they’re doing it.
So expect this list to grow, as we find out about more people. (It might not literally grow, I’m not committing to editing this post or anything. But it will grow… in my mind.)
(Plus I might remember ones I’ve forgotten, whoops, I bet I’ve forgotten someone really obvious too and I will feel bad about it.)
Well, that’s it then. The last day of KiwiRPG Week 2022. A good time to stop, even though there’s more to talk about, always.
(Like, hey, what about discussion & consideration & criticism of gaming? Like the long-running Gametime group blog on livejournal, or (Kapcon SDC veteran!) Alasdair Sinclair’s epic critical work – his Brindlewood Bay review that’s actually a multi-part deep dive into the nature of investigative roleplaying is a masterwork I reckon.)
(Stop it morgue, you can’t introduce a whole new subject area in the last few paragraphs of a four-post journey!)
I hope you’ve enjoyed this tour. I am sure you now have many more tabs open in your internet browser, where they will wait for months until you lose them in a computer crash; or maybe you’ll read them now?
Read them now, I reckon. It’s what the shark would do.
– morgue and the KiwiRPG crew