19th Level

With a two week break between classes at Brandeis, I had a little bit of time to goof off and make use of the PS4 I received as a birthday gift last month. I finally made my way through Naughty Dog's The Last of Us . This isn't really a review of the game, there's about a gazillion out there on the internet - though I will give a brief overview of it. I'll also note there are spoilers about the game in this post so if you've not played it and want to play it unspoiled, you should read no farther. A bit unlikely for a game released in 2013, but just in case... The Last of Us tells the tale of Joel and Ellie in a post-apocalyptic world. Joel is a survivor of the original outbreak in his late forties. Ellie is 14 and for unknown reasons, is immune to the infection. In September of 2013 a mutant Cordyceps fungus wipes out civilization.  Cordyceps is a real kind of fungus and is a parasite, with some species able to alter the host's behavior. Luckily for us, ...

Free? Free is good. I think we can ignore scurvy pirates. Most RPGs are available for "free" if you're willing to go to some sketchy sites and be willing to justify doing so to yourself. Rather we'll be focusing on free RPGs that the creators intended to be free... I'm also going to be focusing on free complete games, not free teasers or introductions. For this, I'm going to go back to Evil Hat's Fate Core  RPG. You can go to RPGNow right now and get yourself a copy of it and pay absolutely nothing for it. That is a great deal. You get an absolutely complete game that you can use for years. I'll also give a few honorable mentions. Stars Without Number - A game I'm itching to try someday - almost went with it in place of our current Star Wars game. Kevin Crawford's games do a lot better than tell you "oh set your game in a sandbox" - they give you a ton of tools and awesome backgrounds to do so. In Stars Without Number  yo...

One thing I've liked about Sine Nomine Publishing is they take the adage that old school RPGs should be all about the "sandbox" (i.e. players go wherever they'd like on the map with no predefined plot) and make games and supplements that actually help you do that. As I've built up a modest collection of 1970s and early 80s RPG products I have seen there were a ton of products designed to help GMs do just that. System-wide,  Stars Without Number  is pretty similar to early D&D incarnations. It has three classes - Expert, Psychic, and Warrior. It has a simple, yet effective, skill system of which, not surprisingly, the Expert is the best at. Where it really shines is a default setting which is really made for adventure. The idea is there were two waves of human expansion. The first of which made use of spike drives which allowed faster than light travel in bursts - basically you had to start it from the edge of a solar system and had to turn it off at...