THE RUSTBELT: Tales of Tenacity, Depravity, and Hope
Life here is nasty, brutish, and short. The Rust slowly eats everything away. It wears a man down. Corrodes him. Changes him. Makes him do things he wouldn’t think himself capable of. If you had to, wouldn’t you?
It’s a hard world, and you gotta pay for what you want. Sometimes the price is so hideous it makes you think twice, but it might be your only chance. The Rust whispers in your ear, “C’mon, do the math.”
So, how much are you willing to pay? What are you willing to do? What are you willing to become?
You gotta go a long way in the ‘Belt to find a good man.
THE RUSTBELT is a post-apocalyptic roleplaying game featuring:
- The Blood, Sweat, & Tears Engine: a flexible and easy-to-use resolution system in which your resolve matters more than your abilities.
- The Psyche System: personality mechanics that keep the characters psychologically and emotionally realistic and compelling – no matter how inhuman they turn out to be – without taking away the player’s control.
- Player-authored stories: your characters will be pushed against the wall until they’ve revealed all their most monstrous and most admirable qualities, but the decisions are always yours to make, and the prices yours to pay. The end result is a gritty, desperate tale in the vein of The Stand, The Road, or Mad Max.
- Customization support: full guidelines for adapting the game to other settings, as well as three examples to get you started.
What some folks have said about THE RUSTBELT:
"THE RUSTBELT is lean and mean. The laissez-faire, non-balanced character creation is excellent and totally appropriate; with the right Psyche traits, a one-legged stable boy could be the most dangerous guy in town. Fights are desperate, horrible affairs. I look forward to playing again.”
- Ron Edwards, designer of Sorcerer, Spione, and S/Lay w/Me
“The Psyche System is the most elegant model for human behavior I’ve ever seen in an RPG. And I have a master’s degree in psych.”
- Jonathan Davis
“Psyche did a really good job of fleshing out all the characters even during chargen. One character started off as ‘the Hulk as a mercenary in a Western’ and turned into an immigrant who tries to buy acceptance, without sacrificing any of the player’s original concept.”
- Josh W
160-page digest-size perfect-bound B&W interior
Click the button below to buy it if you're in the US, Canada, or Mexico-ish:KNUCKLEHEADS! The Game of Classic Slapstick Comedy
KNUCKLEHEADS! is a rules-lite RPG designed to emulate classic slapstick comedy in the vein of the Three Stooges, Buster Keaton, and (especially) Laurel & Hardy.
The image below is a quote from the text, and says it all. If it sounds even remotely fun to you, then buy this game and give it a whirl.
$2.00
7-page B&W letter-size PDF, designed for home printing.
CONSTRUCTION & CONQUEST: the Game of Strategic Ingenuity
CONSTRUCTION & CONQUEST is a wargame for two or more players using LEGO building blocks and pieces.
Play alternates between phases of building your army and fortifications from LEGO, then invasions and other battles. Construction is limited by time and by resource management mechanics. Battles are handled by a simple set of rules that let you get straight to the carnage with out a bunch of memorization or math.
Added onto the basic framework are custom-written rules by you, the players, made up on the fly to add special functions to your constructions and units. As the resultant arms race pits players' ingenuity and resource management skills directly against each other, new optimal strategies in the battle phase constantly emerge and mutate through the interaction of the special rules.
Who will able to adapt the quickest and strategize for maximum conquest? Dig out your old LEGO, invite some friends over, and find out!
$2.00
5-page B&W letter-size PDF, designed for home printing.
CAFFEINE & NICOTINE LIVE ACTION ROLEPLAY is an experimental RPG inspired by the film Coffee & Cigarettes by Jim Jarmusch. Its deceptively short rules combine techniques from improv, film direction, and live action roleplaying in order to accurately model the narrative "shape" of Coffee & Cigarettes -- by using these techniques, you and your friends can produce stories just like those in C&C.
Recommended for fans of the film and improv performers, as well as jeepform fans and anyone who wants to try something new.
$2.00
3-page B&W letter-size PDF, designed for home printing
CROW'S HOARD: the Card Game of Strategic Greed, Caution, and Backstabbery
It is commonly known that certain crows gather shiny objects and hoard them in their nests. There are plenty of theories, but nobody knows exactly why they do this. Perhaps the crows do not even know. Personally, I suspect it is because crows are so intelligent that they accomplish all the daily work necessary for survival by the afternoon, so they figure out little games to divert them for the rest of the day. I can imagine that somewhere there is a crow bragging to the other crows about his shiny dime from 1940, and that another one aspires to bring home the moon one day.
I can even imagine that, had crows playing cards and the ability to shuffle, they would bet their shiny objects against each other in a game not too different from this one.CROW'S HOARD is a trick-taking card game similar in many respects to the game of Hearts. The players compete to possess the most shiny objects, and every card you catch has an impact on that goal.
With its constant upsets, reversals, and hair-trigger alliances, CROW'S HOARD is one of the craziest card games you'll ever play.
$2.00
7-page B&W letter-size PDF, designed for home printing
BTW B&W PDF PACK!
Buy all four of the above PDFs (Knuckleheads!, Caffeine & Nicotine, Construction & Conquest, and Crow's Hoard) in one go!
$8.00
Four PDFs totaling 22 pages, all B&W letter-size
