#R.Talsorian

[demon-of-side-quest-hell]

Alex Eggleston is canon to cyberpunk 2077 now...

I'm yiiking out right now

What the fuck is life

#yiik: a postmodern rpg #yiik #alex yiik #leave the demon to its demons #leave the demon to its fandoms #i'm not explaining this connection to y'all. Do the research please #I need someone else to confirm that they independently came to this conclusion #If any of you YIIKheads out there need a start #Check the official R.Talsorian games site #I'm not tagging this as Cyberpunk because holy fuck this post is not for them

[haveyouplayedthisttrpg]

Have you played MEKTON ?

By Mike Pondsmith / R.Talsorian Games

Anime Mecha The TTRPG

purple-haired pilots of gigantic humanoid robots fighting for humanity and living...complicated romances.

#ttrpg #tabletop rpg #poll #poll time #usa #1980s #Mekton

[peteramthor]

Another sneak peak at Blue Moon from R.Talsorian Games.

#blue moon #ttrpg #roleplaying #ttrpgs #cyberpunk #scifi

[neondreams2145]

"Fads swept the youth of the sprawl at the speed of light. Entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly." -Williams Gibson, Neuromancer

Art by the wonderful people over at R.Talsorian games

#cyberpunk #cyberpunk aesthetic #quoteoftheday #book quotes #cyberpunk red #never fade away #neuromancer #netrunner #internet culture

[thegaminggang]

#Cyberpunk RED #Monster Fight Club

[on-a-lucky-tide]

a lil birdy told me the next one shot dnd game on the bog may be witcher themed. youve talked about rpg witcher before so i thought you might be interested. theres still room for a player or two to join.

*happy squeals*

Yes! I'd love to join. Must make a note of it.

R.Talsorian Games just released A Book of Tales as well!

I can't wait to get my grubby hands on it. ^^

#rawrkinanswers #Anonymous #thanks Anon

[whoisthatwitcher]

Junod of Belhaven

Race: Witcher Aliases: “of Belhaven” is an assumed sobriquet. He is not from Belhaven. Loyalty: Bear School

First, a moment to introduce the Bear School: 

From The Witcher's Journal (R.Talsorian TTRPG):

The Bear School has a reputation for being huge, hefty and hairy, much like their namesake. As their founder, Arnaghad, is said to be 9 hands wide at the shoulder- not sure if that's just part of what makes up most Bears who survive the mutations or just the rumors that surround them. While the Viper school is known for its beginnings in betrayal, the Bear school's beginnings were the same. Arnaghad was the first to break the Order of Witchers. Their keep was far south; in the Amell Mountains. They were known as kinslayers, though infighting between schools was generally considered not worth it. They were estranged brothers, not bitter enemies. Gwent disagrees, however, saying meetings rarely end without bloodshed.

From Gwent: 

Their armor: Quilted gambeson, Heavy mail that extends all the way to the knees, plate armor spauldrons. It's tank armor- meant to endure blows, for melee attack. They were often found in Skellige, one even featured in the Ballad of Torgeir the Red. 

Bears were said to be loners, avoiding even those of their own school once they've grown and been released onto the path. They abandoned Haern Caduch rather than fight for it against a mob of peasants- though Gwent points out that the secrecy of its location is notable, as the slaughters of the Wolf and Cat school are infamous on the continent. It's implied (Thronebreaker) that the mutations have drastically neutralized their emotions/feelings- Possibly being why it was so easy for them to abandon the keep. 

- Ivo of Belhaven, Thronebreaker. Re: Witcher motivations Junod we mostly hear about from Ivo. Junod apparently liked the sound of Ivo's sobriquet, and decided to use it as well- becoming Junod of Belhaven. The reasoning being that Junod did not expect the smaller witcher to live very long, so 'stealing' his sobriquet wouldn't be an issue. However, it was Junod's life that was cut short. In May, 1243 Junod seached out the grandmaster smith Tyen'sail to forge him a set of the Grandmaster Ursine Armor. However, he lost all his money gambling so needed work in order to pay for it. He took a contract from Charité Gontran de Tufo, and after research headed to the caves the following day.

He carves this bear medallion on the walls, leaving the following warning:

 Warning! Buildings around here have been collapsing because a monster’s dug tunnels all over the place. Not sure yet what kind of beast it is. Don’t come after me. And don’t wipe my symbols off the walls, because I need them to find my way out.

He was ill-prepared for this fight, and regretted accepting the contract, as Geralt finds out from his journal. He did try to complete it, but fell to the Shaelmaar. In Blood and Wine, you can collect the diagrams that the fallen witcher left behind.

Junod is remembered as being as big as a mountain, with a beard that would put a Dwarf Elder to shame. He was also not one to hide his thoughts, but spoke plainly and candidly. He also apparently "haggled like a fishwife".

Gwent Flavor Text:

Rumour has it he was born of an unusual love between a lady giant and one VERY brave dwarf. Gwent Voice Lines: 

Well, as long as you’re sinking, might as well walk on the bottom.  Dammit.. Should never have taken this contract.  Ye never know which contract’s gonna kill yeh.  Big fella... easy.... Size don’t matter? Sounds like somethin’ a midget would say.   (Author’s Note: Midget is a slur. Please do not use it.) 

#Junod of Belhaven #Junod #Bear School #Gwent #Games

[mechanicalinertia]

STMPD Recommends Bubblegum Crisis Fanfiction - Resources: The Licensed Bubblegum Crisis RPG Books

No. Not my own RPG. That's... in a state of transition. I broke a bunch of stuff in it and will probably need to get back to it someday to fix it. Not high on my priority list.

And no, not the Shadowrun Second Edition Partial Conversion drafted up by Neo No Armor Against Fate's Shawn Hagen. Apparently Shawn maintains that his RPG conversion is better, said he was able to dissect the combat easily on Usenet back in the day. And he might very well be right in terms of mechanics, except, oh, wait, probably not, because it's Shadowrun, amirite folks?

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week.

No, I don't claim to make any defenses for the BGC RPG as an RPG book, and I'll explain what I mean in a bit. I will, however, argue that these sterling little books, published in the two years before R. Talsorian went dormant for nearly two decades (cyberpunk 3.0 notwithstanding), are hands-down the best 'guides' to Crisis 2032 you could ever want. If you're writing fiction in 2032, and maybe you're pressed for ideas, I say give these three books, each shorter than the last, a read...

Which you can do electronically, for free, right here.

This is going to take awhile, isn't it? Well, yeah, we're talking a few hundred pages of small-font text and some really good settei (concept art) serving as the pictures, some of which saw no reproduction outside Japan at all. So, like the multi-part epic rant I've had brewing in my drafts folder for the past half a year, let's break it down into sections. We'll start with

DON'T ACTUALLY PLAY BUBBLEGUM CRISIS: MEGATOKYO 2033 THE ROLEPLAYING GAME: ARU PEE GEE NO DENSETSU

For context, and this is kind of an interesting story: R.Talsorian Games, the primary publisher behind the OGBGCRPG (OG for short) made its fame on two big product lines.

First there was wargame / RPG hybrid Mekton, pioneered by Mike Pondsmith back in the eighties as a mecha fighting game, in the halycon days when most anime watchers got fansubbed tapes from conventions or were watching rebranded Voltronesques on Saturday mornings. Anime fandom as we know it, or even knew it in the nineties, just did not exist, and here's Pondsmith drawing up a whole fucking wargame to do it. The most recent edition circa the nineties was Mekton Zeta, which also had the mecha-building sourcebook Mekton Zeta Plus.

The other was Cyberpunk 2013, released in 1988, which was essentially a street level adaptation of Mekton's mechanics (called 'Interlock' 'cause all the systems could, e-hem, interlock), that got a cool sourcebook or two (including one inspired by cyberpunk classic Hardwired that was written by the novel's author) before getting a second edition in like '89 or '90. That's Cyberpunk 2020 - that's what put R.TAL on the map, that's what I wrote a shitty fanfic crossing with BGC about (It wasn't hard to do), that's what became Cyberpunk 2077, and that's also what became Cyberpunk RED once R.Tal got money from CDPR to make a new edition.

With me so far? I bet you're thinking, Kyle, "gosh and golly gee wilikers so they put their anime system together with their cyberpunk system, because all those parts interlocked just like you said, and they made Bubblegum Crisis!"

And oh, my sweet summer child, how your eyes are shut.

Yeah... So, the OG is actually run on a system called Fuzion, which blends R.Tal's loose network of systems with that of the HERO System, which is... one of those really complicated universal systems that they say can build anything and everything, was designed with a variety of advantages and disadvantages for characters to use to represent their character, and isn't GURPS. No, it was made more for a superhero RPG, I guess?

Anyway, somehow the two companies met, decided to make a joint universal system for all their work going forward, and called it Fuzion. Many other licensed games used it for awhile, people made universal themed supplements for it, but it's not in wide use anymore as far as I know.

Why? Let me see if I can explain by way of picture.

Champions used 3d6. Interlock used a d10. The devs argued and argued and argued over which type the game should be balanced around, then gave the fuck up. Does that fill you with confidence, readers?

So there's this sort of... highly elaborate mishing and mashing of various elements of two very different systems such that neither comes out the better for wear. Here's R.Talsorian's Lifepath, a character-backstory generator where you roll dice to build a character (setting-agnostic, because they were trying to sell a universal system); then here's Champions's Perks and Complications, bought using those same precious campaign points you're using to buy civilian gear (but aren't your players playing as Knight Sabers? Who needs real shit to be marked when you're building hardsuits with separate points entirely?), and complications must be activated x amount of times a session even if it diverts from the fun of playing the game. And so on and so forth. Shit, even crossing Cyberpunk with Mekton doesn't always work, since blocks of damage from Mekton (Kills) scale unsteadily with the more dice-driven combat of CP. Worse still is that the mecha system and the hacking system are off in MZ+ and CP2020 respectively, so if you want to custom-build hardsuits beyond the small pool of tools you're given on the last fucking page of the book, or you want your Nene equivalent to do something useful, nyah-nyah, go buy more books.

And then I'm sure Shawn Hagen has plenty of reasons why the combat doesn't work, but we're not paying attention to him. Whatever. Let's talk about what does work, which is a mix of worldbuilding lore, stuff the R.Tal writers seemed to just sort of come up with, and a great gallery across all three books of Fucking Cool Mecha (especially BGC EX).

LORE IS SERIOUS BUSINESS FOLKS

I mean that earnestly. It's hard to get right, especially when said lore reflects upon the tone of the actual content, the plot, the franchise, whatever. But when telling stories with a licensed game, some degree of lore is, to my mind at least, incredibly mandatory. Maybe not so much for games where the story ought to be made up as one goes along (see RPG's like The Sprawl), but in the case of BGCrisis, an anime which at the time had a pretty loyal fanbase chomping at the bit for answers for their questions about the wider universe the Sabers operated in, R.TAL had to do a mix of cribbing from untranslated material, the B-Club special and all that, and making their own shit up without looking like they'd cribbed from their own work (CP2020) overmuch. The result is very uneven, but charmingly so. I almost want to say it feels more grounded than CP2020 or Shadowrun, but is that just because it's comparatively light on the ground? Perhaps. The mandatory universe timeline is one page, and focuses more on putting years to events that were already canon instead of adding extraneous stuff in.

Likewise with what the politics look like worldwide. We get a few paragraphs about how the U.S. is recovering (not collapsed as in CP2020), Japan is doing pretty good for itself as GENOM's puppet-state, Russia successfully integrated into the EU even if Eastern Europe didn't (See? Wacky shit like that can only be called charming), and China's one big North Korea (which I think is a holdover from the CP2020 Pacific Rim Sourcebook, where Deng was assassinated by Maoist radicals.) We get another dry bit about the idea of a zaibatsu lifted straight from CP2020's Corpbook 1, where Arasaka is discussed... newspapers are now faxed (look it was in BGC OVA 1 what do you want me to tell you)... on and on it goes.

I suppose I like the lore independent of the actual characters because of a few clever predictions. One is using all the cybernetics-gone-bad in AD Police Files to explain why nobody has them in the 2032 OVA, a link I sense wasn't really made concrete until this RPG. It's one of the most interesting interpretations of the source material and of cyberpunk tropes I've seen, you know, where all the splicing and dicing of the body turns out to be a fad and a failure, leaving those who bought into the trend left with butchered and failing bodies - in light of the crypto crash that seems to be dragging the stock market down back into recession / stagflation, that seems pretty classic capitalism.

The other is tied to Before And After, covering the impact of the cheap and now even more ubiquitous Boomers of Crash:

I mean, what can I say? I like predictions of the future that actually consider the effects of hyper-futuristic technology in that sort of way.

That's what a lot of the RPG's lore is at its best, basically working overtime to paper in the gaps left ignored by the series' creators. So we get a nuanced look into how ADAMA is different than similarly-sentient Boomers from the ADPF OVA; we get the Largo = Mason + Boomer Messiah explanation theory that the internet came up with just a year or two prior to the RPG's publishing; we get conspiracy theory proposals about whether or not GENOM undermined the cybernetics market to replace the enhanced with Boomers; we get to see the ADP go from hotshot riot suppression force able to slaughter undesirables en masse to actively disdained by GENOM; a weird consideration of how recognizing Boomer rights could still serve GENOM's agenda... on and on and on. It's such a mishmash of ideas, beautiful because of it.

Obviously no sane RPG player would ever give a rat's ass about any of this, but again, this was a product also marketed towards fans who just wanted a good worldbuilding book. I'm not saying you should take every part of the RPG's world into your own fanfiction, but you can take a great deal of it in and things will hold up.

POWER CREEP? YEAH, I'VE GOT THE POWER, CREEP!

The actual sourcebook sections of the sourcebooks are a) the characters, and b) the mecha. That's it, that's all. Civilian gear is almost an afterthought shoved into the front of the book like it didn't need to be there, cybernetics don't show up until Before and After. For although there is a section in the corebook proposing non-Saber campaigns players can run, they're essentially permutations of the already-existing types from CP2020: Corporates, mercenaries, medias, etc. And why, I ask you, would you run anything else but your own fanmade Saber team in your home city, overgrown and under threat? Shit, RTAL even went out of their way to put a few pages in EX, the last book in the series, highlighting player campaigns with online presences (Geocities, email addresses, etc.) and describing them in brief. Oh, to be a fly on the wall for the play sessions of the guys who did Mega-Gotham...

Anyway, back on topic. Both character pages and mecha pages get a great deal of settei transposed onto these pages, concept art ripped straight from Artmic's design docs and provided, again, more as a nerd resource than anything super useful. This especially comes into play in BGC: EX, where all the concept art and mecha are instead from everything that wasn't animated. Rejected concepts for hardsuits with wheels for feet; Boomer sketches only found in old hobby magazines; scribbles one of the Crash! mecha designers tried to get in that were apparently labeled 'problematic' (I guess he was a toy designer before all this?). I unironically love all this shit, even the beam cannons mounted on a hardsuit right where the boobplates are. Shit, my Discord profile pic is a non-Boomer mecha supposedly used by the JSDF, a 'Battlemover' whose origin I have no idea about, but which looks cool as hell. That's the kind of weirdo fan I am.

My point is that if you need to spice up your fiction, throwing 'new Boomer X' at the Sabers is one thing, giving the Sabers some power-up parts you dreamed up is another, but using the designs Artmic came up with before you did is more galaxy-brained than either. Shit, I should know, it was what Craig Reed did for the fanfics that I continued off of back in the day. And it's the same with these extraneous lore details that some rando RTAL staffer dreamed up a quarter-century ago, because they beg to have an entire fanfic made about any one of them. What happened to Jeena, folks? Inquiring minds want to know.

Anyway, that's it. That's all. Read through these and be a better fan because of it.

#stmpd reviews bgc fanfic #bubblegum crisis #fanfiction #fanfic rec

[adventuresandshopping]

The Witcher Pen & Paper RPG published by R.Talsorian Games on DriveThruRPG

Free Easy Mode rules

Lords & Lands Expansion

R.Talsorian Games - all products on DTRPG

#the witcher #witcher #RPG #tabletop #drivethrurpg #toss a coin

[highshelfcollective]

HSCharity starts NOW!

🔴 LIVE // You ready, Choombas?? We are LIVE with the first game of our #HSCharity event: #CyberpunkRED from R.Talsorian Games, ran by Jonjon Thewise!

This is all to help raise money for The Trevor Project, so each $10 donation gets you entered in tonight's giveaway: A #CyberpunkRED digital PDF bundle & a 1 year subscription to LegendKeeper! Plus, there may be some other ways your donations can effect the game . . . 

#Twitch: twitch.tv/highshelfcollective

#ttrpg #tabletop #tabletop gaming #charity #The Trevor Project #CyberpunkRED #Cyberpunk #R.Talsorian Games #livestream #twitch

[cultofthewyrm]

The Hit. Cyberpunk RPG- R.Talsorian Games by Neil Branquinho

#cyberpunk #sci fi #environment art #cyborg

[fryingsquid]

Me: Just wants to see R.Talsorian, the small company that made Cyberpunk 2013 and 2020, thrive and be noted as an important foothold in LGBT+ entertainment as it was one of the earliest games to include and promote LGBT+ expression(albeit not without being un-problematic) and even features trans characters in its adventure books.

CD Projekt Red: 

#cd projekt red #Cyberpunk 2077 #cyberpunk 2020

[oneangrygamer]

Cyberpunk 2077's Mike Pondsmith Puts SJWs In Their Place

Cyberpunk 2077's Mike Pondsmith Puts SJWs In Their Place After They Accuse The Game Of Being Racist | #ShutdownAndShutUp #Cyberpunk #Cyberpunk2077

Cyberpunk 2020 creator and Cyberpunk 2077 consultant Mike Pondsmith from R.Talsorian Games dropped into a Reddit thread on June 15th, 2019 to correct some misinformation being spread around by Social Justice Warriors and propaganda media outlets about CD Projekt Red’s upcoming game. (more…)

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#CD Projekt Red #Cyberpunk 2077 #Mike Pondsmith #PC #PS4 #SJWs #Xbox One

[neondreams2145]

"You fell over the edge, punk!" -Main

-Cyberpunk Edgerunner

Art credit goes to the wonderful artists over at R.Talsorian games.

Trigger Warning- Blood

#cyberpunk #cyberpunk aesthetic #quoteoftheday #cyberpunk 2077 #cyberpunk red #never fade away #cyberpunk edgerunners #netrunner

[boardgametoday]

Monster Fight Club Announces a Licensing Partnership with R.Talsorian Games

Monster Fight Club Announces a Licensing Partnership with R.Talsorian Games #rpg #roleplayinggames

Monster Fight Club has announced a licensing partnership with Michael Pondsmith and his publishing company R. Talsorian Games. The deal is to create a range of tabletop miniatures for Cyberpunk and The Witcher.

A first look of the new miniatures is expected at this year’s Gen Con taking place in early August.

Monster Fight Club is focused on “evolving the tabletop hobby through fun and…

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#cyberpunk #michael pondsmith #monster fight club #r. talsorian games #the witcher

[cyberpunk12]

We refreshed the autofire graph alongside a couple of different outlines that were refreshed after R.Talsorian Games refreshed their rulebook. We trust it helps any GM running Cyberpunk RED missions or one-shots as speedy reference sheets!

#Game Master Round Table #Tabletop Role Playing Game #Cyberpunk Podcast Videos #Cyberpunk RED official gameplay #Cyberpunk podcast episodes #Cyberpunk Red Live Game Play