itch.io

Awesome. I hope you enjoy the game enough for the trouble to be worth it! 😄

Sorry for the inconvenience. I’ve looked into making a bundle but I don’t see a way to carry over the “pay what you want unless you want the bonus content” thing with one, so it kinda has to be individual.

The good news is that as I update each of them, you will be notified and get access to updated content, which you wouldn’t if you only bought the one and I sent you the extra content.

Hi, IamDandu.  Sorry for the confusion, but thanks for reaching out.

I've initiated a refund request with itch.io (they handle all the payment stuff - it's one of the cool things about itch for small indie creators like me!). This is the first time I've had to issue a refund, so I'm not sure what the turnaround time is on that or what to expect, but assuming there aren't any issues, you should get the refund soon and then can go back and buy each of the individual volumes separately to get the bonus content.

Note that you didn't need to pay $15 to get the bonus content – you only need to pay $3 for each one, for a total of $12.  I'm of course appreciative of tips on top of that, but if you want all the booklets including the bonus content, it should only set you back $12. Buy each volume individually at $3 (or more) each and you should be good to go.

Again, sorry for the confusion, and I hope you enjoy the game.

The rules are basically the same. Version two has some better layout and slightly clarified explanations. But the mechanics are the same, so if you’ve already printed everything out, you probably don’t need to do it again. Unless you want to!

Okay. I'm not on PC, but if you ever release on Mac, be sure to send out a devlog to followers! The art of this game looks like an interesting style I haven't seen elsewhere, so I'm interested. Good luck with the project.

Looks interesting. What platforms will this game be for when it's released?

Awesome! Glad your son is enjoying it.

Right. That’s just there to point out that if you make a character that is “d12 I am awesome” and “d10 I kick ass at everything I try to do”, and then use those dice for every roll, then you’re likely to not have fun with the game because it will be trivially easy. (Basically the opposite problem you had!)

Well, the adventures ARE balanced assuming that you'll be mainly rolling your non-d4 traits with only the occasional d4 in weird circumstances.  They assume you'll be creating a character reasonably able to take on the challenges of the adventure.

Thus, it's not exactly a problem to come up with traits you don't use often – it won't break the game mechanics – but it will make the game a lot harder.

Nice, I checked it out.  Looks like you got the gist of the game pretty quickly!  The goal is to search the bayous, sea caves, and shipwrecks for the stuff you need, get the magical surgeries to give you the advantages you require, and then face BloodBeard!  Hope you enjoyed it.

Hi, vlad_tepesch.  Thanks for playing!

I just pushed up a new build of the game that should fix all three of the issues you mentioned.  You might need to clear your browser cache.

That first issue you mentioned had some other places it would have happened, too, and I fixed them as well, but if you find any more of these game-breaking bugs, please let me know.

Oh, and thanks for taking the time to let me know about these issues!

Enjoy!

Okay I managed to get a game in!  I used some old papercraft terrain and minis I made to play Space Station Zero.

My crew, consisting of a leader, a gunner, a rookie, and a custom-built medic, entered through the airlock and started heading into the derelict ship.

Their trackers indicated two points of interest close by - one in a large operations bay around the corner, and one in the hallway ahead. The team split up, with two crew heading towards each.

As soon as the rookie tapped in the pirate codes to unlock the stasis vault, a feeble alarm sounded, and some old, rustbucket sentry robots rose up from panels in the floor.  The crew could hear one group of robots arriving far away, but the other group appeared between them and the airlock!

The medic moved forward and took a shot with her rifle. It was a solid hit, but it mostly just pinged off of the robot's metal exterior. The crew realized that none of their weapons would be able to take one of these sentries down – it was just going to be a race to the exit.

The heavy gunner stepped forward while the leader looted the other stasis vault, firing on the robots but his shots merely pinging off their armor.

As the heavy gunner moved in to draw the robots' fire, the remaining crew ran, skirting around the robots which were hammering the gunner's armor with their shots.  Luckily, the robots were old and malfunctioning, so they failed to deal any damage to the gunner.

Having kited their way around the robots, the crew managed to duck back into their ship and take off, just as the other group of robots arrived to back up the first.

Looking at the haul of loot, they were dismayed to find that one of the stasis pods they'd dragged back to the ship was, essentially, worthless. The other was a small-value pod worth maybe fifteen credits back at the station.

"All in a day's work," said the captain, but he knew they'd barely covered the cost of ammo. Next time they may not be so lucky.

Thoughts on the system!

The setup and theme are fun. The "stalk through the corridors and roll to see if they show up" is cool. Really liked the "don't kill everything, just try to escape with the loot" vibe.

The "roll under on d10" mechanic works fine, but when most stats are in the 2-4 range, and even the "spotlight" stat is a 6 or so, that means a heck of a lot of failed rolls. I might try house-ruling it to be "roll under or equal on d10", just so stuff happens more.  (But since the enemy shot at my crew far more than we shot at them, that might really ramp up the difficulty...)

One thing about the "roll under on d10 with most stats at 2-3" thing is that it makes it really unlikely that anyone will try to climb for different elevations if they don't need to, since they have to roll a 1 or maybe a 2 on d10 or else they fall, wasting an action and taking damage that ignores armor if they're trying to climb more than 2". And since you'd almost certainly have to climb twice if you climb once (because you need to get back out after climbing), then chances are very good you'll fall at least once.

Ballistic plate seemed very, very powerful. I'd invested in a laser rifle for my medic, and I hit one of the robots with the 2d8 hit, rolling a 12 – a pretty good hit! But rolling their 1d8+4, they blocked 9 of that, so I only did 3 points. I'd have to hit that robot seven more times at that rate to take it out, which would have cost me about 20CR worth of ammo. I only escaped with 15CR so taking down even ONE of those robots would have meant the entire mission was a net loss.  And there were six of them.

Worse, my gunner character, with his scrap rifle, could only do 2d4 damage, but the robots would block 1d8+4 of that, so the absolute most damage I could do would be 9-5 = 3, and that's if we both rolled perfectly high and low.   When they have 20 hit points, and it costs 2CR per attack, there's no use in even attacking. For him to take out a robot, again, rolling perfectly, it would have cost a minimum of 14CR. (And again, I only escaped with 15CR!)

The flip side, of course, is that my gunner could walk around with near impunity despite being shot at 6-8 times per round. The robots only did 1d8 with their lasers, so when I block 1d8+4 of that, and they miss 50% of the time, it's not surprising that they never did manage to pierce his ballistic plate. It made for a nice cinematic scene – the gunner holding off this barrage of enemies as their bolts ping off his plate, him firing back desperately but not taking any of them out, while the rest of the crew crept around trying to get to the airlock– but in terms of gameplay, it kinda felt like nothing was happening.

But maybe all that's intentional for the robots – maybe they're intended to be these indestructible, menacing things that you just have to outmaneuver. It will be interesting to try it out with one of the enemies that doesn't have armor and see if/how it feels different.

Anyway the game rules themselves seemed easy and streamlined, and the game went super quickly, taking only about half an hour from setup to conclusion. Loved that aspect of it – I can play a salvage operation pretty fast with very little in terms of ramping up or maintenance, which means it'll get to the table more often.

Overall, a cool little game! I'm a little concerned about the armor and weapon balance and the difficulty of rolls making a lot of nothing happen, but I think the jury's still out on that until I get it to the table a few more times. But it was fun to read through, try out, and get played at the table.

Picked this up and can't wait to try it out. Some cool ideas in here, like how the game starts with you sneaking through a derelict craft, and then hustling back out once you make enough noise to bring the enemies out of the woodwork. That's a twist I haven't seen before, and it really reinforces the theme of risky salvage operations.

The 'zine aesthetic is strong – each page is a treat to look at, and it all seems to work.  It's not so over-the-top that it's not readable, though, so it's still a functional rulebook, too, which I appreciate.

I also love that there's an online crew builder app! I didn't expect that when I bought it, so that was a great little surprise. And it's slick, attractive, and seems to have nice features, including a nice-looking print output option.

I do have a question about the builder app. though: how do I add more than one ammo item to a crew member? It's not a huge problem – I can just hold back some CR and buy the ammo once my crew is built, but it would be nice to buy the ammo with the character while assembling my crew.

Anyway, it all looks great. Good luck with the game.

You may have to adjust how you fold the 'zines if you are not printing on 8.5" x 11" paper (like, people across the pond often print A4) or if your particular printer cannot print as close to the margins as expected.

I believe if you're printing centered on A4 and there aren't any margin-rescaling issues, you'll trim 6.25cm off of each end, leaving a center of 27.2 cm or so.  But you may have to adjust based on your printer.

Ideally, there should be roughly equal margins on all sides of each "page", which will be determined by the interior margins between pages. Basically, you'll trim the sides of the page until the margins on the "outside" of the content matches up with the margins on the "inside" of the content.  You can measure it with a ruler if need be, or you can "eyeball it" by doing some of the folds and hand-cutting matching margins on the outside of the folds.

(Another approach is to just fold the parts of the 'zine until the pages look right and then trim.)

Ah sorry, didn’t read down through the comments below. Anyway good luck with the game!

Ah sorry, didn’t read down through the comments below. Anyway good luck with the game!

This is excellent. Love the vibe, and all the cozy little touches. I especially liked how you could also just pet the cow to get a little extra happiness each day.

I wishlisted on Steam, but I hope to see the full (Mac) version available here, too.

Great work!

Oh nice! Glad to hear you (and your dog!) are enjoying them. I hope you continue to enjoy the other ones too. And thanks for taking the time to write in - it made my day!

I don't think it's ill-considered at all. It was absolutely fun to try that level of the game. Just because we weren't able to keep up doesn't mean it's not fun – just trying to see how long you can last at that level is kinda fun on its own!

Oh heck yes. My son and I spent some time playing through this game. The demonic difficulty was too much for us – we got wrecked! But the default difficulty we could keep up with and had a blast with.

I think my favorite part is when the monk says, "So if I don't make any mistakes there's nothing to worry about"...and then something happens that I won't mention here due to spoilers, but suffice it to say it was hilarious.

Very well done, and the art looks great. Loved it.

Hope you enjoy them!

Oh, awesome, glad to hear that. Your game looks cool, too!

Oh nice. Hope your daughter enjoys the new set!

Awesome! Hope you enjoy it!

Heh. This comment made my day. I hope you enjoy it!

Awesome, glad you and your wife are enjoying it!

Tried it out. Nice little deckbuilder.

I liked the progression mechanic, but the four-cost cards might be too powerful. Once you get a couple of them in your deck, it quickly becomes trivial to make quota and churn a lot of coin.  But it was certainly fun getting to that point, and the little puzzle of how to get over that hump was enjoyable.

I'd love to see this with more art on the cards, more cards to buy, etc., but maybe that's beyond the scope of what you're trying to accomplish here. Either way, I sure liked what was here, and had some fun with it. Great work!

Okay, I see where the confusion is.

Your point #5 is not what I intended for the rules.  The intent is that you only remove dice if two or more dice show the same top value. You don't just remove all dice that aren't the top value – you only do it if there's a "tie".  The rule says:

First, if two or more dice show the “top value”, remove all dice that do not show that value.

In other words, if there is a tie for the highest value (across all four dice), then you eliminate anything that wasn't part of that tie.  If there was only one die with the highest value (which will fairly often be the case), you don't remove anything.

Sorry for the confusion!  That rule as written might be a little too terse, making it easy to miss the nuance there, so I'm going to add some clarifying language to that section in the rules and release a new version soon that might help me convey the rule better for future players.  

Thanks for taking the time to talk about this with me – if you got caught by my description of the rules, it's pretty likely others have, too, but never spoke up about it, so I appreciate it.  This will help me clarify the rules not just for you but for other players as well!

Hmm. I might need to go look at how I described things, but no, crits should still be rare as the system should be largely unchanged from 1e.

My intent was that you still take the top value across all dice, just as in 1e, so crits would only happen if one side rolls doubles that are higher than both the other side’s dice. If that’s not clear, or if a strict reading of the rules doesn’t support that, I might need to tweak the 2e explanation. I’ll try to take a look at that today.

Thanks for asking. It’s difficult to detect points of confusion in the rules when you’re the one who wrote it!

Yeah that could work too, but might also require some enemy adjustments. You’d have more powerful characters but fewer actions a turn and more concentrated damage targeting each character because it wouldn’t be “spread out”.

If you try this route I would be curious to hear how it goes!

I would only recommend one or two players, honestly. It gets pretty crowded even at three.

If you decide to go to three or four players, you might consider running a two player game and splitting up the heroes and companions among the players to control. That keeps the model count manageable and the combats quicker.

If you do decide to do a full game with 3+ players, I would recommend adding at least one more dungeon tile to generated rooms, too, just to give a little elbow room.

Okay, glad you got it sorted.  I hope you enjoy the game!

Well, I tried multiple times and it seemed to get through the ordering process fine for me.  I didn't go all the way to actually pressing "place order" – where did it fail in the process for you?

I did get hit by that captcha thing that cloudflare does  once. Maybe it failed for you there because it erroneously thought you weren't a human for some reason?

Hmm.  Thanks for bringing this to my attention. Let me look into it!

Love it.

Okay, I set aside some time to check it out and watched it. Great work! I posted some thoughts on the actual video, but overall very happy to see this. You did a great job bringing the story to life and showcasing the mechanics clearly. Thanks for taking the time to make the video!

Oh cool I will check it out! Glad you liked the game!

Okay, it sounds like they're in the process of moving a lot of their PNP games over to itch (yay!), but as they have literally hundreds of games, it's going to take a while. Subscribe to me to be notified when they go live – I'll post a devlog when they're available.

...that is a very good question.

I'll ask and let you know.

The hard part would be getting to that from this point, because green balls fired by the bishop do not gain the damage multiplier bonus for some reason, so I'd be downgrading while working up to that. Green balls are like plain balls if you don't have any actual attack panels.

I was thinking about just going all-in on healing only (with no other panel types) paired with the bishop to see how it goes, making every panel eligible for a crit. It might work because with all panels healing, you'd likely gain ~40 max HP and heal ~336 HP per spin (before any multipliers from the balls).