itch.io

Five basic broad-stroke martial arts so players who don't have experience in martial arts have an easy on-ramp, and 50+ very specific martial arts so those with experience can get really persnickety.

The player decides when it's time for the character to step away between Years. The rules for Successors are important for the next character, but there's no more rules beyond that for retirement.

It's hard for me not to write reams and reams about my favourite martial arts movies. If you're just starting out I'd suggest these three films that I most often hear from people as, "This is what made me fall in love with martial arts movies." Each of them come from very different places and do very different things.

• Bloodsport (1988)
• Enter the Dragon (1973)
• The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978)

Beyond those films, my suggestion for exploring martial arts movies is to start early and work you way forward. If you start with Ong-Bak (2003) or Ip Man (2008) or The Raid: Redemption (2011), or Blood and Bone (2009)—all truly great in their own right—you won't have as much context to appreciate them than if you went on a bit of a journey with it.

If you fall in love with the technical complexity of Hong Kong martial arts films—and how could you not—then I say start with Five Fingers of Death (1972), which really popularized the genre internationally. Then you should go through Bruce Lee's Hong Kong films, which happened soon after, because he's an icon with good reason. From there, look to the Shaw Brothers and Golden Harvest films. Some of my personal favourites are:

• The Prodigal Son (1981)
• The Five Deadly Venoms (1975).
• Snake in the Eagle's Shadow (1978)
• Master of the Flying Guillotine (1976)
• Duel to the Death (1982)

If you instead want to explore the emotional depth that Western martial arts films are capable of capturing, it doesn't get better than Walter Hill's Charles Bronson movie Hard Times (1975). This is maybe an atypical start because most of the genre from the Western perspective is dominated by a very different feeling of low budget, direct-to-video movies that are nonetheless infectious with their martial enthusiasm. That's a whole journey very much on its own, and a great journey—Cynthia Rothrock is an under-appreciated master of her craft.

You're lucky. You'd be getting into martial arts movies at a time when they're a lot easier to find, now. I can't tell you how we used to freak out when raiding a Chinatown shop to find an import VHS of Drunken Master II (1994). 

Have a great time.

Great! I love to hear these things.

Just each Round when you know people need to prep Moves, get them to send it to you. You don't even have to really look at them, but it helps people not cheat themselves. Also, they're not consecutive! It's just a pool of options.

For NPC Moves I just write them down on a slip of paper beside my monitor and cross them off when I use them, I don't bother sharing them. I guess you could send them to everyone else not involved in that particular fight to heighten the tension? That could work. Just make sure to write up the NPC Moves before the game even starts, to make sure it's not a game about the fighting player trying to outguess you specifically. Keeps you honest.

Thanks for the message. F2S is a pretty easy game to run online, and has a few advantages over running it at a table. Here's my tips.

1. Have players message you, the GM, their Move picks for the Round. Keeps them honest. A one-letter shorthand, GPKBF, is good.

2. When something is happening to everyone and all PCs need to pick a Move, have them type it into a General channel visible to everyone. It makes it more exciting for the players.

3. When a Comfort is Under Threat I type it out where everyone can see and pin it so people know it's still a problem.

I might have to say that most of my F2S games have been run online, in fact. That's just the way it goes these days.

Good luck with that. Fight the good fight,

James Kerr, Radio James Games

I'm about to go into a convention weekend and your post has been doing a little dance inside my heart for a few days now. It's nice when somebody gets it. I believe F2S has a great future if it can find its audience. Thank you for spreading he word, and thank you for your kind words.

Today for Valentine's Day I have released my new physical game PDF of the tabletop roleplaying game "In Love with the Moon", a storygame of made-up science. It's pay-what-you-can right now in celebration of the Under a Bad Moon game jam being put on by Shouting Crow Games.

Fall in love with the moon, here.

Here's the skinny: Science is awesome and terrible, and so too is the moon—your destination.

The year is 1968. You are a team of scientists, crowded in an old castle where the air flows thick with LSD and there is a maze of rooms below you stocked with every scientific oddity, all for one purpose: to get you to the moon by whatever means necessary. This game is a looney race to luna. Champion your crackpot ideas, wrestle with hallucinations, confess your love to the moon, fall out of love, get weird, but above all—get to the moon!

• GMless play for 2 to 6 players.
• Diceless mechanics, except for the moon herself who is a d20.
• Hypothesized for one-shot use, but projects can carry over from session to session, if you've found sustainable funding for your research.
• Break the glass, embrace the weird, and fall...In Love with the Moon!

Check it out on it's Itch.io page.

For more information on Radio James Games, please visit our website at www.radiojamesgames.com.

Kaiju Kontrol is here! Released today, a physical TTRPG (in pdf form) of giant monster battles, geo-politics, and trauma. Kaiju Kontrol. 1,000 giant battle Kaiju, all different, and scattered around the world, their keys left in the ignition and no note, only a scrawl on the Kaiju tphat kind of reads “Mike”. People from all walks of life touched them to become Kontrollers. Some took over their countries, some defend their country’s borders. All are at war with each other because only one Kaiju can beat another.

See Kaiju Kontrol's Itch.io page here.

Kaiju Kontrol is a lovingly hand-crafted gonzo indie work from Radio James Games. Absolutely no generative AI had anything to do with this project, it is far too janky. This is a Sunday matinee monster movie of TTRPGs, with all the fun of people in rubber suits, roaring, stomping around on buildings.

For more on Radio James Games, please visit www.radiojamesgames.com.

Saddle up for the ride of your life! Bettin' Bullets is a tumbleweed of a TTRPG about a generation of cowpokes in a small frontier town in the late 1800s, showing off and showing each other up, and rallying together to overcome dangers. Conflict resolution is all diceless—who needs dice? You've got bullets. You bet your life on the bullets themselves here in Bettin’ Bullets.

This book includes:

• Gunslingin’ and horse wranglin'
• Lonesome campfire songs
• All the fixins of cowboy life—riding, homesteading, and a sense of wonder for the natural world
• Rivalry between cowboys of a plain immature nature, such as who has the better looking horse
• Sassy writin' and some pretty rough and tumble hand-drawn cowboy art

There's a few games out there that're weird west, and this isn't one of them. This is primarily a game about community, you see, and overcoming adversity in an environment that's sometimes mighty harsh. Check it out, now on Itch.io, right over yonder: https://panjumanju.itch.io/bettin-bullets, if you'd be so kind. Community copies will roll in over time.

For more information on Radio James Games please visit our website.

I've made a new game, a completely vanilla cowboy and western game named Bettin' Bullets. It's a pretty gonzo, indie little thing—it's diceless, where conflict resolution involves betting bullets themselves to see your way through the wild, wild west. Check it out: https://panjumanju.itch.io/bettin-bullets

Beta Maxx is a good name, I enjoy that. That alone gets me going.

Out now in pdf on itch.io: Solo Martial Blues is a hard-hitting martial arts tabletop RPG for one player. You're a violent loner, fighting against all odds, always just one fight from death. It's just you, your fists, and the mean streets. If you want a unique solo play system of intense martial arts action, this is for you.

Visit the itch.io page now: https://panjumanju.itch.io/solo-martial-blues

Solo Martial Blues:

• Single player TTRPG
• Standalone, with no other material needed
• 5.5” by 8.5” paperback and pdf of 196 pages
• Art by Steven Wu
• Written by Indie Groundbreaker Award nominated James Kerr

Solo Martial Blues is sure to pack a punch.

For more from Radio James Games please visit www.radiojamesgames.com.

Thanks! You made my afternoon.

If anyone needs a kick to get them into the game, there are community copies available now.

Now out on itch.io, it's Fight to Survive: Role-playing Martial Arts Meets Heart, is a heartbreaking, struggling, mundane, down-and-dirty ttrpg about martial artists in the 20th century. It captures the spirit of 20th century martial arts action cinema, with all its sincerity and emotion.

If you want to get into the fight, it's ready for you here: https://panjumanju.itch.io/fight-to-survive. 

Fight to Survive is:

• A hyperlinked PDF, 330 pages, full colour
• Published by Radio James Games (March 2023)
• ISBN: 978-1-7388155-0-0

For more information on Radio James Games please visit our website at www.radiojamesgames.com.

This game packs a punch.!

James Kerr

Publisher, Radio James Games