System Mastery

https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/system-mastery-40.mp3 System Mastery 40 – Duckman He’s just one more duck detective, that works with a pig, lives with the twin sister of his dead wife, three sons on two bodies, and a mother-in-law with so much gas, she’s a fire hazard.  This week System Mastery is overjoyed to present The Official Duckman RPG, a mixed bag of failure, liquor, nymp...

https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/system-mastery-39.mp3 System Mastery 39 – Witch Girls Adventures Witches!  Rustics!  Technomancers!  The Ugly One!  It’s Witch Girls Adventures, and it’s your chance to step into the stylish shoes of a 13-year old witch and go on way cool adventures, maybe even at the mall.  Shopping!  This game is aimed a little young, so we try to puzzle out what...

https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/episode-38-stormbringer.mp3 Episode 38 – Stormbringer ELRIC!  Thy book is a thousand times more execrable than thou!  Though I have to admit I had this iconic piece of nerd power fantasy confused for the early part of my young life with the other one, Raistlin, this guy is apparently quite pedigreed.  The doomed albino of deficient blood and his ev...

https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/episode-37-deliria.mp3 System Mastery 37 – Deliria During the 90s, a lot of the small-market games were about trying to fix one issue that the author had with basement-ready games from the 70s.  By 2002 a renaissance was required!  No longer were games just for mega-nerds programming Scorched Earth into their graphing calculators!  Now the games we...

https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/system-mastery-36.mp3 System Mastery  36 – Dungeons & Dragons We take a much needed break from endless reading of defunct gaming manuals, but that doesn’t mean we don’t seek to entertain!  This week, System Mastery brings you fresh coverage of the 2001 hit film, Dungeons & Dragons.  It has a Wayans, and a Riff-Raff, and more!  This film might be ex...

https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/system-mastery-35.mp3 System Mastery 35 – Vanishing Point If you’ve read any Neil Gaiman or just been stuck in line at a convention behind steampunk people, you’re all set for Vanishing Point.  It’s a neat little RPG about visiting a planet shaped like a brain, populated by weirdos classified by insanities, and choked full of more British flavor th...

https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/systemmastery34.mp3 SystemMastery 34 – Fantasy Imperium This game was surprisingly difficult to find art for.  The cover is easy enough, since it’s got a famous story behind it, but apparently no one wanted to put any of the many boring knights or cheesecake witches inside the book on the internet.  We stuck some fairies on the homepage that get th...

https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/systemmastery33.mp3 SystemMastery 33 – Maid This week, we’re joined in studio (my living room) by a guest host!  Our friend Claire joins us because we just didn’t feel comfortable tackling this sexist minefield without her.  It’s Maid!  The RPG where you wear a frilly sex uniform and tee-hee your way through a day of almost-charming almost-sex that...

https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/systemmastery32.mp3 SystemMastery 32 – Darkurthe: Legends The least requested game of all time comes to System Mastery!  We discuss Darkurthe, a world of isolated city-states, deep racial convinctions, and clans, guilds, cults, and freeholds.  Play as humans, elves, dwarves, gross elves, mean dwarves, and anguls.  Check out a great spell system tha...

https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/systemmastery31.mp3 SystemMastery 31 – Synnibarr 2 The final chapter in our saga of Synnibarr.  Impossible continents, insane monsters, and ludicrous facts about this maddening world.  This time around, we even try to tell you how you were supposed to play the game! Let us know what you thought of Synnibarr in the comments!  Have a book you’d us to...

https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/systemmastery30.mp3 SystemMastery 30 – The World of Synnibarr 1 The most requested title of all comes to System Mastery!  Biogladites (whatever that is), chameleon drakes, and I guess archers engage in insane adventure and deadly battle on a hollowed out Mars thousands of years from now and light years from here.  Sound engaging?  Well hang on beca...

https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/system-mastery-special-edition-synnibarr.mp3 System Mastery Special Edition – Synnibarr Today, we bring you a little something special.  A dramatic reading of the brilliant beginning to the tale of The World of Synnibarr.  Tune in next week for our full review. Let us know what you thought of Synnibarr in the comments!  Have a book you’d us to cove...

https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2014/10/systemmastery29.mp3 SystemMastery 29 – Dark Heresy Skulls for the Skull Throne!  We take a discerning look at Dark Heresy, one of many games set in the grim darkness of the dark grimness of the Warhammer 40k universe.  Will you be greasy scum, oily robot man, or festering, gibbering psychic?  The correct answer is probably psychic, but we’ll try to...

https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/systemmastery28.mp3 SystemMastery 28 – Spookshow This game is about ghost spies.  Get it?  It’s a double meaning on the word.  I’m not sure if you get it.  You see, spook is occasionally used as a derogatory term for someone who works in the intelligence industry, and is also sometimes used as a synonym for an intangible entity from beyond the grav...

https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/systemmastery27.mp3 SystemMastery 27 – Nexus Live Action Roleplaying Time to gather up 50 or so of your greatest friends and then slowly and painfully lose them over the course of a complex, sweaty, argumentative weekend!  We discuss our very first LARP with Nexus, a game of galactic intrigue, simple rules, bad puns and lots and lots of backrubs. ...

https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/systemmastery26.mp3 System Mastery 26 – Car Wars Strap in, it’s going to be a dense, chart-heavy ride.  Steve Jackson’s Car Wars is heavy on near-future apocalyptic flavor, and equally heavy on complex movement and combat rules.  It’s a battle of cars, bikes, trucks, trikes, trars, trike-trucks, truck-trikes, and for some reason, helicopters on thi...

https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/systemmastery25.mp3 SystemMastery 25 – D&D Set 1 Basic Rules We celebrate a year’s worth of RPG reviews with a return to a true classic.  The original Red Box D&D, complete with the white crayon for your dice and the $30 registration form for the 1981 RPGA.  Take to the dungeon as a fighter, a magic-user, or perhaps a halfling in one of the earlies...

https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/systemmastery24.mp3 SystemMastery 24 – C°ntinuum: Roleplaying in the Yet It’s a time travel game!  More accurately, it’s a game about keeping meticulous detailed notes because the DM might check to see if you did at any second!  Join millions of other time travelers working and playing together, but try not to accidentally erase yourself from exist...

https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/systemmastery23.mp3 SystemMastery 23 – Star Wars RPG Our second look at West End Games takes us to a galaxy far, far away, where an antagonistic GM is expected to control the party with an iron (if capricious) fist.  We’ll discuss whether or not Boba Fett lives up to his hype, what the deal is with all that expanded universe stuff, and maybe even b...

https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/systemmastery22.mp3 SystemMastery 22 – After the Bomb Wounded and battered from months of learning new systems, we take a brief respite to review something we knew already.  This week, we spend a lot of time talking about Bio-E, the difference between the rad animal men of yesteryear and today’s watered-down furries, and general Palladium shenaniga...

  https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/systemmastery21.mp3 SystemMastery 21 – Nobilis Have you ever dreamed of being the god of something?  Perhaps the god of socks, or the god of internet memes, or the god of cabbage?  This odd, dense game may be as close as you can get to realize your weird boring dreams, internet friends!  Take a tour through the mind of Rebecca Bergstrom, aka Jenn...

https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/systemmastery20.mp3 Episode 20 – Cthulutech It might just be because we like 75% of the brazenly lifted source material, but Cthulhutech passes our review gauntlet and comes up looking pretty fun.  We discuss the many variations on giant robot and giant monster robot you can play as, discuss the latest iteration of merits and flaws, and hash out th...

https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/systemmastery19.mp3 SystemMastery 19 – Furry Pirates This week, we take hold of a book with a bifurcated design sensibility.  Will we actually discover “Swashbuckling Adventures in the Furry Age of Piracy”?  Or will we find that the furries appear to have been added to this book late during development?  Is this a case of Type 1 or Type 2 Furabetes...

https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2014/05/systemmastery18.mp3 SystemMastery 18 – Big Eyes, Small Mouth We sit down for a rousing discussion about the many varieties of anime, and the game that tries to let you play them all.  Big Eyes, Small Mouth is a charming attempt to capture the entirety of a diverse range of shows into a single ruleset.  There are a few glaring errors, but that’s wha...

https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/systemmastery171.mp3 SystemMastery 17 – Don’t Look Back:  Terror is Never Far Behind Don’t Look Back is a mid-90s Horror RPG, featuring hilarious send-ups of your favorite 80s horror film tropes!  Oh no wait, that’s just the cover.  The actual text appears to be a middle school math book with some surprisingly opinionated digressions about what con...