Roleplaying Links

This page contains links to useful roleplaying sites including RPG homepages, game companies, and forums and review sites.

RPG Home Pages

• Blue Planet v2 - A very decent hard sci-fi RPG set on a water world in the near future. Also includes public-access message boards to ask questions on! Think "Rugged frontier ecological post-cyberpunk with biotech angle, uplifted cetaceans, and alien mysteries", and you're on the right track. This would fit quite nicely with Transhuman Space - conveiently enough a GURPS version of Blue Planet is in preparation...

  CommCore Plus - another useful resource for Blue Planet v2, including new rules and an 'in-character' magazine about life on Poseidon.

• Anders Sandberg's RPG page, by Anders Sandberg: There aren't that many people around that write their own RPGs just for kicks, but Anders is one of them - this guy is about 3000 years ahead of his time, and it shows in his games (influences include Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, and Greg Egan)! This page contains the backgrounds he has written - all of which can only be described as Transhumanist Sci-fi. All the sci-fi games I've ever seen don't fully appreciate just how much technology can change society - Anders' games completely embrace nanotechnology, genetic engineering, the merging of man and machine, directed evolution, and ultratech with quite amazing results. Although the name is a bit clunky, 'Big Ideas, Grand Visions' is Anders' masterwork (designed for the Alternity system, but it can be easily adapted to others) - roughly 400 pages of hardcore sci-fi (downloadable in two large PDF files), a taste of how things really could be. Although the concepts therein can be hard to grasp (a good knowledge of bleeding-edge (and beyond) science would help the reader!), the result is nothing short of stunning. Go see for yourself!
       Anders has also written other games, including the rather cool Countdown RPG about a war with aliens - you can find all of these on his RPG page.

• GURPS, by Steve Jackson Games. GURPS (Generic Universal Role Playing System) is one of the original multigenre systems, consisting of a core rulebook (containing just the game system and mechanics), and more background supplements and world settings than you can shake a large redwood forest at! They span just about every setting under the sun, including Fantasy, Sci-fi, Cyberpunk, Pulp, Horror, Conspiracy, Time Travel, Alternate Worlds, Historical, and just plain Weird. There's a vast amount of information available, particularly for Sci-Fi (which is what I get GURPS for) including Tech books (Ultratech, Biotech, Hightech, Lowtech), original settings (Transhuman Space, World War II, Terradyne), ports of sci-fi books (Humanx, Vorkosigian, Uplift, Planet Krisha, Lensman, War Against The Chtorr, Riverworld, Witch World, New Sun).
       All the backgrounds are well-written and complete in their own right, which is a definite bonus (no other supplement is actually required to run a game other than the world book and the GURPS core rules). They've even made a stripped-down 'GURPS Lite' version of the core rules that you can download for free from their website! While some of the settings may be pretty specialised (particularly the literary book conversions) and have a short print run as a result, they're still great for fans of that setting. And all of this is pretty easily adaptable for any other games. While the system isn't absolutely perfect (way too crunchy in places, and don't even get me started on the nightmare that is vehicle design), it can be as complicated as you want it to be, and the vast amount of high quality background material makes GURPS a worthwhile investment.

• The Aeon Society - An unofficial website supporting White Wolf's rather good Trinity sci-fi RPG, this also contain a far future setting (Millenium's Edge 2297) in development for the game, which definitely has potential, as well as material for Aberrant and Adventure. Definitely worth checking out if you're a fan of Trinity.

  EurOpNet - Another very fine Trinity/Aberrant/Adventure resource site.

• The Wraith Project - J. Edward Tremlett's rather fine online magazine-cum-continuation of White Wolf's OOP "Wraith: The Oblivion" WoD RPG. Lots of useful stuff here.

[back to top]

Tabletop RPG Company Homepages

Alderac Entertainment Group - (Legend Of The 5 Rings, 7th Sea)

Atlas Games - (Ars Magica, Feng Shui, Unknown Armies, Rune)

Chaosium Inc. - (Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer)

Delta Green - (Delta Green government conspiracy/Call of Cthulhu RPG)

Dream Pod 9 - (Heavy Gear, Jovian Chronicles, Tribe 8, Gear Krieg)

Eden Studios - (Conspiracy X, Witchcraft, All Flesh Must Be Eaten, D20 Odyssey)

Fantasy Flight Games - (D20 Dragonstar, D20 Legends and Lairs, Disk Games, Lord of the Rings (board game))

Godlike - (Godlike - "World War II Superhero roleplaying in a world on fire")

Guardians of Order - (Big Eyes Small Mouth, Heaven & Earth, other Anime RPGs)

Heliograph - (Forgotten Futures, Space 1889)

Hogshead Publishing - (Nobilis, SLA Industries, Warhammer FRP, New Style)

Holistic Design - (Fading Suns)

Issaries Inc. - (Hero Wars)

Kult - The Abyss (An excellent Kult resource page)

Living Room Games - (Earthdawn 2nd Ed.)

Palladium - (Rifts, Nightbane, Fantasy, TMNT)

Steve Jackson Games (SJG) - (GURPS + tons of RPG worldbooks, Traveller RPG, Car Wars, loads of other card and board games)

Sanguine Productions - (Ironclaw Anthropomorphic Fantasy RPG)

White Wolf - (World Of Darkness, Trinity, Aberrant, Adventure!, D20 Swords and Sorcery, D20 Ravenloft)

Wizards of the Coast - (Star Wars, D&D, CCGs)

[back to top]

Forums and Reviews

• gamingreport.com - an excellent site with useful site containing roleplaying news and announcements. The place to check if you're after the latest gossip in the RPG World :).

• RPG.net - a useful site containing reviews and other RPG-related material - the great thing is that it's not centred around one specific company so it's a pretty handy resource. Includes a very useful searchable Review Database, or you can browse through a huge list of all the reviews.

• Ex Libris Nocturnis - a very good 'unofficial' White Wolf forum site, that also accepts and publishes online supplements for World of Darkness and Trinity settings. In fact, the quality of material on this site is far superior to that on the official White Wolf site - the forums (which are free to join and cover all the White Wolf settings) also tend to be rather more civilised (and are moderated very well by some very fine people).

[back to top]