The next chapter of BattleTech’s titanic resurgence is the Mercenaries Kickstarter campaign and has hit $4.6 million as of this writing. The new campaign introduces more than 50 new designs, including ’Mechs, armored and support vehicles, a VTOL, additional battle armor, and a new aerospace fighter–all to the same high-quality standards and is ready to play right out of the box.

During the recent D&D Direct, Manganiello offered a brief update on the documentary he’s filming for Wizards of the Coast to celebrate Dungeons & Dragons’ 50th Anniversary. Before diving into it, he took a moment to acknowledge how the game had informed his love of stories. Then, Manganiello revealed that it led to his working with Wizards of the Coast on a live-action television adaptation of the Dragonlance novels, which he loves. The Dragonlance novels were initially written by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, though many other authors have written stories for the series since.

Free League Publishing today officially released their two new open game licenses for community creators: a Free Tabletop License (FTL) for the Year Zero Engine and a third-party license for their upcoming fantasy RPG Dragonbane. The Year Zero Engine FTL comes with an updated Standard Reference Document (SRD). All three documents are now available for creators to use.

The Terminator 2: Judgment Day sourcebook for the Terminator RPG adds stats for the liquid metal T-1000, as well as allowing players to play as reprogrammed T-800 models on the side of the human resistance – similar to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s heroic android. As in the original Terminator RPG and its campaign book based on the first movie, players can also just play as bog-standard humans faced with the threat of robotic terminators. Those resistance troops now include an elite force of Time Displacement Commandos who hop between the game’s settings of the 1980s, 1990s and the Future War in an attempt to bring down Skynet.

 #balttletech #dragonlance #freeleague #terminatorrpg

BattleTech Mercenaries:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cgl/battletech-mercenaries

The YZE FTL can be found here:
https://freeleaguepublishing.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Year-Zero-Engine-License-Agreement.pdf?mc_cid=73ab3ad2dc&mc_eid=311aacd06e

YZE SRD (version 1.0) can be accessed here:

https://freeleaguepublishing.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/YZE-Standard-Reference-Document.pdf?mc_cid=73ab3ad2dc&mc_eid=311aacd06e

Terminator RPG T2: Judgement Day:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nightfall/the-terminator-rpg-t2-judgement-day?ref=nav_search&result=project&term=terminator

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Wizards of the Coast has announced the return of two popular settings now for 5E. Unfortunately, according to Twitter, Tracy Hickman and Margaret Weis, creators of Dragonlance and Jeff Grubb, creator of Spelljammer, were not involved in the announcement and found out at the same time everyone did during the announcement. We talked previously about the lawsuit involving the new Dragonlance novels. It doesn’t make WotC look great to ignore the original creators of these settings. Is this to emphasize a break from the past or a chance to save some money?

During the D&D Direct announcement last week, Modiphius Entertainment had a strange announcement of their own. In an attempt to possible distract from WotC, Modiphius had an hour long livestream announcement that was just a torchlit wall that eventually crumbles after a very long wait with only some slight change in lighting. They revealed their new TTRPG Cohors Cthulhu set in ancient Rome, a spinoff of Against the God Themselves, set in the same universe as Achtung! Cthulhu. I guess they were following the old adage “if you can’t beat ‘em, just be boring and confusing” or something like that.

We finally have a date for the Kickstarter campaign for Warzone Eternal. It will be launching May 17th, but be sure to listen to the entire livestream to make sure that date is correct. We talked with Alex Kanous from Res Nova Games previously about the new game and crowdfunding campaign. This should be a fun game to follow and hopefully a big success on Kickstarter. Hopefully with either the Cardinal’s blessing or the influence of the Dark Symmetry we will see the return of wargaming in the Mutant Chronicles universe.

Finally, there is a new release in Japan a a Swedish TTRPG, Kutulu by Mikael Bergström. Call of Cthulhu is the most popular tabletop roleplaying game in Japan. This is a much more rules light and streamlined d6 system. The insanity mechanic especially stands out as a great innovation to the Lovecraft setting. The Swedish language PDF is available as pay-what-you-want PDF on DriveThruRPG. With a little language software translation magic you can get an idea of how this system works. Hopefully we will see an English language release. Free League are you listening?

Modiphius website for Cohors Cthulhu:
https://www.modiphius.net/pages/cohors-cthulhu

Kutulu in Swedish on DTRPG (afilliate link):
https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/382400?affiliate_id=2081746

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Games Workshop licensing is now open to proposals for merchandise using the Warhammer IP. This includes crowdfunding those projects on Kickstarter. The authors of the Dragonlance novels, Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman, are suing Wizards of the Coast due to the breakdown of the revision process for the first draft of the first book of the, now in doubt, next trilogy of novels. Our topic this week is about using horror in your tabletop games. What are the considerations and how should you pace a one-shot or campaign?
#horror #dragonlance #gamesworkshop

The Trajectory of Fear – or How to Use
Horror Tropes Effectively in your Game by Ash Law
https://img.fireden.net/tg/image/1453/84/1453840962349.pdf

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