Early Look at My New RBRB Review - The Obsidian Bat

Hello Patrons!

Well, after 3 years of running, Covid finally caught me this month. In my Kult Character Creation video I was seriously congested and you can hear it in my voice. By the next day I was coughing my guts out, took the test, and got the bad news. I'm Vaxxed, Boosted, and all that, and got immediately on antivirals. So it was a couple days of feeling rough, one day of feeling like death, and several days where I felt fantastic but was still coming positive on my tests. But I'm all good now.

Sadly, between getting sick and the ice storm at the beginning of the month (difficult to imagine now, as today was in the 80s) we didn't get to play anything in February. We should have 1 session left to wrap up our Righteous Blood Ruthless Blades campaign, and after that (probably April) we'll try out the new Bladrunner RPG. While we haven't played it yet, my initial impression is a lot like my impression of Alien (also by Free League), and that's that it looks beautiful. Rules and art and the whole package looks top notch, but the scope of what you can play is pretty limited. The adventure in their Box Set looks good and the number and quality of handouts and stuff is awesome, but there's only the one adventure. Not even a small sample adventure in the corebook :-(  The game seems pretty limited to only being police bladerunners hunting replicants. Nothing about all the off-world stuff mentioned in the films, nothing about playing an on-the-run group of replicants, nothing about just being normal people living in the Bladerunner Universe. So, like with Alien, it looks like it can do one specific thing very, very well. We'll see once we get some play-time under our belts. Gonna need to find a good outfit for Jack, too. My buddy Jorge already 3d printed a gun, but I'll need to figure out the rest of Jack's ensemble.

Next month I should also finally begin playtesting an adventure I wrote for Kult. It started as an adventure for our campaign, but I thought it might be good enough to sell. So I wrote it out in module format, which ended up making it a lot better because I was finding places to flesh out or add to. I pitched it to Helmgast. They said they'd like to see it but wanted a different setting because they already had a "Characters Snowed-in" scenario. Didn't take much to change it to an island resort being hit by a supernatural hurricane, so I sent the updated version in 2 days later. Evidently they hadn't realized I'd already fully written it before pitching it. They said they wanted it, but I told them I needed to playtest it first, but expected to do that in a month, maybe 2. That was September. Our Kult play schedule went sideways, then holidays, then the short, single-session adventure we were doing first ended up taking us 3 sessions.  Anyway, fingers crossed that we manage to get this playtest started (and finished) so I can get it to Helmgast. It's a cool scenario, I feel, and I hope my players enjoy this little twist in our campaign.

In other news, I got the confirmation that I will be attending ChaosiumCon in April. I'd been 50/50 on going, but Chaosium bribed me with a hotel room and some panels to be on. So anyone going to that or in the Ann Arbor Michigan area I hope to see you there. Anyone coming let me know and I'll bring you something extra special.

I'm also attending Origins this June. Again, hit me up and let me know if you'll be coming so we can meet and I can bring you something.

Anywho, my latest review video is done and available for you. This one is for the Righteous Blood, Ruthless Blades adventure The Obsidian Bat. Fun adventure. Biggest issue with it was simply the standard RBRB hurdle of how many Special Abilities there are, which makes it tricky to GM all the NPCs. The game has been a huge hit with my players. Better than I'd expected. They really love it. 

I should have the Closed Captioning finished for it tomorrow, and I'll be posting it Live for the general masses Thursday, I hope.

After the initial review of the RBRB corebook at the end of 2022 Osprey evidently sold out and I noticed the PDF on DriveThruRPG is now at Gold status, which makes me happy to know I helped make that happen. Evidently the authors retained the rights to it when Osprey passed on publishing more and it sounds like they might have found the motivation to try to release some more supplements for it. I hope they find the money and resources to do it. 

Anyway, that's the update of what's been going on. Ended up being way longer than I'd planned, but I had a lot to say. Thank you, everyone, for your continued support. I've been so fortunate to be able to do this as my actual day job and it wouldn't be possible without you. 

Seth