Blade Runner is one of the published games by Free League which uses a version of the Year Zero Engine (YZE) which eschews dice pools in favour of stepped dice. This means that instead of just adding more dice until you’re rolling a handful of clickety-clacks, you increase the ‘magnitude’ of the dice for skills…
Tag: Year Zero Engine
Languaging and the Naming of Things
One of the important things for the World is familiarity. I remember reading a great (and hefty) first RPG by a Scottish crowd and one of the things I remember most is not their evocative prose or the art which captured the sort of neo-victorian fantasy world, but that they took the time to use…
Patreon Launched
Some small encouragement from people exposed to my first short story set in the “Tales of Distant Lands” world, I’ve launched a Patreon. You can have a look at it here: https://patreon.com/Lategaming All new content for “Tales of Distant Lands” will be released on the Patreon first and then updates posted here later. So, come…
A Hopeful Ending and a New Beginning
We played our final session of The 23rd Letter play test this week, and wrapped up the story of Poppy and her baby. After recuperating overnight (under Joy’s watchful care, and a handy saline drip), Poppy recovered enough from her ordeal to tell the group about what had happened, which really just confirmed all their…
Rise of R’lyeh – Apocalyptic Mythos Horror
Playtest copies currently available Rise of R’lyeh is designed to work with the Year Zero Engine (Step Dice) shared by games like Twilight 2000, Bladerunner, Terminal Shock, The 23rd Letter and Excession. It can be mixed with other third party supplements like Deadzone, Twilight Tangents, Twilight 2249 or any of the others out there. Mythos…
Venting Pyrokinetics
Our fourth and fifth in-game sessions of the 23rd Letter saw quite a lot of action! I’ll give a brief summary, and then talk about some of the rules that I think were interesting. I’ll put a * and a number on some rules I’m going to talk about at the end. Everybody woke up…
The 23rd Letter, 3rd Edition playtest doc
It’s out there in the wild. We are inviting you to the Playtest. Either join our little Discord or, if you already own The 23rd Letter 2nd Edition, check your inbox as you’ll have been sent a link. The highlights are New character options in a new archetype-based system More focus on The Network Explosive…
Power Armour (Living Steel) for YZE-Step
An M.I. lives by his suit the way a K-9 man lives by and with and on his doggie partner. Powered armor is one-half the reason we call ourselves “mobile infantry” instead of just “infantry.” (The other half are the spaceships that drop us and the capsules we drop in.) Our suits give us better…
A precog walks into a bar …
Now a few weeks into the first play-test of the 3rd edition of The 23rd Letter, I wanted to post some updates on what’s been going in the game, and a few reflections as both Referee and game designer. First off, let’s talk about the party, which in this edition is by default a Cell…
YZE Dice Roller – including Step Dice
AJ built this YZE dice roller on the site so we have a super quick way of rolling dice and collecting successes. It’s the only one that works for Step Dice YZE as well as Pool Dice. Click the image and add to your bookmarks!