Let's talk about extraterrestrials!

Since 2023, the United States Government has come out and stated that there is evidence, and lots of it, of aliens, non-human-based technology, and biologics.  Very recently within the past couple of weeks, the world has seen an uptick in this phenonomon, sources state that these UAPs are coming out of the oceans, and strange earthquakes have been occurring near these sightings as well.

What are your thoughts on this topic?  Personally, I'm kinda bummed out because there's like nothing here in Boston that would warrant an advanced armada to pay a visit.  It's been said that these beings are sending a strong and clear message, not to humanity in general, but to our collective governments.  Compound this with the outright silence and lack of news coverage on these visits, makes me guess that I think we need to buckle up, and enjoy the ride!

Personally though, I'd love to go for a ride.  Especially if it means that I don't have to go to work tomorrow.  Hey, I wonder if they'd fix my the pain in my feet so I can actually walk normally again.  Do you think they'd do that favor for me?  Eh, a girl can dream.  Right?

If I had Netflix, I would check it out!  But it sounds interesting!

When Momo and Okarun's beliefs clash, they're thrown into a world of ghosts, aliens and awakened powers. 

Anyone else been watching this one on Netflix?  It is a great anime with tons of laughs.

So, I'm looking into purchasing the digital versions of the books (5e), and I've noticed that they are incredibly difficult to come by.  My typical source: DriveThruRPG, only has the VTT editions available, and those are only good on the various platforms they are built for, such as Roll20, etc.  I went over to the D&D Official website, and found that, yes, I can purchase the books, but if I want the digital versions, I HAVE to purchase the physical books too.  I mean, that's great that the digital versions are only $10 more, but I don't have the bookshelf space for the physical books.  Also, keeping in mind with how rarely I'll probably play this game, that's too much valuable space wasted on books that will just collect dust, and inevitably have to be boxed up and moved and potentially lost whenever I do happen to relocate residences.

I'm not a happy camper right now.

I found the following list on Reddit while searching for games that use a Standard Deck of Playing Cards.  I've decided to add this listing because there are some places where dice are not permitted, and cards make an easy substitution.

Games that use playing cards as a Core mechanic

• 52 Fates
• And You Will Rest Your Head on Your Parent's Grave
• Angakkuit
• Aesir: The Last Avatar
• Back to the Beginning
• Beat to Quarters
• C22 System
• Capers
• Castle Falkenstein
• Crash Cart
• Cold Dead Hands
• A Cool and Lonely Courage
• Delve
• Dog Bear
• Draw: A Simple Western
• Dust Devils
• Duty & Honour
• Exile Deal
• EXUVIAE
• FAITH
• Frankenstein Atomic Frontier
• Generations
• Grin
• Gun & Slinger
• Hands of Destiny
• Heaven & Earth
• Hillfolk
• The House Doesn't Always Win
• Hot Guys Making Out
• In a Wicked Age
• The King is Dead
• Legends of Avallen
• Love & Barbed Wire
• Merger
• Miserable Secrets
• mole.mole
• Monkey: The Roleplaying Game
• Motobushido
• Murderous Ghosts
• My Way
• Network 23
• Night Reign
• Nine Worlds
• Our Minerva
• Parselings
• Praxis Arcanum
• Primetime Adventures
• Protocol Game Series
• Purgatory House
• The Quiet Year
• Rascals
• Route Clearance
• Saga Machine system (Shadows Over Sol, Against the Dark Yogi, Dime Adventures and Age of Ambition)
• Shonen Final Burst
• Suited
• The Suits
• Tadhana: A Filipino Tabletop RPG
• Terra the Gunslinger
• Through the Breach
• Tokyo NOVA
• Unbound
• UNOwned (uses an Uno deck)
• Upwind
• We Are Champion
• Westbound
• Wild Cards
• Wretched & Alone
• Zombie World

Games that use playing cards in some aspect of the mechanics (or as an option)

• Aces & Eights
• All Flesh Must Be Eaten
• Blue Rose (Tarot)
• Deadlands
• Deliria
• Dream Askew
• FATE
• Forbidden Lands
• The Ground Itself
• Journey
• Never Going Home
• Savage Worlds
• Sleepaway
• Steampunkers
• Twilight: 2000
• Wolsung

Games that use Tarot Cards

• 7th Sea 1e & 2nd Edition
• Alas Vegas
• Anomaly
• Artesia
• Blade of Arcana
• This Body of Mine
• Demon City
• Engle
• Everway 2nd Edition
• Fate of the Norns
• Fortune's Fool
• His Majesty the Worm
• House of Cards
• Psychosis
• Relics
• Royal Blood
• Sine Requie
• Tarotweaver: A Tarot Based TTRPG
• Weave
• You Are the Dungeon

Games that use a proprietary card deck

• A Thousand Faces of Adventure
• The Brokenhearted
• Clockwork Dominion
• Dialect
• Dragonlance: Fifth Age
• Dungeon Solitaire: Labyrinth of Souls (Tarot)
• For the Queen
• Free Market
• Gamma World (7th Edition)
• Invisible Sun
• Juggernaut
• Marvel Super Heroes Adventure Game
• Mouse Guard
• Paranoia: Red Clearance Edition
• Phoenix: Dawn Command
• Sign
• Spindlewheel
• TORG
• Torg Eternity
• The Yellow King
• This Thing We Started
• Winterhorn 

I plan on enhancing this list with mini descriptions as I have time to add them.  Perhaps some of these games will end up as official library entries here on the site!

Let's Get Silly!

Toon is a different roleplaying game. Remember those great Saturday morning cartoons? Now they're back – and you're the star!

Toon lets you be a rabbit, duck, mouse, moose, woodpecker, wombat, crocodile, caveman . . . whatever you want.

In Toon, anything can happen, and nobody ever gets killed. Been punched? Blown up? Steamrollered? Don't worry – you'll bounce back in the next scene, ready for more!

This book includes quick, simple rules, plenty of silly charts and tables, and lots of cartoon adventures – a joker's dozen! This edition of Toon includes all the material from the original version, plus everything from Toon Silly Stuff, Son of Toon, and Toon Strikes Again – and lots of brand-new material, including two new Feature Films!

Ready to get silly? Get in Toon!

Purchase Link:  Steve Jackson Games

The year is 3200 and mankind's empire lies in ashes.

The Jump Gates fell six hundred years ago, severing the links between the myriad worlds of the human diaspora.

Now, the long isolation of the Silence falls away as men and women return to the skies above their scattered worlds.

Will you be among them once more?

Stars Without Number: Revised Edition is an old-school-inspired game of sci-fi adventure, one built from the ground up to encourage sandbox play and simplify a GM's job in providing it. Familiar mechanics are employed to forge new worlds and explore new possibilities, guidelines built on long experience used to help a group venture in wholly new directions. Within the full-color pages of Stars Without Number: Revised Edition, you'll find... .

    Backwards compatibility, as the Revised Edition is built to work cleanly with existing Stars Without Number supplements and materials. The new systems slot in smoothly, and you can take or leave them individually as your group prefers.
    Expanded character creation, with PCs now customized by special talents and character foci, new options for psychic characters, and new ways to make your hero mechanically distinct. Yet the process is still smooth and quick, with a special quick generator spread to create a hero from nothing more than a half-dozen die rolls.
    Refined psionics, with more options to distinguish your psychic hero's powers and more flexible choices for their abilities. Tailor your psychic to your concept, whether as a cynical gunslinging brainguard or an ascetic psychic healer from a world of austere psionic scholars.
    Improved starship combat, with decisive roles for every member of the party. Build your own starships with the included system and employ new hardware and new starship mods to make your ungainly crate the fastest contraband runner this side of the Veil Nebula.
    New systems to support additional types of play, including rules for hacking, remote drones, and expert technical modification of gear and starships.
    Upgraded tools for sandbox sector creation, with forty new world tags to help define a GM's stellar creations, guides for adding additional system points of interest, and material to help a GM define the interesting traits of the worlds they create. These tools aren't just a clump of random tables, they're a framework to boost your own creativity and help you make fast, good, playable material for your game.
    Augmented adventure creation guidelines. Aside from a hundred piping-hot adventure seeds that mesh smoothly with the world creation tools, Stars Without Number: Revised Edition also includes content to help you turn your vague ideas into a playable evening's adventure. Guidelines on challenges, rewards, and complications in play are all aimed toward the working GM, the man or woman who's not just theorizing their adventures, but actually responsible for making something fun for the whole group.
    Tools for creating aliens, Virtual Intelligences, and hostile human foes, with guidelines for handling potentially-hostile encounters and creating the kind of fearsome xenobeasts that can challenge the doughtiest explorer. Or perhaps you want to be an alien or robot? You'll find the tools for that in Stars Without Number: Revised Edition.
    Faction rules, for handling the background warring and intrigues of hostile groups. Need to add life and motion to your stellar sectors? Sprinkle in a few factions to make news for the PCs to respond to, or use these rules to handle the colonies, spy agencies, mercenary companies, or other enterprises your heroes establish.

And these things? They're all in this free version. Yes, just like the original edition, Stars Without Number: Revised Edition has a free PDF edition to share with your friends and pass around to interested parties. Those daring stellar freebooters who want more can grab the deluxe version right here, gaining....

    Transhuman tech, with rules for bodyswapping, digital identities, post-scarcity economics, and just as importantly, GM guidelines on making exciting adventures when all the old pillars of familiarity have fallen away.
    True AIs, the vast and terrible intellects that can bring forth wonders and ruin in equal measure. Playing a synthetic VI or aspiring organic godmind? Learn how your PC can accumulate the tech they need to ascend to this new plane of being.
    Mechs, for those GMs who relish the thunder of steel titans on their far-future battlefields.
    Heroic PCs, for groups that want to trade the gritty, lethal tone of a standard campaign for classic space opera, with larger-than-life heroes and superhuman skills.
    Society creation, customizing a world or a hab with its own culture and history, pre-designed with fault lines and conflicts to engage your heroes. You'll get more than a dry recounting of details; you'll get the information you need to build adventures that fit with this world's smouldering tensions.
    Space Magic, with rules and guidelines for introducing sorcerous powers and old-school magic into your starfaring adventurers, with sagacious Magisters, versatile Arcanists, and Adepts graced with supernatural powers.

So leap forward, brave adventurer! The stars await you, and the wild glories of an untamed sky!

Purchase Link:  Drive Thru RPG.

Sparks is a game about playing magical girls (and sometimes boys), heroes of Light, love and inexplicable wardrobes. This book contains a complete playable setting and GM options to calibrate your level of play from completely family friendly to danger at every turn.

Become a Spark, empowered by Light and Hope and find out how far your heart can carry you.
Your friends are your strength. Together, you can overcome anything. You'll have to. The Dark won't stop until it has Harvested every last innocent and taken over the world itself. You are the Light that protects the hopes and dreams of everyone's heart.

But don't underestimate the mundane world, it's hard to fight the forces of evil when you're grounded! Better study hard if you want that grade, and make sure to leave time for your friends, because those who take Bonds for granted lose them. Can you conquer the Dark, protect your friends, and still get an A on that math final?

This game is intended to be family friendly, if the players can handle Sailor Moon, they can handle this. If you're looking for a more dangerous experience, use the GM dials to amp things up!

The system is rules light, using a single d8 for task resolution, the result modified up or down by aspects good and bad which define the character. The player has to choose to spend hope points to make the aspects active, but choose carefully, your hope points are also your defense against the attacks of the Dark!

Purchase Link:  Drive Thru RPG.

The panel exploded in a glowing crash of sparks. Mrralff cursed violently, waiting for the diagnostics to flicker across his screen. He breathed a sigh of relief. Nothing was damaged that did not have a redundant system.
Their relative velocities had carried Mrralff and his enemy far apart. It would take a
 moment for the Jeronan to pull his craft back into a firing position. but only a moment. The computer was still fighting to orient after the torpedo impact. His father, when training him to fly, had been very clear on the matter "Recover the tumble within 3 seconds or I'll beat you until you're unconscious." His ISC flight instructor had been more helpful. "When your gimbals are out and you dont 't have time to tackle roll, pitch and yawl one at a time, just pick a point in the sky fly toward it. Easier said than done.

Spacemaster Privateers is the perfect way to start your adventures with the ultimate science fiction role playing system. In the dynamic Privateers setting. you and your players play a part in the last, desperate gamble to win a war against an evil driven by insanity.

Everything you need to play combat-- character creation, a complete setting, starships. and even psychic powers can be found in the pages of this one book!

Once you're up and running. other Spacemaster support books add even more flavor, detail, and action to your game.
The wonders of the future can be yours today!

Purchase Link:  Drive Thru RPG.

The year is 2072. Magic has returned and creatures of myth and legend walk among us as megacorps bleed the world dry. You're a shadowrunner—a deniable asset, a corporate pawn—using bleeding-edge science and magic to make your meat body and mind better-than-flesh. Stay on the edge, and you may survive another run on the mean sprawl streets.

Shadowrun, Fourth Edition offers a completely new rules system that is simple, integrated, and accessible. The state-of-the-art has also been advanced, introducing a new level of augmented reality, new gear, and new magical discoveries. This full-color rulebook contains all the rules gamemasters and players need to create characters and ongoing adventures set in the popular Shadowrun universe.

Purchase Link:  Drive Thru RPG.