Toucanadian

The infamous cooper/sharp-shinned debacle. My bet is on sharpy because of the bug eyes and some preeeetty sharp-looking shins.

Saw this during my last trip to Japan! Mt. Yotei has a crazy amount of woodpeckers.

So the short answer is yes it’s best at a fantasy setting and hard to hack.

BW has a massive collection of skills, traits, and lifepaths that are all tailored for a fantasy medieval setting. These aren’t just lists but each has its own stats, nuance, and connections to other things. You need all of this just to create characters and skills are pretty much how you play the game.

To hack this you would need to make entire new sets of lifepaths and new relevant skills at a minimum. It’s not hard to make a new skill or two to fit a custom setting but if you were trying to do cyberpunk or something the amount of overhaul would be staggering.

I haven’t looked into it but there something called Burning Empires that has done the heavy lifting for you and modified BW for a sci-fi setting. Mouseguard and Torchbearer also re-theme the BW system in specific ways (Mouseguard more so) but also simplify the rule system considerably.

That all said, BW itself has a pretty crazy range of stories you can tell just from the different settings (loosely tied to races) available. Classic fantasy? Stick with humans, maybe with a sprinkle of elf/dwarf if you’re feeling spicy (recommend sticking with humans for your first go though). Want a pastoral setting plagued by cult-crazed terrorists? Roden got you covered. Want to play as giant magic wolves dealing with pack dynamics and protecting the woods? Great Wolves are all set up for you. Want to be giant spiders and…uh…anyway yeah you can do that too.

It’s a wild system that does so much differently but there’s a lot of great stuff packed in there. It’s changed how I play basically everything else.

Interesting, I’ll have to look more into it. Thanks!

So what does it mean to buy a DRM-free game on Steam? Can I download and play it separate from the Steam client?

Thanks for this, a lot of these sound very cool and I love the push to spread creativity. Makes me want to make some of my smaller adventures that I’ve done more publishable. Maybe get something out there n the internet.

Wow the robot is SO much worse

I’m on Island III of Cuphead. Just beat the Bee Boss and it was certainly brutal. Even then once you get better at understanding what you’re supposed to do with each fight it really helps.

If it’s of interest, the Glass Cannon Podcast is running Shadowdark as their main game right now. Worth checking out on youtube if you’re interested to see how it plays. The videos show how the hexcrawl works a bit as well. The system seems like a really strong option if it fits the darker vibe you’re looking for.

Just got back from travels to Japan and Taiwan and picked up some cool looking stuff over there! Slowly getting to try it out.

Viking See-saw - Banger dexterity game, and even better with drinks around the table. Dead simple, but lots of luck pushing and enough thought to make each turn tense and interesting.

Tiger & Dragon - I see this one becoming a classic round here. Pretty simple idea but lots of room for depth and the different scoring variants will keep it around a long time.

Onstage - Interesting Vietnamese trick-taker with a delightful stage prop that helps determine trump suit each trick. We played with five and the chaos of the card powers felt way too random to do anything strategic. Want to retry with less players and/or the no card power variant before giving up on it because there’s definitely something there.

Herbalism - I adore my english version of the game, but picked up another in Taiwan because I liked the new box size. Turns out it’s a brand new edition with reworked actions, guessing, and scoring! Not sure if I like it more but I’ll have to play them both again to decide.

Still to try: Ravens of Thri Sahashri, Sail, Samurai Shodown: The Card Game

Special shout out to For Northwood! for being a great time killer during travels! Such a hardcore solo game wrapped in such a cute package.

Damn, this one slipped off my radar. Hope they pick a good one!