RPGaDay Day 3 First RPG bought (this year)

Today’s prompt for RPGaDay is First RPG bought this year.

This is a tricky one. My first reaction was “I don’t buy new RPGs. I have enough and more to interest me and keep me busy with my D&D campaign.” And then I remembered the whole OGL fiasco which blew up over Christmas and prompted a lot of looking around at alternatives in the new year.

Which led to this blog post comparing different alternative systems, this overview of Castles and Crusades, and then this one with quick summaries of Pathfinder 2, Kobold Press Project Black Flag (now Tales of the Valiant, Kickstarter funded and delivery being worked on) and DM Dave’s Helkara (which was far too gritty for my taste).

And then WOTC saw sense (or at least the dollar signs draining rapidly away) and backed down and rolled back the OGL changes and put the 5e SRD under Creative Commons, and everything calmed down again.

But by then I had started looking at different systems. So it appears I did buy some RPGs this year, or at least start investigating them.

Looking through my accounts, it’s difficult to see which was the first purchase of the year. The PDF with the earliest 2023 date seems to be Castles and Crusades, but looking at my account on Troll Lord games, it appears that I paid a massive $0 for the players handbook and monsters and treasure (very generous of them).

I have assorted Pathfinder PDFs, both original and Pathfinder 2, but looking at the dates on the files, although I haven’t really studied them before, it appears I bought them via a charity Humble Bundle a while ago.

DM Dave’s Helkara I acquired for no additional fee as a Patron – does that count as a purchase?

I definitely started looking at Kobold Press Project Black Flag in January (I even got the t-shirt!), and I paid for it in the Tales of the Valiant Kickstarter, but that payment wasn’t taken until the end of June. But I started considering some features of that early in the year – in particular their take on luck points.

And I also restarted looking at Level Up A5E, which I received in PDF form at the end of 2021 and in book form in 2022. I gave first impressions of the Adventurer’s Guide in May 2022, but never got round to using it in earnest. The whole question of weapon mastery in OneD&D (or whatever we’re supposed to call it now) and Tales of the Valiant got me looking again at the Combat Manoeuvres in A5E, and we’re about to start trying them out in our campaign.

I started reviewing Bruce Heard’s Calidar mechanics for a blog post (it may yet still happen), but again I’ve had those a while.

So – definitely a tangle. And that’s without all the supplements (which I don’t really think count as RPGs in and of themselves).

And what am I actually using? Well, I’m still running my D&D 5e campaign, lightly house-ruled to make it slightly more gritty, based in my version of Akorros in the Republic of Darokin in Mystara (the BECMI world from the 1980s). But we’re about to start experimenting with Level Up A5E Combat Manoeuvres. And I do want to try the ToV luck points…if I remember…