Ghost Echo ... AWESOMESAUCE!

Two completely free ... AWESOMESAUCE Indie-RPG games for you if you just hit the links below ... 

Ok .... 

Most Sunday evenings are "Indie-RPG" night for me .... I have loads of 4e and other standard fare going on Thursday through Saturday ... but Sunday is reserved for the sometimes avant garde sometimes silly ... sometimes just crazy ... world of small press indie RPGs.

This past weekend we tried Ghost Echo ... "a quick-play aetherpunk adventure module for 2-6 players."

Wow .. where do I begin.

To start I was sort of sad as one of our regular indie game crew has had to drop out of our indie game (though he remains for other gaming so its not a total loss) due to school wearing him down. Totally understood ... real life comes before gaming (that just sounds so heretical though doesn't it). We had planned to play Lady Blackbird ... ironically yet another one.seven game ... and we've been saying we are going to try it for quite some time and just for whatever reason haven't . As an aside I should mention that I've also done Danger Patrol from them ... AWESOMESAUCE ... but haven't tried Agon yet though I own it ... it looks cool but its a bit more crunchy than their other titles.

Anyway so its just the three of us ... fellow indie fans Rustin and Sadie and myself ... Rustin busts out Ghost Echo ... having not really had it prepped or anything ... though he has run it once before ... and we just get into it. I'm not going to go into the dynamic of the mechanics ... seriously just download it and read it ... its friggin small ... it is certainly not a crunchy system.  But it is really sleek and I have to say in our case we felt it was simply profound. 

We had a really immersive interesting game that just came together and was very satisfying. We started with a few terms that led us into some odd cyber-feudal corporate wars setting and our characters were really cool and the world just popped out to us. I seriously wanted to convert it into a longer playing campaign ... it was that good.

What we discussed in the post game wrap session is that this system (as Rustin has used it once before) would be actually well suited to generating character back-story for the big simulator systems ... with some slight adjustment ... for really any game ... from D&D to RIFTS to Dark Heresy to Shadowrun to you name it ... clearly if your already playing something Old School or indie you wouldn't need that ... but in the big crunchy systems ... short of boringly having all the players type up ... yet again ... a two to five page back-story *yawn* ... which will likely never come into play ... using a quick method to really delve into an interesting story might be the ticket to getting certain types of players really engaged right from the get go with their characters.  I'm going to try it next time I run a game. But in the meantime ... I'm going to keep Ghost Echo close at hand for those off nights when we need something impromptu. Download it ... Try it ... hopefully you'll enjoy it as much as we did!