Guess what came in the mail today!

As I spent all day anxiously awaiting the fateful email from Amazon that my comic book order I made Satuday night would inevitably be cancelled, I was very excited to see a nondescript packaging waiting for me at my front door. I had no idea what it would be as, apparently, my working memory is pretty bad. It was too small to hold the giant three hardcovers I ordered (and will likely never get) from Amazon, not to mention it was way too quick for the free shipping option I selected. Alright, so that's out of the picture, what could it possibly be?

I recently (although not recently enough that I remembered making it!) made an order on Indie Press Revolution for a couple of small-press RPG's. Originally it was to pick up the PDF for Fiasco as A.) I wanted the game pretty badly and B.) I had to prepare for my interview with Jason Morningstar, designer of the game. I knew it would be one of those neat indie games you'd probably be hearing about quite a bit on places like rpg.net as an indie darling.

For more information on Fiasco, you really should give my little interview a click and a read. Fiasco, as it turns out, is one of those books that reads so much better in deadtree version than it does pdf format. Don't get me wrong, the pdf will get you were you need to go, but the book is a really high quality and the layout is very well done for the two-page format. I love the size of these indie rpg's so much. Although I claim to love text book-sized rulebooks, there's definitely a certain appeal to the ultra-portable indie game.

The other game I picked up, Timestream was bought on a lark since it was cheap and involved time travel. I don't usually do blind buys, but the appeal of a concise time-travel game was just too strong. The game, by Nathan Paoletta, is a simple system that's highlighted by its rules specifically dealing with time travel. To be honest I haven't read the 67 page rulebook yet this afternoon, but I really like what I see. This is from the back of the book:

"Some can journey through the stream of time. They are the Travelers. Some can control the flow of time. They are the Manipulators. Some are forced to wade the tides of time. They are the Thralls. All have great power. And great weakness."

I think reading that on IPR's page for it is what really grabbed me. There's a very strong sense of theme here. I'm really looking forward to giving it a read and writing up a full review of it here, so stay tuned for that. The other thing that really makes me happy is that it comes spiral bound from the get-go. Check out the picture to the right here. This is the advantage of spiral-binding your game books. You can just lay them out on the table to a rule and keep going. I've found that this kind of thing is almost essential in miniature wargaming, but it still can be useful for RPG's as well.

Hello, my name is Paul, and I am a nerdy nerd who loves getting nerdy things in the mail.