I decided to hedge my bets on this one and give the first RPG played with my daughter, and with the gaming group, this year. That gives me a chance to talk about two games!

The first is the game I was playing with my daughter (and later the wife jumped in, as well): Aegean. This is a rules lite RPG set in ancient and mythic Greece. The players can be normal folks or demi-gods, and the there’s a couple of expansions that came along as stretch goals on the Kickstarter which ended way back in October of 2021, and which was supposed to be on backers’ doorsteps in Summer of 2022. Of course, between shutting the f***ing planet down and the attendant issues that caused, while the PDF has been in hand for a while, the printed materials (as of this writing) are still vaporware.

The system is simple — you have five attributes and fifteen of skills. To do something, add the appropriate skill and attribute and roll that number of ten-sided dice. Eights and above are successes, with 10 allowing you to activate a feat on your weapon, bank Resolve (their luck/story/hero point mechanic), give a success to a companion, or “invoke the fates”. It’s a pretty standard mechanic, especially for d6 games. It’s light, fast, and works. The character can embark on adventures from monster killing (a pretty common hero thing, even in Greek myth), to competing in contests at city games, to help to build up one’s polis — the city you are from. Players work together to create a basic polis and can get elected into the government.

Overall, the system is tight, there’s enough material to work with, and fans of the myths should be able to craft story arcs with ease. The production values, based off of the PDFs is very simple. Layouts are single column, block paragraph with easy to read typefaces. Art is at a minimum in the core book and teh follow-on Book of Heroes and Book of Empire — which I still haven’t had a chance to look through, as they came in which we were kicking the tires on other games systems at the time.

Aegean can still be pre-ordered at Kickstarter, and at DriveThruRPG. I should have gone with the print-on-demand version; proof for the print version were only spotted in April, so I’m expecting this to take another few months to see.

The other “first” for the game group was Free League’s Blade Runner. I love police procedurals and espionage adventures. Always did. Hell, they directed me into my former field of endeavor, before I got into teaching. Set in the rain-soaked, neon-lit, dystopian future of the movies, the game has the characters playing the eponymous police assassins. You can play a human or a replicant. I promptly ignored the need to be Rep-Detect and several of the characters are in other divisions of LAPD: a Robbery-Homicide detective (who caught the murder that started our campaign), a Special Investigations Service detective (they’ve got an…interesting history), and a pair of Blade Runners — an older experienced one with a dark secret, and a new Nexus 9.

The system is the Mutant Year Zero system, well the “2.0 version” I guess you might call it. Rather than rolling all d6s, the the characters roll between a d4 (really a d6 is the lowest for characters) up to a d12 depending on their attribute and their skill. A 6 or higher is a success, and a 10 or higher is a double success. (That sounds familiar…doesn’t it?) After having played Alien, where a wheelbarrow of die could seemingly not get you a success, this version of the MY0 engine (and which also powers Twilight:2000) seems to guarantee more consistent results for higher levels. It good enough I’ve been considering converting Alien over to the newer version — something Free League should seriously consider.

I’ve been enamored with the admitted-awful future of Blade Runner since I sat as a teen in the theater and watched it opening night. It still is a draw and I will admit this is the most I’ve enjoyed running a game since my five-year long epic Battlestar Galactica game ended.

Both games are good and worth a look. Aegean will set you back $25 on DriveThruRPG, Blade Runner more than that from Free League.