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Black Death is a humorous and macbre little board game about life in the Middle Ages, circa 1400, during the height of the Plague. Each player takes the role of a different disease and whoever wipes out most of Europe wins!
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EABA is our foray into open source, or in this case, open supplement gaming. We sell the game and some supplements, you do whatever the hell you want with it.
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End of Days is a fast little card game about the end of the world. A giant meteor is going to smash the planet in eight rounds (or less!).
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soft landing is a boardgame for today. Each player controls a nation or group of nations, and is trying to keep their own people happy in a world of declining resources.
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| Blacksburg Tactical Research Center is a little game company nestled in the Appalachian foothills, slowly and tediously handcrafting the finest role-playing games and supplements for a small audience of die-hard fans, and for new converts acquired through word-of- mouth advertising. We do it because we love the work. Though managing to get some non-game fiction published would be nice too... |
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BTRC News
Applied Vectors has done a permanent price reduction on their expansion to CORPS. You can see more info on it here. In other news, EABA v2 moves along slowly but surely. You can see the accumulated chapter art by Paul Bourne by clicking here. On the non-rpg front, the tile game Keep Off the Grass is pretty much done and I'm just looking for a publisher. Empires is another tile-based title and it is in advanced beta-test right now. Pictures of both are on the 2/2012 update.
Work on EABA v2 and ASE proceeds apace. You can see some of the preliminary art by Paul Bourne on the forums or the Facebook page. However, the past week and the next few weeks will have some non-rpg emphasis. You can see some playtest shots of Empire and Keep off the Grass below. Empire is not surprisingly, an empire-building game using tiles and meeples in a new way. Tiles can be staggered or orthagonal, and control is based on soldiers straddling the border between tiles. Players are simultaneously trying to build an empire and sabotage or take over chunks of the other player's. Think of it as a cross between Alhambra, Settlers and Carcassonne. I did the first solid playtest up at Mysticon last weekend and it is solid, but needs tweaking, which I have to do in time for StellarCon next weekend and the Spiel meeting in Blacksburg the week after that.
The other game is Keep off the Grass, which is maze/tile game with a simple rule set and a lot of strategy.You trying to capture tiles and knock other players off the paths. It is pretty much done, I have a company interested in it and it was very well received at Mysticon, in the "can we play that again?" kind of way. I'm very happy with that one, and will be examining the tile mix to see if I need to make any changes, but otherwise it is complete.
Among the many spiffy features of the new site is the ability to sell things to you directly. The entire BTRC catalog of downloads can be purchased direct from this site if you have a PayPal account.
If you see a "buy now" button in any product description, it means you can buy the pdf download of that product directly from BTRC. Just click the button and you can pay through PayPal and download from our secure server. In addition to being faster than going through an external site, it also puts a higher percentage of the product's price in BTRC's pocket. And every little bit helps. At the moment it is on a “per item” basis rather than a shopping cart, but we'll see if that can be adjusted later on.
Purgatory Bay
Sometimes you can't go home. Purgatory Bay is an experimental rpg outside the normal EABA mold. Purgatory Bay is where things sometimes wash up when they are lost at sea. A pocket reality surrounded by the Fog, it is a quasi-Renaissance community of varying races and faiths from across time and dimension, forced to uneasily coexist in a pocket reality that only a few can exit from and return to. Click the pic for more details.
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EABA dice curve
The way the "best three" system in EABA works in practice is along the lines of the image to the right (click to enlarge).
So, if you were rolling 5d (the cyan line) and needed to reach a target number of 16 or better, you can see that you have about a 25% chance of success. Some of the benefits of the system are that all success curves are bell curves, your chance drops a little at first, and then steeply with increasing difficulty. Another benefit is that the system is "closed”. No matter how good you are, you cannot roll higher than a difficulty of 20, the best you can get with a number of d6 with a +2 (like 6d+2). In fact, if you are using a +1 or a +2 and this table, you simply shift all the results 1 or 2 places to the right. So, a 4d+2 roll (the green line) is a better chance of success than a plain 5d roll (move the 4d mark at "14" two places over to "16" and you'll see). That is why you always have the option in EABA of "rolling down", choosing to lose a die and gain a +2 on the roll.