System Mastery

We couldn’t get enough theme months! Welcome to a brand new thing here at System Mastery, Sweater Weather! Reviewing the games that make you feel as cozy and comfortable as a good bowl of stew and a blazing fireplace. Today, we’re discussing Golden Sky Stories, a game with a nearly microscopic focus on small, simple slice of life interactions, where you play as little animal children with whimsical powers. 

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As we draw this festive Ween to a close, we continue the project of a brief examination of newer space horror (Yes, that last game was a heist thing, but c’mon, you were working for the literal Devil, right? That counts!), this time with the most recent offering in the Alien franchise, a comprehensive and enormous RPG with a lot of modern design sensibilities and a commitment to getting every bit of the fairly sprawled franchise some inclusion (except Resurrection, apparently no one likes it).

Announcement Masteries!

The Adventuring Party: theadventuringparty.net

A weekly gaming podcast with an Irish bent (because it is Irish and made in Ireland). Discussions about RPGs, CCGs, and pop culture in general with all the calm and sober tones you’d expect from a pub brawl.

Valhalla Hobby: valhallahobby.com  (Use this link! It applies our code!)

5% off all manner of excellent hobby products, shipped direct to your door! Get the coolest and newest hobby stuff from a wide variety of ranges including Crisis Protocol, Malifaux, Star Wars: Legion, and more! They’ve even got our books, which you know, definitely buy those! (must spend $100 for discount, shipping exclusively in the US)

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The customary three great blessings of Ween to each and every one of you! Okay, so this game isn’t especially scary. By now you should have recognized that we may or may not give a fuck about tradition from one day to the next. In this case, we’ve decided to harness the power of ween to focus on a few newer games for the season. Any chance to dodge another OSR retroclone or D20 shovelware, am I right? Today we discuss Stealing Stories for the Devil, which is a heist game written by Monte Cook, so that’s two new things!

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https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2022/09/system-mastery-235-ray-winningers-underground.mp3

Hurray, one of those edgy 90s games where people have superpowers but aren’t superheroes! You know, like the other ones? This one at least has an interesting angle of entry by being more about society failing veterans, but is that enough to help it shine beyond it’s fairly timeworn genre? Well, let’s find out!

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https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2022/09/system-mastery-234-apocalypse-world-2.mp3

Wait, from Psi World to Apocalypse World? Two worlds? One network family? Oh right, I should probably mention that because we both have been down for a bit with the old Covid-19, James stepped in to help record this one, which turned out useful because Jef was just plain too sick all the past couple weeks to even read. But he got better! And he came to join the fun anyway! Just, you know, without reading any of the book at all.

Special thanks to our guest host James D’Amato, check out his fine works at some weird place we never heard one called Oneshotpodcast.com.

Double special thanks to our Announcement Mastery sponsor https://www.twitch.tv/goblincavetv, a great place to watch non-WOTC streamed tabletop actual play content!

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https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2022/08/system-mastery-233-psi-world.mp3

Back to the old psionic grind! This game has almost exactly two whole paragraphs of story. Everything else we’ve had to glean from the margins and unusually informative rules. Wanna… I guess be a psychic refugee in the near future of 198X? That’s pretty much what’s going on here.

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https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2022/08/system-mastery-232-leaked-6th-ed-dd.mp3

Hell yeah, we got some leaked documents up in here! Shame we gotta do it to them. But such is the rule of law here on the wild internet frontier.

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https://systemmastery.files.wordpress.com/2022/07/system-mastery-231-kevin-kell-rpg.mp3

A rare occasion where the “How the hell did this even happen” question seems fairly obvious (some company wanted a furry game in their line and this was close enough) but hot damn is this ever the weirdest thing we’ve seen in a long, long while. Strap in folks, this episode is extremely long, and not all that much of it is about the rules to the Action! licensed engine it runs on. Kevin & Kell is a weird, weird comic strip, and mainlining the lore of it in a long week without actually reading the strip at all is a weird, weird way to interact with it. Just a friendly warning!

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