ffutures | Recent Entries

Following recent site outages my hosting company has finally found the cause - an attack-fleet of bots firing thousands of messages to non-existent email addresses on my site and making endless requests. I'd previously taken down some big files in the hope that would reduce the load. Just posted the current state of play to the blog on the site:

Many apologies for continued site outages, caused by bandwidth issues which are mostly caused by bots. As a temporary measure I've taken down the largest files on the site, Verne's The Children of Captain Grant, since they aren't needed for any of my games etc. and translations can be found on other sites. At the moment there's still a link on the front page but it doesn't go anywhere. I hope to reinstate it soon.

My hosting company has now quadrupled my bandwidth, and is blocking access from various bot sites etc. and setting up Cloudflare to control access - many apologies, I'd hoped to avoid that, hopefully it won't cause problems but it has to be better than the site being down half the time.

Please let me know if you run into any problems with this.

This is a new bundle featuring "the Norrongard campaign setting in the mythic frozen north" from Lou Anders at Lazy Wolf Studios. The books support D&D 5E and Tales of the Valiant from Kobold Press.

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/ThronesBones

One of the interesting features of this offer is that it's based on a series of award-winning YA fantasy novels written by the game's author, the first of which is included, so it ought to be reasonably faithful to the source material. The down side for me is that I'm not currently a big fan of fantasy RPGs and the D&D style of play, so it really isn't my sort of thing. But you get quite a lot for your money and if you like the idea of a viking-inspired RPG it may be just what you're looking for.

Many apologies for the delay in posting this, due to me being an idiot and somehow going through the entire evening without remembering...

Two offers for the Orbital Blues RPG, a "lo-fi space Western RPG" from SoulMuppet Publishing. One's a repeat, the other all-new

ORBITAL BLUES (from June 2024)
https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Orbital2026

ORBITAL BLUES AFTERBURN (new)
https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Afterburn

In 2024 I said "This is an interesting idea but presentation is a little garish and offputting if you just want to read the rules and understand the system quickly. A plus is that it's pretty cheap. On the whole I think it's worth a look if you're in the market for this sort of game and setting."

Since then I've been reminded that there are much more garish RPGs out there (borg borg borg) so that isn't really an incredibly strong objection. I haven't had a chance to check out the Afterburn bundle properly yet but it seems to continue the themes of the original game, and remains pretty cheap. I think both are worth a look.

This is a bundle of material for Vast Grimm, the "Creation Curation SFRPG of bizarre horror inspired by Mork Borg," It's a special offer timed for 7/7, which is apparently a special day for Mork Borg fans.

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/VastGrimm

Like a lot of material inspired by Mork Borg the typography is often somewhere between "Urgh, that's a weird layout" and "My eyes! They bleed!" which is not ideal for someone who has a damaged retina and often sees straight lines as sine waves, which is why this review doesn't go into much detail. But it's cheap and if that's the sort of thing you like it contains "everything you need to fight frenzied battles for survival as the Universe inches closer to inevitable demise. It'll be fun!"

Definitions of fun may vary, of course...

Launching in an hour, this is an offer of Oldskull Generators Bundle, random generators from Kent David Kelly for AD&D and compatible systems. Some of them were in an earlier bundle, Castle Oldskull, the rest are new.

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/OldskullGenerators

These really aren't my area of interest - if they're yours, they might be worth a look. If you previously got Castle Oldskull it may be worth checking if you need the new material in this offer, and it it'd be cheaper to cherry-pick the ones you need rather than buying the whole bundle.

This is a repeated bundle of material published for the Palladium Role Playing System, focusing on mutants and ninjas, which seem to go together for some reason:

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/MutantNinjas

Last time I said: I would like to be positive about thus, but Palladium's games have never been my favourites; they tend to be rules complex, often at the expense of playability, and fairly inflexible in the style of play they require. With the exception of Ninjas and Superspies and Mystic China all of the games in this bundle were originally spinoffs and sequels to their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles RPG, whose rights have presumably now lapsed. But if you want to simulate Mad Max with talking animals, or run post-apocalypse Kung Fu Panda, this might be a useful source.

As then, so now. TMNT is still the elephant missing from the room, and I'm still not very interested in running any of this material. And it hasn't got any younger - most of this has copyright dates in the eighties and is a bit clunky compared to modern RPGs. But if you like the system and don't already own these RPGs and supplements it's reasonably cheap.

This is an offer of the solo journaling RPG Colostle, from creator Nich Angell at Draconeer Games about exploring a world-sized and in many respects living castle.

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Colostle

It's an interesting idea that seems to combine elements from a lot of fantasy and SF sources, although none are explicitly acknowledged. Since it's intended primarily as a solo game, with the player making up a lot of it as they go along it may be a good idea to leave this part of things a bit vague. Something I came up with that was primarily suggested by Iain Banks and China Mieville might be very different to something someone else wrote based on Girl Genius and Japanese anime. My trouble here is that I'm not really very interested in solo and journaling RPGs and prefer to interact with other players. Since the rules are very firmly aimed at solo play that limits their usefulness to me.

Having said that, it's cheap and nicely designed, with quite a lot of art, and has rules that seem to work reasonably well. For a change it uses a pack of standard playing cards for deciding random events, so you don't have to worry about weird dice. If you like this style of play it's worth a look.

Later - many thanks to

vivdunstan who pointed out I'd spelled the name of the game wrong twice despite numerous examples in the bundle page - for some reason Mr. Brain here was convinced that a game about a castle would have "astle" in the name, not "ostle". Now corrected.

Sorry, this should have been posted yesterday but I forgot.

This is a bundle for Mappa Mundi - An Exploration + Ecology RPG from Three Sails Studios. It's set after an ecological disaster has changed every detail of the world and its environment, and it's now full of kaiju and other weird creatures. characters are explorers mapping it while avoiding violence which might lead to a catastrophe.

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/MappaMundi

This is an interesting setting, especially the idea of trying to resolve everything non-violently, but the time scale for the change is frankly a bit silly - everything is supposed to have happened in about a century, and evolution etc. really doesn't work that fast or produce so many spectacularly successful results so quickly. What we don't seem to see here is all the things that must have gone horribly wrong in that time; giant creatures that couldn't find enough food or collapsed because their skeletons were too weak for their physical size and other evolutionary dead ends.

It really only works if you assume some sort of magical explanation, alien intervention, or some other godlike influence. This might not worry some players, but most of my scientific background is in biology, and this sort of thing makes suspension of disbelief more or less impossible for me. But if you can live with that it's got some interesting ideas.

This is a bundle for the fantasy RPG Torchbearer from The Burning Wheel.It's a grimdark take on fantasy RPGs, with the characters poor and likely to die horribly because there are no easy fixes for injuries etc.

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Torchbearer

As I understand it, this is derived from the Mouse Guard rules, which in turn derive from the Burning Wheel system. I haven't tried to track it back beyond that, but it basically seems to be yet another dungeon bashing setting, which isn't my preferred genre. If you like that sort of thing you're getting a complete RPG and a reasonable amount of support material reasonably cheaply, so it may be worth a look.

This is a bundle of the RPG Rider from Independence Games, a Wild West game based on the Cepheus Engine rules:

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Rider

It\s been a VERY long time since there has been a "pure" western RPG, everything seems to be Western Horror, Western Fantasy, Western Cthulh Mythos, etc. I have no idea if there's actually a market for this, but it's pretty cheap and might make a nice change for someone - and if all else fails, it looks to be compatible with the Clement Sector material for Cepheus Engine, so Space Cowboys might be a thing.

Take me out to the black
Tell them I ain't comin' back
Burn the land and boil the sea
You can't take the sky from me

Two offers of the venerable and highly regarded fantasy RPG Chivalry and Sorcery from Brittannia Games - one a repeat, the other all new:

CHIVALRY AND RISING SUN (from Feb 2024)
https://bundleofholding.com/presents/RisingSun2026

C&S NEW LANDS (all-new)
https://bundleofholding.com/presents/ChivalryNewLands

The last time the Chivalry and Rising Sun bundle was on offer I said: "This seems to be a fairly good updating of this venerable system which is now 44 years old - the new edition is very nicely presented and adds new material with a focus on cultural diversity. By modern standards it feels a little rules-heavy, but it hasn't aged nearly as badly as some of its competitors. Pricing seems good, and there's a lot here for gamers with historical interests to enjoy." I don't see any reason to change that.

For various reasons I haven't had a chance to take a good look at New Lands - my impression on a quick look is that it seems to be the sort of material that is useful if you're running a game that needs it, but may be of secondary interest otherwise. If you pay more than the base price you can get a lot of adventures, which is possibly more useful to some referees.

One of the links from the original offer leads to a blog post about Lee Gold, creator of much of the C&S worlds, and is well worth a look even if you aren't interested in the game. It's about a third of the way down the page:

beyondthebundle.com/2026-06-15/chivalry-and-sorcery-x2/

This is an all-new offer of generic material for fantasy RPGs which can be adapted to the GM's needs, published by Raging Swan Press

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Dungeononomicon

I'm a bit puzzled by this one because I could have sworn that I'd seen something very similar in a previous bundle, but I may be remembering it wrong. This isn't really something I'm likely to need, since I don't play pure fantasy RPGs these days, but if you have a use for it it's reasonably cheap and may be easier than designing your game setting from scratch.

Apologies - the link was originally going to an older offer, now fixed.

Back when I published The Original Flatland Role Playing Game I somehow missed that there were TWO flatland films in production - the one that I missed was Flatland: The Film by Ladd Ehlinger, which was eventually put it on YouTube as a free download. It's more than an hour long, and updates the idea of Flatland very nicely.

For best results open the link in a tab

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avMX-Zft7K4

Another bundle, this time comics rather than RPG. I'm not really familiar with this publisher or the comics, but you're getting a LOT of their work

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/TopCow

A lot of comics in a lot of genres - if you like comics there ought to be something to interest you - but if you only want one or two titles cherry-picking the ones you want may be a better option.

This is an offer of a new (2024) edition of the humorous fantasy RPG Kobolds Ate My Baby with a lot of support material. It uses a rules set based on the polymoph system, unfortunately I last saw the old set some time around the year 2000 (it was published in 1999), and while I'm pretty sure I have a copy somewhere I now have no idea where that somewhere might be, and can't do a direct comparison - basically, the new version is quick and simple with a lot of gratuitously horrible things happening to the player characters, and looks to be a lot of fun to play. Think of it as Paranoia with baby-eating monsters the whole world wants to destroy as the player characters and you won't go far wrong...

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/KAMB2026

As mentioned above, it's been a long while since I looked at this game. The new edition is prettier than the old one, with better layout and a lot of new art (all of the art is by John Kovalik), and there are a lot of adventures and add-ons in the bundle, offering kobolds new and exciting ways to die. It's VERY silly, but sometimes silly is fun, and you can learn it VERY quickly. Enjoy!

I was just looking out a couple of figures for a game and found one I'd forgotten - a 1986-ish Citadel model of Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius in their short-lived Eternal Champions series. A bit old and battered, and I'm amazed at the amount of trouble I want to with the patterns on the trousers etc. Don't seem to own any of the others, but I was a much bigger fan of Cornelius than the fantasy characters in this range.

Two bundles of translated material for the Brancalonia tabletop roleplaying campaign setting from Acheron Games (Milan, Italy) for Dungeons & Dragons Fifth Edition and compatible systems. It's a "Spaghetti Italian" setting with an emphasis on rogues, humour, bawdy jokes, etc. and seems to be fairly popular. One is a repeat from 2024 containing the rules etc., the other is all-new supplementary material:

BRANCALONIA (from Nov 2024)
https://bundleofholding.com/presents/2026Brancalonia

BRANCALONIA BOUNTY (new)
https://bundleofholding.com/presents/BountyBranc

I don't think that there are any changes in the original bundle, but if there are anyone who previously bought it should get them free of charge. The other is all new.

Last time I said "On a quick look this seems to be well presented and reasonably faithful to its genre, and more honest than most RPGs when it comes to character motivation; they're in it for the loot etc.. It doesn't, unfortunately, have anything resembling a flying spaghetti monster in the monsters section, but you can't have everything. If you're interested in D&D I think it's worth checking it out."

The new material adds a lot more creatures, my favourite being demonic geese, and includes recipes for cooking them, but there is still no flying spaghetti monster. So it goes...

This is an offer of the Undying Corruption 5E Bundle, featuring the Undying Corruption D&D Fifth Edition campaign from Nine Heavens Press based on Korean myth and folklore. It's only available for ONE WEEK, not the usual sort of period.

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/UndyingCorruption

This one probably isn't on my bucket list - I know very little about Korean mythology etc. and I'm not a fan of D&D or fantasy RPGs in general. But it's cheap and it looks like you get a fair bit for the price

A big bundle of ready-made maps for fantasy RPGs from cartographer Dyson Logos, last offered in 2024

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/2026Dyson

Last time I said "I don't really have any use for this sort of thing, but what I've seen looks pretty good, and they're designed to be easy to print and customize. If you use these games it's probably worth a look." I think this all still applies.

This is a repeat bundle of GameMaster's Apprentice, eight sets of idea-generator cards for RPGs by Nathan Rockwood at Larcenous Designs. This has been updated since the last time it was offered - if you previously bought it you get the update free.

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/2026Decks

Last time I said: "This isn't really something I have a lot of use for, though I've occasionally used random photos, books etc. as equivalent idea generators, e.g. by flicking to random pages and using the first words of a few paragraphs to describe a character or setting. My main reservation would be the cost of printing it all if you want to use it in card form - you're going to need a LOT of ink or toner. On the other hand it looks reasonably cheap, and it ought to be possible to come up with a way to select a random card and look at it as a PDF or graphics file without the need for printing."

None of that has really changed much.

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Meme-Free Zone

And other lies by Marcus L. Rowland

Recent Entries

Forgotten Futures Web Site.

Another Fantasy Bundle - Thrones & Bones

Another Two SF Bundles - Orbital Blues

Another SF / Horror Bundle - Vast Grimm

Another Fantasy Bundle - Oldskull Generators

Another Repeat RPG Bundle - Mutants and Ninja

Another Fantasy Bundle - Colostle

Another RPG Bundle - Mappa Mundi

Another Fantasy Bundle - Torchbearer

Another RPG bundle - Rider

Another Fantasy Bundle - Chivalry and Sorcery

Another Fantasy Bundle - Dungeonomicon

Another Flatland Movie

Another Bundle - Top Cow Comics

Another Fantasy Bundle - Kobolds Ate My Baby

A Very Tasty World, Mister Cornelius...

Two Fantasy Bundles, one New - Brancalonia

Another Fantasy Bundle - Undying Corruption

Another Repeat Fantasy Bundle - Dyson Delves

Another Repeat Bundle - GameMaster's Apprentice