Projects

Welcome to Tales of Menace & Mystery, a game of Pulp Action set in the adventurous era of the pulp novels and serials from the early 20th century. Menace & Mystery will allow you to perform the fearless stunts of the daredevil flying ace, fight crime as a bold masked vigilante, or uncover conspiracies as a hardboiled private investigator, all in the style of movies like Raiders of the Lost Ark, books like those by Dashiell Hammett, or radio serials like The Shadow. You will fly across the world on zeppelins and clipper airplanes, uncover forgotten civilizations at the core of the Earth, and tangle with the Mob using your trusted .38 Special.

Tales of Menace & Mystery is an exciting, brand new adventure-filled role-playing game from The Yellow Hand, set in the vibrant, action-packed pulp era of the 1930s, and features a unique campaign setting centered around the popular magazine with the same name. In the periphery, a masked vigilante known only as The Ghost is lurking, who may come to involve the PCs in some of his adventures. The game is powered by the proprietary STAR System, also seen in Draconicus – The Fantasy Role-Playing Game.

The STAR System

The STAR System could be referred to as a "mini-dice pool system".

At its most basic level, Natural Abilities and Experience are ranked 1-3 stars. This indicates how many dice are used, mostly in so-called Task Rolls: to resolve tasks, or to resolve a fleeting situation with a non-permanent outcome.

For any Task, Players can choose to use their Character's Natural Abilities (basic characteristics) OR their Experiences (learned skills), whichever is higher, but if they lack relevant Experience, their Natural Ability might be penalized.

All human characters use d10s. If you roll more than 1 die, you pick the highest one.

All tasks are assigned a Difficulty Rating (DR) ranging from 1-10 and you need to beat that rating to succeed.

In terms of outcomes, if you succeed and roll a 10, that's a Critical Success. If you succeed and hit the DR, that's a Significant Success. If you fail and hit the DR, that's a Significant Failure. If you fail and roll a 1, that's a Critical Failure.

There are also open-ended Task Rolls, i.e. rolls without a Difficulty Rating, which produce a lasting (i.e. non-fleeting) outcome – typically objects. The die result for these rolls produce a score 1-10, which reads as a Quality Rating (QR). The QR is analogous with the DR, so to break an object produced with a QR of X, X becomes a Difficulty Rating, and you need to beat X. For example, you could tie a knot (a Task) and produce a QR of 9 when rolling for it, and that means a person trying to undo the knot (such as a person tied up with it) would roll against that 9 as a DR, and have to roll a 10 to escape.

In addition, in combat, the system scales by assigning different dice to different creatures. A squirrel might use a d4, a human uses a d10 and a monster like a T-Rex might use a d20. A god-like being would use a d100. The scale remains 1-10 though, and 10 is always the highest roll you can record.

Three children are gifted with super powers by a god-like alien named Roshambo. Discovering that the seemingly simple game known as Rock-Paper-Scissors is, in actuality, the most perfect form of justice in the galaxy, the comedic trio, christened as heralds of Roshambo, must pit their newfound powers against a host of new villains whose abilities are based on popular children's gags and games like Hopscotch, Freezetag, Red Rover, DuckDuckBear and many more.

"Brave, Strong, and Confident Me!" is a delightful and uplifting book designed for toddlers, featuring vibrant illustrations and elements of Filipino culture. Through daily affirmations, help encourage your little ones to embrace their unique qualities and confidently face new experiences. The engaging visuals and positive messages aim to foster self-esteem and cultural pride, reminding every child that they are amazing just the way they are.

Sentience is an exciting, innovative new sci-fi RPG where players play awakened, sentient robots. This new, revised and expanded 220-page book contains a high-level presentation of a world where terraforming robots have gained sentience; a new adaptation of the 2d20 ruleset from Modiphius; a detailed lifepath character creation system that explains how the Awakening has made you who you are today; an advancement system that rewards you for exploring all of your emotions while playing an adventure; complete rules for creating NPCs to interact with robot society, six adventure seeds and a full introductory adventure – ”Union Strike”  – which gives players a chance to try out the world of Sentience and learn the rules of the game.

Within the pages of the latest issue of Star Trek Explorer, dive into a handful of exclusive fiction, interviews, and features.

Star Trek Explorer #11 celebrates the final season of Star Trek: Discovery with an exclusive interview with Sonequa Martin-Green. She teases things to come as the series draws to a close, and offers some candid comments on what she hopes the legacy of the show will be.