Kiwi RPG | Kēmu Whakatau O Aotearoa
You want new releases? Mate, we’ve got new releases!
There’s heaps of great stuff launching as part of KiwiRPG week – special episodes, new games, and crowdfund campaigns – covering Monster of the Week, OSR, D&D 5E, For The Queen, and more!
Let’s dive into this treasure hoard of awesome and swim around in it, Uncle Scrooge style!
Say hello to the new best way to get KiwiRPG goodness in your ears!
A special one today: a new KiwiRPG podcast that catches the best RPG audio from across the motu and brings it right to you!
Continue reading “Spotlight: Our new podcast, the KiwiRPG Chorus!”
Create your own short sharp adventure!
Kia ora koutou!
Yesterday you learned about our game bundles and our spotlight for day two of KiwiRPG week is another all-week event.
The KiwiRPG 20 minute adventure jam is open now, and anyone can join in! You don’t have to be from Aotearoa or part of the KiwiRPG community to enter.
What better way to celebrate game than to making more games?
Get in on this year’s selection of great Kiwi games!
Today’s spotlight is on the KiwiRPG game bundles on DriveThruRPG and itch.io! These collections of games and supplements will be available all through KiwiRPG week 2024.
This year’s KiwiRPG week features a special event running all week: 7 days of streaming, featuring Kiwi games played by Kiwi players.
Here’s the whole week schedule in a single image for easy reference and sharing (click for full size):
Of course all the details here are included on the full KiwiRPG Week schedule.
Every stream features Kiwi players from our community of shows trying a different game created by KiwiRPG game design members!
BONUS: Prizes to be won every stream, courtesy of our lovely sponsors Bea DnD Games! Details in the schedule.
Watch us on Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/kemuwhakatauoaotearoa
New on the KiwiRPG YouTube channel: Greg Ellis (Forever GM) talks to Tim Denee (Old Dog Games) about his phenomenal game Deathmatch Island!
HOT TIP: Greg is running Deathmatch Island live on stream as part of KiwiRPG week 2024!
Looking for new content to spice up your game table, virtual or otherwise? Want to support Kiwi creatives? Then you should check out the two active Kickstarters below, both of which have a bit of Kiwi in them. Added bonus: they have already reached their funding goals!
Continue reading “Current Kickstarters Involving Kiwi Creatives”
Over on YouTube we’ve set up two playlists collecting videos of KiwiRPG creators doing their thing!
The Discover KiwiRPG channels playlist collects some videos from the wide variety of channels run by KiwiRPG creators. Lots of actual play and other interesting sorts of game things to be found here!
And the KiwiRPGers Talk playlist collects videos where KiwiRPG members are chatting about games. This is for convention panel appearances, conference talks, interviews, and other stuff.
Now closed: The Rainbow Violence Prevention Network TTRPG fundraiser bundle
This bundle is organized by KiwiRPG to raise funds for the Rainbow Violence Prevention Network, a collaborative group of organisations that aims to reduce sexual and domestic violence against the rainbow community.
Continue reading “Charity Bundle: Rainbow Violence Prevention Network”
So far we’ve explored lots of exciting games that have been launched into the world from Aotearoa. Look at them all! So shiny! Now, to bring our tour of the game design side of KiwiRPG to a close, we just need to look over our shoulder – yes! You see it now! I know, it’s big, isn’t it? That’s right, it’s heaps and heaps of Kiwi-made material for other games!
As Chief Brody might say, we’re going to need a bigger blog tour series. Well tough nuggins Chief Brody! You’re gonna compare scars and fight that shark in the one blogpost remaining to you, and you’re gonna like it!
Into the 5th edition of D&D? It’s only the biggest game in the world. If you like the 5e-ness of it all, KiwiRPG has a few things for you to check out:
Away from 5th edition, in the broader dungeon-type dragon-ish scene:
There! Lots of dungons for your dargons!!
SF game Mothership is one of the hottest things in gaming right now, and making epic contributions to it (the one at that link is just the start) is Liam Stevens a.k.a. Toa Tabletop! (Also Mothershipping it up: that very same Scrap Princess who was just mentioned a few paragraphs ago!)
Malcolm Harbrow has been steadily releasing amazing stuff for science fiction game Uncharted Worlds
Marcus Bone! Where to even start on Marcus – years of highest-quality free content you can just go and download and use right now! Call of Cthulhu and Conspiracy X and Open D6 and The Esoterrorists and so much more!
Grant Robinson has been knocking out Shadowrun material for a long time, contributing to loads of books, chummer! (ED: Do Shadowrun people still say “Chummer”? Check before publishing – NO DON’T NO TIME KEEP GOING)
Tim Denee’s mapping for Blades in the Dark (in the DriveThru bundle!) is legendary and that’s just a kind of iceberg-tip of what he’s contributed to the RPG scene.
Who’s that in the contributor list for the Brindlewood Bay Kickstarter, currently cruising past the quarter-million mark with weeks to go? Why it’s Donna Giltrap, another veteran of the Kapcon SDC discussed in the last games post!
*second self-promo alert* I wrote some books for the Doctor Who RPG, good stuff if you like Doctor Who. (I like Doctor Who.) But hey lets do a REAL deep cut and link to these articles by Kelly Buchanan for Time Lord (the 1990s Doctor Who RPG from Virgin Publishing), published in legendary DW fanzine TSV.
*final self-promo alert* The biggest thing I’ve been working on is a|state 2nd edition, for Handiwork Games. This is a reboot & reworking of early-2000s cult hit a|state, about hardscrabble troublemakers in a sprawling and haunted sci-fi cityscape, and honestly it is an incredible project.
Paul Cockburn was there at the ground floor of Warhammer FRP, and has his mitts all over iconic 80s RPG mag IMAGINE, among other contributions. He’s been in New Zealand for years and years so does that make the Old World part of KiwiRPG? No? How about the D&D world of Pelinore then? Maybe a little bit? It’s in the blogpost now, too late, hahaha!
Colin Chapman, best known for free RPG Atomic Highway. has a long list of RPG freelance credits on amazing games you know. He’s now in New Zealand too! What does that signify exactly? I dunno! But he’s in the blogpost now too!
Malcolm Craig wrote Hot War in the cafes of Wellington! Ha ha, he’s in the blogpost too! You can’t stop me! Nothing can stop anything! It’s the climactic action sequence, the shark is eating the boat, no time for details now!
Is it really time to stop?
ok ok fine
But only with this final note: that’s definitely not all. There are gonna be other people out there making stuff and getting it out into the world, and they are going to be from Aotearoa, and I don’t know about them yet. Kiwis connect out to the global creative scene in all kinds of ways and, because we often don’t do much shouting about it to each other, their fellow Kiwis might not even know they’re doing it.
So expect this list to grow, as we find out about more people. (It might not literally grow, I’m not committing to editing this post or anything. But it will grow… in my mind.)
(Plus I might remember ones I’ve forgotten, whoops, I bet I’ve forgotten someone really obvious too and I will feel bad about it.)
Well, that’s it then. The last day of KiwiRPG Week 2022. A good time to stop, even though there’s more to talk about, always.
(Like, hey, what about discussion & consideration & criticism of gaming? Like the long-running Gametime group blog on livejournal, or (Kapcon SDC veteran!) Alasdair Sinclair’s epic critical work – his Brindlewood Bay review that’s actually a multi-part deep dive into the nature of investigative roleplaying is a masterwork I reckon.)
(Stop it morgue, you can’t introduce a whole new subject area in the last few paragraphs of a four-post journey!)
I hope you’ve enjoyed this tour. I am sure you now have many more tabs open in your internet browser, where they will wait for months until you lose them in a computer crash; or maybe you’ll read them now?
Read them now, I reckon. It’s what the shark would do.
– morgue and the KiwiRPG crew