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TL;DR: The Dyson Logos edition of NGR is available to people who didn’t back the kickstarter now on OneBookShelf

The book has arrived!

Last July I announced that I was illustrating an edition of Zzarchov Kowolski’s Neoclassical Geek Revival RPG as part of his Kickstarter campaign.

Last week I received a copy of the finished work – a 151 page 6″ x 9″ hardcover book containing all the rules needed to play in our weekly NGR campaign, with some 80-90 art assets that I drew throughout the book.

I’m in my second NGR campaign right now run by Zzarchov – our first campaign was set in colonial Xanthandu as we exploited the natives in our efforts to secure the Eye of Set in a race against another weekly group that was doing the same thing. The current one has a bunch of iron age tribes working to unite into a kingdom… with two player groups again in competition to do so before the other does.

Neoclassical Geek Revival is described as iterative series of house rules to classic RPGs to the extent that none of the original mechanics or rules survive. There are some great mechanics in NGR that I would quickly drag over to any game I was designing – there’s an escalating “chance” mechanic where you start each session not rolling dice, just “taking 10” on every test. But if that’s not enough (or if you take damage to your “luck”), then you can move from taking 10 to rolling 3d6… or to rolling a d20. The problem is that you can never come back down – there’s no way to get back to taking 10 – once you start taking chances, things start getting swingy.

Character types / classes are really interesting (you get three pieces of “pie” for a character – if you put all 3 in one class, you get all 6 of that classes abilities, but you can put 2 slices in a class for 3 of the abilities, or a single slice for 1 ability, making for interesting “multiclass” combinations from the moment the game starts), and character creation is done in play (do your stats, probably your pie, and figure out actual skills and equipment as the game progresses – meaning that a new character joining an existing group is still REALLY useful, as they happen to have the exact skills you need when a situation comes up).