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Penguin King Games

@penguinkinggames / tumblr.penguinking.com

The company blog for Penguin King Games Inc., featuring art previews for our upcoming games. Visit us at penguinking.com!
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One unearthly night, a ray of colourless light descended from the stars, and under its warping radiance, creatures unlike any the world has ever seen were born. They do not know the world, and they do not know themselves. Unfortunately for the world, they're quick learners!

Star-spawned is a GMless, oneshot-oriented tabletop RPG in which you don't know what your own traits do when play begins. The names of each group's stats are randomly generated using morpheme chaining, and characters are created while having absolutely no idea what they mean; figuring that out forms the greater part of play.

This is the official version 1.0 release. If you've been following along during playtesting, the only major differences between this version and playtest draft 0.4 consist of formatting and typographic fixes and some reorganisation of the random lookup tables in the back of the book.

Credit where credit is due goes out to @pomrania for beta reading, @catgirlhell for graphic design, @counterclockworkminds and their crew for playtesting, and far too many names than can feasibly be listed here for suggesting entries for the random milieu tables and stress-testing the stat name generator to make sure it won't easily spit out any slurs, swear words, and/or results that sound like they might be a kind of penis – check the "Credits & Acknowledgements" section for the full list!

Star-spawned can be obtained at the link above, or right here.

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Hey, folks. Cerebos: The Crystal City and Costume Fairy Adventures are 50% off for itch.io's Creator Day Sale. The preceding link leads to a bundle containing everything that's on sale, but you can also get the same discount on each item individually by clicking through to it.

Cerebos is a surrealist travelogue game written by Zach Welhouse (and edited by me) about a group of amnesiac travellers riding a train to the titular Crystal City, with plenty of strange stops along the way.

Costume Fairy Adventures, meanwhile, is one of the earliest games I worked on from back in 2013; it's about, well, fairies. In costumes. Having adventures. (Look, I freely admit it's not a creative title.)

If you've ever been terribly curious to check out either one, now's your chance. All of my smaller games (Radical Catgirl Anarchy, Olaf Hits the Dragon with his Sword, Jellyfish Felonies, Sinister Hovering Orb, and To Serve) are already pay-what-you-want, so there's no sense putting them on sale, but they are included in the "100% of all sales go to the creator" thing that's running today, so if you just happened to pay what you want today in particular, that sure would be convenient!

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Hey, folks. To Serve is out of public playtest and has been officially released! For those just joining us, To Serve is a tabletop roleplaying game where one player will take on the role of a questing Knight, and the other 2–4 players will assume the roles of the various Servants who make up the Knight’s retinue. Throughout your travels, many challenges will be overcome through the Servants’ careful preparation and occasional direct interference, and the Knight will – of course – receive all the accolades.

To Serve can be found here:

Illustration by @catgirlhell

Cerebos: The Crystal City, a tabletop roleplaying game about magic trains, lost memories, and the intersection thereof, is available in print-on-demand softcover via DriveThruRPG. Whether you’ve been waiting for this day or you’re just hearing about it for the first time, you can now get your hands on Cerebos in the literal sense!

(If you previously backed the crowdfunding campaign at the PDF-only level, don’t forget to claim your discount code.)

Cerebos: The Crystal City Version 1.0

Cerebos: The Crystal City leaves early access today! This tabletop game of memory, attachment, and magic(?) trains was successfully crowdfunded in April of this year, and today’s update marks its full public release. If you’re into trains, deserts, magical realism, the looming spectre of mortality, and/or talking about your feelings, Cerebos may be the roleplaying game for you.

Cerebos is available via itch.io and DriveThruRPG.

Changelog under the cut:

An art teaser from the forthcoming version 1.0 release of Cerebos: The Crystal City, a tabletop RPG of memory, attachment and magic trains currently available in early access via itch.io and DriveThruRPG. This piece – courtesy of the very talented Kaninchanbau – depicts the game’s Conductors; each journey to Cerebos will have a single Conductor, and each Conductor carries with them a set of special rules that defines the journey’s genre, ranging from the cheerful Mr. Wumpus’s “All-Ages Fairy Tale”, to the enigmatic Duke Akira’s “Surreal Anime Bildungsroman”, to the gruesome Grimlight’s “Folk Horror”. (No points for guessing who’s who!)

Radical Catgirl Anarchy Version 1.1 and Olaf Hits the Dragon with His Sword Version 1.2 now available

This is a minor update that addresses portability issues in the previous versions of each game.

  • HTML versions no longer have an external dependency on Google Fonts API
  • HTML versions no longer require Internet access in order to correctly display Creative Commons logos
  • HTML versions now provided as zipfiles containing all required resources (i.e., rather than having to download the illustrations separately)
  • Radical Catgirl Anarchy and Olaf Hits the Dragon with His Sword are now available in EPUB format

The latest versions can be downloaded here:

Jellyfish Felonies, Version 1.1: Changelog

This is a minor update that addresses reported legibility issues in version 1.0, particularly with respect to the small-caps effect used for Attribute names.

  • Main body font changed from "Poppins" to "Raleway"
  • Attribute names now use true small-caps (i.e., rather than faking it by reducing the font size)
  • Improved formatting of footnotes
  • Minor clarification to how the GM allocates Ill-Gotten Gains

Version 1.1 can be downloaded here:

Gaming with Godot is a compendium of fifty tabletop RPG supplements – playbooks, scenarios, rules modules, and other miscellanea – by 48 different authors, with a catch: none of the games the material is written for actually exist. Entries run the gamut from transdimensional diners, to polyamorous starships, to a character class which can only be taken by a character who has killed God, each one offering a tiny glimpse of what tabletop roleplaying might look like in a world very slightly askew of our own.

Gaming with Godot can be downloaded for free via itch.io:

Jellyfish. Few would suspect that these fragile bags of transparent goo are the most dangerous thing in the ocean – and that's just the way you like it. Take advantage of your unassuming appearance and the hidden wisdom of the depths to lie, cheat, swindle, defraud, embezzle, and prove that you don't need a brain to be a criminal mastermind!

Jellyfish Felonies is a semi-competitive tabletop roleplaying game for three to five players, plus an optional Gamemaster, and is available on a pay-what-you-want basis via itch.io:

A couple of teasers from the 0.253 update of Cerebos: The Crystal City. This version adds more stops and events by our very talented guest writers, as well as a 216-entry table of random touchstones for when inspiration runs short (or just for those who like tables).

You can check out the full changelog on itch.io – which by an incredibly convenient coincidence is also where you can get your hands on the game in early access – or under the cut, below.

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Olaf Hits the Dragon with His Sword

Back in October my friend @unrepentantauthor and I played a round of @prokopetz’s mini-RPG Olaf Hits the Dragon with His Sword. Today I noticed that every post about the game was made by someone playing solo, so (with my friend’s permission) I’m posting our game as an example of what it looks like as a back-and-forth between two people.

They played Olaf; I played the Dragon.

The crowdfunding campaign may be over, but Cerebos: The Crystal City is now available in early access. If you're a fan of trains, deserts, magical realism, episodic journeys through fantastical landscapes, the looming spectre of mortality, and/or talking about your feelings, Cerebos may be the game for you!

Cerebos is available through the following sites:

Note: at the time of this posting we’re experiencing technical issues with the preview widget on DriveThruRPG, so if you want to see some sample pages, please check out the itch.io page instead.

(Illustration by Cynthia Yuan Cheng)

Cerebos: The Crystal City is live on Kickstarter. Cerebos may be the tabletop roleplaying game for you if you’re into any of the following:

  • trains
  • deserts
  • magical realism
  • episodic journeys through fantastical landscapes
  • the looming spectre of mortality
  • talking about your feelings

The campaign will be running through April 10th, 2021 – and if you can’t pledge yourself, please pass the word along!

(Illustrations by Shel Kahn and Cynthia Yuan Cheng; logo design by Francita Soto)

It’s down to the final 24 hours, folks – last chance to pledge!

Cerebos: The Crystal City is live on Kickstarter. Cerebos may be the tabletop roleplaying game for you if you’re into any of the following:

  • trains
  • deserts
  • magical realism
  • episodic journeys through fantastical landscapes
  • the looming spectre of mortality
  • talking about your feelings

The campaign will be running through April 10th, 2021 – and if you can’t pledge yourself, please pass the word along!

(Illustrations by Shel Kahn and Cynthia Yuan Cheng; logo design by Francita Soto)

This is it, folks – the clock has officially ticked over from “days” to “hours”. If you’ve been on the fence, this is your last chance! Thanks to our backers knocking down stretch goals in record time, the amount of content in the game is nearly double what it was when we started, so if you pledge now, you know you’ll be getting the good stuff.

We’ve also posted a small update concerning some of the finer details of how the early access program is going to work, since the subject has come up. If you have any questions that aren’t answered there, please let us know!