Steve Jackson's Blog, page 12

July 3, 2025: Covers I Love – Steven Marsh Edition

Sometimes I'll have a thought of a thought. That is, I'll think of something I want to think about. In this case, I had one that really interested me: What covers or box-art treatments have we done at Steve Jackson Games that I really like?

Two sprang to mind. The first is Ogre Sixth Edition (itself based on the gargantuan Ogre Designer's Edition ). It's a simple design, but the large title treatment and the silhouette make a memorable box that jumps to my mind and heart.

The second is Munchkin Apocalypse: Kaiju . The Len Peralta art is fun in the traditional Munchkin way, while still being evocative and exciting. It also features kaiju, beloved by all humanity and those who would see it eaten.

I might extend this question throughout the office to get other people's perspectives – we have almost 50 years of cool stuff to consider! In the meantime, if there are any of our covers that you find particularly iconic or memorable, feel free to drop me a line or share your thoughts on the forums.

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

July 2, 2025: Playtesting In Bath

I've been meaning to write about this for a bit now, but I'm finally able to get around to it. I traveled to England for the first time earlier this year with two missions:Experience UKGEPlaytest Seven-Part Pact , my ambitious wizard gameUKGE was a total blast (and Birmingham is, in my opinion, unfairly maligned by the British – it would be amongst the most beautiful cities in the US if it was located here). I got to hang out with some dear friends, meet some people I've been trying to meet for ages, and learn what indie secrets the Brits are hiding out on their side of the pond. My personal highlight was grabbing a copy of Revolt! , a collaborative map-making game where the ruler changes based on who won the previous game.

I also had the incredible opportunity to playtest Seven-Part Pact with a really unique group of people in a really unique place. My friend and colleague Emily Friedman rented out the Elton House, a landmark trust Georgian-inspired household at the center of the city, directly next to the Abbey of Bath. We, along with a truly fantastic crew (Kieron Gillen, Quinns Smith, and Brian Flaherty, along with my dear friend Molly Darling) spent 4 days straight playtesting Seven-Part Pact , pushing it to its absolute limit and exploring the deepest recesses of the game.

It was a phenomenal experience.

I've been working a lot on this game, so expect to hear more about it as I go forward. Now that I'm recovered from the trip to the UK, I'll be focusing my creative attention on my darling messy wizards.

– Jay Dragon

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

July 1, 2025: But How Is AI At Yar's Revenge?

In case you missed the news, someone pitted the general-purpose AI software ChatGPT against the Atari 2600 version of chess ( Atari Chess , as the 1977 cartridge is known). Spoiler alert: ChatGPT lost badly, on the "beginner" level of difficulty. The original post on LinkedIn has more details.

Personally, I like imagining that the cartridge software used is actually a piece of super-computer code designed to be hyperdimensionally squeezed into the 4,096-byte program size, which somehow escaped from Warehouse 23 . . .

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

June 30, 2025: Welcome To The Bobiverse

Beyond a doubt, this is my favorite "discovered in 2025" series. The Bobiverse books, by Dennis E. Taylor, chronicle the adventures of one Robert Johansson. He was cryonically suspended, murdered and uploaded by a Christofascist future government, and installed as the enslaved brain of a space probe designed to do the Von Neumann thing: replicate, replicate, replicate, and explore the galaxy.

And that's in the first hundred pages, give or take, of the first book. Then Bob, in his new space probe body, blasts out of the solar system and the adventures really start. Yes, replication works. No, the copies are not identical to the original. Much less the copies of the copies. And thereby hangs a tale.

This is space opera at its best: unashamedly escapist, with heroic but conflicted heroes and unconflictedly wicked villains. Also: aliens. Space battles. Threats to the Whole Human Race. And a virtual Admiral Ackbar.

Amazingly, Taylor could not find a "regular" publisher for the books. So, with his agent, he did it himself. There are audiobooks, too . . . 

Taylor has written five Bobiverse books, and – so I hear – plans five more. I can't wait. Except, I gotta.

– Steve Jackson

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

June 29, 2025: Last Train To Bremen Backerkit

Last Train To Bremen is available now on Backerkit! It is a tragedy for a doomed quartet: a storytelling game about four arrogant musicians who made a deal with the Devil that blew up in their faces. Now they're stuck in a boxcar, fleeing from their cursed contract, and there's nothing left to do but point fingers and lay the blame for how they wound up in this sorry mess. It's one of my favorite games of 2024, and I'm beyond thrilled that Possum Creek and Steve Jackson Games are publishing it.

– Jay Dragon

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

June 28, 2025: I Am The Laziest Die Roller

My gaming tables tend to be as organized as my computer desk . . . which is to say, "Completely not organized, oh help, I just pulled a load-bearing pencil and now I'm buried." As a result, I don't necessarily have the dice I need at my fingertips. But I'm lazy; I'll just roll whatever's handy that gets the job done.

For example, we're currently playing a Dungeons & Dragons campaign in our house. Unlike GURPS , which keeps things easy by just using good old six-sided dice, D&D employs a jillion different dice. But who has time to find a four-sider when you need it? So I just toss an eight-sider and divide by two. (Heck, I'll even use this method if I can find my four-siders; I just like how eight-siders roll better.) If I need to randomly determine which of five targets are getting hit, maybe I'll use a 10-sider and divide by two. Maybe a 20-sider and divide by four. Maybe a six-sider, rerolling sixes.

This works even when I can find my dice, but I just need more dice. Does a particularly nasty damage roll require a bunch of 10-siders? I've used the custom percentile dice and ignored the zero at the end. I've rolled 20-siders. Heck, in a pinch, I've dropped a 12-sider down the ol' dice tower and just rerolled 11s and 12s. After all, 83% of the time, it works perfectly.

If you're the same way, or if you have some other weird randomizer quirk, I'd love to hear about it on the forums!

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

June 27, 2025: A Bundle Of Goodness For A Good Cause

If you've perused high-quality RPG books in the gaming biz in the past couple of decades, you've likely run across Owen K.C. Stephens (who, among a jillion other credits in the gaming realm, had an ongoing column – Icosahedron Adventures – that's part of the Pyramid Volume 2 HTML Archive).

Owen had a rough bout with fighting a two-prong battle against cancer – which he beat – and cancer-related expenses . . . which he's still working on thwarting.

To that end, Legendary Games has organized a charity bundle to help fight against the shambling mound of bills. Featuring more than a hundred PDFs from more than 10 publishers, it provides cool support for multiple games – and also supports a cool guy who's fighting the good fight.

If getting more than $870 in inspirational downloads for less than 30 bucks – while doing a good deed – sounds appealing, check out the Owen Stephens Summer Survival Spectacular Bundle while it lasts!

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

June 26, 2025: The Best _____ You'll _____ This Week

I've previously recommended online daily puzzle games Align and Raddle. Here's another one that started not too long ago, for more trivia-minded folks: Revealed.

Revealed is from Encyclopedia Britannica, and it's pretty ingenious: It pulls articles from the Britannica site, but removes most of the nouns, verbs, and other details that make the answer obvious, replacing them with blank lines. You then decide which bits you want to reveal to solve the puzzle, one tidbit at a time. After revealing a certain number of clues, you can ask for hints about the answer itself – letter by letter.

I personally know a lot about many topics, so I find this one on the easier side . . . so easy, in fact, that I've probably solved about half the puzzles so far with no clues at all. The category is a big hint; if you encountered a puzzle with a category of Card Games, and it was about how for nearly ___________ ______, since September ____, it's encouraged players to _________ their _______, _____ their _____, and be the _____ to reach _____ __, the odds are good you'd know what it was about . . .

Anyway, check out Revealed and have fun filling in the blanks.

– Steven Marsh

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

June 25, 2025: Wanderhome Now On Pre-Order

Incredibly excited to announce that Wanderhome is now available for pre-order on Warehouse 23! Five years ago, Ruby and I created Wanderhome,  a pastoral fantasy game that focuses on characters and relationships over combat, and while my current style of game design is very different from that, it's still something I'm incredibly proud of. More than 250 pages with 16 different artists, Wanderhome presents a charming and idealistic look into another world as both a TTRPG and a coffee table book. The gold-embossed hardcover is a beautiful addition to any RPG collection, and I'm so excited for it to finally be available with Steve Jackson Games for the first time.

– Jay Dragon

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!

June 24, 2025: Munchkin Apocalypse At LibertyCon

SJ, Irene, and I are were at LibertyCon over the weekend (6/20-22). It's an awesome convention, and you should go sometime if you possibly can.

One of the events was a multi-round Munchkin tournament, with the championship round being against Steve. They played Munchkin Apocalypse , which I personally hadn't seen played before – it may now be my favorite version! Steve pulled off an amazing come-from-behind victory; the ultimate tournament winner was April Barr.

Check out all the folks having fun around the table!

Congratulations to April and all the round winners.

– Jean McGuire

Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action

There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!