Old Ideals for New Games

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Fiasco Preview Sample

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A weighty preview of what is available in Fiasco. Includes table of contents, index, the elevator pitch and overview, samples of artwork, several pages of each chapter, an entire Playset, and a taste of the Replay.
6 x 9 PDF, 38 pages (1.7MB)   Download Now!

January Playset - Touring Rock Band

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It’s all about the music, man. It’s about becoming famous. It’s about the chicks, the drugs, the fans. It’s about burning bright and dying young, leaving behind a legend!

Or maybe it’s about paying for the hotel room once the stupid legend has left the building.

Touring Rock Band is an over-the-top collection of iconic rock and roll glories and unwholesome lunacy. It’s about golden gods rising to fame and falling back into addiction, stupidity and squalid failure.

JM05 - 12 page PDF (1.5MB)   Download Now!

February Playset - Gangster London

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A dead body, a Cockney drug-dealer selling from the back of the kebab shop, three suitcases full of blue flake cocaine and an unexploded World War Two bomb - these are a few of the things that make for a proper East End fiasco.

Written by our friend and collaborator Graham Walmsley, this playset is for fans of films with a certain ugly, stylish sensibility.

GW01 - 12 page PDF (269KB)   Download Now!

March Playset - Last Frontier

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Adding some pitch black and blood red to the great white north ... fishing villages and fishing village idiots, timber contracts and factory ships, State Troopers in floatplanes and the weird guys who hide when they fly over - set among the emerald forests of southeast Alaska’s vast archipelago, this playset drags an offbeat but familiar setting into the crosshairs.
JM06 - 12 page PDF (635KB)   Download Now!

April Playset - Lucky Strike

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This playset takes place at the United States Army’s Camp Lucky Strike Replacement Depot, near Le Havre, France, in the waning days of World War Two. Nestled safely in the rear, the "repple depple" was a temporary home for soldiers awaiting new units. Boredom and low morale led to crime and foolishness. The black market has never been blacker.

It was, in a word, a fiasco.

JM07 - 12 page PDF (1.3MB)   Download Now!

May Playset - Flyover

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This playset is all about Middle America - hard-working agribusiness professionals, construction contractors, Mexican drug mules and the people who love them. It’s the God-and-country heartland, where high school football is the best bet for a Friday night date and everybody knows everybody.

With corn and soybean fields stretching for miles in every direction, the endless sky punctuated only by enormous grain elevators, things can get a little squirrelly.

JM08 - 12 page PDF (696KB)   Download Now!

June Playset - Reconstruction

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It is 1867. The American Civil War is over and the South is in ashes. Newly freed slaves mingle with former owners. Carpetbaggers and scallywags look for quick profits. Corruption is the coin of the realm, and the desperate, despicable and insane all look for an angle.

Written by our friend Tom Gurganus, this playset takes place in the still-smoldering ruins of southern Virginia.

TG01 - 12 page PDF (1.1MB)   Download Now!

July Playset - Manna Hotel

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The Manna Hotel is three miles north of Manna, Kansas, population 1,200. A twenty-room motor lodge with its own in-ground swimming pool, now unused, the hotel burned down and was rebuilt in the fifties. Wood paneling and window-unit air conditioners were installed in the seventies, and it looks like that’s the last maintenance anyone did to the place.

Written by our friend Dan Puckett, this tight playset focuses on the claustrophobic confines of a small, run-down Kansas hotel full of odd mysteries and desperation.

DP01 - 12 page PDF (1.1MB)   Download Now!

August Playset - 1913 New York

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Fin de siècle New York, 1913 - a city perched on the edge of the abyss. Modernity is at war with tradition, and automobiles uneasily share the roads with horse-drawn carriages. Change - sweeping, terrible change - is in the air, and all of Europe is about to be thrown under the bus, dragging the world down after it. But tonight? For now? Cars that can go forty miles an hour, women not ashamed to show off a little ankle, and as much opium as you care to smoke. In the dirty places labor is organizing, anarchists are murdering plutocrats, and children are going hungry. But it’s a pretty good world if you are on top of it, so find a way to get on top, fast...

This playset draws heavily on real New York history, and includes an additional section of notes to provide more detail about some of the more colorful locations and organizations.

JM09 - 14 page PDF (2.0MB)   Download Now!

September Playset - Transatlantic

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The time is 1932, the place? Somewhere in the mid-Atlantic aboard the luxury cruise ship Leviathan, a week out of Southampton en route to New York on her maiden voyage.

Written by E. Tage Larsen, Transatlantic draws inspiration from movies such as Bitter Moon, Titanic and Poseidon Adventure, among others. Gather your friends and some classy cocktails for an evening of fun below decks!

EL01 - 12 page PDF (820KB)   Download Now!

Fiasco Play Mat

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Keep your Fiasco train-wreck on the tracks with this colorful and handy reference sheet. Includes a space to keep your dice pool during play along with a reference chart of the stages of play. Includes a black-and-white version, but it looks best printed full-color and laminated!

2 page PDF (303KB)   Download Now!

Grey Ranks Character Sheet

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This is a single page character sheet for the Grey Ranks roleplaying game.
1 page PDF (393KB)   Download Now!

Grey Ranks Grid

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You need the grid to play Grey Ranks, and this version is big enough to be quite convenient.
1 page PDF (50KB)   Download Now!

Grey Ranks Radio Lightning/Situation Sheets

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Cut these in half, and you have a Radio Lightning broadcast for each chapter. Flip it over, and you've got space to record situation elements and people your crew encounters. Around the edges are names and places, for inspiration in case you get stuck.
10 page PDF (147KB)   Download Now!

Grey Ranks Table of Contents and Index

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Both the index and the table of contents from Grey Ranks.
6 page PDF (109KB)   Download Now!

Grey Ranks Sample

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Just a taste of Grey Ranks - some pages from each of the five main sections, including a bit of history, an example of play, Radio Lightning transcripts, and other stuff.
39 page PDF (3.0MB)   Download Now!

Grey Ranks Checklist

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What do we do, when? This document guides you through the games procedures. Very handy!
One page, short and sweet (34KB)   Download Now!

The Roach Returns: Darker Character Sheet

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This is a character sheet for Graham Walmsley's Darker setting.
Two letter-sized pages (384KB)   Download Now!

The Roach Returns: Overlord Character Sheet

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Two pages of military occupational specialty, active duty assignment, expertise, nationality and service branch. Includes space for listing other player characters and their cause of death.
A two-page character sheet (81KB)   Download Now!

Grey Ranks Wallpaper #1

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The Wola district of Warsaw, 7 August 1944. The high water-mark of the Uprising.
1024 x 768 desktop wallpaper. (169KB)   Download Now!

Shab-al-Hiri Roach Character Sheet

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Our own Character and Event Record sheet, for use with the Shab-al-Hiri Roach. Everything you need in play on the front, with handy stuff like the Event list and prominent Pembertonians on the back!

Note that you can turn layers on and off! So if you don't want the Pemberton seal watermark, open your layers side panel in Acrobat and de-select it. You can also turn off the border to save toner when printing, if you want.

2 page PDF (408KB)   Download Now!

Roach Comics

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2 pages of "Actual Play" comics for the Shab-al-Hiri Roach!

2 page PDF (473KB)   Download Now!

Shab-al-Hiri Roach Wallpaper #1

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The greased roach pole, a Pemberton favorite!
A 1024x768 JPG (385KB)   Download Now!

Shab-al-Hiri Roach Wallpaper #2

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The Shab-al-Hiri Roach in all its oily glory, pinned to a dissection table for your perusal and edification. It has a message for you!
A 1024x768 JPG (233KB)   Download Now!

Shab-al-Hiri Roach Wallpaper #3

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The 1919 Gamma Gamma Gamma Christmas ball. Elegant and classy.
A 1024x768 JPG (754KB)   Download Now!

Shab-al-Hiri Roach Preview

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This is a preview of the Shab-al-Hiri Roach. It contains 14 pages, including the table of contents, an example of play, and some of the awesome art. It is really intended to whet your appetite and show you both what the game is like and what the production values are. We hope you'll check it out!
14 page PDF (6.4MB)   Download Now!

Shab-al-Hiri Roach T-Shirt Transfer

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Make your own Pemberton University T-shirt, using iron-on transfer paper and your home printer. All the cool kids and Big Men on Campus have one!


The .pdf file is a reversed image of the classy Pemberton seal.

1 page PDF (281KB)   Download Now!

Shab-al-Hiri Roach T-Shirt Transfer 2

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Make your own Pemberton University T-shirt, using iron-on transfer paper and your home printer. All the cool kids and Big Men on Campus have one!

The .pdf file is a reversed image of snazzy PEMBERTON lettering.

1 page PDF (160KB)   Download Now!

Roach Cheat Sheet

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Lists of people, places, and things to draw from when your 1919-fu fails you. Handy to have floating around during the game!
2 page PDF (1.5MB)   Download Now!

Shab-al-Hiri Roach - The Movie

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This is the promotional trailer for the Shab-al-Hiri Roach game, developed by Greg Jansen Films. The film follows the tragic fate of Herr Dr. Moeller, Pemberton's celebrated chemist, and the terrible decisions he must make.

Even compressed, the video is over 13MB, so it might not last long in our downloads section. Get it while you can!

4 minute B&W video; .mov file (13.6MB)   Download Now!

Shab-al-Hiri Roach Errata

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Even our fever genius editors make mistakes - and in the spirit of fair play and a square deal, we do our best to make them right. Here's a single-page PDF describing the (admittedly minor) errors in the first printing of The Roach.
1 page PDF (130KB)   Download Now!

Drowning and Falling: Text Version

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The Creative Commons text version of Drowning and Falling.

The Drowning and Falling Role-Playing Game includes everything you need to slip and plunge into a world of mystery and adventure!* With five character classes, two alignments, over twenty three spells and prayers and fifteen statistics unlike any seen in the history of role-playing, you and your friends will be tossed head-first into thrilling tales limited only by your imagination and certain rules!

The Drowning and Falling Role-Playing Game— play it once and you'll never look at drowning and falling in the same way ever again!

*Everything you need not included.

text file (54KB)   Download Now!

Drowning and Falling: Web version

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The Creative Commons HTML version of Drowning and Falling.

The Drowning and Falling Role-Playing Game includes everything you need to slip and plunge into a world of mystery and adventure!* With five character classes, two alignments, over twenty three spells and prayers and fifteen statistics unlike any seen in the history of role-playing, you and your friends will be tossed head-first into thrilling tales limited only by your imagination and certain rules!

The Drowning and Falling Role-Playing Game— play it once and you'll never look at drowning and falling in the same way ever again!

*Everything you need not included.

HTML (64KB)   Download Now!

Drowning and Falling Characters Sheet

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A delightfully old skool characters sheet, complete with harmful traits that are actually harmful!
1 page PDF, US Letter format (465KB)   Download Now!

Drowning and Falling Euro-Characters Sheet

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For our friends in The Europe, a characters sheet sized for A4 paper.
1 page PDF, A4 Format (466KB)   Download Now!