Kickstarter Silent Legions: A Sandbox Horror RPG by Kevin Crawford

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Kickstarters are more and more prevalent these days and now author/designer Kevin Crawford has launched a new old school Lovecraftian horror sandbox campaign system. This game looks like it treads the same ground as his Stars Without Numbers Rpg rpg system and its cross compatible. Even though the project is funded, a pledger can get in on the ground floor right now with the Beta version of the rule book. There's a ton more Mythos style rpg systems on the market these days but this looks very well done. Here's the low down on the game from the Kickstarter campaign.

The world is woven of secret names. The skin of our days is stretched tight over strange bones. There are powers that move in the dark corners of the earth, truths that are spoken in lonely places, and heroes who die nameless deaths fighting forces that they dare not comprehend. These are the silent legions that guard the waking world, and their blind armies struggle against the powers of a fathomless night.

Silent Legions is a modern-day Lovecraftian role-playing game, one built to support a sandbox style of gaming and the creation of your own diabolical Mythos. While compatible with the Stars Without Number game system and many other classic old-school games, Silent Legions is built to stand alone and provide you with everything you need to develop a grim world of unspeakable occult secrets and mad, sorcerous scheming.

Silent Legions is 160+ pages of specially-designed material to help a game master create their own cosmic evils and mysterious alien powers. Rather than simply recycle the traditional Cthulhu Mythos baddies, Silent Legions gives you the tools and techniques to make your own, the better to shock and dismay your players with fresh horrors that haven't already been wrung dry by familiarity. The creatures and cults the game helps you build are also fully compatible with most classic OSR games, allowing you to export them to other settings or mix and match with material you've drawn in from your other games.

More than that, Silent Legions is designed to help a GM create a true sandbox horror campaign. Instead of sending the hapless investigators along an intricate story arc, the GM creates a region, seeds it with points of interest, and then uses the tools in the book to quickly and easily create content for the heroes wherever they may go. The faction tools help keep the nefarious cults in motion even when the heroes are otherwise engaged, and both players and GMs are allowed the special excitement of not knowing how their desperate struggles are actually going to end. Will they crush the insidious powers of darkness, or will they miss some cyst of evil until it is far too late?

Inside Silent Legions, you'll find...

Tools for creating eldritch gods, alien races, black sorcery, unique Lovecraftian magical artifacts, fantastic demi-planes of dream, and unspeakable cults of foulest evil. Make your players afraid of the dark again- give them an enemy that's a genuine mystery to them!

Guides for the creation of horrific monsters, building them from basic templates elaborated by unique qualities and special flavors of horror. Use the example templates for a quick abomination or flesh them out to be a special nemesis for your players.

Region creation tools for building your own sections of demon-haunted Earth, including sixty location tags to define the special torments of your land. These tags are largely compatible with the other tags found in Sine Nomine products such as Stars Without Number and Scarlet Heroes, so you can mix things up for even more dread chaos.

Adventure templates for quickly producing an investigative adventure suitable for sandbox use. You can create "blank" templates out of raw plot elements and then drop them on top of your region; the blank spaces in the template interlock with the location tags to create an instant adventure no matter which location receives the template.

Cult rules that adapt the popular Faction system from Stars Without Number for the dark machinations and secret feuding of the malevolent cults you create. Keep your world in a steady downward spiral whether or not the PCs are there!

So what the hell is this game system coming under the swords and sorcery label on my Dark Corner blog? Believe it or not this system is going to be a welcome resource to pull from for S&S because one thing that the Lovecraft circle of writers often did was hint at a myriad of faceless horrors lurking in the backgrounds of their literature and stories.
This book  and attendant systems is going to put the power of random Lovecraftian creation of cults, monsters, and whatnot in the hands of the DM. This enables the Dm to pull enemies from a wide variety of places, times, and circumstances.
All in all I'm really looking forward to using this new system and its up coming products. I'd get in on the ground floor of this one and begin to look into the background of the system's Beta. Even though this project has been funded there is plenty of room for lots of rewards and releases to come.