I Ran Alter Arms at AwesomeCon this past weekend and had players had some good positive feedback to round out the rules. I'm currently at the stage where I'm finalizing the rule-set for blind playtests and hope to send them out to people who have signed up sometime in the early Summer. Thank you for your patience!

Big thanks to all those who tried out Alter Arms as part of the MAGFest Indie Tabletop Showcase! Players had epic battles against mystic knights, vampire lords, technopathic bikers, and demonic stock brokers, and did so in awesome setpieces they came up with. One team had a member's giant robot combine with their shapeshifting alien ally to form a sword, which was used by their ally in an even bigger giant robot to attack their opponent as they fought in the middle of a weapon testing facility; Another group had a  combat robot use their battle computer to find an enemy's weak points and destroyed them in a missile barrage; A magical girl took control of an armored car through use of spells so she could bash a pursuer with her flaming mace, while her partner shifted from their beastial form to their cyborg form to take out their opponent; An extraterrestrial peacekeeper summoned their transforming robot starship to knock down a door (and conv

New Alter Arms players. I just got back from PAX Unplugged, a major tabletop gaming expo in Philadelphia where I had some great playtests. I am grinding away on the blind playtest rules, which is good because more and more people are asking for copies to play with their friends. Minor musings: The rules can be grasped by young children, as a group of playtesters quickly and eagerly leapt into the game. I was also able to test out character creation, which I've been able to streamline to about 5-10 minutes. A BLOCKBUSTER! playtester holds up the character sheet for their actor, Bick Thudgun, star of such films as Time Spiders , You're a Monster! , and The Green Desk Lamp Knows All (as the Lamp). Also, I played some large playtests of my other game, BLOCKBUSTER! which I have been working on as a side project. I'm likely going to be publishing that before I publish Alter Arms just because it will likely take less time since the rules are so streamlined An

After thorough testing, the Alter Arms system is almost complete. The next step is going to be to get blind feedback from playtesters interested in using the playtest rules to make their own characters and run their own adventures. This means sending out copies of the rules for players to review. I have been gathering emails from interested players, but if anyone would like to take part in this playtest, feel free to contact me by commenting on this post, or notifying me via @AlterArms on Twitter. In addition, I am going to look into running games on Roll20, and will update on that in time.

The first playtest group from JohnCon. (Photo by Duffy Austin) This past weekend I visited JohnCon , the annual gaming convention held at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Md. hosted by the university's science fiction and fantasy club. Alongside the other developers there as a part of Break My Game , I was able to get one full playtest in along with two partial playtests and feedback from a number of helpful individuals. The first group was made up of two college students and a board game designer with Break My Game. that session lasted about two hours. The other sessions had two high school students each, but unfortunately had to cut our sessions short. WHAT'S NEW? EXPERIENCE FOR ARCHETYPES Experience can now be gained from lowering allies' Drama. The intent here is to encourage players to use their archetypes to keep other players from Crashing. Originally, lowering Drama was the only way to Advance characters. I included the experience system - reward

My playtesters during BFG Con. I was able to get in one playtest at the Big Frederick Gaming Convention this past weekend with some lovely volunteers and wanted to go over the session and feedback I received. I had two players - a father and son - who had prior experience in role playing games and were familiar with the tokusatsu genre who took part in a two-hour playtest session. This gave me the opportunity to take things a bit slower for each player, and gain more focused feedback. WHAT'S NEW? For this playtest, I incorporated new features including unique benefits for Finishers, the consequences for Crashing, and what I'm calling Trappings that are tied to different forms. FINISHERS As before, Finishers are all-or-nothing attacks where players can max-out their Drama so that they at the brink of Crashing, but gain access to the next-highest dice-type (a characters in form 1 who normally uses a d6 would have access to a d8). For this session, I tied spec

This weekend I'll be running playtests at the Big Fredrick Gaming Convention. Hope to see you there!

Just an update: You can follow on twitter  @AlterArms for more frequent updates Some production art I doodled when I was playtesting a friend’s cyberpunk rpg tonight #tokusatsu #magicalgirl #art #tabletopgames #RPGs pic.twitter.com/CD7M03cuMm — Alter Arms (@AlterArms) March 15, 2018

Hi everybody! My name is Duffy Austin, and this is the production blog for my tokusatsu-themed tabletop role playing game, Alter Arms. Like a lot of kids who grew up in the 90s, I was blown away by the Power Rangers phenomena. At the time, it was astonishing to see such care and dedication being put into creating a live action television show about people in brightly colored costumes fighting crazy monsters with lasers and giant robots. Looking back, a lot of the series hasn’t aged well, but the charm of it, and of all special-effects driven shows like it, remains. No matter how silly the special effects, or plots, or lines seemed, the fact that the creative forces behind them sincerely presented them made them real and important. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I discovered the original Super Sentai series that provided the footage that was used to make a lot of Power Rangers. The franchise, and the entire genre of tokusatsu , had been around since the 1950s