D6xD6 RPG Expanded Edition

by Lester Smith

From Origins award winning designer Lester Smith, with former Dragon Magazine editor Dale A. Donovan—and 21 contributing authors—comes an innovative one-stat role-playing game featuring:

Five-minute character creation.
Quick-and-easy tactical combat rules.
Endless setting possibilities

The D6xD6 role-playing game is centered on a single stat, Focus. The more skills you choose, the higher your character's Focus number. Choose just a few skills, and your character is very focused. Choose many, and your character becomes a jack-of-all-trades.

Task rolls are 1d6 x 1d6. Roll high for things you know well; low for things you don't. That single roll serves as both level of success and turn order, making combat quick and easy.

This 200-page expanded edition contains all the best-selling core game rules, plus 26 settings from a range of genres, including the worlds of popular fantasy, sci-fi, and horror novelists.

Genres: Role Playing Games

200 pages, ebook

First published April 24, 2015

About the author

Elissa Malcohn has been published in Amazing Stories, Asimov's, Hugo Award winner Electric Velocipede, Hugo nominee Helix: A Speculative Fiction Quarterly, IPPY Silver Medalist Riffing on Strings, Tales of the Unanticipated, Bram Stoker Award winner Unspeakable Horror, and elsewhere. Her story "Hermit Crabs" (Electric Velocipede #14) appears in the recommended reading list in The Year's Best Science Fiction, 26th Annual Edition.

She was a John W. Campbell Award finalist in 1985 for best new science fiction writer of the year, reached preliminary ballot for a Nebula Award in 1989, and is a four-time Rhysling Award nominee for best speculative poetry of the year.

Covenant, the first volume of her Deviations series, was released by Aisling Press in 2007. See this blog entry for publication changes.

Covenant is now available as a free download (ISBN 978-0-9819764-0-2), in formats compatible with Kindle and other e-book readers, Palm and other PDAs, HTML for reading on a browser, and PDF (Acrobat Reader) reflowed to fit different-sized screens. In May 2009 Elissa released Volume 2, Appetite (ISBN 978-0-9819764-1-9).

Downloads are available at The Deviations Series website, Smashwords, and in even more formats at Manybooks.net.

Thanks to Rachel Baker for this review of both volumes at the Old Musty Books website, and to hosts Mark Eller (Chronicles)and Cyrus A. Webb (Conversations LIVE!) for having me on their shows. You can listen to the Chronicles interview here (click here for a transcript with accompanying photos and links) and to the Conversations LIVE! interview here (links-inclusive transcript here).

Elissa's novelette "Flotsam" and poem "Derivative Work" appear in the Oct./Nov. 2009 Asimov's. Work is forthcoming in the Dybbuk Press anthology She Nailed A Stake Through His Head: Tales of Biblical Terror (expected 2010), and elsewhere. Publication details here.

Elissa is also a participant in Operation E-Book Drop and keeps a Facebook fan page here."

Reviews

[Cyber Killer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very light, very fast ruleset, though to be honest it's the settings that captured me. This book comes with 26 (sic!) gaming settings for the GM to use. Fantasy, scifi, horror, urban fantasy, steampunk, etc... I only found a space opera missing :-).

But is it inspirational? Very much yes. Each setting, though short, comes with a lot of ideas, adventure seeds, etc to jump start a game. I once ran this after less than 15 minutes of preparation. Great for one shots, and I think it can manage longer campaigns also.