Fantasy Flight Games

Available Now – September 11

Published 11 September 2020 | Star Wars: Legion

Available Now – September 11

New Star Wars: Legion and Genesys Products are Now Available

Take a look at the latest products from Fantasy Flight Games, now available at your local retailer!

Clan Wren Unit Expansion

An ancient Mandalorian clan with ties to House Vizsla, Clan Wren's storied warriors are legendary for their battlefield prowess. Now they unite with the Rebellion, fighting for a free galaxy and the liberation of Mandalore.

Within the Clan Wren Unit Expansion for Star Wars™: Legion, you’ll find seven highly customizable Mandalorian miniatures—enough to deploy in two distinct units—and eight upgrade cards to outfit them for combat. Three of these miniatures blast off from their bases with jet packs and flight stands let you decide their height and trajectory. Meanwhile, a single Mandalorian trooper can wield the traditional beskad saber or appear with a single Westar 35 blaster pistol. Finally, Clan Wren matriarch Ursa Wren leads her family into battle with her signature Nite Owl helmet.

Pick up your own copy of the Clan Wren Unit Expansion (SWL68) at your local retailer or online through our website here!

Inferno Squad Unit Expansion

Tasked with protecting the secrets of the Empire by silencing any who would reveal them, Inferno Squad is a special forces unit led by the brilliant command Iden Versio. Among the elite ranks of the Imperial special forces, Inferno Squad is particularly notorious for its unconventional tactics, but its efficacy is undeniable.

This expansion adds seven finely detailed, unpainted Imperial Special Forces miniatures to your collection—enough for two distinct units—along with seven upgrade cards that invite you to kit them out for battle. In addition to the standard Special Forces troopers, you can also assembe Inferno Squad members Gideon Hask and Del Meeko miniatures with or without their signature helmets.

Pick up your own copy of the Inferno Squad Unit Expansion (SWL69) at your local retailer or online through our website here!

Republic AT-RT Unit Expansion

Built for speed across any terrain, the AT-RT Republic scout walker lets a single clone trooper bring an entire unit's worth of heavy firepower to the battlefield. Capable of striking from unexpected angles and outflanking formations of enemy battle droids, the AT-RT makes a formidable addition to any force of clone troopers.

The Republic AT-RT Unit Expansion puts a single beautifully detailed, unpainted hard plastic AT-RT miniature with two distinct pilot options at your disposal. Beyond the pilots, you can also pick the weapon mounted on the AT-RT’s hardpoint, choosing between a rotary blaster, a laser canon, and a flamethrower. Finally, five upgrade cards help bring these visual modifications to life in game.

Pick up your own copy of the Republic AT-RT Unit Expansion (SWL71) at your local retailer or online through our website here!

STAP Riders Unit Expansion

Swift scouting craft designed for coordinating allied forces and performing reconnaissance, single trooper aerial platforms, or STAPs, are typically piloted by B1 battle droids and kept aloft by whirring repusolorlifts. As they speed above the battlefield, these nimble craft allow their riders to deliver targeting data to friendly units or strike at enemy forces before flitting away from harm.

Within the STAP Riders Unit Expansion, you’ll find two beautifully detailed, unpainted STAP rider miniatures that featuring a number of customization options. Two different flight stands let you depict them at different heights, while the STAP pilots themselves can be assembled in a variety of poses. Finally, four upgrade cards invite you to equip them with comms systems to more fully integrate your STAP riders into your army.

Pick up your own copy of the STAP Riders Unit Expansion (SWL73) at your local retailer or online through our website here!

Mutant Invasion!

The Crucible is filled with strange and wondrous creatures, belonging to many disparate Houses. And if that inherent variety wasn’t enough, the introduction of mysterious dark æmber has welcomed in a flood of mutation, as once-familiar giants, thieves, demons, knights, and others become forever changed. Some rejoice in the changes, while others see them as heresy and fight to eradicate the dark æmber and its effects. Which side of the conflict will you take?

Within the Mutant Invasion! roleplaying supplement pack for Genesys, you’ll find 40 oversized cards stuffed with information for players and Game Masters alike, expanding on the content included in the Secrets of the Crucible sourcebook. You’ll encounter a brand-new playable species, rules for incorporating the mutative dark æmber into your own games, adventure builders, locations, and over 30 NPC adversaries to populate your adventures. If you’re planning to take your Genesys adventures to the Crucible, the Mutant Invasion! supplement pack brings even more of the diversity and wonder that makes the Mass Mutation set of KeyForge decks so compelling.

Pick up your own copy of Mutant Invasion! (GNS13) at your local retailer or online through our website here!

Discuss this article
in our forums!

Mutant Invasion!

Published 5 March 2020 | Genesys

Mutant Invasion!

Announcing a Card Pack for Genesys: Secrets of the Crucible

Fantasy Flight Games is proud to announce Mutant Invasion!, a Genesys roleplaying supplement pack, designed to expand the content first introduced via the Secrets of the Crucible sourcebook!

Within this pack, you’ll find 40 oversized cards stuffed with information for players and Game Masters alike. You’ll encounter a brand-new playable species, rules for incorporating the mutative dark æmber into your own games, adventure builders, locations, and over 30 NPC adversaries to populate your adventures. If you’re planning to take your Genesys adventures to the Crucible, the Mutant Invasion! supplement pack brings even more of the diversity and wonder that makes the Mass Mutation set of KeyForge decks so compelling.

New Horizons Await

The Mutant Invasion! pack begins by introducing a new playable species to your games: the proximan. This species has been seen on the Crucible for at least several millennia and is thought to hail from the Alpha Centauri system. Proximans have a symmetrical, largely humanoid appearance, and evolved neuro-accelerant glands within their twin cranial protrusions, allowing proximans to quickly process sensory information and determine the best way to react when prey or deadlier predators are detected. While they are not as strong as other species due to their homeworld’s lower gravity, proximans are true survivors and not to be underestimated.

If you’re a player who wants to excel at detecting and dealing with dangers, the proximan might be the perfect species for you!

Of course, the bulk of this roleplaying supplement pack is devoted to over 30 NPCs that Game Masters can use to fill their adventures, drawing on the weird and wonderful creatures of the Crucible and the dark æmber mutations introduced by the Mass Mutation set for KeyForge. You and your fellow players may be out doing a job and discover that Bad Penny is after the same item as you. Or, you may find Fandangle the witch seeding dark æmber to cause mutations in the local wildlife. Your explorations may even lead you across a tribe of niffle apes, a niffle queen, or the gigantic, mutated Kong. These NPCs may work with the players, or they may stand in their way, but either way, they bring new life to the allies and adversaries on the Crucible.

Finally, Game Masters will uncover a host of adventure seeds in this pack. An easy adventure builder takes Game Masters through a simple process of developing an adventure, from the hook, through the escalation, to the climax of the plot threads earlier established. As an added bonus, three location cards help Game Masters bring some of the most common locales on the Crucible to life with additional plot seeds, special rules, and examples!

Mutate Your Adventures

The onset of dark æmber is about to change the Crucible forever. Unlock the next chapter of your adventures with the Mutant Invasion! roleplaying supplement pack for Secrets of the Crucible, scheduled for release in the second quarter of 2020!

You can pre-order your own copy of Mutant Invasion! (uGNS13) at your local retailer today!

Discuss this article
in our forums!

Secrets of the Crucible

Published 6 January 2020 | Genesys

Secrets of the Crucible

Announcing a New Sourcebook for Genesys Roleplaying

Pre-order your own copy of Secrets of the Crucible at your local retailer or online through our website with free shipping in the continental U.S. today!

In the center of the universe hangs the Crucible, an enormous artificial world created by the enigmatic Architects and home to countless beings and cultures. Here, impossibly advanced technologies mix with arcane powers to make for a setting unlike any other. Uncovering the secrets of this mysterious, artificial world will take all your skills—but the possible rewards are boundless...

Fantasy Flight Games is proud to announce Secrets of the Crucible, a new sourcebook for the Genesys Roleplaying System set in the KeyForge Universe!

This 272-page sourcebook allows you to undertake fantastical adventures and uncover the Crucible’s many wonders and dangers. Lost civilizations, cryptic conspiracies, bizarre environments, mutated monsters, and more await!

Secrets of the Crucible contains new character creation options, unique weapons and armor, new skills revolving around the mysterious Æmber permeating the world, bizzare adversaries, and a new adventure builder that puts all these aspects together!

Are you ready to discover a world where anything is possible?

The Keys of Discovery

The first portion of Secrets of the Crucible introduces new character creation options. The Crucible is a diverse landscape full of uncountable species. This book contains 11 of these species to choose from when creating a character, including Giants, Martians, and Robots. But Secrets of the Crucible also features a full set of rules for creating your own species, making your character creation options truly limitless! Traverse the land as an aquatic horse-type species or roll through the Crucible as a giant rock; the choice is always yours!

Of course, selecting a species is just the beginning, Secrets of the Crucible also contains a set of fresh new careers for players to explore. Battle for æmber and glory as a mighty VaultWarrior, or acquire wealth and fortune as a mercurial Trader! Each of these careers has access to a wide variety of new skills and talents introduced in Secrets of the Crucible, including the powerful new Æmbercraft skill, which invites you to learn the secrets of the mysterious substance permeating the Crucible.

Of course, you're characters history and future will inevitably be intertwined with the various factions of the Crucible. Given the enormous number of beings on the Crucible, it is no wonder there are untold millions of groups, factions, houses, associations, and other ways for them to band together. Referred to as organizations, these groups range from congregations of belief systems followed by thousands of species to a singularly immortal hive mind linking a multitude of small protoplasmic blobs. Wherever there are beings who share beliefs or desires, organizations are formed. Does your character hail from the fierce legions of Brobnar, or from the scientific minds of Logos? As always, your character is yours to craft.

Master of the Vault

But Secrets of the Crucible isn’t for players alone. Game Masters are offered plenty of advice for running adventures in the world of KeyForge! Games set on the Crucible can be as divergent and expansive as the world itself, and it may feel a bit daunting to craft adventures. The wild mix of species, super-science, and fantastical technologies may seem too large to handle, but its beings have motivations and needs that everyone can understand—and thus adventures on this world can be both fun and familiar for players as they explore the Crucible with their characters.

Much of the chapter focusing on the Game Master is devoted to exploring the Science Fantasy genre, depicting life on the Crucible, Introducing NPC templates, and working Æmber into your adventures. The rest of the chapter offers a way for you to quickly create adventures featuring prominent or common elements of the Crucible with an adventure builder template. The adventure builder uses a modular format, allowing segments of the adventure types to be reused to create different combinations each time. The resulting framework may include unexpected twists, moral quandaries, and some of the general weirdness inherent to the Crucible.

These modular adventures are similar to the encounters found in Shadow of the Beanstalk, but with a Crucible twist. The adventure builder contains three categories: Hooks, Escalations, and Climaxes. By combining one of each, you can create your own story full of adventure, twists, and a satisfying conclusion.

Hooks are the initial enticement and incentive for your players to get involved in the adventure. These work best when they are clearly presented, so the players don’t spend a lot of time wondering what the possibilities are. Hooks can be quite cliché, which is great for telegraphing the basic intent of the adventure and can help set up unexpected events later on. Perhaps an Æmber Hunter needs you to fight off a Martian scouting party, or the PCs find a hot lead on a valuable artifact.

An escalation raises the stakes or difficulty of the adventure. Sometimes it challenges the morality of the situation as the PCs decide how far to go in their pursuit of their ultimate goal in changing conditions.

Climaxes are more open and nebulous compared to the hooks and escalations. They represent broad categories of possible resolutions that can always be greatly impacted and even circumvented by PC actions. We’ll take a look at each of these aspects in-depth in a future preview!

Unlock the Secrets

The world where anything is possible is colliding with the roleplaying system of boundless adventures, what adventures await you when Secrets of the Crucible releases in the second quarter of 2020?

Explore infinite possibilities with Secrets of the Crucible (GNS12), available for pre-order now from your local retailer or our website!

Discuss this article
in our forums!

A New Challenge

Published 13 December 2019 | Genesys

A New Challenge

Designer Sam Gregor-Stewart Walks Through New Genesys Errata

Join us today as Designer Sam Gregor-Stewart introduces new errata coming to the Genesys Roleplaying System! The new errata makes several updates to the system and can be found here.

Sam Gregor-Stewart on Genesys Errata

Although Genesys is all about empowering you to design your own setting and rules, we want to make sure that the materials we provide have the cleanest mechanics and the least possible mistakes. So when errors do creep in, we take the opportunity to correct them and make you aware of our mistakes with an errata.

With the release of the Genesys Expanded Player’s Guide, we wanted to take the chance to update the entire line with a new edition of our errata and FAQ! You can check out the new version for yourself here (1.2 MB), but here are a few of the highlights you can expect.

New Challenge Ratings

The Expanded Player’s Guide introduces a new mechanic for building and making encounters; a challenge rating for each adversary. Our new quick-build adversaries have ways to calculate their challenge rating, and all the new adversaries in the Expanded Player’s Guide have their challenge rating already calculated.

But what about all of the adversaries in previous books? Well, we wanted to make sure that you could use the same system with Realms of Terrinoth, Shadow of the Beanstalk, and the Core Rulebook. So we went ahead and calculated the challenge rating for every Genesys adversary we’ve ever published. You can find them all in the errata.

Network Encounters Explained

Some of you have had some questions about how Network encounters in Shadow of the Beanstalk are supposed to work. In our FAQ section, we took the time to address those questions in a way that should bring additional clarity for those of you looking to make runs on the Network.

Corrections

And of course, it wouldn’t be an errata if we didn’t take the chance to fix some of the regrettable mistakes that ended up in our books. You can find any corrected errors here, listed by page number.

Overcoming New Challenges

Thanks Sam! Keep your eyes on the Fantasy Flight Games website for even more Genesys news and be sure to pick up the Expanded Player's Guide (GNS11) from your local retailer or our website!

Discuss this article
in our forums!

FFG Live in December

Published 27 November 2019 | Star Wars: X-Wing Second Edition

FFG Live in December

Check Out What FFG Live Has in Store for December

With the holidays fast approaching, FFG Live is speeding towards the conclusion of its second season, but there’s still plenty of action coming your way!

Enter Rokugan with a stream on December 3rd focusing on the Clan War Premium Expansion for Legend of the Five Rings: The Card Game. Developer Tyler Parrott will show off new cards coming your way when the expansion releases in the first quarter of 2020!

On December 5th, Marvel Champions: The Card Game designers Michael Boggs and Caleb Grace play a game featuring all-upcoming releases! Tune in to get a sneak peak of the Captain America Hero Pack, the Ms. Marvel Hero Pack, The Green Goblin Scenario Pack, and the very first look at the Thor Hero Pack!

On December 10th, John Shaffer returns to the FFG Live stage for more advanced painting tips for Star Wars™: Legion! This is the third stream in a series giving you tips on how to paint your favorite Star Wars: Legion figures! For the first streams, click here and here!

Our ongoing RPG series Flights of Fantasy will close out its first campaign in the Genesys Roleplaying System on December 12th. Join Game Master Sam Stewart and players Max, Evan, and Alexis as they navigate the world of Android using the Shadow of the Beanstalk sourcebook!

Be sure to tune in on December 17th to get an early look at upcoming releases for Star Wars™: X-Wing! Developers Max and Brooks will be on hand to show-off and answer questions about the iconic tactical miniatures game!

From there, FFG Live will be embarking on our season break until January 9th with one exception. Join us at 10 a.m. on New Year’s Eve for a blast from the past as Head of Studio Andrew Navaro and Senior Manager of Digital Development Andrew Fischer play Android: The Board Game! Originally released in 2008, this game kickstarted the Android universe with flawed investigators trying to solve a murder-mystery. The festivities start at 10 a.m., don’t miss it!

Join us on our YouTube and Twitch channels for FFG Live every Tuesday and Thursday at 1:00 PM Central Time. Don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss a new video or livestream—we hope to see you there!

Discuss this article
in our forums!

Genesys Foundry Spotlight: Something Strange

Published 25 November 2019 | Genesys

Genesys Foundry Spotlight: Something Strange

Check Out Extraordinary Supplements on the Genesys Foundry

Welcome to the Foundry Spotlight! Every month, we ask fans of our community content creation marketplace for the Genesys Roleplaying game, The Foundry to submit a request for the product they want us to take a closer look at. Then one of our RPG developers writes up an article about what they find fascinating and enjoyable about it!

This month, RPG Producer Tim Huckelbery takes a look at Something Strange by Scott Zumwalt, which can be found here!

Something Strange

Two things I have to start with: first, like all of us at FFG’s Roleplaying Department, I’ve been very happy to see all the great work folks have done for Genesys Foundry products. Second, I love horror, and so was delighted to see Scott Zumwalt’s excellent Something Strange become this month’s Genesys Foundry Spotlight subject. If you like horror, then this a perfect item for you. Even if you don’t follow horror that much, it’s still a great addition to any Genesys library.

So, what do you get in Something Strange? Quite a lot—it’s over 40 pages and packed with content. Most importantly, though, it’s a great example of modern horror. This setting allows for a great combination of horror staples like vampires and werewolves but in places and times that are very familiar to us. This makes things feel immediate and thrilling—what you’re playing could be going on while you’re strolling downtown or near that old abandoned house at the end of the street. Scott captures this right off the bat when he discusses the themes and tropes for Something Strange. Here we see magic and supernatural creatures (which could include you!) that could be lurking in the shadows of our own world. Monsters and magic users exist in Something Strange, and the words make it feel like they could really be out there.

You’re playing humans in this game and you get three new archetypes to expand on the four from the Genesys Core Rulebook. The Athlete’s ability to nimbly react to combat threats is perfect for humans who face superhumans, and I can’t wait to try it out. Along with these there are over a dozen careers to boot, so there are plenty of player options to pick from.

You’ll find lots of new talents for PCs in Something Strange, but there are two noteworthy ones that can make you a vampire or a werewolf. Rather than using new archetypes to create these supernatural beings, as might expected, Scott uses a new talent for each. This allows players to discover a hidden past or a supernatural aspect for their characters during play, and it’s quite clever. Both Vampire and Werewolf are Tier 1 talents, so it’s also easy to buy them whenever you want or even at character creation.

Additional talents work with them, so your vampire can gain Blood Potency or take on a Bat Form, while a werewolf can make a Summoning Howl or become an Expert Tracker. Overall, it’s a smart way to allow for supernatural player characters to emerge and grow in power.

If you’re not feeling thirsty or hungry, though, there are also powerful talents for humans that help you cast magic with less effort or detect characters who are supernatural. And these PCs will need them—it’s a dangerous world when you step into the shadows.

The new rules within all add good flavor to the game. My favorite concerns weapon noise, a nice touch as modern weapons are generally very loud! Of course, you could equip your firearm with a suppressor (also included) but sometimes ya just gotta be loud as you kick the door open and blast away at the bloodsuckers.

Speaking of firearms, you get quite a few here—not too surprising as it’s a modern setting—but it’s cool to also see unique items like crossbows and tasers. There are also flashy cars and even helicopters for your hunters. I especially liked the magical items like Houdini’s Pocket Watch, which improves your Augment spells.

As can be imagined given a horror tone, there is a plethora of adversaries (including some who can act as allies), plus named characters who can really add flavor to adventures. There’s a great range of monsters, from moth men to jackalopes. Some things (literally) don’t even have names, like the mysterious “Specimen ZZ-331” (a very nice touch that clicks well with a modern setting).

If all of this wasn’t enough, Scott’s done superlative work in crafting a wonderful graphic design for Something Strange complete with cool art. It boasts a very creepy cover and a unified and appropriately sharp presentation style. Everything captures the setting; even the fonts feel like they are from a Hammer Horror film from the 70’s. These aspects may seem minor, but when well done (like here) they help to hold your attention as you’re reading and keep you immersed in the setting.

Bottom line: This is definitely worth checking out if you’re looking to do horror games. Even if you’re not planning on using the exact setting, Something Strange has enough cool weapons, talents, and monsters to make it worthwhile for many other games too. I really liked it, and I think you will too. I’m looking forward to seeing adventures in this setting as well, as the world it creates feels very compelling. So get out there and grab a stake—there’s something strange in the shadows!

Thanks, Tim, and thank you to Scott Zumwalt for your creation! If you enjoyed this Foundry Spotlight, be sure to submit your vote for the subject of next month’s Spotlight article. Send an email to foundryspotlight@fantasyflightgames.com with the name of the product you want us to feature in the subject, and your reason for picking it in the email.

Discuss this article
in our forums!

Crafting Your Reality

Published 13 November 2019 | Genesys

Crafting Your Reality

Preview How to Build Your Own Setting in the Genesys Expanded Players Guide

Pre-order your own copy of The Expanded Player's Guide at your local retailer or online through our website with free shipping in the continental U.S. today!

Creating a new setting gets to the heart of the Genesys roleplaying game. Even if you are using one of the established settings provided in the Core Rulebook you still have the freedom to experiment. To add and take away aspects of the world that better suit your games.

Creating and modifying your own setting can be a daunting task, but the Expanded Player's Guide provides a step by step process on how to craft your own universe. Join us today as we take you through this process!

The Expanded Player's Guide provides plenty of new tools for players and Game Masters alike. From the setting creation section detailed here to new talents and skills, to sample settings, the Expanded Player's Guide gives you everything you need to take your games of Genesys to the next level!

The Blank Slate

The first step to crafting your own setting is organizing your thoughts on it. The Expanded Setting Sheet available in the book and soon on our website is a great place to start, breaking aspects of your world down into smaller segments and making it more manageable to create. The book itself breaks your world down into six aspects for you to develop, and each of these sections contains plenty of examples to draw from in the form of charts. These charts can both spark your imagination with a variety of options, or they can simply be used to insert random elements into your world for variety. Read on to discover the various aspects that will inform your setting.

Tropes

Tropes are common storytelling devices, clichés, or both. They can help define a genre, like steampunk or alternate history, or they can define morality, like good and evil. Tropes can be refined all the way down to specific elements within classic stories, but you should stay more general when developing a setting.

Tropes help give your setting an easily recognizable element for your players to identify with. If, say, your setting has the gritty realism trope, this helps your players know what kind of game they’re going to be playing in. It informs how they build their characters and what kind of adventures they can expect.

This section contains a full list of tropes on a table to help narrow down your options or you can pick a few at random to help develop your world.

Technology Level

Technology levels range from the historical to the fanciful. Most settings have a primary technology level that applies to most, if not all, of the setting. Some settings may have access to multiple levels of technology, as some parts of a world advance at a quicker pace than others. However, you should put some thought into exactly how far apart those levels are, and how much it matters to the stories you’re telling.

The Physical World

What kind of physical world does your setting exist in? The natural or artificial environment characters deal with every day a effects adventure and story construction, at least to some degree. Interesting worlds provide an enjoyable backdrop for your stories and can draw the players further into the setting, hopefully enticing them into discovering memorable locations.

Your world can have one environment, or many environments. The choice is always up to you!

This stage goes in depth on developing climates, locations and more for your world. As always, handy charts can make it easy to spark your imagination or throw in a few random elements to keep your world fresh.

Religion and Cosmology

One important element of most societies are their religious practices. Gods and religion are a prominent part of most settings, just as they play a prominent role in our actual history. In some settings, the gods are going to be real, tangible beings with their own desires, fears, and agendas. In other settings, there may be little evidence of the existence of the divine, but that doesn’t stop society from having established religious practices. Thinking about Religion and Cosmology will lead you to the next section detailing the society of your setting.

Government and General Society

How do the people in your setting organize themselves politically and socially? What does their government look like? What is it like to live, work, and succeed in the major society of your setting? Just as importantly, does your setting have one society, or more than one? These questions can be difficult to answer, and the Expanded Player’s Guide provides plenty of avenues for you to answer them.

Society tends to group up, a table within the Player's Guide can let you populate your world with a variety of these factions.

All of these charts can help spark your imagination, but don’t feel limited by the ideas suggested within them. These are your worlds, your setting, your decisions. The suggestions made inside are merely that, suggestions. You are the final arbiter of the world you are creating, the Genesys Expanded Player’s Guide is just a tool to show you the way!

Igniting the Spark

The Expanded Player’s Guide is the perfect way to spark your imagination and make your games of Genesys bigger than ever. A system with no limits, Genesys can be whatever you want it to be. What worlds will you create when the Expanded Player’s Guide releases in the fourth quarter of 2019?

Create your own world with the Genesys Expanded Player’s Guide (GNS11), available now for pre-order from your local retailer or our website!

Discuss this article
in our forums!

Your Guide to Adventure

Published 6 November 2019 | Genesys

Your Guide to Adventure

Preview the New Settings Featured in the Genesys Expanded Player's Guide

Pre-order your own copy of the Genesys Expaned Player's Guide at your local retailer or online through our website with free shipping in the continental U.S. today!

In Genesys, the only limitation is your imagination. The settings are limitless, and the adventures infinite. While the system offers complete freedom to make whatever world you envision, it also gives you the tools you need to begin your journey, including plenty of sample settings to base your world on.

Join us today as we preview the new settings found in the Expanded Player’s Guide for Genesys Roleplaying!

These settings draw inspiration from a diverse range of media—from the epic legends and myths of past civilizations, to the classic horror literature and films of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the desperate stories of societal collapse that captivate our imaginations today.

Each of these settings includes new character creation options, equipment and weapons, and adversaries to challenge your characters. These settings provide a broad overview and starting point for building your own games in these universes, including tips on how to strike the appropriate tone and tell compelling stories.

The World of Heroes

From the time of humanity’s first words, we have told stories of epic heroes, magic swords, dire monsters, and treasure hoards. Real-world mythology provides richly detailed settings filled with exciting characters ranging from superpowered demigods to quick-witted tricksters. Some of these stories, like that of Jason and the Argonauts—whose quest for the golden fleece pitched them against islands of vicious killers, fire breathing oxen, and monstrous dragons—could have been plucked directly from a tabletop RPG.

The Age of Myth setting allows you to step into these iconic tales from a variety of cultures and history. Greek, Roman, and Egyptian myths and more are the perfect settings for a group of heroes looking for adventure.

In this Age of Myth, you can even play as a veritable Demigod, like Hercules himself. This character might have been born of a union between a mortal and a god, or perhaps they are the child of gods stolen at birth and robbed of some of their divine majesty. Either way, playing as a Demigod can provide rich character and story options no matter the setting.

The stats and abilities of a Demigod in the World of Myth setting.

Of course, the heroes of myth also need appropriate weapons and equipment to tackle the challenges ahead of them. In many myths, these weapons are just as important as the heroes who wield them.

Apollo’s bow was said to be so accurate the god could not miss a shot. In addition, the merest graze from one of its arrows could bring on a terrible plague. If your hero is lucky enough to wield this mighty bow, they remove every setback die from a skill check using it. Furthermore, every enemy hit by a critical injury from the bow suffers a debilitating illness!

With the Expanded Player’s Guide, the World of Myth is at your fingertips!

The World of Horror

Horror has been a part of human storytelling since the time of cave paintings. In the 1800s, a new form emerged featuring a series of monsters whose legacy has echoed across the years, most importantly in film. Today, nearly everyone is familiar with these terrors: stitched-together corpses reanimated via chemicals and electricity; beings neither dead nor alive and damned for eternity to drink blood; shapeshifters cursed to dread the coming of the full moon, and many more.

This horror isn’t just about monsters. It is also about the people who have become monsters, often in a quest for power. In their hubris, they have conducted experiments on animals, humans, and even themselves that go far beyond the limits of safety and morality.

In Monsterworld, your characters experience a unique brand of horror as they struggle to survive their adventures in a terror-filled land. Perhaps they are normal people struggling with the horrors around them, or maybe they themselves hold a piece of this terror within themselves.

Those who stalk the monsters of the night can be terrifying individuals themselves. Consumed with vengeance, they attack with all the fury of the creatures they hunt. One day, they will also fall, but not before they end the existence of as many of their hated foes as possible. Perhaps your character is one of these Fearless Slayers, the one thing that strikes fear into the monsters stalking the night.

The stats and abilities of a Fearless Slayer in the Monsterworld setting.

A unique weapon within this setting, the Sunlight Grenade, may be your greatest hope of survival. A special weapon designed for exposing those who stalk the night to the burning light of day, sunlight grenades may be difficult to create, but they have proven deadly to some things that science cannot explain.

When a sunlight grenade explodes, it acts as direct sunlight on all characters within medium range until the end of the current round. Characters in cover who have the Sunlight Sensitivity ability suffer 3 wounds and 6 strain instead of the ability’s normal effects.

What horrors await you in your own Monsterworld?

The World of Survival

The post-apocalyptic genre is a setting in which a world’s society has collapsed, and the remaining populace must survive in a strange and dangerous new world. One of the oldest genres of fiction, post-apocalyptic stories can be found throughout the founding myths and religious stories of various real-world cultures. As far back as the Babylonians and the ancient Judaic cultures, people were telling tales of the end of the world.

Post-apocalyptic stories as we know them today gained popularity in the wake of World War II. With the development of nuclear weapons and the constant threat of mutually assured destruction, the idea that the world could be wiped out at a moment’s notice became the defining cultural anxiety of the twentieth century. Apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic themes were rampant in all forms of media, from books and films to popular music.

Most of the people one finds in a post apocalyptic setting are survivors, average people who through luck and skill have managed to ride out the calamity that destroyed civilization. Now they’re trying to master the most valuable skill in this new era: staying alive.

The stats and abilities of a Survivor in the Post Apocalypse setting.

Life in a post-apocalyptic setting isn’t an easy one, your characters will have to use every single tool at their disposal in order to survive, including weapons like nailbats, a simple but vicious weapon.

Expand Your World

With three new settings included, the Genesys Expanded Player’s Guide offers plenty of ways to spark your imagination. But that’s not all it contains, a new step-by-step guide on creating your own setting, and expanding alternate rules. The Expanded Player’s Guide is the perfect way to find new ways to use the Genesys Roleplaying System!

Expand your world with the Genesys Expanded Player’s Guide (GNS11), available now for pre-order from your local retailer or our website here!

Discuss this article
in our forums!

Genesys Foundry Spotlight: Ready...Fight!

Published 4 November 2019 | Genesys

Genesys Foundry Spotlight: Ready...Fight!

Check Out Extraordinary Supplements on the Genesys Foundry

Welcome to the Foundry Spotlight! Every month, we ask fans of our community content creation marketplace for the Genesys Roleplaying game, the Foundry, to submit a request for the product they want us to take a closer look at. Then one of our RPG developers writes up an article about what they find fascinating and enjoyable about it!

This month, RPG department manager Sam Gregor-Stewart takes a look at Ready…Fight! by Keith Ryan Kappel, which can be found here!

Ever since we first launched the Foundry, I’ve been incredibly excited to see what people come up with. One of my hopes was that people would use the Foundry as a chance to come up with brilliant and innovative new ways to play Genesys; ways my team and I have never even thought of. In that regard, as well as many others, Ready…Fight! does not disappoint!

Created by Keith Ryan Kappel, Ready…Fight! is a supplement that’s devoted to unarmed combat in Genesys. Traditionally, we’ve kept unarmed fighting as something pretty broad and open to narrative interpretation. That means there’s plenty of room for someone to do a deep dive into fighting with one’s fists and feet, and Keith’s supplement demonstrates that with impressive detail.

Keith has created over 90 pages of content, enough that it took me a while to get through it all! I have to admit that the first thing I appreciated was the attention to professionalism, with a clean layout, table of contents, introduction that explains exactly what I’m getting, and even a page devoted to the video games, movies, and TV shows that inspired this. I also enjoyed the art, which for the most part was a nod to the “architectural drawing” style we use in our Core Rulebook and the Expanded Player’s Guide, but still possessed its own distinctive tone. Artist Sean Vrabel did some solid work.

Keith breaks his book into three parts, mirroring the organization of the Genesys Core Rulebook. The first part presents new rules for unarmed combat that can be used in any setting. These are mostly new character creation options (new archetypes, careers, and talents). I found the general archetypes particularly interesting. Each one was clean and simple, with a compelling once-per-game archetype ability that reinforced the flavor of that archetype.

When it comes to new rules, there were two that stood out to me. The first seems simple, but it opens up a lot of new gameplay for the book later on—Keith splits the Brawl skill into two separate skills; Brawl (Striking) and Brawl (Grappling). Striking covers all the punching, kicking, and hitting your opponent, while Grappling is focused on more wrestling-style moves. In addition, Striking is linked to Agility, not Brawn. I love this! In a game focused on unarmed combat, it gives players two very different avenues to pursue with their character, and it makes sure that Brawn doesn’t become a characteristic that everyone wants to max out. It’s a smart design decision, and it forms the basis for a lot of other new innovations throughout the book.

The second new rule I really liked was treating various unarmed attacks as weapons. These are “weapon profiles” that range from Punch and Submission Hold to Dragon Bite and Choke Slam Takedown. Each one works like a weapon, but are purchased with experience points instead of currency. For games focused on unarmed combat, this is a great way to represent specific unarmed fighting techniques that gives characters something to work towards and “level up” to, while still working within the same basic system of earning and spending XP.

This takes us into the five new settings in this book. The first is a basic “unarmed combat” setting that is intended to be added to existing settings. This is the setting for players who want to create an unarmed fighter in an existing setting or ongoing game. The second is the Kung-Fu Setting, with plenty of nods to wuxia media. The Pro-Wrestling Setting is taken straight out of the professional wrestling TV shows of the 80s and 90s, while the Tournament setting is more of a nod to arcade fighting games and mixed martial arts organizations. However, my favorite has to the Street Brawler setting, which is a love letter to side scroller beat’em up games and modern kung-fu movies. The example setting (ahem.. “Rumble City”) is grimy, over-the-top, and hilariously campy, with locations like Swoleside and Bloodshot Borough. I love it!

The book wraps up with a GM’s section that includes some more optional rules and a whole bunch of GM advice on how to run games that emulate the tone of sports and fighting movies.

My final note is that all these rules do make unarmed combat a lot more complex, but Keith addresses this as well. A lot of the rules make fights that may otherwise be somewhat one-dimensional (such as two wrestlers fighting in an open ring with nobody else involved) into exciting and cinematic experiences. He also makes the smart choice of noting some of the rules as optional, so Game Masters can dial the complexity up and down. All in all, this is a well put together product that left me very impressed!

Thanks, Sam, and thank you to Keith Ryan Kappel for your creation. If you enjoyed this Foundry Spotlight, be sure to submit your vote for the subject of next month’s Spotlight article. Send an email to foundryspotlight@fantasyflightgames.com with the name of the product you want us to feature in the subject, and your reason for picking it in the email.

Discuss this article
in our forums!

FFG Live in October

Published 27 September 2019 | Star Wars: X-Wing Second Edition

FFG Live in October

Check Out What FFG Live Has in Store for October

The weather may be cooling down, but FFG Live is just heating up! Read on to discover what we have on tap for live stream programming for the month of October!

Join us the first week of October for an Ask Me Anything with the developers of two of our biggest Star Wars™ lines. On October 1st, the developers of Star Wars™: Legion will sit down to answer your questions! On October 3rd, it’s the Star Wars: X-Wing developers turn in the hot seat! You can ask your questions here for Legion and here for X-Wing!

On October 8th, get your first look at the Ms. Marvel Hero Pack for Marvel Champions: The Card Game! Ms. Marvel will be the second hero pack coming to the game after the Captain America Hero Pack, and this will be the very first time the pack is shown off to the public, be sure not to miss it!

The middle of October will see the World Championships for both Star Wars: X-Wing and Star Wars: Destiny! We’ve already posted our streaming schedule for the week of October 16th, but be sure to join us on October 10th for a preview of what’s to come featuring the developers of both games!

We’ll return to our normal schedule on October 22nd with a Legend of the Five Rings: The Card Game stream featuring new cards from the Defenders of Rokugan and Seekers of Wisdom Clan Packs! Prepare for new spoilers as developer Tyler Parrott guides us through the two newest Clan Packs for Legend of the Five Rings: The Card Game!

After one drank an abomination of a milkshake, and the other scorched their taste buds with a burning hot tamale salsa, KeyForge developers Brad and Danny will duke it out once more to determine who is the superior KeyForge player on October 24th. What cruel fate awaits the loser of this winner-take-all matchup?!

On October 29th, celebrate the impending release of Marvel Champions: The Card Game with a celebration giveaway! We’ll be taking on the some of the toughest villains in the Marvel Universe while giving away copies of the upcoming Marvel Champions: The Card Game Core Set!

Finally, join us on Halloween for our second session of Flights of Fantasy, our new actual-play roleplaying adventure using the Genesys system! Our heroes adventure in the Realms of Terrinoth is just beginning, what does GM Sam Stewart have in store for our adventurers? Find out on this very special Halloween stream on October 31st!

Join us on our YouTube and Twitch channels for FFG Live every Tuesday and Thursday at 1:00 PM Central Time. Don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss a new video or livestream—we hope to see you there!

Discuss this article
in our forums!

Foundry Spotlight

Published 23 September 2019 | Genesys

Foundry Spotlight

Help Us Spotlight the Best of the Genesys Foundry

Since the launch of the Foundry, our open marketplace for Genesys-related content, we’ve seen an incredible outpouring of enthusiasm for the awesome content that you, the fans, have created. And with over 20 unique products released so far, there’s already plenty of content to choose from!

Given all of the interesting material out there, we want to help direct Genesys players and GMs towards the Foundry material that they may find particularly useful, interesting, or just plain fun! And we figured that the best people to determine what Foundry content fit those criteria are you.

So we are pleased to announce the Foundry Spotlight! This monthly article focuses on one piece of Foundry content. One member of the RPG team will read through the material, summarize it, and highlight some of the things about it that they think are particularly great. Then, we’ll post that spotlight article right here on our website!

But how are we going to decide which Foundry content gets the spotlight treatment? Well, that’s where you come in. For the first half of each month, we’re encouraging all of you to send us an email to foundryspotlight@fantasyflightgames.com. In that email, we want you to tell us what Foundry product you want us to spotlight. Just put the name of the product in the email’s subject line, and include a brief (1-2 sentence) reason why you want us to review it in the email. On the 15th of each month, we’ll tally up the emails, and whatever product gets the most votes will be the product that’s featured at the end of the month.

You may want us to showcase something you thought was cool, or you could be hoping we’ll look at something you’re curious about before you pick it up. You may even want us to spotlight something that you created for the Foundry; A bit of self-promotion is just fine. Whatever the reason, just be sure to cast your vote each month. And if the product you voted for doesn’t get featured, don’t worry! There’s always next month.

Be sure to check out the Genesys Foundry and nominate the products you want to see us spotlight starting next month by sending an email to foundryspotlight@fantasyflightgames.com!

Discuss this article
in our forums!

FFG Live in September

Published 30 August 2019 | Arkham Horror: The Card Game

FFG Live in September

Check Out What FFG Live Has in Store for September

FFG Live Season 2 continues in September with KeyForge, Mansions of Madness, a new monthly series, and more! Read on to discover what FFG Live has in store for the end of the summer.

On September 3, explore the world of Star Wars: Legion with designers Alex Davy and Luke Eddy as they show off the new Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker Operative Expansions! This is your chance to see upcoming Legion expansions in action, don’t miss it!

Hop into a cockpit on September 5 and witness an epic battle in X-Wing Second Edition! This stream will highlight the upcoming huge ships coming to X-Wing with developers Brooks Flugaur-Leavitt and Max Brooks!

On September 10, join us for a first look at the Captain America Hero Pack for Marvel Champions: The Card Game! Captain America brings his iconic shield and leadership skills to Marvel Champions, and this is your first chance to see him in action!

Enter the Dreamlands on September 12 as we play through the first scenario of the The Dream-Eaters deluxe expansion for Arkham Horror: The Card Game! If you feel you can stomach the horrors Arkham brings, join us on September 12 as we dive into the Arkham investigators' worst nightmares.

On September 17, we’re heading back to the Crucible for more World’s Collide gameplay wirh KeyForge! Last time, Developer Danny Schaefer had to drink a gross milkshake of his own making—what will be the stakes in this next all-out battle? Find out on September 17!

Mansions of Madness makes its debut on the FFG Live set with a live playthrough of a scenario from Path of the Serpent, the newest expansion for the game! Join us for an app-guided experience into a new world of terror on September 19!

Finally, on September 24, join Game Master Sam Stewart on a new monthly RPG Liveplay series! This series will tell a continuous story over several months, and gives you an opportunity to see our RPG systems in action. First up is an adventure in Terrinoth using the Genesys system!

On September 26, join us for a special KeyForge announcement with designer Richard Garfield. While the announcement must remain shrouded in mystery, If you’re interested in Organized Play for the game, this is one stream you won’t want to miss!

Join us on our YouTube and Twitch channels for FFG Live, every Tuesday and Thursday at 1:00 PM Central Time. Don’t forget to subscribe so you never miss a new video or livestream—we hope to see you there!

Discuss this article
in our forums!

The Genesys Foundry

Published 2 August 2019 | Genesys

The Genesys Foundry

Announcing a Compilation of Community Resources for Genesys Roleplaying

In the Genesys Roleplaying System, creativity is limitless. Gaming groups all over the world have told their own stories and designed their own adventures in a sandbox with no limits. Now, it’s easier than ever to share those creations with the Genesys community!

Fantasy Flight Games is proud to announce the Genesys Foundry, a bastion of resources for the Genesys Roleplaying Game created by you, the player!

Hosted on Drivethrurpg.com, the Foundry allows you to purchase and sell player-created resources for Genesys and can be found here. In the Genesys Foundry, you’ll find a wide variety of downloadable products ranging from new gear and player options to GM support and adventures.

As a creator, you can set any price you want, including free or pay-what-you-want—it’s all up to you. We’re here to help you make your creations available to the entire Genesys community!

What Can I Find in the Foundry?

If it’s Genesys, you’ll find it in the Foundry. New encounters and adventures, tips for running games, additional possibilities for Player Characters, new weapons and vehicles, and more. Some products use the Terrinoth or Android settings, while others can be used in almost any kind of game.

Genesys is all about creating your own worlds, so you’ll also find a fantastic collection of creator-owned settings here! These all use the Genesys rules, so you can easily use them with your gaming group. If you’re looking for something new for your group, or even ideas for expand on your own settings, these will be perfect for you.

Here are a list of items you can already find on the Foundry!

Something Strange

A modern horror setting that lets players take on the roles of vampires, werewolves, or the humans that hunt them.

Setting: New

Brain Drain

The up-and-coming megacorp, NeuroNew, has had a breakthrough in their research that rivals the technology of Jinteki and Haas-Bioroid. The PCs are hired to steal the data but once they learn what it is they must decide between doing what is right or making off with the cash.

Setting: Android

Familiar

A fantasy setting where players take on the roles of familiar animals in a human world.

Setting: New

Starcana Campaign Setting

Explore the edges of known space, face off against pirates and politicians in interstellar altercations, and unleash the power of the mysterious mystical energy "starcana" against a great evil from the darkest depths of the unknown.

Setting: New

Everything New is Old - Starcana Adventure 1

Scouting ships are disappearing into the newly discovered Sector Red-105. Can your team of galactic first responders use their limited resources and newfound magical powers to discover the cause and save the explorers?

Setting: Starcana

Ready....Fight!

This Unarmed Combat Supplement provides Archetype, Career, and Talent support for Genesys characters of any setting who specialize in a variety of martial arts along with optional rules and GM advice for getting the most out of unarmed combat encounters or even campaigns, including four new settings!

Setting: Generic

Inquisition Campaign Setting

Inquisition is a whole campaign setting set in a medieval low-fantasy world. The Church of the Creator has an inquisition going on to hunt down witches.

Setting: Inquisition (new)

Haedra's Shard

The first of a three part adventure series, which can be run as a standalone game, or as a mini-campaign for the Realms of Terrinoth setting. Though the adventure explores the world of Mennara, this adventure can easily be converted for use in your own fantasy world. Introducing new creatures, monster template, and optional rules, along with GM advice for how to integrate this adventure or the series into custom fantasy campaigns!

Setting: Realms of Terrinoth/generic fantasy

Anthrochimerics

A dozen new animal hybrid species that can be inserted as cultures or used as PCs or cultures in your setting.

Setting: Generic

Instant Adversaries

Quickly create minions, rivals, nemeses, and vehicles on the fly to fit the situation, during the game, and right when you need them.

Setting: Generic

Power Play

An Android mini-campaign where investigations into lunar black market cybernetics reveal a secret internal corporate power struggle with orgcrime complications, and the PCs become kingmakers over the winners and losers, if not becoming the "kings" themselves.

Setting: Android

Power of the Vril

In this adventure set near the end of World War II, join a daring commando raid that blows open a new, weird front in the war. The war may be soon over, but the battle with arcane forces is just beginning.

Setting: Weird War

This is just the beginning. The Foundry will be a constantly growing resource; be sure to check back frequently for new content!

Creating Your Own Content

Of course, you can also create your own content for Genesys through the Foundry!

We’ve provided support material such as Genesys layout templates, collections of art including pieces for the Terrinoth and Android settings, and other resources that you can use in your products. There are some rules for how to use them, which can be found in our Content Guidelines. If you plan on creating your own content, we recommend you check out these guidelines to get a feel of what is and is not allowed.

After creating your content, go to your account page and look in the "My Content" section. You can use the "Add a new title" link after you agree to the Community Content Agreement. Once content is published, it will appear in the Genesys Foundry. You'll be able to check your sales history, view reviews, and other information using your Account page on DriveThruRPG.

So what are you waiting for? Get creating!

The Power to Create

The power is in your hands, explore the Foundry to improve your games of Genesys, or create your own content for the community! The choice is yours. Either way, Genesys will never be the same again!

Share your creations with the world in the Genesys Foundry, found here!

Discuss this article
in our forums!

Boundless Opportunities

Published 2 August 2019 | Genesys

Boundless Opportunities

Announcing the Expanded Player's Guide and Game Master's Screen for Genesys Roleplaying

Pre-order your own copy of the Genesys Expanded Player's Guide and Game Master's Screen at your local retailer or online through our website with free shipping in the continental U.S. today!

The world of Genesys Core Rulebook Roleplaying offers unlimited possibilities. The system gives you all the tools you need to create your own setting in a tabletop environment. With unlimited freedom, the world of Genesys has been yours to explore and create. Now, it’s time to take your game to the next level!

Fantasy Flight Games is proud to announce the Genesys Expanded Player’s Guide and Game Master’s Screen for Genesys Roleplaying!

These two new products give you expansive new options for your game in the form of the Player’s Guide, and a way to keep the flow of your game organized and clean with the Game Master’s Screen!

Both of these resources are intended to enhance your games of Genesys, whether you’re a Game Master utilizing the handy charts and art of the GM Screen, or a player using one of the many new options detailed in the Expanded Player’s Guide!

Furthermore, if you pre-order the expanded player’s guide from the Fantasy Flight Games website, you’ll also receive 10 different Magic Spell cards! These cards describe the rules for casting various spells included in the book!

The Expanded Player's Guide

The Expanded Player Guide contains a wealth of knowledge for players eager to equip their characters with interesting new gear, vehicles, and spells as well as Game Masters designing their own settings. This is the first expansion book that is for Genesys as a whole, rather than focusing on a specific setting. This 112-page book features three exciting new example settings, a step-by-step guide that makes creating your own settings easier than ever, new rules for creating your own vehicles, quick rules for creating your own adversaries, and new spells and talents for the Genesys Magic System to further customize your games.

Some of these systems will assist players, others will help Game Masters, and others will be useful for everyone! Basically, the Player's Guide expands on key concepts from the Genesys Core Rulebook, making them easier to implement in your own games.

The first section of the book introduces the three new settings for use in your games. Game Masters can utilize this section to help create their own world, while players can take a look at the new character creation options, equipment, and skills found in each setting!

From the time of humanity’s first words, we have told stories of epic heroes, magic swords, dire monsters, and treasure hoards. Real-world mythology provides richly detailed settings filled with exciting characters ranging from superpowered demigods to quick-witted tricksters. The Age of Myth setting brings these classic tales to your tabletop, bringing in tropes and legends from around the world to thrill your players.

Horror has been a part of human storytelling since the time of cave paintings. In the 1800s, a new form emerged featuring a series of monsters whose legacy has echoed across the years, most importantly in film. Today, nearly everyone is familiar with these terrors: stitched-together corpses reanimated via chemicals and electricity, beings neither dead nor alive and damned for eternity to drink blood, shapeshifters cursed to dread the coming of the full moon, and many more. These are the horrors your players face in your Monsterworld setting, facing their darkest nightmares in a world where just surviving is a monumental achievement.

The post-apocalyptic genre is a setting in which a world’s society has collapsed, and the remaining populace must survive in a strange and dangerous new world. One of the oldest fiction genres, post-apocalyptic stories can be found throughout the founding myths and religious stories of various real-world cultures. As far back as the Babylonians and the ancient Judaic cultures, people were telling tales of the end of the world. Can your players survive in a world that has already ended in your Post-Apocalyptic setting?

Each of these profiles introduces new setting-specific adversaries and player options, as well as general advice regarding the tone of these three unique settings. Play as a Demi-God in a world of heroes, hunt vampires in a campaign focused on the horrifying creatures of Monsterworld, or gear up with a crossbow and whatever you can scavenge in a Post-Apocalyptic wasteland! If none of these pre-made setting appeals to you, the Genesys Player’s Guide also contains a guide on creating your own setting!

Creating your own setting is challenging but enjoyable, as you decide exactly what kind of game you want to play. While you do, there are many factors to consider. What does your world look like? What items can players find? What elements and situations will you and your players have fun using and exploring? This can range from building your world completely from scratch to taking an existing setting and modifying it to better match your vision. This section breaks down what can seem to be an overwhelming task into smaller steps, guiding you on your way to setting creation.

The second part of the book has rules for creating your own vehicles and an extensive list of premade vehicles for you to use. It also has quick rules for building adversaries that work with our new challenge level system and an extensive list of adversaries for your game. This expands on the rules found in section III of the Core Rulebook, giving you more options to populate your setting with various characters and vehicles, ranging from chariots to rocket ships.

The final section of the book contains alternate rulesets to help you further customize your games. This includes new talents and spells designed to work with our magic rules, some alternate rules for character advancement and social encounters, and new tones. This section can be used by either Game Master’s or player to expand your options in Genesys like never before!

The Game Master’s Screen

Speed up your adventures, hide your notes, and impress your players with the Genesys Game Master’s Screen! This three-panel screen has the most commonly referenced rules and charts to keep your games flowing quickly and smoothly.

This screen will help you keep your notes, dice rolls, and plans hidden from your players while also providing handy information. Immerse your players in your world with the Genesys Game Master’s Screen!

Up Your Game

Are you ready to take your games of Genesys to the next level? The Genesys Expanded Player’s Guide and Game Master’s Screen allow you to dive into roleplaying like never before. Are you ready to enter a world of boundless possibilities?

Discover a new world of Adventure with the Genesys Expanded Player’s Guide (GNS11) and the Genesys Game Master’s Screen (GNS10), available now for pre-order form your local retailer or our website with free shipping in the continental United States!

Discuss this article
in our forums!

Night on the Town

Published 22 March 2019 | Genesys

Night on the Town

Download a Free Adventure for Shadow of the Beanstalk

At the base of the ladder to the stars, nothing is as it seems. Most who call New Angeles their home live a relatively mundane life in the near-future. But all of that can change in an instant. Taking a wrong turn can change your life in an instant, and running into the wrong people can turn a simple night out on the town into a bloody affair.

Fantasy Flight Games is proud to present “Night on the Town,” a free digital Shadow of the Beanstalk adventure for Genesys roleplaying that can be downloaded here (2.6 MB)!

“Night on the Town” is split into two parts. The first part, “Happy Hour” was originally a one-shot adventure ran at Gen Con 2018 and the Magnum Opus event at the Fantasy Flight Game Center later that year. The second part, “On the Run” was written as a sequel to “Happy Hour” and was featured at PAX Unplugged in 2018.

Paranoid Android

Together, this two-part adventure follows the lives of several comrades and friends living in the seedy port districts of New Angeles, the massive megalopolis that forms the heart of the Android setting.

These adventures were originally designed to be run with six pre-constructed characters:

Aditi Desai is an escaped clone hiding her true identity, now working as a street doctor.
Tam Kamaka is a genetically modified bounty hunter looking for his next big payday.
After resigning from the NAPD, Harry Raines became a private eye to try and do some good in the world.
Having recently arrived from the Moon, con artist Vince Mallory has already gotten in trouble with members of the local underworld.
Zoey Ortega used to work for the company that runs the Beanstalk, but after she got fired she's been trying to get her own tech business off the ground.
A space construction worker with degrees in orbital mechanics and physics, Mila Braun just wants to enjoy life with her friends.

Each of these characters can be downloaded here (4.8 MB)—however, "Night on the Town" has been modified to work with any group of PCs!

New Faces, New Places

After a hard day’s work in New Angeles, a night on the town is just what the doctor ordered. But when your night takes a turn for the worse, do you have what it takes to survive in New Angeles, and maybe make a profit along the way?

Find a new adventure in “Night on the Town,” a new adventure for Shadow of the Beanstalk (GNS04), available now for download here!

Discuss this article
in our forums!

Available Now – February 7

Published 7 February 2019 | The Lord of the Rings LCG

Available Now – February 7

New Products from the Android Universe and The Lord of the Rings Are Available Now

Take a look at the latest products from Fantasy Flight Games, now available at your local retailer or online through our webstore!

Shadow of the Beanstalk

In the not so-distant future, humanity has spread out across the solar system, unlocked the frontiers of cyberspace, and created millions of intelligent androids in its own image. At the heart of this progress stands a ladder leading to the riches of the stars—the massive space elevator called the Beanstalk. And at its base sprawls the biggest, meanest, and most exciting city on Earth: New Angeles.

You can explore this world with Shadow of the Beanstalk, an Android sourcebook for the Genesys Roleplaying System!

Take on the roles of cops, con artists, roughnecks, and escaped androids trapped between greedy corporations, corrupt officials, and vicious street gangs. Outwit your foes, uncover their conspiracies, flee their retribution, and maybe you’ll survive. Who knows? Maybe you’ll even get rich...

Shadow of the Beanstalk is a 256-page sourcebook for use with the Genesys Roleplaying System. In this book, you’ll find new rules for character creation, new weapons, equipment, and adversaries, new rules for running the Net, information on the Android universe, and advice for Game Masters running a campaign in the cyberpunk future of Android. All of this is accompanied by beautiful art and elegant mechanics that can be used in any setting for Genesys Roleplaying!

Pick up your copy of Shadow of the Beanstalk (GNS04) at your local retailer or online through our website here!

Citizens of New Angeles Adversary Deck

Enter the greatest city on Earth with the Citizens of New Angeles Adversary Deck for Shadow of the Beanstalk!

The Citizens of New Angeles Adversary Deck features twenty cards representing powerful adversaries from the Android universe for use in the Genesys Roleplaying System. These cards feature vital stats for these adversaries, giving Game Masters all the tools they need to keep the game running while introducing new NPCs into your adventure!

The Citizens of New Angeles Adversary Deck features characters from all walks of life in the city of New Angeles, from seedy club owners to corporate sysops to grizzled detectives. These characters all call New Angeles their home, and with the Citizens of New Angeles Adversary Deck, they can be right at your fingertips!

Pick up your copy of the Citizens of New Angeles Adversary Deck (uGNS08) from your local retailer or online through our website here!

Androids, Drones, and Synthetics Adversary Deck

Access a world beyond humanity with the Androids, Drones, and Synthetics Adversary Deck for Shadow of the Beanstalk!

The Androids, Drones, and Synthetics Adversary Deck features twenty cards representing powerful adversaries from the Android universe for use in the Genesys Roleplaying System. These cards feature vital stats for these adversaries, giving Game Masters all the tools they need to keep the game running while introducing new NPCs into your adventure!

The Androids, Drones, and Synthetics Adversary Deck explores new life in the world of Android. From the bioroids of Haas-Bioroid to the clones of Jinteki, populating your world with these characters will make it feel like the not-so-distant future, and this adversary deck keeps them right at your fingertips!

Pick up your copy of the Androids, Drones, and Synthetics Adversary Deck (uGNS07) from your local retailer or our website here!

Runners, Mercs, and Criminals Adversary Deck

Dive into the underworld with the Runners, Mercs, and Criminals Adversary Deck for Shadow of the Beanstalk!

The Runners, Mercs, and Criminals Adversary Deck features twenty cards representing powerful adversaries from the Android universe for use in the Genesys Roleplaying System. These cards feature vital stats for these adversaries, giving Game Masters all the tools they need to keep the game running while introducing new NPCs into your adventure!

The Runners, Mercs, and Criminals Adversary Deck features some of the most famous faces in the Android universe. From clone detective Caprice Nisei, to NBN executive Jackson Howard, to rogue runner Reina Roja, if you want to include individuals who have made their mark in the Android universe in your games, this is the Adversary Deck for you. While some of these adversaries are featured in Shadow of the Beanstalk, others are profiled for the very first time in this deck!

Pick up your copy of the Runners, Mercs, and Criminals Adversary Deck (uGNS09) from your local retailer or our website here!

Undercity

Javier Zamora used to be a real journalist, with all the perks of working for NBN. Now, he vids scandalous, fringe, and downright disgusting content for a less mainstream corner of the Net. His stories draw an audience, at least enough of one to fund his life in the undercity. Or they used to, anyway.

When Zamora stumbles on evidence of a serial killer stalking the undercity, he thinks it might be his ticket back to journalistic respect—or at least a steady revenue stream. But as the investigation draws him into a sordid world of underground cage fights and blackmail scams, the notorious Los Scorpiones gang warns him to drop the story.

Faced with the choice between abandoning the story of his career or antagonizing a dangerous criminal cartel, Zamora must tread carefully if he wants to keep his creds, his life, and maybe even his integrity.

Walk into the deepest parts of New Angeles with Undercity: A Javier Zamora Novella by Richard Lee Byers! This page-turning adventure explores the dark center of the Android universe, as Javier Zamora risks life and limb to find the perfect story!

Pick up your copy of Undercity (NAD10) from your local retailer or online through our website here!

The Ghost of Framsburg

The Ghost of Framsburg is the fourth Adventure Pack in the Ered Mithrin cycle for The Lord of the Rings: The Card Game.

In an attempt to slay the Dragon Dagnir, you have set off for the cursed city of Framsburg in search of a weapon capable of felling the beast. It is said that the legendary blade Wormsbane, sword of Fram son of Frumgar, lies here entombed with its master. But the city will not offer up its treasures easily. Foul beasts prowl the city's ancient keep and disturbing those long past is sure to draw their ire. You would do well to discover Fram's sword and escape quickly, lest you lose yourself in the darkness of this place forever.

Among The Ghost of Framsburg's sixty cards, you'll find a new Spirit hero, as well as a new Song and Weapon that will boost any of your Warrior characters.

Pick up your copy of The Ghost of Frambsburg (MEC69) from your local retailer or our website here!

Discuss this article
in our forums!

The Lord of the Rings and the characters, events, items and places therein are trademarks or registered trademarks of Middle-earth Enterprises, LLC and are used under license by Fantasy Flight Games.

FFG Live in February

Published 31 January 2019 | KeyForge

FFG Live in February

Catch All Our Livestreams Throughout the Next Month

We have exciting news for all fans of Fantasy Flight Games: beginning in February, we’ll be bringing new video content to you twice a week with FFG Live!

Streaming every Tuesday and Thursday at 1:00 PM Central Time on YouTube and Twitch, FFG Live is your invitation to come behind the scenes with us at the FFG studio. We’ll have showcases of new and upcoming products, gameplay from our hottest new offerings and older classics, panel discussions with members from every department at Fantasy Flight Games, and much more. We can’t wait for you to join us, so here’s our schedule of what you can expect in February from FFG Live!

Up first in February, we’ll be featuring a roleplaying segment with the soon-to-be-released Shadow of the Beanstalk science fiction sourcebook for Genesys Roleplaying. From creating our characters to engaging in a fast-paced, one-off adventure led by designer Sam Stewart, you can join us in the Android universe on February 5 and February 7.

Then, on February 12, we have a very special KeyForge livestream, featuring the game's legendary designer, Richard Garfield! Since its launch in November, KeyForge has welcomed tens of thousands of gamers into the world of the Crucible, with over half a million unique Archon Decks currently registered in the KeyForge Master Vault. At this stream, you’ll have the chance to ask your own questions and hear the game’s designers share just a bit of what you can expect to see from the future of KeyForge.

We’ll enter the Emerald Empire on February 14 with designer Tyler Parrott to talk about the design of the Children of the Empire premium expansion for Legend of the Five Rings: The Card Game and show off some of the newest cards from Warriors of the Wind and Masters of the Court in action.

February 19 and February 21 form a Star Wars™: Destiny block, as we look closer at the game’s upcoming Convergence set with designer Aaron Haltom! We’ll first show off the new Obi-Wan Kenobi Starter Set and General Grievous Starter Set, playing these two starter sets against each other in a Clone Wars clash. Then, on Thursday, we’ll run a draft featuring a sealed Convergence booster box and the brand-new Allies of Necessity Draft Set. (Even we don’t know what we’ll find in this box, so it’s sure to be a surprise!)

On February 26, we’ll be offline for a day as we finalize construction of our brand-new set to house FFG Live for plenty of future broadcasts. And finally, on February 28, you can catch the first episode of a three-part series—KeyForge Versus! Here, we’ll be following two players new to KeyForge as they explore the game, learning to master their new decks.

Join us on our YouTube and Twitch channels for FFG Live, starting on Tuesday, February 5, at 1:00 PM Central Time. Don't forget to subscribe so you never miss a new video or livestream—we hope to see you there!

Discuss this article
in our forums!

The Shadow of the City

Published 28 January 2019 | Genesys

The Shadow of the City

Preview Game Master Resources in Shadow of the Beanstalk

Order your own copy of Shadow of the Beanstalk at your local retailer or online through our website today!

Roleplaying in the world of Android is unique from many other roleplaying settings. Rather than heroes embarking on an epic quest, the world of Android invites players to live their lives in an increasingly crowded and complicated world—a world where megacorporations control nearly every aspect of daily life and your character's greatest adventure might be just finding the means to survive another day.

Luckily, Shadow of the Beanstalk, an Android sourcebook for Genesys Roleplaying, contains plenty of advice for Game Masters on how to immerse their players in the cyberpunk future!

From a bevy of NPCs ready to populate your world to pre-made adventure setups full of twists and turns, the sourcebook is filled with advice to bring your adventures to life. Of course, with any Genesys setting, the world is yours to create, and the mechanical and thematic information in the book can be applied to any cyberpunk setting that you imagine!

Learn the Streets

For a city as enormous and diverse as New Angeles, a comprehensive guide is impossible. Even a New Angelino might feel the need to access a map when first visiting a location in a district not their own. However, Shadow of the Beanstalk provides a full chapter dedicated the finer details of the various locales featured in the city and beyond.

The city is split into twelve districts, eleven on earth and one on the moon. Over 500 million people call these districts their home, and Shadow of the Beanstalk provides a glimpse of each of them, from the starscrapers of Rutherford to the distant lunar colony of Heinlein. This sourcebook includes various locations around the district, maps, and NPCs who frequent these locales. While the city of New Angeles is so large it is nearly incomprehensible, with Shadow of the Beanstalk at your side, the perfect destination is always right around the corner.

Enigmatic Acquaintances

Not only does Shadow of the Beanstalk detail the city of New Angeles, it also includes plenty of NPCs to populate the megalopolis. In New Angeles, the citizens are as diverse as the endless cityscape, ranging from rich hedonists to the destitute denizens of the undercity, struggling to survive. Shadow of the Beanstalk includes over 70 NPCs for use in your very own cyberpunk campaign.

Disenfrancistos live off the grid in New Angeles’s undercity, and they encompass everyone from homeless panhandlers to those who choose to live a life away from the corporate controlled world that exists above plaza level. Many disenfrancistos get by on odd jobs, scavenge the undercity for valuable finds, and sleep in disused transit tunnels, clone barracks, bioroid warehouses, and other squats.

Disenfrancistos are found in droves throughout New Angeles, and can make for a great minion group for the players to encounter during a campaign.

The stats for one of the disenfrancistos.

In a megapolis as polarized as New Angeles, there is never a shortage of salacious scandal, corruption, or murder to write about. Referred to as “news-nosies,” reporters spend their days tracking down stories, often in the less-than-safe undercity.

As your characters get embroiled in the crime and conspiracies of New Angeles, the news may prove to be a consistent nuisance, or a valuable ally. Either way, Shadow of the Beanstalk gives you the tools you need to include an intrepid reporter in your games.

The stats for a reporter in Shadow of the Beanstalk.

Should your characters get involved in the corporate intrigue of New Angeles, it's likely they will come in contact with the massive resources these powerful organizations wield, including the SXC Exosuit. An exosuit on the loose in a metropolitan area like New Angeles is the kind of threat that keeps police commissioners up at night. While the largest exosuits are basically walking tanks, even the smaller “person-sized” suits used in each SXC battalion can turn a single soldier into a fast, well-armored, and highly lethal threat. They can deploy either as infantry support units or en masse as an armored line, and they can even drop from orbit.

Of course, tangling with an Exosuit Pilot is a rare occurrence for any citizen of New Angeles, but in the neon glow of this megalopolis, anything can happen.

The stats for an Exosuit Pilot, ready to confront the NPCs.

The Job of the Century

The final chapter in Shadow of the Beanstalk describes how to bring these characters and situations to life as the Game Master. Through unique social encounters and an adventure builder included in the sourcebook, you can bring the conspiracies and intrigue of the Android universe to your tabletop.

Through selecting a variety of hooks, escalations, and climaxes provided in the book, Game Masters can create modular adventure frameworks, complete with twists, turns, and moral quandaries for the party to face. These modular adventure acts can be rejiggered and combined in new and interesting ways. A hook can be replayed several times with a completely different escalation and climax, resulting in a wildly different adventure. With enough change in set dressing, even the same old hook can feel completely different!

No matter where your adventure is headed, it starts with the hook—a starting concept to get your players moving into a broader adventure. Each hook consists of three major parts; the primary goal, the challenges, and the twist. The primary goal is what your PCs are trying to accomplish, the challenges are what stand in the character’s way, the twist is an unexpected complication that take characters by surprise. These hooks can range from an airplane heist job to tracking down a rogue experimental clone, and they simply form the basis for an adventure.

An escalation is a rise, either in the stakes or in the difficulty of the adventure, and it's usually the point where the waters of morality beomce muddy. There is often a plot twist of some kind that shows the players that the milk run they signed up for isn’t as cut and dried as advertised. Perhaps a third party gets involved in the job—whether it’s a rival corporation or an orgcrime faction, this complicates things for your players and creates new challenges.

Finally, the climax generally represents how the most powerful organization involved wants to attempt to resolve the issue. This organization is probably a powerful corporation or orgcrime faction, but it could also be a religious group or a government. It could be that a higher-up just discovered the actions of their underlings, and orders a radically different course of action. Perhaps the organization decides to cut their losses, silencing everyone involved in the operation, or maybe they decide to place their bets in court, calling in the NAPD to cause trouble for everyone involved. While the climax represents how the most powerful organization wants events to unfold, the players still have the agency to determine how their adventure will end.

With a full data vault of hooks, escalations, and climaxes to choose from and improvise with, Shadow of the Beanstalk is the perfect starting point to your own cyberpunk adventure in the Android universe or beyond!

A Face in the Crowd

With so many places to see and people to meet, New Angeles is an intimidating city. But with Shadow of the Beanstalk and The Worlds of Android to supplement it, you can always have a new adventure rich with lore and backstory to immerse your players in a cyberpunk future. What new stories will you tell?

Embrace the future with Shadow of the Beanstalk (GNS04), available now for pre-order from your local retailer or our website!

Discuss this article
in our forums!

The Shadow of the Net

Published 21 January 2019 | Genesys

The Shadow of the Net

Preview Running in Shadow of the Beanstalk

Order your own copy of Shadow of the Beanstalk at your local retailer or online through our website today!

Some technologies become so ubiquitous that it is hard to imagine what life would be like without them. For most citizens of New Angeles, the Network is always there. Users order food, pay for products, and find love—or at least company—all without leaving the Network. Young people who have grown up in the fully connected world incorporate the Network seamlessly into their daily lives, filtering between PAD holograms, the physical world, and augmented reality as it suits their needs.

At the heart of the Network underground are runners: users who grew up on the Net and know it better than the people who made it. Any serious runner uses a brain machine interface to get online and a whole suite of tricks to hide their real identity and location. Once they're jacked in, runners use code tools and raid vulnerable businesses, breaking into digital systems for profit, fun, and challenge.

The Net is the most prolific technology in New Angeles, and those who can manipulate or defend it hold untold power. Join us today as we preview the rules for running the Net in Shadow of the Beanstalk, an Android sourcebook for Genesys Roleplaying!

g00ru’s Guide to Everything

The Network rules used in Shadow of the Beanstalk offer a significantly expanded version of the hacking rules originally found in the Genesys Core Rulebook. While the fundamentals of hacking are the same, the Network encounter rules have been expanded and revised to reflect the greater complexity of the Net in Android.

Though it is structured like a physical encounter, Network-based encounters are a little more abstract, as runners sift digitally through servers, systems, and sub-systems. Still, making a run works within the same framework as any other encounter in Genesys—with rounds, turns, actions, and maneuvers.

A run can be broken down into two steps: accessing a system and telling that system to do something. These systems could range from a basic operating system for a door to the security system for an entire building!

To get into these systems, a runner must first gain access to the system by making a Computers (Hacking) check. Of course, the difficulty of accessing these systems depends on their security measures.

Of course, gaining access to the system is only the first step, and once you’re in, the hard work begins.

Breaking the Ice

Once a runner is in the system, they have access to the sub-systems held within. These sub-systems each have specific purposes: if the overall system is building security, one sub-system might control the cameras, while another controls the alarm. Runners can shift their attention between various sub-systems with an incidental action, but while this allows you to waltz into some sub-systems and use an Enact Command action to control it, other sub-systems have more specialized defenses.

Once you access the system, not only is every sub-system revealed to you, but you also get to know which sub-systems are protected by ice—the powerful defenses dedicated to stopping malicious runners from accessing important sub-systems. You can see where the ice is, but you won’t know exactly what these pieces of ice are until you attempt access.

An example system, detailing sub-systems and ice.

Before you access the sub-system in question, you'll need to encounter the ice. These defensive countermeasures are powerful and offer a range of effects, from booting you out of the system, to alerting corporate sysops, to frying your brain. To prevent this, a runner must use an action to break the ice.

Each piece of ice has a program strength, and the runner’s Break Ice action must generate a strength that exceeds the strength of the target ice in order to break it. To determine their own strength, the runner simply makes an average Computers check, with the number of successes determining their strength.

Any runner worth their salt will be using specialized icebreakers, however, and if the runner has an appropriate icebreaker, they can add that icebreaker’s strength to their results. A runner can use the Activate Program action to make one of their icebreakers active, and each icebreaker can only interact with certain types of ice.

If you succeed in breaking the ice, it remains broken until the end of your next turn, and if you can break all pieces of ice protecting a sub-system, you gain full access! Naturally, if there are great quantities of ice protecting a server, it may require multiple runners or impressive talents to break, but heavily guarded sub-systems are often worth it. However, ice isn’t the only danger you’ll have to watch out for on the Net.

Cat and Mouse

Runners aren’t the only humans interacting with servers. Often, corporations will employ systems operators, or sysops: a runner’s polar opposite. Their job is to spot intrusions into systems, and once they do that, they need to track down the point from which the runner accessed the system and lock them out. They do this by utilizing two different actions: the Trace User action and the Lockout action.

Tracing a user is an opposed check that sees the sysop pitting their Computers (Sysops) skill against the runner’s Computers (Hacking). Should the sysop succeed, they gain one trace—the more traces a sysop has, the closer they are to discovering a runner’s exact location in meat space, and the easier it becomes to boot them out of the system.

A Lockout action is available to a sysop once they're aware of a runner’s presence. With a formidable Computers (Sysops) check, they can kick an unauthorized user out of the system. Not knowing where the runner is makes this check extremely difficult, but the more traces a sysop has, the easier a lockout becomes. When a sysop knows exactly where a runner is, not only is it near impossible to stay in a system, but a runner can probably expect a visit from the NAPD in the very near future.

And this is just the basic cat-and-mouse game between sysops and runners. Shadow of the Beanstalk also contains additional rules for runs that include ways to hide servers, or even burn rigs to the ground through the Net.

Run the Net

The game of cat-and-mouse between the runner and sysop can be deadly, but the winner may find their pockets lined with enough credits to survive another day in the shadow of the Beanstalk. Will you dare to run the Net with the best of them, and survive with your mind and credits intact?

Run the system with Shadow of the Beanstalk (GNS04), available now for pre-order form your local retailer or our website!

Discuss this article
in our forums!

The Shadow of Humanity

Published 10 January 2019 | Genesys

The Shadow of Humanity

Preview Archetypes and Careers in Shadow of the Beanstalk

Order your own copy of Shadow of the Beanstalk at your local retailer or online through our website today!

Most of the inhabitants of New Angeles are just regular people living regular, boring lives. They wake up, go to work, order takeout from their favorite fast-food joint on their way home, then spend the evening with their families and friends, or logged into the Network enjoying an entire solar system’s worth of entertainment. Then they go to bed—only to wake up the next morning to do it all again. Yesterday, that could have described you. Tomorrow, you may wish it still did.

Join us today as we preview some of the new character creation options introduced in Shadow of the Beanstalk, an Android sourcebook for Genesys Roleplaying!

Shadow of the Beanstalk takes the concepts and rules of archetypes and careers found in the Genesys Core Rulebook and adapts them to characters living in the near future, in the bustling city of New Angeles, in the shadow of the beanstalk. These characters are supplemented with new equipment and skills to help them survive the day-to-day struggles of a world under corporate control, where advances in technology have made anything possible.

To Be Human

While many of the archetypes found in the Genesys Core Rulebook can work in the Android setting, Shadow of the Beanstalk provides plenty of rules for specific archetypes pre-established in the universe to help immerse yourself in the setting. And of course, while these archetypes are designed specifically for use with the Android setting, they can also be easily adapted to any Genesys campaign taking place in a cyberpunk future!

Just one of the new archetypes that you can explore in this sourcebook are the lifelike automatons known as bioroids. Bioroids are fully artificial creations, with all the attendant benefits and disadvantages. Their strength and durability are second to none, allowing them to go places and undertake tasks that normal humans or even clones cannot. On the other hand, bioroids are not viewed as people, but rather property. Likewise, bioroids find it difficult to become accepted in some places; their artificial appearance conjuring fear or hatred in certain groups.

Furthermore, all bioroids are limited by their directives, such as "do no harm to humans," and "do not let humans come to harm through your inaction." These directives cannot be broken, and as hardcoded drives, they prevent bioroids from obtaining true freedom. Yet rumors persist on the streets of New Angeles of bioroids who have broken their programming or evolved beyond it to become something more.

As machines, bioroids do not need to eat, sleep or breathe, and are unaffected by deadly toxins and poisons. They also cannot recover wounds through pain killers or a medicine check, instead relying on rest and mechanics checks to revitalize their systems. If you like the idea of playing an artificial person struggling to understand their place in the world, a powerful companion and ally, or a liberator fighting against the injustice they see in society, a bioroid might be the right choice for you.

While Haas-Bioroid perfected the production of bioroids for labor, the Jinteki corporation’s clones fill a similar role. There are numerous clone lines, each created for a specific purpose. These include the Henry line of diligent and durable workers, the Molloy line of skilled cooks and cleaners, the Tenma line of fearless pilots, and the Desai line of patient and intelligent tutors. There are even specialist clone lines created for specifically research or other, stranger purposes.

Like bioroids, clones are kept in check by their creators, each undergoing neural conditioning. While a clone is as intelligent as a natural-born human, their conditioning ensures that their mind only works a certain way and they can only consider certain responses. Defining your clone’s specific purpose allows you to gain two ranks in two different skills during character creation. Furthermore, society’s general underestimation of clones and their abilities allows you to add an advantage to opposed checks.

If you like the idea of playing a liberated rebel hiding in plain sight, an intelligent but naive person experiencing the world for the first time, or someone who sees themselves as an improvement over “normal” people, a clone could be right for you.

Clones and bioroids offer a strikingly unique option for your character, and these are just two of the archetypes that await in Shadow of the Beanstalk. But creating your character doesn't stop with the archetype.

Finding Your Place

While these new archetypes define who your character is in the world of Android, ten new careers in Shadow of the Beanstalk define what they do—from hard-boiled detectives drinking themselves to an early grave to scholars pushing the boundaries of knowledge and science in a world dominated by technology.

They may be NAPD detectives, or private eyes, or corporate agents and independent profilers, but no matter where they work, investigators are masters of getting information. In worlds where people will go to great lengths to hide their crimes from the countless electronic eyes that watch society, sometimes only a human with tested instincts can pick up the trail. Investigation is as much art as science, and good investigators learn to rely upon their gut, knowing when to squeeze for information and when the truth requires a light touch. Investigators need smarts to be successful, and many of their skills revolve around knowledge and perception. But when things get hairy, investigators may also need a good weapon at their side, like the Fletcher Pistol.

As far as talents go, anything that enhances the group's social skills will be useful in your role as an investigator. Getting the information you need is your job, and in the neon wilderness of New Angeles, that might mean using coercion, deception, and knowledge to get the job done.

On the other hand, you may choose to dedicate yourself to the life of a runner, the talented hackers who thrive in the Network. These are the warriors of the virtual world, and though they might appear like ordinary people or androids when they walk the slidewalks of New Angeles, they are giants in their digital environment. To master the programmed world of the Net, defeat its denizens, and overcome its many dangers is no easy feat. For most people, if there is not an appropriate function on their PAD, they have no idea how to go out into the virtual world and find something, let alone something that doesn’t want to be found. Good runners are prizes almost every agency in New Angeles will fight over, for these are the people who hold the keys to the true battlefields of the future and who have the ability to win in the constant digital wars fought between the corporations.

Runner’s skills naturally revolve around computers, whether that be knowledge of the Net or how to find something that doesn’t want to be found. Any decent runner will have a PAD stocked with a few icebreakers, and we’ll take a look at how these tools are used to run the Net in a future preview! But a runner’s usefulness comes from far more than just hacking. A Net Search talent can help you find useful information if used properly, but can also lead unsuspecting runners astray should things go horribly wrong.

No matter what career your character finds to get by in life, your skills will be essential to your survival in a world that never sleeps.

The Stage Is Set

Determining archetypes and careers are just the first steps in your journey. The world changed, but what does it have in store for you? You’ll have to use your background and specialized skills if you hope to survive, and maybe make a profit along the way.

Enter a new world with Shadow of the Beanstalk (GNS04) available now for pre-order from your local retailer or our website and releasing in the first quarter of 2019!

Discuss this article
in our forums!