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Lords of Mars's itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Vote for your favorite | #2 | 4.583 | 4.583 |
Ranked from 24 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
Damn ray. You got a lot of world and system packed into this little package. All great stuff. Somehow I'm the most jealous of your simple yet evocative map. I can never quite strike that balance, but believe me buddy, I'm ripping that thing right off for future projects.
Thanks for all the great feedback! Read my development debrief and future plans: https://viridianscroll.blogspot.com/2019/09/lords-of-mars-debrief.html
Man, there's just so much here. The ship-to-ship combat rules are simple enough that they fit with the system overall, but different enough that they really add something (and implicitly give a hint as to what kind of events you should think about introducing!). "Specials" add something fun to every character; if I had to offer any critique of the game at all, it's that I wish there were more examples of them to choose from (randomly or otherwise) for those players who struggle with coming up with their own. And the art! The map! The bestiary! Next time I want to run a game on Barsoom, I'll be reaching for this game.
This was just phenomenally good, start to finish -the layout, the art, the info-density, the gameability - top notch.
I love the inclusion of lightweight ship-to-ship combat and wargaming! This is something I desperately want to see more of in games and it's handled well here - would love to see an expansion on both systems at some point, maybe just in terms of content rather than necessarily additional rules (stock units, fancy ships, etc). The only real complaint I have here is the density of paragraphs for the wargaming rules, could've used some more of the amazing layout throughout the rest of the work - but that's only because (I think) so much of the rest of the layout stands as exceptionally good.
Thank you so much for this one, I'm looking forward to trying it!
Thank you so much. And that's a perfectly good and accurate criticism. Trying to cram wargame rules into three 1/4 pages was probably overly-ambitious. But it was fun! At this point I will be running/playing the game for a while; but will probably release an updated book at some point, perhaps in digest size. (But still a small zine! I don't want to bloat it.)
Definitely! I think this would be an incredible buy as a little half-letter or A5-sized zine, it lends itself really, really well to that. I'm excited to see play reports surface at some point!
The artwork is incredible and the setting is really firing all cylinders in my imagination noodles.
Mars! Sword and planet really fits the lite nature of Tunnel Goons, so you can splurge on giving color to the world and gameplay! Amazing game!
Excellent light RPG with war game elements for land and air battles!
I can now run adventures on Burroughs' vision of mars. Excellent. The illustrations are top notch as well.
Excellent work Ray, this looks fantastic.
Pure excellence
Gorgeous - love the page size, layout, and art. Can't wait to print this out.
An amazing full game of Burroughs -inspired Mars crawling & planetary fantasy. So much love poured into this game -- maintains the Goons simplicity but gives you many things to dress your adventures on a fantastic red world!
Beautiful work! Love the old school, wargamey elements!
The art in here is great, and there aren't enough John Carter inspired RPGs in the world, so it's nice to see it!
Just saw yours today and haven’t read it yet, but I would say the same about caveman RPGs!!