Sci-Fi Bulletin: Exploring the Universes of SF, Fantasy, Horror and Spy-fi!

Sophie Iles and James Bojaciuk’s tabletop RPG Paradoxes & Possibilities is a love letter to the time travel films and series of the 80s and 90s. It was fully funded on Kickstarter in less than two hours, and still has the full two weeks of its campaign run to go,

Paradoxes & Possibilities is a complete, standalone RPG that will take players and their friends into the farthest reaches of time! It features everything players need right out of the box.

Players take on the role of one of six time traveller classes as they build their history, their relationships, and their home.

In a unique mechanic, players the fourth dimension in a time machine the players build themselves, unique to them and their friends. Working with their fellow players, they will select the form and temporal mechanics that embody their machine. Is their machine a motor vehicle, a permanent gate, or mounted on their wrist? There are eight different designs! Then they can purchase additional hardware to give their machine unique effects and make it truly their own. Will their machine fly, distort space-time, or even have a dedicated staff back home to keep it in tip-top shape?

In addition, there is fleshed out gameplay for exploring time, which goes beyond a mere roll to travel, involving the whole party in the process. Weapon systems make players feel the difference between using a shotgun or pistol, a sword or your fists.

The base game features two adventures by Sophie Iles and James Bojaciuk. The first, “The Buzzard’s Treasure,” takes players into a pitched battle between pirates and privateers, racing to be the first to crack Olivier Levasseur’s cryptogram and find his gold. The second, a futuristic bank heist, throws players into a heart-racing caper through a vault whose timeline is falling apart around them.

Paradoxes and Possibilities is proudly an OSR game. The Old School Revival (or Renaissance) is a design philosophy in tabletop role-playing games. Light, fast, and fun, these games promote player creativity and agency. In particular, Paradoxes & Possibilities runs with these elements of the OSR…

• These rules are light. Perfect for introducing new players to the hobby, we’re here to give players easily grasped, fun rules with deep possibilities. Hold all the rules in your head at once, and explore what you can do with them, instead of pouring over hundreds of pages of predetermined resolutions.
• Your creative solutions and agency come first. How do you escape the pirates chasing you?  Do you make a trap out of bamboo? Do you hide in the brush? Do you turn on them with your sword?
• Combat is exciting but dangerous. As wanderers in time and space, you could be stranded (or worse) if things go wrong. In light of this, do you negotiate with your enemies? Do you sneak by them? Do you lay traps? Or do you take the risks and face them head-on?

You can find the link here.

In addition, there are Kickstarter additional goals for additional character classes, gameplay, and adventures by a number of award-winning mystery, historical, and science fiction authors (including several official Doctor Who authors).