From my blog, The Thing Of The Day:

    In June, I contacted Bully Pulpit Games about posting an audio recording of the rules to The Shab-Al-Hiri Roach. They were very nice about it. At Gencon, Roach creator Jason Morningstar premiered an add-on to the Roach called The Roach Returns. The expansions details two new settings for Roach-y mayhem to take place.

    I had an idea for a new setting and that's today's Thing. Today's Thing actually took a few days.

    The Roach always struck me as an evil, evil soap, so why not expand on that idea. It's Dallas meets American Psycho. The Cashingtons are not just merely rich, but unholy rich. And like most large rich families, the siblings are at each other's throats. You play a spoiled sibling out to harm your other siblings. This is BEFORE The Roach arrives. Greed is great, but bedlam is better.

    The four-page PDF features character sheets, events, business interests and obsessions, descriptions, dice charts and play rules, plus a new rules page add-on to encourage deep, dark secrets to come to the surface. Most of the changes in setting can be inferred from the PDF and your imagination can fill in the gaps. I hope it's playable. I haven't play-tested it just yet. I just finished the new setting today.

    If you want to know more about this weird game, The Shab-Al-Hiri Roach follow the links below down the rabbit hole. The Roach, um, commands you. Also, if you have any suggestions for improvement, leave a comment or [email=gebryan@mac.com]email me[/email].

    Grab the rules in handy audio form, either  MP3 version or AAC version. The rules are slightly abridged and poorly read by me. Also, the card text was left out, so buy the game. Or come over to my house and play. This is just a taste.

    Download the new setting, The Cashington Roach HERE. It's a small four-page PDF, handy for printing and usable with existing Roach rules.

    Enjoy.

Super cool!  How would you tune the deck to play this?  I suppose any academic-themed cards could easily be re-worded.  This looks really fun; I'll try to offer some more substantial feedback soon.

I admit I didn't look at the cards when I wrote the setting. I hope they work.

But I have a more shocking secret--- I haven't played the game yet. I bought The Roach over a year ago and my girlfriend wanted to play (That's why I made the audio recording, so she could listen at work), but we haven't found anybody to play here in Lincoln, Nebraska. The RPG'ers here play Warhammer or Vampire.  Also, although we've done some RPG's at a few Cons, I'm still a bit skittish dipping my toes into the heavy duty stuff. Plus all that stat-gazing and dice rolling is a turn-off. Very few people at my job have time or inclination to try a new game and our kids don't like RPG's that much, although they LARP which is odd. Maybe it's 'cause we're the parents.

How do you find an easy-going adventurous group in a medium-sized market? The game store people are no help.

I enjoyed reading the rules and even recording them. I used to teach at a college, so the evil setting is almost a form of hyper-realism---even with the Roach's meddling.

Games on The Forge are the ones I'm interesting to me, but not to other's around me. The weird thing is thinking about the game, I feel I got my money's worth. But that's also kinda sad.

I'm thinking of developing a two-player storytelling game with some variable structure, so me and my girlfriend can play. Once again, sad.

(I have the dating game, Breaking The Ice, but we haven't gotten to that one yet either.)

Thanks for the feedback. I hope the setting can make for an interesting play session and what I submitted was just a rough draft.

Now, to dig out those cards...

Bryan Gahagan

The Thing of the Day

Hey Bryan,

A couple of resources: 

Nearbygamers (http://nearbygamers.com/tags/Indie+RPGs)

and

Story Games (http://www.story-games.com/forums/)

The former is a practical gamer finder tool, and the latter is the sort of place where you could start a "Hey!  I'm in Lincoln, NE!" thread and get some feedback.  Either way, play some Breaking the Ice, go buy Beast Hunters (also a two player game on a very different axis), and design your own game!

Thanks for the links. I've been sick for a week, but have been thinking about a two-player RPG. I hadn't seen nearby gamers, but have stopped by
story games a few times. And Beast Hunters is new to me as well.

Thanks again.

you could also play over IRC or Skype, if you keep the number of players down to 3 or 4