r/bundleofholding

Through Monday, September 7 we present the new Blue Planet Recontact Bundle featuring Blue Planet: Recontact, the new 2025 edition of the hard-SF RPG from Biohazard Games, published by Gallant Knight Games, about humanity's precarious future on a distant waterworld. On the colony planet Poseidon in the year 2199, after the impoverished Earth re-establishes its authority and discovers the priceless mineral "Long John," political unrest and a hungry alien ecology threaten the colony. On this "Wild Wet" frontier, Incorporate mercenaries wage amphibious proxy wars, GEO marshals struggle to maintain peace, and native insurgents fight for their adopted world.

AD 2078: Investigating an anomaly at the edge of the Solar System, the Prometheus II probe discovers a traversable 'wormhole' (space warp) that leads to the Lambda Serpentis system, 35 light-years from Earth. Ten years later, the United Nations establishes a small frontier colony of genetically engineered humans and 'genlifted' cetaceans on the system's habitable ocean world, Poseidon. Earth's civilization promptly collapses for over a century, but the abandoned colony thrives. Now it's 2199, and Earth's resurgent government(s) and Incorporate States have returned to Poseidon in a gold rush for the life-prolonging xenosilicate Long John. There's a world to explore, an alien ecology to study or plunder, criminals to catch – and the original pioneers are rebelling. Meanwhile, deep in Poseidon's endless ocean, mysterious Nereids pursue unknowable goals of their own.

On this wide-open frontier you can try just about anything, take on just about any profession, and be any kind of person – or uplifted dolphin, orca, or whale. (Play a beluga whale! With a rocket launcher!) Poseidon is a place where life is hard and dying is easy – where GEO marshals enforce the peace and wired mercs patrol deep waters in deadly fighter subs – where corporate greed and human desperation threaten to plunge humanity into a war of survival with an ancient legacy. The 23rd Century will be a time of unprecedented possibilities, not just for institutions and governments, but for real people (and cetaceans) who have the will and courage to build a future for themselves.

Funded in an April 2021 Kickstarter campaign, the 2025 Blue Planet: Recontact edition (the third) offers hard-SF adventure on the contentious frontier of Poseidon, Earth's first extrasolar colony. The new Synergy rules set is a modern evolution of the Second Edition (2000), and Blue Planet's renowned reputation for scientific accuracy is upheld with Recontact's new technological, scientific, and sociological worldbuilding. For fans of media like Avatar and The Expanse, and novels such as Legacy of Heorot, Songs of Distant Earth, and Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, Blue Planet: Recontact continues its decades-long exploration of colonialism and collapse.

In a Free Zone of blighted 22nd-Century Earth, these Recontact rulebooks would cost you US$60, adjusted for two centuries of inflation. But you pay just $14.95 to get both complete rulebooks in our Recontact Collection as DRM-free .PDF ebooks: the Blue Planet: Recontact Player's Guide and the Moderator's Guide (plus the pay-what-you-want Quickstart).

Don't miss your trip to the new frontier. Book passage to Poseidon before this new Blue Planet Recontact offer heads out to Lambda Serpentis Monday, September 7.

   https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Recontact

Through Wednesday, August 26 we present the Inkwell NPC Deck Bundle featuring 13 print-and-cut .PDF decks of system-neutral, ready-to-run NPC personalities from Inkwell Ideas. As the player characters explore a campaign world, they meet the setting's nonplayer characters (NPCs) – threats, rivals, and potential allies. Entirely human-created (no AI of any kind!), each of the 700 cards in these NPC Portrait Decks presents a full-color character portrait and a description with the NPC's personality, quirks, sample dialogue, and means of persuasion, deception, or intimidation. With their wide variety of power levels, backgrounds, and fantasy ancestries, these fun and flavorful NPCs can take any story in new directions at the flip of a card.

The cards focus on each character's background and personality. The few stats used (class, race, level, alignment, ability scores, armor class, and hit points) are easy to convert to another system before the game or even during play.

Each of the 700 characters in these 13 decks has interesting details that can lead to adventures or side-quests: How are the rebels planning to use Prinestia Sellex? Why does Tik Elleth constantly refer to Wizly? How is Princess Klestra planning to save her kingdom? What is Tansall the Scoured's greatest regret? What will Ohn do now that his mission is complete? Who is blackmailing Zelaymor Tynalria? How does Ularian plan to wipe out the elven kingdom? Why is Trayvis known as the "Oathbreaker"?

Why did Quinn's love leave him? What plot did his brother Alvariaus nearly uncover? What trouble is the widow Fanny stirring? When will Styxie reveal her true mission? Is the mission Chono Vurrbilt assigns a deathtrap? Who can replace Sir Rafael as protector of his estate? Are the rumors of Sintram's deal with a fiend true? When will Li carry out her plan to resurrect her god?

Pay just US$12.95 to get all thirteen complete print-and-cut decks in our Inkwell NPC Collection (retail value $65) as DRM-free .PDFs, including Adventurers, Animals, Castle Nobles & Staff, Coastal Townsfolk, and Desert Townsfolk. Fantasy 1, Fantasy 2, Frontier Townsfolk, Henchmen & Hirelings, Monsters, Quest Guardians, Science Fiction, and Tavern Staff & Patrons.

Get this Inkwell NPC Decks offer before it shuffles off Wednesday, August 26.

   https://bundleofholding.com/presents/NPCDecks

Through Monday, August 31 we present the Frontier Scum Bundle featuring Frontier Scum, the rules-lite Acid Western RPG from Games Omnivorous about helter-skelter gunfights in guttermucked streets, with death following 2d6 days later. You're no-good outlaws on a fictional Lost Frontier – Discharged Deputies, Ghoulish Undertakers, Recurrent Jailbirds, Highfalutin Inventor Sorts – all drifting from one flyspeck town to the next, chasing a payday, a grudge, or just the next sundown. What keeps you from getting clear? The law, rival gangs, and your own bad impulses. You spend your ill-gotten coin on bad whiskey and worse ideas, stay an inch ahead of the marshals, and hope you can ditch this one-horse town afore the gentlefolk figger it were you.

Karl Druid's Frontier Scum started as a scrappy Mörk Borg hack, then grew into its own ENNIE-winning game (Silver, Best Layout & Design, 2023). The stripped-down ruleset is styled as a 19C mail-order catalogue or almanac. Out in these parts, guns hit almost automatically – pull the trigger and go straight to a damage roll – so the only thing between you and a bullet is the Hat Rule. (Instead of losing hit points, you say the shot knocked off your hat. After the gunfight, roll to see if your hat survived.) Burn an Ace to reroll a bad result – get Drunk and watch your stats swap places – fail a Death Check and go out in a d10-minute blaze of glory (or rot from a d4-week mortal wound). Frontier Scum dishes out one-shot bloodbaths and chaotic campaigns for fans of Deadwood, Tombstone, and long one-way rides into the sunset.

What makes Frontier Scum an "Acid Western" and not "Weird"? It's in the baseline, the background level of strange. For most Lost Frontier folk, life is mundane. Ghouls and goblins belong in supernatural stories told around the fire, and only lunatics say otherwise. The real everyday dangers are plain unbridled greed and violence.

But the weird is out there. Stories begin somewhere ordinary, then turn progressively bizarre. Tides of Rot starts as a heist in Dredge-upon-Rock, a port town crumbling into the bay under a storm that won't quit. Floodwaters unearth the folk buried there, and then the dead decide they're not done with the place. Corpse Trail to Hell hires your scum out to the Battercod Lubricate Company to cross the frozen Jetty Sheets and reclaim the ice-locked whaling ship Ichabod Noster – one-tenth of the cargo's value if you hold the ship till spring. The first act is a frosty journey across the ice, following a trail of bodies; the second is a crawl through the abandoned ship, where the howling Flaywinds are the least of what's waiting belowdecks. There is no third act.

"The fantastical should feel fantastical," as the Frontier Scum corebook puts it; "if everything is weird, nothing is." Frontier Scum has no bestiary of supernatural creatures. These exist, but each is custom-made for a given scenario. No two ghosts play by the same rules.

This all-new Frontier Scum Bundle presents almost the entire line for less than the price of a Duke of Death Deluxe Explosives Thrower from the Dalliance Dynamite Co. (grenades sold separately). Pay just US$7.95 to get all four titles in our Frontier Collection (retail value $39) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the complete Frontier Scum corebook, the splattercrawl adventure (with soundtrack!) Tides of Rot, the frozen-wastes scenario Corpse Trail to Hell, and the gunsmith's pamphlet Scumslinger's Arsenal issue #1.

Get this Frontier Scum offer before your Wanted poster curls up and blows off the jailhouse wall Monday, August 31. And bring your hat!

   https://bundleofholding.com/presents/FrontierScum