Josh and I made a decision. We’re going to start taking a look at cool indie games at least every other episode on “The Goblins and Growlers Podcast.”
These mainly are going to be releases we’ve found in the pen-and-paper section of itch.io, so when we’re talking about indie games, we mean the kind of things one person is creating. There’s so much creativity from small-scale designers. It’s amazing.
The first game we looked at is “Salt & Strife,” and it’s going to show up as a short segment in the next episode of the podcast. We found it while we were searching for a TTRPG that was suitably tied to July 4 without coming off as jingoistic or hagiographic. We wanted to talk about it on our Independence Day episode, but it turns out no such games exists that we could find. We scrapped the idea and instead talked about American cryptic monsters for that episode.
But at least we found “Salt & Strife.” It’s a game about fighting against and tearing down powerful people, i.e. the “Great Men” of history. Heck yeah. The heroes of the adventure are pirates, vagabonds, or just people fed up with the status quo.
It’s set in the early modern era, so 1400s through 1800s. It’s easy to romanticize this period, so the GM is directed to really sell how terrible it was to live here.
Character classes include such stalwarts of the era as: the leper, the libertine, the barber-surgeon, and the pamphleteer among others. It’s pay what you want on itch and it comes with a wealth of information about the early modern period to help you give the setting some gritty verisimilitude.
My immediate ideas for “Salt & Strife” adventures included a Caribbean adventure to take down a decadent island governor, and a Revolutionary-era yarn about a group of Philadelphia citizens conducting raids on warehouses to destroy British goods because of the Townshend Acts. Just good fun destabilizing existing power structures.
“Salt & Strife” runs on the “Powered By The Apocalypse” system, so you won’t be lost if you have some passing familiarity with that ruleset, which, conveniently, requires only two six-sided die. It’s pay what you want, but try and throw the creator a few dollars if you’re able. It looks like they have a couple of cool, rules-lite “Star Trek” games, too…
