I play mostly through the web these days, but I am still on the lookout for strange and new games that strike my fancy. I am not particularly hot for the so-called Old School Revival, that to me too often feels like people talking about how they would play, if they actually sat down to play, but are in fact too busy discussing the Byzantine minutiae of a pretty wooden gaming system that was developed before they were born. People that take themselves too damn seriously for my tastes, and that often flaunt unlikely degrees in Political Sciences or Modern Letters, usually applied to Fantasy Fiction (with a paper on P.K. Dick, or H.P. Lovecraft) or the Social Dynamics of the Gaming Ecosystem.
So, I often roam DriveThruRPG looking for something different – and if I maybe will never play it, well, at least it’s new.

A good example is Cruel & Unusual, a small, fiendishly clever game published by Sinister Beard Games and designed by Oli Jeffery; the game caught my eye thanks to a beautiful cover by artist Lenka Simeckova, and turned out to be something I will certainly, sooner or later, spring on my unsuspecting players. Possibly in a public place, when public places will become available again in the future.

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