You have to love any game where calling out with a primeval shout to the skies for flying phoenixes to drop wolves made of iron and flame upon your enemies is part of the action. I played this with a group of my friends last night, and it was beyond good. It was mythic.

Heavy Metal God Slaying with sick licks, gravely lyrics, and screaming umlauts! light mechanics with a wide birth of narrative control in the hands of the players.

Mythender is a splendid mix of tight well paced design and evocative setting. The mechanics (and yes they do require a lot of dice, but yes it is worth it, and yes, you probably have that many dice lying around ) fit snugly into the fiction of the game.

Many games offer you the chance to be someone powerful but few games actually deliver on that promise. Mythender is one of the few games that provides you the feeling of power it offers.

Last there's great tutorials to get you started and great advice to run the game.

And for free???? This game is better than many games you would pay for. Pick it up, please.

I was lucky enough to play a couple of playtest games during the five and a half years this game's been floating around in Ryan Macklin's head. This game takes high-fantasy tropes, cranks the volume to 11 and keeps it there. Not for the faint of heart, but a rollicking good time in the right hands.

In a nutshell, you play as mortals who, for various reasons, have been touched by divine power. And what better way to use that power than kick some God ass? Because these are your old school Gods. The ones that destroy entire towns because one person in them mildly annoyed them. They need killing and the only one's that can stop them are you. The catch? You need to use that divine power to take them down. And the more you use that power, the stronger it (and by extension, you) become. Which makes God killing that much easier. But use it too much and you ascend, coming to represent all you've fought against. How do you hold onto your fading humanity? But more importantly, how long can you: Kick Ass. Erase Names?

The cons: Power-grabbing players are going to ascend quickly, unless they grasp the mechanics of shedding excess power. This could lead to some very mayfly-like characters. So some characters might have less of a playable lifespan than a Call of Cthulhu character. Though that might have also been an artifact of the nature of one-off playtest games. If you're never going to see the character again - why not grab all the power you can? Who cares if the character ascends at the end of the game? Not like you'll ever play them again, right? Also, the game seems more suited for fun one-offs or sporadic games, rather than an on-going campaign - though this might be addressed in the full ruleset (or in one of the promised bits of future content).

The pros: It's a good time. Crazy, epic-level stuff done right. There's the promise of future content (for example, new settings beyond the Viking-esque Norden). The game is very hack friendly (one of my fellow playtesters has been talking about hacking it into a starship combat system as a possible graft-on to other sci-fis games with less than stellar ship combat systems). And come-on, it's free (thanks to the Random Kindness backers). So what do you have to lose? A few megs of drive space?

If you try it and like it, check mythenderrpg.com for playaids and sheets.

This product is, at its essence, a joke - maybe a trick (I can't decide which). Sadly, the joke (or trick) is on those who purchase it. I once bought a game about dancing animal lawyers for a dollar that was made free a few days later. Until this product, I always considered that the worst gaming money I ever spent. Now, I have Hit-a-Dude to replace it.

To be fair, I should have looked carefully to see the page count and researched it a bit. I let the good reputation of the author convince me there was something worthwhile here. Do not repeat my mistake.

A brilliantly transgressive work, the Hit a Dude: World Players Guide #1 explores the "freemium" model applied to a non-video game (even describing the transcendent genre of Hit a Dude makes a review difficult) for the full game is available at hitadude.com, but supplements such as this that clarify the world in which Hit a Dude takes place while providing optional rules, settings, and characters is available at a cost. Indeed, you might not think of this as a $3.50, two page supplement, but instead as a $3.50 donation to the Hit a Dude foundation (whose work worldwide we all know) that happens to come with a game expansion.

As mentioned, there are new rules for Hit a Dude (completely optional, of course, but thoroughly vetted by a team of game developers), a series of settings that may seem familiar and even a bit sly, some clarifications, and a few hints at the people that inhabit the world of Hit a Dude. Harkening back to the setting excesses of 90s supplements, the details are not even called out as fodder for your Hit a Dude games, but instead, done through narrators that serve to fully immerse you in the world of Hit a Dude. Likewise, you may even discover by interpreting the text that you have been playing Hit a Dude at some different key junctures in your life without even realizing it!

For Hit a Dude fans who have processed the game (truly a monumental undertaking for which I commend you), the World Players Guide #1 may serve to further enlighten you as to the nature of the game and hold up a mirror to ourselves as we, in our daily lives, go on about our regular quest to "hit a dude." This makes it an invaluable supplement to the die-hard HaDers. To the rest who dismiss the intricacies of Hit a Dude as merely being a controversial morass of violence and unanswered questions, this will only serve to muddy your existence further, and leave you unprepared for the time in which you too might be called upon to Hit a Dude.