I’ve been acquiring various TinyD6 books that are available on DriveThruRPG lately, trying to decide which TinyD6 book I want to run with my friends online during these days of self quarantine and lockdowns. I’m leaning towards something to use with a modern setting. So I decided to check out Stranger Stuff (by Lucus Palosaari and Rick Hershey).

I’ve read through it in just a couple of days and I really liked it. I wasn’t planning to run a Stranger Things or Goonies type game but this book is really tempting me to do so (or maybe a Supernatural (TV show) type game). And even if I don’t end up running one, I found there’s still lots of cool stuff and ideas in this book that are just useful for any TinyD6 game.

Here are some of the stuff I liked from the book:

• It uses the TinyD6 system (that’s a given)
• Toughness+Stress (interesting variation to hit points)
• Drawbacks (negative traits, could be useful to flesh out flawed characters)
• the GM adventure creation section with examples
• the Location rules (interesting simple ideas for creating your own town)
• the list of Stranger Stuff (made me think about how to create my own custom items of interest or artefacts for my own game)
• the Build-your-own-monster section (useful for building custom monsters even in other TinyD6 games)
• the included adventure made me think of how I could be writing adventures for my TinyD6 games
• I even liked the hand-drawn town map at the end of the book that you can colour-in and label as you like

At only 122 pages, it’s a complete game including the helpful GM stuff. I felt I got my money’s worth.

I'm going to make this short. I love the simplicity of White Star but I'm not a big fan of its classes and implied setting. I'm looking for a more Traveller-like setting with classes to suit.

The replacement classes and races in this book are exactly what I'm after. It has Brain, Face and Muscle for classes plus androids and psionicists as "races". It covers cyberware too.

It has enough stuff that I would've used Traveller or Stars without Number for but a lot simpler and rules light. Exactly why I wanted to use White Star in the first place.