Watch Well Games #63
Wazza reviews Stay Frosty Remastered by Melsonian Arts Council. I share a special sneak peek from our upcoming zine The Quintessential Curios.
Wazza reviews Stay Frosty Remastered by Melsonian Arts Council. I share a special sneak peek from our upcoming zine The Quintessential Curios. We’re still welcoming nominations for our first-ever Watch Well Games Non-Awards.
🥶Stay Frosty Remastered Review by Wazza
“Now listen up, I want this review to go smooth and by the numbers!”
“So how many reviews is this for you Wazza?”
“Thirty-eight, simulated."
“How many published reviews?”
“Ah two, including this one.”
Admit it, you love roleplaying your character’s rich backstory, interacting with interesting NPCs. and traveling to exotic locales, but sometimes you just want to blow off some steam, experience the visceral feel of combat and kill some monsters! If so then Stay Frosty Remastered by Melsonian Arts Council (who kindly provided my review copy) delivers this experience in spades and is available on DTRPG as a 111-page pdf for $19.92.
Stay Frosty Remastered seeks to emulate all those sci-fi action movies such as ALIENS and Predator and first-person shooters like DOOM and QUAKE. Does it succeed? Read on!
Straight off the bat the game's tone is vividly expressed in the wonderful cover art showing a bunch of marines blasting alien monstrosities to pieces with huge guns. The words “The TTRPG of Sci-Fi Marines versus the universe” are 100% accurate because that is exactly what your character will spend most of their time doing!
The interior has a simple black-and-white layout, which is easy to read and populated with numerous illustrations of marines, guns, vehicles and aliens throughout. This is an OSR (Old School Rules) TTRPG which gets straight down to the basics. The rules? roll a d20 above your attribute to succeed, that's it.
Character creation is fast, roll four stats, choose a MOS (Military Occupational Specialty), roll your rank (face it you’re a grunt), grab your gear and complete your mission or die trying (usually the latter). There are eight MOS to choose from with Armour, Cyber, Engineer, Infantry, Intelligence, Medical, Psi-ops and Spec. Ops. Each has a perk which comes in handy when facing off against groups of slobbering xenomorphs. Roll just 1d6+4 for your Hit Points and once they’re gone your stats are next. Expect to die a lot but you’ll be rolling up your next marine in no time, ready to be dropped into the meatgrinder.
Guns, guns, guns! You’ll need them (and other stuff too) and rather present a huge list of weapons. They're grouped by type, so pistols, rifles, shotguns etc… broken down by damage, range, ammo die and special features, ammo die, what's that? Well its a neat mechanic allowing you to blaze away and not worry about tracking every single bullet. After a fight roll a d8 for your assault rifle, on a 1 or 2 reduce it one step to d6, get down to d4 and roll 1 or 2 again and it’s melee time, good luck with that! Utility gear uses a supply die which is essentially the same thing, so go easy on those medpacks! We even have a few military vehicles to drive around in.
We now arrive at the real meat and potatoes of the game, combat! Rounds last a few seconds and are used while fighting with ten-minute turns for exploration (check those corners!) Roll dexterity to go first in initiative and then choose to attack, intimidate the enemy, focus, use a psi-power, a skill or a piece of equipment. On the GMs turn NPCs must roll under a PC’s stats to hit. Fast and definitely furious.
What's another name for psi-powers? Brain bullets of course! Here you can swap your gun for your grey matter and unleash psychic mayhem. A dozen powers are presented allowing you to dominate, control and heal amongst other things. Think of them as spells which require a roll to succeed with the option to bleed your brain out if you’re desperate enough.
Stay Frosty ramps up the tension by using a danger die, the GM rolls a d6 if the PCs dither too long in one place resulting in either an encounter, an environmental effect, increasing stress or ramping up tension. The latter tracks your PCs mental state providing combat benefits the higher it gets but you’ll eventually snap under the pressure and your fellow marines had better watch out!
We’re at the half-way point and into GM territory with advice on generating missions to send your marines. A point-crawl system is the recommended approach allowing marines to travel between encounter driven locations. The basic structure is a flowchart linking nodes representing choices and possible paths, with a two-page spread of random tables to determine mission type, environment, antagonists, NPCs, complications and aliens. A short bestiary has your marines fight flesh-dissolving ameboids, multi-tentacled cephalopods, flaming demons, and cyborg assassins.
Then we’re given not one but two adventures. The first is for green marines investigating a distress signal from an isolated archaeological research base, what could possibly go wrong? And the second presents a twist as you play convicted criminals who’ve enlisted in the marines rather than face execution. They must secure an alien transmission from a deep-space listening post. Sounds easy, believe it isn’t. This one has apocalyptic overtones and high stakes. So there you have it, Stay Frosty Remastered is a great game for one-shots and adrenaline-filled campaigns. This is Wazza signing off.
🎨Creating: The Quintessential Curios: Issue #1
The Watch Well Games creators coalition is wrapping up the final touches on our first zine. This collaborative project will feature six system-agnostic adventures from over half a dozen indie creators. The Quintessential Curios (issue 1) from Watch Well Games is scheduled for release later this year (we’re estimating mid-to-late October).
CJ Weigel is one of the talented writers behind this zine. He gave us keen analyses of several episodes of Record of Lodoss War (you can start here to catch up). Here’s a teaser from his adventure “The Black Bell.”
💙 Follow us on Bluesky as well, where we’ve been introducing the indie contributors and sharing extra sneak peaks.
🎲The First-Ever Watch Well Games Non-Awards🎲
Join me in recognizing others who’ve produced non-award-winning-yet-amazing creations.
This will be a great way to give shout-outs to the things we’ve enjoyed, showing our appreciation of the many talented indie creators in the tabletop RPG space.
Who would you designate as worthy to receive an award 🏆a non-award🏆? What did they make or create that deserves a bit of hype?
The criteria:
The item has not won any awards (that you’re aware of at least).
You cannot be the creator.
The item does not have to be officially published anywhere. It can be homebrewed.
A shareable link to the item so others can access it (whether to read or purchase) must be included. Homebrew items can be Dropbox or Google Drive links.
It can be hot off the press or an older item.
It must be indie, whether a small publisher or a single individual. No big names.
Stumped? If you can’t think of a RPG-related item for a certain category, you can submit something else, like a book, song, short film, comic, etc.
Categories (game, system, mechanic, adventure, or something else):
🚀 Sci-fi
🧝 Fantasy
👻 Horror/thriller
🕵️ Investigative
🐦🔥 “Other” genre
🎨 Artist (has not won any RPG-related awards)
✍️ Writer or creator (has not won any RPG-related awards)
✨ ”Something freaking cool in the indie RPG realm that folks need to know about!” (open category)
Optional: Let the creators know you’ve submitted something of theirs to the Watch Well Games Non-Awards. Share this newsletter with them. Either way, let’s build awareness and celebrate well-made content!
🏅 Recipients of Non-Awards will be announced in the next 5th Friday newsletter (October 31st). 🏅
That’s a wrap! Remember:
Submit your WWG Non-Award entries by leaving a comment. 😉 (Feeling shy? You can send these via direct message or email kj@watchwellgames.com)
 | A guest post by
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Kal Arath and Niv Lova for games
Witches of Weanderwald for art