Pinnacle Entertainment Group will take Savage Worlds back to Kickstarter this year. October 16th will see Shane Lacy Hensley’s RPG system, the winner of the 2003 Origin Gamers’ Choice Award, go back to the community to raise funds.
The game had the internal codename ‘Savage Worlds Black’ and somehow that leaked, fans started to refer to it ‘Savage Worlds Black’, and so the name stuck.
Bureau 13 by Tri Tac Legacy on Savage Worlds
Bureau 13 is an RPG that dates back to 1983. The game is written by Richard Tucholka, founder of Tri Tac, who started writing RPGs in 1978. If you’re curious to how close that is to the beginning to the roleplaying hobby, then check out What was the first RPG and you’ll see how early Tucholka was. Bureau 13 was published in 1982.
Richard died in 2017, taken by cancer, but completed a large number of games before then and perhaps Bureau 13 is his most famous. This game caught the attention of the FBI and triggered a raid on the young publisher’s headquarters. How? They handed out bright orange and pink paper badges at Gen Con 1994 for players in Bureau 13 and someone reported the props.
The new Bureau 13 will hopefully avoid the FBI’s attention. It’s due for 2020, by which time Tri Tac must hope PEGINC has successfully Kickstarted and launched the next Savage Worlds.
Bureau 13 is an urban fantasy RPG, with mysterious events and creatures, rooted in both horror and paranormal investigations. The new edition will use Savage Worlds Black.
The project is being pushed on by Mel Natcher, the current owner of Tri Tac and Tucholka’s wife, but will be written by Longshot Productions. There will also be a tie-in novel from David Boop. Great name.
Boop has worked with Savage Worlds RPGs before and is a game designer himself. He has worked on Deadlands: Noir and Flash Gordon.
It’s also worth quickly looking at the corporate set up here. There’s a company called Tri Tac Legacy LLC, that will publish Bureau 13, which is a partnership between Mel Natcher of Tri Tack Games, David Boop who happens to own Longshot Productions and the game’s communication manager, Sally Vilkman. I’m sure that set up is to ensure everyone is appropriately compensated for their time and efforts.
Edit: Just to be clear – the new Tri Tac Legacy LLC is not part of Pinnacle. Tri Tac will be a licensee using the new Savage Worlds rules if all the Kickstarters are, as expected, successful.
