Four for the price of one! That’s right: four simultaneous releases from Animalball Games.

We’ve done a little housecleaning here at Animalball, and found a few tidbits tucked under the sofa cushions. These are four items that have been around forever here at Animalball, but for one reason or other have never become a full release:

Hero Battle
Bulldrek, the RPG
God’s Dice
Legacy of Justice

Hero Battle: Hero Battle is a forum-based game of cutthroat strategy for eight or more players. The rules are deceptively simple—however game play is anything but.

Each player is assigned a Hero for the Battle, and as the game starts, all Heroes have an equal number of hit points (HP). Every turn, each player chooses two Heroes to hit and one Hero to heal. Any Hero reduced to zero is dead, and the last one left alive wins.

To complicate things further, Heroes can gain bonuses when their nemeses are killed or suffer penalties if their secret identity is revealed. Every Battle brings new twists and possibilities, from prison gangs to celebrity plastic surgery. So the players always have to remain on their toes.

We’ve been playing Hero Battle on the Animalball Forums for over a year now, starting up a new battle every month or so. In that time, the rules for Hero Battle have slowly evolved into the pinnacle of perfection we present to you today. All you need is an online bulletin board and ten of your closest friends, so get to it!

Alternately, feel free to come join us. Watch for our next game at Animalball. We’re always thrilled to get new players.

Download the Hero Battle rules for FREE on our download page.

Bulldrek, the RPG: Once upon a time, there was a free and untamed forum called Bulldrek. In its early days, Bulldrek was home to some of the most bizarre and wondrous group storytelling experiences ever. Bulldrekkers collaborated in seemingly haphazard fashion to cobble together stories of wild fantasy that crossed all genres and respected no boundaries. It seemed that the Bulldrek characters were drawn to destroy and humiliate each other at every turn, and yet somehow mostly-coherent tales emerged from the jumble. Great legends and everlasting inside jokes were born, gods walked amongst the Bulldrek, and everyone… everyone… had a good time.

Bulldrek was a product of the moment that was pure serendipity. It was built around the online bulletin board structure that created it, and that online medium shaped and guided it for both good and bad. As Bulldrekkers came to know one another in real life, I thought it might be worthwhile to take a stab at a face-to-face version of this sort of collaborative storytelling—something that might go well with the company of good friends and the consumption of age-appropriate beverages. So I created Bulldrek, the RPG.

Many of the terms and concepts of the game are taken straight from the old Bulldrek forums themselves, and the game is intended for a braggart’s style of outlandish fantasy storytelling. The point of each session is to try to have a rollicking good time, and hopefully create something lasting in the group memory that hasn’t been done before.

I’ve shared this document a couple times before over the years, both on the Animalball Forums, as well as on Bulldrek itself when it was still around. So this is not so much the introduction of a new Animalball product as it is a new look at an old friend.

Download Bulldrek, the RPG for FREE on our download page.

God’s Dice: ”God does not play dice with the universe.” –Albert Einstein

Very simply, God’s Dice is the greatest unfinished sci-fi campaign world ever! Emphasis is on “unfinished.” The God’s Dice campaign world is my take on the solar system 1,000 years in the future, in a setting where faster-than-light travel is still just fantasy, and despite finding itself still alone in the lonely universe, mankind has managed to diversify itself into a stunning array of forms.

I began God’s Dice over ten years ago with a basic vision of a solar system that buzzed with life. Instead of the vast empty tracts of space we envision today, the people of 2921 would see their beloved Sol System as teeming with life, every corner of it buzzing with drones and satellites, tiny shuttles and massive floating cities. The bustle of space would seem to them as the traffic of Chicago to us. And from this image, I started building God’s Dice.

I’ve had help from dozens of people over the years, and while some are credited, some are not. What you’ll find here is not a complete work—not by far. Instead it is a collection of my thoughts and writings and notes on the world of God’s Dice from the last ten years. It is now, and will probably always remain, a work in progress. But it contains a lot to inspire and motivate. I hope people enjoy it, and I know I will keep going back to it again and again over the years to add new bits here and there. My thanks to everyone who has participated.

Download God’s Dice for FREE on our download page.

Legacy of Justice: Just like God’s Dice, this one is very much a work in progress. Legacy of Justice is the second of my unfinished worlds. It started from just three words: my brother called me up one day and said, “I’ve got it! I know what our next project needs to be: Post-apocalyptic superheroes!” Okay… so maybe post-apocalyptic is only one word. But anyway, I was blown away.

All I needed was a way to blow up the Earth, and Legacy of Justice would be the superhero world that rose from the ashes. The ideas came to us fast and hard. We quickly developed the flux-shattered Earth, and with the help of our forum members, we began to compile world elements. Imagining a post-apocalyptic Earth was the easy part. We didn’t need to dwell on that. What we wanted was snippets of just a couple paragraphs each, detailing some special corner of this new landscape.

So from post-apocalypse beasties like mutants and flux dogs and road apes to super-warlords and their dominions like Elvis Aron of Graceland or the elderly Commish in his power-armor, cruising the shattered New York skyline searching for evil-doers, the Legacy of Justice document is merely a collection of these snippets, compiled into a single place for safekeeping.

For now, Legacy is on one our way-further-back burners, but we love so many of these characters and ideas that we feel compelled to share.

Download Legacy of Justice for FREE on our download page.