In September 2024 we presented the Beam Saber Bundle featuring Beam Saber, the anime-inspired Forged In The Dark SFRPG from Austin Ramsay Games about Pilots fighting The War across known space. Send your squad of characters and their Gundam-style mecha into dramatic and challenging battles, and then play to find whether they get out physically and mentally intact. The “fiction-first” Forged In The Dark rules ensure play moves quickly. Jump right to the action, and play out flashbacks that show how you prepared everything you need in the moment. Play any of a dozen-plus Pilot playbooks in one of eight Squad types, or create new squads, factions, and regions that suit your style. And remember, Pilot: Fight The War, not yourself.
Beam Saber has earned respect in the populous field of Forged in the Dark RPGs. “I ran a Gundam-inspired Beam Saber game, and it’s gone down as my favorite TTRPG experience I’ve ever had the pleasure of GMing,” said redditor Rasen22 in an April 2022 Reddit r/rpg comment on the topic “Asking about Beam Saber” (Reddit r/rpg, 19 April 2022). “I ran Blades in the Dark proper right after, and it quickly cemented FitD as my game system of choice. […] As we played, the ways in which the various mechanics interlink with one another felt very natural to me, and once you start to piece together the flow or rhythm of play, I think it’s pretty easy to pick up.
“The faction and resource management stuff were actually the things that drew me to Beam Saber over other mecha systems. I wanted to be able to include story beats like Ramba Ral getting denied his Doms in [Universal Century year] 0079, or the tense relationship shared by the Anti-Earth Union Group and the Earth Federation proper in Gundam ZZ. Seeing that sort of bureaucratic interplay baked in to the game really excited me. It intensified the connection the players felt to their allied NPCs, as well as the hatred they felt towards their rivals, in a way that wouldn’t have happened without the faction system guiding the group narratively.”
On Bell of Lost Souls J.R. Zambrano summed up Beam Saber‘s appeal: “It’s melodramatic in the extreme, but it works so well for the kind of stories that this game wants to tell. If you’re looking for some of the finest in military science fiction, this game is absolutely for you.”
This all-new offer presented the Beam Saber line for an unbeatable bargain price. There were three titles in our Beam Saber Collection (retail value $65) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the complete 438-page Beam Saber corebook, the Stardost Memento campaign, and the latest version of the large and ever-growing sourcebook The Growing Conflict. The Growing Conflict was presented as a work in progress, and purchasers were guarantee to receive new versions as Austin Ramsay releases new versions, as well as the eventual published ebook.
