In September 2023 we presented the new Flying Circus Bundle featuring Flying Circus, the Apocalypse Engine aviation-fantasy RPG from Newstand Press. In Flying Circus you’re a fantasy adventurer, but instead of a sword and spells, you have an overworked biplane with rusty machine-guns – and you might still have to fight a dragon. Above the sprawling industrial-fantasy land of Himmelgard, daring pilots – heroes, knights errant, and scoundrels for hire – protect small rural communities beset by monsters, bandits, and tyrants. You can play not only a Soldier but a Fisher or Farmer, a Believer or Skyborn, minor nobles or workers – or a Witch. Groups of Flying Circus mercenaries take their ramshackle aeroplanes into battle, earn triumph or defeat, find ways to pay for it all, and maybe even learn who they are and where they belong – if they don’t crash and burn.
The Flying Circus setting will charm fans of anime classics like Porco Rosso and Laputa. “Picture a world from a Hayao Miyazaki film,” reads the introduction. “There are peaceful little towns and vast beautiful landscapes, a warmth to everything even when things are grim. Everything is rustic and worn and lived-in, and most folks are decent, more or less. Aeroplanes are beautifully rendered dreams, the detritus of a long-ago war litters the landscape, and in the shadows lurk things difficult to understand.”
Flying Circus optimizes the Apocalypse Engine system to support highly detailed aircraft construction rules and an authentic (and authentically dangerous) flight experience. You can do anything you can imagine in an airplane, but air combat is still summed up with Moves like Altitude Adjustment, Pull Up, Extend, Overstrain, Overspeed, Cool Off, Open Fire, and (uh oh) Bail Out. Dogfighting centers around a printable Instrument Panel that focuses air combat on what matters. You don’t track your flight path or check your turn radius; instead, you just keep an eye on your speed and altitude gauges while you describe your actions in freeform. When you make combat maneuvers, it costs you speed. To get more speed, you accelerate or dive, which costs fuel or altitude respectively. If you run out of speed, you stall. If you run out of fuel, your engine dies. If you run out of altitude, splat.
Flying Circus also has systems for battles and daring escapes on foot, for pilots to blow off steam between missions, and for the financial and social aspects of running the company. Pilots always live between excess and stress, between riches and ruin, between victory in the skies and impact with the ground.
We presented the Flying Circus core rulebook in the November 2020 Indie Cornucopia 8. The corebook included more than 50 aircraft both historical and fictional, and since then Newstand Press has released several “Plane Packs” and expansions that enlarge the armada to more than 100 aircraft both historical and fantastic: the von Morgen Vampyr, Mammut Smuggler, Skyborn Dhow, Kreuzer Skorpion, Tejas Interceptor, Dryad of Hanriot, Marut Raider, and dozens more, plus the all-metal “Hugo’s Metallisches Jagdflugzeug!” This new Flying Circus Bundle brought back the corebook and added two Plane Packs plus the expansion Horrors of the Heights, which enlarges the bestiary of monsters that dwell above the Himmelgard clouds.
There were four titles in our Circus Collection (retail value $75) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the complete Flying Circus Core Rulebook (plus the free Aircraft Catalogue Core), along with the expansion Horrors of the Heights and the Plane Packs Flights of Fancy and First Flights. (The three titles new to the Bundle of Holding had a combined retail value of $40.)
Note: The version of Horrors of the Heights in this offer has been newly updated for compatibility with the forthcoming Flying Circus ground combat expansion Chariots of Steel.
