For about as long as I’ve been into tabletop RPGs, SLA Industries (“SLA” pronounced “Slay” for comedy reasons) has kind of been lurking about there in the background. There was the original 1993 release that Nightfall Games helmed themselves; there was the brief period when Wizards of the Coast held the IP before they bought the wreckage of TSR and canned all their RPG properties that weren’t Dungeons & Dragons; there was the blink-and-you’d-miss-it period when Hogshead Publishing had the rights and put out “Edition 1.1” (basically the first edition with new cover art and a sprinkling of corrections and clarifications) before James Wallis pulled the plug on Hogshead; there was that fairly extensive period when Cubicle 7 were keeping the core book and some supplements in print but didn’t seem to be doing very much to promote it.
These days Nightfall Games have gone their own way again rather than relying on third party publishers. At the moment they are putting out a trickle of material with the hope of building up interest and reserves before ploughing ahead with a 2nd Edition of the game. In the meantime, Edition 1.1 is available for download via DrivethruRPG on a pay-what-you-want basis. That’s handy for me, because one of the members of my Monday evening group is going to be running some SLA after my current Ars Magica block wraps up, so now’s the perfect time for me to pick the thing up and see what it’s like.
My God, it’s full of 90s.
Continue reading “The 1990s, Cranked Up To 11”
