When I saw Action! System 2.0 pop up in my Kickstarter feed, it took a few minutes to remember why it looked familiar. Then I remembered: Gold Rush Games. This was an interesting little system from the early days of D&D 3.0 that took just the OGL and released its own open ruleset. I have a PDF copy of the Action System rules on one of my external drives, but other than that, I don't remember much else about it.
According to the Kickstarter page:
The Action! System™ was the second commercially-supported set of tabletop RPG rules ever to be published under the first edition of the Open Game License (OGL). It was originally released by Gold Rush Games in 2001 and used by multiple publishers between the years 2001 and 2005. It is a generic system that was designed to be incredibly similar to a variety of late-90s RPGs, specifically to ones that were used in anime RPGs.
After using it for some home games starting in 2013, Neon Necromancer Games finally bought the rights to it in 2020 intending to publish a second edition for its twentieth anniversary and then, well... *gestures broadly to the news events of the past couple years*.
Now that a certain company is being evil [censored]holes about the Open Game License, we feel it is necessary to revive this OGL pioneer. The Action! System was an entirely new creation upon release, with no text taken from other "system references". The intention is that A!S 2.0 will be released both under the original OGL 1.0a as well as Paizo's new Open RPG Creative License (ORC) once it is ready and released. (In the event that the ORC license sucks we will also release it under another open license, such as Community Commons.
So, is a two-decade-old system that barely made a splash 20 years ago a good candidate for a Kickstarter refresh today? According to the funding I'm looking at, the answer is no. The Action! System 2.0 Kickstarter has $1,397 pledged of $7,500 goal with 4 days to go. It simply aint gonna happen.
Nostalgia doesn't work when one has no nostalgia for something. Ah well.
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