SAN FRANCISCO, June 20 — This week’s excellent strategy adventure Desperados III brings its hard west realism and supernatural undercurrent to the realm of pen and paper for an asking price of zero dollars.

They say the pen is mightier than the sword. In this free tabletop adaptation of Desperados III, you might find it’s more potent than a six-shooter.

Designed by the studio behind the samurai strategy Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun and the award-winning, vibrantly visaged project The Last Tinker: City of Colours, the PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC video game Desperados III marks a return to the dusty frontier for a long-dead franchise.

The 13-year gap since unofficial spin-off Helldorado doesn’t seem to have been too unlucky for Desperados III, launching this week to excellent reviews, rustling up an 86 per cent average score from aggregation services OpenCritic and Metacritic as a consequence.

And, for those that fancy more Desperados III when they’re not playing Desperados III, we now have Desperados: The Pen & Paper RPG.

Distributed for free through DriveThruRPG (registration required), the Desperados spin-off is built on Green Ronin’s versatile AGE System, the ruleset that powers role-playing adaptations of sci-fi saga The Expanse, video game franchise Dragon Age, comic book series Lazarus and the company’s own fantasy-inspired original Blue Rose. — AFP-Relaxnews