Welcome, I’m Charlie Etheridge-Nunn, a writer and waffler about various things like comics and games in all forms.
Explosion High & Mad Robot Comics
First of all, I write comics at Mad Robot. If you see us at conventions you can pick up my first work in Cadavers: World Gone to Hell, including the tragic horror “Fractured” and the monster noir, “Blob Detective”
My main work at the moment is Explosion High! It’s a comic about a fun and deadly superhero school. In it, a team of lacklustre sidekicks and directionless deities find a home and friends in a place which is literally trying to kill them at every opportunity. It’s full of noise, explosions, dinosaurs and friendship.
Pictures: Explosions and friendship. I assure you there are dinosaurs inside.
You can pick up physical copies at conventions, at Dave’s Comics and the Dice Saloon in Brighton, or Comics, Games & Coffee in Chichester.
Hundreds of students enter, a lot fewer will leave.
There’s a Kickstarter for issue two coming soon, which you can sign up to get notified about by going here.
Climbzilla! The gym class kaiju!
Casual Trek
I started a podcast about Star Trek with Miles Reid-Lobatto, one of my older, favourite writer friends. Inspired by shows like Every Story Ever, Battle of the Atom and BatChat with Matt & Will, we watch a few episodes of Star Trek at a time and rank them against each other on an increasingly large list of best to worst.
Go do a Starfleet!
Star Trek’s kind of a tertiary fandom to us both. It’s been a constant fandom in our lives, just not as much as X-Men for me or Doctor Who for Miles, so we consider that makes us the perfect moral authority on such a subject.
For people more casual than even us, we recap the episodes and try not to overrun too much (although we are keeping record of who’s overrunning more). This is an accessible entrance to Star Trek, even if we get into a great many tangents like the Young Ones, Blake’s 7, the writer Chris Claremont and our combined experiences in Brighton.
You can find Casual Trek on any podcatcher, on Spotify and here.
One of the alternate titles for one of the recent episodes
Who Dares Rolls
I write about indie RPGs for Who Dares Rolls, and put up videos occasionally on their YouTube channel, along with the eccentric, effervescent Mike B.
The super serious logo, made by Mike B from when I was only writing about solo RPGs.
Recently I’ve been putting out some solo roleplaying game Actual Play podcast episodes in my occasional series, “Playing With Ourselves”. These are kind of re-enactments or short story readings, going through games like the letters written in “Quill”, a journal from someone in the nigh-eternal queue to see Edd the Duck’s coffin in “The Queue” and the self-explanatory “You Are Quarantined with Adam Driver and he is Insisting on Reading You His New Script”
Faked Tales
This blog is where I put any short stories, articles or general blog posts about my writing and the popular culture in general.
It’s time for a new quest, set your thrill power to maximum!
Rats!
First of all I have a confession to make. I’m a terrible British nerd. I didn’t watch Dr Who until the Matt Smith era, despite the many protests of my Casual Trek cohost I haven’t watched Blake’s 7. And I’ve only ever occasionally read 2000AD.
My main experience of 2000AD is through Judge Dredd. My brother and I had a few of the record-size collections of Judge Dredd stories. Outside of that I’d read a little Nemesis: The Warlock, played the Commodore 64 Judge Dredd game and watched the movies. That was it.
When the opportunity came to read 2000AD from its earliest days, I tried it out, then petered out before I hit prog 80. This year I decided to try it again. I’ve had some smaller quests this year, like reading all of the 7th Sea RPG stretch goals and all of Dragonball. I’m not sure why I got into trying to read 2000AD from the start, but I did. Then I made a spreadsheet, as I tend to do. Miles told me what I described as my 2000AD sheet was ‘psychotic’. This is why we’re keeping Star Trek casual, as my spreadsheet for that would be much worse.
I’ve been missing making the clackity sound lately, so I thought I’d share some of what I’ve experienced in 2000AD so far, and as I’m me, I’d also see if I can think of an RPG to recommend to create a similar experience to each story.
Here are the titles from the 26th of February 1977 to 17th February 1979 and my encounters with each of them.
DAN DARE
Like Judge Dredd, my first encounter with Dan Dare was a Commodore 64 game. He was a fairly generic science fiction hero and in my first attempt at reading 2000AD, he was a stumbling point where it just couldn’t get my interest.
Dan Dare goes through a couple of revisions, one of which we’ll see in his final appearances in the next set of 2000AD I read.
I’ve had hangovers like this.
The first set of stories have Dan brought into a more science fiction universe than his pre 2000AD incarnation. When we get our next reboot, there’s a space fortress headquarters, a villain in the Star Slayer and an entourage of varied survivability. The most notable of these is Hitman, a man who has a gun stuck to his hand, which must be incredibly awkward.
Whether fighting the Mekon in a Hollow World, a deadly doppelgänger or a saboteur on the star fortress, Dan manages to push through, often losing a friend or two as he goes.
RPG Recommendation: I’ve not read or run Death in Space, but that sounds like it’d fit. Keeping to what I know, I’d say Mothership’s like a darker version of the stories we get here. Make it a bit more classic sci-fi instead of rusty Alien-style sci-fi and it’d work.
I like a good dinosaur story and this one has a ludicrous premise I can’t help but admire.
In the future, sources of meat are scarce so using time travel technology, Wild West-looking ranchers went back to dinosaur times to harvest them.
While we get a hero in Earl Reagan, he’s nowhere near as much of a focus as Claw, an arsehole with a deinocychus claw for a hand who’s in it for himself and leads a lot of people to their deaths.
Then there’s the real main character… Old One-Eye. The hag-beast Tyrannosaurus Rex who is out to ruin the day of the time travellers. Even without humans she’s a fucking maniac, she butchers one of her kids without thinking and eagerly destroys any dinosaur in her way.
Old One-Eye is a brilliant force of nature and the first 2000AD monster who I fell in love with. The first ‘book’ of Flesh doesn’t last long, but has people fighting dinosaurs and even giant spiders at one point. It even has a fun epilogue showing that even past extinction, Old One-Eye can still get a kill in.
RPG Recommendation: This will require a very small amount of modification, but Escape from Dino Island is a Jurassic Park style game where players are in a dinosaur park trying to escape to safety after it all went wrong. You could easily change this into a Transtime farming facility.
I never read sports comics like Roy of the Rovers as a kid, so Harlem Heroes was a hard sell, even with the science fiction twist on sports. Luckily the plight of the Heroes and their attempt to win at Aeroball quickly gets replaced by a vengeful cyborg antagonist, Artie Gruber. After he’s nearly killed by Giant from the Heroes, he does his best to take vengeance out on the team.
There’s also a teammate who’s a brain after being mostly destroyed. He eventually gets a body, which is good for him.
I’d be more interested in sports f they were more like this.
The series pivots to Inferno, changing sports to something far more incomprehensible and violent. This was a bit of an uptick for me, interest-wise. I don’t think I ever learnt the rules of the game, but it was all good fun until the fatal final story, where most of the cast die. That seems to be pretty common in this era of 2000AD.
RPG Recommendation: Storybrewers Games has a sports drama RPG called Fight with Spirit. It focuses on the team’s relationships and the personal drama on and off the pitch. Even better, you can pick the sport and you don’t even know the rules. As you face adversity, you built up Fight and Spirit points, to better win the dramatic rounds when you’re playing a sport.
The Volgan Empire has invaded the UK and managed to take it all over. All, apart from Bill Savage and a team of resistance fighters. Bill’s apparently from the midlands but talks like he’s in a Guy Ritchie film. He’s great. He’ll run around, firing his shotgun at any problems, sabotaging things and being a general nuisance to the invading force. On his way, he meets other fighters who sadly don’t all make it.
The final long arc involves a prince who got into the UK and needs to be shipped back to Canada where the royals are hiding. It makes for a tense change as Bill’s not just attacking anything, he’s trying to get somewhere and protect folks.
With dialogue like this, he should be played by Jason Statham.
RPG Recommendation: I’ve not read or played Twilight 2000, but it sounds like a game that could do this sort of game. One option you could choose for this is Comrades by WM Akers. It’s about a revolutionary group carrying out an uprising through different methods, often leading to bloody rebellion or vicious coups. The default mode isn’t quite as violent as Bill Savage, but there are enough playbooks that you could curate a set to do this sort of game.
In my first attempt to read 2000AD, M.A.C.H. ONE was a strip I didn’t quite care for. Revisiting it, I’ve found John Probe a lot of fun. He’s a secret agent, but he’s also been enhanced which seems to mostly involve a computer in his head, a willingness to use vehicles as weapons at multiple occasions and a lot of shouting.
The series changes a bit as M.A.C.H. ONE goes on, briefly showing M.A.C.H. Zero, a Hulk or Frankenstein’s Monster like figure, and turns some of Probe’s attention towards the people that made him.
Ultimately, as fun as his missions are, he dies. M.A.C.H. Zero gets a comic set in the same world, but it’s more Hulk-like hijinks as he tries to get away from people who judge him for his appearance.
So much shouting…
RPG Recommendation: If it was just shouting, I’d say to hack AGON, as that’s a key part of making rolls. Eat the Reich has vampires instead of robots, but the wanton destruction is about the level of Probe. For spy action though, I’d recommend Outgunned. It handles the kind of action John Probe does easily and with fun ‘push your luck’ mechanics that make you feel like a badass.
Here’s the big one. Judge Dredd is the most iconic character from 2000AD. We may never see his face, but his scowling jaw is often more than enough for folks. Mega-City One is a police state and Judge Dredd is one of the best enforcers of the law. Crimes big and small are fought by him, from littering to murder, and his career takes him all over. I actually read a number of these from the Complete Case Files, which I bought the first four of. It’s been long enough, I remember very few of the stories.
There are some great villains like Frankenstein 2, who the comic says makes the original look like a jelly baby. Frankenstein 2 as it turns out, is a reference to the doctor, not the monster. There are rebellious robots, apart from Dredd’s loyal servant, Walter.
A classic story.
I remember not being as thrilled by Dredd’s assignment to the moon, but I’m not sure why, as it was a lot of fun here, especially with a story about Roberts trying to heist oxygen.
The longest full story in this set is The Cursed Earth, where Dredd has to drive a vaccine to Mega-City Two and we finally see what life is like outside. Pretty rough, it turns out.
The Day the Law Died is the last story arc of these first hundred progs, with the insane Chief Judge Cal in charge of the city (and also Deputy Chief Judge Fish). There are attempts to frame, exile and kill Dredd, all while Cal’s issuing madder and madder commands. It’s not quite over by issue 100, but there’s a lot of tension and a lot of madness. It’s been good fun.
RPG Recommendation: There have been Judge Dredd RPGs, but I’ve never quite felt the flavour of them aside from Dread: Dredd. For the perp’s side, a Fiasco would probably work. Personally, I’d love to try and build a system using a Carved from Brindlewood framework.
Like Old One-Eye, Shako’s an animal who spends the series fucking up a lot of humans. Unlike Flesh, you’re not really meant to side with the humans here, you’re on Shako’s side and that’s good with me.
Shako is a polar bear who’s very fighty and swallowed a capsule with a deadly germ weapon in it, so the CIA start hunting Shako down. As the series goes on and Shako butchers more hunters, the KGB also get involved.
Shako does sadly die by the end, but in a 2000AD annual we do get a fun origin story of Shako’s early years. He’s attacked by two hunters as a cub and bites one in the leg, causing him to shoot the others. You get them, Shako, live your best life.
RPG Recommendation: You thought I’d say Honey Heist here, didn’t you? The problem with that is the bears in Honey Heist are torn between their lives as thieves and bears. Shako is all bear, all the time. While this one’s difficult, I think you could run the RPG of Actual Cannibal Shia LaBeouf with Shako instead of Shia and see how long you survive against him.
This is a small comic strip about a giant monster travelling the world and eating people. You’d think that I’d be down with more monsters doing murders. These short strips have aged terribly, especially when he goes to Asia.
RPG Recommendation: No.
THE VISIBLE MAN
You know that kind of Hulk dynamic? The one where someone’s experimented on, given weird powers and on the run? Yeah, this is kind of that but with one fundamental difference. What if the person had translucent skin and absolutely no positive abilities.
The Visible Man has some problems with trying to apply make-up so it’s like he’s got proper skin, or with a scientist who wants to inject him with diseases in order to see how they work through his transparent skin.
The story ends with him going up into space and deciding he doesn’t want to come back. Fair enough.
A relatable hero.
RPG Recommendation: I’m realising the rod I made for my own back here. Add in a game show element and Hell for Leather could do well for this. You play folks who are on the run constantly and roll dice at (but not into) a tower of dice on the table.
Aliens invade. I had a few stories which took some time for me to get invested. This is only ten parts, and it never quite got my attention. The aliens have incredible technology, but once unmasked they’re actually weird gnome-looking guys. It’s kind of underwhelming.
RPG Recommendation: Our Last Best Hope by Magpie Games is a fun way to run a one-shot where players are trying to stop the end of the world. There are several end of the world scenarios and an alien invasion would work well here. I say that, having never succeeded at saving the world in that game. The way 2000AD’s been, I’m sure this won’t be the last recommendation for this game.
This story’s for the first female lead character in 2000AD. A shame it’s not good. It’s one issue shorter than Colony Earth and the crashed survivors of a colony ship try to make their way through a deadly world in theory led by Lorna. Unfortunately she’s often reduced to a slightly more proactive damsel.
RPG Recommendation: Perseverance is a game about surviving after a disaster, a crash, anything like that. It’s generally more of a wildernesss thing, but you all establish the elements and could easily make a science fiction version.
I really wanted to like Ant Wars, I really did. You’ve got giant ants invading Brazil and South America. What could be more fun than giant ants?
Unfortunately as entertaining as the ants are, the lead character’s constant racism, especially towards “Anteater”, are not. He’s constantly treating this kid like crap, even if he’ll still run back and rescue him. Still, it’s so persistent I hoped that Anteater would turn out to know English and leave our hero to his doom. Sadly instead they both die. The ants however, persist.
Don’t worry, the captain does die.
RPG Recommendation: With this it depends on what you want to do with giant ants. My first thought is Savage Worlds for some pulp fun, but you could easily run a Dread game of trying to escape one of the many cities overrun by ants.
Sam Slade is an old, ornery hunter of robots in a future society where they’re everywhere and in theory should be behaving nicely. Unfortunately that’s not always the case. He’s an odd hero and fairly early on gets de-aged (along with his colleague who’s younger and gets turned into a very irate baby). They get stuck on a robot planet where all of the robots have been convinced any humans are fakes and therefore not to obey them. It’s a bit of a problem for Sam. Luckily he gets some help on his journey, including from a pair of robotic legs. I thought I wouldn’t enjoy an old guy hating on robots, and luckily it was more than that.
Sam needs some work on his wordplay.
RPG Recommendation: I think this might be another one for Mothership, especially as you can play androids and there are plenty of scenarios involving robots going wrong.
Another very short-lived early 2000AD series. A pilot flies an experimental plane, it crashes and he’s merged with its computer. Somehow this makes him physically superior to the average man, as well as able to see and figure out any technology he sees. He goes from there to action hero adventures, mainly seeming to involve falling from great heights. The computer thinks he’s a plane and luckily he’s very good at landing, even if it’s not as talkative as M.A.C.H. One’s. It’s nowhere near as good as M.A.C.H. One and didn’t stand the test of time, only going for five issues.
Weird premise, but fine, we’ll let them cook.
RPG Recommendation: This one could go with Outgunned, but just to be different and to reflect the constant sense of chases going through it all, Operators does a good job of capturing super-competent action movie heroes.
This has been a mixed bag, but mostly very positive. It’s been interesting seeing how many stories end with the protagonists dying. There are also only a couple of 2000AD mainstays here at this point, as several won’t get seen again or will have sequels a long time from now. The merge with Starlord will take some of the strips with more potential from there, add them to this lot and keep going. Then they’ll repeat this again with Tornado.
Next time, as a little bonus, I’ll be looking at Starlord’s stories, both in their own series and in the first 100 of 2000AD.
It’s Christmas Day and we’re giving you the gift of a new episode of Casual Trek and we’re now, as is traditional, gifting each-other an episode of Star Trek each to cover for the holiday season.
There must be something in the air because both Miles and Charlie decide to go with a nice present instead of any potential lumps of coal. Miles desire to make reperations for Tek War results in us getting a good example of film noir in Deep Space 9’s Necessary Evil while Charlie gifts Miles a chance to talk about both racism and post-war SF with Far Beyond the Stars, another Deep Space 9 classic, thank goodness there’s seven season of Deep Space 9 or we might be in trouble!
Episodes include
DS9: Necessary Evil (13:49)
DS9: Far Beyond the Stars (41:44)
Talking Points include: Christmas Traditions with the family, The Goes Wrong Show and Fawlty Towers, Is there a bad episode of DS9? The strange Mandela Effect of the Meat Loaf song ‘I Would Do Anything For Love.’ Thanks to the court case, we are now no longer allowed to say that Sean Orange pays for Twitter while then going on to probably offend all our US listeners, while Charlie makes some small attempt to curb his unreasoning hatred of Blake’s 7 (Miles wrote these notes BTW) Yes, we’re doing Threshold when we hit the 100th episode of Star Trek covered for the show. Miles’ Most Passive Aggressive Handover at Starbucks. Prequels needlessly making big introductions of everything, including Hercules Poirot’s mustaches. Quark’s Code-switching. Hiding stuff in walls. Miles has been a dick at many a job. The closest character we could compare Odo to is Judge Dredd… not great. Claude Raines in Casablanca. How long can a collaborator remain on the sidelines? One more ALLAMARAINE for the season. We’ll see how long it takes Charlie to hate Blake’s 7 again. SF Writers of the Post-War Age, Golden Age vs. New Wave, Policy Brutality, The Harlem Renaissance, LET’S GET POLITICAL AT CHRISTMAS TIMES, don’t trust Centrists, Police Brutality in Riverdale, the ideas of Science-Fiction that can change the world, THE CURRENT EDITOR IN CHIEF OF MARVEL PRETENDED TO BE JAPANESE IN ORDER TO GET WRITING GIGS, the problems with our Big List, what is a ‘Unit of Star Trek,’ Top Trumps, the NPR Star Wars Radio Dramas
Don’t they look so merry.
PEDANT NOTES: Miles refers to Kira as a Collaborator instead of a resistance fighter as I meant to. Claude Reins doesn’t shoot the Nazi in Casablanca, but helps cover up Rick’s role.
NEXT WEEK: Saddle up partner as we head to the Wild West… in Space!
You can find Casual Trek “Another Casual Christmas” on Spotify, all good podcatchers and here.
Most of my RPG Quest posts have been two posts for each month, but between some shorter books, industrial action meaning a little more time for reading and general momentum, I read 37 RPG books. Here’s the last batch.
Two Summers
By Emojk – Côme Martin
Read before? No
Played? No
One of the few RPGs I played with The Gauntlet during one of their open gaming days was with Côme Martin, so I when he launched Green Dawn Mall I checked it out. It was a fun enough experience that I’ve become a serial backer of anything he does.
Two Summers is based on an old RPG build that the author apparently made in his childhood and updated. It’s set during the teenage years of a group of characters and then also them a a few decades in the future going on another, related adventure.
There’s a very casual tone with rules on pieces of graph paper spread throughout the book. Session Zero takes up a lot of room as there are a lot of rituals to go through. Players start with their teenager and take traits bit by bit as they answer questions. You also make concerns for them which are all suitably teenage. As you take each step, you create and link items on a relationship map between the characters. Once that’s done, you make a shorter version of this for them as adults, modifying traits and concerns, accordingly.
Play is expected to go through about six sessions of three hours, flashing back and forth between the past and present, following the characters as they meet different obstacles. The end should bring the teenagers to the end of their grand adventure and the adults into some changes which may last into their future.
Tonally, this is a fairly light game. There isn’t anything supernatural, although there can be with a supplement which allows for darker tones, time travel and parallel worlds to be used. There’s also a smaller, one-shot version of this game which was released as a demo. As much as I like the look of this game, I feel like I’m probably more likely to try out the one-shot version before doing a full miniseries.
Back Again from the Broken Land
By Cloven Pine Press – Alexi & Leah Sargant
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
The first game I played in person after the pandemic lockdown subsided was Back Again from the Broken Land. It felt fitting.
A fantasy RPG using Powered by the Apocalypse mechanics, this game specifically replicates the moments in Lord of the Rings after Sauron’s been defeated and when people need to go home. They’re small and should not have been in a war this big, should not have faced threats so epic and all-consuming. Still, they did and shockingly they ended up playing a pivotal role. Now the Doomslord has been defeated at great cost to everyone involved, and it’s time to go home. But can you, after all of this? After all you’ve seen? All you’ve done?
Starting from the end of the heroic journey, the game places characters in the remnants of the final battlefield. Friend and foe alike are reeling. Players determine what the Doomslord was after, what they were like, why their minions are still a threat and then have playbooks to pick from:
The Shepherd
The Volunteer
The Bodyguard
The Burglar
The Wayfinder
The Stargazer
The Imposter
The Haunted
The Turncoat
Each of these playbooks has one named Burden and slots for more. You’ll be unlocking new unnamed Burdens and aiming to clear them on your journey home. This is the core part of gameplay and some of the peril you’ll face may cause you to take on new ones as you go. You may have played a pivotal part in the downfall of the Doomslord, but you’re still small, able to slip beneath notice and escape from peril. You don’t have any badass combat moves to fight against things, instead you run, hide or make a desperate stand. The latter of these actions could well mean the end for your character.
There’s peril, sure, but there’s some loveliness in the main set of moves, called the Homeward Bound moves. You name a burden in quiet moments, writing in one of the unlocked slots. The perception type move involved gazing into the distance either physically or into your memories. Share a Meal is a pivotal move, where you tell a story of home and roll to see how many people can use this moment to clear a named burden.
Blessedly, there are examples of stories of home, the journey and doom. The latter are in the form of checkboxes, unlocked when players hide from the hunters and then used rather than dying at a future point.
At the end of the game, players consult their epilogue against different stories. Everyone gets one Story of Growth, while those who named and cleared burdens get another. Those who didn’t clear named burdens have to add elements from the Stories of Amends and those who have unnamed burdens have to use Stories of Isolation. They may have gone home, but are still haunted after it all.
This was a joy to run and is up there with R’lyehwatch and Escape from Dino Island as perfect modern one-shot RPGs.
Quest: Character Book & Treasure Book
By The Adventure Guild – T.C.Sottek & Grim Wilkins (character book) and Marianna Learmonth (treasure book)
Read before? Yes
Played? No
Anyone remember Quest? Quest was hot shit for a brief moment a few years ago. It was co-created by someone from Polygon so there were some great inroads to help publicise the game. It was very pretty with some incredible art from Grim Wilkins and had a lot of thought on the layout.
What helped Quest, as well as all this, is it was actually a pretty good game. One which I like to think is a perfect introductory system either for people who are brand new to the hobby or who have only tried D&D before and don’t know how other systems work yet. A lot of the game psychology of ‘say yes or roll the dice’, fictional positioning and so on are pretty standard for indie RPGs but are presented in a nice accessible way for newcomers. Characters have a very open character questionnaire which will establish where they sit in the fiction for a lot of things and will roll 1d20 with no modifiers for anything they’re chancing their hand at. As an example one of my group was a doctor cursed into the form of a giant grasshopper. He could diagnose people without rolling, but trying to manage fine motor skills was a die roll. Then there are abilities which are the special sauce, the actual tangible mechanics for each class as presented in skill trees which you can unlock.
I came late to Quest, picking up the digital version and still longing for a way to get a physical copy of the book and cards in order to better run offline demos for people. Unfortunately the company’s going through some issues and looking for a person to take the game on at the moment.
Before all that happened, they ran a second Kickstarter for a pair of expansion books.
First up is the Character Book.
In other games this might be referred to as a Monster Manual, but this is much broader than that, and the themes of the system are a lot more geared towards interaction with the world in a non-combat fashion. Fights may happen, especially against entities like Assassins, Blood Jelly or the Chaos Goat, but at the same time there are people who might be mentors, underlings, friends, quest-givers or even environments to traverse.
Quest has a fairly light touch when it comes to genre, bringing some characters with robotic-looking devices or planet-eating monstrosities. What’s nice is a lot of the descriptions of characters tie in with each other, with a list of major alliances in the back to help you gather characters up if you want the group to encounter a specific group with a specific goal.
The entries are presented with a piece of art, a name, a small segment of flavour text for when you first encounter them, the story of the monster and any abilities. Like characters, there’s a lot of fictional positioning in the abilities and a number of them are simply narrative. Finally there are just two stats: the health and the damage of the characters. They generally scale up through the three tiers of character: Commoner, Minion and Boss, but that’s not always the case.
Finally, there’s a framework for the creation of these entities. This is good as there was only really fairly light guidance in the core game book.
Second is the Treasure Book.
Again, this fits a need the core game book had of more interesting treasures. Just to put my old man hat on for a moment, I remember in D&D Third Edition where it felt like magic items were getting more commonplace as a way of rewarding players that felt almost mandatory, to help with the scaling of challenges. Every adventurer would have +1 weapons which didn’t really do much other than that. I kept hold of an old Dragon Magazine issue which had random tables of minor effects, appearance changes and so on, in order to make any generic +1 weapon a little more interesting.
Luckily with Quest there’s a whole book of unique items, each with weird descriptions and most of them illustrated in this tome. There are a handful on each page, with all manner of odd mechanics.
Early on that light touch with creating a continuity begins with a series of items made by ‘Brell’. Unlike Bigby or Melf or whoever the old D&D spellcasters were, these all seem like items you’d find in an eccentric shop somewhere, with things like Brell’s Tent in a Tin, Brell’s Everlasting Bear (a size-changing gummy bear, not an eternal bear, although I might use that for a Quest adventure one day).
There are random magic potions, marbles, pipes, all manner of things. There are weapons, but the book doesn’t seem to have a discernible order for types of item to help you find them. There are different levels of rarity instead, going from uncommon things (e.g. a jar of fireflies) to rare (e.g. a disposable persona) to legendary (e.g. a map of the multiverse).
Items generally have a thing they can do in the fiction as their rules. The Everlasting Bear tells you that it changes your size, it doesn’t say what that encompasses statistically as Quest has no statistics. It’s kind of a given that if you want to smash a door you couldn’t damage in your regular size, you either can do that effortlessly or if its reinforced then maybe you go to the dice. Nice and easy. Some items cost Action Points for special effects and weapons have a damage rating, but that’s about it for hard mechanics.
Like the character book, this generally does in a kind of cute tone, with a lot of little fun references and game-changingly weird effects.
As ever with Quest, I don’t think I’d run it for a specifically grim game. For something more light-hearted, these are perfect. The digital copies of these books also came with PDFs of the decks of characters and treasures, which would be great to hand out at a table, especially to kids learning RPGs. They’d get to see the art and have the mechanics in a very readable style.
Thursday
What a concept.
By Eli Seitz
Read before? Yes
Played? No
I love a good time loop, and this game allows you to play through a Russian Doll type scenario. This is Belonging Outside Belonging, so it’s got no GM which is an interesting ask for something pretty maintenance heavy like managing a repeating timeline.
The playbooks all have questions which they’re looking to answer, locations, vibes and a set of strong, regular and weak moves. The latter of which includes “Die” which triggers the ill-fated deaths of each other player, then resetting the timeline.
The choices of playbooks are:
Artiste
Misanthrope
Sellout
Trendsetter
The players also takes a setting element:
The Loop manages the loop itself and ends scenes
The City establishes scenes and helps to build location
The Home Team is your allies
The Away Team is your enemies
It’s an interesting looking game, it feels a little slight which is something fairly common with ZineQuest entries. In this case it’s because I feel the mechanics of the type of story being told might be a little tricky. I could see myself suggesting that we keep a bit of paper in the centre with the timeline as it resets to and any changes that we make to it as we go along.
Low Stakes
By Craig Campbell
Read before? No
Played? No
From Russian Doll, we move over to What We Do in the Shadows (and to a lesser extent Being Human).
Players take the role of supernatural entities (and occasionally a human) who have to cohabit together. Characters have a pool of Confidence to spend and a state of having Clout, which only one player holds at a time, but can be stolen by anyone.
The supernatural entities are: Vampires, Psychic Vampires, Werewolves, Ghosts, Mystics and yes, humans. But none of these are character classes, instead providing a power and some fictional positioning. Instead the character playbooks are:
The Anachronism
The Caregiver
The Grump
The Instigator
The Judge
The Peacock
The Rebel
The Stickler
These are all more based around personalities than anything else, each with their own things they have difficulty with and ways of snatching the Clout.
Stories have a quick outline which can be picked or determined randomly using a series of tables, each around different themes like, “Bureaucracy” and “Lost Pet”.
The core mechanics are based around improv rules (mainly yes… and), or die rolls depending on your Problem Areas and Clout. You’ll be adding complications as things change, then holding Confessional scenes like a lot of modern sitcoms, gaining an amount of confidence and/or giving people complications depending on what you do.
In a way, this feels like a competitive RPG, but in a fairly light-hearted way. Whoever has the Clout can finish the episode when they want, but someone else might steal it and try to finish things on their terms.
Paranormal, Inc
By Alicia Furness
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
I love the Carved from Brindlewood framework and what better to use with it than a Scooby Doo/Ghostbusters kind of game. Paranormal, Inc has players all taking the roles of people investigating the supernatural including:
The Scientist
The Skeptic
The Medium
The Intern
The Bookworm
The Ghost
Each of these characters gets a set of stats, a vibe and some moves. They also have Personal Hauntings which are kind of like the Masks in other CFB games, often modifying your stats or giving conditions.
A big innovation of this game is the lack of a GM. CfB games don’t have a fixed solution to a mystery anyway, but instead clues to find and locations and people to interact with. This game shares those roles between everyone, splitting a deck of playing cards into:
Locations (Hearts)
Clues (Clubs)
NPCs (Spades)
Paranormal Events (Diamonds)
These decks each have an entry for each card. Locations have Paint the Scene questions for the group to help flesh things out. NPCs have a quote to help give you an impression of them. Clues and Paranormal Events give you multiple choices of items in order to better pick what fits to the location and method of acquiring clues.
Each mystery has a goal to each and you go from location to location, interacting with what’s there, unearthing clues and hopefully piecing together a mystery by the end. Paranormal Events are spooky occurrences which could be a problem and normally go off whenever you enter a new location.
Like other CfB scenarios there’s an establishing question to kick things off, then the play can move naturally from there.
These are all elegant changes to the systems found in Brindlewood Bay. I still remember some of the early PbtA variants and how they felt like they weren’t doing enough to change the game. This feels like it’s captured the spirit of the system but does some great things to establish itself as its own thing.
Outside of the main book, there have been a lot of mysteries made, including a sequel to a Brindlewood Bay mystery, with “(Another) Night at the (Whaling) Museum”. Playbooks for a kid and a talking animal have been published, too.
I’ve hosted a game of Paranormal, Inc and really enjoyed the sense of momentum and light-hearted spookiness as we tried to uncover the truth of spooky events happening in a dark alleyway outside our intern’s flat.
The One Ring, Second Edition
By Free League Publishing
Read before? No
Played? Yes
Okay, this is a slightly embarrassing one to be looking at right before the end of the year, given I’ve been playing it intermittently throughout 2023. In my defence, I’m not GMing and I have looked at the starter set’s rules.
The One Ring is unsurprisingly a Lord of the Rings game, set between the trilogy and The Hobbit, where dark forces are growing, Bilbo’s back in his home and the Fellowship hasn’t formed yet.
Characters are fairly easily built, with a combination of a Heroic Culture and a Calling, then a few XP to help make people a bit more unique. You also customise them with gear, including some personal items, and choices of Distinctive Features.
The Heroic Cultures are:
Bardings
Dwarves of Durin’s Folk
Elves of Lindon
Hobbits of The Shire
Men of Bree
Rangers of the North
These give you some distinctive features, a set of skills, a lifestyle and a table of choices for your stat spread.
The callings are:
Captain
Champion
Messenger
Scholar
Treasure Hunter
Warden
These give you a few more favoured skills, a specific distinctive feature and a Shadow Path, which is how you can get pulled towards bad actions and corruption.
Rolls are made using a Feat Dice which is a d12 with 1-10, an eye of Sauron and a Gandalf rune for negative twists and magical successes, respectively. You also roll an amount of Success Dice (d6’s) equal to your dots in a skill, in a fighting proficiency and if you’ve got some signature gear that helps out. These all get rolled against a Target Number established from your three main stats of Strength, Heart and Will.
There are a number of modifiers to this. If you’re Favoured or Ill-Favoured then you roll an extra Feat Die and take the highest or lowest, respectively. You can spend Hope to add a Success Die to your roll (or to other people’s rolls) and if you’re Inspired then you get two Success Dice instead.
There are a number of sub-systems. Fights put people into different positions at the start of the round, allowing you to pick your turn order and giving access to some special actions based on where you are. You’ll be chipping Endurance off of each other until you start taking Wounds and then you know things are going to go badly. People didn’t get injured in Lord of the Rings and just walk it off, after all.
Exploration is a large part of the game, with groups traversing lands, encountering problems or sometimes sights that are quite lovely. You’ve got patrons who can give you abilities and missions, a Fellowship phase for downtime, levelling and healing. There’s also the Shadow, where you might gain shadow points for evil actions and you might start getting noticed by Sauron’s growing forces.
The book is nicely laid out to help with these phases and actions, but I think that possibly some reference sheets might have helped with. I’ve been a player in a game of this for ages, but I don’t know how much of all of this we’ve engaged with (or maybe others have and I’ve simply forgotten about things like the extra dice for signature items).
Towards the back there’s a lot of nice detail on locations in Eriador, a selection of enemies to fight which I thought was pretty small originally but there’s a good amount of variation within each broad category. Finally there’s a site-based adventure to get people started. I could say I didn’t read this book to spare the GM the adventure, but it’s been a while since we played it. I think being an almost 250 page hardcover book, I’m generally out of practice with them.
I’ve previously played the D&D 5E version of this, Adventures in Middle Earth, which I found turned Tolkien fantasy into basically D&D, with all the looting and fighting and threatening people in taverns that you expect in any game of that. The subsystems there felt bolted on in a cursory manner, not really gelling with 5E’s baseline mechanics. In this game, there may be a number of systems, but they’re all in dialogue with each other.
I don’t know if I’d run a full campaign, although I’ve got a couple of vague ideas for ones. I definitely want to try running the starter set adventures for folks as they were good fun to play and feature the players as hobbits.
Token
By Glowing Roots Press – Gabriel Robinson
Read before? No
Played? No
Another Rooted in Trophy game, this one’s more self-contained than Gabriel’s previous outing which acted as an epilogue to a Trophy Dark incursion.
This time, the game is only for two players: A Seeker and a Dweller, drawn to each other in the Forest. The Dweller is already there and has become strange, monstrous. The Seeker is breaking in from elsewhere, and both have their own instincts pushing them forwards and a secret which will only get revealed at the end of the game under certain conditions.
There are numerous tables to help roll or choose the elements of their character, or several scenarios at the end of the book to set things up.
Play goes back and forth, starting with the Seeker. Instead of the Hunt Roll from Trophy Gold there are Reflection Rolls, where you’re looking through the Forest for clues. These can give you a token, which you’ll need three of to conclude the game. If you fail or roll a partial success, The Forest gets a token. If you come up against a threat, you make a Challenge Roll which will give you a scar upon failure or help remove a token from The Forest.
You can help each other, even though you’re not directly in contact most of the time. You can offer an Enticement which will pass tokens back and forth, heal scars and unfortunately give The Forest a token. These also redefine your initial instinct, changing your original goal as you go.
If you get too scarred or The Forest gets three tokens, you lose. If either of you get three tokens, then the other player tells you their secret. An exchange of Tokens could happen, changing up the instinct one last time and bringing the game to an ending.
This looks like an interesting use of the Trophy system, and I’m curious to see how it plays.
I’m Sure You’re All Wondering Why I’ve Gathered You Here This Evening
By Logan Jenkins
Read before? Yes
Played? No
I watched the recent version of “And Then There Were None” a little while ago, when I was writing a murder mystery. The pitch of this game sounded a little like that, but maybe if you throw in Battle Royale as well.
The default setting has players brought to a remote island and a fancy manor. It’s wealthy owner is dead and all their wealth will go to one of you. Specifically, the one who survives until dawn.
That’s right, this is a competitive RPG. A manor is set up, people are given their motivations and secrets, Non-Player Guests are created and everyone’s set loose through the manor. The GM is the ‘Butler’, managing the game.
Players take a turn each hour, hiding, manipulating each other, rummaging through rooms and of course carrying out a lot of murders.
The game runs off a deck of cards with a number of oracles and guides to help interpret things. First up is your Secret, which determines your proximity to the Deceased. Then there’s the actions themselves, which often involve finding belonging cards which are determined by the suit and value, or spending them to make murder attempts.
Once characters die, they become ghosts in order to keep playing and haunt the remaining players. If you’re lucky, then you might even possess a body and be back in the game!
This is a one-shot game and lasts for seven rounds going from midnight to 7am. It feels like a good amount of time for something so heavily PVP. It also has a nicely light tone, which also helps. Finally, there are several different premade Deceaseds such as Santa, Xena, the head of a weird school, someone in a cyberpunk setting and more. That creates a nice variety to the game. I did build a Roll20 room for this filled with different weird icons, a map and deck of cards, but the game got cancelled, so hopefully I’ll get to try it one day.
Vampire Cruise
By Amanda Lee Franck
Read before? No
Played? No
Two vampires had what they thought was a fantastic idea: If they get a cruise ship them the human passengers will be like an all you can eat buffet of people who’ll come to them. The problem is, it’s not actually been a great idea and they’ve had to be less picky than they’d have liked, bringing random passengers along with a cult who booked a whole floor.
Vampire Cruise is a systemless adventure in the weird OSR style. The cruise ship’s given both top down and sideways maps in the centre and the inside covers of the book. It’s the kind of cruise ship that has a castle inside, a massive climbing wall, an auditorium and so many other things to explore. As this is a cruise with folks stuck at one place at sea you also have tables of guests, staff and vampires which are all good fun.
There’s a list of events which go from ping pong tournaments to matters of a more apocalyptic variety. It assumes the players will disrupt things so everything’s loosely laid out and easy to adjust, bending to react to the players. This is the main structure of the adventure, being more event-based than location-based. The locations are key, but they’re also often changing, with people moving through and different items popping up from tables.
And oh yes, the tables. There’s one for room service, jobs the group can have, items in storage and more.
Oh, and there’s a zombie shark, so that puts this up there as one of the best books I’ve read in this quest.
Eat the Reich
By Rowan, Rook & Decard – Grant Howitt & Will Kirkby
Read before? No
Played? No
It’s World War II, you’re a bunch of vampires and you’ve been dropped on occupied Paris with one mission: Drink all of Hitler’s blood.
What a concept. Do I need to mention any more?
I mean, I guess I probably should. It’s a Rowan, Rook and Decard game, so it’s got that gleeful chaotic energy to it. This is also a game that has premade characters and is probably not going beyond a session, the same way games like Lady Blackbird do.
The vampires are:
Iryna – a warlock and swordfighter
Nicole – the muscle and explosive expert
Cosgrave – a wideboy necromancer
Chuck – a cowboy!
Astrid – animalistic predator
Flint – a kind of adorable bat monster
The system has people build up dice pools using a stat and bonuses for gear and/or abilities. The GM rolls a threat pool at the same time and both players ditch anything that’s a 1-3. On a 4-5, players deal damage, defend or gain blood. On a 6 it’s a critical effect which doubles the previous result or activates special abilities. The GM just deals damage on a 4-6. This is a fairly simple system, as you’ll mostly be ripping and tearing through Nazis, killing your way to Hitler on his airship parked by the Eiffel Tower.
There’s a sector map, helping establish where players are and the level of threats as they close in on the tower from Sector Three and going inwards. Not every location will be used and the descriptions of the locations are economical with information. You won’t need much, just enough to get a sense of the place and the threats before you unleash vampire chaos.
There are some sub-boss type characters who provide threats about as weird as the player characters, and then there’s Hitler at the end of it. They do a good job of not making Hitler super-competent or amazing at things. Having listened to enough about Hitler’s reading habits and drug habits thanks to Behind the Bastards, I feel they’ve got a Hitler that’s very much in that space.
This is a fun-looking game and a beautful book. The design is stunning, the layout is messy without becoming an obstruction and the colours pop vividly. I read this in PDF form, but I can’t wait to get the physical version.
Conclusions
This was probably my best month for reading RPGs, I’m almost caught up with where I should be at this time of year. There might be time for one post for the first half of December, and then I’ll see you in 2024 for the last post and my thoughts on the quest.
I read a few extra books this month. I also have my history with Deadlands to talk about and a few other interesting items.
Deadlands: The Weird West
By Pinnacle Entertainment Group
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
I was a Deadlands fan a long time ago, buying the First Edition just before realising a Second Edition has recently been released. I ran a couple of campaigns of it over the years and got massively obsessed with the Doomtown CCG.
I played Savage Worlds once and it was fine. I killed the character of Paco from GMS Magazine in an Arthurian RPG, which might have been a bit bad, as he was playing my son. I remember this as he entered Onslaught Games once during Tabletop Day and shouted at me, calling me out as a murderer. I was in the middle of a game of Bang!, a Wild West betrayal game. So that didn’t do well to earn the trust of everyone round the table.
After enough time away from Deadlands, I decided to back this new edition. I got excited about it after talking to my old GM, Graham, who is an endless font of enthusiasm for games. Little did I realise it didn’t actually come with the current version of Savage Worlds. I quickly remedied that.
Savage Worlds is a toolbox game, one which I like, but often find the layout of a little frustrating as far as getting new players on board. Seriously, the book takes about 80 pages before giving any indication of how the system works.
Deadlands is primarily a setting book, getting people up to speed with the world in a way which is a lot more welcoming to newbies. There’s a little information for veteran players as they retconned a lot of the elements from the old editions and decided to actually do that in canon.
For those that don’t know, Deadlands is a game set in an alternate Wild West where things went decidedly spooky. There are mad scientists, magicians who gamble with dark forces and people who are kind of zombies.
The book is a fairly trad one, acting more as a list of different topics, providing the new character options, new gear, subsystems which are specific to Deadlands compared to Savage Worlds and new character types. There aren’t classes as such, but there are builds which ban be made with specific advantages:
Agents – Basically ‘Men in Black’.
Blessed – People whose religion allows them to perform miracles.
Chi Masters – Martial artists.
Harrowed – The undead, also a group you can join if you win and are lucky(?) enough to draw the right cards
Hucksters – The aforementioned people who gamble with the devil for magical power.
Mad Scientists – Inventors of strange devices (although it’s also a kind of magic but shh, don’t tell them.)
Shamans – Practitioners of Native American spirit magic.
Territorial Rangers – The newer version of the Texas Rangers
There are some new rules like Fear Levels, which to a meta-level players are generally trying to lower. The corruption that goes through the Weird West is measurable at the GM level and helps you work out how to narrate the way the world works in the fiction.
You get a broad look at the Weird West, going through each of the locations and a nice bestiary to give you a glimpse into what’s out there.
This is an overview, more than anything else. There’s an additional companion which has some slightly weirder, more specific things. Deadlands has a lot of adventures out there between the old and new editions, which flesh each area out nicely. It’s a fine book, but feels like you need a bit more in order to run a great Deadlands game.
I’ve run a long campaign of Deadlands using the Horror at Headstone Hill boxed set, which was possibly one of my favourite premade campaigns. I may be down on the book at a fun read, but it is a useful reference guide.
Monster of the Week
By Evil Hat & Generic Games – Michael Sands
Read before? No
Played? Yes
Here’s another part in this quest where Charlie makes a rod for his own back. The only Monster of the Week book I crowdfunded was the most recent, the Codex of Worlds. I’m going to be running this after The Betweek: Ghosts of El Paso, so I figured I’d read all three books even if two of them were surplus to requirements.
Monster of the Week is a classic PbtA game, one which has been revised over the years. Replicating Buffy, Supernatural and countless other monster hunting television shows, comics and books, you each take a playbook which embodies the kind of hunter you are:
The Chosen
The Crooked
The Divine
The Expert
The Flake
The Initiate
The Monstrous
The Mundane
The Professional
The Spell-Slinger
The Spooky
The Wronged
No offence to Monster of the Week but I started reading it, thinking it felt a little bit basic. The book won me over, but it took a little bit of time. The problem I’m finding after reading a lot of Carved from Brindlewood games is that they tend to make other mystery games feel a little shallower. MotW’s focus is quite different to a Brindlewood game, though. You’ve got a mystery each week, a monster of some sort, and you need to find out how to take them down.
You generally can’t harm the monster without doing some kind of research, or hunting up the food chain to it. The mystery’s fairly light, the fights fairly bouncy and then you’re on to the next one.
There are ‘season’ mysteries which are dealt with as a scaled up version of regular ones, and a few fun ways of playing with McGuffins like ‘Big Magic’ in order to allow weird rituals and one-off shenanigans which aren’t necessary to be reflected mechanically.
Monster of the Week: Tome of Mysteries
By Evil Hat & Generic Games – Michael Sands & Others
Read before? No
Played? No
You’ve got a fairly simple, if robust system, why not start having some fun with it? Monster of the Week’s an older PbtA, like Dungeon World, with a number of hacks and modules by other people. This supplement definitely helps breathe some new life into the game, as will the next one, something which DW never had.
First up are four new playbooks, not necessarily needed but still welcome.
The Gumshoe
The Hex
The Pararomantic
The Searcher
Then there’s a lot of advice including things like running convention or lunch break games, solo gaming and having different Basic Moves using the Weird stat to reflect science, intuition and so on.
Finally, there are a TON of mysteries. I like making my own, but I also love being able to use pre-built mysteries. There’s a lot to harvest here, whether it’s taking a whole mystery or just harvesting some for parts.
Monster of the Week: Codex of Worlds
By Evil Hat & Generic Games – Michael Sands, Marek Golonka & Others
Read before? No
Played? No
I’d promised to run Monster of the Week after a lot of badgering from one of my group. That was before this was crowdfunding, and I’m pleased that it came out as it feels like it adds a new factor which will really make a Monster of the Week campaign sing.
Inspired by Blades in the Dark, there are Team playbooks:
Agents in Black
Always on the Road
The Chosen One and the Entourage
Guardians of the Borderland
I.M.P.S.
Interdimensional Crisis Team
The Last Survivors
League of Double Lives
Mercenaries
Mystery Club
The Night Shift
Suburban Watch Group
Touring Band
Whistleblowers
Wild Hunt Fugitives
Each of these gives the group origins, benefits and a big bad out of several choices. There’s also a starting mystery for each of the groups, which is a good thing to have if you’re picking your team in the first session and need a bit of lead time to get the longer term plans ready.
There are also Other Worlds which are more specific campaign frames:
This Strange Old House
Gothic Century
Dreaming with the Gods
Monster Marches
Bone Spear
After that, there’s some guidance about making your own worlds, but there’s so much here to use which looks really fun. I’m definitely going to provide about 50% of the team playbooks as ones for my group to pick from. There are a few that just won’t get over and some I’d rather not run for, but a lot of them look great.
Galaxies in Peril
By Samjoko Publishing – Kyle Simons
Read before? No
Played? No
I love superheroes in comics, I like reading RPGs and seeing how they try to replicate superhero stories. I like the Simons brothers’ work, but I missed Worlds in Peril when it came out. That’s the predecessor to this game and used Powered by the Apocalypse mechanics. This game uses Forged in the Dark as its basis and promises games going from street level like Defenders or galactic level like the Fantastic Four.
Like Beam Saber, this was a big FitD book with a topic I like the idea of and just didn’t get round to reading. Similar to Beam Saber, I’m surprised at how close it sticks to the FitD framework. I’m used to things like Quietus and CBR+PNK which rip the system apart to do fantastic things. There are some systems like Hack the Planet which doesn’t go that far and still feels like it’ll be great.
This version of the system is interesting. It feels like it sticks close to Blades and it has made some understandable changes. You have Resilience instead of Stress as a way of reframing your pool of power. Your powers are primarily based around fictional positioning and then you also pick three levels of special effect that cost you Resilience. Luckily there are some examples, although they’re broad enough that they scale to crazy levels which aren’t always going to be valid for every type of hero.
The playbooks are few, with some very specific examples in mind, and are separate from the types of powers you might have:
The Agent
The Inventor
The Leader
The Occultist
The Vigilante
There are also only three types of team:
Detectives – Taking on cases and crimes.
Explorers – Learning new things, exploring the world and the universe
Rebels – Fighting bad guys and fighting for causes
The game has a really nice way of physically mapping out your campaign with maps and stickers (or the virtual equivalent of those).
There are some interesting ideas here and some good reframing of some FitD elements, but I do worry that the playbooks can’t quite make some superhero characters. I tried to put together a Fantastic Four with them and there wasn’t really a role for Johnny Storm and a lot of choices were more ‘making do’ with what was there.
Brinkwood: Blood of Tyrants
By Far Horizons Co-op – Erik Bernhardt & Others
Read before? No
Played? No
The pitch for this is a great one: A fae-powered Robin Hood and Merry Men fighting a vampiric Sheriff of Nottingham. It’s also Forged in the Dark, which is always a sure bet with me.
Brinkwood is set in a fictional fantasy land where the rich have turned into vampires, using coins mixed with blood. They control and oppress the public and have one of three specific bosses to pick from, flavouring their corruption over the land.
The Duke who represents industrialisation and dehumanising the poor
The Countess who represents decadence turned to rot
The Baron represents all-consuming, gluttonous late stage capitalism
Characters are part of a group who fled into the titular Brinkwood and bargained with the fae. They carry out daring raids and attacks, you know, regular Merry Men stuff. To help you, characters put on one of several masks which give them extra abilities and have their own XP tracks. The masks each represent a different fae and make certain demands of their wearer:
Judgement
Lies
Riot
Ruin
Terror
Torment
Violence
Characters have a Folk which determines their look and an Upbringing which gives them traits and associates. There are classes, but they’re just a selection of action dots rather than whole playbooks.
There’s a structure to the campaign, albeit not in the same strict framework as Band of Blades.
I love the look of this game and I want to give it a try at some point. When I’m not racing through the rest of the RPGs I’ve Kickstarted, then I’ll be checking out the extra book with all the stretch goal material as I’m sure it’ll be fun.
Thirsty Sword Lesbians
By Evil Hat & Gay Spaceship Games – April Kit Walsh
Read before? Yes
Played? No
There are a lot of good fantasy games using Powered by the Apocalypse mechanics. There was a time when it was pretty much just Dungeon World, which tried (to various success) to ape Dungeons & Dragons. The cool thing about these later games is that they strike out, aiming to do something different. They each use the genre emulation of PbtA design philosophies to do a specific thing and in this case, it’s to tell very queer fantasy stories about lesbians who fight with swords, declare their love, act like chaotic disasters and generally have a lot of fun.
When I first read this, I thought it was a very standard PbtA framework, but in a bit of a modern She-Ra style. Rereading it I’m definitely more down with what’s going on here (not that I’m against anything being like the modern She-Ra, this is one of multiple Kickstarters I’ve backed on that premise).
The game does a lot to help with the main aspects of sword fighting and flirting. There’s even a bullet point list of flirts like, “tilt up their chin with the point of your sword” or “wipe a smudge of engine oil from their cheek”. The fighting and the flirting are pretty closely linked, as one of the options for the fight move includes a flirt or provocation of the enemy to gain a string on them. Yes, there are Strings like Monsterhearts, just slightly less transactional feeling.
As well as basic moves around things like fighting there are Heartstring moves, which are how you figure people out, influence people or get smitten. There’s also a “Finally kiss, in a dangerous situation” move which is frankly, perfect for this game.
The playbooks are as follows:
The Beast
The Chosen
The Decvoted
The Infamous
The Nature Witch
The Scoundrel
The Seeker
The Spooky Witch
The Trickster
The book itself is over 200 pages, with almost half of it being settings and adventures to use. They’re both specifically different, with campaign frames to base things in (e.g. cyberpunk, a coffee shop) or more directed adventures (e.g. disrupt a wedding or Basically Fire Emblem: Three Houses!)
I’m not a lesbian, I’m a cis guy, but I like the tone of the book. Like Bluebeard’s Bride, there’s a little stage fright about doing something so specifically for women and doing right by it. Some of the campaign frames don’t entirely appeal to me more as I’ve got other things which might do that genre, or I’m just not a fan of that thing (the coffee shop one, for instance). I love a lot of the settings and adventures, the one where you disrupt a wedding which has been ordered by a Heterosexual empire and the Three Houses one are big favourites. I’d probably run one of those, although I can see myself using this more for fun one-shots rather than full campaigns.
Wildsea
By Mythopeia – Felix Isaacs
Read before? No
Played? No
The world ended not from pollution or disease, but from trees springing up everywhere, so high no one would be able to see the ground. People and creatures alike changed to adapt to this new, weird world.
A long time later, people have made their homes on treetops, on the mountaintops which are barely visible and on ships. Oh, the ships. They sail across the leaves with blades and chainsaw to rip a path before the trees grow back. People make their lives on this grand sea, whether it’s providing tours, running supplies between settlements or even daring to explore the depths beyond where the sun reaches.
You play characters made from a combination of three parts:
Bloodlines:
Ardent – what’s left of humanity.
Ektus – big cactus people.
Gau – living fungus.
Ironbound – half-ghost contructs.
Ketra – translucent people from down below.
Mothryn – cool looking moth people.
Tzelicrae – colonies of spiders living in a bipedal husk.
There are also several origins which include people raised on ships, on the few scraps of land that surface occasionally, and even ghosts.
The final part of a character their current post, which there are several of, including pirates, chefs, repairmen, gunslingers, scribes, wreckers and more.
Characters are formed of parts from each of these three things, including an Edge, Skills, Drives and Gear.
You’ll be making challenges with a fairly standard d6 system where you roll a pool of dice and look for your highest result. A 6 is a success, a 4-5 is a partial success and 1-3 is a failure. Doubles add a twist and Cuts remove your highest results to reflect difficulty. There are also tracks. A lot of tracks. They’re basically like clock in Blades of the Dark, although there are also bits of guidance about making tracks where events pop off at certain times. Some character aspects like your massive height can protect you but mark its track. The same with armour. Locations and problems also have tracks to mark things like something in the leaves, following you. It’s a simple system, but it looks like it works well here.
The book has an explanation of the elements of characters before the character creation which felt a little jarring, but once I got to the listings of character elements I was a lot more impressed by it.
The back of the book has a lot of explanation about the world at the different levels of the trees, from the very treetops to vague rumblings of what goes on underneath. It’s a sinister world down there, and something I think a supplement will be covering. You get ideas about settlements and hazards, as well as a lot of lists of creatures, infections, towns, groups and so on. There’s a lot to work with which I always find necessary in a very specific, unique world like this.
Slugblaster: Kickflip over a Quantum Centipede!
By Wilkie’s Candy Lab – Mikey Hamm
Read before? No
Played? Yes (beta version)
I love Forged in the Dark games. I also love Tony Hawks Pro Skater. Here’s a game which combines both of those and then mixes a whole junk drawer of random stuff as well and it is glorious.
Slugblaster sees the players taking on the role of a gang of youths who travel from their home dimension on Null (rhymes with dull and rightfully so) all across the multiverse into strange places to skate, face off against rival gangs and generally get into scrapes.
The roles are all fairly broad:
The Grit
The Guts
The Smarts
The Heart
The Chill
Each of these get a budget of Boost and Kick to help add dice to your normal pool of just 1d6 or to increase the impact of your result, respectively. You can also get Dares which are the equivalent of the Devil’s Bargains from Blades in the Dark.
Each playbook also gets some traits, some gear and an arc of things which happen for an amount of Style or Trouble. Each player also gets a sweet device which will help them perform tricks or face off against things from the multiverse when you accidentally land in a world that’s all monsters or about to explode or whatever.
The vibe of the book is very fun, very slapdash 90’s/early 00’s through a nostalgia haze of Crazy Taxi, The Adventures of Pete & Pete and so on.
Once you’ve been through the multiverse having fun (and there are so many different worlds provided both from the author and stretch goal writers!) you’ll go back home and have Trouble to contend with. Real life might come crashing down around you, there might be problems for your crew. You’ll be gaining and banking Trouble during your runs, gradually seeing it go up and knowing that it’ll be there, waiting for you when you get home.
I ran a demo using the earlier version of the rules and my group did some sick stunts on a mech graveyard before their rivals could. They also accidentally blew up one of the mechs and skated away from the explosion in a video which got them a lot of cred with other Slugblasters. It was a riot and I’m looking forward to revisiting this game someday.
The House Doesn’t Always Win
By Michael “Wheels” Whelan
Read before? No
Played? No
I’m a fan of Dicebreaker and Wheels from their staff has created a couple of games. This one’s an interesting game about resistance and fighting forces greater than yourself. I admit with the playing card style keeps making me think it was a heist game, but it’s a broader ‘resistance’ sort of thing.
The system uses a set of playing cards, with a fun ‘push your luck’ kind of system. The GM sets a difficulty number and a suit of cards for the skill used. Clubs are brute force, Hearts are persuasion and Spades are Finesse. Players draw card by card until they either get the number of cards matching the difficulty or four of any other suit, which causes a failure. They can choose to stop early for lesser failures, and if they draw any face card matching their suit they succeed.
Characters have a fairly simple sheet and are made by picking one of the face cards. You reduce difficulty for one of the three card types and add it for another. There are also abilities you can pick, modifying the way you interact with cards a bit further.
The Diamonds are laid out in a row where they can get swapped into the player deck, acting as wild cards. The Jack, Queen and King of Diamonds are the targets of the mission the players are on. For a one-shot, you’re only taking down one of them. For a full campaign, you’re going through three missions to take them all down.
The system is without a default setting but has tools to help make your own missions, as well as a generous helping of premade scenarios. This is the sort of game where I’d probably go for one of those rather than making up my own, just as it’s more likely to hit my table when I’m demoing a one-shot.
I’d be interested in running this at some point, I think the card-by-card draw will cause that fun Dread-like tension where even though you’re slowing down the action for the resolution mechanic, the suspense will keep people’s attention on the table.
The Sol Survivor
By W.H. Arthur
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
First of all some due diligence: I’m a friend of Arthur’s and playtested this game for him.
The Sol Survivor is a one-shot story game about accompanying the sun in mortal form across the land after being shot out of the sky. As allies ranging from merchants to dragons, you’re aiming to restore it to power in the sky. Each player will take control of the sun from time to time, while everyone else plays friends, allies and travellers who accompany them on their journey. Some players might be the same person for the whole game, some might drift in and out of their lives or have a fleeting glimpse.
Similar to Lovecraftesque the group will take turns being The Narrator, The Sun, an Ally or simply adding extra flavour/NPCs to scenes.
The sun has a ‘faith counter’ d6 which they’re looking to keep on their travel while they face threats. The game will keep going until the journey reaches a natural conclusion or the Sun has lost all their faith, then they check against multiple questions and draw cards, looking at the lowest result. This is compared against a track of all faceup and facedown companion cards, to see if they make it back to the heavens and if they can bring themselves to shine again. This means that while technically you can try to get the Sun back up in the sky at any point, you want to keep going to gain more companion cards, but also don’t want to push your luck as the Faith of The Sun may dwindle and vanish.
There’s a bestiary which gives a different person or creature for every value and colour from a deck of cards, allowing a good amount of variation in both threats and companions. The interpretation of them in either role is interesting to figure out in play, and worked better than I first thought it would during our playtest.
This sort of system is interesting to tell the story of an individual protagonist even if they’re not as much of a focus for players as whatever ally they’re taking the role of. Arthur released an SRD which does make this an easy target for hacking into different tales as well as this one.
Our Shores: Navathem’s End
By Santa Posadas & Pamela Punzalan
Read before? No
Played? No
This is part of the Our Shores trilogy of games where Sandy Pug helped South-East Asian authors bring their games to Kickstarter, which isn’t normally possible.
A PbtA-ish game, Navathem’s End is a high fantasy game where you play the agents of a Tower, an organisation spread throughout the three continents to try and stop apocalyptic events from happening. Previously in this world there were nigh-apocalyptic events thanks to a cult. The Core Seven rose up and stopped the apocalypse, then becoming beings of worship for people. In the new age, a mage woke The Colossals, gigantic gods which the agents must put down.
Characters pick from different types of Agents:
The Crafter
The Command
The Control
The Medic
The Scholar
The Shield
The Weapon
Each of these has skills which are close to moves in PbtA games, and three stats: Blood, Crown and Will.
There are several Origins which give some background questions and EXP triggers. While there are some core ones listed in the main book, the back also has several alternative ones to choose from. There’s also a Hubris Bond, which is a link to one of the Core Seven which the character has, giving them more EXP triggers. A theme of the game is hubris and as heroic as these foundational heroes were, their hubris is something which echoes through their bloodline and their students.
There are also several types of magic which can be used to add to your playbook if you want, being either a Mageborn or Awakened Mage:
Biochaotic – Life mages
Fulgurchaotic – Storm mages
Pruinchaotic – Frost mages
Pyrochaotic – Fire mages
Telechaotic – Psychics
A big difference from other PbtA games is the rolling mechanic. You roll 2d6 on a scale of success, but on a 14+ you succeed too much. Again, hubris is a big element here. You get EXP for failing or succeeding too hard, and there’s an Advantage/Disadvantage system which uses rerolls instead of the “Roll & Keep 1 more die” version that a lot of other games use. Skills don’t seem to add new moves, but modify existing ones which is good as there are a lot of moves. The game suggested that Forged in the Dark was an influence as well as PbtA and in the Moves you can see how some of the aspects of Forged in the Dark games have been adopted.
The world is thoroughly detailed and fortunately has a number of campaign seeds to help people get an impression of the sort of story that you’ll be telling. There’s some information on how to make your group’s Tower and who staffs it, which will help drive up investment in it and their mission. There are some great example Colossi for the group to take on, with illustrations showing just how epic they are in scope.
I admit I found some of the language a little odd on my first pass through the book. I think part of it is getting used to a different take on systems and styles which I’m used to a slightly more prescribed version of, similar to how Fantasy World read quite differently to Fellowship, being an Italian PbtA game.
Our Shores: Maharlika
By Joaquin Kyle Saavedra
Read before? No
Played? No
The third of the Our Shores books (after Navathem’s End and Capitalites which I read much earlier in the year).
This is a mech game, but with a few differences. People went into space and there were massive alien monsters to fight in the galaxy of Arkipelago as people were colonising it. Eventually, the remaining people broke into massive corporations and went to war with each other as well. During this time, Meka were developed and used as massive battle suits.
Unlike other mech games, the Meka are piloted by spirit warriors, the titular ‘Maharlika’ who can commune with the entities that inhabit the Meka in place of the AI of other mech fiction. There’s a lot more mysticism involved in communing, but at the same time this is still very much a mech game.
You’ll be making your characters who roll on a kind of PbtA-style scale of success. As a human you’ll roll 1d10+stat, in a Meka you’ll roll 1d20 instead, reflecting that difference of scale. A 10+ is a success, 6-9 is a partial success and 1-5 is a failure. This makes the odds feel a little closer to Quest as far as the ladder of success once you’re in a Meka, although with modifiers, you should be capable to a lot when you’ve suited up.
Unlike PbtA games, there aren’t moves to make, in fact, like a lot of tactical RPGs there are several combat actions to take instead. There are references to a grid and to spaces. It’s the kind of thing which feels closer to trad games. It’s always interesting to see an indie RPG do things to play in the more tactical combat field, although its often not quite my flavour.
The book has a ton of Meka components to make your particular version, also corporation-specific components and a ton of example Meka to help make things easier. I think for a mech game, I’m still more likely to go with Beam Saber instead of this, but it was an interesting read.
That’s two thirds of this month’s RPG reading done, just one more to go.
Okay, crunch time, I’ve got this month and next to try and read everything I’ve backed on crowdfunding platforms. I’m ahead more than I have been for most of the year and I’ve been beasting the marathon for this month. Let’s do this!
The Artefact
By Jack Harrison
Read before? No
Played? No
The field of solo RPGs has led to some fantastic ideas over the last few years, with people telling all kinds of strange stories by themselves with just a short game and a few tools.
Here, you play the story of an artefact, a magical device with its own will, possibly one that’s more useful than my friend’s mace which would speak when it detected a slope.
You pick one of several items, each of which is a scenario in itself:
The Weapon
The Shield
The Instrument
The Ornament
The Deck
The Footwear
The Staff
The Tome
The Automaton
You then play through the stories of the owners of each item, asking questions of it as it goes from owner to owner throughout the years. As part of the process you draw the item and then modify it as time goes on. The owners are picked or randomly determined with questions to ask about them. Once they’re done with you, stop and rest for an amount of time based on whether you’re immediately found or left alone for up to a decade. Like Morningstar’s The Skeletons, this is something which can nicely pace out real time by simply pausing what you do.
Palanquin
By Genesis of Legend – Jason Pitre
Read before? Yes
Played? No
A short zinequest game about a royal Heir who’s fleeing for her life. Her family’s been murdered in a coup, but the game’s not about that, it’s about the journey. The GM plays the young Heir and the players take the role of the people trying to smuggle her out to freedom, each given a name, backstory and role:
Ulu, the Veteran
Xanling, the Scholar
Tanalor, the Magister
Madani, the Faithful
Peryani, the Hunter
Illic, the Shadow
You can see how each of them has a specific focus which will help them over others deal with protecting The Heir. They also have reasons they might be seen as not pulling their weight, and links to The Heir from their background. This includes Illic, who was a criminal helping The Heir with her escape.
They each get chances to save the Heir in each situation, and talk about their past, their motives and so on. The more they explore things within the group, the better the dice pool the Heir has gets and if they all fail to save her, she’ll roll and try to save herself. Once you’re done with the listed sets, you’ll reach an epilogue where the fate of everyone is decided.
It looks like a light, neat little game and a good one-shot that tells. you everything it needs for the scenario, giving you a lot of space to work with and develop.
Candlelight
By Glowing Roots Press – Gabriel Robinson
Read before? No
Played? No
I’ve made it pretty clear through my words over the years that I’m a big Trophy fan. When I saw third parties starting to make their own Trophy games, I had to check them out. Gabriel Robinson’s a person who’s contributed to official Trophy books and other Gauntlet work including the recently released (at time of writing) Silt Verses RPG, so I knew this was going to be a good time.
Candlelight is a game that can stand alone, or act as a sequel to a Trophy Dark game. In it you play the souls of the dead, trying to work their way back through the way they came and away from the forest that is trying to consume them. Along the way they have baggage to deal with and things which they may encounter trying to stop their progress.
The game mostly uses the same system, but flips the five Rings into Gates that you’re traversing. You have a Hope score and a Despair score, both of which end your game when they are maxed out. A success on a roll will help raise your hope.
Instead of Rituals you have Dirges and instead of Ruin rolls you’ll be making a Reckoning to see whether your Hope or Despair goes up in a horrific moment.
There are still Devil’s Bargains, but this time it may summon an entity from the Forest which may be its own problem.
The game explains how to make characters from your dead Trophy treasure hunters, but also gives tools to convert other games into Candlelight if you get a TPK.
This was a good read, like so many Trophy games, and is definitely one which I want to try if my weekly group play another Trophy Dark game.
Sunken
By Mike Martens
Read before? No
Played? No
Another third party Trophy game, this one rewrites the Trophy Dark rules and takes one of the incursions from the main book, remixing it to make a new tale of familiar horrors. You then also get another couple of nautical scenarios to round it out.
While this is a self-contained book, it also has a few changes to the Trophy Dark system.
You sail under a specific flag, which gives you your Drives
Magic is represented by prayers to the Saints
Light and Dark Dice are replaced with The Flesh (light dice), The Deep dark dice) and The Heavens (a new, divine dice). Calling to The Heavens replaces Devil’s Bargains and provides some fortune if it is your highest roll, but advances your Fall if it is your lowest
A Covenant of Silence is the remixed scenario, where the grew find a ghost shop from the East Passage Company. They loot and investigate, but the cargo might not take kindly to their presence. This takes influence from things like Alien.
The Wreck of Futility ruins the characters’ ship in some ice, all too near a strange vessel with mechanical beings. This is inspired by The Borg form Star Trek and The Terror
The Colossus Beneath is a bit closer to Bioshock, with a strange culture found under the sea, decadent and on the edge of its own ruin.
You Got a Job on the Garbage Barge
By Amanda Lee Franck
Read before? No
Played? No
This is a fun OSR-ish dungeon all set on a garbage barge. You got a job on the barge and there’s a lot going wrong with it. There are NPCs roaming which you can interact with, and so many critters. There’s also a lot of trash, some is useful, some is sold in shops and some is just… there. You get locations like “The Rebar Forest” which is a maze of rebar on some metal scrap. “The Fox Bilge” which contains a fox snake. It’s all gloriously messy and weird.
Given the kind of place this is, there’s an adventure, such as anything can be called that here, called, “Your first job is to keep the gas lake from exploding” so good luck with that.
A critter from the garbage barge
Personally, I think I’d probably run this with Into the Odd, Electric Bastionland or Troika, as those are the kind of weird OSRs that are taking my fancy at the moment.
i’m gonna be
By Laura Lovelace
Read before? No
Played? No
A short solo game about going on a journey, using a mixtape. There’s one of these already called Ribbon Drive by Avery Alder and it’s very good. That’s specifically a group experience though, and this is a solo one with a bunch of tables to work out what you encounter as well as how to tie the track on the mixtape to it.
It’s a shorter game than Ribbon Drive, taking just one person’s mixtape rather than swapping regularly between multiple people’s. The comparison’s a bit unfair, but it is there. Personally I’m more likely to go through this, as it feels like the kind of game I could simply do by myself with some dice, a notepad and a mixtape in an afternoon.
Another thing of note is that I have a PDF now, but I thought I only had this in its tiny physical edition which is very cute and came with stickers.
Disk Horse 1: Off to the Races
By Fiona Maeve Geist
Read before? Yes
Played? No
This game is a statement about the Satanic Panic, which affected roleplayers a long time ago, primarily in America. I never experienced this myself being someone who started roleplaying in the 90’s in a fairly self-contained group who only encountered other roleplayers several years into our gaming time. Still, it’s a fascinating time. We’ve all read Dark Dungeons, some of us have seen the film adaptation of it and the Tom Hanks film, Mazes & Monsters.
Disk Horse is an RPG about playing an RPG. One player is a private detective trying to deal with their own baggage but also trying to prove that Mazes & Monsters is evil, leading to all kinds of odd behaviour. They have a set of character creation details for themselves, then the players have theirs with all kinds of personal goals and character quirks. One player plays the GM who has their own set of rules, they have a game they don’t really know the rules for and their moves involve mostly making things up and pretending to look for rules.
It looks very silly and fun, although it might be better with either a physical version or printouts of each characters’ creation rules to help speed things along. I love the idea of this kind of weird shit and it’s a fun read, even if it feels like it’ll be a hard sell at the table given the modern lack of familiarity to this era.
Night Reign
By Sinister Beard Games – Oli Jeffery
Read before? No
Played? No
Another Rooted in Trophy game, Night Reign feels like quite a departure and thematically, a little closer to Blades in the Dark by way of the Hitman games.
You were servants of a noble house who were murdered, and now you’re going to take a vicious, bloody revenge on the people who did it. The city is of the kind of technological level as Doskvol, but the weird thing about isn’t an endless night, but a nightly rain which is strange, slick, toxic and can power things.
The game gives a list of different houses, their specialities and their rulers as a kind of shopping list of murder. There’s also a scenario at the end of the book which makes for a good example of how to design future hits.
The system uses cards instead of dice, and some tokens to show your progress in an incursion. Your character draws cards based on their dots in a talent and on any cover identity you’re adopting. You draw cards one at a time, aiming to get as close to 21 at possible without going over. Sound familiar? Odd that. There are tables of results for different types of roll (stealth, guile, violence). If you stop early it might be a problem, but at least you can stop. If you go over, you’re fucked and things go really badly.
As well as a deck of cards with Aces to Tens, you also have a second deck with face cards, representing The Sisters. You can draw a card from their deck to guarantee a result of a 10, but things are going to get weirder for you. The Sisters are almost like the opposite of Trophy’s Saints, entities that you curse, that you wish on other people and try to avoid the notice of.
This is a 50 page game, so the land of Laefendport doesn’t have a massive amount of coverage, but there’s enough to start you off and you can build from there. The same with the incursions. It’s really interesting to see how a game like this can so briefly evoke a unique world and structure for a campaign.
Pasión de las Pasiones
By Magpie Games – Brandon Leon-Gambetta
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
Pasión de las Pasiones is a game about telenovelas. I’ve never watched a telenovela, but I know soap operas, I like good, dramatic soap operatic stories from my years putting in time with Eastenders to my love of The OC and X-Men. Even if like me, you don’t know proper telenovelas, Brandon Leon-Gambetta perfectly explains through his writing and through the mechanics of the game how to reflect that style of storytelling.
This is a game of pensively looking out of a window, throwing evidence in an easily accessible waste paper bin, making a glorious entrance down a set of stairs, having a heated stand off with your twin and riding your horse into a courtroom. It’s a game that doesn’t half arse anything.
This is PbtA, but without stats. Instead, each move asks you a couple of questions which gives a +1 to your roll when you answer ‘yes’ to them. Each playbook also gets a question which is unique to them. This creates a roll of 2d6 plus up to three, like a standard PbtA spread and helps encourage you to act certain ways or do certain things in the fiction.
The playbooks are:
La Belleza – Beautiful, showy and able to draw people in, but also able to be evasive with giving their heart away.
El Caballero – The guileless blunt instrument of a hero, dashing, and easily manipulated.
La Doña – The scheming matriarch, caring at times and quietly vengeful.
La Empleada – The employee, naive and in over their head.
El Gemelo – The twin of another playbook, the opposite of what they are, but looking uncannily like them.
El Jefe – The boss, wealthy, in charge and violent, but often through underlings.
The Treasure at the End of This Dungeon is an Escape from This Dungeon and We Will Never Escape This Dungeon
By Riverhouse Games
Read before? Yes
Played? No
I already liked Riverhouse Games’ games, but this kind of title would have made me instantly back it. The title feels like a post-rock band’s album name. Maybe it will be.
You are adventurers, each with their own rules, trying to navigate a dungeon with a small number of rooms. You will always be going through these rooms. They may change gradually and you may change gradually, but you will always be going through these rooms. You may die. You may scream. You may question your existence, but you will always be going through these rooms.
The adventurers include:
The Muscle, who protects people and can’t due, but removes rules whenever they would.
The Mage who loses spells but gains secrets at they die, also gaining the ability to merge spells.
The Thief… shh, their rules are secret and I’m not going to spoil it.
The Healer has a selection of miracles and oaths they have to serve, but change each time they die
The rooms each have their own rules and elements that are expanded on as you go:
The Gatekeeper
The Puzzle
The Trick
The Battle
The Treasure at the End of this Dungeon is an Escape from this Dungeon and we will Never Escape This Dungeon
I love this idea for a game and ended up reading Fractals Fractals Fractals Fractals, the book of extras which were wisely kept separate from the main book, which should remain pure. The additional character classes and rooms are a great addition to an already fascinating game, and will help to keep things interesting if you play it multiple times.
Beam Saber
By Austen Ramsey
Read before? No
Played? No
This is another one which has been a long time coming, only got a final version this year, but because I’m reading these mostly in the order of their campaign on Kickstarter, here it is.
Beam Saber is a space-faring mech game where multiple factions are all fighting over Earth, once abandoned and now returned as a nice token victory. There are broad factions: Autocracy, Corporatocracy, Democracy, Oligarchy and Theocracy. These allow people to flavour them for their own campaign or use the specific examples later in the book.
The game itself is Forged in the Dark and I’m not sure why, but I expected it to be a lot less Forged in the Dark than it ended up being. The gear system’s quite different to allow the creation of mechs and vehicles for missions. There are also some skills which are specific to the mechs, mainly about moving and smashing things while piloting. It’s a good change which fits the theme, unlike some other FitD games where the theme and system clash a bit.
The playbooks are:
The Ace
The Bureaucrat
The Empath
The Envoy
The Hacker
The Infiltrator
The Officer
The Scout
The Soldier
The Technician
There are also several team playbooks which will help direct the types of missions you’ll be going on:
The Consulate
The Frontline
The Logistics
The Mechanised Cavalry
The Profiteers
The Recon
The R&D
The [REDACTED]
I admit my first thought with a mech game is that it would focus pretty much exclusively on combat, but I’m interested to see what the other squads would be like. They also explain why you get playbooks like The Bureaucrat. It feels like you’ll need to work with the players to make sure everyone’s on the same page.
Because this is a space-faring mech game, there are quite a few differences to things like the new actions and how they work in fights, how downtime works and development of your tech. Handily there is a premade campaign, descriptions of the different powers to work for, locations and example mechs. The latter is really useful as some players might not want to have to build their mechs or to have a baseline to modify.
I grew to enjoy Mobile Suit Gundam, primarily through the Gundam Warriors series of video games and through watching the entirety of Mobile Suit Gundam shortly after. I haven’t seen anything since then, but I loved the last mech game I ran (a preview version of the sadly abandoned Souls of Steel). I was originally a little intimidated by the size of the book and the many, many draft copies which happened over the last few years, but reading it was nice and easy. I’d be interested in trying this game at some point.
World Wide Wrestling 2E
By NDP Design – Nathan Paoletta
Read before? First Edition
Played? No
I’m not a wrestleboy. My main knowledge of wrestling comes from The Mountain Goats’ “Hail the Champ”, a season of Glow and whenever War Rocket Ajax talk about wrestling. That said, it’s a thing that’s adjacent to a lot of the fan spaces I’m in, it’s ludicrous, entertaining and has a fun mix of reality & fantasy to it.
World Wide Wrestling is a Powered by the Apocalypse game where people replicate the running of a wrestling show. I’ve seen some games which had you build wrestlers and then fight them against each other like it was a combat in D&D. In this game, you’re booked to win or lose the show. You’re generating Heat with your opponent and trying to make the Audience pop. It’s not all predetermined though, as sometimes fate will get in the way, sometimes you’ll have a different idea from what Creative set up for you.
This is the second edition of the game and includes a few changes, a number of which I don’t recall as it’s been years since I read first edition and I never got to play it. I do know it has a lot of International Incident incorporated into it.
Playbooks include:
The Ace
The Anointed
The Anti-Hero
The Call-Up
The Clown
The Fighter
The Hardcore
The Jobber
The Luchador
The Luminary
The Manager
The Monster
The Provocateur
The Technician
The Veteran
Some of these sound a little samey to an outsider, which I’m sure first edition was a little more clear at, but there are probably reasons behind the changes. A nice touch is a guide to complexity for the roles.
The gameplay loop is in the form of a show, where you cut promos, Creative sets up matches between players and NPWs (non-player wrestlers). There are several different formats which can be called upon to mix things up and stop games from getting too formulaic. There’s a fun mechanic to turn players whose wrestlers aren’t involved into announcers, giving a little mechanical push if they want, mainly to help encourage drama.
I’ve had WWW on my list of games to try for a while now, more for one-shots than anything else. I’ve been thinking about making an alt-UK where the counties are like the old wrestling territories. The other thing I want to do, more in a one-shot capacity, is to have a wrestling league where the personas are all based on the group’s old characters. A rabbit, a Night Witch, a weird little gnome. I reckon it’d be a fun love letter to previous games and the kind of bombastic personas that would make for an entertaining game.
This month’s books are going to be split into three parts, as I managed to get that much reading done. Next up will include me making a rod for my own back as I read several Monster of the Week books, only one of which is technically part of this quest.
I’ve got a few more games this time, with a few interesting later PbtAs which do some interesting things with the system. Ther may not be many, but I’ve actually had a pretty good go at running all of them.
Voidheart Symphony
By Miranda McJanda – UFO Press
Read before? No
Played? No
Legacy: Life Among the Ruins had a spin-off called Rhapsody of Blood which was a kind of Castlevania legacy game, as generations of heroes fought evil castles in the past. Voidheart Symphony remixes that idea and brings it to the present.
No longer are you generations of heroes, but normal people living in a normal world. But something’s festering inside it. A wound in the world which is spreading through susceptible minds. The Castle forms around them in a strange dreamspace and starts to infect reality.
In the human realm, players have to deal with life’s problems and their investigation by rolling 2d6 against various gauges representing health, money, notoriety and so on. If both dice beat the gauge then you’re fine, one means a success at cost and neither means bad things.
When you find a way into your enemy’s specific bit of The Castle then it becomes a Powered by the Apocalypse game, with your characters getting their own different set of stats and cool weapons. You can also take items through with you, imbuing them with extra abilities and calling on your friendships in the real world for help.
I’ve not played Persona 5, but I’ve seen my partner play some of it and it’s a heavy influence here. You live out a normal life, go into a strange other realm, fight your way through and take down a boss to improve the world.
Character playbooks are:
The Authority
The Captive
The Harlequin
The Heretic
The Icon
The Inhuman
The Penitent
The Provider
The Watcher
Each of these have fun things they can do in the real and dream worlds, and are further customised by taking tarot-themed Covenants with PCs and NPCs alike.
This is a big game with a lot going on. I love that PbtA games use reference sheets and they’re a good indicator of what to expect from a game. This has a LOT of reference sheets. I’ve heard an actual play which flowed pretty well and I love the idea of something which feels like a Persona/Hunter: The Reckoning sort of thing. While Rhapsody didn’t do well with my group, hopefully in time I’ll be able to test this out on them.
Electric Bastionland RPG
By Chris McDowall – Bastionland Press
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
Bastion is the most important city. A sprawling, growing mess. Players have failed at a career and have £10,000 in debt. They’re going to get it by going on dangerous adventures.
I’ve listed out character classes or occupations for these games. I won’t be doing that here, as the majority of the book is over 100 ‘Failed Careers’ for your characters. Your highest and lowest stat dictates which career you’ve got and whoever’s the youngest player at the table determines why the £10,000 debt war incurred. Each career has some gear, a short blurb and a couple of tables giving you your money and health, as well as some random things (roughly) scaled to that result.
As an example, result 30a is the Amateur Amputator. They get a bonesaw (d6 damage) and some ether. At £5 starting money that means I unsettled my patients with my paranoia so I get a tiny pistol (d6 damage) that I always keep one hand on. At 6 Hit Protection (HP) I also liked to bring a bottle of Strong Perfume to work.
The system’s an OSR game, but with only Strength, Dexterity and Charisma as your stats. You roll a d20 for a Save, aiming to get equal or lower. If you’re in a fight then you don’t roll attack, just damage. Everyone gets an amount of Hit Protection which absorbs damage and regenerates after a bit of a rest like a shield in a video game. After that it goes into Strength.
There are some great methods for generating maps of Bastion and the spaces outside of it. I’ve run a two-shot of the game where the group were exploring a Waste Forest. I really enjoyed it and definitely want to go back. I think the high point is still the character and world creation, seeing what strange things come from it. Luckily the rest of the game was fun, but I think that’s where a lot of the thrill came from.
Retropunk: Cyberpunk roleplaying game
By Fraser Simons – Samjoko Publishing
Read before? No
Played? No
This is a gorgeous-looking book and another cyberpunk offering from Fraser Simons. It’s a city crawl, with several interestingly made cities in the back from different authors, each with missions to complete.
Your characters are Glitches living off-grid like in Hack the Planet, but in a world with a lot of virtual overlays over things like The Veil. It’s all got a cool, retrofuture, almost vapourwavy aesthetic to the book.
Characters are either Specialists, Heavies or Breakers, with special abilities linked to those classes. Rolls use their Approaches and while this is an OSR-ish game, the system feels reminiscent of Forged in the Dark with the use of Approaches and the way outcomes happen.
This is a very pretty looking book, but out of Simons’ cyberpunk outings I think I still prefer Hack the Planet.
Last Fleet RPG
By Joshua Fox – Black Armada
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
I love the Battlestar Galactica reboot, irrespective of the finale which I consider to be mainly fine. Like Lost, ultimately it’s about the journey and any long form ongoing media is going to have to have issues which they could have solved if they had somehow known how long they were going to get, when cast members would change and so on.
Anyway, I’m not here to judge the existence of BSG, I’m here to look at Last Fleet.
This is a Powered by the Apocalypse game which replicates the experience of the BSG reboot. You play a fleet of the remaining survivors of the human race, on the run from a relentless force at the same time as handling shortages within the fleet and real or imagined traitors. The default setting has its own potential bunch if infiltrators which are more like a strange fungal network who can chew up people and spit out replacements who may not even know what they are.
There are roles like Tactician, Engineer, Scientist, Marine, Pilot, Influencer & Investigator which provide a move and a defined role as the playbooks are a lot more about what kind of person you are:
Aries – an impulsive hothead who runs in and pushes the big red button, whether verbally or in a fighter
Taurus – a dependable, principled character who’ll take a lot of punishment but won’t compromise their beliefs
Gemini – someone with shady motives, generally crime or mutiny-based
Cancer – a leader who might be a bit too softhearted and let bad actors get away with things
Leo – a charismatic leader who inspires followers, hopefully for good and not for culty reasons
Virgo – an overachiever who takes on too much, pushing themselves beyond the limit
Libra – a diplomat and manipulator, who might get up to unscrupulous things
Scorpio – a sleeper agent, losing time and doing awful things they then need to stop and/or cover up
Sagittarius – someone who loves discovering new things and may stumble into bad situations
Capricorn – a tactician who may go too far for victory
Aquarius – an investigator who wants to get to the truth no matter the cost
Pisces – the supernatural-adjacent playbook with weird visions
You might have noticed a few things about these playbooks. All of them have things they do and ways that might go too far, might break. Instead of health you have Pressure which you’ll constantly be pushing at. The book highlights some moves which raise and lower pressure as being particularly important to the gameplay loop.
There are breaking points which are a combination of some communal and then one or more specific to each playbook. These help give you a scripted moment of acting out, like Monsterhearts’ Darkest Selves.
The fleet itself is created with its core abilities and problems, then you see how the wear and tear of your constant attempts to escape take you. Hopefully home, or to safety, but it’s rarely that kind.
Handily there are two quickstart scenarios and there’s even an alternate version where you play Ancient Greek people trying to outrun death’s vengeance after stealing immortality.
Trophy Loom
By Jesse Ross & Others – Hedgemaze Press & Gauntlet Publishing
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes… kind of
I ran a campaign of Trophy Gold earlier in the year but I didn’t count this as being read back then even if I often referred to it. Trophy Loom’s the setting book for Trophy Dark and Trophy Gold, providing information on the realms you’ll be travelling and the places around them. It’s also anti-canon, to encourage you to use what you want or roll to see what’s there.
It would have been enough if this was a book of tables. If it was a listing of places. It accomplishes a lot more, than that, managing to evoke the strange beauty and horror of the world of Trophy.
The book starts in civilisation, much like your standard treasure hunter might. Specifically, the book provides details about the capital city Ambaret. Districts and traditions are provided in d66 lists. There’s also a nice set of tables about the people of the land which gives even more names for NPCs and random character traits for humans, faeborn, manikins and beast bitten.
Civilisation is fleeting in Trophy though, so the middle section of the book goes into The Borderlands, taking you from wealthy holiday homes to the haven of most Trophy treasure hunters, Fort Duhrin. There’s a scale of law to chaos for each settlement and tables about an outlaw band, about local gods and cults.
The last third of the book, like the last act of most treasure hunters’ lives, is occupied with Kalduhr. The forest grows and consumes. It’s the place where so many Trophy Incursions are set, and this helps fill in some detail. Again, it’s all in d66 tables, so you can roll and inject something random on the way to an Incursion, in-between them or use them to inspire your own stories.
Like fantasy RPGs of old, there are treasure tables at the back, which include such wonderful things as “Coffin of tarnished metal, wrapped in chains and locks. It seems empty and makes no noise when shifted” or “A crown of smoky black crystals woven in bands of tarnished gold”.
I made most use of the Fort Duhrin tables when I ran Trophy Gold, which I guess was to be expected. I used tables about the sisters, waystations, tales about the Witch of Nevask helped inspire other witches.
Venture & Dungeon
By Possum Creek
Read before? Yes
Played? No
This is not one, but two Belonging Outside Belonging RPGs, reflecting fantasy roleplaying games in different ways. Both use the same system as Dream Askew & Dream Apart, where there’s no GM or dice. Players take a character and an element of the setting, asking questions, making weak moves to gain tokens and spending them to make strong moves.
Venture shows us heroes in a fantastical world, finding places to adventure and weird things to do. First up you determine the setup of the quest together, then you set forth. Each character class has a list of things they’re trying to find out through play as well as the main quest.
Roles are:
The Paladin
The Fighter
The Bard
The Rogue
The Wizard
The Cleric
The Setting has:
The Darkness
The Celestial
The Arcane
The Mundane
The Authority
The Underbelly
These seem a little broad, but with the quest established at the start and a focus on the internal quests, they should work well enough.
Dungeon zooms out to the game table itself, with you telling the stories as the characters who play the characters. There’s some interesting bleed between the two places. Not quite DIE level, but in what feels like a much more light-hearted way. The characters each have a role at the table and for their character. The setting elements are all fantastical, with a number of aspects of the dungeon, but also a ton of monsters.
The playbooks are:
The Cleric
The Fighter
The Rogue
The Wizard
The Little Sibling
The Game Master
You’ll note a few oddities there. The character classes reflected often share elements with the person playing them, so when you’re making The Fighter you as what both your characters have given up out of: A Home, A Family, A Gang of Friends, A Support Group, A Mentor or A Happy Ending.The Little Sibling is a glorious mess and while my little sibling wasn’t this bad at the table, it’s common to hear tales of people who did have this experience. The GM may be playing the world in the game, but they have things like traits they project onto NPCs and so on.
The Setting Elements are:
The Dungeon
The Denizens
The Powers-That-Be
The Mysteries
The Monsters are:
The Restless Dead
The Glamorous Ones
The Gazing Monstrocity
The Great Dragon
The Mind Devourer
The Vampires
Green Dawn Mall – A Zine Quest Game
By Côme Martin – Emojk
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
I’ve reviewed Green Dawn Mall on Who Dares Rolls already so I won’t go too far into it here.
Green Dawn Mall is a surreal ‘mall crawl’ where you make your way through a strange place that lives under and connects shopping malls. There are so many tables for shops, each escalating in weirdness as you get deeper, and rules for places above and below the mall.
When I ran it, the group were trying to find a friend who was desperate to clear up her scaly skin so she went to a potentially mystical pharmacy. The group entered through the basement of a real world mall, found themselves navigating a chaotic roller-rink, talking talking with fish and being pursued by mannequins. They wrecked a toy shop, stole a car and eventually managed to rescue their friend before going hom.
It was somehow disturbing and wholesome all at once. I really enjoyed reading the book and the surreality worked well in play.
Leaving the mall.
Conclusions
I’m finally only 6% behind where I should be after spending most of the year much further behind. This is feeling more doable, but I’m also planning n how to deal with ‘overtime’ if I go over 2023 and still have books to read.
We’re in the last quarter of the year, so it’s crunch time. I have admittedly neglected reading various interesting games I’ve picked up from Itch and a few bigger RPG books have ended up as surfaces to lean on while I’m writing this article. I will get round to them, but after all these books!
Bleak Spirit
By Chris Longhurst – Certain Death
Read before? Yes
Played? No
I haven’t played Dark Souls. It’s a point of contention with my brother and one which he raises fairly often. I get it, and I’ve played a bit of Bloodbourne which I enjoyed but couldn’t get too far in. Between my impaired coordination and infrequent playing times, I found putting in an hour or two in every couple of weeks didn’t really help.
Bleak Spirit is a Dark Souls style RPG which uses a variation of Lovecraftesque, and it deals with the subject matter in a way I like. One which doesn’t need keen hand-eye coordination or memories of attack patterns.
In Bleak Spirit the group controls a wanderer traversing a haunted, broken world, gathering lore and hunting for an adversary.
Taking turns, players are either:
The Wanderer – traversing the world, talking, fights, surviving but never talking about what’s going on in the world or inside the Wanderer
The World – establishing everything the Wanderer encounters and that kind of scene is being played
The Chorus – Adding detail to descriptions, playing some voices and flavouring things to fit their special cards
There are three types of scenes:
Danger presents monsters or traps
Interaction introduces people
Feature shows the landscape
Each scene adds to the lore of the world and there are some strict amounts for both types of scene and scenes which you’ll get in each act before the grand finale against the antagonist.
Lovecraftesque is a great game with some fairly ritualised play. This feels like it dials that up a bit, and mutates the rules in an interesting way. I backed the book on PDF but have since bought the cards to better help running this at some point. Like Lovecraftesque there’s a teaching guide and some premade scenarios, which I also find to be useful as I don’t know how long after reading this I’ll actually get to play it.
Heart: The City Beneath
By Chris Taylor, Grant Howitt – Rowan, Rook & Decard
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
Heart is a follow up to Spire, set in a mile-high drow city occupied by elves and filled with all manner of weird magic. There’s a city beneath which is somehow much weirder.
The Heart has a number of different potential origins or reasons for being, but the exact one doesn’t matter. It messes with reality, warping things that get too close. This creates an environment for dungeon crawling which is somewhere between Borderlands and Annihilation.
Unlike Spire, you can play Ancestries beyond the drow, adding aelfir, humans and gnolls to the mix. You also get Callings which give you an ability and ways of levelling up. Importantly, they’re all defined by your motivation to keep delving in somewhere as weird and horrific as the City Beneath.
The classes are:
Cleaver
Deadwalker
Deep Apiarist
Heretic
Hound
Incarnadine
Junk Mage
Vermissian Knight
The system has players gather a dice pool based on their Skill, their Domain, any Masteries and then roll them, looking at the highest result for their level of success. Failure and damage (physical, mental or other) add to different types of Stress, which eventually turn into Fallout the GM rolls against your Stress and fails. It’s a nice, simple system with a lot of customisability between the character classes and callings.
The Heart campaign is quite different to Spire. Here you play strange, lost people who are going on delves through the ever-changing lands underneath Spire. The closer you get to the Heart, the weirder things get.
There are different locations which can be used and tools to make your own, along with a beastiary which could be larger, but gives a great indication of the kinds of horrors to expect. In my short demo, my group escaped fractal seagulls, found a cult living in a wall, coin-toothed traders, a lake made of spiders, courts of the ghost pigs and one of the group even died and was replaced with an alternate reality version of himself.
I’m not a massive dungeon crawler guy when it comes to RPGs, but this is a way that really appeals.
Root: The Tabletop Roleplaying Game
By Brendan Conway, Mark Diaz Truman – Magpie Games
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
I love the Root board game by Leder Games, where factions of animals all scheme and make war in a giant woodland realm. There’s just enough backstory in the board game to get people in the mindset for an adorable-looking game with some real sharp teeth. A lot of the setting is through play and through Kyle Ferrin’s gorgeous artwork.
The Root RPG takes that concept and positions each player as individual vagabonds looking to survive in a woodland filled with warring factions. The Marquis de Cat have invaded and are industrialising the woods, the Eyrie Dynasty is old, stuffy and wants to reclaim the woods, the Woodland Alliance carry out daring acts of resistance against the others.
As a vagabond, you work for any of those factions or the denizens who have to live among all this warfare. You get playbooks taken from the roles the Vagabond player in the board game chooses from:
Adventurer
Arbiter
Harrier
Ranger
Ronin
Scoundrel
Thief
Tinker
Vagrant
The playbooks are simpler than a lot of PbtA games, with one side for your rules and the other with a questionnaire about your character’s past.
This game differs from other fantasy-based PbtA games by having an emphasis on combat skills, roguish skills and weapons.
If you have a combat skill then it unlocks a unique move with any weapons which have a matching skill. It feels a little clunky at first, but running a demo I got used to it, and while I bought the PDF I also bought a deck of equipment cards to help when I’m demoing.
Each playbook has access to different Roguish Feats which help emphasise the daring actions the group will take, as well as the mischievous tone of their deeds.
There’s a great deal in setting up the woodland and making sure it’s a living place, even with a sample clearing. There are several Free RPG Day modules which provide pregenerated characters and clearings filled with potential drama.
Root: Travelers & Outsiders
There’s a supplement which was made at the same time, so I’m lumping it in as a core text rather than a stretch goal.
This book adds four factions from the Root board game who can be mixed with the previous factions. The Riverfolk Company are hypercapitalistic traders. The Lizard Cult offer aid to the needy but also sacrifice them. The Grand Duchy are an invasive force filled with political infighting. The Corvid Conspiracy are a crime syndicate.
There are new weapon skills, roguish feats, gear and all-new playbooks including:
Champion
Chronicler
Envoy
Exile
Heretic
Pirate
Prince
Raconteur
Raider
Seeker
None of these are Vagabonds in the Root board game, so it’s interesting seeing the increase in variety. There are similarly new natures, connections and drives to open these up a bit. One other new addition is a set of moves based on the animal species you’ve picked. Things are kept a little broad as a few traits had to be lumped in together.
There’s an alternative method of setting up the woodland by playing three rounds of the board game and measuring things from there. Finally, there are a couple of new clearings which specifically use the newer factions.
While I’ve got other fantasy PbtAs I want to try out, if my group want to do some high fantasy violence, I’d like to try a campaign of Root out.
Under Hollow Hills
By Meguey & Vincent Baker – Lumpley Press
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
The Bakers made Apocalypse World and the PbtA framework, but few other people know how to rip it apart and play with it as well as them.
This game’s about a fairy circus and the people travelling in it between fairyland and the human world. You travel to a new location, scout it out, check out the locals, then you put together a performance fitting what they want, or need, to see. Then, you move on. It’s a simple loop and the language of play makes it feel like a great variation from wandering heroes slaughtering their way from land to land. You’re still scouting, you’re still hitting a dramatic crescendo, but here it’s all art and emotion.
You’re mostly fairies, so things like age, time, seasons, gender and even death are just plays. You can mess with them as you feel fit. A fairy may die in a scene and come back in the next one. What are normally ‘Moves’ in PbtA games are ‘Plays’, each given their own score and decoupled from any stat. You don’t have health, but as time moves or at some other points you might change your style between summer and winter. Then there are mortals, who have a slightly different pairing of styles from bold & cautious. They also might have reasons to be pretending to be fae, and if they die then it’s for good.
The playbooks are:
The Boondoggle Hob
The Chieftain Mouse
The Crooked Wand
The Crowned Stag
The Feather-Cloak
The Interloper
The Lantern Jack
The Lostling
The Nightmare Horse
The Seeker
The Stick Figure
The Troll
The Winding Rose
Each playbook gets a selection of similar basic plays and some that are their own. They also get potential roles in the circus, as everyone needs to pull their weight, even if they’re there specifically to complain about things.
I’ve run a demo of this game, set in an art fair at an old pub in the Northeast. The group helped an old lady come to terms with retirement and took her to fairyland in a touching scene. The Stick Figure had some fun, disturbing performances where they fell apart, the Crowned Stag summoned hordes of animals and the group helped a local goat cause havoc on a golf course.
Agon
By John Harper – Evil Hat
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
If John Harper makes a game, you back it. It’s a rule. By this point I already knew that was the case, but I saw the subject matter. My dad studied Greco-Roman Ancient History when I was a kid so I grew up with these myths.
Here you all play your own version of The Odyssey, but you’re also competitively out-heroing each other as you go from island to island, trying to find your way home. You play mortals or demi-gods, who make die rolls by yelling out their name, their epithet and what they’re rolling, also whether they’re calling on their favour from a good or their pathos. This was a game that got me hired to run demos as I ran it in a game store and the staff saw my group were having great fun yelling and competitively being heroes. I’ve run it since with only two players and it had a very Hobbs & Shaw vibe, but if one of them was the son of Hades.
There’s guidance to make islands, and several prebuilt ones so that the Strife Player (GM) can launch them into challenge after challenge with no prior work. Each island plays out in the same pattern: the heroes rock up and see the initial problem, they take on a number of tasks and then can access the finale. They compete to see who takes the lead and that player decides which stat will be used in the finale. Players split between those looking to take on the final challenge or save the locals for less glory. There are rewards, the players sail off and the mists take away that island, while revealing a new one. Eventually, hopefully, they’ll find their way home.
Visigoths Vs Mall Goths
By Lucien Kahn
Read before? Yes
Played? No
The moment I heard the name I knew I was in for a fun time. This game’s about time travelling Visigoths and 1990’s mall goths all getting up to hijinks in a weird mall. It’s not like Green Dawn Mall with a level of underlying horror, this is all about the hijinks.
Players are split into teams trying to accomplish goals which often clash against each other.
Visigoths are split into three classes: Conquerer, Charlatan and Runecaster.
Mall Goths are split into Theatre Techs, Witches and Cyber Pets.
Rules are pretty simple with 2d6 plus any modifiers, the highest result succeeds and both people do on a tie, but the situation escalates dramatically. People can get Hurt Feelings as that’s the only kind of damage available here. If you attack someone, then you both get Hurt Feelings. If you have two then you’re emotionally overwhelmed and need to calm down or talk it out.
The main thing here is the mall. There’s an intricate map detailing each store, each staff member and their allegiance to either or neither side. Players have a set amount of time in a day in order to complete their mission and sabotage the other side.
There are several different scenarios which each give a selection of goals and modifiers to the world the players are in. Some add X-Files type investigators, others add metal heads as new rivals. All in all, this looks like a ton of fun. As a competitive team-based game, it’s all fairly light and unlikely to cause real life hurt feelings as the rivalries are all pretty lightly handled at the end of the day.
This was a shorter list than September’s, but I’ll stop here and pick up next time.
This month sees the start of a lot more zine-length books. That and taking part in industrial action meant some nice times of reading RPGs after being on the picket line.
Zombie World
By Brendan Conway & Magpie Games
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
I love Powered by the Apocalypse games, especially when people do different things with it. The Bakers who kicked it all off are normally the best for that, but here we’ve got another interesting usage.
Zombie World is a card-based PbtA game, contained within a small box. You quickly create a character with their past, present and trauma all taken from drawn cards. The present is the only one that’s face up and the others can be revealed when dramatically relevant. The group then have a couple of cards to pass around, determining the community and a few more introducing NPCs.
Finally, you have cards which determine the initial lack the community has, the reason you’d go out into the wild and risk zombie attacks. This is a world after the dead have risen and where people are clustered in small communities in places like farms, malls and more.
For actions, there’s a deck of cards which you draw a number of based on your relevant ability. There are misses, hits, partial hits and critical successes. There’s also a ‘bite’ deck, for when you make moves involving groups of the undead. A single zombie isn’t much of a challenge, but they get a lot worse when there are a number of them. The regular challenge deck is shuffled after each check (a reason I sleeved my copy) and the bite deck is only shuffled when someone draws the one ‘bitten’ card. That way, someone’s going to get bitten at some point.
The game’s primarily for one-shots and while the book’s tiny, the cards really make the game. The art is black, white and red, evoking The Walking Dead and helping to establish who people are. I’ve run it four times and had very different experiences with each game. Yes, zombies are passé, but this is one of the absolute best zombie RPGs out there.
Something is Wrong Here
By Kira Magrann & Cyborg Serpent
Read before? Yes
Played? No
This is an odd one to work out things like a page count for. It’s a deck of cards with a few of them covering the rules. It’s a parlour LARP and one which asks the facilitator to have a full-length mirror. Luckily I have one of those, but I don’t know how many players I can enlist to play this.
The game’s based on Twin Peaks, specifically the stranger side of it, the lodges and so on. Each player has a role and as the game goes on, they’ll interact with each other and with a strange box we won’t open but we’ll wonder about the contents of. Each player also looks in the mirror and confronts another self, a dark parallel played by someone else when they speak to us.
It’s one of those parlour LARPs which feels quite specific in what it needs and looks fascinating. I don’t know when I’ll be able to run it, but if I do, at least I have a full-length mirror for it.
Codex Zine Volume One
By Gauntlet Publishing
Read before? Yes, in Zine Form
Played? Played some
I’ve been a fan of The Gauntlet since I first saw mention of them on Google Plus. I remember listening to the first episodes of their podcast and thinking they sounded a bit confrontational about some games, but incredible with their knowledge of RPGs, both the mechanics and the social side of things. As time went on, I fell in love with their various podcasts and games. When they started a Patreon, I was there right away, and here they collected the first issues of their zine. It remains the one Gauntlet Publishing book I don’t have a physical copy of.
Early in its history, Codex had a lot of supplements for published RPGs, especially Dungeon World. These issues show the start of their unique games, but stop before they introduce Trophy Dark to the world.
Blood – A location for Urban Shadows, some Dungeon World content
Chrome – A Sprawl campaign starter, science fantasy items for Dungeon World
Ectoplasm – A Monster of the Week mystery, a Sprawl playbook, some Dungeon World items
Starlight – A Malandros campaign starter, a Lovecraftesque scenario in space (the first Lovecraftesque game I ever played!). Of note here is “The Temple of the Peerless Star” for Dungeon World, which would get heavily reworked for Trophy Gold
Darkness – Called (a self-contained nanogame about encouraging a possession), a Final Girl scenario, Pizza Time! for Lovecraftesque, a 6D6 superhero scenario
Love – Some setting material for Lady Blackbird, a deity and campaign starter for Dungeon World,
Yellow – The Society for Vegan Sorcerers (a self-contained RPG), a Dungeon World campaign starter & campaign elements, a Cheat Your Own Adventure scenario
Iron – An OSR adventure about dwarves, Wind on the Path (a self-contained RPG about duels to play at conventions), Dwarven shrines for Dungeon World
Madness – A city for Dungeon World, Rituals (a PbtA game about living with OCD), The Madness of Cú Chulainn (a two-player story game), a Cheat Your Own Adventure scenario
Time – Timegasm (an RPG about time travel and the legal problems arising from it), Reset (a two player Memento-inspired RPG), Turning (a tool for time shifts in RPGs), Overlooked (an RPG made to play with Turning), a Dungeon World campaign starter
Neon – Tonight Only! (An RPG about battling bands), a campaign frame for The Veil, Mechanical Oryx, Route Clearance & Memories (the 200 Word RPG challenge winners for 2017)
Crystal – Heroes and Crystal Kingdoms (an Indie Hack RPG), Dungeon World elements, a supplement and a knightly order, Keepers of Antarra (a story game),
Joy – Bunk Beds (a LARP), So You’re Becoming a Dragon (a how to guide), an Apocalypse World playbook inspired by Babymetal, some Dungeon World celebrations and the first ‘Gauntlet Daddy’ pinup
Discern Realities Annual – This was just Dungeon World material and I’ve used a ton of it in DW and Quest over the years.
It’s really interesting seeing how far The Gauntlet has gone from this era. There are some concepts which have persisted and evolved, like Pizza Time which I’ve seen as “Chuck Eat Cheese”, then this, a Cthulhu Dark AP and tidbits about it as a self-contained game.
As I don’t really run Dungeon World anymore, I might harvest some of those parts for other games, but probably not. I want to try Wind on the Path at some point with some friends, and I definitely recommend the Lovecraftesque & Lady Blackbird supplements.
Dinosaur Princesses
By Hamish Cameron, Dana Cameron and Ardens Ludere
Read before? Yes
Played? No
This is a light game about playing dinosaurs who are also princesses, solving problems. The book has black and white images with thick enough lines to help colouring in, which the game heartily encourages.
The Paleontologist (GM) comes up with a problem and the Dinosaur Princesses help define a plan to deal with it. They use their keywords to add dice to a pool, versus the Paleontologist doing the same. Any 4-6’s are successes and people can help by using their words or ‘cheering’ which is a support mechanic.
Dinosaur Princesses is definitely a kid’s RPG and a fun-looking one. The definition of ‘princess’ is kept purposefully broad and almost like the recent filmic outing for Barbie, there are additional careers the princesses can have. Unforgivably, the definition of ‘dinosaur’ is also broader and can be anything if people want. Child Charlie would have been livid, although I get that you might end up running this for kids and one of them would want to be a cat or a robot.
Thousand Arrows: A Samurai Action & Drama TTRPG
By James Mendez Hodes & Galileo Games
Read before? No
Played? No
One of the interesting things about having my spreadsheet ordered by the date games were launched on Kickstarter means that I’ll come across games like this which were launched in October 2018 but fulfilled this year.
I first learned about the Warring States from Path of the Assassin by Kazuo Koike and the Samurai Warriors series of games. This RPG’s set during that turbulent time, with mechanics linked to the different clans and religious orders from the time.
Players pick a clan and one of several playbooks:
The Courtier
The Retainer
The Knight
The Foot Soldier
The Secret Agent
The Warrior Monk
The Summoner
The Farmer
People might have quite different roles while interacting with each other, unlike games like Legend of the Five Rings which have everyone as samurai. That’s another factor in this game, the terminology is all translated so ‘samurai’ is ‘knight’ for example. Hodes wanted to show a samurai game set in Japan without being one of those dozens of RPGs that think owning a replica katana, a handful of keywords and having a shonky honour system will do.
I admit I don’t know enough about the era (see above list of how I first encountered the Warring States Period) but this game does a good job of presenting the setting and informing an ignorant rube like me with enough detail to run without falling down Orientalist pitfalls. Hopefully.
Turn: A Tabletop Roleplaying Game
By Beau Sheldon & Daedalum Analog
Read before? No
Played? No
I’ve been looking forward to reading this for a while. Turn is an RPG of shapeshifters living in small towns. Each player has a playbook for their role and an animal that they shift between.
The Human Roles are:
The Beastborn
The Heir
The Late Bloomer
The Lover
The Organiser
The Overachiever
The Showoff
The Beast Archetypes are:
Bear
Bison
Cougar
Otter
Raccoon
Raven
Snake
Wolf
The Town Manager (GM) and players establish the small town the make it a suitably messy little place. As their characters they shift back and forth and manage the stress that builds as they go. This is a PbtA game, but one of the nice innovations is the reverse rolls, where you’re aiming to fail at times as you struggle against your dual natures. An example is ‘Mind your manners’ where your beast may want to speak first. You roll minus your Honest instead of plus, hoping to keep yourself from blurting out something helpful or betraying your nature.
I’m not a massive werewolf or shapeshifter guy, but this is a fun looking game. There’s a supplement which introduces sample towns from outside of America, including an English coastal town which means a Seagull Beast Archetype. Brilliant, and horrific.
After the War
By Alasdair Stuart, Jason Pitre and Genesis of Legend
Read before? No
Played? No
This was one of the RPGs which inspired this whole quest. I started it so many times and could never get through it. More of a failing on my part, but I just couldn’t focus on it. With a quest like this, I knew I’d have to power through and even so, it still took a surprising amount of my afternoons after picketing, before editing podcasts.
The concept of this game is fascinating. The idea is that in a spacefaring society comprising humans and several other alien species, a memetic disease started spreading through music. People would be drawn into it and become part of a kind of hive mind, pulling others into the collective. Given how it’s spread, it shot through civilisation with shocking speed. People were cut off from each other, isolated and pursued by their loved ones. A solution was made which was similarly horrific. Another virus was spread, one which would counteract the Song but drove a third of the people with it into becoming berserk, violent monsters. Once everything was over, the traumatised remnants gathered together and started to rebuild, ever aware that the Song and Tormenta were still present.
Although there are a few alternative places later in the book, the game defaults to having characters based in Polvo (translated that means ‘Dirt’). A settlement which is being rebuilt. The healing from trauma and the paranoia about would could happen make for the driving forces of drama in the game.
This sounds like a cool setting and that does make a vast amount of the book, with survivor interviews, histories and so on. You engage with the rules by going through free play until something needs to be acted on, demanding attention and providing a Question. Conflicts answer them, with people declaring their sides for what should happen, collecting dice for Traits and Convictions, then rolling to see the totals. Characters gain Strain which drops any of dice from that score or lower. It’s not just PVP, though, as the GM will often be rolling for things like The Song or Tormenta.
All in all this is a fascinating setting. The system’s a little off in how it frames these moments of conflict, but probably fine when you’re playing it. My mind went more into the directions of Last Fleet or Legacy: Life Among the Ruins when I read it, so I think I’m more surprised by what it ended up being than anything else.
The Demon Collective, Vol 1
By Camilla Greer, Mabel Harper, Comrade Pollux & David Shugars
Read before? No
Played? No
This is an anthology of OSR adventures, each of which are interestingly weird. Given my interests in these kinds of adventures, I’ve been looking at these with an eye too probably running them in Into the Odd, Troika or Trophy Gold if I ran them in anything.
Night School
Things are awry at a wizard school. Luckily this is nothing like that other wizard school. What’s nice is that the place is still in use so there’s a lot of students to deal with while following the various hooks, hunting a child catcher and so on.
She’s Not Dead, She’s Asleep
There’s a vampire princess and a tumbling block tower in this one. The dungeon’s really interesting in being in two states. You want to traverse it quietly, carefully, but need to pull whenever things will make noise. When the tower falls, things change for the much, much worse. You also have to get through the slumbering vampire princess’ tomb in order to get to the treasure.
Bad Faith
There’s a village which seems pretty poor, sad and doomed before you include the cultists who have set up nearby. They’re getting bolder and they’ve started to be able to warp the memories of the locals, making everything much worse.
Hush
This time the dungeon’s a dwarven library, which feels like a fun place to set things. I like that this isn’t just another Moria type situation. It was sealed off, but has since been unearthed and there are a number of hooks to motivate people into going in.
I think Hush might be one of the easiest to convert into a Trophy Gold scenario, but I can see how each of them could work fairly well. You just need to use a theme (e.g. ‘Silence’ for Hush) and to split areas out into sets with goals to pass. My plan for a first Trophy Gold conversion is Sunless Citadel, mainly as my players bounced off it back in the day, but this feels like it would be more satisfying to convert.
Girl Underground
By Lauren McManamon, Jesse Ross & Hedgemaze Press
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
Girl Underground is a small RPG and a great way of experiencing Powered by the Apocalypse games. It’s a simple zine with sparse, lovely art. It takes influence from Alice in Wonderland, Labyrinth and other, similar tales.
The Girl is a shared character co-created by the group and passed around with who controls her in a scene. She has Manners she needs to mind, such as, “A girl must be quiet” or “A girl must never make a mess”. These are illustrated on index cards and one of them has been broken just prior to her arrival into a fantasy world.
The Girl makes several strange and powerful friends:
The Beastie
The Construct
The Faun
The Mythic
The Ogre
The Runaway
These companions are all introduced in quick scenes where they’re having problems and brought together by The Girl. Their moves can be incredible and strange, but they all drive the action and decision-making into the hands of The Girl. Her goal is to travel from place to place, learning to change the Manners she’s being forced to adhere to.
The book has guidance on how to play, details of the playbooks and different locations to find, along with potential threats, ways they can link into each other and troubles to deal with. Looking through these for a few minutes prior to running might give a good throughline to use and a way to plan a finale. Even with that low level of planning, you can always find ways to change the places on the fly, cutting them short if you need to or extending them if you’ve got more time to play.
I’ve run this game once and it was an adorable experience. The companions were all a joy to run for, with a Construct made of tools who would keep handing bits of himself over and falling apart, a Mythic who was the last of the dragons and a Faun who was an escaped djinn.
People often ask what a perfect one-shot game is and this is definitely up there as one of the best.
Mall Kids
By Matthew Gravelyn
Read before? No
Played? No
Based on the system behind Honey Heist, Mall Kids is a game about kids who work and hang out in a mall. They have to perfectly balance working for The Man and being rebellious enough for the people they want to impress.
There are multiple mall games I’ve backed on Kickstarter and while I think this is the one that least appeals to run, that’s just because Green Dawn Mall and Visigoths Vs Mall Goths are both so conceptually strong. It’d be interesting to run this one and I’ve got some vague ideas of adapting my local mall as it was in the 80’s, back when my dad and his friends used to play pranks and he dressed as a gorilla to sell copies of the Socialist Worker to people.
synthesis.
By Riley Rethal
Read before? No
Played? No
A selection of ‘meta’ games. I like this kind of post-modern examination, but it makes it a bit tricky to talk about.
The games include:
Post-Mortem for the Post-Modern – You are the heirs of an author who recently passed away, trying to work out what to get when divvying up the inheritance. Make up assumptions about the intentions of the author, objective statements about what is publicly known about the author. You can’t definitively say anything under the surface though, after all, the author is dead
Pop-Popcorn – Making up a movie that you just saw, using a couple of tables
Fitting in – Teenagers talking about things they don’t understand and pretending to know what they’re saying
This Game Has No Rules – I feel I don’t need to say more about this game
All Roads Traveled – Going through a journey on a piece of paper and viewing things from different angles
Resonance and Echoes – A game about reincarnation and moving from setting to setting, having events which echo between them.
Comrades
By WM Akers
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
This is a game about resistance and revolution. Unlike Spire it’s not something that’s fantastical by default, but grounded in reality or a version of it. I remember an interview with the author where they said about wanting to present a version of resistance which isn’t plagued with in-fighting or doom & gloom ideas about how any attempt to improve things is doomed to failure. We get enough of those narratives, so it’s time to try something else.
I appreciate this a lot. Sometimes it’s too easy to get bogged down with despair that any positive change can come, that people will work together.
This is a Powered by the Apocalypse game with playbooks like:
The Artist
The Brute
The Demagogue
The Mystic
The Patron
The Professional
The Propagandist
The Soldier
The Student
The Worker
The moves are often good indicators of what’s going on in a game. This includes things like “Start something”, “Get Rough” as “What’s Going on Here?” And there’s even a move called, “Cradle a Dying Comrade” which might bring them back or use their sacrifice to inspire others.
The system’s not dramatically different from the usual PbtA games, but the big difference is the pathways to revolution, a way where your actions both stated and performed change the group, leading to an eventual success in different ways. The paths are:
Force
Organisation
Zealotry
Mayhem
Fellowship
There are positive and negative effects for going up in each of the pathways, but if you focus on one then eventually you’ll win, whether it’s a way that involves democracy, assassination or flooding the streets.
I love the idea of this game, but when I ran a one-shot in 2020 I was not in a good place to set it in the real world, or even the fictional Krescht provided in the book. I decided to take a leaf out of Rich Rogers’ book as he runs Star Wars-themed hacks of all kinds of different RPGs. I took my love of the X-Men and ran a game set in the most glam dystopia ever, The Age of Apocalypse. The group were pregens who were introduced either after 1998 or never featured in the event itself. They knew that Fabian Cortez, the ruler of Staten Island, was going to have official visitors and they had to figure out how to wreck his parade. A powerless Jessica Jones and Loki trapped in mortal form managed to sneak explosives onto the island and blow up Fabian’s giant statue of himself during the parade. It was a fun time and I think I’ll try and run this one shot again, but now I know the system I may even run something in Krescht or during the Paris Commune.
Bite Marks: A game of werewolf pack dynamics
By Becky Annison & Black Armada Games
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
Powered by the Apocalypse supernatural games are not uncommon. There’s Monsterhearts 2, which is a favourite of mine, Urban Shadows and Monster of the Week. So what makes a game about werewolves so interesting, especially as someone who generally doesn’t give a crap about werewolves?
This is a Black Armada joint for starters and I trust them to put out a good game even if it’s about a subject I’m not entirely invested in. Secondly, this isn’t just about werewolves, it’s about family. Imagine Vin Diesel or one of the Mitchell brothers from Eastenders saying ‘family’ when you read that.
Bite Marks is about a family of werewolves, whether bound by blood, adoption or simply being a pack who hang out together a lot. You’ve got an area that’s yours and obligations to each other. Unlike a lot of PbtA games, this is one where there is a way to make people do what you say and Becky Annison is very good at clarifying what to do and when to use it. This isn’t a “kill this person for me” type of control so much as a “pick your uncle Dennis up from the airport” kind of control, one born more of family obligation. The reason this exists is because there’s a lot of drama that can build, including a mechanic called Spill, where people blurt out how they feel or put their foot in their mouth.
Playbooks include:
The Alpha – This playbook may end up moving if someone contests it
The Cub – A new wolf (or a new human)
The Enforcer – The fist of the pack
The Fixer – The person with connections with mortal & supernatural worlds
The Greypelt – An elder who probably used to be the Alpha
The Howl – The mystic, knowledgable in the weird ways
The Prodigal – A rebel, recently returned to the pack
Players build up Pack points as they play, especially when there are conflicts and drama between them. These points can be used to help, or saved up until they get spent for a massive move like instantly thwarting an enemy. Assuming the group stay together for that long.
I’ve run this game once, set in Devil’s Dyke in the South Downs. A human had been thrown from the nearby golf course down the dyke, along with the golf cart he was in. The worry was that it would draw attention to the pack who worked out of an abandoned church nearby. They discovered vampires had been creating hybrids who were incredibly powerful and needed to feed on werewolves. The group had trips into town, covered up investigations, lied to other packs and nearly broke apart a few times before all working together to slaughter a giant pack of vampire/werewolf hybrids who tried to siege the church.
Thirteen games! That’s a lot and next up I’ve got another thirteen, too! Come back next time for a few more!
This entry is going to be entirely Mothership. I’d bought the original edition of Mothership a while ago and ran it during the Kickstarter for the full first edition, just to make sure that it ran well as well as looking pretty. It did, so I went all in on the first edition and backed a number of other Mothership books during Zinequest. I decided to read them all together.
So what is Mothership? It’s a space horror game in the kind of junky future that you’d see in films like Alien and Event Horizon. It’s got an OSR framework but uses that mentality to accomplish something very much its own. There’s been an incredible amount of adventures and resources for it, both from Tuesday Knight Games and third parties.
Mothership 1E
By Sean McCoy & Tuesday Knight Games. (Unconfirmed Contact Reports & Another Bug Hunt have a ton of other writers)
Read before? The 0th Edition
Played? Yes
Player’s Survival Guide
The player’s guide is the home of the main rules and it’s presented in a gorgeous fashion, even with the purposefully old school, scrappy style. Players’ eyes are guided through the steps of creation both on the character sheet and on the pages of the book. The classes are four simple ones:
Marine
Scientist
Android
Teamster
That’s it. Each one modifies the attributes and the skills you roll, as well as an effect that happens when you panic. You customise the character with some skills, items and some rolled extras, then you’re ready to go. It’s quick to make a character and this is a system where your character sheet has a ‘high score’ entry which ticks up for each session your character survives.
The system itself is percentile, which I already know is going to be a hard sell to one of my players as he’s developed a disdain for them. Skills get some useful bumps to help make this less of a problem and the style of game this is made it feel like it’s not as much of a problem. Like a lot of games, there’s also an advantage/disadvantage system. There are critical effects when you get a double on the percentile dice, whether that’s good or bad and that seems fun.
There’s a horror system using ‘Panic checks’ where you roll a d20 (the only time you do such a thing) and try to get more than your Stress in order to not panic. Stress goes up with failed rolls and other events.
There are a number of subsystems for dealing with things like air and other potential hazards you may have to deal with in space. Combat of course gets a good amount of attention, with illustrations and fallout boxes for armour, images for several weapons and a great two-page sequence of people sighting a monster in order to demonstrate range.
As far as space horror goes, if I want a pure horror then I’ll go for Cthulhu Dark (and specifically Graham Walmsley’s upcoming Cosmic Dark). This feels like its own beast and something I’m excited to try, mainly for the amazing scenarios which I’ll get to shortly. I’m holding off until I get the physical boxed set, though.
Shipbuilder’s Toolkit
Ship rules were fairly light in the 0 edition, but the boxed set comes with a book entirely about ships. I’m not a ship combat fan, but this provides tools to make a ship your home, as well as a thing you fight with.
Familiar to the Player’s Survival Guide, there’s a guide to creation of the ship, but this time the character sheet as a deck plan on it. The majority of the book are premade ships with stats and maps, all serving their own purposes.
This isn’t the most exciting book, but a lot of that’s on me. It’s fine. I like the illustration of the comparative scale of all the ships.
Warden’s Operation Manual
This is the standout book of the boxed set by a mile, and I love all the books in the boxed set (apart from the Shipbuilder’s Toolkit… again, it’s just fine).
This is the book that seals this as something which can be used for a first time roleplaying group. Where the previous books have double page spreads showing how to make a character and a ship, this does the same for a campaign. It literally tells you to get a notepad and what to put where to start things off. Throughout the book there’s good advice about running a game and also it returns to the notepad and maintenance for it.
There’s some advice about hacking, which is good as Mothership and the community around it have been making all manner of wonders and more ways of doing that it always good.
Unconfirmed Contact Reports
Mothership’s a game with some incredible adventures featuring great scenarios and monsters, but if you want to make your own scenario and need to add a monster, then there’s this book.
The World Worm
Each monster here could be a boss and is disturbing in new and different ways. There are a few which are more standard monsters, but there are haunted streams, nightmare items, weirdly ‘normal’ infiltrators… They’re fascinating to read and each have their own art style to evoke their specific horrors. The back of the book also has some simple stat blocks you can use for general enemy types. I always love when a game does this.
Another Bug Hunt
The last book from the core ‘boxed set’ is an adventure. Another Bug Hunt is a gorgeous multi-part scenario which follows suit from the Warden Operations Manual, having a little educational helper who’ll talk to you in sidebars to help you run the game.
There are four scenarios in total, starting with the crew looking to make contact with a colony who’s not checked in after a few months. There are a number of factions in play when the group arrive, and after their initial encounter with the titular bugs, they’ll have to navigate the people on the colony. The NPC illustrations are fairly basic, but the descriptions and motivations are all really good. The monsters sound horrific and there are a lot of secrets to pick away at.
The maps are really interesting looking, and the design work on the book is lovely, a perfect adventure for first time GMs.
Mothership: A Pount of Flesh
By Sean McCoy, Donn Stroud & Luke Gearing
Read before? 0th Edition
Played? No
This is an adventure based on a space station called Prospero’s Dream, filled with a number of different factions and a ton of plot seeds to use or discard as necessary. The Mothership adventures encourage taking what you want, abandoning what you don’t want and writing over the books (literally on page four here).
There are several people who can act as quest givers or enemies, depending on what the players want to do. Nicely there’s also a list of events which go on in different phases of the adventure, so even if you’re not interacting with everyone at all times, their lives will continue and abandoned groups will get up to mischief on their own. It gives a sense of a living, breathing station.
The station’s illustrated in a number of different ways with infographics, blocks, old style computer graphics and more. The book’s black, white and bright pink which is radiant on the PDF version, I’ll be interested to see what it’ll be like in the printed copy.
Mothership: Dead Planet
By Donn Stroud, Fiona Maeve Giest & Sean McCoy
Read before? 0th Edition
Played? No
I read this one back when it was a 0th edition booklet and I think even though there are some splendid adventures, it’ll be this or Another Bug Hunt that I’ll bring to the table as my first Mothership 1E adventure.
This adventure rips apart space and strands the group in the orbit of the titular Dead Planet. There are several different areas, each of which are their own adventure in different styles.
There are derelict ships to loot with one specific ship and a way of generating your own derelicts by rolling & stacking dice.
Moon Colony Bloodbath sounds like the kind of horror movie my dad would have shown me when I was younger. There are a couple of factions who have made the moon their home and have their own destructive agendas. Players can side with one, the other or neither faction. This does include some potential voluntary amputation to earn the trust of moon cannibals.
The Dead Planet itself has a map which looks like it belongs in a fancy version of a Ceefax page. There are several locations to explore in the hope of stopping the effect that keeps people here and stranding them.
There are also resources like tables of nightmares as this hellish place is not one to stay on for long.
Mothership: Gradient Descent
By Luke Gearing
Read before? 0th Edition
Played? No
For the unfamiliar, there’s a thing called a megadungeon which has been a phenomenon for a while. AD&D had some, and in the d20 boom (and bust) Alderac Entertainment Group made “The World’s Largest Dungeon!” Even the D&D 5E Mad Mage adventure has a nod to this idea. I’ve run RPGs since I was 13 and I’ve never been a fan of a long dungeon crawl.
That said, Gradient Descent is a megadungeon and along with Trophy Gold’s Ruins of Old Kaldhur, is one of the few I’d entertain doing.
Cloudbank is a gigantic facility made to create androids, but it’s been abandoned for some time. The group make dives into the ship and find their way around the remnants of what’s there. This includes actual people, fake people and the fear that you might be an android, yourself. The map of Cloudbank looks like the map from Paradroid, and has a ton of links back and forth. For a megadungeon, it’s 64 pages and each area has its own little chunk of map which helps figuring out where everything is.
This Paradroid-looking map may seem confusing at first, but is great when you read it alongside the locations
There’s an old abandoned rocket thruster floating nearby that can act as a temporary staging area for delves, but it has its own factions and people with motivations. The rooms are fairly sparsely detailed but in a way that encourages expanding on them rather than laziness like some much smaller dungeon adventures I’ve seen. There are tables of random events in areas, as well as items to find on your adventures. This is a really interesting location, and I’m curious how long a group would spend delving in it before going mad.
Next up are some third party Mothership modules:
Mothership: Adspace
By D G Chapman
Read before? No
Played? No
The first of a bunch of third party modules I’ve backed.
This is a trifold adventure where players are trying to get to the top of Crab Foot Tower in order to get a ticket to the moon. The tower’s covered in adverts and automated deterrents to make sure that people watching are entertained.
Mothership: The Drain
By Ian Yusem
Read before? Yes
Played? No
I’ve mentioned the megadungeon, now let’s look at another RPG phenomena I’ve yet to play with: Funnels. These are mainly found in OSR games, where players make up a batch of 0 level characters and run them through a meat grinder (sometimes literal). Any survivor gets to level one. These are people who are often ill-equipped and the deaths are often part of the entertainment as players try to work out how a ladle and a chicken will help them deal with a dungeon.
Here, you’re playing prisoners from PrayCo who are all fitted with explosive collars and sent to storm a rogue agricultural space station that’s gone a bit weird. They need to reach the centre, but the thing is they’re not hardened prisoners, they’re anyone who was on hand. Everyone’s fitted with tinfoil halos and explosive collars that go off if they’re separated from each other for too long. Like so many Mothership adventures the map’s weird. It’s a set of concentric circles representing each areas with pictures, going from the trenches you arrive in, a church, an amusement park and more.
This looks like a lot of fun and there’s a ship combat prequel: Wrath of God, and a sequel which is a proper Mothership adventure called Meatgrinder. Ian Yusem did a great job with this project.
Mothership: Dying Hard on Hardlight Station
By David Kenny
Read before? Yes
Played? No
You know Aliens? You know Die Hard? This is basically both of them. Hardlight Station has had a break of horrific monsters and terrorists holding hostages. Can you deal with them both? There are ways of having just one of these stories rather than both and a lot of references, especially to Die Hard. This feels a little more daft in that presentation, but still pretty deadly.
Conclusions & Observations
Mothership looks awesome. I’ve only run a one-shot using 0th Edition, but I definitely want to give it more time. I think it’ll mostly be a machine for one-shots and miniseries, but there are a lot of tools for making campaigns both in each adventure and in the core books.
I think the core boxed set (Player’s Survival Guide, Warden’s Operation Manual, Shipbreaker’s Toolkit, Unconfirmed Contact Reports and Another Bug Hunt) is going to be one of the best ways to start roleplaying. The Warden’s Operation Manual is something which anyone aspiring to write GM advice should look at. The scrappy graphic design in all the products looks weird and loose but has had so much thought put into it. Going through all of these books took until the end of August and I know I’ve banged on about it a lot here, but it’s definitely been worth it.
I’ve been speeding up through books and in the chronological read I’m finally hitting Zinequest which was when I figured things would accelerate given the smaller books.
This is also The Month of Mothership, as the final PDFs of the space horror RPG’s first edition arrived and that consumed a lot of my reading time. I even skipped ahead in my chronological read to go through everything I’d backed for Mothership over the years. Expect a lot of that here.
7th Sea Khitai
By Chaosium, Mike Curry, John Wick & Friends
Read before? No
Played? No
Like a lot of 7th Sea fans, I’ve been waiting for this one for a while. I love the 7th Sea RPG and Theah as a setting. The main Kickstarter for 7th Sea Second Edition had a ton of delays, but covered some areas beyond the fantasy Europe in interesting ways, often with people on staff to make sure there weren’t the kind of mistakes that some fantasy versions of our world (including 7th Sea) have done in the past. The thing about 7th Sea 2E is that it was too ambitious in the amount of books, the amount of staff, it seemed to burn bright and quick, leaving a lot of unfinished books and a second campaign based on Asia which faced a ton of delays. Chaosium acquired 7th Sea and eventually, Khitai came out.
The cultures covered in this book are:
Agnivarsa – Moghul India
Fusō – Japan
Han – Korea
Khazaria – Korea
Nagaja – Thailand/Southeast Asia
Shenzhou – China
What era are each of these cultures represented? Purposefully vague/the more swashbuckling eras. This may not be a game telling exactly the same kinds of stories as 7th Sea, but it still has swashbuckling action at its heart.
Characters start out from one of these nations with a background from a long list, five traits from a list of seven and skills. Similar to 7th Sea you grab ten-sided dice equal to your trait + skill, as well as any other bonuses you might get. You say what you’re aiming to do and the GM tells you what additional risks you might face. You roll the dice and group the results together in set totalling 10 or more. Each set solves the main problem and mitigates the risks. Fights work similarly, with sets taking out mooks or potentially injuring named enemies.
I’ve lived through the eras of D&D’s “Oriental Adventures” and even 7th Sea 1E’s attempts at handling Asia, this version has had a massive do-over and goes thoroughly into religion, cultural practices and the interaction between everyone. It feels like a lot of care’s been taken, similar to the second edition in general.
Each nation feels packed with interesting problems and places to visit, similar to the core 7th Sea Second Edition, each with big gaps where the players can be inserted to do heroic things.
Agnivarsa’s ruler has murdered his way to the top while his mother is forming a rebellion. Fusō’s been isolated and busy with civil war which has got in the way of its ambition to expand to its neighbours. Han’s got a mad king and the results of a slave uprising that it’s dealing with. Khazaria’s filled with nomadic groups and looking like it’s going to be invaded by Shenzhou. Nagaja’s an empire of city-states dealing with constant attacks from monsters and monster hunters who are often a problem, too. Shenzhou has a corrupt bureaucracy and seeks to invade everywhere, while being attacked by pirates and bandits.
There are definite themes of rebellion against those in authority, changing the status quo if it’s stagnating or fighting for its return if it was at all progressive.
The book is nicely laid out and instantly familiar if you’ve read 7th Sea itself. I’m still curious how the new take on traits works. In 7th Sea 2E you have five traits which are closer to old ability scores. In Khitai, there are seven based on what you value and you only get five of them. Like 7th Sea 2E you get bonus dice if you keep changing which skill and trait you use, so people won’t constantly be spamming the same thing. If there’s one criticism of latter 7th Sea books including this one, it’s that they have a lot of black & white art which feels a bit jarring compared to the pretty colour layout and art in the rest of the book. I’m aware the campaigns ran low on funds they could put in for art so this was a necessity, it’s just a bit of a shame.
I’ll definitely be running this at some point, like 7th Sea in general.
By the Author of Lady Windemere’s Fan
By Lara Paige Turner and apparently not Oscar Wilde
Read before? Yes
Played? No
You’re all actors who haven’t been paying attention to what theatre production you’re going to be doing. The director’s quit and the show’s starting sooner than you thought. It’s time to use the sets from whatever other plays have been going on and make your own production in the style of Oscar Wilde.
By the Author of Lady Windemere’s Fan is one of those games that sounds like an amazing resource for fun one-shots. Players make a character and between them list out some sets without discussing what they are, then you go through scenes, trying to make a play, steal scenes and generally work out how to make it to the end without everything going awry.
The game feels like Fiasco or What Ho, World in its tone. The voice of the book is really good, including talking about using a battlematt to map out the theatre, but warning that if you LARP the game, then you’re just doing a theatre performance. This feels like a perfect one-shot system for a night where you’re down a player.
Operators RPG
By Kyle Simons and Samjoko Publishing
Read before? Yes
Played? No*
I generally back anything the Simons siblings have launched on Kickstarter. Operators isn’t necessarily a theme I would have gone with, but my liklihood of running it has only gone up over time, mainly after watching the John Wick films.
Operators is a game of highly competent ex-military characters who go through fight and chase-filled action movie stories.
Characters have skills which go down the better you are, as you’ll be rolling Fate Dice and looking for + results equal to your skills. Minuses can cause complications. You have ‘specials’ which are your training, discipline and trademark, each of which help you fudge with the dice and some of them need to be ‘primed’ by referring to them in the narrative. This replicates the kind of Chekhov’s Gunning of things in stories, letting the audience know you’re a master hacker and then getting to use those skills later.
Fights are interesting, using a deck of cards to help narrate the beat by beat play of a quick fight between two characters. While I’ve not run the game, I’ve used the deck when writing prose to help cover the blow-by-blow play. There are chase cards which are similar.
A few Simons staples appear here, like suggestions of everyone making a collage on somewhere like Pinterest in order to create the palette for the players and GM to use.
If there’s one negative, it’s a personal one, as there’s a LOT of military fluff in here. Personally if I ran this kind of game, I’d probably go down the direction of a John Wick or a Kyle Starks comic about assassins rather than needing to know anything realistic.
Kids on Bikes RPG
Yes, I went for the fancy edition
By Jonathan Gilmour, Doug Levandowski and Hunters Entertainment
Read before? Yes
Played? No
Kids on Bikes references things like Stranger Things, The Goonies, It and Paper Girls, as well as having a lovely art style of its own to represent stories of kids on bikes dealing with supernatural things.
Characters are fairly simple to build with escalating die types for their attributes and a selection of traits. It’s really simple, and goes beyond just the aforementioned bike-wielding kids as you might play teenagers or adults joining them on their journeys (again, like in Stranger Things).
The system’s pretty generic and broad, but there’s one core element which is different. There’s a Powered Character who isn’t controlled by any one player or the GM, instead they’re controlled by everyone as each player takes an index card with one aspect of them. It could be telekinesis or a fondness for cookies. That player can pipe up, directing the Powered Character to action. They have tokens making sure that their game-changing abilities are limited and you can’t just TK your way through all problems.
I backed the special edition which has a nice comic at the front and then a TON of scenarios in the back. These include a few sets based on the author’s towns when they grew up, or variations like “Dads on Mowers” which looked like it could be some Barbie movie style weirdness.
I don’t know whether I’d run this or not, the system feels pretty basic, but a lot of the worlds are inspirational enough that I might have to run one of them, just to see what it’s like.
Sigmata: This Signal Kills Fascists
By Chad Walker and Land of NOP
Read before? No
Played? No
Okay, here’s a controversial one. Probably more than it needed to be, but certainly enough that it had to have a follow-up supplement to modify, correct and clarify different elements.
At its basic level, Sigmata is a cyberpunk superhero game in a 1980’s dystopia where Joseph McCarthy became president and while he was got rid of fairly quickly, he put in enough tools for totalitarian rule to take over.
Players are enhanced by a radio signal and work for a rebellion because of this. They are ‘receivers’ with cool powers and cybernetic enhancements. They’re here to help overthrow the Regime and to expand the radio signal as they grow more powerful the nearer they are to it.
There’s a lot of fiction to the world, showing how America could very easily slide (both in the fiction and the real world) into fascism. The easy inaction from a lot of people and the intentional horrors done by the Regime.
The big problem here is that one of the core elements of resisting The Regime is that there are other groups who are sighting them, but most of them are incredibly problematic in different ways. It made the game feel like some weird centrist thing about having to work with one bunch of fascists and problematic actors in order to stop the main ones. Chad goes into great depth replying to this in his follow up, “Repeat the Signal”. The core book also mentions very early on about never giving fascists an inch and that all people have a right to exist, all people have to fight against any fascism and tyranny. Chad’s work in Repeat the Signal clarifies the four factions and specifies that they’re all based on the resistance against the Assad regime, but he feels obscuring things gave a message incredibly far from what he wanted. I’m not his defence force, but after reading both books it feels like the reaction to this project wasn’t entirely wrong, but was incredibly disproportionate and unnecessary in how loud it all got.
Anyway, back to the book. The system has players roll five dice, with d10’s equal to the stat being used and d6’s for the rest, trying to get a 6 on one or more dice. The amount of successes changes up how well or badly a success is. The four stats of Judgement, Guile, Valor and Aggression do pretty much the same things in fights, evasion and intrigue which are the main modes of drama. Repeat the Signal changes things a bit so you can be good or bad at different actions in those modes rather than having a high Aggression meaning you’re always Storming in fights, Rushing in evasion and Confronting in Intrigue.
I admit I’m not won over by these systems for dramatic scenes, but hopefully a playthrough of it would give me a better feeling. There are also different abilities, training and cybernetic pieces which can modify how you do things. After hearing about Chad’s work with Cryptomancer I expected it to be more complex than I’d like, but this is a bit simpler than that.
At the same time, like Operators, I felt the back matter about hacking in the 80’s was possibly a little too long when I read it. If I ran the game I’d probably be thankful for it, but it’s just a bit dry.
Summerland Second Edition
It’s weird seeing the cover as the PDF didn’t have it.
By Greg Saunders and Fire Ruby Designs
Read before? No
Played? No
One day the world became trees. Civilisation was shattered as they pushed through roads, buildings, cities. Then people started feeling the call and left civilisation behind, going into the forest and mostly, they weren’t seen again.
You play survivors of this arborial apocalypse, some of the few people who travel through the woods between cities, helping folks out but also too damaged to stick around communities for too long. Eventually you’ll heal and be ready to settle down, but not yet.
This uses the MiniSix system. You select a skill or attribute and roll d6’s equal to that number, one of which is a Wild Die which will explode if it gets a six, letting you roll it again and again, adding each 6 you get until you roll something else. Tags allow you rerolls and help can lower the difficulty of a task.
The world’s interesting and evocative, although I feel Wildsea which was released later might be an arborial apocalypse which might interest me a little more. The layout of the book is pretty basic and at times I found myself wishing they would get to the point. When looking for the core system there’s so much establishing terms before we actually see how the system works. Given the simplicity of it, an infographic or cheat sheet would have been really nice to help guide the eye through the system.
Hack the Planet
Not the cover image, but more evocative than the cover image
By Fraser Simons & Samjoko Publishing
Read before? Yes
Played? No
I last read this book on a coach home from AireCon in March 2020, just as things were beginning to feel really apocalyptic. I was going to read Apocalypse World Second Edition and couldn’t bring myself to given how things were going. Instead I read this which was also apocalyptic, but in a different way.
Hack the Planet is a Forged in the Dark cyberpunk RPG set in a world which has been environmentally devastated. As everything fell apart, three corporations finally did something to help. Kind of. They created Shelter One, a giant mega-city controlled by the corporations to such a level that the food grown is modified to monitor the people who eat it. There is, of course, classic cyberpunk disparity between the people most at risk from the elements battering even the people in Shelter One, to the decadent rulers in their own safe zones.
You play a gang of Glitches who have hacked their copies to be able to move off the grid and whose gang type can utilise the Acts of God in order to help their missions.
Cleaners are mercenaries
Clippers are a biker gang
Shifters are storm-chasers
Wired are fences of illicit goods
Comets drop in to steal stuff from their airships
Characters are one of a few different playbooks:
Edge – fighters
Lens – trackers
Torque – builder
Fuse – infiltrator
Haunt – hacker
Faint – strategist
Quirk – wanderer & scholar
There are some other game types in the back of the book along with all the stretch goals from the campaign. Keeping them a separated is quite nice for showing what’s part of the essential experience and what isn’t.
Mechanically this is Blades in the Dark. It’s an early hack, so it’s excusable for its lack of ambition in changing things up. The main differences are cybernetics which are mostly stat modifiers and Acts of God which are clock-based devastation which can hit in different ways during missions.
The thing is, I sound a bit negative in saying this hasn’t been too ambitious in what it’s done, but the system’s good and with the small mods here works with the setting. Then you get to Shelter One. Both the factions and the locations make the game. This is an incredible location filled with detail both from what places you’ve got to play in and the agendas of each faction.
I definitely want to run some games in this world, I love Blades in the Dark and Shelter One makes for an interesting, different cyberpunk setting. One which feels a bit less confusing than The Veil was and more relevant to our time than Cyberpunk Red.
Cartel
By Mark Diaz Truman & Magpie Games
Read before? No
Played? No
Cartel is a Powered by the Apocalypse game about people in or around a cartel, under the constant pressure that provides. It focuses more on the narofiction side of things and nicely elaborates what that means. It takes stories like Breaking Bad, The Wire and Desperado as its inspiration to tell desperate, dramatic stories.
The basic moves are framed around this kind of genre like, “Justify your behaviour” and “Turn to violence”, showing how you’ll be interacting with each other and the world. There’s also “Get fucking shot” which highlights the incredible lethality. You’re able to control an amount of that, but you’re best trying not to risk it.
You build up Stress instead of having hit points or harm (after all, if you Get Fucking Shot you just be dead). Like Darkest Self states, when you’ve got too much Stress you’re going to act up, lose yourself or do something else which will get you in trouble. You’re flawed characters, after all.
The playbooks are:
El Cocinero – The cook, smart and vital but fairly low level
La Esposa – The spouse of someone who’s involved in the business
El Halcón – a ambitious lower manager running the street operations
El Narco – upper management, in charge and responsible for keeping order
La Polizeta – a corrupt cop, playing both sides
La Rata – a mole in the organisation, always moments from being found out
La Sicaria – the enforcer, brutal and surrounded by death
When Cartel was first announced there were concerns that it would be glamourising of the life in some way or cheapening the seriousness of it. The book does a great job of navigating making a compelling drama that’s larger than life the way a television show would be.
It’s an interesting setting and I’m curious to see how it plays, especially for a mini-campaign where you could get into some really messy situations.
Imp of the Perverse
By Nathan D Paoletta
Read before? No
Played? No
First of all, I’ve hired Nathan Paoletta to do a cover and logo for a project of my own in the past.
This book was a difficult read. I’d bounced off it a couple of times previous to this quest. I’m pleased to say that after a while of delving through and wondering if it would be the undignified end of this quest, I eventually got the hang of it.
In Jacksonian America, you are investigators who all have a demon on their shoulder. A ‘perversity’ made manifest that’s eager to nudge you towards being consumed by it. You’ll be carrying out investigations into people who have similar problems but are in a much worse state, often entirely taken over by their imps.
Success in your investigation is a given, but how well it goes and how much of yourself it costs if going to vary. The mechanical terms are a little tricky to get into, especially a month after reading this.
Ratiocination is how you discover clues, using your Standing, Resources and Reason are spent to get your clues, costing an amount equal to the current Anxiety of the threat which will escalate as the game goes on.
Exertion is the die-rolling process which can look a bit involved at first glance. This is the layout of how it goes:
So yeah, it took a bit of time to warm to, and by the end I think I got it. I’d definitely be interested to give this a go, mainly for a one-shot and ideally as a player to get a feel for it. There are elements of the mechanics which remind me of Yellow King like the division of clue-getting and active rolls. There’s also a vibe of an American version of The Between (no, not Ghosts of El Paso). I think if I wanted to do something of this style I’d go with them first, but hopefully if this gets a play I’ll see how it stands out from them and not simply be baffled by the flow of the actions.
Journey Away
By Jacob S. Kellogg
Read before? Yes
Played? No
Here’s an interesting one. Journey Away is a chill fantasy game which works without big challenges and tells small tales set in a small area between a few towns.
Characters are fairly simply built with escalating dice for stats, although you’re not limited by how much you put in each one. This could mean you put all of the stats in at the highest level, but hopefully people will put in whatever’s fitting for the character.
Stories may involve travel between towns, encounters on the way, interactions with each other and the world, but it’s not going to have fights or world-ending battles.
Talking with one of my players about this, he was as horrified as I was at the idea of putting whatever you want in any stat and got a bit hung up on it. I think after reading enough Possum Creek type games I’m a bit more fine with it, but I definitely get the concern.
It’s a nice idea, but I think it sits in an odd halfway house between lighter, more traditional games and the kind of games like Wanderhome which don’t concern themselves with ideas like success or failure and don’t even present the tools which normally engage with those things.
Star Crossed
By Alex Roberts & Bully Pulpit Games
Read before? Yes
Played? No
Star Crossed is a fascinating concept, inspired by the horror game Dread and the idea of doing it, but kind of in reverse. You and another player create characters who are attracted to each other, but can’t be together.
You decide who is the ‘lead’ and who is the ‘follow’ like in dance. Then you take turns taking actions as you play through eight scenes. Some actions require you to pull from a tumbling block tower, and actions like talking require you to be touching the tower to help create a sense of rare importance to the conversations.
A lot of the actions earn you points and collectively you’re wanting to build up a lot of points before you knock the tower down. Yes, unlike Dread you actually want the tower, and your characters’ inhibitions, to fall. The thing is, if it falls too early then this is just a clumsy moment, an awkward revelation or a brief fling. Leave the tower standing by the end and you’ll both let the moment pass. This does mean you’ll pass through a number of scenes, but you actually don’t always want the game to go to the full amount of scenes.
This is a game I definitely want to try, although the only tumbling tower I have is a slightly uneven WH Smith own brand tower which I’ve covered in fake blood and the names of dead Dread characters, which feels like it’d only be fitting for some very specific genres of Star Crossed game.
At time of writing, there’s a BackerKit campaign for an expansion to Star Crossed.
Dream Apart & Dream Askew
By Avery Alder, Benjamin Rosenbaum & Buried Without Ceremony
Read before? No
Played? No
We’re at the founding of Belonging Outside Belonging. I downloaded a copy of Dream Askew a long time ago when it was a much smaller book, and a while after release, it received a proper printing in a book alongside another game in the same system called Dream Apart.
Both games use modified versions of the same system. You have No Dice, No Masters (the other term, which as far as I know is synonymous with Belonging Outside Belonging). Each player creates a character from a playbook, filling in details and possessing moves which gain tokens or require the expenditure of them (weak and strong moves, respectively). You also have a ‘lure’ which encourages people to interact with you in certain ways in order to gain themselves a token. Each player also takes a part of the GM type role in controlling part of the narrative beyond their character. This could be a group of people, a concept or a part of the community. The player with a specific environment defines anything relating to that thing, asks players questions about how they relate to it and throw in story elects based on it.
Dream Apart
Dream Apart is about a queer commune during the apocalypse. The world’s going to hell, but you were already living that kind of life, so your community’s hopefully going to be alright in among it all.
The roles are:
The Iris – Marked by the psychic maelstrom
The Hawker – A trader and hustler
The Stitcher – The person who fixes things and people
The Tiger – The one who fights
The Torch – An inspirational figure
The Arrival – someone new
The setting elements are:
Varied Scarcities
Psychic Maelstrom
Society Intact
Digital Realm
Outlying Gangs
Earth Itself
Dream Askew
Set in a Jewish shtetl, a small market town in the countryside, you’re interacting with other communities and with the unseen world.
Roles include:
The Sorcerer – someone who interacts with the invisible world
The Matchmaker – you’re trying to help arrange matches and handle gossip
The Midwife – you help the births in the community and have seen all manner of things in your work
The Klezmer – a charmer and performer
The Scholar – a smart and methodical person
The Soldier – a protector of the community, lost and violent
The setting elemtns are:
The Market
Unseen World
Goyishe World
Text & Traditions
Gossip & Reputation
Wild Forest
I have minimal knowledge of that side of my family who lapsed over the generations. Luckily in this game there’s a glossary and a lot of information to make it feel accessible for folks.
Looking at the listing of the roles and settings you can see why both use the same skeleton but how they differ quite a lot from each other. It’s also been adapted into several different games whether it’s Umbrella Academy style superheroism in Molotov College, travelling animals in Wanderhome, space adventures in Galactic and more.
I’ve wanted to read this for a while, but the PDF copy I’ve got kept crashing iBooks. I’ve redownloaded it for this quest, so this is the first time I’ve been able to read it since the original, smaller version of Dream Askew.
Behind the Masc
By Beau Sheldon & More
Read before? Yes
Played? No
This is an anthology about looking at masculinity in RPGs, with a number of different materials and articles. All of the pieces have a set of designer notes explaining the purpose behind them which is a nice touch. The authors all have a wide range of backgrounds and experiences which definitely helps make this a good, broad look at the topic.
The Mabon Monastery – a D&D 5E background about moon worship.
Ming Dynasty Transgender Man – Artwork
Chosen of the People – A premade character for D&D 5E
The Minotaur – A Monsterhearts Skin about protection and of course, a labyrinth
The Harlequin – Artwork
The Demi – A Monsterhearts Skin about being a demigod, impressive, powerful and of course, in need of the prayers of your worshippers
Palisade – A Twine game which I have not tried and can’t speak on
Echoes – An audio only game which I’ve also not played yet
The Grifter – An Apocalypse World playbook about being a tricksy so and so
I will say, this is possible the only thing I’ve backed which includes some 5E content. I’m a fan of Beau and there’s enough other material that I don’t begrudge it being here.
Flotsam: Adrift Amongst the Stars
By Joshua Fox & Black Armada
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
I was writing about Belonging Outside Belonging earlier and here’s another version of it already.
Flotsam is a game about the people living in the lower decks of a science fiction setting, living under the pressure of numerous internal and external challenges. There are tools to create your own setting or several premade ones included. Like Lovecraftesque before there’s an amazing teaching guide which allows you to run the game just with the printed resources.
The system feels a little simpler than the other BoB games, although that might be because it’s the first one I facilitated and the teaching guide did a lot of hand holding.
The playbooks are:
The Thunder – an enforcer
The Spider – a sneaky character
The Voice – a community leader
The Cast-Off – an outcast
The Sybil – a prophet
The Hybrid – a human mixed with an AI or alien
The Scum – someone connected to the community
The Outsider – someone trapped in the station from outside
The Vapour – an AI, ghost or something else
The situations are:
The Community
Poverty
The Gangs
The Above
The Spirits
Outside
The Resistance
War
There are more situations than there can be players, allowing you to pick and choose which elements are relevant in your game. The premade scenarios definitely take advantage of this, with required playbooks and situations for the minimal player counts, then others which can be added with each player.
I’ve facilitated a one-shot using The Grey Plague scenario where we were in the bowels of a space station, mostly abandoned to our own devices due to a medical outbreak the upper levels didn’t want to get too near. We had dwindling amounts of medicine and unscrupulous people who’d learnt where the drops of supplies were landing. There were some stand-offs in allotments, intrigues with a hologram bartender playing multiple sides and a drunken enforcer with dwindling authority. It was a really fun time and more dramatic than I thought a game with this structure would be. I’d love to give it another go sometime.
The next part will be basically all Mothership books, so look forward to that…
Faked Tales 