March was another mixed month. There were some good long reads and games I’ve had for years which I’ve literally never read, but also a few lengthy additions and a realisation of a few extra additions which has shifted the percentages back. I’ve also had to split this into two posts with seven games each, as I have gone on a bit about some of them.

Out of the new RPGs to arrive, Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast was one of the longest RPGs I’ve backed on a crowdfunding platform. It’s from IndieGoGo, and clocks in at 500 pages. As we stand on April 1st I’m halfway through already, so I expect April to look a lot better.

There was also a contentious entry. I decided to read the Apocalypse World: Burned Over book immediately after Apocalypse World, but it’s a game I didn’t back on Kickstarter as I didn’t need to. I’m a Patron of the Baker House Band, and get all of their crowdfunded projects through Patreon instead. I decided that I’d add the other Baker games in, one of which is long (Under Hollow Hills) and then there are several tiny ones. Hopefully when it comes time to read them, they’ll be some quick wins. I’m not going to include every RPG that’s been crowdfunded as I’ve bought a ton which were on platforms like Kickstarter, but that I’ve bought afterwards. That feels like going too far, and with the Lumpley ones, I’d have backed them if not for the Patreon.

Dead Scare – An RPG of blood-spattered white picket fences

By Tracy Barnett

Read before? No

Played? No

Dead Scare was a zombie PbtA game which sounded interesting and then was so late I forgot about it for a while. It’s the 1950’s and a zombie outbreak has happened in the cities, in places where the men go to work. You’re women, primarily housewives, grandmothers, anyone who’s not busy working during the day. You can also choose to play a child. You’re basically all that’s left.

The playbooks are pretty self-explanatory and include:

• The Wife/Spinster
• The Preacher’s Wife
• The Teacher
• The Nurse
• The Grandmother
• The Nanny/Housekeeper
• The Scout (child)
• The Troublemaker (child)
• The Goody Two Shoes (child)
• The Runner (child)
• The College Girl (child)
• The Infected (supplemental)

By modern PbtA standards it feels like it doesn’t quite do enough, while also providing more moves than I’d generally want in a game. It’s fine, but I don’t think it’s a game I’ll be gagging to get to the table. I feel I’ve probably been spoiled by Zombie World which is a favourite zombie RPG of mine. There’s some fun setting material in the back as ‘postcards’, which I think were mainly stretch goals but provide some things you can play with in a zombie campaign.

Curse of the Yellow Sign

By John Wick

Read before? Yes

Played? Yes-ish

John Wick released a trilogy of Call of Cthulhu adventures a while before this Kickstarter, called Curse of the Yellow Sign. They were three Yellow King-themed stories set in different time periods but also linked together. Wick in his typical format mixed the adventure with advice, examples of stunts he pulled in his games and the challenge he set himself to make Call of Cthulhu adventures with no monsters, no tomes and no cults. It feels fairly easy in the present, years after experiencing Trophy and Cthulhu Dark, but like so many trad games, Call of Cthulhu was built around a specific experience which tends to include all three.

He promised a number of resources and provided some of them, then ended up turning to Kickstarter for a collection which would also include his own RPG system.

Digging for a Dead God is the only one of these I’ve run so far. It’s got a slightly controversial sell. You are playing Nazi soldiers in Ally-occupied Africa, trying to dig for diamonds and split before Allied forces get to you. First up, this is a horror story where you’re expecting everyone to die, you’re encouraged to root for this even if you’re playing them. Again, this feels like it could easily be a Cthulhu Dark scenario and if I run any of these games, it’ll be in that system. You start the game with pregens all loaded up against each other with fragile alliances, hatreds, unwell underlings and desperate prisoners who have found a door underground. They don’t want to dig any further. Players are encouraged to push them and to be terrible, even though some might not want to take part (in fact, the adventure encourages forcing the one person who really doesn’t want this to be the one to dole out punishment. Some of my group were uncomfortable with this scenario and luckily there’s a character who is perfect for that. Once the group saw what was behind that door, they started turning against each other, they mutilated themselves. Two people survived (one more than the scenario expects) and they looked at each other, saw what was happening and fled.

Calling the King is set in the 2000’s in a snowed-in and abandoned hotel which is purposefully evoking The Shining in every fibre of its being. A famous director has rented it out in order to go through a script reading of The King in Yellow. He also has an ulterior motive I won’t get into as I want to run this one. Joining him are his ex-wife who’s very high and very emotionally fragile, varied friends of the pair and the director’s new girlfriend. The creation of the script and copying of it was difficult, ruining several photocopiers and printers, almost like it didn’t want to be read. Now, trapped together, they’re going to read the play and I’m sure everything will be fine. I was originally going to run this and kept holding on for apparent copies of the script which were all different for each character. They never happened and there are some pieces of script which are available here. I think I’ll have use Paint the Scene>>> and similar techniques to reflect this if I run it in the future.

Archimedes VII is a science fiction story where the players have woken up from stasis with no memory. The AI is acting strangely and as the group hit key milestones in their reactions to horror, they learn more about who they all are. This is a game which would work brilliantly with Cthulhu Dark or even Dread. The revelation’s a little obvious but the drip feed of details could be fun.

Unnamable is a simple system which is fine. It uses a simple dice pool system and has some fun with people gaining new abilities as they crack. I wouldn’t run this game with Call of Cthulhu, but similarly I wouldn’t run it in Unnamable. I’d probably go with Cthulhu Dark which I’ve had the bleakest, darkest horror experiences with.

[A quick note, between writing this and publishing it I’ve run Archimedes VII using Cthulhu Dark. I’ll get into my thoughts on that experience in the future]

Microscope Explorer

By Lame Mage

Read before? No

Played? Only the base game

I like Microscope. It’s a neat little story game where you build a timeline in a nonlinear fashion. You have the start and end, but zoom in forward and backwards in the timeline, placing cards to answer a question a player poses in each round. You have ‘period’ cards which show a large span of time, ‘event’ cards which zoom the microscope in to one specific part of that period and ‘scene’ cards which allow everyone to play a quick moment in time, trying to answer a question.

Explorer is an expansion to the original book, providing advice, sample settings and a few extra modes of play.

• Union – Instead of playing through a timeline, you create a family tree.

• Chronicle – Pick a thing: an object, a place, anything like that. Then you see how it changes over time.

• Echo – How does time travel work in Microscope? What can you change and what will stay the same?

These all sound like fun additions, although if I had to pick one standout it’s the family tree. It would be interesting to use the game to create the story of a dynasty and see where it goes.

The Warren

By Bully Pulpit Games

Read before? Yes

Played? Yes

I’ve reviewed The Warren before, after running a campaign of it set in the fields by the race course on the border of Whitehawk in Brighton. I made my own playbook for the setting, which at some point I should put up online for folks to use.

The Warren is a Powered by the Apocalypse game where you play rabbits. Not anthropomorphic rabbits, not armed rabbits, but literal rabbits. There aren’t playbooks, as you’re just rabbits. There’s a set of special abilities which your warren shares, so each of you only have one and can’t duplicate them. 

As PbtA games do a lot of work to emulate genre, the moves to great work to keep your world at a small, dangerous scale. You build up an amount of Panic which can cause you to run, flee or worse, fight. This is also a game with no fighting mechanics, so you will lose any time you fight. As an MC you learn to play with senses other than sight, and with scale.

The world of The Warren is a fun one, but one filled with threats. We had a potential rival group of rabbits, some maternal sheep, horrendous seagulls, weird displaced lizards, a brutally friendly young dog called Gideon and an utter psychopath of a cat called Prosecco. There was also the threat of the Grey River (the road), the hypnotic tunnel leading out of the race course and one rabbit even fell prey to a friendly human who took her away to a loving home when she kept failing to escape his car.

Downfall

By Caroline Hobbs

Read before? No

Played? No

I love dystopian science fiction. It sounds odd to say, but when I was a teenager I got really into 1984, Brave New World, The Machine Stops, We and so on. This game is kind of about that, or at least the last days of a dystopia.

You have three roles: the lead character, the system and everyone else. The start of the game is setup, where you establish the rules of the world, the traditions they’ve got and how our hero bucks up against it. Once you’ve got everything put together, you play through scenes until a point where it all falls, and see what happens to our hero.

This feels like a nice, simple one-shot with the only problem being that it’s for specifically three players. I’ll probably get round to it at some point. It’s too few players for my paid GMing, and two fewer people than my regular group, so I’ll have to wait for some specific cancellations before I can give it a go.

Masks: A New Generation

By Magpie Games

Read before? Yes

Played? Yes

This is a favourite RPG of mine. Anyone who’s seen me online knows that I love superheroes. I specifically love heroes whose intention to do good far surpasses their actual power and/or competence. Masks is that. It’s also possibly my favourite superhero roleplaying game.

Masks is a Powered by the Apocalypse game and I’ve explained those earlier. The big differences here are that you’re all superheroes in training and your stats are based on how you view yourself. You’re a Danger, you’re Superior, a Saviour, a Freak or just Mundane. These stats also move. An adult might tell you that you shouldn’t be a hero and spend all your time being a kid, so your Saviour might go down and your Mundane go up. As the game goes on you can start locking in stats and figure out who you are.

You also get moves which start out like, “Unleash Your Powers” and as you go on, you might be able to turn that into a more controlled version where you’re not accidentally breaking everything.

Instead of damage, you get conditions like Guilty, Angry and Afraid. Villains get them, too. You might suffer one from a hit, even if you’re invincible as it might be embarrassing, or you might have accidentally injured a bystander. I remember someone on Google Plus asking about “So what, Spider-Man would guilt an enemy into giving up?” And yes. Yes he does. It’s not always a punch that saves the day.

The core playbooks are as follows:

• The Beacon – You have no powers but some cool gear and you’re going to go through the whole superhero experience. You have a list of things you want to do, and your enthusiasm will get you through your relative lack of power.
• The Bull – You’re great at fighting and are in a love triangle, even if you can’t articulate your feelings well. The literal and emotional bull in the china shop.
• The Delinquent – Oh, you rogue, you rebel. You want to be seen as the antihero, but not necessarily actually be evil. You just want people to tell you you’re bad.
• The Doomed – You’re really powerful, but on a clock before you die, go evil, get lost in the timestream or something else.
• The Janus – You’re the kind of hero whose main deal is having to balance their life as a hero and as a human, like Peter Parker in his early years.
• The Legacy – You’re part of a long line of heroes, the latest one, who has to live up to the name they’ve inherited and the judgement of the last one.
• The Nova – You’re a font of power with incredible abilities, but also you need to build it up and can lose control if you’re not careful.
• The Outsider – You’re not from round here, with weird technology, weird powers and a lack of understanding of Earthlings in general.
• The Protege – You’re someone’s sidekick, taking a more active role in their life unlike the Legacy. You also have to live up to them, but also define yourself by knowing when to rebel against them or become your own person.
• The Transformed – You’re a monster, unable to blend in with society or interact with it easily.

These playbooks cover a wide array of powers as those are mostly linked to fictional positioning, the basic moves and the playbook’s moves. They also have questions for their own origins, those of the group and prompts for character defining Moments of Truth where that player takes over the narrative for a while.

I’ve run so many granular superhero RPGs where you have to think ahead of time to put points in any different type of move you might reasonably do, or everything gets changed into different modifiers. Here the powers are able to feel different while being simply entries on a playbook and how they interact with moves. Fights zip along at a good speed and the fail-forward mechanics help things roll back and forth through the scenery, giving a sense of tension balanced for everyone whether they’re a dude with a bow or a guy with invincibility and laser vision.

Masks: The Fan Favourite

By Lin Codega & More

Read before? No

Played? No

This is an anthology zine which covers a bunch of things for the Masks RPG. This came out later, but I figured I’d read it immediately after the main Masks book.

What is Masks? – A pretty basic introduction

Rook to G4 – A chess-themed villain and their scheme to fight, including a rival team of adult heroes. I’ve seen a lot of Masks third party content and this made me realise I’ve not actually seen many adventure modules

Adventure Seeds – A d66 table of adventure hooks, which might be very useful for me as my main plot building tends to be things like writing “Attacksidermist” on a post-it note.

Homecoming – A literal homecoming dance scenario, Masks-style

How to run Masks for Large Groups – I’ve run games for big groups, it always feels like madness.

MeRIT Scholars – A playset specifically for a team rather than individuals, with young heroes working for the Mystic Reseach and Investigation Team who are an arcane group. There are suggestions for each of the playbooks. 

The Ascendant Playbook – A playbook of for the kind of hero who’s always been told they’re the best of the best. This feels like a good Money St Croix style playbooks.

Teenage Masks – An essay about running Masks for teenagers.

Haunted Horatio’s Horror House – A one-shot module to run, all about a spooky haunted house.

In Cold Pursuit – Another one-shot, this time about escorting a villain who’s a prisoner and stopping a vigilante from murdering them.

The Enduring Playbook – A playbook for someone depowered, who sounds a bit like Jessica Jones from Alias or Christian Walker from Powers.

There’s also a bunch of fiction with The (Alien) Princess Diaries, TItan Academy: Takar, The Petal Prison and Spinel Tap.

To Be Continued…

That’s only seven games, but I talked about them a lot. You won’t have to wait long for the next segment, where I cover another seven games both briefly and somehow also in laborious detail!