Here are the rest of the games I’ve read in May, including a few newer offerings which I either read to run, or just in an attempt to keep on top of everything new that arrives.

My friend Graham asked me why I didn’t limit my readthrough to everything between my first backed project and 31 December 2022, so I wasn’t constantly updating my list and moving the goalposts. I… don’t have a good answer for that. Oh well.

Eden

By Marc Hobbs

Read before? Yes

Played? No

This is a map-drawing game about creating your own garden of Eden, then providing lessons to the humans from the perspective of an animal or group of animals. I love The Quiet Year as far as map-drawing goes, but this feels like it might be a bit more chilled than that. The book handles the ritual of play pretty well, so I feel confident in being able to run it even when the rules have faded from my terrible memory.

Ghost Court

By Bully Pulpit Games, Jason Morningstar & Steve Segedy

Read before? Yes

Played? No

This is another LARP-ish game. There really seem to have been a lot released around this time. I love Bully Pulpit’s games anyway. This one’s a courtroom drama where the living and the dead settle petty disputes. You need people to fill various courtroom roles like judge, prosecution and defence, and then you hand out the cards for each case. Players have to argue their side and anyone in the jury needs to make a decision. It feels like it would be the perfect game to have people drop in and out of, although I’m not sure how I’d organise the logistics of it. If I get a big table, I might just run it there.

Bluebeard’s Bride

By Magpie Games, Whitney “Strix” Beltran, Marissa Kelly and Sarah Richardson

Read before? Yes

Played? No

This is an incredible-looking horror game. It’s beautifully made and incredibly creepy. 

The idea is that you play out the story of Bluebeard from the perspective of his bride, taken from her home, wed to this strange man and left alone to travel through his extremely Silent Hill style mansion, allowed everywhere but one room. She investigates items and ghosts in the rooms, deciding bit by bit about whether to resist or obey Bluebeard, eventually reaching a choice to open the final door or not.

The Bride isn’t just one player, though. The Bride is played by multiple people, all representing different aspects of her:

• The Animus – bold action, confrontation
• The Fatale – sultry and controlling
• The Mother – authoritative, helpful and judgemental
• The Virgin – naive and innocent
• The Witch – mystical and intimidating

One person at a time controls the Bride as they travel through rooms, but give up control to keep themselves safe. The other Brides and whisper to them, tell them to do things or notice things, but it’s only the one in control who can affect the physical world.

There’s a move in this game about when you shudder from fear. Not the character, but the player. I love that. If things go bad, one aspect of the Bride may shatter, becoming lost to the mansion and helping the Groundskeeper (the GM) with the downfall of her sisters.

This is a specifically feminine horror story, and one which I really want to try, but I’m also painfully aware that I’m a cis man in a group full of cis men, and it feels like something I could fuck up quite easily. One day I will get this to the table, it’s too interesting not to.

Follow

By Lame Mage & Ben Robbins

Read before? No

Played? No

I’ve played Microscope and Kingdom by Ben Robbins. The first creates a timeline which could be in any genre. The second creates a location with a hierarchy and how each strata deals with problems.

Follow creates a group of people accomplishing a task and the challenges they face. It’s an interesting idea, but feels like the broadness of the concept is something dealt with by most other RPGs. You’re almost always on a mission to do something.

If you want to represent that kind of task from beginning to end, this might still be the game for you. The resolution is with a bag and tokens which gets modified as you play, often in ways which might make things trickier as you go on. The type of quest can be quite broad, too. You might be on a journey to put a cursed ring in a volcano, but you might also be handling a space launch, research into a virus, some espionage. It feels like it can handle smaller stakes than Our Last Best Hope, but can still give us similar types of stories even if the world isn’t on the line.

Personally I think I’m more likely to run Microscope or Kingdom, but if I do this, it’ll definitely in be more of a mundane setting.

Home By Dark – A Story Game of Hope and Fear

By Protagonist Industries

Read before? No

Played? No

This is an RPG of kids on bikes and strange encounters in the style of Stranger Things and 80’s movies. Unfortunately it isn’t Kids on Bikes, a game which went onto Kickstarter a bit later, and it suffers a bit for that.

This is another game where I feel I need to invoke Our Last Best Hope (I realise there may be another game presceding that which does these things, if so I don’t know it). Characters have cards representing the Fear, Insecurity, Responsibility and Hope. You pick a divide between Hope and Belief to represent your innocent wonder and cynical awareness, which might change in the game.

There are three piles of dice as the pillars: Danger, Pursuer and Secret, trying to clear them off as you go towards the finale and deal with either the Pursuer or the Danger. 

It’s fine, and I might be more amenable to it if Kids on Bikes wasn’t a bit easier structured, beautifully designed and filled with more different scenarios.

Trophy Gold

By Hedgemaze Press, Gauntlet Productions & Jesse Ross

Read before? Yes

Played? Yes

We’re up to more recent games now, and this is one I read half as a treat to me, half because I was running a Trophy Gold campaign anyway.

I’ve reviewed Trophy Gold, I recommended it in an episode of Casual Trek, I will not stop talking about Trophy Gold.

The gist, just to keep things brief is thus: You are desperate treasure hunters going into horrific places to pry loose any treasure and return alive, ideally closer to the thing that drives them to go to these terrible places.

Yes, capitalism is the real monster at the heart of this game. You might be a blighted farmer, an ex-cultist, a fallen priest, you’ll have a drive like buying and destroying the orphanage you hated, finding a banner of a lost legion, even just retiring in peace in a nice part of the capital city of Ambaret.

Each Incursion is based around a specific theme like ‘Harvest’ and is made up of sets filled with traps and treasures. You’ll interact with them like you’re in a point and click adventure, just one filled with a lot more horror which you may never escape.

The Hunt Roll is how you interact with the world, getting valuable Hunt Tokens by talking to people, prying open floorboards, checking suspicious statues, looting bodies and so on. Hunt Tokens allow you to answer the goal of any particular set, sometimes unlocking other sets, sometimes getting treasure, sometimes understanding the horrors a little better. You can also cash them in for money, and lose them if things go really badly, so sometimes you’ll want to cash them in even if it’s not too helpful.

There are more rolls than that. Risk Rolls are needed to avoid harm when doing anything risky which isn’t clue gathering. It tags in the players aside from the roller to pitch ideas about what could go wrong if they fail or bottle it, and Devil’s Bargains where the roller will get a bonus die if they accept something wrong which will happen whether you pass or fail. It sounds a bit metagamey and yeah, that’s still part of the game. Zooming out of the moment and letting players into this GM space is fantastic. If gives suggestions the GM wouldn’t necessarily have thought out themselves, adds to the players’ ownership of the game and lets everyone embrace horror on their own stakes.

There are some supplemental rolls for helping or hindering, but the other big roll is Combat. The group all describe how they open themselves up to potential harm, roll a die as their ‘weak spot’ and then a bunch of dice which they’ll pick the highest of and try to match the Endurance of a monster. If any of the dice (used or not) hit your weak spot then you’ll be hurt, closer to your destruction.

It’s a game which manages to be the most video gamey and the most narrative thing I’ve seen for this kind of adventuring. The incursions are a joy to read and were wonderful to play. It’s a simple system and character creation takes minutes which is great, as luck can run out easily in this world.

Fight With Spirit

By Storybrewers Games

Read before? No

Played? No

I’m not a sports person. I’ve never given a crap about watching it and I was taken out of team sports between the dyspraxia and later all sports due to childhood health problems. I loved watching Friday Night Lights after being told that it was about sports the same way that Buffy’s about vampires. It was a great show, and when I was marathonning series of teen drama movies a while ago, the Bring it Ons were more good than bad. Oh, and I did actually play basketball for a year or two. We were utter amateurs and I loved it. There was another short dyspraxic person so we were put on opposing sides, making a blend of actually alright blocking and the occasional incredibly powerful but aimless throw. In my case it was “The Etheridge-Nunn Bullet” which would go pretty much in a horizontal line from where I was, rarely into the hoop, sometimes at an ally and often a long way away.

So aside from the above things, I’m not a sports person. Storybrewers are a company I’ll back anything from, and this is no different. I love Good Society and the Littlebox RPGs, I’ve not run Alas for the Awful Sea, but it looks interesting.

Fight With Spirit is a sports drama as an RPG. It doesn’t concern itself with the actual rules of the sport and as long as it involves teams and is played competitively then it’s all the same (there are solo sport rules, too). 

You pick one of four teams and your characters, along with typically sporty drama like you’re being poached by another team, or you’ve got a rivalry going on. The group run through cycles of pre-match and match play, going through not rigid details about the rounds, sets, innings or whatever that you’re playing, but instead you’re going through dramatic beats. There’s a chance to show up a rival on the same side, you’re out there on your own, you hear people on the other side talking about weak spots on your team. Each match event might have a slightly different ritual for how the play of it goes and whether you win or lose, things are going to get dramatic.

Spindlewheel

By Sasha Reneau

Read before? No

Played? Yes

Spindlewheel isn’t a rulebook. At least, there’s a rulebook, but mostly it’s a deck of cards. A really pretty deck of cards with gold trim on the sides and a few smaller stacks based around specific themes. Spindewheel’s a kind of tarot-style thing where each card has a name, then two different descriptors for it, all fairly vague and open to interpretation.

The idea here is that you can use them in games, or make up brand new games with them. I’ve used the deck to help add elements to adventures, especially the mini-decks when I had relevant Trophy Gold incursions. There are a ton of games which use the deck and I’ve used a printed set to play them before the official one arrived.

My favourite Spindlewheel game so far was Spindlewheel Detective, where you make and solve a murder mystery using the cards to imagine each element of the murder, the suspects, pick the murderer and then the decision of how it was resolved.

I admit I expected a selection of games, like the Spindlewheel Microgames PDF with Detective in it, but this had a single game in it. It’d be interesting to try, but for the most part I’m still eager to try more minigames and to modify some of my fiction & RPGs with it.

NULL

By Gila RPGs and Spencer Campbell

Read before? No

Played? No

I’ve loved running the Lumen system as a quick hit of tactical combat roleplaying in an indie game frame. It shows that if you want fighty action and combat optimisation you don’t have to only look in the trad space.

Null is the latest game by the prolific Spencer Campbell, founder of Lumen. This game sees you as operators facing off against a malicious nanotech and its forces. Similar to Nova you enter a zone, attack enemies and collect drops from them, but here you graft tech to yourself, fight as far as you can in the knowledge you’re probably not all making it out.

The classes are:

• Medic
• Commander
• Scout
• Researcher
• Soldier

Each of these have weapons and abilities. It feels like gear’s more of a factor here, similar to Light, an earlier game of Spencer’s. You don’t have the epic frames from Nova, filled with superpowers. Here you might have some grenades, you might have the ability to make a static wall, to fire some lasers and so on. This game cites Trophy in its ‘play to lose’ style and has built everything accordingly. 

I think Nova (both the current version and oncoming second edition) will be my go to Lumen game as I run enough play to lose games and cutting loose with a fun, stupid power fantasy can be great fun. That said, I’m eager to get this and Light to the table to see what other Lumen games are like.

Conclusions & Observations

Was I specifically backing LARPs around the era I’m reading or did it just pan out that way? I’m still not sure, maybe it’s that the designers I liked (Bully Pulpit, NDP and Burning Wheel) all came up with them around the same time.

I was a little cold with some games as they’ve been replaced in my eyes by later games, sometimes by the same author, but this was a good selection to read.