Here’s part two of the RPGs I read in June 2023 and brief looks at what I’ve found in them.

Dust, Fog and Glowing Embers, an RPG

By Slide Stolar

Read before? No

Played? No

Dust, Fog and Glowing Embers is a kind of Industrial Age Bioshock kind of game. It’s set in a darkly humourous world.

Players roll light and dark dice, giving narrative control to the GM or taking it for themselves. This allows you to succeed but also add soft and hard details to the fiction. You can exploit details to give oyu bonuses to the light die, making you more likely to succeed. 

Characters have a choice of their background and one of three archetypes which change whether you’re relatively balanced in your stat spread or vastly weighted towards just one. You also get humours which you pick one of to determine how you react to people. This can shift over time as you balance or change your humours.

The main treat of this book is the city of Stome, which is a world of weird academia ruled over by tons of picklists to roll or choose elements for each area. This was an approach I loved in Trophy Loom and works well to keep things fresh. 

It looks interesting, although I think for this sort of tone I’d probably use Electric Bastionland or Into the Odd and scavenge bits from here.

Sensational: A Superpowered RPG Where Empathy Matters

By Thomas Constantine Moore

Read before? No

Played? No

I like superhero RPGs and it’s often interesting seeing where different games prioritise different things. This one advertised that it’s a game with powers and feelings. 

The system’s fairly basic in the rolling mechanic: you roll a number of d6’s and count anything with a 4+ as a success. You move around on an emotional scale from Plutchik which was weird as I read this around the same time that I read DIE, which handled it better. The more you feel things, it modifies you like Masks with conditions, just more of them. There are powers and while they’re varied, there wasn’t really much that inspired me here. That feels like the statement of the RPG as a whole. While there’s a simple base to the game, the emotions are a bit too fiddly. I think I’d try to play it to see if it’s easier than it looks, but I probably wouldn’t try running.

Exuvaie: Relics of House Dragonfly

By Sean Smith

Read before? No

Played? No

I love film noir, and adding some weird elements to a real world setting. You’re characters uncovering a conspiracy relating to an insect cult. You’ll use a deck of cards to built elements of the conspiracy but also to determine your level of success. There’s some interesting stuff going on with the deck in a kind of solitaire-style mechanic, but I found a quick initial read still had be a little confused. I wondered whether I’d need to grab a deck of cards and run myself through some of it just to get a feel for it, but handily Sean had a tutorial video to help.

This is a one-shot I’ll have to remember and run when I’m feeling a bit noir-ish. Unlike some of these kinds of one-shot story games, I’ll definitely need to reread the rules beforehand to make sure I’ve got it all right.

The Sword, The Crown & The Unspeakable Power

By Todd Nicholas, Todd J & Wheel Tree Press

Read before? No

Played? Yes, the playtest version

Back in the Google Plus days (RIP), I saw a shout out for playtesters for a Powered by the Apocalypse game which was a kind of high council Game of Thrones type affair. I’d been running Dungeon World a lot and liked the idea of this different perspective. 

In SCUP, you all take the role of people in charge of a location, utilising power both soft, hard and strange. There are different playbooks who leverage power in different ways and have interesting abilities to deal with each other. It’s all a bit more mysterious and enigmatic than Dungeon World, and worked brilliantly for a zoomed out perspective on the world we’d created together.

The classes are:

• The Adept: A magician, filled with knowledge and odd abilities
• The Beloved: Someone loved by the dark power
• The Black Hood: An assassin, quietly offing people
• The Bloodletter: A doctor, a rare and valuable trade
• The Crown: Someone in charge or related to a person in charge
• The Gauntlet: An enforcer for someone
• The Hex: A witch, mysterious and worrying
• The Lyre: A musician, able to influence hearts and sway the public
• The Screw: A torturer, gathering information in questionable ways
• The Spur: A soldier, generally loyal to money
• The Voice: Basically Grima Wormtongue

There’s also guidance for making places, belief systems and how to determine the needs everyone has, creating the initial drama for everything to escalate out from.

I loved the game I ran of this and where running the people in charge of a city went poorly in a more traditional game, given the freedom it presented, the tools in use here are fantastic for generating drama. I think the tension and backstabbing might fatigue a group, but I’ve not tried it myself yet.

The Imposters, A Conspiracy Game Anthology

By Jeremy Morgan, Banana Chan, Nick Wedig, Alex Carlson, James Mullen, Todd Crapper, Josh Jordan & Tim Hutchings 

Read before? Yes

Played? No

This is an anthology of different games, themed around conspiracy and some taken from RPG design contests in the past. They are:

• They’re Onto Me: Red – ones a week, record videos about noticing people in your life acting strangely, and then abruptly stop.
• LOVEINT – A 200 word RPG about making a messy tangle of agents working together while pursuing emotional, romantic and/or professional goal.
• The Meet – Pairs of players arrange their covert meetings in false identities, trying not to be noticed.
• The Thought Police – A game where you’re all describing your thoughts, only one player is secretly telepathic and is the only one who can hear them. 
• The Light of Day – A kind of heist game, where one player’s trying to catch the conspirators leaking data, actually using phones, laptops or other ways of covertly communicating.
• The Way of All Flesh – Agents attend the funeral of a colleague, using drawn cards to determine their relationship with the deceased and what their active case is. These can end up being quite surreal, like a treasure map, a fight with rival agents or a werewolf’s appearance!
• Field Notes #23 – This game gets players to wander about a bit, finding and interpreting conspiracies, hiding information and so on. It’s an interesting read, possibly a tricky sell.

The book is nicely designed with photos and conspiracy-looking art in the games, as well as dividing them. Like any anthology some of these grabbed me right away (like They’re Onto Me: Red) and others kind of drifted out of memory. If I’m feeling suitably conspiratorial I might give some of them a try.

The Quick: Nordic Noir Ghost Stories

By Ville Takanen & Myrrysmiehet Oy

Read before? Yes

Played? No

I’m not a big Nordic Noir person, so I think I backed this partially for the interesting, clean look and partially for the supernatural side of it. I’m also curious about checking out TTRPGs from outside of the UK and America.

You’re part of a group of damaged people solving supernatural mysteries. You roll a pool of dice when you make a move, some good, some bad. You get them based on your concept, background, aspects and harm, with 4+ counting as a success. The moves are things like “Try” and the book goes through the results whether you succeed, fail or get more perils with the bad dice than good. I like that the violence move is “Cross the line” as you’re only going to resort to violence in an act of desperation and things are going to go badly whether you succeed or fail.

The character classes are:

• Seeker – Someone desperate to uncover the truth
• Spook – Someone who worked for The Man
• Touched – A psychic able to touch things and get visions
• Bloodbound – Part of an influential family
• Old Soul – Someone who’s seen too much
• Channel – A bridge between the living and the dead
• Rogue Ops – Someone working for a shady corporation

This is a game which I forget about and once I start reading it, I’m interested all over again. For a mystery it’d be difficult thinking about running it in anything other than a Carved from Brindlewood style, but this feels like it’d be an interesting game for the vibes it’s putting down.

Beak, Feather & Bone

By Tyler Crumrine

Read before? Yes

Played? Yes

We’re at the new games part of this month’s reading, both of which are part of my ‘bucket list’ for 2023. This one I didn’t manage to play, but read and have printed out ready to go at some point soon.

Beak, Feather and Bone is a game about colouring in a map. Each player represents one community in the city and has a felt tip of a unique colour. You’ll be drawing cards and determining the following:

• The type of building & level of influence (based on the card drawn)
• Beak – What people say about the building
• Feather – How it looks on the outside
• Bone – How it looks inside

You keep going a few rounds and determine who rules the main seat of power. It looks nice and simple, it’s bird-themed, but could easily be used to help with worldbuilding for a bigger RPG.

DIE: The Roleplaying Game

By Kieron Gillen and Rowan, Rook & Decard

Read before? Yes

Played? Yes

DIE is a comic by Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans about a roleplaying group who vanished into their campaign world as teenagers and came back changed, unable to speak about what happened. As older people with lives and families of their own, they’re sent back and have to deal with both representations of their real world, of games and of fiction in general.

So that makes this a roleplaying game about a comic about a roleplaying game. There’s a very specific ritual to set up play, where you are a former roleplaying group who have a reunion and end up trapped in their campaign world thanks to their GM (who is also a character played by the game’s facilitator).

Each character class is based around a die type, as well as classic character classes, play styles and of course, the characters from the comic:

• D4 – The Dictator, a terrifying bard able to tell people to do things with a word
• D6 – The Fool, a swashbuckler with simple rules that involves drawing on their dice
• D8 – The Emotion Knight, the fighter type who can annihilate more and more things as they feel their dedicated emotion
• D10 – The Neo, a rogue who uses pilfered Fair Gold to power cybernetics
• D12 – The God-Binder, able to communicate with and bargain with gods for miraculous feats
• D20 – The Master, played by the GM, generally the antagonist and able to cheat

I’ll keep this brief as I have a full review I want to do for this. The system’s fairly simple, almost too simple, especially in fights. My group didn’t quite gel with that side of it, despite the really interesting rituals to set things up and the ways to construct the story.

The standard mode of play is Rituals, which is around 3-4 sessions starting with the character creation, has you play in first person and make a persona before ending up trapped in the fantasy world. From there, you need to decide whether you’ll stay or leave. This means you’ll even need the GM’s agreement and they’ve just vanished. I used my own set of fancy dice for each players’ specific dice, the worst d6 for The Fool and some old fragments of abandoned campaigns as fodder.

There’s a Campaign mode which has more options for advancement and goes into mapping out the 20 sides of the game world, or several one-shot setups including being in a horror movie shoot that’s become real and being trapped in the dungeon of a killer GM.

It’s a fascinating game, gorgeously drawn, with some spectacular ideas. I have a few more praises and criticisms which I’ll get into in my full review one day soon.

Cthulhu Hack Second Edition

By Paul Baldowski & Just Crunch Games

Read before? No

Played? No

I’ve run a lot of Lovecraftian RPGs and I have some clear favourites which go more on the story game side. Cthulhu Hack’s a Lovecraftian RPG which is more on the OSR style of things. I’ve been eager to play it before running, to see the style of play and make sure that my attitudes from other games don’t get in the way.

This second edition is better at putting the style of play across and I feel a bit more confident in trying it out as a GM first. The system uses Saves which you’ll roll against when facing horrors, and Resources which you’ll spend to try and investigate or gain things in the world.

Like a lot of OSR type games it uses the standard D&D style spread of attributes: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma. Then there’s Sanity, Flashlights, Smokes, Hit Die, Armed Damage & Unarmed Damage which are fixed by your Archetype. The first three are your resources, which start with a Die Type and might shrink as you use them up.

The Archetypes are:

• Adventurer
• Bruiser
• Performer
• Philanthropist
• Ruffian
• Scholar

You also have abilities and skills to help you out. The characters from this will be a little more advanced than the Squamous ones, but less than Call or Trail of Cthulhu.

The layout of the book highlights where everything is, although in the PDF the bestiary layout meant a bit of flipping back and forth to see what monster is being talked about. The physical book is small and gorgeous, and worth picking up anyway, so I don’t begrudge it too much.

There’s an adventure called “Save Innsmouth” which I gather is a revamp of an old adventure and it looks like a lot of fun. At some point I’ll have to run it either with my weekly group or as something to show my Arkham Horror group between campaigns.

Conclusions

For the most part these were positive reads. I bounced hard off Age of Anarchy, despite the interesting time period, and Sensational. I think this is the first time in this quest that I’ve had some difficulty pushing myself onwards. Hopefully July will be a bit better.