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.