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.

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.