I read a few extra books this month. I also have my history with Deadlands to talk about and a few other interesting items.

Deadlands: The Weird West

By Pinnacle Entertainment Group

Read before? Yes

Played? Yes

I was a Deadlands fan a long time ago, buying the First Edition just before realising a Second Edition has recently been released. I ran a couple of campaigns of it over the years and got massively obsessed with the Doomtown CCG.

I played Savage Worlds once and it was fine. I killed the character of Paco from GMS Magazine in an Arthurian RPG, which might have been a bit bad, as he was playing my son. I remember this as he entered Onslaught Games once during Tabletop Day and shouted at me, calling me out as a murderer. I was in the middle of a game of Bang!, a Wild West betrayal game. So that didn’t do well to earn the trust of everyone round the table.

After enough time away from Deadlands, I decided to back this new edition. I got excited about it after talking to my old GM, Graham, who is an endless font of enthusiasm for games. Little did I realise it didn’t actually come with the current version of Savage Worlds. I quickly remedied that.

Savage Worlds is a toolbox game, one which I like, but often find the layout of a little frustrating as far as getting new players on board. Seriously, the book takes about 80 pages before giving any indication of how the system works. 

Deadlands is primarily a setting book, getting people up to speed with the world in a way which is a lot more welcoming to newbies. There’s a little information for veteran players as they retconned a lot of the elements from the old editions and decided to actually do that in canon.

For those that don’t know, Deadlands is a game set in an alternate Wild West where things went decidedly spooky. There are mad scientists, magicians who gamble with dark forces and people who are kind of zombies.

The book is a fairly trad one, acting more as a list of different topics, providing the new character options, new gear, subsystems which are specific to Deadlands compared to Savage Worlds and new character types. There aren’t classes as such, but there are builds which ban be made with specific advantages:

• Agents – Basically ‘Men in Black’.
• Blessed – People whose religion allows them to perform miracles.
• Chi Masters – Martial artists.
• Harrowed – The undead, also a group you can join if you win and are lucky(?) enough to draw the right cards
• Hucksters – The aforementioned people who gamble with the devil for magical power.
• Mad Scientists – Inventors of strange devices (although it’s also a kind of magic but shh, don’t tell them.)
• Shamans – Practitioners of Native American spirit magic.
• Territorial Rangers – The newer version of the Texas Rangers

There are some new rules like Fear Levels, which to a meta-level players are generally trying to lower. The corruption that goes through the Weird West is measurable at the GM level and helps you work out how to narrate the way the world works in the fiction. 

You get a broad look at the Weird West, going through each of the locations and a nice bestiary to give you a glimpse into what’s out there.

This is an overview, more than anything else. There’s an additional companion which has some slightly weirder, more specific things. Deadlands has a lot of adventures out there between the old and new editions, which flesh each area out nicely. It’s a fine book, but feels like you need a bit more in order to run a great Deadlands game.

I’ve run a long campaign of Deadlands using the Horror at Headstone Hill boxed set, which was possibly one of my favourite premade campaigns. I may be down on the book at a fun read, but it is a useful reference guide.

Monster of the Week

By Evil Hat & Generic Games – Michael Sands

Read before? No

Played? Yes

Here’s another part in this quest where Charlie makes a rod for his own back. The only Monster of the Week book I crowdfunded was the most recent, the Codex of Worlds. I’m going to be running this after The Betweek: Ghosts of El Paso, so I figured I’d read all three books even if two of them were surplus to requirements.

Monster of the Week is a classic PbtA game, one which has been revised over the years. Replicating Buffy, Supernatural and countless other monster hunting television shows, comics and books, you each take a playbook which embodies the kind of hunter you are:

• The Chosen
• The Crooked
• The Divine
• The Expert
• The Flake
• The Initiate
• The Monstrous
• The Mundane
• The Professional
• The Spell-Slinger
• The Spooky
• The Wronged

No offence to Monster of the Week but I started reading it, thinking it felt a little bit basic. The book won me over, but it took a little bit of time. The problem I’m finding after reading a lot of Carved from Brindlewood games is that they tend to make other mystery games feel a little shallower. MotW’s focus is quite different to a Brindlewood game, though. You’ve got a mystery each week, a monster of some sort, and you need to find out how to take them down.

You generally can’t harm the monster without doing some kind of research, or hunting up the food chain to it. The mystery’s fairly light, the fights fairly bouncy and then you’re on to the next one.

There are ‘season’ mysteries which are dealt with as a scaled up version of regular ones, and a few fun ways of playing with McGuffins like ‘Big Magic’ in order to allow weird rituals and one-off shenanigans which aren’t necessary to be reflected mechanically.

Monster of the Week: Tome of Mysteries

By Evil Hat & Generic Games – Michael Sands & Others

Read before? No

Played? No

You’ve got a fairly simple, if robust system, why not start having some fun with it? Monster of the Week’s an older PbtA, like Dungeon World, with a number of hacks and modules by other people. This supplement definitely helps breathe some new life into the game, as will the next one, something which DW never had.

First up are four new playbooks, not necessarily needed but still welcome.

• The Gumshoe
• The Hex
• The Pararomantic
• The Searcher

Then there’s a lot of advice including things like running convention or lunch break games, solo gaming and having different Basic Moves using the Weird stat to reflect science, intuition and so on.

Finally, there are a TON of mysteries. I like making my own, but I also love being able to use pre-built mysteries. There’s a lot to harvest here, whether it’s taking a whole mystery or just harvesting some for parts.

Monster of the Week: Codex of Worlds

By Evil Hat & Generic Games – Michael Sands, Marek Golonka & Others

Read before? No

Played? No

I’d promised to run Monster of the Week after a lot of badgering from one of my group. That was before this was crowdfunding, and I’m pleased that it came out as it feels like it adds a new factor which will really make a Monster of the Week campaign sing.

Inspired by Blades in the Dark, there are Team playbooks:

• Agents in Black
• Always on the Road
• The Chosen One and the Entourage
• Guardians of the Borderland
• I.M.P.S.
• Interdimensional Crisis Team
• The Last Survivors
• League of Double Lives
• Mercenaries
• Mystery Club
• The Night Shift
• Suburban Watch Group
• Touring Band
• Whistleblowers
• Wild Hunt Fugitives

Each of these gives the group origins, benefits and a big bad out of several choices. There’s also a starting mystery for each of the groups, which is a good thing to have if you’re picking your team in the first session and need a bit of lead time to get the longer term plans ready.

There are also Other Worlds which are more specific campaign frames:

• This Strange Old House
• Gothic Century
• Dreaming with the Gods
• Monster Marches
• Bone Spear

After that, there’s some guidance about making your own worlds, but there’s so much here to use which looks really fun. I’m definitely going to provide about 50% of the team playbooks as ones for my group to pick from. There are a few that just won’t get over and some I’d rather not run for, but a lot of them look great.

Galaxies in Peril

By Samjoko Publishing – Kyle Simons

Read before? No

Played? No

I love superheroes in comics, I like reading RPGs and seeing how they try to replicate superhero stories. I like the Simons brothers’ work, but I missed Worlds in Peril when it came out. That’s the predecessor to this game and used Powered by the Apocalypse mechanics. This game uses Forged in the Dark as its basis and promises games going from street level like Defenders or galactic level like the Fantastic Four.

Like Beam Saber, this was a big FitD book with a topic I like the idea of and just didn’t get round to reading. Similar to Beam Saber, I’m surprised at how close it sticks to the FitD framework. I’m used to things like Quietus and CBR+PNK which rip the system apart to do fantastic things. There are some systems like Hack the Planet which doesn’t go that far and still feels like it’ll be great.

This version of the system is interesting. It feels like it sticks close to Blades and it has made some understandable changes. You have Resilience instead of Stress as a way of reframing your pool of power. Your powers are primarily based around fictional positioning and then you also pick three levels of special effect that cost you Resilience. Luckily there are some examples, although they’re broad enough that they scale to crazy levels which aren’t always going to be valid for every type of hero.

The playbooks are few, with some very specific examples in mind, and are separate from the types of powers you might have:

• The Agent
• The Inventor
• The Leader
• The Occultist
• The Vigilante

There are also only three types of team:

• Detectives – Taking on cases and crimes.
• Explorers – Learning new things, exploring the world and the universe
• Rebels – Fighting bad guys and fighting for causes

The game has a really nice way of physically mapping out your campaign with maps and stickers (or the virtual equivalent of those).

There are some interesting ideas here and some good reframing of some FitD elements, but I do worry that the playbooks can’t quite make some superhero characters. I tried to put together a Fantastic Four with them and there wasn’t really a role for Johnny Storm and a lot of choices were more ‘making do’ with what was there.

Brinkwood: Blood of Tyrants

By Far Horizons Co-op – Erik Bernhardt & Others

Read before? No

Played? No

The pitch for this is a great one: A fae-powered Robin Hood and Merry Men fighting a vampiric Sheriff of Nottingham. It’s also Forged in the Dark, which is always a sure bet with me.

Brinkwood is set in a fictional fantasy land where the rich have turned into vampires, using coins mixed with blood. They control and oppress the public and have one of three specific bosses to pick from, flavouring their corruption over the land.

• The Duke who represents industrialisation and dehumanising the poor
• The Countess who represents decadence turned to rot
• The Baron represents all-consuming, gluttonous late stage capitalism

Characters are part of a group who fled into the titular Brinkwood and bargained with the fae. They carry out daring raids and attacks, you know, regular Merry Men stuff. To help you, characters put on one of several masks which give them extra abilities and have their own XP tracks. The masks each represent a different fae and make certain demands of their wearer:

• Judgement
• Lies
• Riot
• Ruin
• Terror
• Torment
• Violence

Characters have a Folk which determines their look and an Upbringing which gives them traits and associates. There are classes, but they’re just a selection of action dots rather than whole playbooks. 

There’s a structure to the campaign, albeit not in the same strict framework as Band of Blades.

I love the look of this game and I want to give it a try at some point. When I’m not racing through the rest of the RPGs I’ve Kickstarted, then I’ll be checking out the extra book with all the stretch goal material as I’m sure it’ll be fun.

Thirsty Sword Lesbians

By Evil Hat & Gay Spaceship Games – April Kit Walsh

Read before? Yes

Played? No

There are a lot of good fantasy games using Powered by the Apocalypse mechanics. There was a time when it was pretty much just Dungeon World, which tried (to various success) to ape Dungeons & Dragons. The cool thing about these later games is that they strike out, aiming to do something different. They each use the genre emulation of PbtA design philosophies to do a specific thing and in this case, it’s to tell very queer fantasy stories about lesbians who fight with swords, declare their love, act like chaotic disasters and generally have a lot of fun.

When I first read this, I thought it was a very standard PbtA framework, but in a bit of a modern She-Ra style. Rereading it I’m definitely more down with what’s going on here (not that I’m against anything being like the modern She-Ra, this is one of multiple Kickstarters I’ve backed on that premise).

The game does a lot to help with the main aspects of sword fighting and flirting. There’s even a bullet point list of flirts like, “tilt up their chin with the point of your sword”  or “wipe a smudge of engine oil from their cheek”. The fighting and the flirting are pretty closely linked, as one of the options for the fight move includes a flirt or provocation of the enemy to gain a string on them. Yes, there are Strings like Monsterhearts, just slightly less transactional feeling.

As well as basic moves around things like fighting there are Heartstring moves, which are how you figure people out, influence people or get smitten. There’s also a “Finally kiss, in a dangerous situation” move which is frankly, perfect for this game.

The playbooks are as follows:

• The Beast
• The Chosen
• The Decvoted
• The Infamous
• The Nature Witch
• The Scoundrel
• The Seeker
• The Spooky Witch
• The Trickster

The book itself is over 200 pages, with almost half of it being settings and adventures to use. They’re both specifically different, with campaign frames to base things in (e.g. cyberpunk, a coffee shop) or more directed adventures (e.g. disrupt a wedding or Basically Fire Emblem: Three Houses!)

I’m not a lesbian, I’m a cis guy, but I like the tone of the book. Like Bluebeard’s Bride, there’s a little stage fright about doing something so specifically for women and doing right by it. Some of the campaign frames don’t entirely appeal to me more as I’ve got other things which might do that genre, or I’m just not a fan of that thing (the coffee shop one, for instance). I love a lot of the settings and adventures, the one where you disrupt a wedding which has been ordered by a Heterosexual empire and the Three Houses one are big favourites. I’d probably run one of those, although I can see myself using this more for fun one-shots rather than full campaigns.

Wildsea

By Mythopeia – Felix Isaacs

Read before? No

Played? No

The world ended not from pollution or disease, but from trees springing up everywhere, so high no one would be able to see the ground. People and creatures alike changed to adapt to this new, weird world. 

A long time later, people have made their homes on treetops, on the mountaintops which are barely visible and on ships. Oh, the ships. They sail across the leaves with blades and chainsaw to rip a path before the trees grow back. People make their lives on this grand sea, whether it’s providing tours, running supplies between settlements or even daring to explore the depths beyond where the sun reaches.

You play characters made from a combination of three parts:

Bloodlines:

• Ardent – what’s left of humanity.
• Ektus – big cactus people.
• Gau – living fungus.
• Ironbound – half-ghost contructs.
• Ketra – translucent people from down below.
• Mothryn – cool looking moth people.
• Tzelicrae – colonies of spiders living in a bipedal husk.

There are also several origins which include people raised on ships, on the few scraps of land that surface occasionally, and even ghosts.

The final part of a character their current post, which there are several of, including pirates, chefs, repairmen, gunslingers, scribes, wreckers and more. 

Characters are formed of parts from each of these three things, including an Edge, Skills, Drives and Gear. 

You’ll be making challenges with a fairly standard d6 system where you roll a pool of dice and look for your highest result. A 6 is a success, a 4-5 is a partial success and 1-3 is a failure. Doubles add a twist and Cuts remove your highest results to reflect difficulty. There are also tracks. A lot of tracks. They’re basically like clock in Blades of the Dark, although there are also bits of guidance about making tracks where events pop off at certain times. Some character aspects like your massive height can protect you but mark its track. The same with armour. Locations and problems also have tracks to mark things like something in the leaves, following you. It’s a simple system, but it looks like it works well here.

The book has an explanation of the elements of characters before the character creation which felt a little jarring, but once I got to the listings of character elements I was a lot more impressed by it.

The back of the book has a lot of explanation about the world at the different levels of the trees, from the very treetops to vague rumblings of what goes on underneath. It’s a sinister world down there, and something I think a supplement will be covering. You get ideas about settlements and hazards, as well as a lot of lists of creatures, infections, towns, groups and so on. There’s a lot to work with which I always find necessary in a very specific, unique world like this.

Slugblaster: Kickflip over a Quantum Centipede!

By Wilkie’s Candy Lab – Mikey Hamm

Read before? No

Played? Yes (beta version)

I love Forged in the Dark games. I also love Tony Hawks Pro Skater. Here’s a game which combines both of those and then mixes a whole junk drawer of random stuff as well and it is glorious.

Slugblaster sees the players taking on the role of a gang of youths who travel from their home dimension on Null (rhymes with dull and rightfully so) all across the multiverse into strange places to skate, face off against rival gangs and generally get into scrapes.

The roles are all fairly broad:

• The Grit
• The Guts
• The Smarts
• The Heart
• The Chill

Each of these get a budget of Boost and Kick to help add dice to your normal pool of just 1d6 or to increase the impact of your result, respectively. You can also get Dares which are the equivalent of the Devil’s Bargains from Blades in the Dark.

Each playbook also gets some traits, some gear and an arc of things which happen for an amount of Style or Trouble. Each player also gets a sweet device which will help them perform tricks or face off against things from the multiverse when you accidentally land in a world that’s all monsters or about to explode or whatever.

The vibe of the book is very fun, very slapdash 90’s/early 00’s through a nostalgia haze of Crazy Taxi, The Adventures of Pete & Pete and so on. 

Once you’ve been through the multiverse having fun (and there are so many different worlds provided both from the author and stretch goal writers!) you’ll go back home and have Trouble to contend with. Real life might come crashing down around you, there might be problems for your crew. You’ll be gaining and banking Trouble during your runs, gradually seeing it go up and knowing that it’ll be there, waiting for you when you get home.

I ran a demo using the earlier version of the rules and my group did some sick stunts on a mech graveyard before their rivals could. They also accidentally blew up one of the mechs and skated away from the explosion in a video which got them a lot of cred with other Slugblasters. It was a riot and I’m looking forward to revisiting this game someday.

The House Doesn’t Always Win

By Michael “Wheels” Whelan

Read before? No

Played? No

I’m a fan of Dicebreaker and Wheels from their staff has created a couple of games. This one’s an interesting game about resistance and fighting forces greater than yourself. I admit with the playing card style keeps making me think it was a heist game, but it’s a broader ‘resistance’ sort of thing.

The system uses a set of playing cards, with a fun ‘push your luck’ kind of system. The GM sets a difficulty number and a suit of cards for the skill used. Clubs are brute force, Hearts are persuasion and Spades are Finesse. Players draw card by card until they either get the number of cards matching the difficulty or four of any other suit, which causes a failure. They can choose to stop early for lesser failures, and if they draw any face card matching their suit they succeed.

Characters have a fairly simple sheet and are made by picking one of the face cards. You reduce difficulty for one of the three card types and add it for another. There are also abilities you can pick, modifying the way you interact with cards a bit further.

The Diamonds are laid out in a row where they can get swapped into the player deck, acting as wild cards. The Jack, Queen and King of Diamonds are the targets of the mission the players are on. For a one-shot, you’re only taking down one of them. For a full campaign, you’re going through three missions to take them all down.

The system is without a default setting but has tools to help make your own missions, as well as a generous helping of premade scenarios. This is the sort of game where I’d probably go for one of those rather than making up my own, just as it’s more likely to hit my table when I’m demoing a one-shot.

I’d be interested in running this at some point, I think the card-by-card draw will cause that fun Dread-like tension where even though you’re slowing down the action for the resolution mechanic, the suspense will keep people’s attention on the table.

The Sol Survivor

By W.H. Arthur

Read before? Yes

Played? Yes

First of all some due diligence: I’m a friend of Arthur’s and playtested this game for him. 

The Sol Survivor is a one-shot story game about accompanying the sun in mortal form across the land after being shot out of the sky. As allies ranging from merchants to dragons, you’re aiming to restore it to power in the sky. Each player will take control of the sun from time to time, while everyone else plays friends, allies and travellers who accompany them on their journey. Some players might be the same person for the whole game, some might drift in and out of their lives or have a fleeting glimpse.

Similar to Lovecraftesque the group will take turns being The Narrator, The Sun, an Ally or simply adding extra flavour/NPCs to scenes.

The sun has a ‘faith counter’ d6 which they’re looking to keep on their travel while they face threats. The game will keep going until the journey reaches a natural conclusion or the Sun has lost all their faith, then they check against multiple questions and draw cards, looking at the lowest result. This is compared against a track of all faceup and facedown companion cards, to see if they make it back to the heavens and if they can bring themselves to shine again. This means that while technically you can try to get the Sun back up in the sky at any point, you want to keep going to gain more companion cards, but also don’t want to push your luck as the Faith of The Sun may dwindle and vanish.

There’s a bestiary which gives a different person or creature for every value and colour from a deck of cards, allowing a good amount of variation in both threats and companions. The interpretation of them in either role is interesting to figure out in play, and worked better than I first thought it would during our playtest.

This sort of system is interesting to tell the story of an individual protagonist even if they’re not as much of a focus for players as whatever ally they’re taking the role of. Arthur released an SRD which does make this an easy target for hacking into different tales as well as this one.

Our Shores: Navathem’s End

By Santa Posadas & Pamela Punzalan

Read before? No

Played? No

This is part of the Our Shores trilogy of games where Sandy Pug helped South-East Asian authors bring their games to Kickstarter, which isn’t normally possible.

A PbtA-ish game, Navathem’s End is a high fantasy game where you play the agents of a Tower, an organisation spread throughout the three continents to try and stop apocalyptic events from happening. Previously in this world there were nigh-apocalyptic events thanks to a cult. The Core Seven rose up and stopped the apocalypse, then becoming beings of worship for people. In the new age, a mage woke The Colossals, gigantic gods which the agents must put down.

Characters pick from different types of Agents:

• The Crafter
• The Command
• The Control
• The Medic
• The Scholar
• The Shield
• The Weapon

Each of these has skills which are close to moves in PbtA games, and three stats: Blood, Crown and Will.

There are several Origins which give some background questions and EXP triggers. While there are some core ones listed in the main book, the back also has several alternative ones to choose from. There’s also a Hubris Bond, which is a link to one of the Core Seven which the character has, giving them more EXP triggers. A theme of the game is hubris and as heroic as these foundational heroes were, their hubris is something which echoes through their bloodline and their students.

There are also several types of magic which can be used to add to your playbook if you want, being either a Mageborn or Awakened Mage:

• Biochaotic – Life mages
• Fulgurchaotic – Storm mages
• Pruinchaotic – Frost mages
• Pyrochaotic – Fire mages
• Telechaotic – Psychics

A big difference from other PbtA games is the rolling mechanic. You roll 2d6 on a scale of success, but on a 14+ you succeed too much. Again, hubris is a big element here. You get EXP for failing or succeeding too hard, and there’s an Advantage/Disadvantage system which uses rerolls instead of the “Roll & Keep 1 more die” version that a lot of other games use. Skills don’t seem to add new moves, but modify existing ones which is good as there are a lot of moves. The game suggested that Forged in the Dark was an influence as well as PbtA and in the Moves you can see how some of the aspects of Forged in the Dark games have been adopted. 

The world is thoroughly detailed and fortunately has a number of campaign seeds to help people get an impression of the sort of story that you’ll be telling. There’s some information on how to make your group’s Tower and who staffs it, which will help drive up investment in it and their mission. There are some great example Colossi for the group to take on, with illustrations showing just how epic they are in scope.

I admit I found some of the language a little odd on my first pass through the book. I think part of it is getting used to a different take on systems and styles which I’m used to a slightly more prescribed version of, similar to how Fantasy World read quite differently to Fellowship, being an Italian PbtA game.

Our Shores: Maharlika

By Joaquin Kyle Saavedra

Read before? No

Played? No

The third of the Our Shores books (after Navathem’s End and Capitalites which I read much earlier in the year).

This is a mech game, but with a few differences. People went into space and there were massive alien monsters to fight in the galaxy of Arkipelago as people were colonising it. Eventually, the remaining people broke into massive corporations and went to war with each other as well. During this time, Meka were developed and used as massive battle suits.

Unlike other mech games, the Meka are piloted by spirit warriors, the titular ‘Maharlika’ who can commune with the entities that inhabit the Meka in place of the AI of other mech fiction. There’s a lot more mysticism involved in communing, but at the same time this is still very much a mech game.

You’ll be making your characters who roll on a kind of PbtA-style scale of success. As a human you’ll roll 1d10+stat, in a Meka you’ll roll 1d20 instead, reflecting that difference of scale. A 10+ is a success, 6-9 is a partial success and 1-5 is a failure. This makes the odds feel a little closer to Quest as far as the ladder of success once you’re in a Meka, although with modifiers, you should be capable to a lot when you’ve suited up.

Unlike PbtA games, there aren’t moves to make, in fact, like a lot of tactical RPGs there are several combat actions to take instead. There are references to a grid and to spaces. It’s the kind of thing which feels closer to trad games. It’s always interesting to see an indie RPG do things to play in the more tactical combat field, although its often not quite my flavour.

The book has a ton of Meka components to make your particular version, also corporation-specific components and a ton of example Meka to help make things easier. I think for a mech game, I’m still more likely to go with Beam Saber instead of this, but it was an interesting read.

That’s two thirds of this month’s RPG reading done, just one more to go.