Most of my RPG Quest posts have been two posts for each month, but between some shorter books, industrial action meaning a little more time for reading and general momentum, I read 37 RPG books. Here’s the last batch.

Two Summers

By Emojk – Côme Martin

Read before? No

Played? No

One of the few RPGs I played with The Gauntlet during one of their open gaming days was with Côme Martin, so I when he launched Green Dawn Mall I checked it out. It was a fun enough experience that I’ve become a serial backer of anything he does. 

Two Summers is based on an old RPG build that the author apparently made in his childhood and updated. It’s set during the teenage years of a group of characters and then also them a a few decades in the future going on another, related adventure.

There’s a very casual tone with rules on pieces of graph paper spread throughout the book. Session Zero takes up a lot of room as there are a lot of rituals to go through. Players start with their teenager and take traits bit by bit as they answer questions. You also make concerns for them which are all suitably teenage. As you take each step, you create and link items on a relationship map between the characters. Once that’s done, you make a shorter version of this for them as adults, modifying traits and concerns, accordingly.

Play is expected to go through about six sessions of three hours, flashing back and forth between the past and present, following the characters as they meet different obstacles. The end should bring the teenagers to the end of their grand adventure and the adults into some changes which may last into their future.

Tonally, this is a fairly light game. There isn’t anything supernatural, although there can be with a supplement which allows for darker tones, time travel and parallel worlds to be used. There’s also a smaller, one-shot version of this game which was released as a demo. As much as I like the look of this game, I feel like I’m probably more likely to try out the one-shot version before doing a full miniseries.

Back Again from the Broken Land

By Cloven Pine Press – Alexi & Leah Sargant

Read before? Yes

Played? Yes

The first game I played in person after the pandemic lockdown subsided was Back Again from the Broken Land. It felt fitting.

A fantasy RPG using Powered by the Apocalypse mechanics, this game specifically replicates the moments in Lord of the Rings after Sauron’s been defeated and when people need to go home. They’re small and should not have been in a war this big, should not have faced threats so epic and all-consuming. Still, they did and shockingly they ended up playing a pivotal role. Now the Doomslord has been defeated at great cost to everyone involved, and it’s time to go home. But can you, after all of this? After all you’ve seen? All you’ve done?

Starting from the end of the heroic journey, the game places characters in the remnants of the final battlefield. Friend and foe alike are reeling. Players determine what the Doomslord was after, what they were like, why their minions are still a threat and then have playbooks to pick from:

• The Shepherd
• The Volunteer
• The Bodyguard
• The Burglar
• The Wayfinder
• The Stargazer
• The Imposter
• The Haunted
• The Turncoat

Each of these playbooks has one named Burden and slots for more. You’ll be unlocking new unnamed Burdens and aiming to clear them on your journey home. This is the core part of gameplay and some of the peril you’ll face may cause you to take on new ones as you go. You may have played a pivotal part in the downfall of the Doomslord, but you’re still small, able to slip beneath notice and escape from peril. You don’t have any badass combat moves to fight against things, instead you run, hide or make a desperate stand. The latter of these actions could well mean the end for your character. 

There’s peril, sure, but there’s some loveliness in the main set of moves, called the Homeward Bound moves. You name a burden in quiet moments, writing in one of the unlocked slots. The perception type move involved gazing into the distance either physically or into your memories. Share a Meal is a pivotal move, where you tell a story of home and roll to see how many people can use this moment to clear a named burden.

Blessedly, there are examples of stories of home, the journey and doom. The latter are in the form of checkboxes, unlocked when players hide from the hunters and then used rather than dying at a future point.

At the end of the game, players consult their epilogue against different stories. Everyone gets one Story of Growth, while those who named and cleared burdens get another. Those who didn’t clear named burdens have to add elements from the Stories of Amends and those who have unnamed burdens have to use Stories of Isolation. They may have gone home, but are still haunted after it all.

This was a joy to run and is up there with R’lyehwatch and Escape from Dino Island as perfect modern one-shot RPGs.

Quest: Character Book & Treasure Book

By The Adventure Guild – T.C.Sottek & Grim Wilkins (character book) and Marianna Learmonth (treasure book)

Read before? Yes

Played? No

Anyone remember Quest? Quest was hot shit for a brief moment a few years ago. It was co-created by someone from Polygon so there were some great inroads to help publicise the game. It was very pretty with some incredible art from Grim Wilkins and had a lot of thought on the layout.

What helped Quest, as well as all this, is it was actually a pretty good game. One which I like to think is a perfect introductory system either for people who are brand new to the hobby or who have only tried D&D before and don’t know how other systems work yet. A lot of the game psychology of ‘say yes or roll the dice’, fictional positioning and so on are pretty standard for indie RPGs but are presented in a nice accessible way for newcomers. Characters have a very open character questionnaire which will establish where they sit in the fiction for a lot of things and will roll 1d20 with no modifiers for anything they’re chancing their hand at. As an example one of my group was a doctor cursed into the form of a giant grasshopper. He could diagnose people without rolling, but trying to manage fine motor skills was a die roll. Then there are abilities which are the special sauce, the actual tangible mechanics for each class as presented in skill trees which you can unlock.

I came late to Quest, picking up the digital version and still longing for a way to get a physical copy of the book and cards in order to better run offline demos for people. Unfortunately the company’s going through some issues and looking for a person to take the game on at the moment.

Before all that happened, they ran a second Kickstarter for a pair of expansion books. 

First up is the Character Book.

 In other games this might be referred to as a Monster Manual, but this is much broader than that, and the themes of the system are a lot more geared towards interaction with the world in a non-combat fashion. Fights may happen, especially against entities like Assassins, Blood Jelly or the Chaos Goat, but at the same time there are people who might be mentors, underlings, friends, quest-givers or even environments to traverse.

Quest has a fairly light touch when it comes to genre, bringing some characters with robotic-looking devices or planet-eating monstrosities. What’s nice is a lot of the descriptions of characters tie in with each other, with a list of major alliances in the back to help you gather characters up if you want the group to encounter a specific group with a specific goal.

The entries are presented with a piece of art, a name, a small segment of flavour text for when you first encounter them, the story of the monster and any abilities. Like characters, there’s a lot of fictional positioning in the abilities and a number of them are simply narrative. Finally there are just two stats: the health and the damage of the characters. They generally scale up through the three tiers of character: Commoner, Minion and Boss, but that’s not always the case.

Finally, there’s a framework for the creation of these entities. This is good as there was only really fairly light guidance in the core game book.

Second is the Treasure Book.

Again, this fits a need the core game book had of more interesting treasures. Just to put my old man hat on for a moment, I remember in D&D Third Edition where it felt like magic items were getting more commonplace as a way of rewarding players that felt almost mandatory, to help with the scaling of challenges. Every adventurer would have +1 weapons which didn’t really do much other than that. I kept hold of an old Dragon Magazine issue which had random tables of minor effects, appearance changes and so on, in order to make any generic +1 weapon a little more interesting.

Luckily with Quest there’s a whole book of unique items, each with weird descriptions and most of them illustrated in this tome. There are a handful on each page, with all manner of odd mechanics. 

Early on that light touch with creating a continuity begins with a series of items made by ‘Brell’. Unlike Bigby or Melf or whoever the old D&D spellcasters were, these all seem like items you’d find in an eccentric shop somewhere, with things like Brell’s Tent in a Tin, Brell’s Everlasting Bear (a size-changing gummy bear, not an eternal bear, although I might use that for a Quest adventure one day). 

There are random magic potions, marbles, pipes, all manner of things. There are weapons, but the book doesn’t seem to have a discernible order for types of item to help you find them. There are different levels of rarity instead, going from uncommon things (e.g. a jar of fireflies) to rare (e.g. a disposable persona) to legendary (e.g. a map of the multiverse).

Items generally have a thing they can do in the fiction as their rules. The Everlasting Bear tells you that it changes your size, it doesn’t say what that encompasses statistically as Quest has no statistics. It’s kind of a given that if you want to smash a door you couldn’t damage in your regular size, you either can do that effortlessly or if its reinforced then maybe you go to the dice. Nice and easy. Some items cost Action Points for special effects and weapons have a damage rating, but that’s about it for hard mechanics. 

Like the character book, this generally does in a kind of cute tone, with a lot of little fun references and game-changingly weird effects. 

As ever with Quest, I don’t think I’d run it for a specifically grim game. For something more light-hearted, these are perfect. The digital copies of these books also came with PDFs of the decks of characters and treasures, which would be great to hand out at a table, especially to kids learning RPGs. They’d get to see the art and have the mechanics in a very readable style.

Thursday

By Eli Seitz

Read before? Yes

Played? No

I love a good time loop, and this game allows you to play through a Russian Doll type scenario. This is Belonging Outside Belonging, so it’s got no GM which is an interesting ask for something pretty maintenance heavy like managing a repeating timeline.

The playbooks all have questions which they’re looking to answer, locations, vibes and a set of strong, regular and weak moves. The latter of which includes “Die” which triggers the ill-fated deaths of each other player, then resetting the timeline.

The choices of playbooks are:

• Artiste
• Misanthrope
• Sellout
• Trendsetter

The players also takes a setting element:

• The Loop manages the loop itself and ends scenes
• The City establishes scenes and helps to build location
• The Home Team is your allies
• The Away Team is your enemies

It’s an interesting looking game, it feels a little slight which is something fairly common with ZineQuest entries. In this case it’s because I feel the mechanics of the type of story being told might be a little tricky. I could see myself suggesting that we keep a bit of paper in the centre with the timeline as it resets to and any changes that we make to it as we go along.

Low Stakes

By Craig Campbell

Read before? No

Played? No

From Russian Doll, we move over to What We Do in the Shadows (and to a lesser extent Being Human).

Players take the role of supernatural entities (and occasionally a human) who have to cohabit together. Characters have a pool of Confidence to spend and a state of having Clout, which only one player holds at a time, but can be stolen by anyone.

The supernatural entities are: Vampires, Psychic Vampires, Werewolves, Ghosts, Mystics and yes, humans. But none of these are character classes, instead providing a power and some fictional positioning. Instead the character playbooks are:

• The Anachronism
• The Caregiver
• The Grump
• The Instigator
• The Judge
• The Peacock
• The Rebel
• The Stickler

These are all more based around personalities than anything else, each with their own things they have difficulty with and ways of snatching the Clout.

Stories have a quick outline which can be picked or determined randomly using a series of tables, each around different themes like, “Bureaucracy” and “Lost Pet”.

The core mechanics are based around improv rules (mainly yes… and), or die rolls depending on your Problem Areas and Clout. You’ll be adding complications as things change, then holding Confessional scenes like a lot of modern sitcoms, gaining an amount of confidence and/or giving people complications depending on what you do.

In a way, this feels like a competitive RPG, but in a fairly light-hearted way. Whoever has the Clout can finish the episode when they want, but someone else might steal it and try to finish things on their terms.

Paranormal, Inc

By Alicia Furness

Read before? Yes

Played? Yes

I love the Carved from Brindlewood framework and what better to use with it than a Scooby Doo/Ghostbusters kind of game. Paranormal, Inc has players all taking the roles of people investigating the supernatural including:

• The Scientist
• The Skeptic
• The Medium
• The Intern
• The Bookworm
• The Ghost

Each of these characters gets a set of stats, a vibe and some moves. They also have Personal Hauntings which are kind of like the Masks in other CFB games, often modifying your stats or giving conditions.

A big innovation of this game is the lack of a GM. CfB games don’t have a fixed solution to a mystery anyway, but instead clues to find and locations and people to interact with. This game shares those roles between everyone, splitting a deck of playing cards into:

• Locations (Hearts)
• Clues (Clubs)
• NPCs (Spades)
• Paranormal Events (Diamonds)

These decks each have an entry for each card. Locations have Paint the Scene questions for the group to help flesh things out. NPCs have a quote to help give you an impression of them. Clues and Paranormal Events give you multiple choices of items in order to better pick what fits to the location and method of acquiring clues.

Each mystery has a goal to each and you go from location to location, interacting with what’s there, unearthing clues and hopefully piecing together a mystery by the end. Paranormal Events are spooky occurrences which could be a problem and normally go off whenever you enter a new location.

Like other CfB scenarios there’s an establishing question to kick things off, then the play can move naturally from there.

These are all elegant changes to the systems found in Brindlewood Bay. I still remember some of the early PbtA variants and how they felt like they weren’t doing enough to change the game. This feels like it’s captured the spirit of the system but does some great things to establish itself as its own thing. 

Outside of the main book, there have been a lot of mysteries made, including a sequel to a Brindlewood Bay mystery, with “(Another) Night at the (Whaling) Museum”. Playbooks for a kid and a talking animal have been published, too.

I’ve hosted a game of Paranormal, Inc and really enjoyed the sense of momentum and light-hearted spookiness as we tried to uncover the truth of spooky events happening in a dark alleyway outside our intern’s flat.

The One Ring, Second Edition

By Free League Publishing

Read before? No

Played? Yes

Okay, this is a slightly embarrassing one to be looking at right before the end of the year, given I’ve been playing it intermittently throughout 2023. In my defence, I’m not GMing and I have looked at the starter set’s rules. 

The One Ring is unsurprisingly a Lord of the Rings game, set between the trilogy and The Hobbit, where dark forces are growing, Bilbo’s back in his home and the Fellowship hasn’t formed yet.

Characters are fairly easily built, with a combination of a Heroic Culture and a Calling, then a few XP to help make people a bit more unique. You also customise them with gear, including some personal items, and choices of Distinctive Features.

The Heroic Cultures are:

• Bardings
• Dwarves of Durin’s Folk
• Elves of Lindon
• Hobbits of The Shire
• Men of Bree
• Rangers of the North

These give you some distinctive features, a set of skills, a lifestyle and a table of choices for your stat spread.

The callings are:

• Captain
• Champion
• Messenger
• Scholar
• Treasure Hunter
• Warden

These give you a few more favoured skills, a specific distinctive feature and a Shadow Path, which is how you can get pulled towards bad actions and corruption.

Rolls are made using a Feat Dice which is a d12 with 1-10, an eye of Sauron and a Gandalf rune for negative twists and magical successes, respectively. You also roll an amount of Success Dice (d6’s) equal to your dots in a skill, in a fighting proficiency and if you’ve got some signature gear that helps out. These all get rolled against a Target Number established from your three main stats of Strength, Heart and Will.

There are a number of modifiers to this. If you’re Favoured or Ill-Favoured then you roll an extra Feat Die and take the highest or lowest, respectively. You can spend Hope to add a Success Die to your roll (or to other people’s rolls) and if you’re Inspired then you get two Success Dice instead. 

There are a number of sub-systems. Fights put people into different positions at the start of the round, allowing you to pick your turn order and giving access to some special actions based on where you are. You’ll be chipping Endurance off of each other until you start taking Wounds and then you know things are going to go badly. People didn’t get injured in Lord of the Rings and just walk it off, after all.

Exploration is a large part of the game, with groups traversing lands, encountering problems or sometimes sights that are quite lovely. You’ve got patrons who can give you abilities and missions, a Fellowship phase for downtime, levelling and healing. There’s also the Shadow, where you might gain shadow points for evil actions and you might start getting noticed by Sauron’s growing forces.

The book is nicely laid out to help with these phases and actions, but I think that possibly some reference sheets might have helped with. I’ve been a player in a game of this for ages, but I don’t know how much of all of this we’ve engaged with (or maybe others have and I’ve simply forgotten about things like the extra dice for signature items).

Towards the back there’s a lot of nice detail on locations in Eriador, a selection of enemies to fight which I thought was pretty small originally but there’s a good amount of variation within each broad category. Finally there’s a site-based adventure to get people started. I could say I didn’t read this book to spare the GM the adventure, but it’s been a while since we played it. I think being an almost 250 page hardcover book, I’m generally out of practice with them.

I’ve previously played the D&D 5E version of this, Adventures in Middle Earth, which I found turned Tolkien fantasy into basically D&D, with all the looting and fighting and threatening people in taverns that you expect in any game of that. The subsystems there felt bolted on in a cursory manner, not really gelling with 5E’s baseline mechanics. In this game, there may be a number of systems, but they’re all in dialogue with each other. 

I don’t know if I’d run a full campaign, although I’ve got a couple of vague ideas for ones. I definitely want to try running the starter set adventures for folks as they were good fun to play and feature the players as hobbits.

Token

By Glowing Roots Press – Gabriel Robinson

Read before? No

Played? No

Another Rooted in Trophy game, this one’s more self-contained than Gabriel’s previous outing which acted as an epilogue to a Trophy Dark incursion.

This time, the game is only for two players: A Seeker and a Dweller, drawn to each other in the Forest. The Dweller is already there and has become strange, monstrous. The Seeker is breaking in from elsewhere, and both have their own instincts pushing them forwards and a secret which will only get revealed at the end of the game under certain conditions.

There are numerous tables to help roll or choose the elements of their character, or several scenarios at the end of the book to set things up.

Play goes back and forth, starting with the Seeker. Instead of the Hunt Roll from Trophy Gold there are Reflection Rolls, where you’re looking through the Forest for clues. These can give you a token, which you’ll need three of to conclude the game. If you fail or roll a partial success, The Forest gets a token. If you come up against a threat, you make a Challenge Roll which will give you a scar upon failure or help remove a token from The Forest.

You can help each other, even though you’re not directly in contact most of the time. You can offer an Enticement which will pass tokens back and forth, heal scars and unfortunately give The Forest a token. These also redefine your initial instinct, changing your original goal as you go.

If you get too scarred or The Forest gets three tokens, you lose. If either of you get three tokens, then the other player tells you their secret. An exchange of Tokens could happen, changing up the instinct one last time and bringing the game to an ending.

This looks like an interesting use of the Trophy system, and I’m curious to see how it plays.

I’m Sure You’re All Wondering Why I’ve Gathered You Here This Evening

By Logan Jenkins

Read before? Yes

Played? No

I watched the recent version of “And Then There Were None” a little while ago, when I was writing a murder mystery. The pitch of this game sounded a little like that, but maybe if you throw in Battle Royale as well.

The default setting has players brought to a remote island and a fancy manor. It’s wealthy owner is dead and all their wealth will go to one of you. Specifically, the one who survives until dawn.

That’s right, this is a competitive RPG. A manor is set up, people are given their motivations and secrets, Non-Player Guests are created and everyone’s set loose through the manor. The GM is the ‘Butler’, managing the game.

Players take a turn each hour, hiding, manipulating each other, rummaging through rooms and of course carrying out a lot of murders.

The game runs off a deck of cards with a number of oracles and guides to help interpret things. First up is your Secret, which determines your proximity to the Deceased. Then there’s the actions themselves, which often involve finding belonging cards which are determined by the suit and value, or spending them to make murder attempts.

Once characters die, they become ghosts in order to keep playing and haunt the remaining players. If you’re lucky, then you might even possess a body and be back in the game!

This is a one-shot game and lasts for seven rounds going from midnight to 7am. It feels like a good amount of time for something so heavily PVP. It also has a nicely light tone, which also helps. Finally, there are several different premade Deceaseds such as Santa, Xena, the head of a weird school, someone in a cyberpunk setting and more. That creates a nice variety to the game. I did build a Roll20 room for this filled with different weird icons, a map and deck of cards, but the game got cancelled, so hopefully I’ll get to try it one day.

Vampire Cruise

By Amanda Lee Franck

Read before? No

Played? No

Two vampires had what they thought was a fantastic idea: If they get a cruise ship them the human passengers will be like an all you can eat buffet of people who’ll come to them. The problem is, it’s not actually been a great idea and they’ve had to be less picky than they’d have liked, bringing random passengers along with a cult who booked a whole floor.

Vampire Cruise is a systemless adventure in the weird OSR style. The cruise ship’s given both top down and sideways maps in the centre and the inside covers of the book. It’s the kind of cruise ship that has a castle inside, a massive climbing wall, an auditorium and so many other things to explore. As this is a cruise with folks stuck at one place at sea you also have tables of guests, staff and vampires which are all good fun.

There’s a list of events which go from ping pong tournaments to matters of a more apocalyptic variety. It assumes the players will disrupt things so everything’s loosely laid out and easy to adjust, bending to react to the players. This is the main structure of the adventure, being more event-based than location-based. The locations are key, but they’re also often changing, with people moving through and different items popping up from tables.

And oh yes, the tables. There’s one for room service, jobs the group can have, items in storage and more.

Oh, and there’s a zombie shark, so that puts this up there as one of the best books I’ve read in this quest.

Eat the Reich

By Rowan, Rook & Decard – Grant Howitt & Will Kirkby

Read before? No

Played? No

It’s World War II, you’re a bunch of vampires and you’ve been dropped on occupied Paris with one mission: Drink all of Hitler’s blood.

What a concept. Do I need to mention any more?

I mean, I guess I probably should. It’s a Rowan, Rook and Decard game, so it’s got that gleeful chaotic energy to it. This is also a game that has premade characters and is probably not going beyond a session, the same way games like Lady Blackbird do.

The vampires are:

• Iryna – a warlock and swordfighter
• Nicole – the muscle and explosive expert
• Cosgrave – a wideboy necromancer 
• Chuck – a cowboy!
• Astrid – animalistic predator
• Flint – a kind of adorable bat monster

The system has people build up dice pools using a stat and bonuses for gear and/or abilities. The GM rolls a threat pool at the same time and both players ditch anything that’s a 1-3. On a 4-5, players deal damage, defend or gain blood. On a 6 it’s a critical effect which doubles the previous result or activates special abilities. The GM just deals damage on a 4-6. This is a fairly simple system, as you’ll mostly be ripping and tearing through Nazis, killing your way to Hitler on his airship parked by the Eiffel Tower.

There’s a sector map, helping establish where players are and the level of threats as they close in on the tower from Sector Three and going inwards. Not every location will be used and the descriptions of the locations are economical with information. You won’t need much, just enough to get a sense of the place and the threats before you unleash vampire chaos.

There are some sub-boss type characters who provide threats about as weird as the player characters, and then there’s Hitler at the end of it. They do a good job of not making Hitler super-competent or amazing at things. Having listened to enough about Hitler’s reading habits and drug habits thanks to Behind the Bastards, I feel they’ve got a Hitler that’s very much in that space. 

This is a fun-looking game and a beautful book. The design is stunning, the layout is messy without becoming an obstruction and the colours pop vividly. I read this in PDF form, but I can’t wait to get the physical version.

Conclusions

This was probably my best month for reading RPGs, I’m almost caught up with where I should be at this time of year. There might be time for one post for the first half of December, and then I’ll see you in 2024 for the last post and my thoughts on the quest.