I woke up late this morning. Losing a bit of a schedule can’t have helped. I figured I’d be able to wake up at a normal time naturally, but I’m not waking up for anyone. I don’t really have much of an agenda.
More of the roll-out pain au chocolats. I might have overdone it a bit by adding some Nutella to the chocolate sticks. A bit of a goopy mess. Luckily I just have you, dear journal, as the only witness. I guess there’s the skull, but it’s in the back of the cabin on one of the comfy chairs, just in case that nut job from yesterday’s around.
I went out for a bit of a walk. I still had my shopping list from yesterday which had been abandoned after the woman had freaked me out. The path out of the cabin to the road is covered in uneven stone slabs. They were ‘characterful’, I decided. Charming, rather than sloppily made. Casey would have complained about them.
Someone had cleared off the stones. I hadn’t, and there was snow through yesterday afternoon and the night. It was light, but it’s been settling. I looked around, I didn’t really have any neighbours near enough to do it out of the goodness of their heart.
As I reached the last stone, I saw red smears in the snow next to it. The stone itself had two circles of dead rats, blood spatter making it look like they were a pair of horrific wreaths. The smell of them hit me and I threw up in the snow, just missing the paving slabs.
I tried to regain my composure, looking at the circles of rats. Someone had nailed the tail of each rat to the head of the next. I looked back at the roof of the cabin. Had there been scuttling last night? After a week I’d become acclimated to it. Was someone helping me out by disposing of the rats? Did someone bring the rats here?
A quick lap of the cabin through the snow left me none the wiser. There were no footprints. I widened the circles, trying to see if there were any tracks, if there was a sign of any cabins which I’d not noticed. It was stupid thinking of that, but I wasn’t sure what else to do. I walked up and down the road. They must have come up and down it, avoiding the snow and keeping to the gritted tarmac.
I grabbed a bin bag and carefully scooped up the horrible wreath.
Day Ten
You are being watched, how can you tell? Open Special.
I got up early to keep an eye on the driveway and see if there was anyone leaving any grim offerings again. I kept the curtains closed, barring a crack to look through.
Of course, I didn’t want to seem paranoid, or like some kind of weird busybody, so I made breakfast like a normal person and ate it while glaring through the sliver of light in the window.
No one was there. No one came out, no new offering of rats was given. Oh, thinking of the rats, I didn’t hear any scratching on the roof. I guess it must have been the ‘offering’ from yesterday instead of a tree branch or something.
After looking at what I’ve written, I decided I was sounding like a crazy person. This was my Christmas holiday, my retreat from a break-up, from all the duties of life back in the city. I wasn’t going to be scared by phantoms. I pulled my curtains open and looked at the majestic glare of the winter sun on the snow. It was time to go for a walk.
The lake took my breath away the last time I saw it, and was nice and open. I decided to head down there without my camera, just for a walk. I rushed out of the woods by the cabin and slowed down once I reached the fields. I assumed that when the weather was better they’d be filled with farm animals or something. Right now it was just me, following the tracks I’d made in the snow the other day.
The lake was still gorgeous, but the ice looked thinner. I paced around the side of the lake until I saw the indentations from my feet the other day, and another pair of footprints in the snow and mud. They looked like they were larger boots than mine. I kept going, keeping an eye out ahead of me. There was a dark patch which I realised was the entrance to a cave. Some old cans and a campfire made it look like it was used as a shelter by people walking or having a pit of a party down there.
The walls had graffiti and markings which looked older than that. I almost stepped in, and that’s when I saw the skull. Not like my stone one in the cabin. Not quite. It was maybe a sheep or goat skull, sat on an old, rotten wooden bench. There were an extra two eyes drawn on it. And it looked at me.
I turned tail and ran back to the cabin, slipping over in the cold mud a couple of times as I made my way up, up and through the fields.
Day Eleven
Something is broken, what do you do about it?
I woke up early this morning, mainly because of the cold. The place has been toasty for the last… nearly two weeks. God, it hits me sometimes how long I’ve been out here. I admit I’ve been blasting the heat a bit, but it’s been freezing out and it’s not a big place so I don’t feel too bad. I’ve just had a break-up, I can treat myself.
Anyway, this morning was different. The generator mustn’t have been working. I tried to wrap myself tighter in the covers and make myself comfortable despite the cool air. I nodded off for a bit, but then reality hit as I started to hear a dripping noise. It was making me want to go to the loo, but more than that… where was it coming from?
The kitchen, it turns out. The fridge/freezer, more specifically. So that’s been my morning, mopping up the kitchen and seeing what frozen food I can salvage. This afternoon I’ll try to see what’s up with the generator. There’s a problem with being out of the way and this is it. If there’s a rat or a skull or anything else in it, I’m just going to go home.
>>>
Advent of Abomination is by Black Armada and available here.
I decided that I’d brush off the bench outside the cabin and have my breakfast coffee in the sun today. It still meant a bit of a damp bum, but I did what I could to keep my dignity intact. It meant wrapping up warm, but was worth it for the smell of the winter air. I didn’t take my camera out and instantly regretted it when I saw something moving in the woods nearby.
I put my mug down and got up, trying to keep an eye out in case it was someone from the nearby village or maybe a hiker. Instinctively, I did my best not to make any noise. I wasn’t likely to be some kind of weird Annie Wilkes murderer or horde of rats, but I was careful anyway.
It was a stag. Like, a big stag. Not moose big, I’ve seen one of those before and nearly lost a car to it when I accidentally went off-road in a Nortdic holiday. Still, this was the first life I found besides birds, and it hadn’t noticed me. It was picking through the woods and felt like it was on a mission. You know the way that sometimes you’ll pass a cat on a street and it doesn’t care about you as it’s got places to me. Basically that kind of attitude.
I watched the stag and found myself following it deeper into the woods. I swear, at one point, it was like it looked back to make sure I was still following. It couldn’t have been doing that. I know that. It was trying to see if there was a predator in the woods.
Eventually I made a noise. I stepped on a branch, hidden in the deep snow. The stag bolted, leaving me alone in the woods. I walked up to where had been and looked around. It was the clearing from the other day, I hadn’t noticed as I approached it from a different angle. From this way, I could see something under the low branches of a tree. Ducking down, I saw a stone that looked like a skull. I admit I almost fell over when I saw it laying there. It was all my nightmares about things on the roof, things out in the woods validated. I crouched down and approached it, armed with a stick. Brave, I know. A solid poke and the skull rolled. The holes which I thought were eyes weren’t right at the new angle. There were four of them and in different places than a human skull would have. The colour was a stone grey. It was just a stone, obviously. With holes in it, odd-looking, but that was it.
I dragged the thing out and held it in both hands like a bowling ball. The holes were deep, with markings which looked a bit like those suns on the beam in the cellar. Circling each other. Eating each other. I decided to take the ‘skull’ in. The only way to take the power away from these things is to confront them, after all.
Day Seven
News from home. How does it make you feel?
Scrambled eggs for breakfast. I only had a couple left after the pancake extravaganza the other day. The stone ‘skull’ was still on the dining room table, my partner in crime for the next couple of weeks and change.
I just about jumped out of my skin when the letterbox went. I didn’t realise the post was still going this far out, but I guess it’s only early December yet. By the time my heart had calmed down, I could hear the post van leaving. There was my attempt at speaking to another human gone. I guessed I’d have to wander into the village at least to get more eggs soon enough.
The post was barely anything. A postcard from Sam. She wanted to check that I was alright, and not going all Shining in the cabin alone. I couldn’t help but imagine Christmas in the city, surrounded by people, my sister and her partner, the kids, the noise of it all. Would I have been better getting lost in all that, or having this meditative calm out here?
Whatever the answer, I decided I’d write a postcard back and tell them about the lake and the stag, enjoying pancakes and books. Light things. Promises to bore them all with photos soon enough.
Day Eight
An unexpected stranger. What is unsettling about them?
The skull and I had breakfast together and I pondered going out for a wander, possibly reaching the village to grab some supplies and post my postcard to Sam and Lou. I admit I’ve been talking to the skull, I patted it on the head. I’ve not gone full Castaway. I know it’s a big stone, but it’s my big piece of stone. It’s probably coming in the car with me after Christmas.
Reciting a shopping list to the skull wasn’t helping. Instead I decided to get a pen and paper to jot it down. Probably futile as I tend to let my stomach guide me anyway and forget about the note, but again, it’s a ritual.
eggs
milk
bread
sweet potatoes
chocolate coins
book/s?
The chocolate coins from our supplies might have been casualties of the first day or two, the sweet potatoes because I preferred them and compromised for Casey. I can have them myself now.
As I was making the list, there was a slam on the window. I ran to it and refrained from talking to the skull. It’d seem weird if there were onlookers. A person in thick winter clothes stood outside in the light snow. I think they were a woman, but their hat was pulled down their head almost down to their eyes and their hair whipped around in the wind.
”What are you doing?” She shouted.
I asked who she was, what she was doing there. She was far enough back that she must have thrown a snowball or something at the window. They were double-glazed but even so, the noise carried.
”What is that?” She pointed at the skull on the table.
”It’s just a sk— a stone,” I said. I’d already got so used to calling it a skull, which wouldn’t have reassured her.
”Take it out of your house. You shouldn’t have it in there.”
”You shouldn’t be out there throwing snowballs and judging me. I’ll take it out when I want thank you very much,” this was about as assertive as I can get.
She was shouting, but the wind was picking up. I decided to put the kettle on and ask her to come inside, maybe talk reasonably about what was going on. Maybe I’d disturbed something she’d made. Maybe the stag did.
I went to open the door and was met with the harsh stings of cold air right in my face. I called out to the woman, barely able to open my eyes. She was gone though.
I made a hot chocolate for myself and moved the skull further into the cabin, to keep from bothering her if she came back.
>>>>
This is apparently the end of things being chill. We’ll see how that goes in the next few days’ entries.
Advent of Abomination is by Black Armada and available here.
I found the basement to the cabin. I didn’t think they had them, but apparently this one does. It looks like it’s been carved out some time after the cabin was built, with timber and some really rubbish plaster work making the walls more solid. I could see damp getting in, but hopefully that’s not going to be my problem while I’m staying here.
Apparently this used to be a bit of a workshop, with a work bench and old tools. A lot of them are rusty, I didn’t dare touch them lest I get tetanus. There’s an old sofa which felt distressingly moist when I pushed on an arm of it. Basically, I’m going to keep the basement alone.
When I was on my way out, I caught sight of a carving in the timber. There were a few little ones dotted around, I figured they were just some kid mucking around with a penknife, but this wasn’t. It looked like two suns, with lines like they were circling each other. Feeding off each other. I’m not sure where that thought came from. I decided against getting my phone to take a photo of the carving and just went back upstairs.
I finished Rats, there are a couple of dry looking war books on the shelves here. Beever, mainly. I figure I’ll read one of those, as it’s unlikely to give me bad dreams or make me think of the noises on the roof.
The special door I opened.
Day Four
Comfort food. What does it remind you of?
I couldn’t get through the Beevor, so I spent last night just laying around, unable to get to sleep and trying not to focus on the sounds on the roof. I had a look this morning and it looked like it was just snow and branches moving in the night.
The weather was rough enough that going up a ladder was as daring as I was willing to be. I like snow, but from the other side of a window. Deciding it’s an indoors day, I decided to make some pancakes. They’re more of an Easter thing, really, but I had the supplies and the process is kind of meditative. After years of wrecking pancakes, I’ve got them down to a fine art. Fairly thin and light, but that’s not a bad thing. A little Nutella, some bananas. It’s nothing fancy, but I like it.
Day Five
A beautiful sight. How does it take your breath away?
The snow stopped overnight, so I decided to put on some walking boots and have a bit of a hike. rather than going into the woods, I wanted to go somewhere a bit more open. I’ve got my old digital camera which has about half the megapixels or whatever of my phone, but hopefully it’ll all look a bit retro instead of just shit.
I found some fields to walk through and took some photos of big vistas, distant woods, hedges. The usual nice snowy things people take pictures of. The snow wasn’t too tricky to wade through and left a satisfying trail which made me more confident in finding my way back to the cabin. After a few hours, I found the lake. It was a stunning sight in the brightness of the afternoon and the cold air. Massive and frozen. It looked like it was from a painting or a cartoon or something. I tried to find a good vantage point a little higher up to get a good shot of it.
After taking a photo or two, I just sat, watching some birds on the lake. As the sun was beginning to go down I could see the pale shadows touching the edge of the lake from some nearby woods. I retraced my steps and made my way back to the cabin.
Advent of Abomination is by Black Armada and available here.
I’m on the Black Armada Patreon and last year they put out a solo journaling advent calendar. I loved the idea, but was too lazy to print it out and too forgetful to preorder one in time for Dragonmeet. This year, as well as having a lovely chat with the UK Indie League folks, I picked up one of the few remaining copies.
It’s a folk horror advent calendar, with each door giving a different prompt. As far as I can see it doesn’t need dice, just the calendar and something to write with.
Beware spoilers, as I’m going to try and go through the whole of the Advent of Abomination.
Day Zero: Going Away
Who are you? Why are you here? Who will you miss?
I’m waiting for a train at the moment and it’s an hour until the next one, so while I was going to wait until I was at the cabin to start this holiday journal, this is going to help kill some time. If I’m lucky it’ll keep my fingers warm as the fingerless gloves aren’t doing enough.
If you find my frozen corpse on Platform 2 of the Caenholm Railway Station, my name’s Martin Price. I’ve spent the last few years staying in fairly remote places with my partner, Casey. It was a great way of avoiding both of our families who are frankly way too much drama. If it was in the middle of nowhere and fairly cosy then all the better. Thing is, places get booked up quickly so as the organised one, I arrange somewhere for us to stay as early as possible.
And that’s why I’m here. Casey and I broke up in October. They’re back with their family now and you know… good for them. I’m not in a good place with mine and while Sam and Lou offered a place at theirs, I didn’t want to be a burden. I’d rented the cabin, I already had a shopping list of supplies, so I’d just spend some time there alone, read some books, get off the grid. If the snow’s not too bad, maybe go out on some walks.
It’ll be good. It’ll be good. If I say it enough times, if I write it down, maybe it’ll even be true.
Day One
A strange sound. What does it make you think of?
Guess what? I survived the trip up to the cabin. It’s quite a walk from the station, I nearly ordered a taxi, but I’m not sure how long that would have taken to arrive and really didn’t want to stand still any longer.
The cabin’s fairly big… you know, couple-size. I reached the place, turned on the heating and unpacked my clothes just in time for the online delivery to show up. There weren’t many substitutions, luckily. I wasn’t sure if they’d make it from wherever they came from, especially through the snow. I offered them a bottle of water and to use the loo if they wanted, but they were on a clock.
The signal’s sketchy here and the WiFi’s rubbish, mostly working in the bedroom and the left side of the sofa. I decided to treat it as a bit of a detox.
I was originally going to read some Stephen King, specifically Gerald’s Game. I decided against it, as I didn’t want dreams of being trapped and alone in a cabin. I grabbed a James Herbert instead, one of his unsurpassed and unsurpassable Rats trilogy. A work of Marenghian magnificence.
Of course now, I’ll be dreaming of rats in the walls instead. Rats on the roof. Not because of Herbert, god help me, I’ve read the trilogy a few times and they’re hilariously bad. It’s because of noises I heard. Scratches, loud scratches. I genuinely thought someone was on the roof at one point. I went outside and had a look, but there was nothing there. Maybe it was some snow falling from one of the trees near the cabin. I don’t know.
Wish me luck with my dreams!
Day Two
A comfortable place. What do you do there?
The rats didn’t return, either in the real world or in my dreams. I got the freezer pain au chocolates (chocolatses?) out and put them together, breaking a bunch of the weird chocolate sticks you put in before you unroll them. They were alright to eat and I’ve got leftovers of them for lunch as I ended up making enough for me and Casey.
I went out walking, not to the village as it felt a long walk just to see their shops which are probably closed for the winter. The paperwork about the cabin said there were some nice woods to walk in with some cultivated pathways, so it’s easier to walk even in the bad weather.
Luckily it was cold, but bright. You could hear the creaking of the snow in the trees. The ground was more treacherous than I’d hoped and I almost slipped over on what looked like fairly stable earth. After a couple of hours I was warming up, but a bit tired. All these years of sedentary work has done in my stamina. Hopefully this time away will help build some up.
I’d gone off the path and wandered through some old woods, past a dew pond which was frozen over. I don’t know if it was used or not, but there were a lot of old trees with their branches dipping into it, all frozen in place now. Beyond that, I found a nice little clearing. Some tightly-packed trees meant that there wasn’t as much snow, I was able to brush off a stump and have a sit for a time. The snow and the light meant that even the shade was a kind of pale blue. I took a few minutes to sit there and regain my breath before returning past the dew pond, to the path and then to the cabin.
Advent of Abomination is by Black Armada and available here.
A Victorian X-Men team from an alternate reality, about to solve a murder!
The Between is a game from The Gauntlet which recently finished a campaign on BackerKit. The game’s about Victorian monster hunters who are incredibly messy people. As they investigate mysteries, they often become part of them and could often be seen as pretty villainous.
The X-Men are a group of superheroes made by Marvel who despite their intentions are often hated and feared by humanity who sees them as their own extinction. They try to help other mutants from human, mutant and robot threats. The journey to mutant liberation is a fraught one and the team’s often populated by people who have at one time or another been villains.
I’m a fan of both these messy groups, and while I was watching The Between’s campaign break the record for how much overtime it was running into on BackerKit, I decided to do something involving both these fandoms over on BlueSky. I enjoyed doing it, but I thought I’d expand on it here.
The Between’s protagonists, all about to investigate a mystery.
The American: James Howlett aka Logan aka Wolverine
Wolverine’s past. Not a great moment.
We’re going to gloss over the fact that Wolverine’s technically Canadian, because he’s pretty perfect for this role.
The American is the ‘werewolf’ playbook, born of a wealthy family originally, cursed by a feral rage which comes out at night. They’re hunted by officials and the fear that they might become a threat to everyone around them.
James Howlett was born to a wealthy family and marked by tragedy, taking the name Logan and resorting to a feral life in the wilderness. Over the years, he was hunted, made into a weapon and managed to eventually break free of everyone, joining the X-Men. Even so, he’s prone to a berserker rage which can be deadly when coupled with his unbreakable bones.
The Explorer: Professor Charles Francis Xavier aka Professor X
The X-Men’s Problematic Dad
Here was the playbook & character mix-up that made me think of it. The problematic boss.
The Explorer is the ‘campaign’ character, with a relationship with the Mastermind where they have had connections and will be intertwined in their chess match. They travelled the world, colonised places, have a mountain range named after them and left behind a lot of scars. Now they have a lot of contacts from their place of privilege and can call on them for help. Their Masks of the Past don’t look into their backstory but instead show The Boy, who was taken in and abandoned by The Explorer. Their final Mask of the Future has The Boy return and physically destroy The Explorer.
Charles Xavier is the founder of the X-Men and a king of hubris. In his youth he travelled the world, sometimes even with his stepbrother Cain. He met ‘Magnus’, they worked together until they fell out, then he got his legs crushed and went home in a wheelchair. He founded the X-Men and in the name of doing good, often did some abominable things with his telepathy. Folks often mention that he created a child army and… that’s not entirely wrong. He did things like wiped the memories of everyone who knew Hank McCoy in his hometown to make it easier to adopt him, completely wiped Magneto’s mind once, had a whole second X-Men team who died, enslaved a robot and turned it into a Holodeck. The list goes on. I think to make him work as The Explorer, his contacts would have to be his students. I’m not sure who The Boy would be, but there are a lot of candidates.
The Factotum: Forge
The first appearance of Forge in his little shorts, showing off his bionic bits.
Forge has almost never been a core member of the X-Men and that’s part of the point here.
The Factotum is a servant at Hargrave House, they have their own background and life, bur that’s not important. They are probably the most competent person in the group, but they will not get recognised for it, living a life of service instead.
Forge aka Maker does have a place of his own unlike the Factotum, generally Eagle Plaza in Dallas. Like the Factotum he has his own dreams and ambitions (a lot of them being Storm), but they will always be unfulfilled. He’s rarely been part of the X-Men outside of as a support role. He makes their technology, repairs them and even in a leadership role with X-Factor ends up helping others out. On the nation of Krakoa, he helped give Domino a weird biological arm-weapon and Wolverine an adamantium surfboard. Now that’s service!
The Mother: Dr Henry Philip McCoy aka The Beast
Beast and an army of clones he’s intentionally made weaker than him, making a clone army of Wolverines.
The Mother is clinical, rational and has a grim project. They’re the ones most eager to get their hands bloody, to dig up graves and assist the authorities in order to get what they want. They have a creature they’re making, one they’re emotionally attached to, harvesting body parts and eventually animating it.
The version of Beast I’m thinking of here is the one from the modern age, where he was the Henry Kissinger of mutantkind, carrying out clinical genocides and cloning an army of Wolverines to assassinate people in the name of Krakoa. The truth is, he was always leading down this path. He experimented on himself and went all grey (then blue). He traded a mentally unwell unhoused woman to Mr Sinister for information. He killed an alternate reality just in case it was bad. Then there was all of the mutant CIA stuff.
The Orphan: Dr Hank McCoy aka The Beast
Hank McCoy The Younger
This was a fun thought, so I had to follow it.
The Orphan is an unlockable playbook, accessible if The Mother completes their project and things don’t go too badly. They’re helpful and bear the sins of their creator. You have some friends, but also may give in to the occasional rage.
Beast left behind a backup version of himself from his Avengers stoner friend of Wonder Man era as he felt it was useless. The X-Men decided to use it to help stop the older, more evil Beast and his clone army. Now this Hank’s the reigning Beast. He’s aware he’s atoning for things another version of him did, a version he could become. He’s not quite a clone, but he’s angry about what he’s done, what he could do and how things have turned out.
The Undeniable: Emma Grace Frost aka The White Queen
Emma Frost in the Victorian alternate reality isn’t too far away from the regular version.
This was difficult. I nearly went with Storm, but there are enough elements of Emma Frost which work better with it.
The Undeniable is a Dorian Grey kind of character. They’re beautiful, immortal and heartless. Somewhere, there’s a work of art looked after by a cult. When hurt or when they transgress, the work of art is scarred somehow. They have a lot of potential to be a real villain.
Emma Frost started out as a villain and a member of the Hellfire Club, one of the most Chris Claremont creations he made in his run writing the X-Men. Despite this, she actually was a good teacher (apart from the time she exploded a horse… it’s assumed she was on a LOT of drugs during her Hellfire days). She joined Generation X as a teacher and then the X-Men after a mutant genocide. Since then she’s alternated between active team member, teacher and reverting back to her Hellfire Club ways. To use her as the Undeniable, the work of art AND the cult could be her students. That way they get worse or end up dying, like too many of her students have, all while she remains a flawless diamond.
The Vessel: Jean Elaine Grey aka Marvel Girl aka Phoenix
Fire and Life Incarnate
Another perfect fit with very little change needed.
The Vessel is as close as you get to a Magic-User in The Between. The magic specifically comes from dark forces who are attracted to The Vessel. They’re drawn to darkness and threatened to be consumed by it.
Jean Grey is a good person, more than you’d think for The Vessel, but that doesn’t mean she’s a nice person. The Phoenix was drawn to her and took her place for a time, living as her. Later, it became more clear that it was still Jean in some way, even if it wasn’t her body. As Phoenix, she is fire and life incarnate. She’s killed a planet, she made Mastermind so cosmically aware that it broke his brain. While Phoenix died and became Jean again, the pair have been linked many times as Phoenix can never really give up Jean. Just re-flavour the dark forces and maybe have the Witches as worshippers of it.
The Mastermind Theodora Braithwaite: Max Eisenhardt aka Erik Lensherr aka Magnus aka Magneto
Professor X and Magneto in their coordinated outfits at the Hellfire Gala.
This isn’t really a playbook, but the season’s big bad. Theodora Braithwaite was a victim of colonisation, a pirate and after a falling out with the Queen, wants to use a campaign of terror to take control and rule without any concern about morality. She’s ominous and ever-present, a Moriarty figure to the hunters of Hargrave House.
Magneto is the best friend and worst enemy of Professor X. The two are intrinsically linked, each others’ biggest defender and hater all at the same time. Magneto, as the saying goes, made some valid points. He knew that mutants may get tolerated but won’t get accepted, not really. He wanted to take over for mutantkind, viewing them as superior and ignoring any assimilationist/integration-based ideas. He’d be a great Mastermind to have linked to the Explorer.
Bonuses:
You can hear Limp Bizkit in the background of this panel.
The Martian is an alien with strange powers and inherited weapons. My choice for him would be Adam X, The X-Treme, specifically the version from Fabian Nicieza where he was a bit more of a Luke Skywalker than a Limp Bizkit fan. His powers allow him to electrocute people’s blood, but it has to be exposed, so his costume is covered in knives. He also skateboards, because he’s from the 90’s.
TheInformals are helpers to Hargrave House. You play a number of them, each with their own abilities but also all doomed. To be honest, these are probably the New Mutants or New X-Men, as they’re all useful but to have a terrible amount of casualties. Poor Doug. And Jay. And two of the Stepford Cuckoos. And so on, and so on.
The Legacy is hunting a beast, defining it at they go. I was tempted to say Cyclops as my boy’s not appeared on the list yet and hunting Sinister would work here. Instead, I’m going to say Bishop, given his hunt for a traitor to the X-Men and his combat abilities. Sometimes he goes through periods of trying to be peaceful, other times he burns the world to make his hunt easier.
The Underground is an Alice in Wonderland type character, thought to be mad and having spent a lot of time in a strange Wonderland. This is one of the new ones, so I don’t know a lot about it, but my first instinct is Longshot. Longshot comes from a strange wonderland called The Mojoverse, run by spineless creatures who get nightmares from our television signals and turned that into their belief system. Longshot’s often lost there, leading resistance efforts and then getting mindwiped. He’s often more Dorothy than he is Alice, but I feel this works. Oh, and he’s also his own grandfather/grandson, but that’s neither here nor there.
The Volatile would be Beast or Forge if they weren’t already claimed. As someone who keeps modifying themselves in volatile ways with science, you could probably get away with having Mr Sinister as them, as he has been someone who keeps tinkering with his genetics. Alternatively if you want someone a little less evil, there’s Greycrow, who has a ton of cybernetic modifications and is always tinkering with himself. He’s also emotionally pretty volatile.
The Dodger is Gambit, obviously.
That is all and I will not be taking any questions.
00:03:55 What Non-Star Trek Thing We’ve Been Enjoying: Still Wakes the Deep, Kew Gardens’ Halloween Trail
00:09:58 Star Trek: The Animated Series “The Eye of the Beholder”
00:35:37 Star Trek: Prodigy “A Tribble Called Quest”
00:56:03 Star Trek: Lower Decks “I Have No Bones, Yet I Must Scream”
Talking points include: Pokémon, which Pokémon wore sunglasses the best? Dave Willis, Still Wakes the Deep, big ups to The Chinese Room, Alien Isolation, Kew Gardens, Merry Xmas Everyone, that song from X-Men Apocalypse or whatever one it was, Charlie tries to remember X-Men: Dark Phoenix, Roger Dean album covers, sand trouts in Dune, that one Flight of the Conchords song where a leg gets eaten, Play-Doh, Morph, vast, desolate landscapes, does The Federation still have Timpsons? You don’t put the Scottish in a zoo, space zoos, Equilibrium, at some point Charlie should watch Star Trek, dunking on Chakotay, picking up a story partway through, Peter David’s weird universal Majel Barrett thing, X-Men, I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream, Todd in the Shadows, Miles gets angry at Charlie, the show and himself for having to listen to Oliver Anthony Music, Anthony Michael Hall, self-destructive insubordination at work, bones and teeth aren’t the same thing, Charlie’s childhood rabbit and the little bunny gulag, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, Nolan North, Vegeta & Goku workforce dynamics, trying to stop from having any Big Bang Theory rants, can you tell Charlie’s vamping for time because he forgot who wrote I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream? The Spoony Experiment, Awesomed by Comics, Miles was right to be a despairing heap on a men’s room floor given the election results. Oh, and occasionally Star Trek.
It’s truly horrid.
Pedant’s Corner:
While I don’t recall Karate Kid being in a zoo in The Legion of Super-Heroes, there was a tragic story about Beast Boy of Lallor dying defending a girl from a zoo animal.
The fish that nibble you in those baths are not piranhas. DO NOT have piranhas nibble your feet.
Oliver Anthony Music has since given up music, I assume it was pressure from us at Casual Trek.
Peter Pan isn’t killed in the holodeck, but Robin Hood
Casual Trek is by Charlie Etheridge-Nunn and Miles Reid-Lobatto, guest starring Reanna Reid-Lobattto and a sample of Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.
Who’s your favourite band member? I like Stone Tellarite and Green Batgirl
Dust off your illegal VHS tapes and be prepared to write a strongly worded letter to Points of View because we’re back with the second part of our ‘Banned by the Beeb’ two-parter looking at three more episodes of Star Trek that suffered the wrath of British censorship.
We’re back with three episodes, the final two banned TOS episodes, starting with ‘The Empath’ where William Shatner has to do some Dark Place style slow-motion running and McCoy definitely violates some medical practices as our latest butt-headed aliens the Vians pull out the chains and then with ‘Whom Gods Destroy’ where Kirk and Spock are repeatedly taken in and out of rooms and forced to ask chess questions by a mad-man in mismatched boots. Which episode is more controversial – SHOOT THEM BOTH, SPOCK! But after that, the fun and hijinks go away with ‘The High Ground,’ a TNG episode banned due to a line about Irish Reunification and Miles and Charlie find themselves having to ponder the age old question, can a show written, produced and made by Americans talk about how fighting for independence against oppressive colonialist Imperialism and somehow seem to conclude that it’s a bad thing, actually. Or, as Miles’ wife Reanna said as she watched the episode with him ‘Gosh, this has aged well.’ There are some things we can try to make fun, not everything.
Episodes discussed
‘The Empath’ (11:37)
‘Whom Gods Destroy’ (42:59)
‘The High Ground (01:08:30)
Oh Data…
Talking Points Include: THEY PUT BABY SUPERMAN IN A MICROWAVE?!?!, Judge Dredd killing the Jolly Green Giant, dialogue censorship in American comics, Miles’ 12th Wedding Anniversary is a good excuse to go off on how amazing the film ‘Lifeforce’ is, Alex Garland’s ‘Annihilation,’ Patrick Stewart’s first movie kiss, Charlie has a physical subscription to 2000 AD (Lucky Bugger, Miles has to do digital), 2000 AD and Judge Dredd Megazine, SHIFT Magazine that Charlie has a story in, Alan Moore’s ‘The March of the Sinister Ducks,’ ‘Love Child’, Miles tries his empathic powers, the three different alien physicalities of Star Trek, DeForest Kelley’s favourite episode, Hurt/Comfort fanfic, sometimes you can tell that the cast know the show’s getting cancelled soon, Hellraiser and the Cenobites would hate dealing with Starfleet, old make-up techniques, how the characters have become less real over the first three seasons, William Shatner doing his slow-mo running, the British hatred of Morris Men and all they stand for, how a lot of modern comedy lacks actual stakes, The Beatles vs. The Rolling Stones, Jeff knows what he’s done, Yvonne Craig (TV’s Batgirl) as a dancing girl, Mental Health doesn’t work how Star Trek thinks it works, lots of shouting, oh God more Am-Dram, Legion of Super-Heroes, did Wayne’s World ruin the name ‘Garth?’ Double-Nerve Pinch, ‘Pointy-Eared Bum Head!’Garth’s really bad Glam-Rock band, did the BBC have a point? Power-Mad-Starbucks Supervisors, padding, Kylie Minogue, Michael Bolton, where do Americans know Kylie Monogue from? the Troubles, the IRA’s attempt to assassinate Thatcher in the 80s (in Miles and Charlie’s hometown no less!), Picard is unable to answer the important question ‘What is terrorism?’ and ‘but doesn’t terrorism occasionally work for good outcomes?’, does Magneto have a point? Imperialism, Colonialism, Centrists are the worst, it really stops being fun talking points for The High Ground, the actor playing Finn seems to be going for a Jack Nicholson-esque drawl to sound dangerous, but he just sounds utterly checked out. And sometimes Star Trek.
Pedants Corner: ‘Neighbours’ was a long running Australian soap-opera that would air in the 5:30 timeslot Monday-Friday evening BBC 1 slot after the kids’ programming ended and before the 6 o’Clock News.
Casual Trek is by Charlie Etheridge-Nunn and Miles Reid-Lobatto
We have an interloper in the podcast! It’s Sean Corse of Famicom Dojo and Two Boobs Watch the Tube fame, here in the spirit of Nerd & Tie unification.
This episode we’re looking at the Unification trilogy, a multi-part story that spans multiple Star Trek series and over 800 years! First up, Picard and Data go to Romulus to hunt down Spock, who might have turned traitor! We also have Riker chatting up a multi-armed widow and a junkyard guy who has way too many face-folds.
Then, we fast forward to Discovery in their grimdark future era and while unifying the Romulans and Vulcans is a good thing, this is actually still all about Michael. Oh, and Tilly, take the damn job already!
00:05:43 What non-Star Trek things we’ve been enjoying: House of the Dragon Season Two, Paddington 2, Taskmaster New Zealand
00:21:30 Star Trek: The Next Generation “Unification I & II”
01:13:26 Star Trek: Discovery “Unification III”
Talking points include: Three Kingdoms, Third Doctor, Farscape, Sean paying for Twitter, Famicom Dojo, Two Boobs Watch the Tube, Quantum Leap (old and new), A World of Ice & Fire, the old Indiana Jones video game, Tom Bombadil, lengthy definitions of “Twee”, Ted Lasso, Kate Fox’s Watching the English, Taskmaster New Zealand, Americans understanding Vic Reeves, Adam Adamant, Bono’s Vertigo Comics look, Miles is coming for David Tennant, Actually liking a U2 track, our threat of a Lost podcast, the guy played by Cameron from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (also from Bunheads), some X-Men level convoluted BS, Come On Eileen, Romulan retirement plans, sleazy space bars, Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Riker deepfakes, are Bones and Spock married? Golden Landis Von Jones, Jimmy from Degrassi, Marion Morrison, Todd in the Shadows, two Brits out-awkwarding an American, Brexit, heists, Space: 1999, we’re all about the cheese, Blake’s 7, Fringe Season Five, Will Section 31 be Guardians of the Galaxy or will it be Borderlands the Movie? Oh, and occasionally Star Trek.
Pedant’s Corner:
Vic Reeves was not on Taskmaster, but Bob Mortimer was
We all butchered the name of U2’s Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me
The Enterprise switches the lights OFF, not on, when they pretend to be a wreck
I have no idea where Sean got the thing about plant-based Vulcans
Carbon Creek took place in 1957
Casual Trek is by Charlie Etheridge-Nunn and Miles Reid-Lobatto
It’s Christmas Day and we’re giving you the gift of a new episode of Casual Trek and we’re now, as is traditional, gifting each-other an episode of Star Trek each to cover for the holiday season.
There must be something in the air because both Miles and Charlie decide to go with a nice present instead of any potential lumps of coal. Miles desire to make reperations for Tek War results in us getting a good example of film noir in Deep Space 9’s Necessary Evil while Charlie gifts Miles a chance to talk about both racism and post-war SF with Far Beyond the Stars, another Deep Space 9 classic, thank goodness there’s seven season of Deep Space 9 or we might be in trouble!
Episodes include
DS9: Necessary Evil (13:49)
DS9: Far Beyond the Stars (41:44)
Talking Points include: Christmas Traditions with the family, The Goes Wrong Show and Fawlty Towers, Is there a bad episode of DS9? The strange Mandela Effect of the Meat Loaf song ‘I Would Do Anything For Love.’ Thanks to the court case, we are now no longer allowed to say that Sean Orange pays for Twitter while then going on to probably offend all our US listeners, while Charlie makes some small attempt to curb his unreasoning hatred of Blake’s 7 (Miles wrote these notes BTW) Yes, we’re doing Threshold when we hit the 100th episode of Star Trek covered for the show. Miles’ Most Passive Aggressive Handover at Starbucks. Prequels needlessly making big introductions of everything, including Hercules Poirot’s mustaches. Quark’s Code-switching. Hiding stuff in walls. Miles has been a dick at many a job. The closest character we could compare Odo to is Judge Dredd… not great. Claude Raines in Casablanca. How long can a collaborator remain on the sidelines? One more ALLAMARAINE for the season. We’ll see how long it takes Charlie to hate Blake’s 7 again. SF Writers of the Post-War Age, Golden Age vs. New Wave, Policy Brutality, The Harlem Renaissance, LET’S GET POLITICAL AT CHRISTMAS TIMES, don’t trust Centrists, Police Brutality in Riverdale, the ideas of Science-Fiction that can change the world, THE CURRENT EDITOR IN CHIEF OF MARVEL PRETENDED TO BE JAPANESE IN ORDER TO GET WRITING GIGS, the problems with our Big List, what is a ‘Unit of Star Trek,’ Top Trumps, the NPR Star Wars Radio Dramas
Don’t they look so merry.
PEDANT NOTES: Miles refers to Kira as a Collaborator instead of a resistance fighter as I meant to. Claude Reins doesn’t shoot the Nazi in Casablanca, but helps cover up Rick’s role.
NEXT WEEK: Saddle up partner as we head to the Wild West… in Space!
You can find Casual Trek “Another Casual Christmas” on Spotify, all good podcatchers and here.
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
What a concept.
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.
Faked Tales 