RPG Quest – June (Part One)

Posted on October 24, 2023 by fakedtales

I’ve been behind both in my reading of RPG books from crowdfunding platforms and in reporting on them. I’m finally catching up and writing this as we’re in the end of June (I assume you’ll see it in July (I was wrong, it’s now September, it’s been a busy time)).

We’re hitting a slightly newer era of books I’ve backed on Kickstarter, including one which I’d consider an old favourite by now. There are a few I’ve just not read, possibly with a pre-emotive instinct that I wouldn’t actually like them once they arrived. I had that with Board Game Quest, when I finally played some games I’d owned since the mid-oughts. Once I got them to the table, they turned out to be stinkers. These aren’t quite so bad, mainly as I’m just reading them.

Perseverant RPG: A Survival Story Game

I’m not quite sure how they got across, maybe some kind of catapult?

By Sibilant Stone Publishing

Read before? No

Played? No

Perseverant is a game about people stuck somewhere, trying to survive. You set a primary problem as well as determining character traits which will help get you some dice to roll to overcome the challenge for a scene.

To be honest, this felt very similar to Magpie Games’ Our Last Best Hope, but the world-ending stakes make for some ludicrously over the top scenes. The survival mentioned here can be a little broader than literally just, ‘survive the wilderness after a plane crash’ sort of scenarios with examples like  like travelling the Silk Road, colonising a region of space or surviving a flood.

I think I’ll probably stick with Our Last Best Hope, unless folks want a specific kind of gaming experience. I’ve used OLBH to introduce a campaign and this could be used in a similar way.

Monsterhearts 2

Some teenage monsters

By Avery Alder & Buried Without Ceremony

Read before? Yes

Played? Yes

Monsterhearts was the first ever Powered by the Apocalypse game I played, after listening to a podcast AP and seeing it was being demoed at Dragonmeet. It’s a game of teenage monsters, replicating shows like Vampire Diaries, Buffy and so many more these days, but with a much queerer, more feral tone to it. The game perfectly emulates the genres of those shows, empowers characters, but also can lead to some moments of beautiful patheticness which only happens during teenage years.

The game book itself for Monsterhearts 2 is one of those ones I always hold up as a perfect example of game design. The page layout is sparse and purposeful in every element, it keeps things personal but without obfuscating the rules.

Players select a ‘skin’ to inhabit, out of the following which are a specific monster, but also a kind of teenagerhood, whether it’s one you were or saw:

  • The Fae: Mysterious and whimsical, the Fae is your playful friend who plays in promises, suddenly turning serious if you don’t keep them.
  • The Ghost: Solitary and sad, the Ghost haunts the story, lurking in the background blaming everyone for their poor fortune. They target people to blame for their condition and lash out, even fading away if things get too bad.
  • The Ghoul: Both exiting and terrifying, the Ghoul binges on things like fire, chaos, possibly even flesh. They gorge themselves and worry folks around them, they’re fun until they indulge way too much,
  • The Hollow: A construct like Galatea or Frankenstein’s Monster, you aren’t real and you know it. Will you get a life of your own, or do you even deserve one?
  • The Infernal: You’ve got a benefactor who gives you a lot of cool shit, and you might even push some of that onto others. The thing is, it all has a cost and the thing giving you all those gifts can take them away again, or worse.
  • The Mortal: Often the scariest playbook, you are incredibly dependent and in love with someone supernatural. You can use their name in threats, you can get put in trouble for bonuses. Your love doesn’t have to reciprocate, and if things go really badly, you can move on.
  • The Queen: Whether a queen bee of high school or the leader of a supernatural hive mind, you’re in charge of the social scene as well as several NPCs you can offer up as social leverage. A terrifying playbook and the only one I’ve seen a player recoil in shock from after doing some of the moves and realising what they’ve done.
  • The Vampire: Cool, aloof and withholding, you benefit from drawing people in but also from shutting them down. I’ve been the Vampire and had a great time being part of a relationship everyone wanted to see flourish, then wreck it all because of my vampiric nature.
  • The Werewolf: A font of often undirected anger, the Werewolf loses control and unleashes their rage at the wrong times, often needing to be brought out of it before they hurt someone they love.
  • The Witch: The Ghost blames people for their lot in life, but The Witch is pure teenage spite boiling up into plans for revenge. They steal items from people and curse them with witchy powers. They speak of justice, but it’s barely ever actually that they’re aiming for.

There are also two bonus Skins which you can download from Buried Without Ceremony’s site, both of which are a little more complex than the ones in the book:

  • The Chosen: A Buffy type character, a chosen one who is destined to fight monsters including a Big Bad who only exists if you take the playbook. You gain benefits from going it alone, getting your friends in trouble and who knows, you might even fall for a monster?
  • The Serpentine: Part of a large, strange dynasty, the Serpentine’s a complex playbook because of the amount of upkeep required both from the player and the MC to manage this failing, complicated family.

The characters have four stats: Hot, Cold, Volatile and Dark which manage what they do.

  • Hot is primarily used for moves to attract people, such as Turn Someone On. This is a teen drama, but one where it’s teenagers by way of 20-something CW actors. You’re all just hormones and a lack of articulation. With this move you can attract people, but what they do with that is up to them, keeping play consensual in this tricky world.
  • Cold is used to shut people down, call them out and be unaffected. You can give people conditions like “gossipy bitch”, “loser” or “Wardrobe by the Pound Shop” which can hurt your rolls.
  • Volatile is used for fighting and fleeing primarily. Harm’s pretty abstract and works well that way. Fleeing might launch you into a new type of trouble, even if you get away from the immediate threat.
  • Dark is an introspective, emo stat. You can do something to gaze into the abyss and get an answer to a question either by thinking it through or actually meddling with something supernatural. There’s no perception rolls in this game, so this is the closest there is

Aside from all that you get Strings on other players and NPCs which you can ‘pull’ to encourage people to do things for XP, or give conditions or Harm to people. It’s a social currency which moves around a lot. Each Skin gets a Sex Move and a Darkest Self. I know, I know, ‘Sex Moves’, how shocking and frankly in games like this and Apocalypse World, they’re fine as mechanics but tend to dominate any discourse about the game. Think about when Buffy slept with Angel and he went evil, or any of those moments. It’s basically a mechanic which happens when you hit that dramatic point in this kind of story, and all folks I’ve played or run with generally fade to black or cut away rather than describe the scene itself. Anyone who has sex with the Mortal will enter their Darkest Self shortly afterwards, the Werewolf can appear and help anyone they’ve slept with, the Witch takes an item for potential future vengeance and the Vampire’s is all about turning people down. The Darkest Self is a kind of limit break of badness, a scripted moment of awful things for you to do when you’re full up of Harm or something else happens to trigger it. The Werewolf sees red and starts murdering, the Fae sees everything as a promise to enforce, the Witch takes revenge on everyone and the Ghost fades away until people remember them.

It’s all lined up for so much drama. There are Small Towns which are premade settings to play in if you’re doing a one-shot, which had tended to be my way of running it. We’ve run games in towns where summer never ends, or had an In-Betweeners style pathetic outing to Chessington World of Adventures where some animal-masked men stalked the group and one of the players tried to impress another by punching a tiger. It didn’t go well.

Monsterhearts 2: Skin Deep

The new monsters, a bit of a different style to the core book, but still fitting

By Sawyer Rankin

Read before? Yes

Played? No

Extra playbooks in PbtA games can be a bit tricky. Some can seem like they’re reinventing the wheel and some can get way too conditional. I generally like to sprinkle just a few in here and there for new playbooks when I’m offering up selections for one-shots, just in case there’s anything game-breaking with them all together. 

Sawyer Rankin made a whole selection of them for Monsterhearts:

  • The Bakenoko: A cat-themed hipster who has a very Jughead feel to them.
  • The Bedlam: A kind of Alice in Wonderland type character who’s not really in this world, mentally (and sometimes physically)
  • The Devil: You grant and call in favours
  • The Dragon: Demanding of attention and destructive when their whims aren’t catered for
  • The Fomorian: You should have been a ruler elsewhere, but you’re here and perceived as different by folks. 
  • The Immortal: You’ve lived forever, potentially Highlander style, and you can’t really die, but your long life makes you alienated from everyone.
  • The Leshy: You’re more in tune with nature and animals than people.
  • The Prometheus: A Victor Frankenstein, Herbert West or even a Reed Richards, you’re smart, a little creepy and you’ve got all-consuming projects which may have weird side effects.
  • The Siren: A performer, both inspiring and needy, but also destructive when they need to be.
  • The Veela: A master of drama, either supernatural or far too mortal. You’re about the attention for better or worse.

There are also a couple of Small Towns and some rule mods at the end for good measure. One of the small towns, Lodestone, has a great setup about having ten days to prevent or cause the end of the world, which could be good fun to play in.

Some of these feel like there’s some overlap with existing Skins which mean I’d limit them to just one or the other in play at a time, but some like the Veela, Bedlam and Dragon definitely appeal.

Monsterhearts 2: Brave New Worlds

A spooky exercise book cover

By Creatively Queer Press

Read before? Yes

Played? No

Another third party expansion to Monsterhearts. This time it’s all Small Towns.

There’s Rockwell, for reframing Monsterhearts around a Roswell kind of vibe, Ennesmouth which is basically Innsmouth, a town where everyone’s predestined into remaining in the same role forever, a town where someone vanishes every few days and no one’s noticed yet and a community out in nature, away from civilisation and the players are the kids who have to commute into town from there.

Again, it’s an interesting selection of Small Towns and as time’s gone on I’ve started gathering up these for one-shot play. I love when you get some outlandish high concept drama ones like Siren’s End (the one where people vanish).

Age of Anarchy RPG

Empress Matilda

By Paul Mitchener

Read before? No

Played? No

Paul’s done a lot of good work for Call of Cthulhu and for Liminal, so it brings me no joy to say this really didn’t do it for me.

Age of Anarchy’s a historical RPG set during The Anarchy in the 12th century. That’s right, this isn’t about anarchists (I’ll get to Comrades later), but about the civil war between King Stephen and Empress Matilda. This is an era I’ve got no experience of, so it was interesting delving into it.

The system is “The Perpetual Motion Engine”, apparently a new thing. You roll 2d6+a skill and any abilities, aiming for a result of 7+challenge rating. You Pick three professions, each giving three skills at different levels depending on what you’re prioritising. You also get some gear and abilities from doing this. It sounds fiddly, but could be fine.

A lot of the setting is working for a patron, and rather than just one default one, there are a number to choose from. At the same time, I didn’t feel entirely sure what the example stories would be with this game. The layout and the art were a bit uninspired, to the level where I had to check and make sure I had the most recent version of the file.

Alas for the Awful Sea: Myth, Mystery and Crime in 1800’s UK

A suitably dour cover

By Hayley Gordon, Vee Hendro & Storybrewers Games

Read before? Yes

Played? No

This was the first Storybrewers Games game that I backed on Kickstarter. The idea of a historical PbtA game in a setting I’d not really seen before, so I had to check it out. The game’s one of grim sailors in a grim sea, generally in a kind of Hebredian landscape. It’s all communities in tumbledown shacks and vague folkloric strangeness working its way through the land.

There are a selection of roles to choose:

  • The Captain
  • The Boatswain
  • The Mercenary
  • The Merchant
  • The Old Sea Dog
  • The Scholar
  • The Strider
  • The Surgeon
  • The Cook
  • The Stowaway

These are all fairly descriptive of what they do and are the core playbooks, but rather than just defining characters by their professions, they also get descriptors:

  • The Lover
  • The Kinsman
  • The Believer
  • The Confidant
  • The Outcast
  • The Creature

The moves are mostly fairly familiar to people who have played PbtA games, with things like Acting Under Pressure and Act With Force. The closest to anything new with the core moves is “Sense What’s Bayond” which is the equivalent of “Open Your Mind” in Apocalypse World. 

Normally I get a bit cynical when I see moves lifted pretty much verbatim from Apocalypse World, but here the setting is expressed so well in the text that it helps keep this feeling distinctive.

There’s a core adventure also called “Alas for the Awful Sea” which sees the players having to seek shelter in the town of Greymoor. There are tons of different plots to get embroiled in with the locals and even potentially something a bit supernatural going on. It’s very evocative, very busy and breathing.

While this isn’t a priority for me to run, it’s something I’d be very interested in trying out. My oldest tab still open on Chrome is a page on Benbecula as I’ve had thoughts about running Alas for the Awful Sea somewhere like that.

The Watch RPG

This feels like it’d be good as sequential art

By Ash Kreider

Read before? Yes

Played? No

Men can be monsters and in here, literally so. The Watch is a grim fantasy RPG where a force called The Shadow has infected the hearts of men and the primary military force is made up of women (this includes trans women and nonbinary folks). This is a game which is about patriarchy, literalising the demons within it all.z

The playbooks are:

  • Bear – a fierce protector
  • Eagle – a glory-seeking danger junkie
  • Fox – the weird one
  • Lioness – the charismatic leader
  • Owl – the sneaky one
  • Raven – the smart, philosophical one
  • Spider – the sinister one
  • Wolf – the aggressive member of the pack

There are a number of different clans with their common professions and some character creation questions to help define your characters.

The moves include things like Blow Off Steam as this is a high-pressure situation and you need to be able to calm down or you’ll burn out. As a defensive group there’s Prevent Bloodshed as a move and Rely on Your Training to get past things. This time, the move to gaze into darkness is Let the Shadow In, which is incredibly risky given it’s an actual entity here.

Reading the book it feels similar to Band of Blades in a way. There are several ways of customising what The Shadow is like and how it acts, and there’s a whole structure for running a campaign which is really nicely made. I don’t need a set campaign structure like Night Witches or Band of Blades, but I definitely appreciate even a rough framework.

Noir World

An understated cover for a big book

By John Adamus

Read before? No

Played? No

This was a Kickstarter that was pretty late and while a PbtA noir game sounded near, I reached a point of not caring so much as there was my beloved Noirlandia. Finally reading this book, I’ve realised how wrong I was. This is a really interesting way of running a film noir style story.

The system’s a dimple PbtA type game, but it has you create the setting and the mystery first, then rotate GMs as you travel through the mystery. The structure’s pretty fixed in aiming for a one or two shot game.

There are a TON of playbooks, all pretty descriptive in what they are and do:

  • The Good Cop
  • The Dirty Cop
  • The Fatale
  • The Mook
  • The Private Eye
  • The War Vet
  • The Politician
  • The Career Criminal 
  • The Gambler
  • The Reporter
  • The Starry-Eyed Kid
  • The Citizen
  • The Socialite
  • The Disgraced Doctor
  • The Musician
  • The Attorney
  • The Gangster
  • The Celebrity
  • The Ex-Con
  • The Girl/Boy Friday

The good news is that they’re all pretty basic and it’s often good to establish ahead of time the kind of story as that’ll help direct you to which playbooks to include. The pick lists for each one includes your belongings and motivations to help push the action forward. There are even scenarios to choose from (some with their own playbooks, just to add even more!). 

As you rotate GMs, the game makes clear the actions to make and ways to build off of what other players have built.

End of Part One

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RPG Quest – May (Part Two)

Posted on October 22, 2023 by fakedtales

Here are the rest of the games I’ve read in May, including a few newer offerings which I either read to run, or just in an attempt to keep on top of everything new that arrives.

My friend Graham asked me why I didn’t limit my readthrough to everything between my first backed project and 31 December 2022, so I wasn’t constantly updating my list and moving the goalposts. I… don’t have a good answer for that. Oh well.

Eden

Just some of the animals you could play in Eden.

By Marc Hobbs

Read before? Yes

Played? No

This is a map-drawing game about creating your own garden of Eden, then providing lessons to the humans from the perspective of an animal or group of animals. I love The Quiet Year as far as map-drawing goes, but this feels like it might be a bit more chilled than that. The book handles the ritual of play pretty well, so I feel confident in being able to run it even when the rules have faded from my terrible memory.

Ghost Court

I want a gavel, not for any reason, just in general.

By Bully Pulpit Games, Jason Morningstar & Steve Segedy

Read before? Yes

Played? No

This is another LARP-ish game. There really seem to have been a lot released around this time. I love Bully Pulpit’s games anyway. This one’s a courtroom drama where the living and the dead settle petty disputes. You need people to fill various courtroom roles like judge, prosecution and defence, and then you hand out the cards for each case. Players have to argue their side and anyone in the jury needs to make a decision. It feels like it would be the perfect game to have people drop in and out of, although I’m not sure how I’d organise the logistics of it. If I get a big table, I might just run it there.

Bluebeard’s Bride

That’s quite a lot of a beard

By Magpie Games, Whitney “Strix” Beltran, Marissa Kelly and Sarah Richardson

Read before? Yes

Played? No

This is an incredible-looking horror game. It’s beautifully made and incredibly creepy. 

The idea is that you play out the story of Bluebeard from the perspective of his bride, taken from her home, wed to this strange man and left alone to travel through his extremely Silent Hill style mansion, allowed everywhere but one room. She investigates items and ghosts in the rooms, deciding bit by bit about whether to resist or obey Bluebeard, eventually reaching a choice to open the final door or not.

The Bride isn’t just one player, though. The Bride is played by multiple people, all representing different aspects of her:

  • The Animus – bold action, confrontation
  • The Fatale – sultry and controlling
  • The Mother – authoritative, helpful and judgemental
  • The Virgin – naive and innocent
  • The Witch – mystical and intimidating

One person at a time controls the Bride as they travel through rooms, but give up control to keep themselves safe. The other Brides and whisper to them, tell them to do things or notice things, but it’s only the one in control who can affect the physical world.

There’s a move in this game about when you shudder from fear. Not the character, but the player. I love that. If things go bad, one aspect of the Bride may shatter, becoming lost to the mansion and helping the Groundskeeper (the GM) with the downfall of her sisters.

This is a specifically feminine horror story, and one which I really want to try, but I’m also painfully aware that I’m a cis man in a group full of cis men, and it feels like something I could fuck up quite easily. One day I will get this to the table, it’s too interesting not to.

Follow

By Lame Mage & Ben Robbins

Read before? No

Played? No

I’ve played Microscope and Kingdom by Ben Robbins. The first creates a timeline which could be in any genre. The second creates a location with a hierarchy and how each strata deals with problems.

Follow creates a group of people accomplishing a task and the challenges they face. It’s an interesting idea, but feels like the broadness of the concept is something dealt with by most other RPGs. You’re almost always on a mission to do something.

If you want to represent that kind of task from beginning to end, this might still be the game for you. The resolution is with a bag and tokens which gets modified as you play, often in ways which might make things trickier as you go on. The type of quest can be quite broad, too. You might be on a journey to put a cursed ring in a volcano, but you might also be handling a space launch, research into a virus, some espionage. It feels like it can handle smaller stakes than Our Last Best Hope, but can still give us similar types of stories even if the world isn’t on the line.

Personally I think I’m more likely to run Microscope or Kingdom, but if I do this, it’ll definitely in be more of a mundane setting.

Home By Dark – A Story Game of Hope and Fear

Such a nostalgic-feeling cover.

By Protagonist Industries

Read before? No

Played? No

This is an RPG of kids on bikes and strange encounters in the style of Stranger Things and 80’s movies. Unfortunately it isn’t Kids on Bikes, a game which went onto Kickstarter a bit later, and it suffers a bit for that.

This is another game where I feel I need to invoke Our Last Best Hope (I realise there may be another game presceding that which does these things, if so I don’t know it). Characters have cards representing the Fear, Insecurity, Responsibility and Hope. You pick a divide between Hope and Belief to represent your innocent wonder and cynical awareness, which might change in the game.

There are three piles of dice as the pillars: Danger, Pursuer and Secret, trying to clear them off as you go towards the finale and deal with either the Pursuer or the Danger. 

It’s fine, and I might be more amenable to it if Kids on Bikes wasn’t a bit easier structured, beautifully designed and filled with more different scenarios.

Trophy Gold

Open the big scary door, you won’t regret it, even if your character will.

By Hedgemaze Press, Gauntlet Productions & Jesse Ross

Read before? Yes

Played? Yes

We’re up to more recent games now, and this is one I read half as a treat to me, half because I was running a Trophy Gold campaign anyway.

I’ve reviewed Trophy Gold, I recommended it in an episode of Casual Trek, I will not stop talking about Trophy Gold.

The gist, just to keep things brief is thus: You are desperate treasure hunters going into horrific places to pry loose any treasure and return alive, ideally closer to the thing that drives them to go to these terrible places.

Yes, capitalism is the real monster at the heart of this game. You might be a blighted farmer, an ex-cultist, a fallen priest, you’ll have a drive like buying and destroying the orphanage you hated, finding a banner of a lost legion, even just retiring in peace in a nice part of the capital city of Ambaret.

Each Incursion is based around a specific theme like ‘Harvest’ and is made up of sets filled with traps and treasures. You’ll interact with them like you’re in a point and click adventure, just one filled with a lot more horror which you may never escape.

The Hunt Roll is how you interact with the world, getting valuable Hunt Tokens by talking to people, prying open floorboards, checking suspicious statues, looting bodies and so on. Hunt Tokens allow you to answer the goal of any particular set, sometimes unlocking other sets, sometimes getting treasure, sometimes understanding the horrors a little better. You can also cash them in for money, and lose them if things go really badly, so sometimes you’ll want to cash them in even if it’s not too helpful.

There are more rolls than that. Risk Rolls are needed to avoid harm when doing anything risky which isn’t clue gathering. It tags in the players aside from the roller to pitch ideas about what could go wrong if they fail or bottle it, and Devil’s Bargains where the roller will get a bonus die if they accept something wrong which will happen whether you pass or fail. It sounds a bit metagamey and yeah, that’s still part of the game. Zooming out of the moment and letting players into this GM space is fantastic. If gives suggestions the GM wouldn’t necessarily have thought out themselves, adds to the players’ ownership of the game and lets everyone embrace horror on their own stakes.

There are some supplemental rolls for helping or hindering, but the other big roll is Combat. The group all describe how they open themselves up to potential harm, roll a die as their ‘weak spot’ and then a bunch of dice which they’ll pick the highest of and try to match the Endurance of a monster. If any of the dice (used or not) hit your weak spot then you’ll be hurt, closer to your destruction.

It’s a game which manages to be the most video gamey and the most narrative thing I’ve seen for this kind of adventuring. The incursions are a joy to read and were wonderful to play. It’s a simple system and character creation takes minutes which is great, as luck can run out easily in this world.

Fight With Spirit

Go Sports!

By Storybrewers Games

Read before? No

Played? No

I’m not a sports person. I’ve never given a crap about watching it and I was taken out of team sports between the dyspraxia and later all sports due to childhood health problems. I loved watching Friday Night Lights after being told that it was about sports the same way that Buffy’s about vampires. It was a great show, and when I was marathonning series of teen drama movies a while ago, the Bring it Ons were more good than bad. Oh, and I did actually play basketball for a year or two. We were utter amateurs and I loved it. There was another short dyspraxic person so we were put on opposing sides, making a blend of actually alright blocking and the occasional incredibly powerful but aimless throw. In my case it was “The Etheridge-Nunn Bullet” which would go pretty much in a horizontal line from where I was, rarely into the hoop, sometimes at an ally and often a long way away.

So aside from the above things, I’m not a sports person. Storybrewers are a company I’ll back anything from, and this is no different. I love Good Society and the Littlebox RPGs, I’ve not run Alas for the Awful Sea, but it looks interesting.

Fight With Spirit is a sports drama as an RPG. It doesn’t concern itself with the actual rules of the sport and as long as it involves teams and is played competitively then it’s all the same (there are solo sport rules, too). 

You pick one of four teams and your characters, along with typically sporty drama like you’re being poached by another team, or you’ve got a rivalry going on. The group run through cycles of pre-match and match play, going through not rigid details about the rounds, sets, innings or whatever that you’re playing, but instead you’re going through dramatic beats. There’s a chance to show up a rival on the same side, you’re out there on your own, you hear people on the other side talking about weak spots on your team. Each match event might have a slightly different ritual for how the play of it goes and whether you win or lose, things are going to get dramatic.

Spindlewheel

Some of the gorgeous Spindlewheel cards

By Sasha Reneau

Read before? No

Played? Yes

Spindlewheel isn’t a rulebook. At least, there’s a rulebook, but mostly it’s a deck of cards. A really pretty deck of cards with gold trim on the sides and a few smaller stacks based around specific themes. Spindewheel’s a kind of tarot-style thing where each card has a name, then two different descriptors for it, all fairly vague and open to interpretation.

The idea here is that you can use them in games, or make up brand new games with them. I’ve used the deck to help add elements to adventures, especially the mini-decks when I had relevant Trophy Gold incursions. There are a ton of games which use the deck and I’ve used a printed set to play them before the official one arrived.

My favourite Spindlewheel game so far was Spindlewheel Detective, where you make and solve a murder mystery using the cards to imagine each element of the murder, the suspects, pick the murderer and then the decision of how it was resolved.

I admit I expected a selection of games, like the Spindlewheel Microgames PDF with Detective in it, but this had a single game in it. It’d be interesting to try, but for the most part I’m still eager to try more minigames and to modify some of my fiction & RPGs with it.

NULL

Into the Null tunnel with you!

By Gila RPGs and Spencer Campbell

Read before? No

Played? No

I’ve loved running the Lumen system as a quick hit of tactical combat roleplaying in an indie game frame. It shows that if you want fighty action and combat optimisation you don’t have to only look in the trad space.

Null is the latest game by the prolific Spencer Campbell, founder of Lumen. This game sees you as operators facing off against a malicious nanotech and its forces. Similar to Nova you enter a zone, attack enemies and collect drops from them, but here you graft tech to yourself, fight as far as you can in the knowledge you’re probably not all making it out.

The classes are:

  • Medic
  • Commander
  • Scout
  • Researcher
  • Soldier

Each of these have weapons and abilities. It feels like gear’s more of a factor here, similar to Light, an earlier game of Spencer’s. You don’t have the epic frames from Nova, filled with superpowers. Here you might have some grenades, you might have the ability to make a static wall, to fire some lasers and so on. This game cites Trophy in its ‘play to lose’ style and has built everything accordingly. 

I think Nova (both the current version and oncoming second edition) will be my go to Lumen game as I run enough play to lose games and cutting loose with a fun, stupid power fantasy can be great fun. That said, I’m eager to get this and Light to the table to see what other Lumen games are like.

Conclusions & Observations

Was I specifically backing LARPs around the era I’m reading or did it just pan out that way? I’m still not sure, maybe it’s that the designers I liked (Bully Pulpit, NDP and Burning Wheel) all came up with them around the same time.

I was a little cold with some games as they’ve been replaced in my eyes by later games, sometimes by the same author, but this was a good selection to read.

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Casual Trek Episodes 25, 26 & 27 – One Year Anniversary, Wrath of Khan and Musical Episodes!

Posted on September 11, 2023 by fakedtales

Casual Trek’s Birthday!

It was this or taking the worst birthday card I could find and using that.

August marked one year since the start of Casual Trek. In our first 27 episodes we’ve managed to cover 7.91% of Star Trek history.

That includes

  • 65 episodes
  • Two movies
  • One graphic novel
  • One chat about having a lovely walk
  • One chat about Lord of the Rings
  • Several deaths in a Star Trek choose your own adventure type book
  • A LOT of tangents

It’s been a fun time, and in episode 26 we took a little time to chill out and talk about our findings so far. We also discuss a little bit about what we’re hoping for in the coming year.

KHAN!

I was tickled by the idea of 1990’s Khan, so I made this.

We’d intended on covering Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan a little earlier to try and make a habit of doing a movie every twelve episodes. Better opportunities came up, so we put it off until episode 26, and of course there was a perfect episode to pair it up with.

Star Trek: The Original Series “Space Seed”

I’d seen barely any episodes of The Original Series prior to starting Casual Trek. I’d known there was an episode where Khan came from, but never sought it out. After watching this episode, that was probably for the best. It’s fine, with a few weird things, but not essential viewing for Star Trek II unless you’re covering it for a Star Trek ranking podcast and need to see everything Star Trek.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

The main feature, and my word, what a film. I’d not seen this for at least a couple of decades and it was a joy to come back to. I know it’s hardly a controversial statement to say that this movie which has a great reputation is good, but we get into what we liked in particular, what holds up, the connective tissue between Space Seed and the movie, set design, space rats and whether Khan’s actually pursuing a one-sided grudge against Kirk.

Music!

We’ve had a few episodes which have been linked to recently-released episodes of Strange New Worlds. It means we’ll have less to cover in the long run, but at the same time it’s been a joy watching the episodes and we’ve been able to match them quite well to other Star Trek episodes.

Star Trek: Voyager “Virtuoso”

This episode ended up being a talk about AI art and the slurry of ‘content’, as a bunch of artless aliens get all excited about how The Doctor can perform music. They become weird fans, although they’re really more into him for the maths of what he does instead of the art. Of course, he finds this out only after letting this all go to his head. It’s a fun episode, and shows that there are some real jerks in the Delta Quadrant.

Picard “Two of One”

It sounds almost unbelievable that this episode inspired our musical theme on the spreadsheet a while before hearing Subspace Rhapsody was ever going to be a thing, but we need ways to crowbar in episodes of Picard and its so serialised it’s kind of tricky to do. This one is both a heist and a musical episode as the Borg Queen possessing one of the cast ends up performing a musical number. It’s a weird choice, but in a show where it’s difficult remembering any single episode, it makes this one stand out.

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds “Subspace Rhapsody”

Finally we have the reason this theme was bumped to the top of the queue, a full musical episode. Not only is this a musical episode in the style of Buffy, The Magicians and so on, but it actually uses the mechanics of musicals to present problems and solutions. Thanks to some probability shenanigans, the cast find themselves starting to sing. Similar to Once More With Feeling, this means truths get spilled in song form and a lot of personal drama can be aired before the horrors of the finale.

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RPG Quest – May (Part One)

Posted on July 13, 2023 by fakedtales

I decided to focus a bit more on getting through some RPGs this month. There were a couple of quick wins and a couple of lengthy reads, albeit fun ones.

The Veil: Cyberpunk RPG

By Samjoko Publishing & Fraser Simons

Read before? No

Played? No

The covers for The Veil all have different art, but the design and layout keep them all unified.

I’ve backed each of Fraser Simons’ RPGs, including multiple Veil-branded games, but I’ve yet to read this one, even though it was the first one I backed. I love Hack the Planet by him (that’ll be later in this marathon), but this one’s a bit weird.

This is a Powered by the Apocalypse cyberpunk game in a world where the virtual world is projected on top of the physical one. There are several interesting, strange playbooks with a number of different sources in cyberpunk media. The biggest twist is that the stats are emotions. You perform better or worse in different emotional states, but you need to keep from spamming the same emotion of you spike it, making things generally worse.

There are so many playbooks in this book and they all take a bit of explaining:

  • The Apparatus is a new AI in a physical body
  • The Architect is able to change the digital environment around them
  • The Attached has a relationship with a strange object
  • The Catabolist is obsessed with grafting more cyberwear onto themselves
  • The Dying is is well… dying. They have a limited time here, but a gift that this state grants them, too
  • The Empath is able to better deal with emotions, a core element of the mechanics
  • The Executive is involved in the business side of cyberpunk fiction with all the horrors that includes
  • The Honed is a rare person without cyberpunk upgrades
  • The Honorbound is all about obligations and social currency
  • The Onomastic is unique, strange and hunted
  • The Seeker is someone with faith, which can give them information beyond what the cyberpunk world normally can
  • The Wayward explores the idea of something ‘more’ than just the relationship between person and machine, bringing nature into the story

There are touchstones for these playbooks listed which is good, although a numbe rare from anime I’ve got no knowledge of, which feels fitting for both Samjoko and for me.

It was an intimidatingly large book at nearly 400 pages back when I was reading <200 page PbtA games like The Warren and Night Witches, which was the main thing putting me off running it. There are a ton of cyberpunk games out there now and I hate to say, most of them feel like a bit of an easier sell than this. I won’t turn down a game of The Veil and with some work I’d be up for running it, but if I just want a ‘cyberpunk’ game, I’m probably going for Hack the Planet, Hard Wired Island or CBR+PNK.

Threadbare RPG: A Stitchpunk Tabletop Role-Playing Game

By Stephanie Bryant

Read before? No

Played? Yes

Onwards, Plastic T-Rex!

A rare RPG I own and have played but never read.

In Threadbare, you are all toys in a post apocalyptic setting where all the humans are gone. You’ll be either a charming soft toy, a hard plastic toy with accessories or a sock. The latter feels like a bit of a stretch, but they all have a number of different things you can do to customise them. Yes, even the socks.

The game itself has different modes from charming Toy Story hijinks to Wall-E ruin or straight up Fury Road with toys. Your character will lose pieces and customise themselves as they go on.

I realised I’d only read preview rules of the game and hadn’t seen the finished package. For something with a simple concept, it goes further into it than I thought.

A friend of mine, Rhys, ran a festive session of this back when I hosted an indie RPG night at the Dice Saloon. I played a group of little army men.

A Grandiose Disaster – A Live Action Roleplaying Game

By NDP Design & Mike Young

Read before? Yes

Played? No

All the different places you might face disaster, all in your living room!

This isn’t the only LARP I’ve backed, or the only one in this selection. This is a ‘parlour LARP’, the kind of thing you can play in a short amount of time in a space like a living room, ideally in this case with a bunch of chairs to use as props.

A Grandiose Disaster is a system for running disaster movie stories, with one example scenario set in a hotel in a volcano that’s totally safe. There’s a selection of roles and scenes play out from a deck of cards. Characters have symbols on their sheet which will go off at certain times, causing a kid to panic, a scientist to die and so on. This is all playable in about 90 minutes, and looks like it’ll be a fun time. I’ve not run it, mainly as I’ve not been certain of how to organise it yet, but I reckon it’ll be fun.

Meridian: A Story Game of Journeys Wondrous and Fantastical

By Christian Griffen

Read before? No

Played? No

A classy card back.

In retrospect I should have backed this to a physical level. It’s an RPG based on things like Labyrinth, His Dark Materials and such, but it uses a TON of cards. The files from the Kickstarter are all individual sheets with cards on in different shapes and sizes, which would make them an incredible faff to print out and sleeve, so I’ve not bothered with this yet. It does look pretty, though.

One of the locations from the game

Similar to Lovecraftesque you have one person playing the main character, one as the Guide and the rest as ‘Touches’. You’ll travel through locations with the Journeyer meeting companions and working their way through to a final choice based on the set of locations and the story you’re going through.

It all looks nice, but I think if I want this kind of story, I’ll probably go with Girl Underground.

What Ho, World! – A Roleplaying Game of Farce and Elegance

By Mina McJanda

Read before? Yes

Played? Yes

You too could be one of these oblivious toffs!

A short card-based farce set in the early 1900’s, with a lot of foppery. Each player picks a character and ability, they have goals and play cards to see how things go.

The moves each have triggers to activate, providing one thing to happen and then extra effects you can use your facedown move cards to activate. You each have goals which you can succeed at and gain wild tokens to help you across the winning line, or you can ditch them and draw another if you mess it up.

The rules are a simple sheet and there are a number of decks. Unlike Meridian, I backed this to a physical level with not just this but the standalone expansion, “Wizards Aren’t Gentlemen” about magicians.

The game itself felt like a lighter, fluffier game than Fiasco, but just as chaotic. Our failed attempts to host a nativity in the village church ended up with all but one character naked. I forget the other particulars about the event, but heartily recommend the game.

Rockalypse: The Fate Core RPG of Musical Conflict

By Eric Simon

Read before? No

Played? No

Do you all want to play that dude with the guitar from Fury Road? This game can do that!

I like Fate, even if it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. I had my fill of incredible settings and adventures from the Fate Core Kickstarter alone, but when I saw the theme of this one, I had to check it out. The world ended, but this system prioritises music and the creation of it as your way of interacting with the world. I love that about these kinds of expansions.

There aren’t many changes, but there are a few which help encourage the themes of the game. As an example are the new skills:

  • Harmony – Adding layers to musical performances, disrupting other bands
  • Melody – Providing beauty & power in music, an attack skill in this world instead of fighting or shooting
  • Rhyme – Inspiring people, an attacking skill (with words)
  • Rhythm – The backbone of music and a potential defence skill

There are also a few different uses for existing skills in order to help them be relevant for both the apocalypse and music.

I’ve yet to run this, or so many Fate worlds. I’ll offer it up like the others and see what players like the sound of.

Inheritance

By Burning Wheel & Luke Crane

Read before? No

Played? No

Not quite Norse Succession, but not not that.

Another LARP, this one concerns two families brought together after the death of a patriarch in Jutland. There’s the matter of the inheritance and where it lies, as well as what to do when an exiled family member returns seeking his cut. This one’s tricky to describe as there are a lot of spoilers and it looks like it’ll need a lot more prep than A Grandiose Disaster, along with an incredibly specific number of players (nine plus a facilitator).

The cast are:

  • Thorvaldsen – A retired Viking
  • Fulla – Powerful matriarch
  • Daxo – Back after being exiled
  • Ring – Youngest son, a dreamer
  • Tyr – A one-armed ex-berserk
  • Gefjon – Wild priestess
  • Ran – Bereaved daughter
  • Ansgar – A Christian priest & accountant
  • Aurvandil – Daxo’s boon companion

Each character has a sheet providing the simple overview of the rules and their opinions on each other. There are some basic resolution systems, but this is more about picking sides in a family dispute than being quantifiably better at bending bars or lifting gates. Handily, they even have illustrations of how to stand and intervene during the disputes, which for a LARP type thing is a good shout.

I like the idea of this story, I think it’s possibly going to be a little fiddly to organise.

MASHED: A Korean War MASH RPG

By Brabblemark Press & Mark Plemmons

Read before? No

Played? No

An army game not about actually fighting? That’s how I like them.

I love playing clerics, healers and support characters in general. This here’s a Powered by the Apocalypse game about playing a MASH unit in the Korean War. It’s not MASH the TV show, but it’s not not that, either. You have to deal with the challenges of daily life and keeping sane during it all.

I don’t know of Mark Plemmons’ background, but the book feels like a ton of research was done with a large bibliography provided. Fortunately, it also reads nicely, without getting too dry. 

You’re not all doctors and nurses, but there are a bunch of different playbooks:

  • The Angel
  • The Corpsman 
  • The Cowboy 
  • The Cutter 
  • The Doc 
  • The Grunt
  • The Padre

You also take on a role, to mix things up from the job you’ve got in the unit, providing a move and some HX (history) modifiers:

  • The Bully
  • The Casanova
  • The Clown
  • The Gray
  • The Misanthrope
  • The Operator
  • The Sky Pilot
  • The Stickler

It doesn’t quite reach Night Witches as far as war games for me, but there are some points of comparison and some interesting ideas here. 

The Frost Papers: Ten Games to Play in the Dark

By Arcana Games

Read before? No

Played? No

A fairly modest cover.

I was tickled by the idea of games you play in the dark and yes, this is another LARP-ish game. It’s presented in the form of letters, each with ominous rituals to perform.

The games are all highly ritualised, asking things like to sit facing a wall while encircled by others, stopping clocks and so on.

  • The Hallway Game has you enter a strange place from your seat
  • The Walking Game allows you to travel in your dreams
  • The Calling Game has you call a demon
  • The Black and White Game is a game of necromancy where you speak to the dead and ask them questions
  • The Doll Game involved burying a doll in a grave in order for a spirit to inhabit it and is not recommended
  • The Jack’s Game involves mutilating a deck of cards
  • The Lantern Game is a warding game which needs twigs
  • The Talking Game is used to speak to spirits or people trapped in The Fog Between, using a planchette and a board
  • The King’s Game has someone act as the King while questioned by The Crone and the Fool, looking for information about things to come
  • The Hiding Game One of you is the Traveler and everyone else is a Guide who enters and hides, to be spotted through a mirror as you look for The Shadow Man.

I’m not sure if I can get this to the table (or the dark room), but it might make for a fantastic prop and ritual for The Between.

Continued in Part Two…

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RPG Quest – April (Part Two)

Posted on July 11, 2023 by fakedtales

I originally aimed not to run as long after splitting March’s reading list into two parts. The thing is, while some of these books were quick reads or didn’t make a great impression with me so I kept them quick, there are also some great books I read this month, and that led to me covering them far more.

Noirlandia

By Evan Rowland

Read before? Yes

Played? Yes

You don’t necessarily investigate giant bones, but you can if you want.

Noir’s one of those genres I like a bit more than average, but I”m not a massive fan of. I studied it in my Media Studies A-Level and it was a good time. Here, we’ve got an RPG which can run through a noir murder mystery all in one night. Even better, it’s a game that encourages using pictures, a cork board, pins and pieces of string.

You play through scenes as you investigate the suspects and locations around the crime, rolling dice and amending the murder board as you go, getting closer to the culprit.

There are rules for creating a mystery, but there are some fantastic premade mysteries provided. One of these is basically an investigation into Mario’s death with the numbers filed off which was the one I’ve run. It was a good time, and there are several genres they’ve put noir mysteries in.

Cthulhu Dark

By Graham Walmsley, Kathryn Jenkins & Helen Gould

Read before? Yes

Played? Yes

One of the strange pieces of art indicative of the section of the book you’re entering. In this case, Consume.

This is one of my favourite Locecraftian roleplaying games (for people keeping that, that’s Lovecraftesque and Cthulhu Dark). It’s an ultra-minimalist system which encourages both investigation where the plot won’t get stopped just because you rolled badly, but also embraced the utter nihilistic tragedy of it all. This is the game I’ve used safety tools the most with, the only one I’ve seen the Open Door tool used with, and it’s been so utterly dark that I’m really proud of my players for engaging with those tools.

The system’s simple and the Trophy games actually use rules inspired by them. You have two rolls: Investigation and Doing Anything Else. For both rolls you take one d6 if what you’re doing if within the realms of human possibility, one if your background or occupation might help and another of a different colour if you’re willing to risk your mind. You roll them and check your highest die. For Investigation 4 is a success, 5 is a success with something extra and 6 is a success where you see too much and the world gets a little strange. Specifically on a 1-3 you don’t necessarily fail, but things go wrong in a way that pushes the fiction forward. This is unlike old Call of Cthulhu games where a failed Library Use roll might hold up the story until you try again and success. Doing Anything Else rolls are a little different as you won’t see more than man was meant to see by climbing really quickly or running away from a security guard.

The different coloured die I mentioned earlier is called an Insight Die and there are a couple of times you might roll it. Whenever you do that, you check it against your only stat: Insight. If beats your current Insight then the stat goes up (in a roll, it also needs to be the highest die). At 6 Insight, you’re done, gone. Eaten, destroyed, broken by the realisation of the horrors of the world. Anything like that.

The rules are tiny, originally made to be contained on a sheet of paper, so why make them a massive book?

This book goes into the base rules, then expands them twice. One time is for players to know more, one time is for the GM and goes into the intent a lot more. There’s information on running games, on horrors you might face. Then there’s the majority of the book which are four settings:

  • London 1851 & Screams of the Children: The only mystery I’ve run from the book. A house of women find a friend of theirs who was supposed to have run off with a fancy man. She’s returned, she’s missing her baby and is terrified. The investigation was harsh before it got anything supernatural, and has to this day been the one use of the Open Door safety tool that I’ve ever seen. I was so happy at a player for being willing to invoke it and sit out of the latter half, which was brutal.
  • Arkham 1692 & The Doors Beyond Time: Set in old Arkham, the scenario sees a family being tormented the day after a witch trial. Perception is messed with and there’s potential to use this as a framing device for the rest.
  • Jaiwo 2017 & The Curse of the Zimba: Set in a fictional African nation, the scenario deals with themes of colonialism and appropriation of beliefs which really should have been left alone.
  • Mumbai 2037 & Consume: Set around a building so large that it almost defies physics, as a family look for one of their number who vanished. Not for anyone with a fear of heights.

The Kickstarter had a ‘season pass’ with two scenarios, one of which I’ve run as my first ever game with the system, set in Dustbowl America in the 30’s. I’ve run it once as a replacement system for Call of Cthulhu and it worked very well for that. This and Squamous are probably going to be my go to conversion systems.

Apocalypse World: Extended Refbook

By Meguey & D. Vincent Baker

Read before? Yes

Played? No

Apparently the apocalypse has a lot of gas masks.

I thought I’d read all of the Apocalypse World 2E books right up until the start of April when I saw this. Oops. It’s more playbooks which are a bit weirder then the originals, which is saying something.

  • The Child-Thing: A feral child and inheritor of the world, including the things which hunt
  • The Contaminated: A kind of disease vector, but a bit more supernatural-themed
  • The Landfall Marine: You’re part of a crew from space hoping to make Earth more habitable
  • The No One: An interesting enigma who may eventually become a person
  • The Quarantine: The Fallout playbook, where you came from a bunker in stasis and aren’t used to the weird new world
  • The Show: The centre of attention with the ability to draw in fans and change the world
  • The Skiller: A selection of new moves belonging to no playbook which you can select when asked to take a move from another playbook. It adds abilities not necessarily tied to any one thing, which is a nice idea
  • The Symbiote: A hive mind
  • The Waterbearer: You help people by providing water, making it a new challenge for folks to deal with, but also a valuable resource.

The Barbarian’s Bloody Quest, The Wizard’s Grimoire, The Last Adventure and The Thief & The Necromancer

By D. Vincent Baker

Read before? No

Played? No

For the best effect, get this and the companion book as they fit together as nice covers.

These are a ton of short RPGs, so I’m lumping them together. I was so far behind, I needed some quick wins. Also I added these to the list despite not actually backing them on Kickstarter. As a member of the Bakers’ Patreon, I get their Kickstarters as part of that and if I was counting the Apocalypse World Burned Over books, I’m going to include these (also later on Under Hollow Hills and World Wide Wrestling 2E). 

Each of these books are in pairs between a character book and an adventure book. These are generally for a hero and two GMs playing their enemies. The Thief & Necromancer is a bit different, with two players as heroes who are friends but sometimes may be in conflict.

Using The Barbarian’s Bloody Quest as an example, you have a series of questions which determine your initial stats and a sheet to hand to volunteers to play the wizards you’ll be butchering, explaining what they need to do. The Barbarian triggers moves and rolls dice when they need to in the fiction, while the Wizards have pick lists to mark as they go, all linked to prompts from the Barbarian’s moves. Eventually the Barbarian will find the right Wizard, but until then they’ll kill as many as they have to in order to reach their target.

It’s an interesting system, but one I’m not entirely confident about without playing first. I’ll have to print them out and test them on my group when we’re down a player or two.

Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast

By Jay Dragon & M Veselak

Read before? No

Played? No

The B&B, the residents and a number of the guests.

This is one of the biggest books in my marathon, and the one that made me realise this won’t just be Kickstarter in my quest. I’m looking forward to the physical version arriving, but as the digital version (and a video gamey VTT interface, oddly) are out, I figured I’d give it a read.

You’re playing through the lives of the staff and guests at Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast. She’s a witch who closed off her heart a long time ago, but keeps letting odd people and outcasts into her home. This game delights in toying with the idea of what a roleplaying game is. The scenarios are all chapters in the book, but some of them are locked until you do certain things or fill in spaces in the book with stickers. There are a handful of guests, but more are unlockable and there’s even a bonus character.

The play of the game is easy enough, with characters gaining and losing tokens by performing actions which are disruptive, bad or dumb ‘whoopsies’ or positive, useful or supportive, ‘bingos’. There are only a few different types of chapter, mechanically, but they all change a bit with each one. At one point you’re doing the laundry but using actions which will disrupt the process in order to eventually get it right. You’re suggesting ways to entertain an impatient demon child (another player) and building tokens up on them or watching everything go awry if they ever run out.

The characters are shared, with each chapter suggesting a couple of fixed characters and guests, then the players can pick from anyone else they’ve unlocked. Each character has their own track of achievements or progress or programming.

  • Gertrude – A perspective character, masked and living on the washing machine in a B&B where everyone has a room, she’s growing in confidence and learning who she is. They have an achievement list to evolve.
  • Hey Kid – A pesky demon child, they don’t know who they are yet, other than a mischief. They’ll develop character traits and doodle a comic on their sheet. Eventually they’ll even become Hey Teen.
  • Sal – A chill dude with a sweet van and an interest in music. He’ll be working on a song. He’s also scribbled all over his sheet already.
  • Parish – A knight who was cursed into frog form and now works at Yazeba’s in the kitchens. His customisation is based around recipes.
  • Amelie – A robot housekeeper who has programming you can customise as you play.
  • Yazeba – The witch judging everyone else, gaining and crossing off enemies.
Sal, probably my favourite of the residents.

There are evolved versions of some characters like Hey Kid, The Moon Prince as an unlockable character and ways to retire some characters. You also get guests like an evil skeleton called Rag-And-Bones and The Rabbits in The Garden Who Wear Little Outfits.

It looks beautiful and interesting, I’m really curious about trying it out. There’s a demo version which was out in beta and I’m thinking about printing the proper book’s pages which were shown in that document. That way I can test the waters with my group before stickering the full book. The only negative I’ve got at the moment is that if you’re running from the PDF instead of the One More Multiverse VTT or the physical version when it shows up is that there wasn’t a file with the stickers to print out.

Gertrude’s backpack, slots for stickers and what they unlock.

Broken Cities

By Côme Martin

Read before? No

Played? No

Some of the nice, crisp design of Broken Cities

I’ve realised that any Côme Martin game will be an interesting one. This game is about existing and traversing a strange city, inspired by things like Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, making it doubly interesting to me.

The game uses a deck of playing cards to establish the city and the people travelling in it. The city has quirks and a need. And it can change over time. The people have primary and secondary goals, as well as odd pasts. The City plays a card as the focus of the scene and players react to it, making actions and either accepting or refusing any compromises the city makes of them. The city itself is mapped out using the cards and these can move around as you play.

The game is glibly written with a fun tone and a ton of footnotes, although only reading it the game feels like it’s not yet entirely in my grasp. While it could come across a little broad at first for traversing a city, you drill down into the oracles for what you draw and it gets suitably weird. I found this with the author’s Green Dawn Mall, too. I’ll have to play it and see how it goes. This feels like one of those games such as Brindlewood Bay and Trophy Gold where just reading isn’t going to be enough to make a solid judgement of it.

R’lyehwatch

By Jayme Antrim & Jesse Ross

Read before? No

Played? Yes… just recently

Just another day at the beach.

I’ve picked up anything Jesse Ross has done, and after the grim portents of the Trophy games, this one was a weird pitch. It’s Baywatch meets Call of Cthulhu. That’s the pitch. Luckily we’re in an age where a game with that basic a premise actually has good mechanics and rules ro back it up.

You’re all lifeguards with one out of three ticked and a role. You also get an ability or piece of equipment and there are nice tables to help you generate your character randomly if the whim takes you. There are negative quirks which you take to make tasks a bit harder in return for rewards. Every character automatically has the ‘slow motion’ quirk to justify running in slo mo like in Baywatch itself. Here it’s explained away that you’re in a spooky city where time doesn’t always work right.

The basic system is that you’ll be given a difficulty between four and six and a stat. You roll a number of dice: one if it’s your stat, one if your role works and one if you spend a Luck and use your perk. You roll the dice and aim to get the difficulty or higher. You can increase the difficulty by tagging in a quirk and gain a Luck point. If you’re successful, you can restore your Grit, the stat working as your health, your composure and your insight into the horrors. 

There are tons of tables and pick lists to help you generate episodes, and two scenarios of which I’ve run one do far. It was really good fun, and I’m eager to run it for folks again in the future.

Conclusions

Out of these books, I’ve run three of them on the month I’ve read them.

I’ve added one IndieGoGo book and four which I got through Patreon, along with their companion books. Going forward, there will be other books from crowdfunding platforms beyond Kickstarter arriving, hopefully not so many as to make this an insurmountable task.

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RPG Quest – April (Part One)

Posted on July 8, 2023 by fakedtales

This month’s been an interesting one for reading RPGs. It’s involved stretching the rules a bit, and while I’ve not caught up with where I should be at, I’ve definitely accelerated despite adding a number of things onto the list.

First up, I’ve been adding Kickstarters which I would have backed, but got for supporting people on Patreon. Also I’ve added an IndieGoGo to the list, which added one book and 500 more pages. I’ve not made this an easy task for myself.

Blades in the Dark

By John Harper

Read before? Yes

Played? Yes. A lot.

My special edition of the book with some decorations in time for CabinCon.

I’ve already said a lot about Blades in the Dark. I’ve written about it, I’ve written scenarios for it, and I’ll keep talking about it. So here I’m going to keep things quick.

You’re in a grimy Victorian-style world filled with crumbling buildings and flickering lights. Weird monster whale oil powers things including giant masts keeping an infinite amount of ghosts from the city of Doskvol. The sun’s broken and it’s almost always night. Bluecoats oppress the populace while the Imperial Army oppresses everywhere else. 

This sounds grim, right?

The good news is that it’s the perfect place for you and your mates to rob it blind and make out like bandits. You start out in the gutters and the better you get at crimes, you might be able to retire comfortably as the best crooks in the city.

Your crew is either:

  • Assassins – Imagine Hitman, but you’re a group
  • Bravos – You’re bullies, but professionally
  • Cult – You believe in something, possibly something awful
  • Hawkers – Del & Rodney Trotter, but in a haunted city
  • Shadows – This is the kind of ‘default’, where you’re burglars
  • Smugglers – You get things from point A to B, generally illicitly

Your playbooks are:

  • Cutter – You’re the muscle
  • Hound – You’re a tracker and shooter
  • Leech – You’re the gadgeteer, trapsmith and healer
  • Lurk – You’re the sneaky one
  • Slide – You’re the face
  • Spider – You’re the brains of the operation
  • Whisper – You’re able to channel the ghost field and toy with the elemtns
  • There are also playbooks for people who die and become ghosts, ghosts who merge with humans making a ‘vampire’ and ghosts who get put in a big metal body

The system’s nice and simple, although I get when some folks feel a bit intimidated by it at first glance. There are a number of different systems in play and the game’s split between free play, doing a heist and then the aftermath/downtime. A physical copy helps as you can flip back and forth between the systems and sub-systems and the reference guides make it a doddle to run once you get the flow of it. 

The main system’s where you describe what you’re doing and if it needs an action check, the GM will mention it, but won’t say which action you need, instead they’ll ask how you’re doing it. You can pick any of your different actions (e.g. Sway, Hunt, etc) and pick d6’s equal to that. The GM will pick the ‘position’ and ‘effect’ based on your choice, but that’s the kind of thing you don’t need to know at first glance. You can use teamwork for extra dice, or spend some of your own Stress. There’s also a thing called a Devil’s Bargain, where everyone else round the table pitches things that can go wrong no matter whether you succeed or fail, giving you a bonus now for causing future problems. You climb that drainpipe but a random person in the next flat saw you. We’ll see if they notify the filth about it.

There’s a lovely flashback mechanic where you dive into the heist and if you need to have made a plan, acquired something, befriended a guard and so on, you can spend more of your Stress, flash back a la Ocean’s 11, and see whether you succeeded. There’s also a harm system which is the weakest point, but you’re generally avoiding harm by making a Resistance roll, rewinding and saying “as a master thief, I would have seen that trap and dodged out of the way”, rolling and taking Stress to avoid harm. The joy there is describing the horrible effects and then skipping back, pulling a “well, actually” on the GM.

The setting is thoroughly planned, but with a view to making sure the players are at the centre of a living world. There’s no central characters apart from ones you’re robbing or being hunted by. The world’s evocative and luckily not in a way that’s tricky to explain to players who havent read the source material.

It’s just the best game.

Laser Kittens: An RPG about tiny kitties growing up

By Stentor Danielson & Cheyenne Wall-Grimes

Read before? No

Played? No

Lasers everywhere!

This was quite a fun novelty idea at the time. You play a group of young kittens who have special laser vision which does odd things. The powers all have names like “pew pew pew” or “dew dew dew” and do things based on the name.

There was a ton of excitement in my writing group about this one and the book looks nice, I just ended up a little underwhelmed by it. There’s a card system for bidding on narrative control, with black suits as positive and red ones as negative, so you’ll have to dump cards in to get rid of bad ones. It looks adorable and if folks were offering to run it, I’d probably give it a play, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to run it.

World Wide Wrestling: International Incident

By Nathan D Paoletta

Read before? No

Played? No

You’ll see this cover art in second edition, too.

This was a bit of a weird one, as it’s a supplement for the first edition of World Wide Wrestling which has been superseded by the second edition. Apparently some of this is incorporated there, but for the sake of completeness here we are.

The chapters are as follows:

  • Global Wrestling
  • Expanding the Game
  • Being More Creative

Global Wrestling’s really interesting as it shows different styles of wrestling from around the world and how to replicate them in the system. 

Expanding the Game adds some extra rules to play with including ‘mythic moments’ and moves for the audience.

Being More Creative provides some sample wrestlers for you to use and ideas for things like wrestle school.

7th Sea: Second Edition

By John Wick

Read before? Yes

Played? Yes

Yarr!

I loved the 7th Sea RPG in its first edition, so I went big when I saw the second edition was on Kickstarter.

The players are swashbuckling heroes in the fictional world of Theah, which uncannily resembles historical Europe from around the 17th century, give or take a bit of fudging for the sake of drama. The world of the first edition was fun, but this time Wick actually got a bunch of folks in to help make it a bit better researched. Other books in the line would expand all over the globe, but this core book gives a great overview of the European nations as a focal ‘home’ for the cast.

  • Avalon, Inismore and the Highland Marches are ruled by glamour and strange fae or fae-adjacent folk. They’re great at boats, drink quite a bit, tell stories and of course fight among themselves. While they were all ‘Avalon’ previously, there’s been more of an effort to separate them this time.
  • Castille is Spain and feels more Spanish than it did in the first edition. It has some fantastic duellists, some religious extremism and influences from the Crescent Empire in its roots.
  • Eisen is Germany, filled with mythical beasts and Witcher-style hunters. They have some incredible tactics and metals, even if their land is blighted by monsters and scarred with war.
  • Montaigne is France, decadent and ripe for revolution. Nobles have strange blood-based teleportation and there are things brewing under the surface of the capital.
  • The Sarmatian Commonwealth is based on Poland and is a rare democracy, where all people were made nobles, in order to stop the original nobles blocking any attempts at change. They also make pacts with weird spirits that might be demons.
  • Ussura is Russia, a gigantic land where people worship Matushka, a kind of Mother Winter sort of figure, they shapeshift and again, the divide between nobles and poor feels like it might head in a revolutionary direction.
  • Vestenmannavnjar used to be a viking nation and still has some who raid, who use runic magic. Mostly though, they’re traders and merchants now.
  • Vodacce is Italy, and the John Wick faction. The ‘don’t trust these guys’ faction. They’re good duellists, deceptive tricksters and have fate witches bending probability to their whim.

The system is one I like, but I’m aware that’s not a universal opinion. The first edition has many fans who stuck with that and haven’t seen the improvements to the world between editions.

Where FFG kept the ‘roll & keep’ mechanic for Legend of the Five Rings and used their funny dice, 7th Sea does a kind of ‘roll & keep everything’ sort of thing. The idea is that to pass a check you need a success, then there might be other risks involved with the check (e.g. being noticed, getting split up). You roll, you group the results together in sets totalling 10 each and can use each of those sets to pass the check and mitigate any of those risks. Combat moves at a good, dynamic pace with mook rules and the only time the GM rolls is for villains. 

Like Blades in the Dark, there’s a compelling world which in the core book and the supplements, inspires you to make a campaign out of the concepts contained in a nation, a city or even a block of streets. It’s weird and the use of many people from around the world, hopefully it’s a lot better researched than the previous edition.

I’ve run one shots and campaigns, I even got to be a player in a campaign of 7th Sea, I’ve reviewed it already. I’ll definitely be returning to it.

£1 Tabletop RPG Rulebook: Era: Lyres – Pocket Edition

By Shades of Vengeance

Read before? Yes

Played? No

Maybe those skeletons just want a go at riding the cart?

I backed this on the promise of a game where you bullshit about your adventures and technically, that it what I got. The Era system’s a fairly basic attribute + skill d10 system similar to the World of Darkness, adapted to the different versions they use but ultimately still the same sort of deal. It gets a lot of love from a small, dedicated community and if they see something good in it that I didn’t, good for them.

This is a preview version of the full rules for Era: Lyres. Sure enough, you play a party of bullshitters, but you make up the story and roll using your standard set of stats. This makes lying particularly powerful and for some odd things like still using strength rolls for feats of strength. I guess you show off your moves to the audience. You also roll up the audience, individually, based on the location they’re at, and how much they’ll end up paying you.

This seems like an interesting idea for an indie game (or the card game Braggart) filtered through some fairly standard trad RPG rules and comes off a bit worse for it.

The Name of God – A Game of Outcasts and Urban Weirdness

By Alessandro Piroddi

Read before? Yes

Played? No

In real life this cover’s actually just a card.

This game is an odd little one, originally just as a set of cards and some minimalist rules, it’s since been expanded a bit. You each take a card representing a god. Or at least, you might be a god. You might just be an unhoused person. You play through scenes of odd magical realism, going through ritualistic play until your character makes a final leap which may be their death or may cast aside their mortal form, bringing them back as a god. Yeah, so big content warning for suicide on this one.

Singularity

By Aura Belle & Josh Jordan

Read before? Yes

Played? No

There is no way I won’t play the host as a kind of space version of Cilla Black.

This is technically a LARP, although I might see if I can run it round a table with some folks. It’s a game playing out a dating show in the distant future. One player is The Host, one’s The Star (the carrier of an endangered parasite) looking for a partner and the other players take the roles of such contestants as:

  • The Computer That Monitors Everyone
  • A Dead Planet
  • An Electric Man
  • The Feelings of Everyone in the Room
  • The Glitching After-Images of a Broken Webcam
  • The Golden Emperor of Time and Space
  • A Hologram
  • A Sentient MMORPG
  • A Song You Can’t Forget
  • The Universe’s Strongest Android
  • An Uplifted Tortoise
  • A Viral Video Avatar

You go through rounds of questions and dates to see who The Star will choose. It’s fairly simple, but where it sings is with the strange contestants. There’s also a cryptic version and a superhero version.

Unbound RPG

By Grant Howitt & Chris Taylor

Read before? No

Played? No

Some nice bold images and a Kickstarter campaign with a lot of yelling, of course I had to check it out.

This was the first Howitt & Taylor joint that I backed on Kickstarter and the only one I haven’t read. It’s an action game which uses playing cards with everyone bringing a deck along for their character and modifying things as they go. It’s not quite Wreck This Deck level customisation, but it’s still a fun idea.

The cards can be used to make a setting, and it’s recommended you scratch-build a game using the tools to hand, which is why I ended up dropping this as candidates to replace my Dungeon World campaign with.

You mix a Core and a Role, each of which give you abilities.

The Cores are:

  • Devout
  • Magi
  • Outlaw
  • Pactbound
  • Warrior
  • Wild

These are how you get your abilities, how you heal and they provide questions about the world and the group.

The Roles are:

  • The Brawler
  • The Deadeye
  • The Protector
  • The Striker
  • The Warden

These give you your proficiencies, stamina, abilities and there’s a big list of example concepts for characters which you can have when you mix a Core and a Role. 

As an example a Pactbound Warden might be a Demonic Construct and a Devout Striker might be a Chief of the Assault Exorcism Brigade.

You also give your character a Trait, and they include:

  • Aura
  • Companion
  • Captain
  • Dirty Fighter
  • Fire
  • Mighty
  • Rage
  • Shadows
  • Spirit
  • Transform
  • The Unnatural

There’s some good graphic design for how to use the system, which I always appreciate and it’s interesting seeing an earlier Rowan Rook & Decard book already doing this.There’s a surprisingly large bestiary for a generic system and all throughout the book there are pieces of art showing off sample ideas for games. This game looks fine and would be interesting to run, but I feel like I’d prefer an established setting as that’s somewhere RRD really shine.

Continued in Part Two…

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Casual Trek – Strange New Synergy

Posted on June 26, 2023 by fakedtales
I would like the podcast to go. Now.

It’s time for some cynical synergy as we decided on the stunt of ranking the first episode of season two of Strange New Worlds! 

Strange New Worlds “A Quality of Mercy”

Pike in some Star Trek II clothes.

The finale for Strange New Worlds was an interesting close to season one, leaping forwards in time a few years and featuring a perplexed Pike as he knows he did something wrong, but has to keep going along with it.

When I first saw the episode I knew there was something missing, but wasn’t really sure what it was. We talk a lot about Paul Wesley’s Kirk, the convoluted work to get where we need to go time travel-wise and do our best not to pre-emptively discuss the following episode.

The Original Series “Balance of Terror”

It’s Spock’s dad! (It’s not Spock’s dad)

Covering A Quality of Mercy meant covering Balance of Terror was going to be a necessity. I sometimes hit the Original Series a little more cynically than Miles as I don’t really have the nostalgia for it and remember a lot of adults telling me how it was better than the newer episodes back when I was a kid. Still, I had to message Miles partway through this episode and say how good of an episode it is.

We’ve got a top heavy list, but this feels like one of the first top shooters we’ve had in a while.

Strange New Worlds “The Broken Circle”

Carol Kane is a wonderful boozy aunt who will help the kids commit crimes.

Finally, the start of season two. It may sound like we’re a bit down on it, but that’s only in comparison to the rest.

We’ve got action, we’ve got Carol Kane, we’ve got Spock wrestling with emotions and the medics kicking arse. It’s fun and after having seen the second episode, I can see the instinct to start with action instead of a courtroom drama, but when we get to that episode, it’s going to be up there.

The episodes can be found on all podcatchers, on Spotify or using this link:

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RPG Quest – March (Part Two)

Posted on June 16, 2023 by fakedtales

We’re in June and I’ve finally remembered to catch up with posting about my findings with reading every RPG book I’ve backed on Kickstarter.

I ran a little long when writing about March’s books, so here’s the last seven games I’ve read for March:

Parliament of Supplements

I hate owls, but I’m good with owlbears.

By Mad Perriot

Read before? No

Played? No

This is a weird one, mainly as it’s not technically finished, but I think it’s as finished as it’s likely to be. That’s fine, I’ve backed a number of Kickstarters that didn’t come out at all and at least there are usable things here. It’s an anthology of modules for RPGs, some of which I’ll find useful.

World Wide Wrestling – Moves for things like beefing over social media or cutting a promo

Monsterhearts – A Skin and campaign frame based on The Wicked + The Divine and a new Small Town based on the town the author grew up in

Blades in the Dark – Academia rules in case you want to play students in a Duskvol academy instead of grimy thieves.

Vampire: The Masquerade 20th Anniversary Edition – the first module I won’t be using, a few mods involving combat.

Stars Without Number – I don’t own or know anything about this.

D&D 5E – inspiration, background, alignment and economy rules. I’ve been done with D&D for a while now.

Pathfinder – real estate rules. My rule for not bothering with D&D includes Pathfinder and other ‘D&D’s’, too.

So overall this is an odd collection of finished and unfinished hacks. I’m interested in trying out the World Wide Wrestling moves when I finally get to run that and Academia feels like it needs a bit of work on my part to pull things together if I want to run it. If folks want a fantasy school, it could be fun. The WicDiv content for Monsterhearts might not be something I’m as eager to get to the table unless a player asks, but the Small Town’s got a lot of promise.

Lovecraftesque

All alone, like any good Lovecraftian protagonist.

By Black Armada Games

Read before? Yes

Played? Yes

I’ve been a fan and patron of Black Armada for a while now, and it all started with this game. I’d already picked up Stealing Cthulhu, which was an influence for both this and Cthulhu Dark (coming later this quest). Listening to Annison and Fox at a convention talking about their project sold me on both their ability to make a damn good and reliable Kickstarter, but also the design philosophy at work.

Lovecraftian games are a tricky art. Call of Cthulhu’s a classic, but there are somethings it doesn’t quite do well. The conceit of being a group of investigators runs against the solitude of the Lovecraftian investigator, but this game solves the problem by having you all control one person.

The Witness is an investigator whose player can interact with the world, but not make anything up in it.

The Narrator describes the world as the Witness moves through it, seeding in clues as they go.

The Watchers are every other player, adding flavour and mystery, inhabiting NPCs if called upon by the Narrator.

You rotate each role as you go through three acts, getting weirder and weirder as it goes, with some incredible mechanics to help the arc of the story towards the horrific finale.

First of all, you are all told you can’t add anything supernatural or violent into the world… unless it’s something listed on a special card you’ll each get. You won’t know what everyone has, but people will hint in their direction of the mystery in ways which will evolve in each act. Some of them could just be strange magic or spaces, others might kill the Witness and bring in a new protagonist.

The other big piece of genius here is Leaping To Conclusions. At the end of every scene every player scribbles down a quick assumption about what’s going on. You won’t know everything, but you will know your special card and what you’ve played through. Then you play another scene and update your theory accordingly. There’s a beautiful thing that happens with this mechanic. You all start with different ideas and gradually tighten the net, changing your ideas to fit the scenes and the assumptions, ending up with a mystery with an answer which you all led towards and couldn’t have existed without you, but still feels unexpected. There’s something incredibly elegant about this system.

I’ve run Lovecraftesque a bunch of times and even hosted an evenin where myself and my friend Saffy ran two tables with one book and set of cards.

There’s a second edition on the way soon and I’m curious how it will have changed.

Trophy Dark

An ominous wood. It’s probably fine to enter, right guys?

By Hedgemaze Press & Gauntlet Publishing

Read before? Yes

Played? Yes

This was a treat to myself which I started after finishing reading Exalted Third Edition. Trophy Dark is one of my all time favourite RPGs.

You play treasure hunters who are trying to take a treasure that doesn’t belong to them from a forest that doesn’t want them there.

Each character has a background, an occupation, a drive and possibly some spells. They also have a stat called Ruin. Characters are kind of a light touch, specifically as you’ll find out more about them as they delve into darkness and reveal who they are in these final moments of their lives.

The system’s nice and simple, needing light and dark d6’s. The main roll is a Risk Roll, where you take a light die if you have a skill or gear which will help, a dark die if you’re risking body and/or mind which you’re always doing if you’re casting a spell. As seen in Blades in the Dark you use Devil’s Bargains to potentially add another light die. You roll all of them, pick the highest and on a six you succesed with no problems. A four to five is a success with a complication and on a one to three then things go badly.

What’s beautiful about these Risk rolls is that the player making the roll says what they hope will happen and everyone else; players and GM, say what could go wrong. The GM makes the ultimate decision, but the kind of writer’s room approach is great for gathering suggestions and playing towards the eventual destruction of these characters.

The majority of the book is incursions which are built around a theme like: Dream, Moss or Void. They list out moments which could happen, conditions which might affect people and the five ‘rings’ as you get closer and closer to the end. They all follow the same rough structure even if they can all end up telling quite different stories. At the first ring, you’re lulled into a false sense of security and encouraged to go further. The second ring turns the environment against you. The third starts to point the group at each other. The fourth has the forest (or other location) wake up and confront the invaders. The fifth is where it goes insane and ideally, no one’s getting out alive or in one piece.

My first game had four players. One died in the fourth ring, sacrificing himself to save the others. The second was killed by the third who let herself be taken over by a weird entity she thought was her mother. The fourth used a ritual to cast her mind back to civilisation and to her imprisoned brother so she wasn’t in her body when she was ripped to pieces in the forest.

It’s brutal, it’s tragic and can be kind of artful with it. Trophy’s one of my favourite RPGs and I’ll be talking about it more on Who Dares Rolls, I’m sure.

City of Winter

A gloomy exodus for a family you’ll all be playing

By Heart of the Deernicorn

Read before? No

Played? No

I love Fall of Magic, a map-travelling game using a scroll as the board to play and coins as playing pieces. The system’s nice and simple, with tones that are poetic and forlorn. In Fall of Magic you follow a Magus to the origin point of magic as it’s leaving the world. In City of Winter, you play a family who will travel from their doomed homeland to a fantastical city. You’ll work out traditions, then you’ll age, die and get replaced by the next family members as the story of the group moves on. You start off playing on a scroll, then move to a large poster-sized city map. There are also a lot of cards, representing different groups and prompts for their traditions. I didn’t look too closely at them, as I still want some surprises for when I play it.

The game looks like it’s going to take a few sessions to play and I had a similar experience with Fall of Magic. It was a shame that our Fall game fell apart when one of the more shy players realised he was framing scenes and technically doing some GM type actions, got stage fright and couldn’t go any further. This means I’ll need to find alternative avenues to play this gorgeous game.

Playing Nature’s Year

I assume this is some kind of odd shrine.

By Meguey Baker

Read before? Unfinished

Played? No

A compilation of dice games, each based around different seasons. I read this on my anniversary weekend with Emma in Rye. You need a lot of six-sided dice in different colours for each game and you’ll be doing different things with them. In one you’re all hunting a deer for a wish, in another you’ll be speaking to the dead. Some of these games feel like they could take a while to do, but there’s a good lot of ritual to them to make simple dice mechanics feel evocative, even emotional.

The games aren’t alone in the book, there are recipes, essays on the flora and fauna encountered in each season and commentary on the games. It’s something I might try to run pre-game with my group if they feel like they’d be up for a bit more of a contemplative experience at some point.

Apocalypse World Second Edition

I guess the gas masks survived the end of the world

By Meguey & Vincent Baker

Read before? Yes

Played? First Edition

Apocalypse World birthed the ‘Powered by the Apocalypse’ series of books, although it had a scrappier, more zine-like look to a lot of what followed. Set in an apocalypse which is vaguely defined, there are three things known: There are vehicles, there are guns, there is a psychic maelstrom tearing in at the edges of the known world.

The book explains that the game is a conversation and the moves each character has from the general list or their playbook explain when the conversation engages with the rules. Most of the time this results in rolling 2d6 plus a stat, with results of 10+ getting what you want, 6 or lower causing a failure and the Master of Ceremonies (MC) makes a reaction, then the sweet spot is a 7-9 which gives you a success at a cost.

The playbooks are: 

  • The Angel: The healer of the group, just about patching everyone up with a base and some great equipment.
  • The Battlebabe: A dangerous person to be around, they are attractive and always trouble.
  • The Brainer: A creepy psychic who wants to get into people’s heads, pulling their strings 
  • The Chopper: The leader of a biker gang, building both bikes and the game they fight with. 
  • The Driver: You’re the group’s wheels, building one or more vehicles which are like a second body to you. One which will hurt when you roll over your foes with it. 
  • The Gunlugger: A simple brute who is incredibly well armed.
  • The Hardholder: You look after a community, providing jobs, help and trouble.
  • The Hocus: A cult leader, receiving signals from the other side.
  • The Maestro’D: The host of local entertainment, in deep with all kinds of shady dealings.
  • The Savvyhead: You fix things and customise them, almost to a supernatural level. 
  • The Skinner: A beautiful person who can hypnotise or summon folks through the psychic maelstrom, but who is also a genius with a blade.

The playbooks have the stats of Hot, Cool, Hard, Sharp and Weird, which power moves. These are listed and then expanded upon for better player and MC clarification. You get some unique rules which only happen if you’re playing a set book, like the Chopper’s biker gang or the Hocus’ cult. There’s Hx (History) which players have with each other, and one thing everyone always brings up with this game: Sex Moves. These are rarely used, but like anything else where there’s rules, shows where the importance of the game is. Interpersonal drama, between the Hx and the Sex Moves, players are in messy relationships with each other and that will effect things.

The MC rules go into Threats and ways to build things to help with the drama. They also give lists: your Agendas which are overall motivations, guiding Principles and Moves you do when players fail or give you a golden opportunity. What they don’t do is provide specifics about the world or adventures, as these are actively discouraged outside of play. The playbooks will establish the world. The play will establish the world.

This second edition clears things up and adds more moves, specifically for fights, damage, vehicles and an overhauled system of jobs. Going through the whole book it feels like there’s a lot of repetition in it as moves get repeated in order to help provide clarification. All in all it’s good, but for teaching people new to the system I’d generally rather go with Monsterhearts, The Warren or a zine like Girl Underground.

Apocalypse World: Burned Over Hackbook

Finally, an Apocalypse World for all ages!

By Meguey & Vincent Baker

Read before? Yes

Played? Yes

If I have one regret about this book, it’s that it requires Apocalypse World Second Edition to play. If not for that, it would be a perfect replacement. This is a version which changes up the stats, removing Hot and combining the moves linked to that to Cool instead. Aggro gets added instead. The MC side of things is a little more chilled and the fights are refined. There are Hard Zones which are settings featuring locations to use, some are premade and you’re always encouraged to add more. There’s also no Sex Moves, as this is in theory a game which can be played by younger roleplayers. The thing is, that doesn’t stop this game going hard and weird.

The playbooks are also more specific and weird. I think I might even prefer them.

  • The Bloodhound: You’re answering mysteries about the apocalypse, defining more about the setting and getting to say what’s true.
  • The Brain-Picker: The equivalent of the Brainer, slightly less creepy.
  • The Gearcutter: The techie, who can hit a point of being almost psychometric.
  • The Harrier: A biker, but also a cult leader, as your gang are weird death-worshippers.
  • The Lawmaker: A kind of sheriff, although you work out what the rules of your holding are.
  • The Medic: The equivalent of the Angel, keeping everyone around you alive.
  • The Monarch: A leader with a near-hypnotic presence.
  • No One: A nobody, figuring out who they are as they play.
  • The Operator: You have places to go and jobs to do, more than most people.
  • The Restless: You’re a person and their dog, travelling through the least hospitable parts of the apocalypse.
  • The Undaunted: A parent/cult leader (again), with urchins who help you.
  • The Vigilant: You’re aware of monsters from the Maelstrom, but you also are the only one who can see them most of the time, and they’re hunting you.
  • The Volatile: You’re extremely dangerous, the Battlebabe of this world.
  • The Weaponised: You’re a combat cyborg with technology with a few flaws as well as incredible powers.
  • The X-Earther: You came from a space station, bringing it and the inhabitants into play while you wander the ruined world.

If there’s one criticism I have of these playbooks, its that the flavour text at the start to describe them can be a little vague at times. I love the presentation of the unique rules for each one. The Hard Zones are useful.

I ran a game of the city building RPG, Ex Novo, where we created a kind of arboreal apocalypse, then the next session we used Apocalypse World Burned Over. It moved smoothly and went to some weird places with a cult and a strange monster bleeding over the psychic maelstrom in the middle of a market.

Conclusions

At a quarter of the way through the year I was at 18.48% through the books or 19% through the page count (which includes partially-read books like Trophy Gold, The Wildsea and Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast.

I didn’t take any cheap wins last month or this month, I might do so in April just to reassure myself that this is a doable task. It might end up being the Barbarian’s Bloody Quest series of books from the Baker House Band as I’ve just added a ton of those to my list.

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RPG Quest – March (Part One)

Posted on June 14, 2023 by fakedtales

March was another mixed month. There were some good long reads and games I’ve had for years which I’ve literally never read, but also a few lengthy additions and a realisation of a few extra additions which has shifted the percentages back. I’ve also had to split this into two posts with seven games each, as I have gone on a bit about some of them.

Out of the new RPGs to arrive, Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast was one of the longest RPGs I’ve backed on a crowdfunding platform. It’s from IndieGoGo, and clocks in at 500 pages. As we stand on April 1st I’m halfway through already, so I expect April to look a lot better.

There was also a contentious entry. I decided to read the Apocalypse World: Burned Over book immediately after Apocalypse World, but it’s a game I didn’t back on Kickstarter as I didn’t need to. I’m a Patron of the Baker House Band, and get all of their crowdfunded projects through Patreon instead. I decided that I’d add the other Baker games in, one of which is long (Under Hollow Hills) and then there are several tiny ones. Hopefully when it comes time to read them, they’ll be some quick wins. I’m not going to include every RPG that’s been crowdfunded as I’ve bought a ton which were on platforms like Kickstarter, but that I’ve bought afterwards. That feels like going too far, and with the Lumpley ones, I’d have backed them if not for the Patreon.

Dead Scare – An RPG of blood-spattered white picket fences

Hang up the washing and kill some zombies!

By Tracy Barnett

Read before? No

Played? No

Dead Scare was a zombie PbtA game which sounded interesting and then was so late I forgot about it for a while. It’s the 1950’s and a zombie outbreak has happened in the cities, in places where the men go to work. You’re women, primarily housewives, grandmothers, anyone who’s not busy working during the day. You can also choose to play a child. You’re basically all that’s left.

The playbooks are pretty self-explanatory and include:

  • The Wife/Spinster
  • The Preacher’s Wife
  • The Teacher
  • The Nurse
  • The Grandmother
  • The Nanny/Housekeeper
  • The Scout (child)
  • The Troublemaker (child)
  • The Goody Two Shoes (child)
  • The Runner (child)
  • The College Girl (child)
  • The Infected (supplemental)

By modern PbtA standards it feels like it doesn’t quite do enough, while also providing more moves than I’d generally want in a game. It’s fine, but I don’t think it’s a game I’ll be gagging to get to the table. I feel I’ve probably been spoiled by Zombie World which is a favourite zombie RPG of mine. There’s some fun setting material in the back as ‘postcards’, which I think were mainly stretch goals but provide some things you can play with in a zombie campaign.

Curse of the Yellow Sign

A fairly plain cover, and numerous horrors inside.

By John Wick

Read before? Yes

Played? Yes-ish

John Wick released a trilogy of Call of Cthulhu adventures a while before this Kickstarter, called Curse of the Yellow Sign. They were three Yellow King-themed stories set in different time periods but also linked together. Wick in his typical format mixed the adventure with advice, examples of stunts he pulled in his games and the challenge he set himself to make Call of Cthulhu adventures with no monsters, no tomes and no cults. It feels fairly easy in the present, years after experiencing Trophy and Cthulhu Dark, but like so many trad games, Call of Cthulhu was built around a specific experience which tends to include all three.

He promised a number of resources and provided some of them, then ended up turning to Kickstarter for a collection which would also include his own RPG system.

Digging for a Dead God is the only one of these I’ve run so far. It’s got a slightly controversial sell. You are playing Nazi soldiers in Ally-occupied Africa, trying to dig for diamonds and split before Allied forces get to you. First up, this is a horror story where you’re expecting everyone to die, you’re encouraged to root for this even if you’re playing them. Again, this feels like it could easily be a Cthulhu Dark scenario and if I run any of these games, it’ll be in that system. You start the game with pregens all loaded up against each other with fragile alliances, hatreds, unwell underlings and desperate prisoners who have found a door underground. They don’t want to dig any further. Players are encouraged to push them and to be terrible, even though some might not want to take part (in fact, the adventure encourages forcing the one person who really doesn’t want this to be the one to dole out punishment. Some of my group were uncomfortable with this scenario and luckily there’s a character who is perfect for that. Once the group saw what was behind that door, they started turning against each other, they mutilated themselves. Two people survived (one more than the scenario expects) and they looked at each other, saw what was happening and fled.

Calling the King is set in the 2000’s in a snowed-in and abandoned hotel which is purposefully evoking The Shining in every fibre of its being. A famous director has rented it out in order to go through a script reading of The King in Yellow. He also has an ulterior motive I won’t get into as I want to run this one. Joining him are his ex-wife who’s very high and very emotionally fragile, varied friends of the pair and the director’s new girlfriend. The creation of the script and copying of it was difficult, ruining several photocopiers and printers, almost like it didn’t want to be read. Now, trapped together, they’re going to read the play and I’m sure everything will be fine. I was originally going to run this and kept holding on for apparent copies of the script which were all different for each character. They never happened and there are some pieces of script which are available here. I think I’ll have use Paint the Scene>>> and similar techniques to reflect this if I run it in the future.

Archimedes VII is a science fiction story where the players have woken up from stasis with no memory. The AI is acting strangely and as the group hit key milestones in their reactions to horror, they learn more about who they all are. This is a game which would work brilliantly with Cthulhu Dark or even Dread. The revelation’s a little obvious but the drip feed of details could be fun.

Unnamable is a simple system which is fine. It uses a simple dice pool system and has some fun with people gaining new abilities as they crack. I wouldn’t run this game with Call of Cthulhu, but similarly I wouldn’t run it in Unnamable. I’d probably go with Cthulhu Dark which I’ve had the bleakest, darkest horror experiences with.

[A quick note, between writing this and publishing it I’ve run Archimedes VII using Cthulhu Dark. I’ll get into my thoughts on that experience in the future]

Microscope Explorer

This looks fairly basic, but is a good companion piece to the original cover

By Lame Mage

Read before? No

Played? Only the base game

I like Microscope. It’s a neat little story game where you build a timeline in a nonlinear fashion. You have the start and end, but zoom in forward and backwards in the timeline, placing cards to answer a question a player poses in each round. You have ‘period’ cards which show a large span of time, ‘event’ cards which zoom the microscope in to one specific part of that period and ‘scene’ cards which allow everyone to play a quick moment in time, trying to answer a question.

Explorer is an expansion to the original book, providing advice, sample settings and a few extra modes of play.

  • Union – Instead of playing through a timeline, you create a family tree.
  • Chronicle – Pick a thing: an object, a place, anything like that. Then you see how it changes over time.
  • Echo – How does time travel work in Microscope? What can you change and what will stay the same?

These all sound like fun additions, although if I had to pick one standout it’s the family tree. It would be interesting to use the game to create the story of a dynasty and see where it goes.

The Warren

Cute bunnies! Also some incredibly tense gameplay!

By Bully Pulpit Games

Read before? Yes

Played? Yes

I’ve reviewed The Warren before, after running a campaign of it set in the fields by the race course on the border of Whitehawk in Brighton. I made my own playbook for the setting, which at some point I should put up online for folks to use.

The Warren is a Powered by the Apocalypse game where you play rabbits. Not anthropomorphic rabbits, not armed rabbits, but literal rabbits. There aren’t playbooks, as you’re just rabbits. There’s a set of special abilities which your warren shares, so each of you only have one and can’t duplicate them. 

As PbtA games do a lot of work to emulate genre, the moves to great work to keep your world at a small, dangerous scale. You build up an amount of Panic which can cause you to run, flee or worse, fight. This is also a game with no fighting mechanics, so you will lose any time you fight. As an MC you learn to play with senses other than sight, and with scale.

The world of The Warren is a fun one, but one filled with threats. We had a potential rival group of rabbits, some maternal sheep, horrendous seagulls, weird displaced lizards, a brutally friendly young dog called Gideon and an utter psychopath of a cat called Prosecco. There was also the threat of the Grey River (the road), the hypnotic tunnel leading out of the race course and one rabbit even fell prey to a friendly human who took her away to a loving home when she kept failing to escape his car.

Downfall

Watch this or any number of other cities collapse!

By Caroline Hobbs

Read before? No

Played? No

I love dystopian science fiction. It sounds odd to say, but when I was a teenager I got really into 1984, Brave New World, The Machine Stops, We and so on. This game is kind of about that, or at least the last days of a dystopia.

You have three roles: the lead character, the system and everyone else. The start of the game is setup, where you establish the rules of the world, the traditions they’ve got and how our hero bucks up against it. Once you’ve got everything put together, you play through scenes until a point where it all falls, and see what happens to our hero.

This feels like a nice, simple one-shot with the only problem being that it’s for specifically three players. I’ll probably get round to it at some point. It’s too few players for my paid GMing, and two fewer people than my regular group, so I’ll have to wait for some specific cancellations before I can give it a go.

Masks: A New Generation

Be a bloody superhero!

By Magpie Games

Read before? Yes

Played? Yes

This is a favourite RPG of mine. Anyone who’s seen me online knows that I love superheroes. I specifically love heroes whose intention to do good far surpasses their actual power and/or competence. Masks is that. It’s also possibly my favourite superhero roleplaying game.

Masks is a Powered by the Apocalypse game and I’ve explained those earlier. The big differences here are that you’re all superheroes in training and your stats are based on how you view yourself. You’re a Danger, you’re Superior, a Saviour, a Freak or just Mundane. These stats also move. An adult might tell you that you shouldn’t be a hero and spend all your time being a kid, so your Saviour might go down and your Mundane go up. As the game goes on you can start locking in stats and figure out who you are.

You also get moves which start out like, “Unleash Your Powers” and as you go on, you might be able to turn that into a more controlled version where you’re not accidentally breaking everything.

Instead of damage, you get conditions like Guilty, Angry and Afraid. Villains get them, too. You might suffer one from a hit, even if you’re invincible as it might be embarrassing, or you might have accidentally injured a bystander. I remember someone on Google Plus asking about “So what, Spider-Man would guilt an enemy into giving up?” And yes. Yes he does. It’s not always a punch that saves the day.

The core playbooks are as follows:

  • The Beacon – You have no powers but some cool gear and you’re going to go through the whole superhero experience. You have a list of things you want to do, and your enthusiasm will get you through your relative lack of power.
  • The Bull – You’re great at fighting and are in a love triangle, even if you can’t articulate your feelings well. The literal and emotional bull in the china shop.
  • The Delinquent – Oh, you rogue, you rebel. You want to be seen as the antihero, but not necessarily actually be evil. You just want people to tell you you’re bad.
  • The Doomed – You’re really powerful, but on a clock before you die, go evil, get lost in the timestream or something else.
  • The Janus – You’re the kind of hero whose main deal is having to balance their life as a hero and as a human, like Peter Parker in his early years.
  • The Legacy – You’re part of a long line of heroes, the latest one, who has to live up to the name they’ve inherited and the judgement of the last one.
  • The Nova – You’re a font of power with incredible abilities, but also you need to build it up and can lose control if you’re not careful.
  • The Outsider – You’re not from round here, with weird technology, weird powers and a lack of understanding of Earthlings in general.
  • The Protege – You’re someone’s sidekick, taking a more active role in their life unlike the Legacy. You also have to live up to them, but also define yourself by knowing when to rebel against them or become your own person.
  • The Transformed – You’re a monster, unable to blend in with society or interact with it easily.

These playbooks cover a wide array of powers as those are mostly linked to fictional positioning, the basic moves and the playbook’s moves. They also have questions for their own origins, those of the group and prompts for character defining Moments of Truth where that player takes over the narrative for a while.

I’ve run so many granular superhero RPGs where you have to think ahead of time to put points in any different type of move you might reasonably do, or everything gets changed into different modifiers. Here the powers are able to feel different while being simply entries on a playbook and how they interact with moves. Fights zip along at a good speed and the fail-forward mechanics help things roll back and forth through the scenery, giving a sense of tension balanced for everyone whether they’re a dude with a bow or a guy with invincibility and laser vision.

Masks: The Fan Favourite

A nicely evocative cover for a Masks zine.

By Lin Codega & More

Read before? No

Played? No

This is an anthology zine which covers a bunch of things for the Masks RPG. This came out later, but I figured I’d read it immediately after the main Masks book.

What is Masks? – A pretty basic introduction

Rook to G4 – A chess-themed villain and their scheme to fight, including a rival team of adult heroes. I’ve seen a lot of Masks third party content and this made me realise I’ve not actually seen many adventure modules

Adventure Seeds – A d66 table of adventure hooks, which might be very useful for me as my main plot building tends to be things like writing “Attacksidermist” on a post-it note.

Homecoming – A literal homecoming dance scenario, Masks-style

How to run Masks for Large Groups – I’ve run games for big groups, it always feels like madness.

MeRIT Scholars – A playset specifically for a team rather than individuals, with young heroes working for the Mystic Reseach and Investigation Team who are an arcane group. There are suggestions for each of the playbooks. 

The Ascendant Playbook – A playbook of for the kind of hero who’s always been told they’re the best of the best. This feels like a good Money St Croix style playbooks.

Teenage Masks – An essay about running Masks for teenagers.

Haunted Horatio’s Horror House – A one-shot module to run, all about a spooky haunted house.

In Cold Pursuit – Another one-shot, this time about escorting a villain who’s a prisoner and stopping a vigilante from murdering them.

The Enduring Playbook – A playbook for someone depowered, who sounds a bit like Jessica Jones from Alias or Christian Walker from Powers.

There’s also a bunch of fiction with The (Alien) Princess Diaries, TItan Academy: Takar, The Petal Prison and Spinel Tap.

To Be Continued…

That’s only seven games, but I talked about them a lot. You won’t have to wait long for the next segment, where I cover another seven games both briefly and somehow also in laborious detail!

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Casual Trek: Shax’s Second-Best Day

Posted on June 11, 2023 by fakedtales
Shax! Shax! Shax!

This one was a weird episode, mainly as two of the episodes were ones I’d seen relatively recently. I knew bad admirals were a thing in Star Trek, but I didn’t know of the trope of ‘Badmirals’ until it was raised in an episode of Casual Trek. 

We had a large selection of Badmiral episodes, admittedly mostly in TNG. Miles also suggested a Bad Commodore episode from the Original Series. I don’t know or care to know enough about military ranks to know the difference, so when we return to Badmirals as a subject, expect a lot of talk about the Commodore 64 from me.

Star Trek: Lower Decks “The Stars at Night”

Buenamigo’s he’s name, but he’s a bad friend!

I forgot this was the finale of season three and that we’ve had this many episodes of Lower Decks already. While a lot of plot things have gone on, there’s actually very little you need to know going forwards. I think this might be the first season finale we’ve covered, too.

Star Trek: The Next Generation “The Pegasus”

Pressman, you were a bad captain and you’re a bad admiral!

John Locke from Lost is in this one! I was given a choice and it was this or a melted old Matt Smith looking guy, so I went with this. Mo Ryan’s new book which had an excerpt published recently shone a bit of a light on the showrunner of Lost being rubbish people. It’s a shame, as Lost is a show that I love, but like Buffy, is going to have to be a show I love with some people in charge who were awful.

Anyway, this episode isn’t awful, it’s got the Enterprise and a Romulan Warbird both roaming around pretending not to be looking for the same ship, it’s got the Enterprise putting its headlights on and some unfortunate behaviour from Riker in his past career.

Picard “The Next Generation”

That’s right, we’re coming for you, JL!

Until next episode of the show, this is going to be the most recent episode that Miles and I watched. Literally, Miles reviewed it on his blog when it aired and we watched the whole thing pretty much on day of release here and in the States. 

It’s a strong start, definitely stronger than season one, although there’s a real fear of nostalgia leading the way here.

The episodes can be found on all podcatchers, on Spotify or using this link:

The Big List So Far

Here’s the big list up to this episode:

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