I’ve got a few more games this time, with a few interesting later PbtAs which do some interesting things with the system. Ther may not be many, but I’ve actually had a pretty good go at running all of them.
Voidheart Symphony
By Miranda McJanda – UFO Press
Read before? No
Played? No
Legacy: Life Among the Ruins had a spin-off called Rhapsody of Blood which was a kind of Castlevania legacy game, as generations of heroes fought evil castles in the past. Voidheart Symphony remixes that idea and brings it to the present.
No longer are you generations of heroes, but normal people living in a normal world. But something’s festering inside it. A wound in the world which is spreading through susceptible minds. The Castle forms around them in a strange dreamspace and starts to infect reality.
In the human realm, players have to deal with life’s problems and their investigation by rolling 2d6 against various gauges representing health, money, notoriety and so on. If both dice beat the gauge then you’re fine, one means a success at cost and neither means bad things.
When you find a way into your enemy’s specific bit of The Castle then it becomes a Powered by the Apocalypse game, with your characters getting their own different set of stats and cool weapons. You can also take items through with you, imbuing them with extra abilities and calling on your friendships in the real world for help.
I’ve not played Persona 5, but I’ve seen my partner play some of it and it’s a heavy influence here. You live out a normal life, go into a strange other realm, fight your way through and take down a boss to improve the world.
Character playbooks are:
The Authority
The Captive
The Harlequin
The Heretic
The Icon
The Inhuman
The Penitent
The Provider
The Watcher
Each of these have fun things they can do in the real and dream worlds, and are further customised by taking tarot-themed Covenants with PCs and NPCs alike.
This is a big game with a lot going on. I love that PbtA games use reference sheets and they’re a good indicator of what to expect from a game. This has a LOT of reference sheets. I’ve heard an actual play which flowed pretty well and I love the idea of something which feels like a Persona/Hunter: The Reckoning sort of thing. While Rhapsody didn’t do well with my group, hopefully in time I’ll be able to test this out on them.
Electric Bastionland RPG
By Chris McDowall – Bastionland Press
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
Bastion is the most important city. A sprawling, growing mess. Players have failed at a career and have £10,000 in debt. They’re going to get it by going on dangerous adventures.
I’ve listed out character classes or occupations for these games. I won’t be doing that here, as the majority of the book is over 100 ‘Failed Careers’ for your characters. Your highest and lowest stat dictates which career you’ve got and whoever’s the youngest player at the table determines why the £10,000 debt war incurred. Each career has some gear, a short blurb and a couple of tables giving you your money and health, as well as some random things (roughly) scaled to that result.
As an example, result 30a is the Amateur Amputator. They get a bonesaw (d6 damage) and some ether. At £5 starting money that means I unsettled my patients with my paranoia so I get a tiny pistol (d6 damage) that I always keep one hand on. At 6 Hit Protection (HP) I also liked to bring a bottle of Strong Perfume to work.
The system’s an OSR game, but with only Strength, Dexterity and Charisma as your stats. You roll a d20 for a Save, aiming to get equal or lower. If you’re in a fight then you don’t roll attack, just damage. Everyone gets an amount of Hit Protection which absorbs damage and regenerates after a bit of a rest like a shield in a video game. After that it goes into Strength.
There are some great methods for generating maps of Bastion and the spaces outside of it. I’ve run a two-shot of the game where the group were exploring a Waste Forest. I really enjoyed it and definitely want to go back. I think the high point is still the character and world creation, seeing what strange things come from it. Luckily the rest of the game was fun, but I think that’s where a lot of the thrill came from.
Retropunk: Cyberpunk roleplaying game
By Fraser Simons – Samjoko Publishing
Read before? No
Played? No
This is a gorgeous-looking book and another cyberpunk offering from Fraser Simons. It’s a city crawl, with several interestingly made cities in the back from different authors, each with missions to complete.
Your characters are Glitches living off-grid like in Hack the Planet, but in a world with a lot of virtual overlays over things like The Veil. It’s all got a cool, retrofuture, almost vapourwavy aesthetic to the book.
Characters are either Specialists, Heavies or Breakers, with special abilities linked to those classes. Rolls use their Approaches and while this is an OSR-ish game, the system feels reminiscent of Forged in the Dark with the use of Approaches and the way outcomes happen.
This is a very pretty looking book, but out of Simons’ cyberpunk outings I think I still prefer Hack the Planet.
Last Fleet RPG
By Joshua Fox – Black Armada
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
I love the Battlestar Galactica reboot, irrespective of the finale which I consider to be mainly fine. Like Lost, ultimately it’s about the journey and any long form ongoing media is going to have to have issues which they could have solved if they had somehow known how long they were going to get, when cast members would change and so on.
Anyway, I’m not here to judge the existence of BSG, I’m here to look at Last Fleet.
This is a Powered by the Apocalypse game which replicates the experience of the BSG reboot. You play a fleet of the remaining survivors of the human race, on the run from a relentless force at the same time as handling shortages within the fleet and real or imagined traitors. The default setting has its own potential bunch if infiltrators which are more like a strange fungal network who can chew up people and spit out replacements who may not even know what they are.
There are roles like Tactician, Engineer, Scientist, Marine, Pilot, Influencer & Investigator which provide a move and a defined role as the playbooks are a lot more about what kind of person you are:
Aries – an impulsive hothead who runs in and pushes the big red button, whether verbally or in a fighter
Taurus – a dependable, principled character who’ll take a lot of punishment but won’t compromise their beliefs
Gemini – someone with shady motives, generally crime or mutiny-based
Cancer – a leader who might be a bit too softhearted and let bad actors get away with things
Leo – a charismatic leader who inspires followers, hopefully for good and not for culty reasons
Virgo – an overachiever who takes on too much, pushing themselves beyond the limit
Libra – a diplomat and manipulator, who might get up to unscrupulous things
Scorpio – a sleeper agent, losing time and doing awful things they then need to stop and/or cover up
Sagittarius – someone who loves discovering new things and may stumble into bad situations
Capricorn – a tactician who may go too far for victory
Aquarius – an investigator who wants to get to the truth no matter the cost
Pisces – the supernatural-adjacent playbook with weird visions
You might have noticed a few things about these playbooks. All of them have things they do and ways that might go too far, might break. Instead of health you have Pressure which you’ll constantly be pushing at. The book highlights some moves which raise and lower pressure as being particularly important to the gameplay loop.
There are breaking points which are a combination of some communal and then one or more specific to each playbook. These help give you a scripted moment of acting out, like Monsterhearts’ Darkest Selves.
The fleet itself is created with its core abilities and problems, then you see how the wear and tear of your constant attempts to escape take you. Hopefully home, or to safety, but it’s rarely that kind.
Handily there are two quickstart scenarios and there’s even an alternate version where you play Ancient Greek people trying to outrun death’s vengeance after stealing immortality.
Trophy Loom
By Jesse Ross & Others – Hedgemaze Press & Gauntlet Publishing
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes… kind of
I ran a campaign of Trophy Gold earlier in the year but I didn’t count this as being read back then even if I often referred to it. Trophy Loom’s the setting book for Trophy Dark and Trophy Gold, providing information on the realms you’ll be travelling and the places around them. It’s also anti-canon, to encourage you to use what you want or roll to see what’s there.
It would have been enough if this was a book of tables. If it was a listing of places. It accomplishes a lot more, than that, managing to evoke the strange beauty and horror of the world of Trophy.
The book starts in civilisation, much like your standard treasure hunter might. Specifically, the book provides details about the capital city Ambaret. Districts and traditions are provided in d66 lists. There’s also a nice set of tables about the people of the land which gives even more names for NPCs and random character traits for humans, faeborn, manikins and beast bitten.
Civilisation is fleeting in Trophy though, so the middle section of the book goes into The Borderlands, taking you from wealthy holiday homes to the haven of most Trophy treasure hunters, Fort Duhrin. There’s a scale of law to chaos for each settlement and tables about an outlaw band, about local gods and cults.
The last third of the book, like the last act of most treasure hunters’ lives, is occupied with Kalduhr. The forest grows and consumes. It’s the place where so many Trophy Incursions are set, and this helps fill in some detail. Again, it’s all in d66 tables, so you can roll and inject something random on the way to an Incursion, in-between them or use them to inspire your own stories.
Like fantasy RPGs of old, there are treasure tables at the back, which include such wonderful things as “Coffin of tarnished metal, wrapped in chains and locks. It seems empty and makes no noise when shifted” or “A crown of smoky black crystals woven in bands of tarnished gold”.
I made most use of the Fort Duhrin tables when I ran Trophy Gold, which I guess was to be expected. I used tables about the sisters, waystations, tales about the Witch of Nevask helped inspire other witches.
Venture & Dungeon
By Possum Creek
Read before? Yes
Played? No
This is not one, but two Belonging Outside Belonging RPGs, reflecting fantasy roleplaying games in different ways. Both use the same system as Dream Askew & Dream Apart, where there’s no GM or dice. Players take a character and an element of the setting, asking questions, making weak moves to gain tokens and spending them to make strong moves.
Venture shows us heroes in a fantastical world, finding places to adventure and weird things to do. First up you determine the setup of the quest together, then you set forth. Each character class has a list of things they’re trying to find out through play as well as the main quest.
Roles are:
The Paladin
The Fighter
The Bard
The Rogue
The Wizard
The Cleric
The Setting has:
The Darkness
The Celestial
The Arcane
The Mundane
The Authority
The Underbelly
These seem a little broad, but with the quest established at the start and a focus on the internal quests, they should work well enough.
Dungeon zooms out to the game table itself, with you telling the stories as the characters who play the characters. There’s some interesting bleed between the two places. Not quite DIE level, but in what feels like a much more light-hearted way. The characters each have a role at the table and for their character. The setting elements are all fantastical, with a number of aspects of the dungeon, but also a ton of monsters.
The playbooks are:
The Cleric
The Fighter
The Rogue
The Wizard
The Little Sibling
The Game Master
You’ll note a few oddities there. The character classes reflected often share elements with the person playing them, so when you’re making The Fighter you as what both your characters have given up out of: A Home, A Family, A Gang of Friends, A Support Group, A Mentor or A Happy Ending.The Little Sibling is a glorious mess and while my little sibling wasn’t this bad at the table, it’s common to hear tales of people who did have this experience. The GM may be playing the world in the game, but they have things like traits they project onto NPCs and so on.
The Setting Elements are:
The Dungeon
The Denizens
The Powers-That-Be
The Mysteries
The Monsters are:
The Restless Dead
The Glamorous Ones
The Gazing Monstrocity
The Great Dragon
The Mind Devourer
The Vampires
Green Dawn Mall – A Zine Quest Game
By Côme Martin – Emojk
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
I’ve reviewed Green Dawn Mall on Who Dares Rolls already so I won’t go too far into it here.
Green Dawn Mall is a surreal ‘mall crawl’ where you make your way through a strange place that lives under and connects shopping malls. There are so many tables for shops, each escalating in weirdness as you get deeper, and rules for places above and below the mall.
When I ran it, the group were trying to find a friend who was desperate to clear up her scaly skin so she went to a potentially mystical pharmacy. The group entered through the basement of a real world mall, found themselves navigating a chaotic roller-rink, talking talking with fish and being pursued by mannequins. They wrecked a toy shop, stole a car and eventually managed to rescue their friend before going hom.
It was somehow disturbing and wholesome all at once. I really enjoyed reading the book and the surreality worked well in play.
Leaving the mall.
Conclusions
I’m finally only 6% behind where I should be after spending most of the year much further behind. This is feeling more doable, but I’m also planning n how to deal with ‘overtime’ if I go over 2023 and still have books to read.
We’re in the last quarter of the year, so it’s crunch time. I have admittedly neglected reading various interesting games I’ve picked up from Itch and a few bigger RPG books have ended up as surfaces to lean on while I’m writing this article. I will get round to them, but after all these books!
Bleak Spirit
By Chris Longhurst – Certain Death
Read before? Yes
Played? No
I haven’t played Dark Souls. It’s a point of contention with my brother and one which he raises fairly often. I get it, and I’ve played a bit of Bloodbourne which I enjoyed but couldn’t get too far in. Between my impaired coordination and infrequent playing times, I found putting in an hour or two in every couple of weeks didn’t really help.
Bleak Spirit is a Dark Souls style RPG which uses a variation of Lovecraftesque, and it deals with the subject matter in a way I like. One which doesn’t need keen hand-eye coordination or memories of attack patterns.
In Bleak Spirit the group controls a wanderer traversing a haunted, broken world, gathering lore and hunting for an adversary.
Taking turns, players are either:
The Wanderer – traversing the world, talking, fights, surviving but never talking about what’s going on in the world or inside the Wanderer
The World – establishing everything the Wanderer encounters and that kind of scene is being played
The Chorus – Adding detail to descriptions, playing some voices and flavouring things to fit their special cards
There are three types of scenes:
Danger presents monsters or traps
Interaction introduces people
Feature shows the landscape
Each scene adds to the lore of the world and there are some strict amounts for both types of scene and scenes which you’ll get in each act before the grand finale against the antagonist.
Lovecraftesque is a great game with some fairly ritualised play. This feels like it dials that up a bit, and mutates the rules in an interesting way. I backed the book on PDF but have since bought the cards to better help running this at some point. Like Lovecraftesque there’s a teaching guide and some premade scenarios, which I also find to be useful as I don’t know how long after reading this I’ll actually get to play it.
Heart: The City Beneath
By Chris Taylor, Grant Howitt – Rowan, Rook & Decard
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
Heart is a follow up to Spire, set in a mile-high drow city occupied by elves and filled with all manner of weird magic. There’s a city beneath which is somehow much weirder.
The Heart has a number of different potential origins or reasons for being, but the exact one doesn’t matter. It messes with reality, warping things that get too close. This creates an environment for dungeon crawling which is somewhere between Borderlands and Annihilation.
Unlike Spire, you can play Ancestries beyond the drow, adding aelfir, humans and gnolls to the mix. You also get Callings which give you an ability and ways of levelling up. Importantly, they’re all defined by your motivation to keep delving in somewhere as weird and horrific as the City Beneath.
The classes are:
Cleaver
Deadwalker
Deep Apiarist
Heretic
Hound
Incarnadine
Junk Mage
Vermissian Knight
The system has players gather a dice pool based on their Skill, their Domain, any Masteries and then roll them, looking at the highest result for their level of success. Failure and damage (physical, mental or other) add to different types of Stress, which eventually turn into Fallout the GM rolls against your Stress and fails. It’s a nice, simple system with a lot of customisability between the character classes and callings.
The Heart campaign is quite different to Spire. Here you play strange, lost people who are going on delves through the ever-changing lands underneath Spire. The closer you get to the Heart, the weirder things get.
There are different locations which can be used and tools to make your own, along with a beastiary which could be larger, but gives a great indication of the kinds of horrors to expect. In my short demo, my group escaped fractal seagulls, found a cult living in a wall, coin-toothed traders, a lake made of spiders, courts of the ghost pigs and one of the group even died and was replaced with an alternate reality version of himself.
I’m not a massive dungeon crawler guy when it comes to RPGs, but this is a way that really appeals.
Root: The Tabletop Roleplaying Game
By Brendan Conway, Mark Diaz Truman – Magpie Games
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
I love the Root board game by Leder Games, where factions of animals all scheme and make war in a giant woodland realm. There’s just enough backstory in the board game to get people in the mindset for an adorable-looking game with some real sharp teeth. A lot of the setting is through play and through Kyle Ferrin’s gorgeous artwork.
The Root RPG takes that concept and positions each player as individual vagabonds looking to survive in a woodland filled with warring factions. The Marquis de Cat have invaded and are industrialising the woods, the Eyrie Dynasty is old, stuffy and wants to reclaim the woods, the Woodland Alliance carry out daring acts of resistance against the others.
As a vagabond, you work for any of those factions or the denizens who have to live among all this warfare. You get playbooks taken from the roles the Vagabond player in the board game chooses from:
Adventurer
Arbiter
Harrier
Ranger
Ronin
Scoundrel
Thief
Tinker
Vagrant
The playbooks are simpler than a lot of PbtA games, with one side for your rules and the other with a questionnaire about your character’s past.
This game differs from other fantasy-based PbtA games by having an emphasis on combat skills, roguish skills and weapons.
If you have a combat skill then it unlocks a unique move with any weapons which have a matching skill. It feels a little clunky at first, but running a demo I got used to it, and while I bought the PDF I also bought a deck of equipment cards to help when I’m demoing.
Each playbook has access to different Roguish Feats which help emphasise the daring actions the group will take, as well as the mischievous tone of their deeds.
There’s a great deal in setting up the woodland and making sure it’s a living place, even with a sample clearing. There are several Free RPG Day modules which provide pregenerated characters and clearings filled with potential drama.
Root: Travelers & Outsiders
There’s a supplement which was made at the same time, so I’m lumping it in as a core text rather than a stretch goal.
This book adds four factions from the Root board game who can be mixed with the previous factions. The Riverfolk Company are hypercapitalistic traders. The Lizard Cult offer aid to the needy but also sacrifice them. The Grand Duchy are an invasive force filled with political infighting. The Corvid Conspiracy are a crime syndicate.
There are new weapon skills, roguish feats, gear and all-new playbooks including:
Champion
Chronicler
Envoy
Exile
Heretic
Pirate
Prince
Raconteur
Raider
Seeker
None of these are Vagabonds in the Root board game, so it’s interesting seeing the increase in variety. There are similarly new natures, connections and drives to open these up a bit. One other new addition is a set of moves based on the animal species you’ve picked. Things are kept a little broad as a few traits had to be lumped in together.
There’s an alternative method of setting up the woodland by playing three rounds of the board game and measuring things from there. Finally, there are a couple of new clearings which specifically use the newer factions.
While I’ve got other fantasy PbtAs I want to try out, if my group want to do some high fantasy violence, I’d like to try a campaign of Root out.
Under Hollow Hills
By Meguey & Vincent Baker – Lumpley Press
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
The Bakers made Apocalypse World and the PbtA framework, but few other people know how to rip it apart and play with it as well as them.
This game’s about a fairy circus and the people travelling in it between fairyland and the human world. You travel to a new location, scout it out, check out the locals, then you put together a performance fitting what they want, or need, to see. Then, you move on. It’s a simple loop and the language of play makes it feel like a great variation from wandering heroes slaughtering their way from land to land. You’re still scouting, you’re still hitting a dramatic crescendo, but here it’s all art and emotion.
You’re mostly fairies, so things like age, time, seasons, gender and even death are just plays. You can mess with them as you feel fit. A fairy may die in a scene and come back in the next one. What are normally ‘Moves’ in PbtA games are ‘Plays’, each given their own score and decoupled from any stat. You don’t have health, but as time moves or at some other points you might change your style between summer and winter. Then there are mortals, who have a slightly different pairing of styles from bold & cautious. They also might have reasons to be pretending to be fae, and if they die then it’s for good.
The playbooks are:
The Boondoggle Hob
The Chieftain Mouse
The Crooked Wand
The Crowned Stag
The Feather-Cloak
The Interloper
The Lantern Jack
The Lostling
The Nightmare Horse
The Seeker
The Stick Figure
The Troll
The Winding Rose
Each playbook gets a selection of similar basic plays and some that are their own. They also get potential roles in the circus, as everyone needs to pull their weight, even if they’re there specifically to complain about things.
I’ve run a demo of this game, set in an art fair at an old pub in the Northeast. The group helped an old lady come to terms with retirement and took her to fairyland in a touching scene. The Stick Figure had some fun, disturbing performances where they fell apart, the Crowned Stag summoned hordes of animals and the group helped a local goat cause havoc on a golf course.
Agon
By John Harper – Evil Hat
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
If John Harper makes a game, you back it. It’s a rule. By this point I already knew that was the case, but I saw the subject matter. My dad studied Greco-Roman Ancient History when I was a kid so I grew up with these myths.
Here you all play your own version of The Odyssey, but you’re also competitively out-heroing each other as you go from island to island, trying to find your way home. You play mortals or demi-gods, who make die rolls by yelling out their name, their epithet and what they’re rolling, also whether they’re calling on their favour from a good or their pathos. This was a game that got me hired to run demos as I ran it in a game store and the staff saw my group were having great fun yelling and competitively being heroes. I’ve run it since with only two players and it had a very Hobbs & Shaw vibe, but if one of them was the son of Hades.
There’s guidance to make islands, and several prebuilt ones so that the Strife Player (GM) can launch them into challenge after challenge with no prior work. Each island plays out in the same pattern: the heroes rock up and see the initial problem, they take on a number of tasks and then can access the finale. They compete to see who takes the lead and that player decides which stat will be used in the finale. Players split between those looking to take on the final challenge or save the locals for less glory. There are rewards, the players sail off and the mists take away that island, while revealing a new one. Eventually, hopefully, they’ll find their way home.
Visigoths Vs Mall Goths
By Lucien Kahn
Read before? Yes
Played? No
The moment I heard the name I knew I was in for a fun time. This game’s about time travelling Visigoths and 1990’s mall goths all getting up to hijinks in a weird mall. It’s not like Green Dawn Mall with a level of underlying horror, this is all about the hijinks.
Players are split into teams trying to accomplish goals which often clash against each other.
Visigoths are split into three classes: Conquerer, Charlatan and Runecaster.
Mall Goths are split into Theatre Techs, Witches and Cyber Pets.
Rules are pretty simple with 2d6 plus any modifiers, the highest result succeeds and both people do on a tie, but the situation escalates dramatically. People can get Hurt Feelings as that’s the only kind of damage available here. If you attack someone, then you both get Hurt Feelings. If you have two then you’re emotionally overwhelmed and need to calm down or talk it out.
The main thing here is the mall. There’s an intricate map detailing each store, each staff member and their allegiance to either or neither side. Players have a set amount of time in a day in order to complete their mission and sabotage the other side.
There are several different scenarios which each give a selection of goals and modifiers to the world the players are in. Some add X-Files type investigators, others add metal heads as new rivals. All in all, this looks like a ton of fun. As a competitive team-based game, it’s all fairly light and unlikely to cause real life hurt feelings as the rivalries are all pretty lightly handled at the end of the day.
This was a shorter list than September’s, but I’ll stop here and pick up next time.
This month sees the start of a lot more zine-length books. That and taking part in industrial action meant some nice times of reading RPGs after being on the picket line.
Zombie World
By Brendan Conway & Magpie Games
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
I love Powered by the Apocalypse games, especially when people do different things with it. The Bakers who kicked it all off are normally the best for that, but here we’ve got another interesting usage.
Zombie World is a card-based PbtA game, contained within a small box. You quickly create a character with their past, present and trauma all taken from drawn cards. The present is the only one that’s face up and the others can be revealed when dramatically relevant. The group then have a couple of cards to pass around, determining the community and a few more introducing NPCs.
Finally, you have cards which determine the initial lack the community has, the reason you’d go out into the wild and risk zombie attacks. This is a world after the dead have risen and where people are clustered in small communities in places like farms, malls and more.
For actions, there’s a deck of cards which you draw a number of based on your relevant ability. There are misses, hits, partial hits and critical successes. There’s also a ‘bite’ deck, for when you make moves involving groups of the undead. A single zombie isn’t much of a challenge, but they get a lot worse when there are a number of them. The regular challenge deck is shuffled after each check (a reason I sleeved my copy) and the bite deck is only shuffled when someone draws the one ‘bitten’ card. That way, someone’s going to get bitten at some point.
The game’s primarily for one-shots and while the book’s tiny, the cards really make the game. The art is black, white and red, evoking The Walking Dead and helping to establish who people are. I’ve run it four times and had very different experiences with each game. Yes, zombies are passé, but this is one of the absolute best zombie RPGs out there.
Something is Wrong Here
By Kira Magrann & Cyborg Serpent
Read before? Yes
Played? No
This is an odd one to work out things like a page count for. It’s a deck of cards with a few of them covering the rules. It’s a parlour LARP and one which asks the facilitator to have a full-length mirror. Luckily I have one of those, but I don’t know how many players I can enlist to play this.
The game’s based on Twin Peaks, specifically the stranger side of it, the lodges and so on. Each player has a role and as the game goes on, they’ll interact with each other and with a strange box we won’t open but we’ll wonder about the contents of. Each player also looks in the mirror and confronts another self, a dark parallel played by someone else when they speak to us.
It’s one of those parlour LARPs which feels quite specific in what it needs and looks fascinating. I don’t know when I’ll be able to run it, but if I do, at least I have a full-length mirror for it.
Codex Zine Volume One
By Gauntlet Publishing
Read before? Yes, in Zine Form
Played? Played some
I’ve been a fan of The Gauntlet since I first saw mention of them on Google Plus. I remember listening to the first episodes of their podcast and thinking they sounded a bit confrontational about some games, but incredible with their knowledge of RPGs, both the mechanics and the social side of things. As time went on, I fell in love with their various podcasts and games. When they started a Patreon, I was there right away, and here they collected the first issues of their zine. It remains the one Gauntlet Publishing book I don’t have a physical copy of.
Early in its history, Codex had a lot of supplements for published RPGs, especially Dungeon World. These issues show the start of their unique games, but stop before they introduce Trophy Dark to the world.
Blood – A location for Urban Shadows, some Dungeon World content
Chrome – A Sprawl campaign starter, science fantasy items for Dungeon World
Ectoplasm – A Monster of the Week mystery, a Sprawl playbook, some Dungeon World items
Starlight – A Malandros campaign starter, a Lovecraftesque scenario in space (the first Lovecraftesque game I ever played!). Of note here is “The Temple of the Peerless Star” for Dungeon World, which would get heavily reworked for Trophy Gold
Darkness – Called (a self-contained nanogame about encouraging a possession), a Final Girl scenario, Pizza Time! for Lovecraftesque, a 6D6 superhero scenario
Love – Some setting material for Lady Blackbird, a deity and campaign starter for Dungeon World,
Yellow – The Society for Vegan Sorcerers (a self-contained RPG), a Dungeon World campaign starter & campaign elements, a Cheat Your Own Adventure scenario
Iron – An OSR adventure about dwarves, Wind on the Path (a self-contained RPG about duels to play at conventions), Dwarven shrines for Dungeon World
Madness – A city for Dungeon World, Rituals (a PbtA game about living with OCD), The Madness of Cú Chulainn (a two-player story game), a Cheat Your Own Adventure scenario
Time – Timegasm (an RPG about time travel and the legal problems arising from it), Reset (a two player Memento-inspired RPG), Turning (a tool for time shifts in RPGs), Overlooked (an RPG made to play with Turning), a Dungeon World campaign starter
Neon – Tonight Only! (An RPG about battling bands), a campaign frame for The Veil, Mechanical Oryx, Route Clearance & Memories (the 200 Word RPG challenge winners for 2017)
Crystal – Heroes and Crystal Kingdoms (an Indie Hack RPG), Dungeon World elements, a supplement and a knightly order, Keepers of Antarra (a story game),
Joy – Bunk Beds (a LARP), So You’re Becoming a Dragon (a how to guide), an Apocalypse World playbook inspired by Babymetal, some Dungeon World celebrations and the first ‘Gauntlet Daddy’ pinup
Discern Realities Annual – This was just Dungeon World material and I’ve used a ton of it in DW and Quest over the years.
It’s really interesting seeing how far The Gauntlet has gone from this era. There are some concepts which have persisted and evolved, like Pizza Time which I’ve seen as “Chuck Eat Cheese”, then this, a Cthulhu Dark AP and tidbits about it as a self-contained game.
As I don’t really run Dungeon World anymore, I might harvest some of those parts for other games, but probably not. I want to try Wind on the Path at some point with some friends, and I definitely recommend the Lovecraftesque & Lady Blackbird supplements.
Dinosaur Princesses
By Hamish Cameron, Dana Cameron and Ardens Ludere
Read before? Yes
Played? No
This is a light game about playing dinosaurs who are also princesses, solving problems. The book has black and white images with thick enough lines to help colouring in, which the game heartily encourages.
The Paleontologist (GM) comes up with a problem and the Dinosaur Princesses help define a plan to deal with it. They use their keywords to add dice to a pool, versus the Paleontologist doing the same. Any 4-6’s are successes and people can help by using their words or ‘cheering’ which is a support mechanic.
Dinosaur Princesses is definitely a kid’s RPG and a fun-looking one. The definition of ‘princess’ is kept purposefully broad and almost like the recent filmic outing for Barbie, there are additional careers the princesses can have. Unforgivably, the definition of ‘dinosaur’ is also broader and can be anything if people want. Child Charlie would have been livid, although I get that you might end up running this for kids and one of them would want to be a cat or a robot.
Thousand Arrows: A Samurai Action & Drama TTRPG
By James Mendez Hodes & Galileo Games
Read before? No
Played? No
One of the interesting things about having my spreadsheet ordered by the date games were launched on Kickstarter means that I’ll come across games like this which were launched in October 2018 but fulfilled this year.
I first learned about the Warring States from Path of the Assassin by Kazuo Koike and the Samurai Warriors series of games. This RPG’s set during that turbulent time, with mechanics linked to the different clans and religious orders from the time.
Players pick a clan and one of several playbooks:
The Courtier
The Retainer
The Knight
The Foot Soldier
The Secret Agent
The Warrior Monk
The Summoner
The Farmer
People might have quite different roles while interacting with each other, unlike games like Legend of the Five Rings which have everyone as samurai. That’s another factor in this game, the terminology is all translated so ‘samurai’ is ‘knight’ for example. Hodes wanted to show a samurai game set in Japan without being one of those dozens of RPGs that think owning a replica katana, a handful of keywords and having a shonky honour system will do.
I admit I don’t know enough about the era (see above list of how I first encountered the Warring States Period) but this game does a good job of presenting the setting and informing an ignorant rube like me with enough detail to run without falling down Orientalist pitfalls. Hopefully.
Turn: A Tabletop Roleplaying Game
By Beau Sheldon & Daedalum Analog
Read before? No
Played? No
I’ve been looking forward to reading this for a while. Turn is an RPG of shapeshifters living in small towns. Each player has a playbook for their role and an animal that they shift between.
The Human Roles are:
The Beastborn
The Heir
The Late Bloomer
The Lover
The Organiser
The Overachiever
The Showoff
The Beast Archetypes are:
Bear
Bison
Cougar
Otter
Raccoon
Raven
Snake
Wolf
The Town Manager (GM) and players establish the small town the make it a suitably messy little place. As their characters they shift back and forth and manage the stress that builds as they go. This is a PbtA game, but one of the nice innovations is the reverse rolls, where you’re aiming to fail at times as you struggle against your dual natures. An example is ‘Mind your manners’ where your beast may want to speak first. You roll minus your Honest instead of plus, hoping to keep yourself from blurting out something helpful or betraying your nature.
I’m not a massive werewolf or shapeshifter guy, but this is a fun looking game. There’s a supplement which introduces sample towns from outside of America, including an English coastal town which means a Seagull Beast Archetype. Brilliant, and horrific.
After the War
By Alasdair Stuart, Jason Pitre and Genesis of Legend
Read before? No
Played? No
This was one of the RPGs which inspired this whole quest. I started it so many times and could never get through it. More of a failing on my part, but I just couldn’t focus on it. With a quest like this, I knew I’d have to power through and even so, it still took a surprising amount of my afternoons after picketing, before editing podcasts.
The concept of this game is fascinating. The idea is that in a spacefaring society comprising humans and several other alien species, a memetic disease started spreading through music. People would be drawn into it and become part of a kind of hive mind, pulling others into the collective. Given how it’s spread, it shot through civilisation with shocking speed. People were cut off from each other, isolated and pursued by their loved ones. A solution was made which was similarly horrific. Another virus was spread, one which would counteract the Song but drove a third of the people with it into becoming berserk, violent monsters. Once everything was over, the traumatised remnants gathered together and started to rebuild, ever aware that the Song and Tormenta were still present.
Although there are a few alternative places later in the book, the game defaults to having characters based in Polvo (translated that means ‘Dirt’). A settlement which is being rebuilt. The healing from trauma and the paranoia about would could happen make for the driving forces of drama in the game.
This sounds like a cool setting and that does make a vast amount of the book, with survivor interviews, histories and so on. You engage with the rules by going through free play until something needs to be acted on, demanding attention and providing a Question. Conflicts answer them, with people declaring their sides for what should happen, collecting dice for Traits and Convictions, then rolling to see the totals. Characters gain Strain which drops any of dice from that score or lower. It’s not just PVP, though, as the GM will often be rolling for things like The Song or Tormenta.
All in all this is a fascinating setting. The system’s a little off in how it frames these moments of conflict, but probably fine when you’re playing it. My mind went more into the directions of Last Fleet or Legacy: Life Among the Ruins when I read it, so I think I’m more surprised by what it ended up being than anything else.
The Demon Collective, Vol 1
By Camilla Greer, Mabel Harper, Comrade Pollux & David Shugars
Read before? No
Played? No
This is an anthology of OSR adventures, each of which are interestingly weird. Given my interests in these kinds of adventures, I’ve been looking at these with an eye too probably running them in Into the Odd, Troika or Trophy Gold if I ran them in anything.
Night School
Things are awry at a wizard school. Luckily this is nothing like that other wizard school. What’s nice is that the place is still in use so there’s a lot of students to deal with while following the various hooks, hunting a child catcher and so on.
She’s Not Dead, She’s Asleep
There’s a vampire princess and a tumbling block tower in this one. The dungeon’s really interesting in being in two states. You want to traverse it quietly, carefully, but need to pull whenever things will make noise. When the tower falls, things change for the much, much worse. You also have to get through the slumbering vampire princess’ tomb in order to get to the treasure.
Bad Faith
There’s a village which seems pretty poor, sad and doomed before you include the cultists who have set up nearby. They’re getting bolder and they’ve started to be able to warp the memories of the locals, making everything much worse.
Hush
This time the dungeon’s a dwarven library, which feels like a fun place to set things. I like that this isn’t just another Moria type situation. It was sealed off, but has since been unearthed and there are a number of hooks to motivate people into going in.
I think Hush might be one of the easiest to convert into a Trophy Gold scenario, but I can see how each of them could work fairly well. You just need to use a theme (e.g. ‘Silence’ for Hush) and to split areas out into sets with goals to pass. My plan for a first Trophy Gold conversion is Sunless Citadel, mainly as my players bounced off it back in the day, but this feels like it would be more satisfying to convert.
Girl Underground
By Lauren McManamon, Jesse Ross & Hedgemaze Press
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
Girl Underground is a small RPG and a great way of experiencing Powered by the Apocalypse games. It’s a simple zine with sparse, lovely art. It takes influence from Alice in Wonderland, Labyrinth and other, similar tales.
The Girl is a shared character co-created by the group and passed around with who controls her in a scene. She has Manners she needs to mind, such as, “A girl must be quiet” or “A girl must never make a mess”. These are illustrated on index cards and one of them has been broken just prior to her arrival into a fantasy world.
The Girl makes several strange and powerful friends:
The Beastie
The Construct
The Faun
The Mythic
The Ogre
The Runaway
These companions are all introduced in quick scenes where they’re having problems and brought together by The Girl. Their moves can be incredible and strange, but they all drive the action and decision-making into the hands of The Girl. Her goal is to travel from place to place, learning to change the Manners she’s being forced to adhere to.
The book has guidance on how to play, details of the playbooks and different locations to find, along with potential threats, ways they can link into each other and troubles to deal with. Looking through these for a few minutes prior to running might give a good throughline to use and a way to plan a finale. Even with that low level of planning, you can always find ways to change the places on the fly, cutting them short if you need to or extending them if you’ve got more time to play.
I’ve run this game once and it was an adorable experience. The companions were all a joy to run for, with a Construct made of tools who would keep handing bits of himself over and falling apart, a Mythic who was the last of the dragons and a Faun who was an escaped djinn.
People often ask what a perfect one-shot game is and this is definitely up there as one of the best.
Mall Kids
By Matthew Gravelyn
Read before? No
Played? No
Based on the system behind Honey Heist, Mall Kids is a game about kids who work and hang out in a mall. They have to perfectly balance working for The Man and being rebellious enough for the people they want to impress.
There are multiple mall games I’ve backed on Kickstarter and while I think this is the one that least appeals to run, that’s just because Green Dawn Mall and Visigoths Vs Mall Goths are both so conceptually strong. It’d be interesting to run this one and I’ve got some vague ideas of adapting my local mall as it was in the 80’s, back when my dad and his friends used to play pranks and he dressed as a gorilla to sell copies of the Socialist Worker to people.
synthesis.
By Riley Rethal
Read before? No
Played? No
A selection of ‘meta’ games. I like this kind of post-modern examination, but it makes it a bit tricky to talk about.
The games include:
Post-Mortem for the Post-Modern – You are the heirs of an author who recently passed away, trying to work out what to get when divvying up the inheritance. Make up assumptions about the intentions of the author, objective statements about what is publicly known about the author. You can’t definitively say anything under the surface though, after all, the author is dead
Pop-Popcorn – Making up a movie that you just saw, using a couple of tables
Fitting in – Teenagers talking about things they don’t understand and pretending to know what they’re saying
This Game Has No Rules – I feel I don’t need to say more about this game
All Roads Traveled – Going through a journey on a piece of paper and viewing things from different angles
Resonance and Echoes – A game about reincarnation and moving from setting to setting, having events which echo between them.
Comrades
By WM Akers
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
This is a game about resistance and revolution. Unlike Spire it’s not something that’s fantastical by default, but grounded in reality or a version of it. I remember an interview with the author where they said about wanting to present a version of resistance which isn’t plagued with in-fighting or doom & gloom ideas about how any attempt to improve things is doomed to failure. We get enough of those narratives, so it’s time to try something else.
I appreciate this a lot. Sometimes it’s too easy to get bogged down with despair that any positive change can come, that people will work together.
This is a Powered by the Apocalypse game with playbooks like:
The Artist
The Brute
The Demagogue
The Mystic
The Patron
The Professional
The Propagandist
The Soldier
The Student
The Worker
The moves are often good indicators of what’s going on in a game. This includes things like “Start something”, “Get Rough” as “What’s Going on Here?” And there’s even a move called, “Cradle a Dying Comrade” which might bring them back or use their sacrifice to inspire others.
The system’s not dramatically different from the usual PbtA games, but the big difference is the pathways to revolution, a way where your actions both stated and performed change the group, leading to an eventual success in different ways. The paths are:
Force
Organisation
Zealotry
Mayhem
Fellowship
There are positive and negative effects for going up in each of the pathways, but if you focus on one then eventually you’ll win, whether it’s a way that involves democracy, assassination or flooding the streets.
I love the idea of this game, but when I ran a one-shot in 2020 I was not in a good place to set it in the real world, or even the fictional Krescht provided in the book. I decided to take a leaf out of Rich Rogers’ book as he runs Star Wars-themed hacks of all kinds of different RPGs. I took my love of the X-Men and ran a game set in the most glam dystopia ever, The Age of Apocalypse. The group were pregens who were introduced either after 1998 or never featured in the event itself. They knew that Fabian Cortez, the ruler of Staten Island, was going to have official visitors and they had to figure out how to wreck his parade. A powerless Jessica Jones and Loki trapped in mortal form managed to sneak explosives onto the island and blow up Fabian’s giant statue of himself during the parade. It was a fun time and I think I’ll try and run this one shot again, but now I know the system I may even run something in Krescht or during the Paris Commune.
Bite Marks: A game of werewolf pack dynamics
By Becky Annison & Black Armada Games
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
Powered by the Apocalypse supernatural games are not uncommon. There’s Monsterhearts 2, which is a favourite of mine, Urban Shadows and Monster of the Week. So what makes a game about werewolves so interesting, especially as someone who generally doesn’t give a crap about werewolves?
This is a Black Armada joint for starters and I trust them to put out a good game even if it’s about a subject I’m not entirely invested in. Secondly, this isn’t just about werewolves, it’s about family. Imagine Vin Diesel or one of the Mitchell brothers from Eastenders saying ‘family’ when you read that.
Bite Marks is about a family of werewolves, whether bound by blood, adoption or simply being a pack who hang out together a lot. You’ve got an area that’s yours and obligations to each other. Unlike a lot of PbtA games, this is one where there is a way to make people do what you say and Becky Annison is very good at clarifying what to do and when to use it. This isn’t a “kill this person for me” type of control so much as a “pick your uncle Dennis up from the airport” kind of control, one born more of family obligation. The reason this exists is because there’s a lot of drama that can build, including a mechanic called Spill, where people blurt out how they feel or put their foot in their mouth.
Playbooks include:
The Alpha – This playbook may end up moving if someone contests it
The Cub – A new wolf (or a new human)
The Enforcer – The fist of the pack
The Fixer – The person with connections with mortal & supernatural worlds
The Greypelt – An elder who probably used to be the Alpha
The Howl – The mystic, knowledgable in the weird ways
The Prodigal – A rebel, recently returned to the pack
Players build up Pack points as they play, especially when there are conflicts and drama between them. These points can be used to help, or saved up until they get spent for a massive move like instantly thwarting an enemy. Assuming the group stay together for that long.
I’ve run this game once, set in Devil’s Dyke in the South Downs. A human had been thrown from the nearby golf course down the dyke, along with the golf cart he was in. The worry was that it would draw attention to the pack who worked out of an abandoned church nearby. They discovered vampires had been creating hybrids who were incredibly powerful and needed to feed on werewolves. The group had trips into town, covered up investigations, lied to other packs and nearly broke apart a few times before all working together to slaughter a giant pack of vampire/werewolf hybrids who tried to siege the church.
Thirteen games! That’s a lot and next up I’ve got another thirteen, too! Come back next time for a few more!
This entry is going to be entirely Mothership. I’d bought the original edition of Mothership a while ago and ran it during the Kickstarter for the full first edition, just to make sure that it ran well as well as looking pretty. It did, so I went all in on the first edition and backed a number of other Mothership books during Zinequest. I decided to read them all together.
So what is Mothership? It’s a space horror game in the kind of junky future that you’d see in films like Alien and Event Horizon. It’s got an OSR framework but uses that mentality to accomplish something very much its own. There’s been an incredible amount of adventures and resources for it, both from Tuesday Knight Games and third parties.
Mothership 1E
By Sean McCoy & Tuesday Knight Games. (Unconfirmed Contact Reports & Another Bug Hunt have a ton of other writers)
Read before? The 0th Edition
Played? Yes
Player’s Survival Guide
The player’s guide is the home of the main rules and it’s presented in a gorgeous fashion, even with the purposefully old school, scrappy style. Players’ eyes are guided through the steps of creation both on the character sheet and on the pages of the book. The classes are four simple ones:
Marine
Scientist
Android
Teamster
That’s it. Each one modifies the attributes and the skills you roll, as well as an effect that happens when you panic. You customise the character with some skills, items and some rolled extras, then you’re ready to go. It’s quick to make a character and this is a system where your character sheet has a ‘high score’ entry which ticks up for each session your character survives.
The system itself is percentile, which I already know is going to be a hard sell to one of my players as he’s developed a disdain for them. Skills get some useful bumps to help make this less of a problem and the style of game this is made it feel like it’s not as much of a problem. Like a lot of games, there’s also an advantage/disadvantage system. There are critical effects when you get a double on the percentile dice, whether that’s good or bad and that seems fun.
There’s a horror system using ‘Panic checks’ where you roll a d20 (the only time you do such a thing) and try to get more than your Stress in order to not panic. Stress goes up with failed rolls and other events.
There are a number of subsystems for dealing with things like air and other potential hazards you may have to deal with in space. Combat of course gets a good amount of attention, with illustrations and fallout boxes for armour, images for several weapons and a great two-page sequence of people sighting a monster in order to demonstrate range.
As far as space horror goes, if I want a pure horror then I’ll go for Cthulhu Dark (and specifically Graham Walmsley’s upcoming Cosmic Dark). This feels like its own beast and something I’m excited to try, mainly for the amazing scenarios which I’ll get to shortly. I’m holding off until I get the physical boxed set, though.
Shipbuilder’s Toolkit
Ship rules were fairly light in the 0 edition, but the boxed set comes with a book entirely about ships. I’m not a ship combat fan, but this provides tools to make a ship your home, as well as a thing you fight with.
Familiar to the Player’s Survival Guide, there’s a guide to creation of the ship, but this time the character sheet as a deck plan on it. The majority of the book are premade ships with stats and maps, all serving their own purposes.
This isn’t the most exciting book, but a lot of that’s on me. It’s fine. I like the illustration of the comparative scale of all the ships.
Warden’s Operation Manual
This is the standout book of the boxed set by a mile, and I love all the books in the boxed set (apart from the Shipbuilder’s Toolkit… again, it’s just fine).
This is the book that seals this as something which can be used for a first time roleplaying group. Where the previous books have double page spreads showing how to make a character and a ship, this does the same for a campaign. It literally tells you to get a notepad and what to put where to start things off. Throughout the book there’s good advice about running a game and also it returns to the notepad and maintenance for it.
There’s some advice about hacking, which is good as Mothership and the community around it have been making all manner of wonders and more ways of doing that it always good.
Unconfirmed Contact Reports
Mothership’s a game with some incredible adventures featuring great scenarios and monsters, but if you want to make your own scenario and need to add a monster, then there’s this book.
The World Worm
Each monster here could be a boss and is disturbing in new and different ways. There are a few which are more standard monsters, but there are haunted streams, nightmare items, weirdly ‘normal’ infiltrators… They’re fascinating to read and each have their own art style to evoke their specific horrors. The back of the book also has some simple stat blocks you can use for general enemy types. I always love when a game does this.
Another Bug Hunt
The last book from the core ‘boxed set’ is an adventure. Another Bug Hunt is a gorgeous multi-part scenario which follows suit from the Warden Operations Manual, having a little educational helper who’ll talk to you in sidebars to help you run the game.
There are four scenarios in total, starting with the crew looking to make contact with a colony who’s not checked in after a few months. There are a number of factions in play when the group arrive, and after their initial encounter with the titular bugs, they’ll have to navigate the people on the colony. The NPC illustrations are fairly basic, but the descriptions and motivations are all really good. The monsters sound horrific and there are a lot of secrets to pick away at.
The maps are really interesting looking, and the design work on the book is lovely, a perfect adventure for first time GMs.
Mothership: A Pount of Flesh
By Sean McCoy, Donn Stroud & Luke Gearing
Read before? 0th Edition
Played? No
This is an adventure based on a space station called Prospero’s Dream, filled with a number of different factions and a ton of plot seeds to use or discard as necessary. The Mothership adventures encourage taking what you want, abandoning what you don’t want and writing over the books (literally on page four here).
There are several people who can act as quest givers or enemies, depending on what the players want to do. Nicely there’s also a list of events which go on in different phases of the adventure, so even if you’re not interacting with everyone at all times, their lives will continue and abandoned groups will get up to mischief on their own. It gives a sense of a living, breathing station.
The station’s illustrated in a number of different ways with infographics, blocks, old style computer graphics and more. The book’s black, white and bright pink which is radiant on the PDF version, I’ll be interested to see what it’ll be like in the printed copy.
Mothership: Dead Planet
By Donn Stroud, Fiona Maeve Giest & Sean McCoy
Read before? 0th Edition
Played? No
I read this one back when it was a 0th edition booklet and I think even though there are some splendid adventures, it’ll be this or Another Bug Hunt that I’ll bring to the table as my first Mothership 1E adventure.
This adventure rips apart space and strands the group in the orbit of the titular Dead Planet. There are several different areas, each of which are their own adventure in different styles.
There are derelict ships to loot with one specific ship and a way of generating your own derelicts by rolling & stacking dice.
Moon Colony Bloodbath sounds like the kind of horror movie my dad would have shown me when I was younger. There are a couple of factions who have made the moon their home and have their own destructive agendas. Players can side with one, the other or neither faction. This does include some potential voluntary amputation to earn the trust of moon cannibals.
The Dead Planet itself has a map which looks like it belongs in a fancy version of a Ceefax page. There are several locations to explore in the hope of stopping the effect that keeps people here and stranding them.
There are also resources like tables of nightmares as this hellish place is not one to stay on for long.
Mothership: Gradient Descent
By Luke Gearing
Read before? 0th Edition
Played? No
For the unfamiliar, there’s a thing called a megadungeon which has been a phenomenon for a while. AD&D had some, and in the d20 boom (and bust) Alderac Entertainment Group made “The World’s Largest Dungeon!” Even the D&D 5E Mad Mage adventure has a nod to this idea. I’ve run RPGs since I was 13 and I’ve never been a fan of a long dungeon crawl.
That said, Gradient Descent is a megadungeon and along with Trophy Gold’s Ruins of Old Kaldhur, is one of the few I’d entertain doing.
Cloudbank is a gigantic facility made to create androids, but it’s been abandoned for some time. The group make dives into the ship and find their way around the remnants of what’s there. This includes actual people, fake people and the fear that you might be an android, yourself. The map of Cloudbank looks like the map from Paradroid, and has a ton of links back and forth. For a megadungeon, it’s 64 pages and each area has its own little chunk of map which helps figuring out where everything is.
This Paradroid-looking map may seem confusing at first, but is great when you read it alongside the locations
There’s an old abandoned rocket thruster floating nearby that can act as a temporary staging area for delves, but it has its own factions and people with motivations. The rooms are fairly sparsely detailed but in a way that encourages expanding on them rather than laziness like some much smaller dungeon adventures I’ve seen. There are tables of random events in areas, as well as items to find on your adventures. This is a really interesting location, and I’m curious how long a group would spend delving in it before going mad.
Next up are some third party Mothership modules:
Mothership: Adspace
By D G Chapman
Read before? No
Played? No
The first of a bunch of third party modules I’ve backed.
This is a trifold adventure where players are trying to get to the top of Crab Foot Tower in order to get a ticket to the moon. The tower’s covered in adverts and automated deterrents to make sure that people watching are entertained.
Mothership: The Drain
By Ian Yusem
Read before? Yes
Played? No
I’ve mentioned the megadungeon, now let’s look at another RPG phenomena I’ve yet to play with: Funnels. These are mainly found in OSR games, where players make up a batch of 0 level characters and run them through a meat grinder (sometimes literal). Any survivor gets to level one. These are people who are often ill-equipped and the deaths are often part of the entertainment as players try to work out how a ladle and a chicken will help them deal with a dungeon.
Here, you’re playing prisoners from PrayCo who are all fitted with explosive collars and sent to storm a rogue agricultural space station that’s gone a bit weird. They need to reach the centre, but the thing is they’re not hardened prisoners, they’re anyone who was on hand. Everyone’s fitted with tinfoil halos and explosive collars that go off if they’re separated from each other for too long. Like so many Mothership adventures the map’s weird. It’s a set of concentric circles representing each areas with pictures, going from the trenches you arrive in, a church, an amusement park and more.
This looks like a lot of fun and there’s a ship combat prequel: Wrath of God, and a sequel which is a proper Mothership adventure called Meatgrinder. Ian Yusem did a great job with this project.
Mothership: Dying Hard on Hardlight Station
By David Kenny
Read before? Yes
Played? No
You know Aliens? You know Die Hard? This is basically both of them. Hardlight Station has had a break of horrific monsters and terrorists holding hostages. Can you deal with them both? There are ways of having just one of these stories rather than both and a lot of references, especially to Die Hard. This feels a little more daft in that presentation, but still pretty deadly.
Conclusions & Observations
Mothership looks awesome. I’ve only run a one-shot using 0th Edition, but I definitely want to give it more time. I think it’ll mostly be a machine for one-shots and miniseries, but there are a lot of tools for making campaigns both in each adventure and in the core books.
I think the core boxed set (Player’s Survival Guide, Warden’s Operation Manual, Shipbreaker’s Toolkit, Unconfirmed Contact Reports and Another Bug Hunt) is going to be one of the best ways to start roleplaying. The Warden’s Operation Manual is something which anyone aspiring to write GM advice should look at. The scrappy graphic design in all the products looks weird and loose but has had so much thought put into it. Going through all of these books took until the end of August and I know I’ve banged on about it a lot here, but it’s definitely been worth it.
I’ve been speeding up through books and in the chronological read I’m finally hitting Zinequest which was when I figured things would accelerate given the smaller books.
This is also The Month of Mothership, as the final PDFs of the space horror RPG’s first edition arrived and that consumed a lot of my reading time. I even skipped ahead in my chronological read to go through everything I’d backed for Mothership over the years. Expect a lot of that here.
7th Sea Khitai
By Chaosium, Mike Curry, John Wick & Friends
Read before? No
Played? No
Like a lot of 7th Sea fans, I’ve been waiting for this one for a while. I love the 7th Sea RPG and Theah as a setting. The main Kickstarter for 7th Sea Second Edition had a ton of delays, but covered some areas beyond the fantasy Europe in interesting ways, often with people on staff to make sure there weren’t the kind of mistakes that some fantasy versions of our world (including 7th Sea) have done in the past. The thing about 7th Sea 2E is that it was too ambitious in the amount of books, the amount of staff, it seemed to burn bright and quick, leaving a lot of unfinished books and a second campaign based on Asia which faced a ton of delays. Chaosium acquired 7th Sea and eventually, Khitai came out.
The cultures covered in this book are:
Agnivarsa – Moghul India
Fusō – Japan
Han – Korea
Khazaria – Korea
Nagaja – Thailand/Southeast Asia
Shenzhou – China
What era are each of these cultures represented? Purposefully vague/the more swashbuckling eras. This may not be a game telling exactly the same kinds of stories as 7th Sea, but it still has swashbuckling action at its heart.
Characters start out from one of these nations with a background from a long list, five traits from a list of seven and skills. Similar to 7th Sea you grab ten-sided dice equal to your trait + skill, as well as any other bonuses you might get. You say what you’re aiming to do and the GM tells you what additional risks you might face. You roll the dice and group the results together in set totalling 10 or more. Each set solves the main problem and mitigates the risks. Fights work similarly, with sets taking out mooks or potentially injuring named enemies.
I’ve lived through the eras of D&D’s “Oriental Adventures” and even 7th Sea 1E’s attempts at handling Asia, this version has had a massive do-over and goes thoroughly into religion, cultural practices and the interaction between everyone. It feels like a lot of care’s been taken, similar to the second edition in general.
Each nation feels packed with interesting problems and places to visit, similar to the core 7th Sea Second Edition, each with big gaps where the players can be inserted to do heroic things.
Agnivarsa’s ruler has murdered his way to the top while his mother is forming a rebellion. Fusō’s been isolated and busy with civil war which has got in the way of its ambition to expand to its neighbours. Han’s got a mad king and the results of a slave uprising that it’s dealing with. Khazaria’s filled with nomadic groups and looking like it’s going to be invaded by Shenzhou. Nagaja’s an empire of city-states dealing with constant attacks from monsters and monster hunters who are often a problem, too. Shenzhou has a corrupt bureaucracy and seeks to invade everywhere, while being attacked by pirates and bandits.
There are definite themes of rebellion against those in authority, changing the status quo if it’s stagnating or fighting for its return if it was at all progressive.
The book is nicely laid out and instantly familiar if you’ve read 7th Sea itself. I’m still curious how the new take on traits works. In 7th Sea 2E you have five traits which are closer to old ability scores. In Khitai, there are seven based on what you value and you only get five of them. Like 7th Sea 2E you get bonus dice if you keep changing which skill and trait you use, so people won’t constantly be spamming the same thing. If there’s one criticism of latter 7th Sea books including this one, it’s that they have a lot of black & white art which feels a bit jarring compared to the pretty colour layout and art in the rest of the book. I’m aware the campaigns ran low on funds they could put in for art so this was a necessity, it’s just a bit of a shame.
I’ll definitely be running this at some point, like 7th Sea in general.
By the Author of Lady Windemere’s Fan
By Lara Paige Turner and apparently not Oscar Wilde
Read before? Yes
Played? No
You’re all actors who haven’t been paying attention to what theatre production you’re going to be doing. The director’s quit and the show’s starting sooner than you thought. It’s time to use the sets from whatever other plays have been going on and make your own production in the style of Oscar Wilde.
By the Author of Lady Windemere’s Fan is one of those games that sounds like an amazing resource for fun one-shots. Players make a character and between them list out some sets without discussing what they are, then you go through scenes, trying to make a play, steal scenes and generally work out how to make it to the end without everything going awry.
The game feels like Fiasco or What Ho, World in its tone. The voice of the book is really good, including talking about using a battlematt to map out the theatre, but warning that if you LARP the game, then you’re just doing a theatre performance. This feels like a perfect one-shot system for a night where you’re down a player.
Operators RPG
By Kyle Simons and Samjoko Publishing
Read before? Yes
Played? No*
I generally back anything the Simons siblings have launched on Kickstarter. Operators isn’t necessarily a theme I would have gone with, but my liklihood of running it has only gone up over time, mainly after watching the John Wick films.
Operators is a game of highly competent ex-military characters who go through fight and chase-filled action movie stories.
Characters have skills which go down the better you are, as you’ll be rolling Fate Dice and looking for + results equal to your skills. Minuses can cause complications. You have ‘specials’ which are your training, discipline and trademark, each of which help you fudge with the dice and some of them need to be ‘primed’ by referring to them in the narrative. This replicates the kind of Chekhov’s Gunning of things in stories, letting the audience know you’re a master hacker and then getting to use those skills later.
Fights are interesting, using a deck of cards to help narrate the beat by beat play of a quick fight between two characters. While I’ve not run the game, I’ve used the deck when writing prose to help cover the blow-by-blow play. There are chase cards which are similar.
A few Simons staples appear here, like suggestions of everyone making a collage on somewhere like Pinterest in order to create the palette for the players and GM to use.
If there’s one negative, it’s a personal one, as there’s a LOT of military fluff in here. Personally if I ran this kind of game, I’d probably go down the direction of a John Wick or a Kyle Starks comic about assassins rather than needing to know anything realistic.
Kids on Bikes RPG
Yes, I went for the fancy edition
By Jonathan Gilmour, Doug Levandowski and Hunters Entertainment
Read before? Yes
Played? No
Kids on Bikes references things like Stranger Things, The Goonies, It and Paper Girls, as well as having a lovely art style of its own to represent stories of kids on bikes dealing with supernatural things.
Characters are fairly simple to build with escalating die types for their attributes and a selection of traits. It’s really simple, and goes beyond just the aforementioned bike-wielding kids as you might play teenagers or adults joining them on their journeys (again, like in Stranger Things).
The system’s pretty generic and broad, but there’s one core element which is different. There’s a Powered Character who isn’t controlled by any one player or the GM, instead they’re controlled by everyone as each player takes an index card with one aspect of them. It could be telekinesis or a fondness for cookies. That player can pipe up, directing the Powered Character to action. They have tokens making sure that their game-changing abilities are limited and you can’t just TK your way through all problems.
I backed the special edition which has a nice comic at the front and then a TON of scenarios in the back. These include a few sets based on the author’s towns when they grew up, or variations like “Dads on Mowers” which looked like it could be some Barbie movie style weirdness.
I don’t know whether I’d run this or not, the system feels pretty basic, but a lot of the worlds are inspirational enough that I might have to run one of them, just to see what it’s like.
Sigmata: This Signal Kills Fascists
By Chad Walker and Land of NOP
Read before? No
Played? No
Okay, here’s a controversial one. Probably more than it needed to be, but certainly enough that it had to have a follow-up supplement to modify, correct and clarify different elements.
At its basic level, Sigmata is a cyberpunk superhero game in a 1980’s dystopia where Joseph McCarthy became president and while he was got rid of fairly quickly, he put in enough tools for totalitarian rule to take over.
Players are enhanced by a radio signal and work for a rebellion because of this. They are ‘receivers’ with cool powers and cybernetic enhancements. They’re here to help overthrow the Regime and to expand the radio signal as they grow more powerful the nearer they are to it.
There’s a lot of fiction to the world, showing how America could very easily slide (both in the fiction and the real world) into fascism. The easy inaction from a lot of people and the intentional horrors done by the Regime.
The big problem here is that one of the core elements of resisting The Regime is that there are other groups who are sighting them, but most of them are incredibly problematic in different ways. It made the game feel like some weird centrist thing about having to work with one bunch of fascists and problematic actors in order to stop the main ones. Chad goes into great depth replying to this in his follow up, “Repeat the Signal”. The core book also mentions very early on about never giving fascists an inch and that all people have a right to exist, all people have to fight against any fascism and tyranny. Chad’s work in Repeat the Signal clarifies the four factions and specifies that they’re all based on the resistance against the Assad regime, but he feels obscuring things gave a message incredibly far from what he wanted. I’m not his defence force, but after reading both books it feels like the reaction to this project wasn’t entirely wrong, but was incredibly disproportionate and unnecessary in how loud it all got.
Anyway, back to the book. The system has players roll five dice, with d10’s equal to the stat being used and d6’s for the rest, trying to get a 6 on one or more dice. The amount of successes changes up how well or badly a success is. The four stats of Judgement, Guile, Valor and Aggression do pretty much the same things in fights, evasion and intrigue which are the main modes of drama. Repeat the Signal changes things a bit so you can be good or bad at different actions in those modes rather than having a high Aggression meaning you’re always Storming in fights, Rushing in evasion and Confronting in Intrigue.
I admit I’m not won over by these systems for dramatic scenes, but hopefully a playthrough of it would give me a better feeling. There are also different abilities, training and cybernetic pieces which can modify how you do things. After hearing about Chad’s work with Cryptomancer I expected it to be more complex than I’d like, but this is a bit simpler than that.
At the same time, like Operators, I felt the back matter about hacking in the 80’s was possibly a little too long when I read it. If I ran the game I’d probably be thankful for it, but it’s just a bit dry.
Summerland Second Edition
It’s weird seeing the cover as the PDF didn’t have it.
By Greg Saunders and Fire Ruby Designs
Read before? No
Played? No
One day the world became trees. Civilisation was shattered as they pushed through roads, buildings, cities. Then people started feeling the call and left civilisation behind, going into the forest and mostly, they weren’t seen again.
You play survivors of this arborial apocalypse, some of the few people who travel through the woods between cities, helping folks out but also too damaged to stick around communities for too long. Eventually you’ll heal and be ready to settle down, but not yet.
This uses the MiniSix system. You select a skill or attribute and roll d6’s equal to that number, one of which is a Wild Die which will explode if it gets a six, letting you roll it again and again, adding each 6 you get until you roll something else. Tags allow you rerolls and help can lower the difficulty of a task.
The world’s interesting and evocative, although I feel Wildsea which was released later might be an arborial apocalypse which might interest me a little more. The layout of the book is pretty basic and at times I found myself wishing they would get to the point. When looking for the core system there’s so much establishing terms before we actually see how the system works. Given the simplicity of it, an infographic or cheat sheet would have been really nice to help guide the eye through the system.
Hack the Planet
Not the cover image, but more evocative than the cover image
By Fraser Simons & Samjoko Publishing
Read before? Yes
Played? No
I last read this book on a coach home from AireCon in March 2020, just as things were beginning to feel really apocalyptic. I was going to read Apocalypse World Second Edition and couldn’t bring myself to given how things were going. Instead I read this which was also apocalyptic, but in a different way.
Hack the Planet is a Forged in the Dark cyberpunk RPG set in a world which has been environmentally devastated. As everything fell apart, three corporations finally did something to help. Kind of. They created Shelter One, a giant mega-city controlled by the corporations to such a level that the food grown is modified to monitor the people who eat it. There is, of course, classic cyberpunk disparity between the people most at risk from the elements battering even the people in Shelter One, to the decadent rulers in their own safe zones.
You play a gang of Glitches who have hacked their copies to be able to move off the grid and whose gang type can utilise the Acts of God in order to help their missions.
Cleaners are mercenaries
Clippers are a biker gang
Shifters are storm-chasers
Wired are fences of illicit goods
Comets drop in to steal stuff from their airships
Characters are one of a few different playbooks:
Edge – fighters
Lens – trackers
Torque – builder
Fuse – infiltrator
Haunt – hacker
Faint – strategist
Quirk – wanderer & scholar
There are some other game types in the back of the book along with all the stretch goals from the campaign. Keeping them a separated is quite nice for showing what’s part of the essential experience and what isn’t.
Mechanically this is Blades in the Dark. It’s an early hack, so it’s excusable for its lack of ambition in changing things up. The main differences are cybernetics which are mostly stat modifiers and Acts of God which are clock-based devastation which can hit in different ways during missions.
The thing is, I sound a bit negative in saying this hasn’t been too ambitious in what it’s done, but the system’s good and with the small mods here works with the setting. Then you get to Shelter One. Both the factions and the locations make the game. This is an incredible location filled with detail both from what places you’ve got to play in and the agendas of each faction.
I definitely want to run some games in this world, I love Blades in the Dark and Shelter One makes for an interesting, different cyberpunk setting. One which feels a bit less confusing than The Veil was and more relevant to our time than Cyberpunk Red.
Cartel
By Mark Diaz Truman & Magpie Games
Read before? No
Played? No
Cartel is a Powered by the Apocalypse game about people in or around a cartel, under the constant pressure that provides. It focuses more on the narofiction side of things and nicely elaborates what that means. It takes stories like Breaking Bad, The Wire and Desperado as its inspiration to tell desperate, dramatic stories.
The basic moves are framed around this kind of genre like, “Justify your behaviour” and “Turn to violence”, showing how you’ll be interacting with each other and the world. There’s also “Get fucking shot” which highlights the incredible lethality. You’re able to control an amount of that, but you’re best trying not to risk it.
You build up Stress instead of having hit points or harm (after all, if you Get Fucking Shot you just be dead). Like Darkest Self states, when you’ve got too much Stress you’re going to act up, lose yourself or do something else which will get you in trouble. You’re flawed characters, after all.
The playbooks are:
El Cocinero – The cook, smart and vital but fairly low level
La Esposa – The spouse of someone who’s involved in the business
El Halcón – a ambitious lower manager running the street operations
El Narco – upper management, in charge and responsible for keeping order
La Polizeta – a corrupt cop, playing both sides
La Rata – a mole in the organisation, always moments from being found out
La Sicaria – the enforcer, brutal and surrounded by death
When Cartel was first announced there were concerns that it would be glamourising of the life in some way or cheapening the seriousness of it. The book does a great job of navigating making a compelling drama that’s larger than life the way a television show would be.
It’s an interesting setting and I’m curious to see how it plays, especially for a mini-campaign where you could get into some really messy situations.
Imp of the Perverse
By Nathan D Paoletta
Read before? No
Played? No
First of all, I’ve hired Nathan Paoletta to do a cover and logo for a project of my own in the past.
This book was a difficult read. I’d bounced off it a couple of times previous to this quest. I’m pleased to say that after a while of delving through and wondering if it would be the undignified end of this quest, I eventually got the hang of it.
In Jacksonian America, you are investigators who all have a demon on their shoulder. A ‘perversity’ made manifest that’s eager to nudge you towards being consumed by it. You’ll be carrying out investigations into people who have similar problems but are in a much worse state, often entirely taken over by their imps.
Success in your investigation is a given, but how well it goes and how much of yourself it costs if going to vary. The mechanical terms are a little tricky to get into, especially a month after reading this.
Ratiocination is how you discover clues, using your Standing, Resources and Reason are spent to get your clues, costing an amount equal to the current Anxiety of the threat which will escalate as the game goes on.
Exertion is the die-rolling process which can look a bit involved at first glance. This is the layout of how it goes:
So yeah, it took a bit of time to warm to, and by the end I think I got it. I’d definitely be interested to give this a go, mainly for a one-shot and ideally as a player to get a feel for it. There are elements of the mechanics which remind me of Yellow King like the division of clue-getting and active rolls. There’s also a vibe of an American version of The Between (no, not Ghosts of El Paso). I think if I wanted to do something of this style I’d go with them first, but hopefully if this gets a play I’ll see how it stands out from them and not simply be baffled by the flow of the actions.
Journey Away
By Jacob S. Kellogg
Read before? Yes
Played? No
Here’s an interesting one. Journey Away is a chill fantasy game which works without big challenges and tells small tales set in a small area between a few towns.
Characters are fairly simply built with escalating dice for stats, although you’re not limited by how much you put in each one. This could mean you put all of the stats in at the highest level, but hopefully people will put in whatever’s fitting for the character.
Stories may involve travel between towns, encounters on the way, interactions with each other and the world, but it’s not going to have fights or world-ending battles.
Talking with one of my players about this, he was as horrified as I was at the idea of putting whatever you want in any stat and got a bit hung up on it. I think after reading enough Possum Creek type games I’m a bit more fine with it, but I definitely get the concern.
It’s a nice idea, but I think it sits in an odd halfway house between lighter, more traditional games and the kind of games like Wanderhome which don’t concern themselves with ideas like success or failure and don’t even present the tools which normally engage with those things.
Star Crossed
By Alex Roberts & Bully Pulpit Games
Read before? Yes
Played? No
Star Crossed is a fascinating concept, inspired by the horror game Dread and the idea of doing it, but kind of in reverse. You and another player create characters who are attracted to each other, but can’t be together.
You decide who is the ‘lead’ and who is the ‘follow’ like in dance. Then you take turns taking actions as you play through eight scenes. Some actions require you to pull from a tumbling block tower, and actions like talking require you to be touching the tower to help create a sense of rare importance to the conversations.
A lot of the actions earn you points and collectively you’re wanting to build up a lot of points before you knock the tower down. Yes, unlike Dread you actually want the tower, and your characters’ inhibitions, to fall. The thing is, if it falls too early then this is just a clumsy moment, an awkward revelation or a brief fling. Leave the tower standing by the end and you’ll both let the moment pass. This does mean you’ll pass through a number of scenes, but you actually don’t always want the game to go to the full amount of scenes.
This is a game I definitely want to try, although the only tumbling tower I have is a slightly uneven WH Smith own brand tower which I’ve covered in fake blood and the names of dead Dread characters, which feels like it’d only be fitting for some very specific genres of Star Crossed game.
At time of writing, there’s a BackerKit campaign for an expansion to Star Crossed.
Dream Apart & Dream Askew
By Avery Alder, Benjamin Rosenbaum & Buried Without Ceremony
Read before? No
Played? No
We’re at the founding of Belonging Outside Belonging. I downloaded a copy of Dream Askew a long time ago when it was a much smaller book, and a while after release, it received a proper printing in a book alongside another game in the same system called Dream Apart.
Both games use modified versions of the same system. You have No Dice, No Masters (the other term, which as far as I know is synonymous with Belonging Outside Belonging). Each player creates a character from a playbook, filling in details and possessing moves which gain tokens or require the expenditure of them (weak and strong moves, respectively). You also have a ‘lure’ which encourages people to interact with you in certain ways in order to gain themselves a token. Each player also takes a part of the GM type role in controlling part of the narrative beyond their character. This could be a group of people, a concept or a part of the community. The player with a specific environment defines anything relating to that thing, asks players questions about how they relate to it and throw in story elects based on it.
Dream Apart
Dream Apart is about a queer commune during the apocalypse. The world’s going to hell, but you were already living that kind of life, so your community’s hopefully going to be alright in among it all.
The roles are:
The Iris – Marked by the psychic maelstrom
The Hawker – A trader and hustler
The Stitcher – The person who fixes things and people
The Tiger – The one who fights
The Torch – An inspirational figure
The Arrival – someone new
The setting elements are:
Varied Scarcities
Psychic Maelstrom
Society Intact
Digital Realm
Outlying Gangs
Earth Itself
Dream Askew
Set in a Jewish shtetl, a small market town in the countryside, you’re interacting with other communities and with the unseen world.
Roles include:
The Sorcerer – someone who interacts with the invisible world
The Matchmaker – you’re trying to help arrange matches and handle gossip
The Midwife – you help the births in the community and have seen all manner of things in your work
The Klezmer – a charmer and performer
The Scholar – a smart and methodical person
The Soldier – a protector of the community, lost and violent
The setting elemtns are:
The Market
Unseen World
Goyishe World
Text & Traditions
Gossip & Reputation
Wild Forest
I have minimal knowledge of that side of my family who lapsed over the generations. Luckily in this game there’s a glossary and a lot of information to make it feel accessible for folks.
Looking at the listing of the roles and settings you can see why both use the same skeleton but how they differ quite a lot from each other. It’s also been adapted into several different games whether it’s Umbrella Academy style superheroism in Molotov College, travelling animals in Wanderhome, space adventures in Galactic and more.
I’ve wanted to read this for a while, but the PDF copy I’ve got kept crashing iBooks. I’ve redownloaded it for this quest, so this is the first time I’ve been able to read it since the original, smaller version of Dream Askew.
Behind the Masc
By Beau Sheldon & More
Read before? Yes
Played? No
This is an anthology about looking at masculinity in RPGs, with a number of different materials and articles. All of the pieces have a set of designer notes explaining the purpose behind them which is a nice touch. The authors all have a wide range of backgrounds and experiences which definitely helps make this a good, broad look at the topic.
The Mabon Monastery – a D&D 5E background about moon worship.
Ming Dynasty Transgender Man – Artwork
Chosen of the People – A premade character for D&D 5E
The Minotaur – A Monsterhearts Skin about protection and of course, a labyrinth
The Harlequin – Artwork
The Demi – A Monsterhearts Skin about being a demigod, impressive, powerful and of course, in need of the prayers of your worshippers
Palisade – A Twine game which I have not tried and can’t speak on
Echoes – An audio only game which I’ve also not played yet
The Grifter – An Apocalypse World playbook about being a tricksy so and so
I will say, this is possible the only thing I’ve backed which includes some 5E content. I’m a fan of Beau and there’s enough other material that I don’t begrudge it being here.
Flotsam: Adrift Amongst the Stars
By Joshua Fox & Black Armada
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
I was writing about Belonging Outside Belonging earlier and here’s another version of it already.
Flotsam is a game about the people living in the lower decks of a science fiction setting, living under the pressure of numerous internal and external challenges. There are tools to create your own setting or several premade ones included. Like Lovecraftesque before there’s an amazing teaching guide which allows you to run the game just with the printed resources.
The system feels a little simpler than the other BoB games, although that might be because it’s the first one I facilitated and the teaching guide did a lot of hand holding.
The playbooks are:
The Thunder – an enforcer
The Spider – a sneaky character
The Voice – a community leader
The Cast-Off – an outcast
The Sybil – a prophet
The Hybrid – a human mixed with an AI or alien
The Scum – someone connected to the community
The Outsider – someone trapped in the station from outside
The Vapour – an AI, ghost or something else
The situations are:
The Community
Poverty
The Gangs
The Above
The Spirits
Outside
The Resistance
War
There are more situations than there can be players, allowing you to pick and choose which elements are relevant in your game. The premade scenarios definitely take advantage of this, with required playbooks and situations for the minimal player counts, then others which can be added with each player.
I’ve facilitated a one-shot using The Grey Plague scenario where we were in the bowels of a space station, mostly abandoned to our own devices due to a medical outbreak the upper levels didn’t want to get too near. We had dwindling amounts of medicine and unscrupulous people who’d learnt where the drops of supplies were landing. There were some stand-offs in allotments, intrigues with a hologram bartender playing multiple sides and a drunken enforcer with dwindling authority. It was a really fun time and more dramatic than I thought a game with this structure would be. I’d love to give it another go sometime.
The next part will be basically all Mothership books, so look forward to that…
Welcome to part two of the RPGs I read in July this year. There’s a lot of Spire as it’s had several books on Kickstarter and I figured I’d read them all together.
Spire RPG
An ominous scene with suspicious lads… and you play those lads!
By Grant Howitt, Christopher Taylor & Rowan, Rook and Decard
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
This was like coming home after so many books I’ve read for the first time. I’ve run Spire since the demo came out, I read it when the PDF came out, when the physical version arrived and again when I ran a lengthy campaign of it last year. It’s a good read.
Spire was a mile high city filled with strange magic, strange gods and a lot of drow. Then the aelfir came and took it over. They’re kind of like elves if elves were every villain in a Bioshock game with kind of eldritch powers. You play as drow who work for The Ministry, a spy organisation dedicated to bringing the aelfir down.
Your character is made from a Durance which is how you spent your years as an indentured servant of the aelfir (or what you did instead of that if you like to live dangerously). Then there are highly-thematic character classes:
Azurite – merchants, able to cut deals, talk their way out of problems and see what people really want
Bound – acrobatic vigilantes who enchant their gear with small gods to help them in their journey
Carrion-Priests – worshippers of Charnel, a carrion god who worships the eating of the dead. Tactical masterminds with giant pet hyenas
Firebrand – a shotgun-wielding revolutionary able to inspire riots and survive long enough to make a change
Idol – a celebrity and artist, able to make a party anywhere and enchant people with their work
Knight – formerly of an honourable order, now mostly drunk bouncers and enforcers
Lajhan – priests of an approved deity, able to heal, earn trust and use that trust to their advantage
Masked – a master of disguise, appearing to be a servant and able to put on a selections of masks for different effects
Midwife – a caretaker who looks after the young and gradually becomes more and more of a literal spider
Vermissian Sage – a genius who uses the forbidden interdimensional train line as a library, hiding place and can pull things out of it
The system uses a number of d10’s, with players rolling 1d10 for luck, plus one for a relevant skill, domain, any masteries from gear or abilities. Your highest die measures your level of success and whether you suffer any Stress. The different Stress tracks are unique in here instead of hit points, they act as measurements of your Blood, Mind, Silver, Reputation and Shadow. Stress builds up and the GM rolls to see whether you suffer Fallout, which takes away some of your Stress but has something awful happen. Sometimes this could be death, sometimes it could be a broken limb, debt collectors, or in one case in our campaign, a character’s Shadow fallout had their block of flats raided and public executions of anyone there suspected to be linked to the Ministry.
The system’s good, but the part that shines is the setting. There’s so much to use in a campaign here, so many NPCs, strange concepts and things for players to poke at. Howitt and Taylor do a great job of mixing a fun, weird world and the horror of both the situation and the things that lurk in Spire.
Spire: Strata
A sickly strange yellow sky you’ll be hiding from as your skin burns in the light
The first expansion book for Spire provides a closer examination of some areas in Spire, a couple of character classes and a bunch of campaign frames to start off your game of Spire.
The new classes are:
Inksmith – a journalist-slash film noir protagonist, using magic to craft the story
The Shadow Agent – A stack of fake identities with a person underneath, leaving their burdens behind as they shed their disguises
The domains covered in the setting are High Society & Low Society, covering areas all over Spire. I mainly used Ivory Row from this area, but I’ve taken bits from all over when running my campaign.
The frames are:
Eye of the Beholder – An aelfir noble is ‘improving’ drow using horrible surgical procedures and mind-breaking methods. You need to plan an ugly death, the kind of thing to serve as a warning not to do this again. My group used a cannon and a cake filled with explosives
Home is where the Hatred is – You’re pretending to be servants of a squabbling dynasty, trying to get to the sealed away heart of the head of the house in order to kill her
Bisquiet – You’re infiltrating a grimdark fantasy Greggs popular with the aelfir, trying to figure out how to leverage this knowledge. My group put a dead aelfir in a pie, were discovered by an aelfir who’d already developed a taste for dead aelfir (these guys really are awful) and had to burn any trace of their existence
The Fall of Glasshelm – An aelfir’s seen fit to clean up Red Row of drugs and lawlessness by buying everything up, gentrifying it and of course doing all manner of horrible things
Better the Devil – You’ve returned to Spire after time away and an aelfir house so awful they were almost all murdered by other aelfir have returned. Yeah, that’s bad
The Forgotten – A drow cleric who has been looking after any sick, disabled and poor drow has vanished and a suspicious new cult has been offering to take people in
Ironshrike – A market has sprung up and something’s wrong with it, almost like the market itself might be aware and feeding
The Sulphurous Presses – You set up a newspaper for the Ministry, having to deal with rivals and keeping yourself from being exposed as operatives
Lines in the Dirt – You’re living in a building where the tenants are all being evicted. You’re going to develop relationships with the locals and keep them from having to move out
Dark Harvest – After an operation goes wrong, you flee to the countryside, as much as they have that in a mile high city. The thing is, even the rural life is fraught with mystery and horror, Wicker Man style.
Spire: Sin
Familiar art with another look at Spire, but the inside’s quite different to the last two
I thought I read more of this than I did. It arrived just as I was in the home stretch of a campaign, so I harvested it for anything related to the areas I was running a game in, then ignored the rest. That meant this was a lovely surprise. It’s also beautifully designed. The previous books look good, but the background was a little distracting.
The new classes are:
Gutter Cleric – Your worship of gods is focused more on quantity than quality, talking to the gods who infest objects and making scrappy mirables
Mortician Executioner – A bureaucratic murderer, you declare people dead and then make that a reality
The Domains covered are Crime, Order and Religion, with some fun new facts and even some maps. Crime is especially good, with a selection of brilliant pub names.
The scenarios are each shared out by domain:
Second-Hand Rain – You’re installed as film noir style private detectives in the North Docks while weird weather’s going on
Birth of Brother Harvest – A Solar cult to Brother Harvest has been doing some worrying things to manifest their murderous deity and the Ministry needs to nip that in the bud
In the Hands of the Gods – You’re trying to take advantage of cult war over a holy relic
Legacy: Life Among the Ruins Second Edition
The post-post apocalypse looks pretty apocalyptic here
By Mina McJanda & UFO Press
Read before? Yes
Played? No
Legacy is a post-post apocalyptic roleplaying game about watching different factions over a long stretch of time, how they interact with each other, how they deal with problems that everyone’s facing and how that changes over time.
The system’s PbtA, but it scales in and out from your character and your faction, each with their own stats and moves. You all play your character interacting with each other, but when you’re with your own faction there are systems for making quick characters to make sure other players are still able to join in. Once a problem’s gone, you move forwards in time, make new characters and see how your world’s evolved.
The core book contains a lot of resources to use including playbooks for factions and characters, but between this and the follow-up Kickstarter there are a ton of world books you can use and resources for even more customisation.
I got excited while reading this, so I read The Engine of Life and End Game, which are the main toolboxes to add more things to the game. These include new playsets based around even more growth or nihilistic destruction, respectively. There are also scenarios in both books to experiment with the new playbooks.
I’ve run Rhapsody of Blood which my group weren’t as keen on as it felt like there was a bit too much going on at once, but I do want to get this to the table and see what the baseline Legacy is like.
Red Carnations on a Black Grave
Not pictured: Black Grave
By Cat Ramen & Aviatrix Games
Read before? Yes
Played? No
I hadn’t heard about the Paris Commune until I listened to an actual play of this… I think on One-Shot, around the time this was on Kickstarter. This topic is entirely my jam, being about the last revolution in France, both the highs and lows.
The game itself is played using a pair of characters each, going through scenes taking place from the founding of the Paris Commune, the ways it runs and the tragic end. It doesn’t feel like an easy sell, the same way as I love This War of Mine but can only get one friend to play it with me.
It’s all played out through character and scene cards, with free play each time developing the stories of each character. Eventually when The Bloody Week happens, one of your characters will die and one of them may die, depending on what you decide they do followed by a draw from the relevant deck. I’m jealous of a friend of mine who bought the physical copy as I just have the PDF. Hopefully I’ll get to play it at some point in the near future.
Wanderhome
Go on a lovely journey
By Jay Dragon & Possum Creek Games
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
Wanderhome is a game about animalfolk in a pastoral setting, looking for a place to call home. There were bad times, ones which have displaced all of you and set you out on your journey, and one day your journey will stop, but not yet.
A Belonging Outside Belonging game, there are no dice and there’s no GM. Instead everyone has a playbook which says what characters are and are not, the latter of which is an interesting aspect I don’t often see in games. You have moves which you can always do like the Veteran drumming on the pommel of their sword, then there are moves which earn you tokens and ones which cost you tokens. They aren’t mapped onto your success or failure as the game doesn’t concern itself with that sort of thing. Instead spending a token might ease someone’s pain temporarily or know something about a place. Gaining a token can be for sacrificing something to help someone or leaving an offering for the small, forgotten gods. One of the things I love is that you also gain tokens for describing the beauty of the world, which encourages people to gain coins by taking a moment to bask in nature. When you’re travelling in RPGs characters tend to bee-line directly to their next point unless they’re ambushed. Some games like The One Ring have mechanics for travel, but they’re still fairly transactional. I like walking a lot in real life, and I appreciate that they’ve found a way to encourage people to linger.
The whole tone is like that, telling you to take your time, reminding players that any talk about the game is also the game. When you’re making characters, talking about what they’re doing, where they’re going and building things.
Each player has a character with their moves, but they also work together to make a location out of three natures. We talk through the creation and linger there, often arriving when some drama’s already underway and probably leaving before it’s resolved. Your goal is to wander, to spend some time in a place and to move on. It can feel quite different from other RPGs, but there’s beauty in it. At the time of writing I’ve played a couple of sessions online and I’m facilitating a campaign with my weekly group. I’m looking forward to getting back to some drama at some point, but I’m loving existing in this space.
Alice is Missing
Alice doesn’t look like this, she’s not a tree person.
By Spenser Stark & Hunters Entertainment
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
Alice is Missing is a unique idea for a game. The pitch is similar to Tall Pines in that it’s a bit Twin Peaks-ish in a quirky American town hiding secrets. In this game, the protagonist is missing rather than dead. That’s not the unique bit, though, it’s that this is a silent roleplaying game.
You play Alice is Missing as the friends of the titular Alice, all talking on a group chat on their phones. After rounding out your premade character, you start a 90 minute timer and then play the rest in silence round a table or VTT. Every 5-10 minutes a player will turn over a card which might point them to a suspect or a location, or do other things. They can differ quite a bit, but one warning at the start of the game is that you need to know where the light switches are. Any communication is in the chat either to the group or in separate chats with people.
You won’t find Alice before the 90 minutes are up, but it’s less about that than it is about how your characters react to a tense situation. I’ve found the gameplay often starts fairly light and chatty, but as the timer gets further down and the event cards are more frequent, it can get incredibly tense. After the end, whether you’ve found Alice in trouble, safe or dead, it’s recommended to have some time to decompress.
So far I’ve played it three times, twice in person and once virtually. Each experience has been different thanks to the selection of different cards for each event, the decks of suspects and locations and the players I’ve done this with.
Alice is Missing: Silent Falls Expansion
Alice also isn’t some hills or mountains.
That said, I wouldn’t say no to more cards. Silent Falls is basically that, more of the same. You get six new characters to use alone or mis with the originals. The same goes for suspects, locations and event cards. There are also cards for little twists or additional things to add into the story if it all feels a little simple or like it’s going too well. This expansion has QR code versions of those cards. I’ve only read this in PDF, so I’ve not seen how that works yet, but I’m curious how it’ll work when the physical copy arrives.
Korg Slayer
This isn’t the business card version, this is the cover to the PDF
By Caleb Englike
Read before? No
Played? No
I love the idea of solo RPGs. A lot of them go into things like journaling, but there are a few games which go a bit more tactical. Rune even uses a mini and a grid for fights. Korg and Korg Slayer are so small they fit on a couple of plastic cards that easily fit in a wallet. In Korg proper you can shop for items or go exploring. The items you have and the luck of the dice will show how far you get and what might stop you, ‘push your luck’ style. There are traps to bypass and enemies to fight. Korg Slayer introduces boss level enemies.
The cards are neat, there are also PDFs which really take that Mork Borg style of artwork and go into a bit more detail about the places to explore and the things you’re there to kill. I’ve had Korg in my bag for a while in case I get some time to myself and want something to do. I’ve yet to play it, but I’ve added Korg Slayer to the plastic sleeve I’ve put basic Korg in.
Conclusions & Observations
With Spire I’ve hit a point where there are RPGs I’m incredibly familiar with and enjoy a lot. The later entries were all because I was using them (Wanderhome, Alice is Missing) or intended to and failed (Red Carnations, Korg Slayer).
I was on holiday for some of this time, and when I hit Legacy, I decided to just keep going with that style of game rather than move on. I did resist reading all of the Legacy books as there are tons of different campaign worlds to try for it. I’ll probably get round to reading some when I’m done with this quest. As much as my regular group didn’t gel with Rhapsody of Blood, there’s still something appealing with the baseline Legacy so I will try it again.
Yes, I’m still behind, but I’m ploughing through anyway. I’m not even at the start of Zinequest yet, which might speed things up when that happens. Anyway, onto the games…
Cortex Prime: A Multi-Genre Modular Roleplaying Game
By Cam Banks & Fandom Tabletop, maybe Dire Wolf Digital…
Read before? No
Played? No
I’m not normally one for fairly trad generic RPG systems. Normally if I want a game for a specific genre or topic, there are already several specific games that can do that.
Cortex is a bit of an exception. I first read the most generic and uninteresting versions with Battlestar Galactica and Supernatural which felt like variations on Savage Worlds and not mechanically near enough to the shows they were emulating. Then two quite different superhero RPGs came out and I missed them both. Marvel Heroic had primarily premade characters and an interesting way of representing skills & powers in ways which would allow someone like Hawkeye to be in a team with Thor and not feel like he was a weakling. This was because it wasn’t all granular about how much you could lift, but a focus on the narrative impact of your abilities and the trouble you can end up in. Then there was Smallville, which sounded shockingly interesting for a license I really didn’t give a shit about. Characters had stats in values rather than physical attributes. You created relationship maps which also had dice in them. This way you could be invulnerable, but still have dramatic stakes.
Similar to Savage Worlds, you use sets of dice for attributes, skills, etc. They scale up and after rolling, you pick the highest two. It’s a fairly nice, simple method of rolling dice and represented in clear, clean infographics. The problem is that it’s quite easy to get a bit mixed up in all the widgets. When I first read the book this was a massively off putting thing, but returning it wasn’t as bad as I feared.
Similar to Fate, there are some incredible settings in the book. My favourite is a kind of Thunderbirds style disaster response game. It advances the climate catastrophe even further and has you with high tech vehicles trying to rescue folks.
I don’t think this is great for a new GM, although if someone made a Cortex book for a setting with the core rules built in, that’d probably help make it more accessible to newbies.
Trouble for Hire: A Game of Hi-Octane Road Adventure
By Kevin Allen Jr & NDP Design
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
This game is a lot of fun. This game follows Ruben Carlos Ruiz in action movie like tales of his often criminal misadventures on the road.
The thing is, you all control Ruben at different points in the game. There are eight roles and each player will switch them during the game:
Ruben Carlos Ruiz – our lead, the person who interacts with the world either as a Wild Card, Fighter or Driver
Los Campañero – Whoever’s Rubén’s sidekick for the story
La Villanos – The bad guy of the story
The Editor – a meta role, editing scenes, retconning things and switching things up
The Road Through the World – literally that
Los Espectadores – Any extras, whether a crowd or a named person who’s neither a sidekick or enemy
The Rider – An enigmatic foil, acting as ally or enemy
La Extraño – Anything supernatural
There are several scenarios which give a rough idea and dramatic beats which happen at set points based on how much you spend RPM, the currency of the game. Each role has actions which cost an amount of RPM and a few free ones. You get more by switching roles and the more you spend, the more you barrel Ruben through the story to its dramatic conclusion.
It feels like a glorious, energetic mess to play, pushing the drama ever forward. The scenarios in the book are good, and there are tools to make more. I definitely want to run this again, and I might have to get a physical copy of the book as it’s gorgeous in PDF.
Tall Pines – A Surreal Murder Mystery Roleplaying Game
By Miles Gaborit & Self-Critical Hits
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
Tall Pines is basically Twin Peaks as an RPG using some decks of cards to represent the victim, the investigators, clues and even symbolism itself.
There’s been a murder, and through three acts, your characters will look into it, but also into themselves, uncovering the secrets in their town and each other.
Each Act has cards which provide clues. You take turns running through scenes, adding them and their relevant symbols, potentially unlocking a secret depending on the combination you get.
In addition to the clues and secrets, you have Symbolism cards which are played and recycled in interesting ways which keep the ones you play coming back up.
Some of the cards from the Symbolism deck
My first time running the game was a little inconclusive, partially as we ran short on time, partially as my lovely group can often be a bit noncommittal with who did a murder in order to keep their options open, and partially as I’d not explained enough that solving the murder is secondary to the personal mysteries.
The second time was stellar, as were the stories a friend told me when she borrowed it to run the X-Files-based expansion. That second time I ran it, we had a high school football star who had died and ended up not just uncovering the murderer, but ended up encountering a weird fraternity of murderous footballer werewolves.
The Veil: Cascade, A Post-Cyberpunk Roleplaying Game
By Fraser Simons & Samjoko Publishing
Read before? No
Played? No
I’d heard about Cascade and assumed it was a sequel to The Veil, which I backed and read for the first time on this quest. Cascade’s set after The Veil and experiments with a bit more of a posthuman vibe to it. There’s technology for people to transmit their consciousnesses into other bodies. There’s a bit more of a sense of exploring the self and what it means.
The new playbooks are:
The Aesthetic: An artist who’s part of the local counterculture
The Percipient: A sneaky scout who may be compromised by their creators
The Denotation: You examine and hack the hybrid reality of physical objects
The Mnemologist: A trader in memories
The Telepresence: A newscaster/streaming reporter
The Futurist: An observer of past, present and future, owned by a weird Society
There’s advice and hacks, as well as some scenarios which I personally find quite useful as it helps get a grip on what you do and how things work.
I originally thought this was a standalone sequel, but it’s definitely an expansion book. Not only does it need the first book for the core rules, but the concepts all feel like they add to it, rather than act as their own separate thing.
Damn the Man, Save the Music
By Hannah Shaffer & Make Big Things
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
I hadn’t seen Empire Records until I was preparing to run this game, and the moment I did, this all clicked into place. It’s basically Empire Records the RPG.
You’re all employees of a struggling music shop preparing for a Big Shot musician’s arrival, balancing whether you help deal with the problem at hand or advance your personal goals.
There are a number of roles which have minor differences, mainly in the way you play:
The Local Rockstar
The Aspiring Poet
The Troubled Artist
The Brain
The Overachiever
The Space Case
The Flirt
The Kid (bonus)
The Wizard (bonus)
The arc has players run through scenes where the boss gives out tasks and the cast either do them, ignore them to follow their own goal, or heal a relationship with a colleague. It’s going to be tricky getting all of these things done as you’ve only got a scene each per act. Things escalate nicely as everything goes on and people will have to start deciding what they actually want to achieve by the end of the day.
There’s a list in the back which acts as a nice cheat sheet, and example tunes along with the suggestion that everyone make up musicians so people who weren’t around in the 90’s or didn’t follow music aren’t left out.
This is a game that reads well and plays better, making for a quite specific, fun experience.
The Yellow King
By Robin Laws & Pelgrane Press
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
This game’s actually four books in one, and quite an undertaking to read. I love Chambers’ King in Yellow series of short stories, so I had to get this. It uses the Gumshoe system, but tweaked into a simpler version called “QuickShock”.
Characters will investigate mysteries themed around Chambers’ stories and the horrors of Carcosa, with several ideas of what it might be and encouragement to kind of use all of them as a way of keeping things weird.
You each have characters made of two halves: Your Profession gives Investigative Abilities which will give you clues without rolling (e.g. Sculpture will let you see something off when looking at some sculptures). Your Background gives you General Abilities which can be spent when rolling a d6 to deal with a problem (e.g. someone with Fighting 5 might spend 2 points to make their Fighting roll d6+2). You get a couple of Pushes to ‘push’ the narrative based on your Investigative Abilities.
Combat’s a bit weird, and I created a couple of characters to run through a test combat. You pick an approach to the encounter, roll and try to get above a threshold based on what the approach is. There are cards for shock and injuries you might take depending on how bad things go. Combat tends not to last long which I always appreciate, and the concept of picking an approach worked better than I thought it would.
Rules & Paris
The first book contains the rules and the first setting. You’re all art students in 1980’s Paris. You don’t come from here (unless you’re a Muse, in which case you might). This way it keeps you a bit out of place and uncertain. There’s a big focus on weird art horror, which felt like it could go a bit Velvet Buzzsaw, a bit Grant Morrison’t Annihilator. This is the version I ran, with the group encountering a plaza which only existed in a painting and popped up occasionally, living sculptures, getting trapped in a painting as it repeated again and again and an attempt to create a weird reflection of the Eiffel Tower. It was great fun and very weird.
The Wars
The next setting puts the cast in part of a war which spans Europe but might pivot around France. The war started in the 1910’s and is still going by the late 40’s, with weird Carcosan technology in a kind of Wells/Verne style way. This is intended to be run after the Paris campaign, with character choices directed by what you played previously and the sides in the war based on events in the campaign. There are some interesting different group concepts such as people faking the presence of soldiers to misdirect enemy forces. Technology includes things like weird dragonfly planes, communication via haunted typewriter and weeping mines that float around like deadly jellyfish.
Aftermath
The third setting once again has players’ choices of characters based around who they were previously, but we move over to America. After the events of Paris (and the Repairer of Reputations short story), America became a weird dictatorship in worship of the King in Yellow, ruled over by the Castaigne Dynasty. Aftermath starts in the present day after a victorious rebellion against the dynasty and has you as forces dealing with what happens next. Everything feels like it’s kind of somewhere between the 50’s and 80’s after stagnation and dystopia. There are Carcosan loyalists and monsters still around, there are different political factions all with their ideas about how things should be run. The system adds a few changes to the rules involving the concept of your group, missions and influence.
This is Normal Now
The final setting, which is set in the present and has you playing the same characters in an alternate reality. This one’s our reality, or at least it looks that way. The characters have slight career changes and echoes from the other world. There’s obviously more going on, but it’s best discovered in play. This book also has advice about running the full campaign, moving through (and sometimes back into) other eras. The Yellow King is best when it is weird, jarring, meta and kind of artistic.
Misspent Youth & Sell Out With Me
By Robert Bohl
Read before? No
Played? No
Technically the Kickstarter item involved here was just Misspent Youth: Sell Out With Me, but it’s an expansion to the main book which I bought from Robert Bohl’s remaining stock when he was having a closing business sale. Still, I needed to give it a reread to remind myself of the system.
Misspent Youth is a game about Young Offenders who are resisting The Man. It’s generally set in a dystopia, with people rising up and sometimes having to compromise their ideals to succeed. As the GM you literally ask “Who will rise up?” And hold out the dice for someone to take. The players and the GM mark out numbers on a track, claiming them as the story goes on. With any luck by the end, the kids have succeeded and not sold out too much along the way.
There are tools for making your own scenario and characters in the main book, but also a few premade ones (the Codex zine also has one I want to try where you’re all the nemeses of a bat-themed superhero).
Sell Out With Me has so many different scenarios, all grouped by themes. I’m going to list them all as there are so many, but these are the themes:
Real Worlds
Flip the Table
One Giant Leap
Youth is Wasted on the Young
Make America Hate Again
Venusian Worlds
Fuck Labels!
There are so many RPG authors who have taken part in this, like Kira Magrann, Alex Roberts, Misha Bushyager, Quinn Murphy and more.
There’s also Outrageous Youth by Daniel Levine, a spin on the system turning it from a dystopia to a game about a band.
Here’s part two of the RPGs I read in June 2023 and brief looks at what I’ve found in them.
Dust, Fog and Glowing Embers, an RPG
By Slide Stolar
Read before? No
Played? No
Dust, Fog and Glowing Embers is a kind of Industrial Age Bioshock kind of game. It’s set in a darkly humourous world.
Players roll light and dark dice, giving narrative control to the GM or taking it for themselves. This allows you to succeed but also add soft and hard details to the fiction. You can exploit details to give oyu bonuses to the light die, making you more likely to succeed.
Characters have a choice of their background and one of three archetypes which change whether you’re relatively balanced in your stat spread or vastly weighted towards just one. You also get humours which you pick one of to determine how you react to people. This can shift over time as you balance or change your humours.
The main treat of this book is the city of Stome, which is a world of weird academia ruled over by tons of picklists to roll or choose elements for each area. This was an approach I loved in Trophy Loom and works well to keep things fresh.
It looks interesting, although I think for this sort of tone I’d probably use Electric Bastionland or Into the Odd and scavenge bits from here.
Sensational: A Superpowered RPG Where Empathy Matters
They’re all feeling something
By Thomas Constantine Moore
Read before? No
Played? No
I like superhero RPGs and it’s often interesting seeing where different games prioritise different things. This one advertised that it’s a game with powers and feelings.
The system’s fairly basic in the rolling mechanic: you roll a number of d6’s and count anything with a 4+ as a success. You move around on an emotional scale from Plutchik which was weird as I read this around the same time that I read DIE, which handled it better. The more you feel things, it modifies you like Masks with conditions, just more of them. There are powers and while they’re varied, there wasn’t really much that inspired me here. That feels like the statement of the RPG as a whole. While there’s a simple base to the game, the emotions are a bit too fiddly. I think I’d try to play it to see if it’s easier than it looks, but I probably wouldn’t try running.
Exuvaie: Relics of House Dragonfly
I don’t fancy this drink (although some of the cocktails in the book sound nice)
By Sean Smith
Read before? No
Played? No
I love film noir, and adding some weird elements to a real world setting. You’re characters uncovering a conspiracy relating to an insect cult. You’ll use a deck of cards to built elements of the conspiracy but also to determine your level of success. There’s some interesting stuff going on with the deck in a kind of solitaire-style mechanic, but I found a quick initial read still had be a little confused. I wondered whether I’d need to grab a deck of cards and run myself through some of it just to get a feel for it, but handily Sean had a tutorial video to help.
This is a one-shot I’ll have to remember and run when I’m feeling a bit noir-ish. Unlike some of these kinds of one-shot story games, I’ll definitely need to reread the rules beforehand to make sure I’ve got it all right.
The Sword, The Crown & The Unspeakable Power
By Todd Nicholas, Todd J & Wheel Tree Press
Read before? No
Played? Yes, the playtest version
Back in the Google Plus days (RIP), I saw a shout out for playtesters for a Powered by the Apocalypse game which was a kind of high council Game of Thrones type affair. I’d been running Dungeon World a lot and liked the idea of this different perspective.
In SCUP, you all take the role of people in charge of a location, utilising power both soft, hard and strange. There are different playbooks who leverage power in different ways and have interesting abilities to deal with each other. It’s all a bit more mysterious and enigmatic than Dungeon World, and worked brilliantly for a zoomed out perspective on the world we’d created together.
The classes are:
The Adept: A magician, filled with knowledge and odd abilities
The Beloved: Someone loved by the dark power
The Black Hood: An assassin, quietly offing people
The Bloodletter: A doctor, a rare and valuable trade
The Crown: Someone in charge or related to a person in charge
The Gauntlet: An enforcer for someone
The Hex: A witch, mysterious and worrying
The Lyre: A musician, able to influence hearts and sway the public
The Screw: A torturer, gathering information in questionable ways
The Spur: A soldier, generally loyal to money
The Voice: Basically Grima Wormtongue
There’s also guidance for making places, belief systems and how to determine the needs everyone has, creating the initial drama for everything to escalate out from.
I loved the game I ran of this and where running the people in charge of a city went poorly in a more traditional game, given the freedom it presented, the tools in use here are fantastic for generating drama. I think the tension and backstabbing might fatigue a group, but I’ve not tried it myself yet.
The Imposters, A Conspiracy Game Anthology
By Jeremy Morgan, Banana Chan, Nick Wedig, Alex Carlson, James Mullen, Todd Crapper, Josh Jordan & Tim Hutchings
Read before? Yes
Played? No
This is an anthology of different games, themed around conspiracy and some taken from RPG design contests in the past. They are:
They’re Onto Me: Red – ones a week, record videos about noticing people in your life acting strangely, and then abruptly stop.
LOVEINT – A 200 word RPG about making a messy tangle of agents working together while pursuing emotional, romantic and/or professional goal.
The Meet – Pairs of players arrange their covert meetings in false identities, trying not to be noticed.
The Thought Police – A game where you’re all describing your thoughts, only one player is secretly telepathic and is the only one who can hear them.
The Light of Day – A kind of heist game, where one player’s trying to catch the conspirators leaking data, actually using phones, laptops or other ways of covertly communicating.
The Way of All Flesh – Agents attend the funeral of a colleague, using drawn cards to determine their relationship with the deceased and what their active case is. These can end up being quite surreal, like a treasure map, a fight with rival agents or a werewolf’s appearance!
Field Notes #23 – This game gets players to wander about a bit, finding and interpreting conspiracies, hiding information and so on. It’s an interesting read, possibly a tricky sell.
The book is nicely designed with photos and conspiracy-looking art in the games, as well as dividing them. Like any anthology some of these grabbed me right away (like They’re Onto Me: Red) and others kind of drifted out of memory. If I’m feeling suitably conspiratorial I might give some of them a try.
The Quick: Nordic Noir Ghost Stories
By Ville Takanen & Myrrysmiehet Oy
Read before? Yes
Played? No
I’m not a big Nordic Noir person, so I think I backed this partially for the interesting, clean look and partially for the supernatural side of it. I’m also curious about checking out TTRPGs from outside of the UK and America.
You’re part of a group of damaged people solving supernatural mysteries. You roll a pool of dice when you make a move, some good, some bad. You get them based on your concept, background, aspects and harm, with 4+ counting as a success. The moves are things like “Try” and the book goes through the results whether you succeed, fail or get more perils with the bad dice than good. I like that the violence move is “Cross the line” as you’re only going to resort to violence in an act of desperation and things are going to go badly whether you succeed or fail.
The character classes are:
Seeker – Someone desperate to uncover the truth
Spook – Someone who worked for The Man
Touched – A psychic able to touch things and get visions
Bloodbound – Part of an influential family
Old Soul – Someone who’s seen too much
Channel – A bridge between the living and the dead
Rogue Ops – Someone working for a shady corporation
This is a game which I forget about and once I start reading it, I’m interested all over again. For a mystery it’d be difficult thinking about running it in anything other than a Carved from Brindlewood style, but this feels like it’d be an interesting game for the vibes it’s putting down.
Beak, Feather & Bone
An adorable bird in a cape
By Tyler Crumrine
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
We’re at the new games part of this month’s reading, both of which are part of my ‘bucket list’ for 2023. This one I didn’t manage to play, but read and have printed out ready to go at some point soon.
Beak, Feather and Bone is a game about colouring in a map. Each player represents one community in the city and has a felt tip of a unique colour. You’ll be drawing cards and determining the following:
The type of building & level of influence (based on the card drawn)
Beak – What people say about the building
Feather – How it looks on the outside
Bone – How it looks inside
You keep going a few rounds and determine who rules the main seat of power. It looks nice and simple, it’s bird-themed, but could easily be used to help with worldbuilding for a bigger RPG.
DIE: The Roleplaying Game
Some of Stephanie Hans’ gorgeous art which is all over this book
By Kieron Gillen and Rowan, Rook & Decard
Read before? Yes
Played? Yes
DIE is a comic by Kieron Gillen and Stephanie Hans about a roleplaying group who vanished into their campaign world as teenagers and came back changed, unable to speak about what happened. As older people with lives and families of their own, they’re sent back and have to deal with both representations of their real world, of games and of fiction in general.
So that makes this a roleplaying game about a comic about a roleplaying game. There’s a very specific ritual to set up play, where you are a former roleplaying group who have a reunion and end up trapped in their campaign world thanks to their GM (who is also a character played by the game’s facilitator).
Each character class is based around a die type, as well as classic character classes, play styles and of course, the characters from the comic:
D4 – The Dictator, a terrifying bard able to tell people to do things with a word
D6 – The Fool, a swashbuckler with simple rules that involves drawing on their dice
D8 – The Emotion Knight, the fighter type who can annihilate more and more things as they feel their dedicated emotion
D10 – The Neo, a rogue who uses pilfered Fair Gold to power cybernetics
D12 – The God-Binder, able to communicate with and bargain with gods for miraculous feats
D20 – The Master, played by the GM, generally the antagonist and able to cheat
I’ll keep this brief as I have a full review I want to do for this. The system’s fairly simple, almost too simple, especially in fights. My group didn’t quite gel with that side of it, despite the really interesting rituals to set things up and the ways to construct the story.
The standard mode of play is Rituals, which is around 3-4 sessions starting with the character creation, has you play in first person and make a persona before ending up trapped in the fantasy world. From there, you need to decide whether you’ll stay or leave. This means you’ll even need the GM’s agreement and they’ve just vanished. I used my own set of fancy dice for each players’ specific dice, the worst d6 for The Fool and some old fragments of abandoned campaigns as fodder.
There’s a Campaign mode which has more options for advancement and goes into mapping out the 20 sides of the game world, or several one-shot setups including being in a horror movie shoot that’s become real and being trapped in the dungeon of a killer GM.
It’s a fascinating game, gorgeously drawn, with some spectacular ideas. I have a few more praises and criticisms which I’ll get into in my full review one day soon.
Cthulhu Hack Second Edition
This person looks pretty jolly
By Paul Baldowski & Just Crunch Games
Read before? No
Played? No
I’ve run a lot of Lovecraftian RPGs and I have some clear favourites which go more on the story game side. Cthulhu Hack’s a Lovecraftian RPG which is more on the OSR style of things. I’ve been eager to play it before running, to see the style of play and make sure that my attitudes from other games don’t get in the way.
This second edition is better at putting the style of play across and I feel a bit more confident in trying it out as a GM first. The system uses Saves which you’ll roll against when facing horrors, and Resources which you’ll spend to try and investigate or gain things in the world.
Like a lot of OSR type games it uses the standard D&D style spread of attributes: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma. Then there’s Sanity, Flashlights, Smokes, Hit Die, Armed Damage & Unarmed Damage which are fixed by your Archetype. The first three are your resources, which start with a Die Type and might shrink as you use them up.
The Archetypes are:
Adventurer
Bruiser
Performer
Philanthropist
Ruffian
Scholar
You also have abilities and skills to help you out. The characters from this will be a little more advanced than the Squamous ones, but less than Call or Trail of Cthulhu.
The layout of the book highlights where everything is, although in the PDF the bestiary layout meant a bit of flipping back and forth to see what monster is being talked about. The physical book is small and gorgeous, and worth picking up anyway, so I don’t begrudge it too much.
There’s an adventure called “Save Innsmouth” which I gather is a revamp of an old adventure and it looks like a lot of fun. At some point I’ll have to run it either with my weekly group or as something to show my Arkham Horror group between campaigns.
Conclusions
For the most part these were positive reads. I bounced hard off Age of Anarchy, despite the interesting time period, and Sensational. I think this is the first time in this quest that I’ve had some difficulty pushing myself onwards. Hopefully July will be a bit better.
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.
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.
Faked Tales 