On the tail of Old School Renaissance has come another movement—the rise of the fanzine. Although the fanzine—a nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon, got its start in Science Fiction fandom, in the gaming hobby it first started with Chess and Diplomacy fanzines before finding fertile ground in the roleplaying hobby in the 1970s. Here these amateurish publications allowed the hobby a public space for two things. First, they were somewhere that the hobby could voice opinions and ideas that lay outside those of a game’s publisher. Second, in the Golden Age of roleplaying when the Dungeon Masters were expected to create their own settings and adventures, they also provided a rough and ready source of support for the game of your choice. Many also served as vehicles for the fanzine editor’s house campaign and thus they showed another Dungeon Master and group played said game. This would often change over time if a fanzine accepted submissions. Initially, fanzines were primarily dedicated to the big three RPGs of the 1970s—Dungeons & Dragons, RuneQuest, and Traveller—but fanzines have appeared dedicated to other RPGs since, some of which helped keep a game popular in the face of no official support.

Since 2008 with the publication of Fight On #1, the Old School Renaissance has had its own fanzines. The advantage of the Old School Renaissance is that the various Retroclones draw from the same source and thus one Dungeons & Dragons-style RPG is compatible with another. This means that the contents of one fanzine will compatible with the Retroclone that you already run and play even if not specifically written for it. Labyrinth Lord and Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay have proved to be popular choices to base fanzines around, as has Swords & Wizardry. Not every fanzine for the Old School Renaissance need be dedicated to a specific retroclone, such as The Phylactery.

The Phylactery Issue #2, published by Planet X Games in September, 2021, following a successful Kickstarter campaign, is a fanzine for the Old School Renaissance rather than any specific fantasy retroclone. Thus, it works for Old School Essentials or The King of Dungeons or Labyrinth Lord. As with The Phylactery Issue #1, it is a collection of magical items, NPCs, monsters, and a scenario or two. It presents the Game Master with a relentless barrage of choice and options, some of which is ready to use, some of which is not, and so will require the Game Master to develop and add some stats. Everything comes with background elements—some specifically so to make them interesting—enabling the Game Master to flesh out her campaign setting as well as introduce an item of magical power. All of it is written by Levi Combs, the publisher, and his words are backed up with some decent artwork and excellent maps.
The issue’s magical items begin with ‘The Skullstaff of Stelos’, the first of its many magical items and it is a big one. Originally crafted for Stelos the Necromancer, it is a great, gnarled staff, topped with a charred, horned skull. The wielder can command undead as a Tenth Level Cleric (or four Levels higher, if already an evil Cleric) as well as cast various spells and talk to the undead. However, it will transform the wielder into an undead creature as well, but he will not accept that he is changing. This is a very nicely detailed item that any Game Master is going to want to equip her big evil villain with.
‘Of Longstriders and Giant Killers – Renowned Rangers of the North’ is inspired by Tolkien’s Aragon and describes five tough NPCs and their most feared weapon or magical items. For example, the Dragon-bone Spear is a Spear +2 once wielded by Helka ‘Red-Spear’, known for her hatred of Frost Giants after her family was killed for them. Not all of the NPCs are dead, like Belken ‘Stormbreaker’, who wears The Counsel of Crows, a silver torc that enables him to talk to crows and other corvids as per the spell, Speak with Animals. He is so feared that even a murder of crows overhead is enough to scare away bands of Orcs and Goblins. None of these NPCs is given stats, so the mechanical focus is on their magical items.
The magical items continue with ‘Magic Armours and Weapons of Legend’. They include The Alabaster Armour of St. Saldric the Blessed, a set of plate armour sacred to the god of justice, all alabaster white, except for the left gauntlet, which is left plain to symbolise the one-handed nature of the god! It is Platemail +2 and can reflect spells as per the Ring of Spelling Turning. This article adds another three, nicely detailed items with lore aplenty that can be worked into a campaign. And then, ‘Secrets From the Lich’s Crypt - A Whole Buncha Weird Ole Crap in a Dead Wizard’s Lab’ gives the Game Master a pick and mix of things to fill a wizard’s laboratory, such as the Elixir of Curdled Swarms, which when imbibed causes the drinker to wrack with convulsions and then vomit Ochre Jellies under his command! This develops a thematic line of oozes and jellies that runs through the issue, and is one of nine fascinating items that add spice to a particular location or can be pulled out and placed elsewhere in the Game Master’s campaign.
The monsters and NPCS start with ‘Strange Things That Live Underground And Other Weird Creatures’. They include Shroud Spiders that combine the worst features of giant spiders and undead shadows; Ooze Cultists of the Slime-Lord which have melted faces and lurk in the underworld, capturing the unwary and transforming captives into gelatinous horrors or feeding them to the carnivorous jellies of their slime-farms; and Worm Polyps from the Void Beyond, great green sacs that hang in fungal forests that when they burst, shower the area with carnivorous worms whose continued bite will transform the victim into a monster (sadly, the actual monster is not detailed).
The legendary Grandmother of Witches is fully described in ‘She Rides on the Wind – Baba Yaga, Hag Queen of the North’. The equivalent of a Twentieth Level Magic-User, she can even learn Cleric spells and has an array of monstrous abilities, the equivalent to a god. Her magical items are detailed too and all together she is a fearsome foe, should she turn her attention to the Player Characters. ‘Hali Oakenspear, Wandering Cleric of the Luck Goddess’ is given a full write-up as an NPC, an Eighth Level Cleric who has dedicated herself to wandering the land and doing good.
The last of the monsters are detailed in ‘Here There Be Monsters!’. The four entries include ‘Sodden Bastards’, the unfortunate souls of those who drowned at sea and now lurk in shipwrecks, ready to instil fear in those they surprise, and the ‘Murdershroom’, a fungal horror formed from the energies of a magical gate or the fallout of a demon summoning gone wrong, which stalks victims in the dark of the underground, breathing toxic spores on them causing hallucinations, and after slaying them, taking their bodies back to a corpse farm to attract more victims.
Further flavour is added ‘More Forbidden Demon Cults of the Outer Void’, which describes three demons and their cults, like ‘Mulg, The Bloated One’, a mountain of yellowing fat and bone whose approach is heralded by a vile, unwashed odour, and who revels in greed, deviancy, and worse, and who can consume anything. Like the other two entries, it is accompanied by a ‘Fun Demon Cult Fact!’, in this case the rise of Mlug from a minor demon to a greater demon after it got lost on the astral plane where it gnawed away at the body of a dead deity!
The Phylactery Issue #2 includes three scenarios of varying length. Deigned for Player Characters of roughly Eighth Level, ‘Brood-Hive of the Slime God’ describes a set of caves near the fishing village of Urtag Horn, several of whose inhabitants have gone missing, been beset by strange dreams, and even gone mad. The local clergy want the matter investigated, the mad man indicating the cause as being inside the caves. These are slime-encrusted and very nicely detailed and quite a tough little dungeon that can played through in a single session, two at most. It is nicely detailed and its location makes it easy to add to a campaign, as is ‘Grindhouse Deep Crawl #1’. This is a dungeon complex intended to be added to a bigger dungeon, a half-finished and forgotten annex. There is no real theme to the set of nine rooms, instead being a set of well designed and interesting encounter written around a very attractive map. There are at least two shafts that drop to lower dangers; a tomb of Prefect Thrim, a cleric consumed by a carnivorous creeper who thinks that it is the cleric and if the Player Characters can speak to plants it might be able to answer questions they pose, whilst the vegetables it grows have divine spell effects if eaten; and a Demon-Frog’s Fane, where the wounded may be given its blessing if they bathe in its waters before its bloated statue and let it feed on more blood! Lastly, ‘It Came From Spawn Vat X!’ is more of an encounter, the Player Characters going to investigate the tower of a well-regarded wizard, which has recently exploded, and facing the last of his experiments gone awry. It is short and simple and very easy to prepare.
In between, ‘Twelve Things a Magic Mouth Would Say’ is a fun table that can be used to unnerve the Player Characters or lay the seed for a puzzle or adventure hook. Similarly, ‘10 Wayward Oddfellows You Might Meet on Any Given Night at Old Man Rumple’s’ gives a table of NPCs can be used in the same fashion, whether to add colour or spur further adventure. The latter is very similar to ‘1d10 Tough SOBs, Roadhouse Hoodlums, Bored Adventurers, and Mean Ole Bastards You Might Meet in a Tavern’ from The Phylactery Issue #1. Barring the stats, they do draw comparison with the ‘Meatshields of the Bleeding Ox’, the regular collection of NPCs from the Black Pudding fanzine, and they are just as useful.

Physically, The Phylactery Issue #2 is very nicely presented. It is well written, and both the artwork and cartography are excellent.

The Phylactery Issue #2 continues the stream of content begun in the first issue, presenting the Game Master with a wealth of options—monsters, treasures, and more that she pick and choose from to add to her campaign. Some of it needs a little development, even if only to fold into a campaign setting, but there is so much here to choose from and use, that a Game Master is not going to be disappointed with the content. (The only disappointment might be when the author runs out of steam!) Suitable for any Old School Renaissance retroclone, The Phylactery Issue #2 continues the torrent of ideas and dangers and more, still giving the Game Master a wealth of choice and content to work with.

On the tail of the Old School Renaissance has come another movement—the rise of the fanzine. Although the fanzine—a nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon, got its start in Science Fiction fandom, in the gaming hobby it first started with Chess and Diplomacy fanzines before finding fertile ground in the roleplaying hobby in the 1970s. Here these amateurish publications allowed the hobby a public space for two things. First, they were somewhere that the hobby could voice opinions and ideas that lay outside those of a game’s publisher. Second, in the Golden Age of roleplaying when the Dungeon Masters were expected to create their own settings and adventures, they also provided a rough and ready source of support for the game of your choice. Many also served as vehicles for the fanzine editor’s house campaign and thus they showed how another Dungeon Master and her group played said game. This would often change over time if a fanzine accepted submissions. Initially, fanzines were primarily dedicated to the big three RPGs of the 1970s—Dungeons & Dragons, RuneQuest, and Traveller—but fanzines have appeared dedicated to other RPGs since, some of which helped keep a game popular in the face of no official support.

Since 2008 with the publication of Fight On #1, the Old School Renaissance has had its own fanzines. The advantage of the Old School Renaissance is that the various Retroclones draw from the same source and thus one Dungeons & Dragons-style RPG is compatible with another. This means that the contents of one fanzine will compatible with the Retroclone that you already run and play even if not specifically written for it. Labyrinth Lord and Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay have proved to be popular choices to base fanzines around, as has Swords & Wizardry. Most, but not all fanzines draw from the Old School Renaissance. Some provide support for much more modern games.

Lowborn is ‘An Independent Grim Perilous Fanzine for Zweihänder RPG’. As the subtitle suggests, this is a fanzine for the Zweihänder: Grim & Perilous RPG, published in 2017 and thus modern, but actually a retroclone of another roleplaying game. That roleplaying game is the definitive British roleplaying game, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, published by Games Workshop in 1986.

Lowborn Issue 2 was published in August, 2020. The content begins with with ‘The Dark Order’ by Peter Rudin-Burgess. This is a scenario set in the chancery of Edessa, below the city of Outremer. This is a murder mystery set below the city where single-sex work gangs labour at feeding the great steam turbines. Gang Master Zangi leads a gang of twenty-four free women who, in turn, drive sixty female mutant slaves, all loading city waste into the furnaces. Gang Master Zangi has disappeared, but now her skull has been raked out of Number 2 furnace. Shortly after, a new gang leader is appointed, and then it happens again when another gang master is found boiled alive and a new gang member is also appointed. This is followed by the murder of a bar owner and then another gang master. The scenario is presented with a lot of set-up up front and then followed by the plot hooks and the various genres in which the scenario might be used on. The scenario needs a lot of work to run effectively with clues to connect the murders to the culprits and it is also only halfway through the scenario is it mentioned that it is for Dark Astral: Chapbook for ZWEIHANDER Grim & Perilous RPG, the Science Fiction equivalent setting for the ZWEIHANDER Grim & Perilous RPG. It is mentioned on the cover, though. The map of the lair is by Dyson Logos, so good.
‘New Distinguishing Marks’ by Adrian Kennelly is literally that, a table of entries like ‘No chin’ or ‘Unbending knee’. Chuck Kranz’s ‘Random Space Encounters’ provides twelve encounters, again for Dark Astral: Chapbook for ZWEIHANDER Grim & Perilous RPG. For example, ‘Just like in the TV shows.’ expands to ‘A tear in space erupts of the port barely out of manoeuvring range, but a strong magnetic pull of the anomaly pulls your ship in. A voice in your head echoes, “I have such wonderful sights to show you.” The darkness takes you after being dragged through the event horizon. When you come to your ships nav-computers are not able to gain bearing on where you are… or when you are.” These are fine and again something that the Game Master will need to develop.
It is not quite clear what Sean Van Damme’s ‘Introduction to Assassinations’ quite is, initially, but what it turns out to be is a means of introducing options for the budding assassin. The Claw of Retribution is the largest guild of assassins in the great city and puts up notices on a board at the West Wind Pub, where the guild previously operated from, of small jobs, or rather, assassinations of minor folk that it has been hired to do. Its members can perform them, but it lets prospective members undertake them as a test. There are thirteen such tasks, not always hits or deaths, such as burning down a distillery that is not guild affiliated or forcing a member of the faith to stop preaching in the docks. The Game Master will need to develop the hooks, but there are some fun options here that will support a grittier, dirtier style of play for thug and thief type characters.
‘Order And Corruption: Purity Points’ by Lyle Hayhurst gives an extension to the Corruption Points of ZWEIHANDER Grim & Perilous RPG. Corruption Points are gained for immoral acts, giving in to personal weakness, and even being injured, and will potentially force a Player Character down a dark path. This article suggests another path that a Player Character can go up. By committing acts of goodness, being tolerant of those different to himself, protecting the innocent, giving to the poor, being merciful to a villain, and more, a Player Character can gain Purity Points. Like gaining Disorders for Corruption Points, he can gain Blessings for accruing enough Purity Points like becoming a ‘Friend of Animals’ or gaining a ‘Inner Glow’ of Purity. The article suggests that a Player Character can earn both Corruption Points and Purity Points and need to be tracked, and what this does is add some flexibility and complexity to the play and reward a player for good roleplaying whatever his character’s action.
Ignacio M. writes three entries in the issue. The first, ‘Learning from Different Arcanas’, suggests a way in which an Arcane Magick user can cast magick from a Wind other than his own. For each symbol that Player Character has to pass through to get between his Wind he has studied and the one he wants to cast from, there is a penalty to the Incantation test and if the Channelling test is failed, then extra Chaos dice has to be rolled. The rule is quick and simple and potentially dirty if thing goes wrong! He also suggests ‘New Combat Actions’ with ‘Oh No You Don’t’ which enables a Player Character to study the ebb and flow of the battle and interrupt the action of a foe; ‘Goad and Deter’ to slow a foe’s action down; and ‘Leave It Open’, in which he tricks a foe to gain a bonus on his next attack. These are decent additions.
Lastly, ‘Carnival II’ continues the description of a magical carnival—a common trope in roleplaying games inspired by Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay such as Zweihänder: Grim & Perilous RPG—begin in Lowborn Issue 1. However, unlike in many cases what lies behind the magic in the carnival is not necessarily dark or dangerous, but that rather its various members are all anthropomorphic animals. They include a middle-aged anthro-rabbit who controls his perfect puppets though his voice alone and Priscilla, middle-aged anthro-hedgehog who is also a very skilled physician, alchemist, and herbalist, and exotic dancers that somehow entice audience to buy the overpriced drinks at their show. The latter is perhaps the only real danger in the carnival, but others might see it differently and act accordingly. This adds another three tents and their occupants to add to the three previously described, so there is yet room for expansion. If there is an issue for the article, it is the inclusion of the anthropomorphic NPCs and whether that fits a Game Master’s campaign. She, of course, has the right to change such details and the various NPCs could be hiding something else instead. Bar some scenario ideas or hooks, ‘Carnival’ offers an intriguing and different type of circus, one with plenty of room for expansion and development.
Physically, Lowborn Issue 2 is a bit untidy and rough around the edges, plus it needs a slight edit. The layout is also a little tight in places.
Lowborn Issue 2 is a mixed bag with some content more useful and more interesting than others. ‘Introduction to Assassinations’ is packed with great hooks for a bruising lowlife campaign and like ‘Order And Corruption: Purity Points’, has plenty of roleplaying potential. Elsewhere, several of the articles are rough and could be clearer in their set-up, let alone their execution.

On the tail of the Old School Renaissance has come another movement—the rise of the fanzine. Although the fanzine—a nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon, got its start in Science Fiction fandom, in the gaming hobby it first started with Chess and Diplomacy fanzines before finding fertile ground in the roleplaying hobby in the 1970s. Here these amateurish publications allowed the hobby a public space for two things. First, they were somewhere that the hobby could voice opinions and ideas that lay outside those of a game’s publisher. Second, in the Golden Age of roleplaying when the Dungeon Masters were expected to create their own settings and adventures, they also provided a rough and ready source of support for the game of your choice. Many also served as vehicles for the fanzine editor’s house campaign and thus they showed another DM and group played said game. This would often change over time if a fanzine accepted submissions. Initially, fanzines were primarily dedicated to the big three RPGs of the 1970s—Dungeons & Dragons, RuneQuest, and Traveller—but fanzines have appeared dedicated to other RPGs since, some of which helped keep a game popular in the face of no official support.
Since 2008 with the publication of Fight On #1, the Old School Renaissance has had its own fanzines. The advantage of the Old School Renaissance is that the various Retroclones draw from the same source and thus one Dungeons & Dragons-style RPG is compatible with another. This means that the contents of one fanzine will be compatible with the Retroclone that you already run and play even if not specifically written for it. Labyrinth Lord and Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay have proved to be popular choices to base fanzines around, as has Swords & Wizardry. Then there is also Old School Essentials.
Carcass Crawler is ‘The Official Fanzine Old-School Essentials zine’. Published by Necrotic Gnome, Old School Essentials is the retroclone based upon the version of Basic Dungeons & Dragons designed by Tom Moldvay and published in 1981, and Carcass Crawler provides content and options for it. It is pleasingly ‘old school’ in its sensibilities, being a medley of things in its content rather than just the one thing or the one roleplaying game as has been the trend in gaming fanzines, especially with ZineQuest. To date, Carcass Crawler #1, Carcass Crawler Issue #2, and Carcass Crawler Issue #3 have all focused on providing new Classes and Races, both in ‘Race as Class’ and ‘Race and Class’ formats as well as general support for Old School Essentials, and Carcass Crawler Issue #4 is no exception.
Carcass Crawler Issue #4 was published in December, 2024 and includes three new Classes, four gods, eight monsters, a shelf of arcane grimoires and their contents, expanded rules for brewing, purchasing, sampling, and describing potions, and a short adventure. The first two of the three Classes draw heavily from Tolkien’s Middle-earth and specifically The Shire. The first is the ‘Halfling Hearthsinger’ by James Spahn and Gavin Norman, which specialises in collecting and memorising legends, lore, and folk tales. The Class’ primary abilities are ‘Foster Friendship’, enabling the Hearthsinger to temporarily make friends if he can tell a story; recall Lore about monsters, folk tales, legends, and even magical items; and ‘Read Languages’ that are non-magical, including codes and dead languages. He can also better listen at doors and as a ‘Rumour Monger’ learn more rumours from others! Eventually, when he has enough money, he can establish tavern, although there is no Level requirement. The ‘Halfling Hearthsinger’ has a maximum of eight Levels and is a Class designed for interaction, so suitable for players who like to talk and build relationships.
The second new Class is also Halfling related. Designed by James Spahn, the ‘Halfling Reeve’ is more obviously based on the Bounder, who patrols the borders of The Shire. The Class must be Lawful and is a capable forager and hunter, good at stealth, and is also a Goblin Slayer and a Wolf Hunter. In addition, the Class also is able to cast Druidic magic at higher Levels. Again, this Class has a maximum of eight Levels. The Class is effectively a variant upon the Ranger, but pleasingly effective.
The third Class is Gavin Norman’s ‘Arcane Bard’. This is intended to be like the jack-of-all-trades Bard Class from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Second Edition, combining skills such as Climb Sheer Surfaces, Hear Noise, Pick Pockets, and Read Languages with the Lore ability as per the ‘Halfling Hearthsinger’ and the casting of Arcane magic. The only musical benefit that the ‘Arcane Bard’ gains is an ‘Anti-Charm’ effect against song-based powers like that of the fairies or Sylvan creatures. With its mixture of Thief abilities and ability to cast magic, the Class is more of a generalist and not quite as interesting a design. It can go up to a maximum of fourteen Levels.
‘Deities and Cults’ by Chance Dudinack and Gavin Norman describes four gods, the benefits of worshipping them, and their spells. For example, ‘The Black Alderman’ is the god of skulls, dentistry, and organ dirges who directs his worshippers to collects skulls for him, including those of rare monsters and influential personages. Some worshippers, known as ‘Bonesmiths’, work as travelling dentists and bone-setters, but its spellcasters gain traits such as a pallid complexion for gaining the ability to cast First Level spells, a sunken, skull-like facial features for Second Level spells, and more. The spells include Skull Speech, which causes a skull to speak, even that of an undead skull; Skull Sentry, which sets a skull to chatter its teeth if anyone of the designed type comes close; Danse Macabre, which makes bones come to life and dace; and Control Skull, which gives complete control of a skull, but not the rest of the bones, to the caster. The other gods include a deity of redemption and light, once a fiendish deity, but now reformed; a god of insane, danger, perils and risk, which revels in seeing others overcome great odds and thus endlessly creates them; and a god of the weird deeps of the Underworld. These are all small cults and will really enhance a campaign as very nicely themed faiths and there are some entertaining spells to go with them as well as some nice roleplaying hooks, whether for a player or the Game Master.
‘The Mage’s Grimoire’ by Brad Kerr and Gavin Norman adds more spells. These consist of Burning Hands, Feather Fall, Shocking Grasp, Unseen Servant, Pyrotechnics, Ray of Enfeeblement, Shrinking Cloud, Blink, Slow, and Tongues. These are all going to be familiar from Dungeons & Dragons, specifically for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, but which do not appear in Old School Essentials. Now they do. The article also add five tomes, packed with spells, including several of those listed earlier. Not only do they add spells that can be studied and learned, but also flavour. For example, the ‘Book of the Hideous Frog, written by the Frogmancer Neem, is a wide, frog-faced tome bound in damp frog flesh that wiggles in an unnerving fashion and which causes frogs to spawn in the owner’s clothes and belongings each night! These are all great fun and will just add a little bit of flavour to a campaign and inspiration for the Game Master to create more should she need them.
Gavin Norman’s ‘Strange Brew’ expands the basic guidelines for potions included under ‘Magical Research’ in Old School Essentials with a plethora of options. It allows any character able to create magical items to brew potions or if not, hire an alchemist. An alchemist NPC can brew potions at half the time it would take a Player Character, but is an expensive hireling—1,000 gp per month, and that does not include the cost of the actual potions. The article does not discuss either Potions of Delusion or poison, but otherwise, keeps things simple by approximating potion effects with particular spells, such as a Potion of Control Undead with the spell Control Monster and a Potion of Speed with the spell Haste. It also suggests possible potion ingredients, like a Storm Giant’s heart for a Potion of Giant Control or Pegasus feather for Potion of Levitation; what hints might be gained on a sampling a potion for the first time; and a table of options to describe potions. Handling alchemy and brewing potions in Dungeons & Dragons-style games can get bogged down in a lot of detail, but the guidelines here opt for simplicity and clarity. It does not delve too much into the how and why of brewing potions, but suggests ways in which the ‘Magical Research’ rules can be expanded and the use of potions in game play can be enhanced.
Penultimately, Gavin Norman details eight new monsters in ‘Terrors of the Dark’. These are all creatures to be found in the depths of the Underworld. They include the Grue, a thing of magical darkness found stalking desolate places; Oil-Mites, tiny, rock-like mites that lurk in webs and drop onto passing adventurers to consume their flasks of oil; and the Torch-Bearer’s Ghost, the spirit of some poor townsfolk who met his end in a dark dungeon after being hired as a torchbearer by an adventuring party and now haunts the dungeon, carrying a flickering light, and potentially leading other adventurers to their doom in revenge! This is a delightfully thematic octet of threats and dangers several of which play upon the fear of the dark for both players and their characters and their need for light.
Lastly, ‘Noximander’s Cave’ by Chance Dudinack and Brad Kerr is a rare inclusion of a scenario in the pages of Carcass Crawler and a rare appearance of a scenario for old School Essentials for Player Characters of Fourth and Fifth Level. With a map by Glynn Seal, it describes a small complex of rooms and caves used by the illusionist Noximander the Tenebrous to worship Moumb and conduct further research. Located under a city, builders recently broke into the complex via a cellar and the adventurers are hired to investigate. This is a decent mini-dungeon using many of the monsters from ‘Terrors of the Dark’ that could be played through in a session or two.
Physically, Carcass Crawler Issue #4 is well written and well presented. The artwork is excellent and the cartography good.
Although Carcass Crawler describes itself as a fanzine, it is not really a fanzine, since much of its content is written by the designer and publisher of Old School Essentials, it is published by the publisher of Old School Essentials, and it is obviously more polished and professionally produced than most fanzines. That aside, the content in Carcass Crawler Issue #4 is a good mix of the useful and the flavoursome. The new-is spells of ‘The Mage’s Grimoire’ and the potion details of ‘Strange Brew’ are interesting, whilst the flavoursome include the ‘Halfling Hearthsinger’ and ‘Halfling Reeve’ Classes with their lovely bucolic feel, and ‘Deities and Cults’ adds delightful roleplaying details that will make any setting that bit more interesting. Overall, Carcass Crawler Issue #4 is a very enjoyable issue with plenty that will enhance any Game Master’s campaign.

On the tail of Old School Renaissance has come another movement—the rise of the fanzine. Although the fanzine—a nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon, got its start in Science Fiction fandom, in the gaming hobby it first started with Chess and Diplomacy fanzines before finding fertile ground in the roleplaying hobby in the 1970s. Here these amateurish publications allowed the hobby a public space for two things. First, they were somewhere that the hobby could voice opinions and ideas that lay outside those of a game’s publisher. Second, in the Golden Age of roleplaying when the Dungeon Masters were expected to create their own settings and adventures, they also provided a rough and ready source of support for the game of your choice. Many also served as vehicles for the fanzine editor’s house campaign and thus they showed how another Dungeon Master and her group played said game. This would often change over time if a fanzine accepted submissions. Initially, fanzines were primarily dedicated to the big three RPGs of the 1970s—Dungeons & Dragons,RuneQuest, and Traveller—but fanzines have appeared dedicated to other RPGs since, some of which helped keep a game popular in the face of no official support.

Since 2008 with the publication of Fight On #1, the Old School Renaissance has had its own fanzines. The advantage of the Old School Renaissance is that the various Retroclones draw from the same source and thus one Dungeons & Dragons-style RPG is compatible with another. This means that the contents of one fanzine will compatible with the Retroclone that you already run and play even if not specifically written for it. Labyrinth Lord and Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay have proved to be popular choices to base fanzines around, as has Swords & Wizardry. Another popular choice of system for fanzines, is Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game, such as Crawl! and Crawling Under a Broken Moon. Some of these fanzines provide fantasy support for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game, but others explore other genres for use with Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game. One such fanzine is the aforementioned Crawling Under A Broken Moon.

Crawling Under A Broken Moon Fanzine Issue No. 10 was published in in october, 2015 by Shield of Faith Studios. It continued the detailing of post-apocalyptic setting of Umerica and Urth which had begun in Crawling Under A Broken Moon Fanzine Issue No. 1, and would be continued in Crawling Under A Broken Moon Fanzine Issue No. 2, which added further Classes, monsters, and weapons, Crawling Under A Broken Moon Fanzine Issue No. 3, which provided the means to create Player Characters and gave them a Character Funnel to play, Crawling Under A Broken Moon Fanzine Issue No. 4, which detailed several Patrons for the setting, whilst Crawling Under A Broken Moon Fanzine Issue No. 5 explored one of the inspirations for the setting and fanzine, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and Crawling Under A Broken Moon Fanzine Issue No. 6 continued that trend with another inspiration, Mad Max. Crawling Under A Broken Moon Fanzine Issue No. 7 continued the technical and vehicular themes of the previous issue, whilst also detailing a major metropolis of the setting. Crawling Under A Broken Moon Fanzine Issue No. 8 and Crawling Under A Broken Moon Fanzine Issue No. 9 were both a marked change in terms of content and style, together presenting an A to Z for the post-apocalyptic setting of Umerica and Urth.

Crawling Under A Broken Moon Fanzine Issue No. 10 is different to previous and that is because it is the fanzine’s ‘monster issue’! Previous issues have detailed new monsters and creatures that the Judge can add to a Umerica and Urth campaign or her own post-apocalypse setting. From the Aetherian War Cat, Bowel Tyrant, and Concrete Giant to Xenotaur, Zilla, and Zmooph presents a total of thirteen new monsters. They include a mix of the weird and the silly and all are given a two-page write up that includes an illustration, stats, and quite a detailed description. Each also includes adventure hooks which lifts the contents far above being a simple, short, mini-bestiary.

The monster list opens with an entry very obviously inspired by one of the inspirations for the Umerica and Urth campaign setting, which is He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. This is the Aetherian War Cat, a combatant so good it has its own Deed Die and can perform its own Mighty Deeds. If a Player Character uses a Deed Die, then he can approach a riderless Aetherian War Cat and attempt to bond with it. When ridden, the only Might Deed it can perform is the ‘Assist Rider’ and the description includes a table of outcomes. The Bowel Tyrant is a tiny, intelligent alien parasite that enters via the bowels of its victims and enslaves them before its slave excretes more when it relives itself, ready in waiting for further victims. It is a bit icky, but sets up an alien invasion of a very different kind. The Concrete Giant lurks in the ruins of broken buildings, its grey, ridged skin looking like concrete enabling it to blend in readiness to ambush its victims and take them back to its lair to eaten raw. Worse are the Cyborg Concrete Giants which are created by the Technomages to lead the other Concrete Giants, being faster, tougher, and armed with shoulder-mounted grenade launchers! The three adventure hooks for the Concrete Giants include them being sent out on random destructive rampages to instil fear by the Technomages; details of where Concrete Giants are forged which could be turned into a raid or encounter; and rumours of road gangs and Concrete Giant wrecking crews actually working together.

Elsewhere, the Flying Laser Ursine, which is exactly what it sounds like, is silly and simple, whilst the Fruiti-Slush Ooze is weird and silly, a jelly formed out of the fruity, partially frozen slushies and partially by the multi-dimensional cataclysm, which do desiccating, freezing Stamina damage that leaves a wound smelling of fruit. Which fruit? Well, there is a table for that! The adventure hooks include harvesting fruity jerky form their victims for exotic gastronomes and having to stand over a cold storage tanker with some sounds of movement coming from inside it… Weird too, is the Harpoonnik, a slimy, batrachian-humanoid with a strange cylindrical mechanism where its head should be. It can fire a tongue-harpoon out of this mechanism, to spear its victims which it drags away and bludgeons them to death! The oddest are the Zmooph, tiny purplish humanoids described as being roughly three grenades tall, but with a quarter of that height consisting of large, speckled cap mushroom that blooms directly from their skull. Ruled by Patriarch Zmooph, they are mostly peaceful, but when they encounter others, they swarm in xenophobic rages and overwhelm the victims of their ire. There is no suggestion as to what they do with such victims or anything about female Zmoophs, but somehow they feel as they should be blue and wear white hats.

Physically, Crawling Under A Broken Moon Fanzine Issue No. 10 is as serviceably presented and as a little rough around the edges as the other fanzines in the line. Of course, the problem with Crawling Under A Broken Moon Fanzine Issue No. 10 is that much of its contents have been represented to a more professional standard in the pages of The Umerican Survival Guide – Core Setting Guide, so it has been superseded and superseded by a cleaner, slicker presentation of the material.

Crawling Under A Broken Moon Fanzine Issue No. 10 contains a pleasing variety of monsters and creatures—weird, silly, and even more silly (Flying Laser Ursine, really?). Now to be fair, bestiaries are not always the most exciting to read and certainly not the most exciting to review, especially if there is monster after monster and not much else. That could be case with Crawling Under A Broken Moon Fanzine Issue No. 10, but the adventure hooks make the entries and descriptions that much more readable and much more immediately useful. Not so much, ‘Here’s a monster I can use’, but more ‘Here’s a monster I can use and a suggestion as to how I can use it’, Crawling Under A Broken Moon Fanzine Issue No. 10 goes that little further than you would expect. Plus of course, the monsters will work with a lot of other post apocalyptic roleplaying games and not just the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game or Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game – Triumph & Technology Won by Mutants & Magic.

Much like the Jonstown Compendium for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and The Companions of Arthur for material set in Greg Stafford’s masterpiece of Arthurian legend and romance, Pendragon, the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition is a curated platform for user-made content. It is thus, “...a new way for creators to publish and distribute their own original Call of Cthulhu content including scenarios, settings, spells and more…” To support the endeavours of their creators, Chaosium has provided templates and art packs, both free to use, so that the resulting releases can look and feel as professional as possible. To support the efforts of these contributors, Miskatonic Monday is an occasional series of reviews which will in turn examine an item drawn from the depths of the Miskatonic Repository.

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Name: The Ballad of Lost DanavaPublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Kevin Kreiner

Setting: The far futureProduct: Scenario
What You Get: Fifteen page, 1.58 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: H.G. Wells’ The ‘Planet’ of Dr. MoreauPlot Hook: Forced to land on a planet where no man has been beforePlot Support: Staging advice, six pre-generated Investigators, one handout, three Mythos tomes and recordings, two Mythos monsters, and one dinosaur.Production Values: Plain
Pros# 2nd Place Winner in Stars Are Right Scenario Outline Writing Contest# Curiously old-fashioned Science Fiction feel# Dinosaurs optional# Decently done pre-generated Investigators# Deinophobia# Radiophobia# Cleithrophobia
Cons# Fairly obvious in its plotting
Conclusion# Escape from H.G. Wells’ The ‘Planet’ of Dr. Moreau# Short and easy to run, more of a classic stranded and escape situation than an investigation

Much like the Jonstown Compendium for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and The Companions of Arthur for material set in Greg Stafford’s masterpiece of Arthurian legend and romance, Pendragon, the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition is a curated platform for user-made content. It is thus, “...a new way for creators to publish and distribute their own original Call of Cthulhu content including scenarios, settings, spells and more…” To support the endeavours of their creators, Chaosium has provided templates and art packs, both free to use, so that the resulting releases can look and feel as professional as possible. To support the efforts of these contributors, Miskatonic Monday is an occasional series of reviews which will in turn examine an item drawn from the depths of the Miskatonic Repository.

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Name: The Lair of DreamsPublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Nick Edwards

Setting: Paris, 1890sProduct: Scenario
What You Get: Seven page, 330.92 KB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: What if art is the vector?Plot Hook: Has a down on his luck artist fallen back into his old ways?Plot Support: One Mythos monsterProduction Values: Plain
Pros# Inspired by ‘The Mask’ from The King in Yellow by R.W. Chambers# Short, direct, single session investigation# Easy to prepare and run# Easy to adapt to other cities and time periods# Xanthophobia# Oneirophobia# Automatonophobia
Cons# Keeper will need to provide NPC/monster stats# What happens if the Investigators fail?
Conclusion# Short, direct, and dreamy encounter with the servants of the Yellow King# Easy to run for Cthulhu by Gaslight (and other cities and time periods)

Time has long since passed since the Old World was destroyed in the End Times. Since that time, eight Mortal Realms have arisen from their remnants, each keyed to one of the eight Winds of Magic and connected by the magical portals known as Realmgates. Sigmar survived the End Times and was borne to the Mortal Realms, uniting the survivors and bringing the gift of civilisation, as well as finding the other gods and appointing them divine protectors of the Eight Realms. Grungni taught mortals metalcraft, Nagash imposed order on the spirits of the restless dead, the savage twin-god Gorkamorka cleared the wilderness of monsters, and Sigmar established a great Parliament of the Gods. It was a new golden age under the protection of the Pantheon of Order, but it was not to last. Rivalries and sins caused cracks and fractures in the world and it is though these that Chaos entered the Mortal Realms. Their worship spread and spread untold, until the emboldened Dark Gods unleashed their legions on all of the eight realms. The gods of the Pantheon of Order together had the strength to stand against the Chaos, but riven by rivalries and jealousies, they failed and what remained of the Pantheon of Order was catastrophically defeated at the Battle of the Burning Skies. Thus, was ushered in the Age of Chaos… It was compounded by the Necroquake, a great ritual by the Supreme Necromancer, Nagash, to harness the Winds of Magic that was undone by Chaos and forcing the dead to rise and changing the nature of magic as it flowed into the realms and unleashed devastatingly predatory living spells that stalked the lands.

All was not lost. Sigmar, the God-King still yet faced the forces of Chaos, rampaging Greenskin Hordes, and Nagash’s legions of spirits and undead servants, for he had his Stormcast Eternals, paragons of humanity whose mortal souls are reforged with the celestial energies of the Cosmic Storm and hammered into living weapons of Azyr upon the Anvil of Apotheosis. Yet they are few in number, and so he put out calls to former allies. Yet it was not enough, for not all answered his call, and so he turned to the people of the Mortal Realms. The mightiest of souls and most powerful of realms came together and entering into Bindings which bound small bands together to fight for the Mortal Realms. Together, they are SOULBOUND, and as a new era looms, the Age of Death, they are needed more than ever!

This is the set-up for Warhammer Age of Sigmar – Soulbound: Perilous Adventures in the Mortal Realms, a roleplaying game published by Cubicle 7 Entertainment based upon Warhammer Age of Sigmar, the miniatures wargame from Games Workshop. Warhammer Age of Sigmar was originally published in 2015 as a replacement for the venerable Warhammer Age of Sigmar—upon which Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Fourth Edition—and as of 2024, is on its fourth edition itself. Although perilous as the roleplaying game’s subtitle suggest, this is not as grim or as grotty as other roleplaying games set with the Warhammer universe, certainly not like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Instead, it is a world of high and heroic fantasy, one in which the Player Characters are bound—or Soulbound—into small groups, or Bindings, which last a lifetime. They embody hope against the death and chaos, and Chaos, and this can be expressed through Soulfire, that collectively, they can make them do amazing and truly heroic things!

A Player Character is primarily defined by an Archetype, which sets his starting Attributes, faction or cultural heritage, Species, and initial options in terms of Skills, Talents, and equipment. The five Species are Human, Stormcast Eternal, Aelf, Duardin, and Sylvaneth. A Stormcast Eternal is a reforged soul, the Aelf and Duardin are similar to the Elf and Dwarf, but not the same, and the Sylvaneth is a living tree. A Player Character has three attributes—Body, Mind, and Soul—which typically range between one and eight, with two being considered average. There are several different factions, such as the Daughters of Khaine, devoted to the Aelven god of battle and bloodshed, and the Idoneth Deepkin, said to have been saved from Slannesh’s gullet and now reside in the most hidden place of the Mortal Realms, its ocean floors; and the Duardin mercenaries of the Fyreslayers and the scientific privateers in their great airships, the Kharadron Overlords. There are twenty-three Archetypes. For the Human there is the Battle Mage and Excelsior Warpriest; For the Aelf there is the Black Ark Corsair, Darkling Sorceress, Hag Priestess, Witch Aelf, Akhelian Emissary, Isharann Soulscryer, and Isharann Tidecaster. For the Duardin there is Auric Runesmiter, Battlesmith, Doomseeker, Aether-Khemist, Endrinmaster, and Skymaster. For the Stormcast Eternal there is the Knight-Azyros, Knight-Incantor, Knight-Questor, and Knight-Venator. For the Sylvaneth, there is the Branchwych, Kurnoth Hunter, and Tree-Revenant Waypiper. Lastly, anyone can become a Trade Pioneer.
What is missing here is options for Orruks or Ogors and other Species. Not all other Species are suitable as Player Characters, the options are limited, as those especially for Humans, although the Stormcast Eternal are a variant of Human, one initially idealised, but each time a Stormcast Eternal dies and is reforged, he loses some of his humanity. To create a Player Character, a player selects an Archetype, several Talents from the Archetype’s list, and spends some given Experience Points on improving the Archetype’s skills. He also sets long and short term goals for his character and together with the other players, sets long and short term goals for the party. Completing these is a major way to earn Experience Points. Connections between the Player Characters are determined, either making them or rolling on the given table, and each player also has a set of questions to answer that help round out his character.

Krylla Heartseeker
Faction: Daughters of Khaine
Archetype: Hag Priestess
Age: 110
Height: 6’ 9”
Eye Colour: Gold Eye Type: Mesmerising
Hair Colour: Deep Red
Distinguishing Feature: Strange arcane markings on chest

Body 2 Mind 2 Soul 4

Melee 3 (Average) Accuracy 2 (Poor) Defence 3 (Average) Armour 1
Toughness 8 Wounds 4 Initiative 3 (Average) Natural Awareness 2 (Poor)
Mettle 2

Core Skill: Devotion (Training 1 Focus 1)
Skills: Awareness (Training 1 Focus 0), Determination (Training 1 Focus 0), Guile (Training 1 Focus 0), Reflexes (Training 1 Focus 0), Theology (Training 1 Focus 1), Weapon Skill (Training 1 Focus 0)

Core Talent: Blessed (Khaine)
Talents: Fearless, Forbidden Knowledge, Blood Binding, Red Mist

Equipment: Ceremonial armour (Light Armour), sacrificial blade (Dagger), a bloodstained ritual chalice (Holy Symbol), a whetstone, manacles, pestle and mortar, and 280 drops of Aqua Ghyranis.

Mechanically, Soulbound uses a dice pool using six-sided dice. The basic aim is for a player to roll dice and get results that equal or exceed a Difficulty Number to generate successes. Both the Difficulty Number and the number of successes required will vary. A Test adheres to the format, ‘DN X:Y Attribute (Skill), where ‘X’ is the Difficulty of the Test, ‘Y’ is the Complexity, or the number of successes required to succeed, and the Attribute and Skill indicating which should be used. For example, a Dexterity Test of Difficulty 4 and Complexity 2 is shown as DN 4:2 Body (Dexterity); a Channelling Test of Difficulty 3 and Complexity 4 is shown as DN 3:4 Mind (Channelling). Most Tests only require a single success, but Tests with greater Complexity will require more. Advantage and Disadvantage will adjust the Difficulty down or up as appropriate.

The number of dice a player will roll to perform a Test will depend on the appropriate Attribute for his character and the degree of Training the character has in the skill. If none, or Untrained, the player just rolls a number of dice equal to the Attribute. For each level of Training—either one, two, or three—a player will add an extra die. In addition to Training, a Player Character can have Focus in a skill, again, either one, two, or three levels. For each level in Focus, a player gains a single +1 bonus. These bonuses are used to adjust the results of the dice after they have been rolled.
For example, the high priestess is testing Krylla Heartseeker to determine if she is worthy of being assigned an important. To prove her worthiness, the Game Master sets the Test at DN 4:2 Soul (Devotion), meaning that Krylla Heartseeker’s player must roll two successes of four or more. Her player assembles her dice pool of four from Krylla Heartseeker’s Soul and adds another one for the single level of Training she has in the Devotion skill. In total, she is rolling five dice. Krylla Heartseeker’s player rolls two, three, four, five, and six. This gives Krylla three success, more than enough to success, but she also a level of Focus in the skill, so uses it to adjust the result of three to a four, and this gives her four success. Enough to succeed and Kyrlla to a give a very impressive answer that persuades the high priestess that not only is she worthy of the task, but is given some secret information about it as well.In addition, all Soulbound have access to Mettle. This partly regenerates every turn after use and can be used to take an extra action, use a Talent or Miracle, and temporarily either double the Training or Focus in a skill. The Binding as whole has access to Soulfire that can be spent to achieve the maximum successes on a Test instead of rolling, to reroll as many dice as necessary, to recover Toughness or all spent Mettle, or to cheat death. Soulfire is a shared resource and every member of the Binding must agree to its use. If a Binding does not agree, a player can still use the Soulfire, but this increases Doom by one. Doom is measure of the hopelessness in the Mortal Realms and it grows as the levels of fear, envy, doubt, and anger rise. On one level it reflects how bleak or tense the current state of the Mortal Realms, but on another, as it grows it draws the enemy to the Binding and will make them powerful foes, increasing their armour, giving them extra attacks, and granting access to powerful abilities. Doom can be decreased, but it takes time and effort.

Combat uses the same mechanics. Initiative is done in a fixed order according to Initiative values, each Player Character can act and move once per turn, and the engagements are fought out in zones. It is not overly tactical, but terrain and cover will be factor, and combatants can undertake actions such as charge, called shots, defend, dodge, grapple, improvise, dual wielding, and more. An attacker’s Melee or Accuracy values are compared with the defendant’s Defence to determine the Difficulty Number of an attack. Weapons inflict a base damage, plus the number of Successes rolled. Armour worn reduces damage and damage reduces a defendant’s Toughness and then his Wounds. Having no Wounds left means the defendant is mortally wounded. Wounds can be minor, serious, or deadly, depending on much damage they inflict. A mortally wounded defendant is stunned, cannot recover Toughness, and must death tests on subsequent rounds. Alternatively, a Player Character could choose to make a last stand, in which case, he is no longer stunned, regains all his Mettle, is immune to all damage, his Melee and Accuracy get better, and his damage ignores armour. This lasts only one turn before the Player character dies, so it had better count.

Beyond the basic rules, there is guide to the endeavours that the Soulbound can do between missions, though never lasting longer than a week, because Chaos never sleeps! This can be to increase the Bond between a Binding, Cleanse Corruption, Create a Spell, Repair Equipment, Train a Companion, and others. There is a full list of equipment, including Aetheric Devices, such as Kharadron devices, weapons, and armour wielded by the Kharadron Overlords and their forces. These include Aetheric Lenses, Arkanaut Armour, Rapid-Fire Rivet Gun, and a lot more. Most have a power requirement and can be plugged into the Basic Aether-rig used by the Kharadron, limiting the number of devices that can be wielded over the course of an adventure. The Regular Maintenance Endeavour is required to maintain an Aether-rig between adventures.
Background is given for the Mortal Realms—Azyr, the Realm of Heavens, Aqshy, the Realm of Fire, Chamon, the Realm of Metal, Ghur, the Realm of Beasts, Ghyran, the Realm of Life, Hysh, the Realm of Light, Shyish, the Realm of Death, and Ulgu, the Realm of Shadow—and the Realm Gates as well as daily life, safety, entertainment, and so on. These are accompanied by various adventure hooks, details on the Realm of Chaos, various factions, and a deeper description of The Great Parch. This is located in Aqshy, the Realm of Fire, where Sigmar first unleashed his Stormcast Eternals, and covers its geography and history and is designed to provide a starting region for the Game Master and her players. Religion is given a similar treatment, including such gods such as Gorkamorka, and Nagash, and the Chaos Gods—Khorne, Nurgle, Slaanesh, and Tzeentch. These traditional four, all of whom fear the rise in power of Nagash and his undead hordes, are joined by the Horned Rat.

Just as the Mortal Realms are divided into eight, so is magic lore, with each lore being tied to a specific realm. Magic energy churns and swirls throughout the Mortal Realms as it has done since Nagash’s Necroquake, empowering even the weakest of spellcasters. Worse, this roiling wave upon wave of aetheric energy have created Endless Spells that have proven to be danger to the original caster, his enemies, and anyone else they come in contact with. (Unfortunately, only one Endless Spell, the Purple Sun of Shyish, is given in the book.). Arcane spellcasting requires a successful Mind (Channelling) Test and extra successes can be used to Overcast a spell, often to increase its duration or the damage it inflicts. Bonus dice are rewarded when attempting to cast spell of a Magic Lore in its associated Realm, for example, casting Amethyst Magic in the Realm of Death, Shyish. If a Channelling Test is failed, then a player must roll on ‘The Price of failure’ Table, which can be anything from the caster simply losing control and suffering damage to inadvertently summoning an Endless Spell! (Depending on how unlucky your spellcasting Player Character is, again, the Purple Sun of Shyish is not enough.) Some ninety spells are listed across all eight Magic Lores and there is even a guide to creating new spells.

In comparison, Miracles are treated as individual Talents that require the ‘Use a Talent’ action to cast and one or more points of Mettle. There are some generic Miracles, but most are tied to particular god and his worship. Rounding out is a decent bestiary of nearly fifty entries, which covers automata, beasts, daemons, mortals, spirits, and undead, from minions, swarms, and warriors to champions and chosen in terms of power levels. They include the People of the Cities of Sigmar, pets and mounts, monstrous beasts, disciples of the Dark Gods, the legions of Nagash, and Greenskin hordes. This is a solid selection and provides a lot of depth in terms of NPCs and threats.

One of the best descriptions the mechanics in of Soulbound—and any roleplaying game—in the core rulebook for Warhammer Age of Sigmar – Soulbound: Perilous Adventures in the Mortal Realms is, “The dice and the rules are tools for you to use to create memories. They are little cuboid wildcards that can completely flip a story on its head, and turn a moment of crushing despair into one of joyous celebration.” There is further advice for the Game Master later in the rulebook, which actually suggests that if the prospective Game Master has not yet learned how to be a Game master, then she learn using the Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Soulbound Starter Set. The Game Master advice covers the rules, but also looks at setting up a game and making it feel like the Age of Sigmar. It states that Soulbound has four tones—mythic, hopeful, tragic, and dark—and takes the Game Monster through them one by one. Besides talking about humanising the setting despite it being about a continuing, often epic war against Chaos, it provides various tools for the Game Master to adjust Soulbound to get the game she wants. This includes using a Point Buy system to create Player Characters, setting up different campaign frameworks, such as making it grim and perilous rather than heroic and perilous, and more. Overall, the advice is good, but it does leave the basics to the Warhammer Age of Sigmar: Soulbound Starter Set. This does leave Soulbound with a disparity between the ease and lighter nature of the rules and the more advanced nature of the Game Master advice, as if the Game Master should be able to pick this book up and easily run a game from its pages without needing to refer to another product in order to learn how to use it.

Physically, Warhammer Age of Sigmar – Soulbound: Perilous Adventures in the Mortal Realms is very well presented with lots of excellent artwork. It is well written and benefits from lots of examples.

Warhammer Age of Sigmar – Soulbound: Perilous Adventures in the Mortal Realms offers both a new set of dice mechanics for playing in the Warhammer universe and a new—to roleplaying—setting within with universe. With it comes a lighter, faster set of rules and a more heroic style of play as well as a setting that is nicely detailed, but not as accessible as others in the Warhammer universe. This is due to the lack of familiarity with it and the differences between it and the Old World, as well as the lack of a scenario which would have provided a way into the setting of the Mortal Realms. What this means is that it requires some adjustment, because Soulbound really is its own thing in terms of roleplaying and has relatively little in common with its forebear, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. The easier, faster style of play could have been eased with advice on why player would want to roleplay a particular archetype and there could have more options for humans compared to the other species. Lastly the lack of scenario also hampers that process, intentionally speedy, of getting into the game.
For the player and the Game Master who wants to get out of the mud and muck of a grim and perilous world, and take a heroic stand, push the fight forwards, and face the forces of Chaos, the Dark Lords, and the undead in righteous fury and make a difference—as heroes—in the Warhammer universe, then Warhammer Age of Sigmar – Soulbound: Perilous Adventures in the Mortal Realms is exactly what they want. High fantasy in a heroic and perilous world.
For the player and the Game Master who wants to get out of the mud and muck of a grim and perilous world, and take a heroic stand, push the fight forwards, and face the forces of Chaos, the Dark Lords, and the undead in righteous fury and make a difference—as heroes—in the Warhammer universe, then Warhammer Age of Sigmar – Soulbound: Perilous Adventures in the Mortal Realms is exactly what they want. High fantasy in a heroic and perilous world.

1974 is an important year for the gaming hobby. It is the year that Dungeons & Dragons was introduced, the original RPG from which all other RPGs would ultimately be derived and the original RPG from which so many computer games would draw for their inspiration. It is fitting that the current owner of the game, Wizards of the Coast, released the new version, Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, in the year of the game’s fortieth anniversary. To celebrate this, Reviews from R’lyeh will be running a series of reviews from the hobby’s anniversary years, thus there will be reviews from 1974, from 1984, from 1994, and from 2004—the thirtieth, twentieth, and tenth anniversaries of the titles. These will be retrospectives, in each case an opportunity to re-appraise interesting titles and true classics decades on from the year of their original release.

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En Garde! is one of the first five roleplaying games to be published and it was the first to be published by Game Designer’s Workshop. It was not the first historical roleplaying game—that likely would have been Boot Hill from TSR, Inc., published like En Garde! in 1975—but subtitled, “Being in the Main a Game of the Life and Times of a Gentleman Adventurer and his Several Companions”, it was definitely the first swashbuckling roleplaying game and the first to emphasis what a Player Character was doing socially and what a Player Character’s social status and standing was. Although it began life as a set of rules for handling duels, the expanded rules provided the scope for roleplaying as gentlemen attended their clubs and caroused and quaffed and gambled, spied pretty ladies and courted them as potential mistresses, joined a regiment and went off on campaign to fight either the Habsburgs, the Spanish, or the Protestants, aiming to win prestige, promotion, and position, all the whilst attempting to maintain sufficient monies to support themselves and their mistresses in the lifestyles they have become accustomed and want to become accustomed to! There is always the danger of death and penury, and insults flung, leading to a duel and its consequences.

Yet, En Garde! has always been overlooked as a roleplaying game and may not even be a roleplaying game in the traditional sense of even the Dungeons & Dragons of 1974. There are good reasons for this. The game play is rarely one of being sat round the table in the traditional sense because a player programs the actions of his character a month in advance. There is none of the immediacy of a traditional roleplaying game, no back and forth between the players and their characters, or indeed between the players, their characters, and the Game Master’s NPCs. Nor is there a real strong sense of place, since the Player Characters move between locations automatically, whether between their club and their barracks, between their mistress’ apartments and the duelling ground, and between Paris and wherever the French army is in campaign. Consequently, En Garde! abstracts France rather giving it any sense of place or geography.

Consequently, the baton of the swashbuckling genre and the period of Alexander Dumas’ The Three Musketeers would be taken up other roleplaying games, most notably Flashing Blades from Fantasy Games Unlimited. Yet En Garde! has had a long life of its own parallel to the roleplaying hobby. This is because its pre-programmed style of play lent itself very easily to what was then Play by Mail, turns and results being sent and received through the mail, and more recently Play by E-Mail. It thus found a home in fanzines devoted to postal games such as Chess and Diplomacy. The current owner of En Garde! began running postal games of En Garde!, and convention games of it, before becoming the publisher.

To be fair, just because the game is played in a procedural fashion, it does not mean that it is truly lacking roleplaying possibilities. En Garde! does have a definitive aim for every Player Characters and that is to acquire better social standing and status—and keep it. That desire to better oneself and maintain it drives a Player Character’s decisions and how he reacts to the outcomes of those decisions and those of the other Player Characters, and it is this space that En Garde! has scope for roleplaying? If a Player Character discovers another man has been courting his mistress, what should he do? If facing certain death on the field of battle, an act of poltroonery might save him, but should the act be exposed, should the Player Character challenge his accusers to a duel and protect his honour or confess and suffer the consequences? As a King’s Musketeer, what insults should he be taunting members of the Cardina’s guard with? Answering them spurs a roleplaying response in character, even if only written down, and in being written, unlike in most roleplaying games, you have a specific chronicle of the actions, reactions, and responses of all of the Player Characters.

A Player Character in En Garde! is simply defined. He has four stats, Strength, Expertise, Constitution, and Endurance. The first three are rolled on three six-sided dice, whilst Endurance is determined by multiplying Strength by Constitution. Strength is a Player Character’s ability to inflict damage, Expertise his skill with a sword, Constitution his health, and Endurance his ability to withstand punishment. His Social Level is determined by rolling on tables for his Birth, Sibling Rank, Father’s Position, and Father’s Title (if Noble). His Military Ability, used when he is on campaign, is rolled a single six-sided die.

Our sample Player Character, Cyrille Mageau, is of a very lowly origins, with barely a Louis d’or to his name. His lack of status means that his prospects are equally as low, but Cyril is ambitious and not without potential. Given his very high Military Ability, his best option is to enlist and prove himself on campaign. If he is successful there, he may improve his fortunes in Paris.

Cyrille Mageau
Social Level: 1
Class: Commoner
Sibling Rank: Bastard
Father’s Position: Peasant
Strength 09 Expertise 13 Constitution 13 Endurance 117
Military Ability: 6
Initial Funds: 9 Allowance: 0 Inheritance: 0

Mechanically, En Garde! does not really offer much in the way that looks like a roleplaying game. It starts by offering the mechanics out of which the rest of the game grew. These are the duelling rules, with participants programming manoeuvres such as Close, Cut, Slash, Lunge, Throw, and more. This is written out in a sequence of letters as a routine, for example, ‘-X-L-X-’ for a Lunge, ‘-CL-K-X-X-X-’ for Kick, ‘-P-(R)-’ for Parry and possible Riposte, and so on, with the ‘X’ standing for Rest or Guard. These sequences are then compared step-by-step and the results determined, with duellist’s Strength, manoeuvre, and weapon type. The latter includes rapier, dagger, foil, sabre, cutlass, and even two-handed sword! A duellist who has a lower Swordsmanship—later called Expertise—will be slower against a duellist who has a higher Swordsmanship, and this is represented by the player having to be put in more ‘X’s. Duels are played out until one participant either surrenders or is killed. Winners will gain Status Points and Social Levels in general, depending upon the Status Points and Social Levels of the participants.

The actual play structure is based on four weeks per month, three months per season, and four seasons per year. A player will program his character’s activities four weeks at a time. These could be to a club with a friend, practice with a weapon, carouse at a bawdyhouse, and court a mistress. A Player Character can also join clubs, gamble, take out loans, join a regiment, and so on. The aim throughout is for the Player Character to maintain his Social Level at the very least, but really the aim is to increase his Social Level. To do this he needs to acquire Status Points. If at the end of a month, the Player Character has acquired Status Points equal to his current Social Level, he maintains it, but he acquires Status Points three times the next Social Level, he can increase it. Just as a Player Character can rise in Social Level, he can also fall, but he will also be seeking out actions that will gain him Status Points. Being a member of a club, carousing, toadying to someone of higher Social Level, successfully gambling, winning duels—especially members of rival regiments, and belonging to a regiment. Actions such as losing when gambling, losing duels, and not spending enough money to maintain his Social Level will lose a Player Character Status Points and his Social Level. Most of these actions will cost a Player Character money. Most Player Characters have some income, but can gain more from gambling, taking out a loan, making successful investments, receiving an inheritance, being in the military and returning from a campaign with plunder. Conversely, loss of loss money and income will lead to bankruptcy and a Player Character enlisting in a lowly frontier regiment in the hope of restoring his name and fortune.

Once per year, members of a regiment will have to go on campaign for a complete season. There is a chance of a Player Character being killed in battle, but he could try to be heroic and make a name for himself, get mentioned in dispatches, get promoted, and take some battlefield plunder. Being mentioned in dispatches gains a Player Character national recognition and ongoing Status Points. In the long term, a Player Character can apply for various positions in both the military and the government. For example, being appointed regimental adjutant, Army Quartermaster-General, or Inspector-General of the Infantry, or Commissioner of Public Safety, Minster of War, or Minister Without Portfolio. Titles can also be won. Once a Player Character achieves a high position, he gains some Influence that can be used to help others.

Of course, En Garde! is a profoundly masculine game. As the subtitle says, it is, “Being in the Main a Game of the Life and Times of a Gentleman Adventurer and his Several Companions”. Women are not really characters at all, merely dalliances there to prove a Player Character’s masculinity and bolster his social standing. It is difficult to get around this, since the role of women both at the time when En Garde! is set and in the fiction it draws upon, is not as protagonists, but even as in some cases in both, as antagonists.

En Garde! is not a roleplaying game that looks beyond achieving high rank, position, or social status. So, there is a limit to how much play potential there is beyond this. Certainly, in a typical group of players, this would be the case. In a larger group, there is greater room for maneuvering and jostling for status and rivalry with players being members of rival regiments, competing for the same positions, even for the same mistresses, and so on. This lends itself to play at a club if it has plenty of members or simply playing with a more dispersed group of players by mail—electronic or otherwise.
One way in which En Garde! is not a roleplaying game is in how little scope there is for the players to roleplay and affect the world around the characters through roleplaying. Perhaps through delivering an insult to a member of a rival from another regiment? Further, players will find themselves playing at odds with each other when they join rival regiments or compete for the same mistress or position. In some ways, to get the most out of En Garde! it is best for the players to play characters who are rivals and so it is adversarial to one degree or another.

Physically, En Garde! is surprisingly well presented and written. Illustrated with a mix of period pieces, the only real downside is that it starts talking about duels rather than characters and what they do and who interact with each other beyond duels. This organisation lends itself to the idea that the rest of the rules grew out of wanting more to the game and more reasons to duel.

—oOo— It appears that En Garde! was never reviewed in the roleplaying hobby press, though it was covered by magazines and publications devoted to games. The designer and publisher, Charles Vasey reviewed it in Games & Puzzles Issue 55 (December 1976) saying that GDW has, “…[P]icked a really splendid period for the new duelling game.” He was critical though, saying, “Despite its complexity, the system does not play as well as one might think. Often duels end very swiftly.” and “It is complex and convoluted, and it feels like real life. Players will soon find they have natural enemies and rivals who must be crushed directly or by a hired blade. One must seek to be in the best set, but beware bankruptcy or it’s the frontier regiment and disgrace until you pay off your debts.”

Similarly, games designer Greg Costikyan reviewed En Garde! in ‘Games fen will Play’ in Fantastic Science Fiction. Vol. 27, No. 10. (July 1980). He was very positive, calling En Garde! “[T]he the first well-written set of role-playing rules.... En Garde! was the first role-playing game by a major company and by established designers; and, as one might expect, it set new standards for role-playing rules — standards to which few subsequent games have risen.”

Perhaps the oddest vehicle for a review was The Playboy Winner’s Guide to Board Games (Playboy Press, 1979). Author John Jackson said that, “There is a minimum of player interaction; play is geared toward individual deeds rather than group action.”, but that, “Although lacking neither color nor detail, the rules to En Garde! are clear and comprehensible.” He concluded that, “If it lacks the scope of true fantasy role-playing games, it’s not as time-consuming, either, and it appears to be a pleasant diversion.”—oOo—
En Garde! is not a roleplaying game per se. There is more of a simulation to it, a means of modelling the life of an officer and gentlemen in the early seventeenth century as he makes his way in life and attempt to better himself. Yet like any simulation, the result of dice rolls on the roleplaying game’s various tables sets up interesting, intriguing, and involving results that draw you in and make you want to explore how to resolve them and how to respond to them. This is where the roleplaying potential lies in En Garde!, even if it is not written to support roleplaying and all but ignores it. Ultimately, it has been shown again and again, in multiple games, all this is best handled and roleplayed away from the table and at distance, whether by mail or email.

—oOo—
The current version of En Garde! is available here.

Now in its eighteenth year, Free RPG Day for 2025 took place on Saturday, June 21st. As per usual, Free RPG Day consisted of an array of new and interesting little releases, which are traditionally tasters for forthcoming games to be released at GenCon the following August, but others are support for existing RPGs or pieces of gaming ephemera or a quick-start. This included dice, miniatures, vouchers, and more. Thanks to the generosity of Waylands Forge in Birmingham, Reviews from R’lyeh was able to get hold of many of the titles released for Free RPG Day.

—oOo—

Arkham Horror: Comets of Kingsport – A Quickstart Adventure is the contribution to Free RPG Day 2025 from Edge Studio. It is a quick-start and scenario for Arkham Horror: The Roleplaying Game, the roleplaying game of Lovecraftian investigative horror derived from Arkham Horror board game and Arkham Horror Living Card game from Fantasy Flight Games, both of which are derived from the original version of the Arkham Horror board game published by Chaosium, Inc. in 1987. Ultimately, Arkham Horror: The Roleplaying Game shares a great deal of setting elements with Call of Cthulhu, but they are not the same roleplaying game. Mechanically, Arkham Horror: The Roleplaying Game has more in common with the GUMSHOE System of Trail of Cthulhu from Pelgrane Press, but plays very differently. Whilst Trail of Cthulhu leans more into a Purist style of play emphasising an atmosphere of menace and growing as a default, Arkham Horror: The Roleplaying Game—at least as far as the Arkham Horror: Comets of Kingsport – A Quickstart Adventure is concerned—is more of a Pulp affair, playing up action and adventure and including Investigators who are not only aware of the Mythos, but also know a few spells too. There are elements too, drawn from EDGE Studio’s Genesys System, used to handle the perils of investigating the Mythos.
Arkham Horror: Comets of Kingsport – A Quickstart Adventure includes everything that a gaming group needs. It explains the rules, provides a full scenario that can be played in a single session or so, and gives a set of six pre-generated Investigators. Apart from copies of the pre-generated Investigators, the only thing it needs is a set of six six-sided per player, plus a lot more for the Keeper and some dice of a different colour. Arkham Horror: Comets of Kingsport – A Quickstart Adventure and Arkham Horror: The Roleplaying Game use what is called the ‘Dynamic Pool System’. An Investigator is primarily defined by ten skills—Agility, Athletics, Intuition, Knowledge, Lore, Melee Combat, Presence, Ranged Combat, Resolve, and Wits. Of these, Lore is how much an Investigator knows about the occult and how to apply it, if necessary. Skills are rated between two and six. He has a variety of Knacks, special abilities that might grant him extra dice, alter the number of dice rolled, allow special actions, cast spells, rerolls of the dice, and more. There is a wide variety of Knacks, even presented in the six pre-generated Investigators in Arkham Horror: Comets of Kingsport – A Quickstart Adventure.
Lastly, an Investigator has a pool of six-sided dice, typically six. These are used and refreshed from one scene to the next and they represent a combination of an Investigator’s effort and health. In the case of the latter, when an Investigator is injured, he loses dice, limiting his actions until he can rest, heal, and receive medical attention.
When a player wants his Investigator to undertake a Complex action, such as climbing a fence in a chase, shooting cultist in a gunfight, researching a newspaper morgue for clues, or casting a spell, he takes as many dice as he wants from his pool and rolls them, comparing the results with the skill being used. For each die result equal to, or greater than, the value of the skill, a success is scored. In general, only a single success is required to achieve whatever an Investigator wants to do, but more successes are needed to trigger the effects of some Knacks. For example, Silas Marsh has ‘Skilled Shot’ and can throw a harpoon as a ranged combat action, and if his player rolls three successes, the target cannot use a reaction to avoid the attack. (This is in addition to the weapon itself, which inflicts a base of two damage—most weapons inflict one or two points of damage, and if three or more success are rolled on an attack, in Injury is inflicted and extra damage is inflicted per Injury, making it a very deadly weapon.) Complex actions can also be rolled with Advantage or Disadvantage, rolling with one more or one less die in either case.
In addition, an Investigator has a supply of Insight points. These can be spent to add an additional success to a complex action, take a Complex Action with Advantage, to add a narrative element to a scene, or to avoid certain trauma.
Play itself in Arkham Horror: The Roleplaying Game is handled as a series of scenes, either Narrative or Structured scenes in which Simple and Complex Actions are attempted. Narrative scenes rarely involve peril, and allow an Investigator to undertake Simple Actions without his player needing to roll dice, whereas Structured scenes do involve peril or great difficulty, such as a combat scene or a confrontation with the Mythos, require a player to roll for both Simple and Complex Actions. Although a player only has access to six dice in his pool—or less depending upon trauma and Injury, this pool refreshes from one scene to the next, and in combat, they are refreshed at the start of an Investigator’s turn. In combat, damage is inflicted in two ways. Primarily by reducing a defendant’s dice pool, limiting his capacity to act, wounding him if the dice pool is reduced to zero, after which he can strain himself to restore his dice pool to full at the cost of suffering an Injury. The other way is by a weapon specifically inflicting an Injury. Injuries are determined by rolling on the Injury Table. These are rolled on a single die, to which are added the number of injuries already suffered. Since the Injury roll is made on a single die, it takes a lot of injuries—at least five—before someone can be killed straight off. There is no little grievous Injury in the meantime, but it is difficult to kill a defendant and certainly an Investigator.
The way of handling Horror Damage or exposure to the cosmic truths of the universe is more interesting, though similar to that used for injuries. When an Investigator suffers Horror Damage—whether from a spell cast at him, seeing a creature of the Mythos, or reading a horrific tome—his player replaces a number of dice in his dice pool with Horror Dice equal to the Horror Damage suffered. Horror Dice work exactly like normal dice in a player’s dice pool and can be lost if an Investigator suffers damage. However, should a player roll a one on any single Horror Die, his Investigator gains a Trauma. The rolls a single die and consults the Trauma Table, adding one for each one rolled on the Horror Dice. Where an Investigator is physically resilient, the same cannot be said mentally. It is a lot easier in comparison to get Horror Dice, roll ones, and suffer Trauma and since there are fewer results on the Trauma Table, for an Investigator to be ‘Lost Forever’.
Horror Dice can be healed from one round to the next, as well as by certain Knacks and spells, replacing them with standard dice. This is an action though and in a Structured Scene, the Investigators might not have the opportunity. Whereas injuries can be healed though, traumas cannot, although they can recede over time. The combination of Horror Dice and Trauma is intriguing as a means of handling the escalating danger of being exposed to cosmic threat, but it does feel undercut by the ability to heal Horror Dice within a scene.
In terms of pre-generated Investigators, Arkham Horror: Comets of Kingsport – A Quickstart Adventure gives six. They include a clever and helpful postal woman; strong sailor armed with a harpoon; a student with first aid skills and good at improvising weapons; a librarian who can cast spells and draw upon the horrors she has seen to gain Horror Dice and bonus dice to a roll; a prepared researcher who is good with people; and a professor who can choose to suffer an Injury or Horror Dice and who is also a skilled shot. All also have a section of equipment and besides a short background, there is also an explanation of the basic rules and the use of Insight on the back. All of the Investigators have travelled to Kingsport, some of them from Arkham’s Miskatonic University, to conduct an anthropological survey in the New England port. Players with a bit of history with roleplaying games of Lovecraftian investigative horror will appreciate that the professor in the included Investigators is none other than Harvey Walters, who appeared as the sample Investigator for the first time all the way back in the first edition of Call of Cthulhu.
The included scenario in Arkham Horror: Comets of Kingsport – A Quickstart Adventure opens with the Investigators visiting the Hall School in Kingsport to examine its rare book collection. Both the school secretary and the headmaster are welcoming, but they are concerned about a member of staff, Cecil Blackburn, who has been behaving oddly, even erratically. When they encounter him, he is found in a bath of salt water, weirdly mishappen, and rage-fuelled! The question is, what has happened to him? The plot and clues link to other citizens of Kingsport acting strangely and ultimately to somewhere otherworldly and further confrontation with something even stranger. It is a solid mix of investigation and interaction leavened with some action, decently presented and written. The primary difficulty with the scenario is the need to make slight adjustments to the plot links with fewer players and Investigators.
Physically, Arkham Horror: Comets of Kingsport – A Quickstart Adventure is decently presented and written. The artwork is disappointingly restricted to just the front cover and the Investigator illustrations, but still very good. A map or two might have been useful, whether of Kingsport or the scene of the scenario’s climax, and it does feel odd that the scenario is presented before the rules are explained.
Arkham Horror: Comets of Kingsport – A Quickstart Adventure provides everything that a group will need to try out Arkham Horror: The Roleplaying Game. It is accessible and comes with a decent investigative and interactive scenario that has a certain weirdness to it. The rules are clearly explained and easy to grasp with a good explanation of the ‘Dynamic Pool System’ on the back of each Investigator sheet, making them also easily accessible. The ‘Dynamic Pool System’ itself lies at the lighter and Pulpier end of the Lovecraftian investigative horror spectrum, both mechanically and thematically. The Investigators are tougher and even augmented in comparison to other roleplaying games of Lovecraftian investigative horror spectrum and because of this, the likelihood is that Arkham Horror: Comets of Kingsport – A Quickstart Adventure is going to divide its intended audience very much along the Purist-Pulp faultline.

It is rare that scenarios are set during the period of the Spanish Inquisition, despite it lasting over three-hundred-and-fifty years. ‘Fires of Hatred Defile the Sky’ from Red Eye of Azathoth, a singular foray into the Cthulhu Mythos for Kobold Press, and Chaosium, Inc.’s ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ from Strange Aeons, both published for Call of Cthulhu, are exceptions. Medieval Mysteries takes gamers back to early period of the Spanish Inquisition with two scenarios designed to be played in two hours each. The first is ‘The Shroud of Pestilence’ in which the Player Characters investigate what looks to be an outbreak of the Black Death in a nearby village, but which turns out to be something else, whilst in ‘Heresy’, they attempt to save a group of conversos—Jews who converted to Christianity—from what is effectively, two monsters! This is all packaged with a framing device which lends itself to an ongoing campaign. Published by Yeti Spaghetti and Friends, Medieval Mysteries is a duology of short play time, one-night horror scenarios, the first entry in the series of historical horror adventures in the publisher’s ‘Frightshow Classics’ line. Ostensibly written for use with Chill or Cryptworld: Chilling Adventures into the Unexplained, the percentile mechanics of the scenario mean that it could easily be adapted to run with Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition and similar roleplaying games.
Medieval Mysteries is set in Spain in about 1490. Whilst the Kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, as well as much of Spain, are united through marriage of Queen Isabella I (of Castile) and King Ferdinand II (of Aragon), but they remain separate entities. What unites the Iberian peninsula is religion and the growing power of the Inquisition under the command of Inquisitor General Tomas de Torquemada which not only enforces Catholic orthodoxy, but also investigates possible acts of heresy, apostasy, blasphemy, witchcraft, and customs considered to be deviant—often in the most violent of ways. As a default, the Player Characters are all associated with the Santa Maria de Soria monastery, some hundred miles or so north-east of Madrid. The monastery offers a place of relative safety, but hides its own benign secrets. It is led by an abbot whose gift of foresight enables him to see paranormal abilities in others and dangers elsewhere, directing such individuals to seek out, investigate, and defeat supernatural and monstrous threats. Such efforts have to be conducted with great care, since any paranormal ability would be regarded by the Inquisition as mysticism and thus heresy.
In addition to a brief description of the monastery, Medieval Mysteries describes two new skills and two new paranormal abilities. The two new skills are Blacksmithing and Religious Mysticism, which will be of a specific faith, like Taoist Mysticism or Judaic Mysticism. The paranormal abilities are Exorcism and True Sight, both of which are likely to find their way into other scenarios. The pre-generated Player Characters consist of a mix of monks, nuns, and peasants, some with paranormal abilities, some without, but all with some background, a description, and a phobia. Perhaps the only thing missing here is advice on creating Player Characters suitable for the period and setting, since the set-up lends itself to a campaign in the style of The X-Files, but set in medieval Spain.
In ‘Adventure 1: The Shroud of Pestilence’, the Player Characters are directed to the village of Herrero which he initially believed to be suffering from an outbreak of the plague, but after receiving a vision, believes that there is an evil dark shadow looming over both it and its inhabitants. He wants them to investigate the possibility of the infernal. The Player Characters will initially encounter a plague doctor attempting to treat the terrible symptoms. The Player Characters get to examine the bodies that have not yet been buried and examine them for the terrible signs of the plague and interview the very concerned remaining villagers. Although many suspect that the devil himself is responsible, but very quickly, the Player Characters should discover signs indicating that something else is responsible, more monstrous than devilish. The Sense Monsters paranormal skill will be useful confronting this creature.
Despite its brevity, ‘Adventure 1: The Shroud of Pestilence’ packs in a decent amount of investigation and interaction before the Player Characters ascend into the hills and the second half of the scenario, which involves a confrontation with the culprit. This is a combat scene in a cave, a nasty encounter that has a chance, more or less, of instantly killing a Player Character, and that is even before the battle commences. Only one of the Player Characters is equipped with an effective weapon, so he should absolutely be selected. Ultimately, the players and their characters should try and get the creature out of its comfort zone, otherwise, a ‘Total Party Kill’ is a possibility. Which is fine for a one-shot, but not if the players want to continue playing their characters in the next scenario.
In ‘Adventure 2: Heresy’, the abbot sends the Player Characters to the city of Sigüenza where he has learned the Inquisition is about to begin an investigation into rumours of heresy and witchcraft among the conversos, those Jews who converted to Christianity. The abbot wants the Player Characters to investigate such rumours before the Inquisition begins its own heavy-handed inquiries. Talking to people in the converso quarter of the city will reveal that there is a young woman who talks to herself. Use of paranormal may confirm more and if confronted, she will tell the Player Characters that there is heresy being committed in the city, but not amongst the conversos. Rather it is occurring in the St. Jerome Monastery attached to the College of San Antonio de Portaceli, the city’s famed university.
‘Adventure 2: Heresy’ follows the same format as ‘Adventure 1: The Shroud of Pestilence’, but the combat encounter is not quite as deadly and does not mark the end of the scenario. Ideally, it should end with a trial of the culprit after the Player Characters have captured him, with them giving testimony against him. This is not the only way that the scenario can end, another possibility being trials of the conversos. Either way, the Game Master will need to run this to best effect, perhaps playing up the drama and theatre of any such trial more than the scenario does, which really only provides broad details. Overall, ‘Adventure 2: Heresy’ is a more sophisticated and more interesting affair than ‘Adventure 1: The Shroud of Pestilence’. The only thing that the Game Master might want to do is create some Inquisition NPCs as none are provided.
Physically, Medieval Mysteries is a decent looking affair behind a somewhere murky cover. The artwork inside is reasonable and the scenarios are generally well written. The cartography is plain and serviceable.
Both scenarios in Medieval Mysteries end in a little sign-off as if presented by the host of a late-night horror anthology series, so making them slightly different to traditional horror roleplaying scenarios. There is an ominous threat of lurking power and paranoia that pervades both scenarios, though definitely more so in the second scenario than the first. The short, two-hour running time for both scenarios does also means that ‘Adventure 2: Heresy’ is underwritten given no stats for the Inquisitors and the lack of staging for the trial. Nevertheless, it is the better and more interesting of the two scenarios in the book. Overall, the brevity of both scenarios in Medieval Mysteries means that they are easy to prepare and run, with scope to develop them a little further and scope to explore the setting in future releases.

For every Ptolus: City by the Spire or Zweihander: Grim & Perilous Roleplaying or World’s Largest Dungeon or Invisible Sun—the desire to make the biggest or most compressive roleplaying game, campaign, or adventure, there is the opposite desire—to make the smallest roleplaying game or adventure. Reindeer Games’ TWERPS (The World's Easiest Role-Playing System) is perhaps one of the earliest examples of this, but more recent examples might include the Micro Chapbook series or the Tiny D6 series. Yet even these are not small enough and there is the drive to make roleplaying games smaller, often in order to answer the question, “Can I fit a roleplaying game on a postcard?” or “Can I fit a roleplaying game on a business card?” And just as with roleplaying games, this ever-shrinking format has been used for scenarios as well, to see just how much adventure can be packed into as little space as possible. Recent examples of these include The Isle of Glaslyn, The God With No Name, and Bastard King of Thraxford Castle, all published by Leyline Press.

The Pocket Sized Perils series uses the same A4 sheet folded down to A6 as the titles from Leyline Press, or rather the titles from Leyline Press use the same A4 sheet folded down to A6 sheet as Pocket Sized Perils series. Funded via a Kickstarter campaign as part of the inaugural ZineQuest—although it debatable whether the one sheet of paper folded down counts as an actual fanzine—this is a series of six mini-scenarios designed for use with Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, but actually rules light enough to be used with any retroclone, whether that is the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game or Old School Essentials. Just because it says ‘5e’ on the cover, do not let that dissuade you from taking a look at this series and see whether individual entries can be added to your game. The mechanics are kept to a minimum, the emphasis is on the Player Characters and their decisions, and the actual adventures are fully drawn and sketched out rather than being all text and maps.

Flaming Fandango in Faratusa is the sixth and final entry in the Pocket Sized Perils series following on from An Ambush in Avenwood, The Beast of Bleakmarsh, Call of the Catacombs, and Death in Dinglebrook, and Echoes of Ebonthul. Designed for Sixth Level Player Characters, this is essentially a fantasy version of Ocean's Eleven, a heist at a big party—rather than a casino—and up front, it is a lot of fun with all of the clichés of the genre left in and it has quite possibly the most Australian of titles! Further, the fact that it contains all of the clichés means that it is easy to run and it is easy to adapt, whether that is to another fantasy genre or roleplaying game or to another genre or roleplaying game all together.
The scenario opens on the night of a masquerade ball hosted by Ortolan, the Governor of Faratusa in honour of Sir Aroldo Tuft, who recently defeated the infamous Fire Chain Pirates and returned with the Salt-Ember Crown. Its set-up quickly throws the Player Characters into the action, with the Game Master being expected to ask their players some questions that somehow link them to Governor Ortolan, establish rumours about the Salt-Ember Crown, and explain how they got into the party, and then giving the players fifteen minutes to devise a plan to get into the vault where the Salt-Ember Crown is being held, get hold of it, and then get out of the governor’s mansion. After that, the scenario begins with the party in full swing, the masked guests enjoying themselves, and the governor’s newly installed Brass Servant automata providing both security and silver (brass) service.
After that, Flaming Fandango in Faratusa is all about whatever the Player Character want to do and how they want to go about the heist in what is a very player driven encounter. Stats and details are provided for Governor Ortolan, Sir Aroldo Tuft, and the governor’s Brass Servants, including in the case of the latter, what they do in the vent that they encounter an anomaly, such as the Player Characters being in the wrong place. There are tables two for random guests, things that the Player Characters might find in the process of searching the governor’s mansion, and for tracking increased security by the Brass Servants. Space constraints mean that the tables for both the guests and the items found are short, so the Game Master might want to expand these to add more colour and detail to the building and the party itself.
So far, so good, but the expanding and unfolding nature of design to the Pocket Sized Perils series is used to very good effect in Flaming Fandango in Faratusa. Flip through the first few pages and everything looks fine, but the first unfold opens up to reveal a fantastic map of all three floors to the governor’s mansion. Done in three dimensions, it has enough detail for the Game Master to describe each room or location in broad details, but leaves her to interpret the specifics. Overall, the look of the governor’s mansion is slightly Italianate and since it sits on the docks, it feels as if it should be in a Pirates of the Caribbean film (the scenario would be a great addition to a Pirate Borg game). Yet, Flaming Fandango in Faratusa is not done for there is one last reveal as the whole of the scenario pulls open for one last reveal. This is what is actually in the vault and the secret plans of some of the guests at the party upstairs! The revelations are anything other than astounding, but they fit the style of the scenario and its set-up to a tee.

Physically, Flaming Fandango in Faratusa is very nicely presented, being more drawn than actually written. It has a nice sense of scale and the combination of having been drawn and the cartoonish artwork with the high quality of the paper stock also gives Flaming Fandango in Faratusa a physical feel which feels genuinely good in the hand. Its small size means that it is very easy to transport.

As written, Flaming Fandango in Faratusa is a serviceable scenario, but not a standout one, since the set-up and plot are familiar. That does mean though, that it is easy to run and easy to adapt to other genres and roleplaying games. Yet Flaming Fandango in Faratusa is elevated by its format which quickly presents the Game Master with its set-up and various details before allowing the Game Master to pull it apart to reveal first the locations for the scenario and then second, the plot complications. There is a lovely sense of a story being told also in these reveals, but of course, the Player Characters are going to tell everyone ultimately, how their heist plays out. It is sad that just as the author seemed to master the format of the Pocket Size Perils, Flaming Fandango in Faratusa marked the end of the series. It is a good design with which to end the series though.

Features / August 14, 2025

Mike and Kelly believe the Dude really ties the room together. Richard’s a fuckin’ nihilist.

GRASSO: I hate Top Whatever lists.

Not the kind of Top X lists that are based on sales or airplay or objective criteria or what have you, but being asked to come up with, say, a Top 20 Personal Albums or Sports Figures or, indeed, Favorite Movies of All Time. How am I supposed to do that? My opinions on movies can sometimes change during the course of a single (re)viewing or conversation with someone! Also, there’s that whole “putting your intimate aesthetic tastes out there to be judged” thing that I’m constantly afraid of doing. Especially with respect to film, which seems to have one of the most contentious communities online these days. So, naturally, when Kelly asked each of us to come up with “20 Films for the Rest of Your Life,” I was grumblingly resistant. I still don’t know how I ended up being the one who finished his list first!

My process entailed just thinking about the movies I’ve watched most, and picking which ones I would still need to have a copy of in Kelly’s “desert island” situation. Then I filled some of the holes in with oddball personal choices and films that, as I was considering my “bubble” of movies in the low-20s, that I just couldn’t bear to see out of contention. I’m incredibly self-conscious about the aesthetic and genre elements of the movies on this list, but I’m sure I’ll get a chance to expand on and justify my choices in my next turn. Here you go, then: Mike Grasso’s Top 20 Movies of, yes, All Time.

Persona (1966)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii (1972)
Network (1976)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Apocalypse Now (1979)
UFOs Are Real (1979)
Blade Runner (1982)
Videodrome (1983)
Manhunter (1986)
Goodfellas (1990)
JFK (1991)
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)
Casino (1995)
Boogie Nights (1997)
The Big Lebowski (1998)
24 Hour Party People (2002)
Inherent Vice (2014)
Mandy (2018)
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

MCKENNA: Jesus Christ. While very much not the first time Kelly has demanded we do something excruciating, he definitely raised the bar with the outrageousness of this one. Once you’re over 50, what is the likelihood of having less than, say, a hundred “favorites” of anything—if you even still like it all? I probably have more than 20 ailments that I’m sort of fond of.

But this weasel-words “You Can Only Watch 20 Films for the Rest of Your Life” phrasing has allowed wily lowlife Roberts to cunningly avoid the inevitable refusal to cooperate that a request for a top 20 would have elicited while, as Mike has pointed out, making the selection even more embarrassingly revealing of the limits of and gaps in one’s own actual tastes. It feels like taking off my jumper at the third year end-of-term disco to reveal the Genesis “Shapes” tee I was wearing underneath it. 

Anyway, the older I get, the less “stories” and “plots” and “resolution” feel relevant to the experience of existing, so I’m going to go with films I love and have either seen loads of times or not enough times and which basically put me into a fugue state while also pressing the specific aesthetic buttons inside me that I like having pushed. There are films I’ve loved very much since childhood, like CE3K and Star Wars, that I’d have put in, but I’ve seen them so many times I think I’ve basically internalized them—I don’t think I need to watch them again, they’re kind of part of the architecture of my brain at this point. 

But anyway, how about we make it thirty?

This Island Earth (1955)
Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
THX 1138 (1971)
The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973)
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974)
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
Eraserhead (1977)
Stalker (1979)
Alien (1979)
The Fog (1980)
Southern Comfort (1981)
Litan (1982)
The Dead Zone (1983)
Manhunter (1986)
Sonatine (1993)
Solaris (2002)
Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)
Dredd (2012)
Evolution (2015)
Petite Maman (2021)

(Okay, great—Kelly’s just informed me that, according to his made-up rules, TV movies aren’t actually movies. Meaning presumably TV dinners aren’t dinners either? That means I can no longer include the film I was planning to include—Journey Through the Black Sun, the amazing Space: 1999 “TV movie” that was made by cobbling together a couple of episodes of the TV show. Fine, let’s just not include one of the greatest human artifacts ever just because, why not. Okay, fuck it, you know what I’m going to include? The 2012 Dredd. So stick that in your pipe and smoke it, brother Rico.)

We all have Alien, right? Right?

ROBERTS: Listen, I don’t know what you guys are complaining about: one of my movies revolves around inept dinosaur puppets. I’ve been laid bare once again. Yes, it’s basically the “desert island” experiment, but in my version you can’t bullshit and say you want Bitches Brew for that last slot when you really want Toto IV (yes, I know, they’re both great albums). As Richard says, this exercise is “embarrassingly revealing of the limits of and gaps in one’s own actual tastes.” That’s the point. You won’t find any Godard or Kurosawa or Altman films on this list not because I don’t admire those directors, but because, if I had to choose, I’d rather watch spiky-haired Kevin Bacon save a small, god-fearing town from dancelessness. If I were in my twenties, my list would look incredibly different; I might even have chosen (bravely, or rashly) 20 movies I’d never seen before. But I just turned 50-something and, you know what?—I want to watch the films that still, after a lifetime of watching films, move me, or simply make me happy. 

Think about the list strategically. It’s for the rest of your life! What will you watch when you’re sad? When you’re high? When the holidays roll around? When you’ve got the flu? When you want to believe in magic? When you need to believe that goodness prevails? When you want to visit a future that you won’t be around to see?

These are not the 20 greatest films ever made. These are the 20 films I can’t live without. 

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
The Poseidon Adventure (1972)
The Land That Time Forgot (1974)
Star Wars (1977)
Watership Down (1978)
Alien (1979)
The Black Hole (1979)
Escape from New York (1981)
Blade Runner (1982)
E.T. (1982)
Mad Max 2 (1982)
The Thing (1982)
Footloose (1984)
The Karate Kid (1984)
Aliens (1986)
Dazed and Confused (1993)
Sense and Sensibility (1995)
The Big Lebowski (1998)
Master and Commander (2003)

You thought Kelly was kidding about dinosaur puppets. Nope.

GRASSO: So first things first, before I get to picking apart both of your lists (just kidding; how could I ever, especially considering the overlap Kelly and I have!), an apologia for my picks (of course): I’m thoroughly and embarrassingly aware of how there are no women directors on my list and how “dudes rock” so many of the films are. I can’t help it. There’s no scenario where I go without watching Goodfellas and Casino for the rest of my life. I’ve watched them, along with JFK, enough times to be able to recite huge wodges of the dialogue purely from memory. If society ever plummets into a Fahrenheit 451 scenario where we need to preserve films using the oral tradition, please assign me these three movies. But yeah, there’s a lot of crime flicks here, psychological thrillers, a fair smattering of science fiction, and big political films (leaving off mid-’70s paranoid stuff like The Conversation, The Parallax View, All the President’s Men, and Three Days of the Condor hurt, but they were all definitely on my bubble). These types of movies are who I am and I can neither deny or excuse it.

So many of my movie preferences were formed in the first quarter-century of my life; as you can see, I’ve only included four films from the 21st century and most of my other picks dwell in the last quarter of last century, the 25 years that overlap with my 20th-century lifespan. These are movies that maybe I didn’t see in the theater when they came out, but definitely caught on TV, cable, or VHS as I became a film buff from childhood into adolescence (thank you again Dana Hersey and The Movie Loft). Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Network, and 2001 are three films I met at a very early age and they will live in my head and my heart forever.

Two directors—Paul Thomas Anderson and Martin Scorsese—appear twice. Ashamed to say that despite Kubrick’s and Cronenberg’s and Lynch’s and Coppola’s inviolable places in my pantheon of auteurs, I only picked one from each director that embodies what I love about their work so much. Maybe I rewatch Blue Velvet or Mulholland Dr. more frequently than I do the harrowing Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, but for my money everything “Lynch” is in the latter, and for that reason it stands alone, much like Videodrome for Cronenberg and Apocalypse Now for Coppola. 

The ones I consider “oddball choices” here are where my other interests intersect with film. Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii and Michael Winterbottom’s impressionistic postmodern tale of the Manchester music scene 24 Hour Party People are two of the best films featuring/about music I could think of, and I need some music on my desert island. I could’ve easily included stuff like Scorsese’s The Last Waltz or Led Zeppelin’s toxically self-indulgent The Song Remains the Same, but both really don’t rise to the level of “must-haves.” Low-rent UFO documentary UFOs Are Real, well, I’ve written about the hauntological impact of that movie extensively for Mutants, and it too is a film that repeated childhood viewings made part of, as Richard suggested with some of his leave-offs, my permanent matrix of obsessions. Unlike Richard, I desperately need that cinematic comfort food.

Whew. Richard, tell us a little about your picks!

Only Michael Mann could make a dude riding an elevator look like an ecstatic vision. And yet Kelly would rather “cut loose / Footloose / Kick off the Sunday Shoes”?

MCKENNA: Christ on a bike, this is torture. Why are we doing this to ourselves? Coming back to my selection is even more agonizing than choosing the bloody things in the first place. I really don’t need to be reminded that my whole personality is just a lame blend of regressive nostalgist who refuses to relinquish the psychic atmospheres he immersed himself in as a kid and the kind of try-hard insecure idiot who cares so much about the opinions of other people—even the hypothetical other people who won’t even read this—that his decisions are always shaped by trying to impress them. I already know that, I said it before! 

Looking at this list again I’d probably change half the films I put in there, but I suppose we have to commit at some point, so fuck it—let the shit film choices fall where they may. It looks like the guiding principle with my list is things that put me somewhere oneiric? I mean, I put This Island Earth, but it could just as easily have been It Came from Outer Space, or Invaders from Mars, or Forbidden Planet: anything that shunts me through the veil that separates us from the dreamworld will do. This Island Earth has a particular appeal for me, though, because it feels to me like a film where the mood is the story, and I suppose that’s kind of a theme that runs through my list. And good to see that we’re overlapping on Manhunter, Mike.

Like I said before, some films that I love I really feel like I’ve seen enough times to make watching them again a bit redundant, and then there’s other stuff that I love and haven’t seen much, or maybe only once, but don’t really have any interest in seeing again. I suppose it’s a bit like the saying “Friends for a reason, friends for a season, friends for life,” which I’ve always (perhaps idiosyncratically) interpreted as meaning that people can be important to you in different but equally valid ways. Some films are friends for a season—I love them but that season’s gone—and others are friends for a reason. Whereas Jason and the Argonauts feels like a friend for life, like I’m entering some sort of eternal mythical dream-space where each visit takes me deeper into something? Myself? The collective imagination? I appreciate that’s a bit bombastic when talking about a film whose main draw (for me) is the stop-motion skeletons, but much as I love, say, Pasolini’s Medea or Cocteau’s Orphée, just to give two examples of other films that engage with the mythical, I’m not compelled to rewatch them in the same way. Is it just nostalgia for the me that watched Harryhausen a shitload when I was a kid, or does Jason and the Argonauts genuinely access some different part of my brain? Does it even matter? Probably not.

Choosing Alien feels pretty stupid—it’s one of the most famous films in the world, and it’s been franchised into absolute shit. And yet it’s still something that affects me in a strange way every time I watch it. I have my own history with it, but it also feels fresh every time. Mythical, you might say.

Anyway, enough of the babbling, let’s get down to what’s important—Footloose, Kelly? Are you fucking kidding? I mean, I’ll give you Sense and Sensibility, I could watch Hugh Grant writhe with discomfort all day, but Footloose? Was proposing this feature just a way for you to indulge some weird public humiliation fetish that risks taking blameless Mike and me down with you? Explain yourself!

ROBERTS: Like both of you said, some of these films are here because of how much they affected me when I was young and impressionable, before my core being solidified. But then, why Footloose and not a dozen other films (WarGames, The Goonies, Legend, Tron, Red Dawn) that obsessed me when they came out in a way that Footloose didn’t? Plus, dancing is stupid! I think it’s because, underneath all the ‘80s (fun) silliness, there’s something incredibly authentic to me, a suburban only child who grew up in the shadow of Reagan, about these small-town teenagers resisting an oppressive and repressive adult regime at a time when young people were patronized, scapegoated, and exploited—punished, in a way, for the sins of the counterculture. (E.T. is on here for exactly the same reason). It still gives me chills when Ren makes his case at the town council for having the school dance, and when Lithgow gives the sermon asking everyone in the town “to guide them in their endeavors.” There’s a mythic (this word keeps popping up, doesn’t it?) or allegorical quality there, at least to me. To answer your question, Richard: I need it. In a way that I don’t need another movie I love, Over the Edge, probably the best movie about teenage rebellion ever made. 

At first I thought I didn’t need Star Wars because I’ve seen it so many times and essentially absorbed it into myself—but I can’t stand the thought of it not being there. So I do need it. But why? And why Star Wars and not the better sequel, The Empire Strikes Back? I could go on and on in this way, questioning each of my choices, trying to make sense of this list. But the word need is pretty basic, and that’s what it comes down to.  

Mike, you have to explain Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii to me. I love it and watched it religiously as a young guitar player, but wouldn’t the soundtrack suffice? Are you that big of a Floyd fan? 

And Richard, why Southern Comfort? There are much better Walter Hill movies, and this one is kind of a rip of Deliverance, no? 

Richard was the only one to honor the great Tarkovsky. Too bad he betrayed the auteur’s memory by also including… the Solaris remake?

GRASSO: Richard: Alien definitely is on my bubble and you should feel no shame about selecting it whatsoever; for Ridley Scott representation, it and Blade Runner are a tossup and, honestly, I feel like Blade Runner edges it out purely thanks to the immortal musical efforts of one Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou at his absolute fucking peak. I totally get what you’re saying about This Island Earth, too: it may be one of the thematically hokier entries in classic ’50s scifi, but visually, even up against the often trippy Forbidden Planet, it’s a phantasmagoria, isn’t it? Honestly, most of your films are visual tours de force: The Fog is probably the most memorably-shot Carpenter next to Halloween, and Manhunter stands head and shoulders above most 1980s thrillers and most of Michael Mann’s already formidable corpus. (I still feel like my jury is out on your abiding love of The Dead Zone, but its chilly, detached vision as you’ve described it now seems like a harbinger of Cronenberg’s late-career turn into the cold, clinical, and cerebral.) As for mythic echoes, I get what you’re saying about selections like Jason and the Argonauts and Alien—and of course you managed to expertly dovetail Manhunter with Dragonslayer in the Mutants book. Now I’m considering THX-1138 as an example of the hero’s journey long before Lucas met Joseph Campbell and, God help me, it fits!

And Kelly, the middle of your list of picks—from Star Wars to Aliens—really does constitute what I would call the late ’70s/’80s “mall movie theater core curriculum,” maybe with the addition of stuff like Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Night of the Comet. The Thing is the kind of choice I see on a list and smack my forehead as to how I left it off (probably the easiest explanation is that I’m not the world’s hugest John Carpenter fan; I know, I know). I probably saw E.T. three or four times in the mall movie theater when I was a little kid. Footloose and The Karate Kid are a pair of pop culture touchstones of my youth, although those two are more likely movies I internalized from repeated cable viewings. Underdog stories—boy, we really did love those in Reagan’s America, huh?

As for my ranking Live at Pompeii, well, I mentioned The Song Remains the Same as its chief competitor because basically I need one “heady” music film on the list that I can get stoned and zone out to on my desert island. I probably like Zeppelin’s music a fair bit more than Floyd’s, but Pompeii‘s mix of sound and trippy, ancient visuals is the winner over Zep by a nose.

The outliers on each of your lists I would love to hear more about: Richard, I love Herzog but I would never put Kaspar Hauser on my list of favorites of his. Also, I’ve never seen Werckmeister Harmonies but loads of people swear by it as superb. And Kelly, I am gonna give you shit for Sense and Sensibility just because I’ve been lassoed into watching countless British adaptations of various Regency novels of manners by my goodly spouse and have hated all of them. Also, I’m kicking myself now for leaving off Dazed and Confused, speaking of good movies to watch stoned.

MCKENNA: Kelly, why the fuck are you trolling me about Empire Strikes Back being better than Star Wars? Why? We’re better than this. We’re more mature than this. We’ve read clever books, we’ve written a book (that nobody read): we don’t need to spend our time trying to provoke each other with self-evidently foolish positions about bloody Star Wars. That said, fuck you, because Empire Strikes Back is the turd that Star Wars shat out (Hoth and Bespin sequences excepted)!

Okay, now I’ve got that off my chest, I actually love both of your lists. In the sense that I think it would probably be possible to reconstruct the pair of you bodily from them like Jeff Bridges from a hair in Starman, or Oddbod Junior from a toe in British comedy horror masterpiece Carry on Screaming, which I’m now kicking myself for not including (even just for Fenella Fielding). And why have none of us included Starman, come to think of it? I hate doing this. 

I get what you mean though, Kelly, about “needing” certain films. It’s as though they have a language built into their interiors that you need to run through your speakers now and then, the way you sometimes need to play back experience in your mind to remind yourself of how you got to be who you are. Calling it “nostalgia” is, I think, reductive (don’t worry, fans of bloviating, I have a long and tedious article on this very concept in the pipeline)—it’s more like refreshing your operating system, or sharpening a knife. 

Mike, I want to thank you for the Alien support and also for locating THX-1138 as an example of the hero’s journey—this is exactly why we need that Grasso laser insight here at WATM. Because, let’s be honest, Roberts and McKenna are not providing it: in classic Gen-X style, vibes is all we’ve got.

Anyway, to answer you two’s questions, I don’t really know why Southern Comfort as opposed to Hill’s other films. I’m kind of a one-note person, and I think it’s the same thing I’ve already said: there’s something about how sleek, reductive, even derivative, it is that takes it into the landscape of the mythical. Plus, it’s basically like four other films that I like rolled in one. And Mike, Kaspar Hauser‘s a film I saw around the same time I saw Truffaut’s The Wild Child, when I was probably eight or nine. They used to show stuff like that in the early evening on BBC2 in the ‘70s, incredibly. Both films affected me very deeply, and I didn’t know which of the two to choose, but decided on Kaspar Hauser for the soundtrack and for its pervasive mood of intense outsiderness. Come on, we all feel like we’re seeing stars in the daytime occasionally and don’t know how to behave in polite company! There’s a case to be made, I suppose, that Werckmeister Harmonies is one of Bela Tarr’s “easier” films, which I suppose in a way it might be, but despite its gloomy themes, watching it in its entirety always feels very… healthy? It feels like you’ve been through a ritual cycle of humanity that in some way is renewing? To be honest, that might be the unifying thread running through all my choices.

I feel a bit shit but apart from fucking Footloose—insert facepalm emoji—I don’t really have any questions about either of your lists. Like I say, I feel like they’re authentic representations of the pair of you. What were the films you two nearly put in but didn’t, and why?

Ridley Scott is the most represented director on our combined lists. John Carpenter is second.

ROBERTS: That’s an interesting question, Richard, so I’m going to give everyone five more selections. Now you can watch 25 films for the rest of your life. See mine below, with notes. 

You make a good point about Mike providing the insight here, because I had no idea how many of my picks are in fact about the underdog against all odds. Ripley, Max, Luke Skywalker, Snake Plisken/R.J. MacReady, Ren McCormack, Daniel LaRusso, even the rabbits in Watership Down! Jesus. It certainly says something about me. It’s Samuel Beckett, I guess—“…you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”—but mixed with some… John Wayne? Irish pessimism meets American exceptionalism?     

Mike notes that many of Richard’s films are visually compelling, which is true, but they have something else in common: they’re about people/beings who don’t fit in, who are overwhelmed by a “reality” that is often alien, irrational, and unstable. The Man Who Fell to Earth is the obvious example, but it’s also the core theme of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, and you can make a good case for Eraserhead (the mood perfected in Lynch’s next film, The Elephant Man), Manhunter, The Dead Zone, Southern Comfort, Evolution, THX 1138, et al. 

With Mike, it’s the intersection of media, politics, and conspiracy. He’s obsessed with the screen, its ability to reflect and/or remake reality. Network and Videodrome are explicit satires on television, but screens have a profound role in many of these other films: the projector and projected images in Persona, the home videos in Manhunter, the TVs that reveal Devil’s Tower in Close Encounters, the prolific “evidence” in UFOs Are Real (mostly photographs made to appear as video), the ubiquitous Zapruder film in JFK. Another thing that’s interesting about Mike’s list: only one of his last 10 films—that is, every film from 1990 on—takes place in the present day. All others are interpretations of the past—the late ‘60s through 1990, when The Big Lebowski takes place. (You could argue that the outlier, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, actually falls into the same category, given the ambiguity of time in the film and its ironic ‘50s mood and aesthetic.) This is our area of concentration at WATM, yes, but there’s something else here. A few of these films posit or suggest an alternate history—what kind of world might we have had if Rick and Cliff had killed the Manson Family? If a government conspiracy to kill JFK had been proven?—but most are tragedies that illustrate why we can’t have that better world: big dreams momentarily fulfilled but ultimately and irrevocably corrupted, mostly by greed. 

In short: you are both far more complicated than me. 

As for Sense and Sensibility, Mike, you have to remember that I was strictly a Western Canon guy well into my thirties, and Jane Austen is a favorite. This is a faithful and beautifully acted and directed adaptation of my favorite Austen novel, and it’s got a big, fat, happy, romantic ending. Every once in a while, I need one of those. 

The Magnificent Seven (1960) (I love Westerns, and this is my favorite, although 1972’s The Cowboys and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly are extremely close. It’s about… underdogs.)
The Time Machine (1960) (George Pal’s best.)
Jason and the Argonauts (1963) (Harryhausen’s best.)
Outland (1981) (Yet another underdog story, an early sci-fi noir with one of my favorite monologues of all time.) 
Conan the Barbarian (1982) (The greatest fantasy action film ever made [sorry, Peter Jackson], and Milius’s finest hour. It’s a retelling of Apocalypse Now, believe it or not.) 

Not even Cliff can save us from our psychotic past. Also, Mike is the only one who repped Tarantino.

GRASSO: Yep, you got it in one, Kelly: paranoia, television, and nostalgia, my three great interwoven lifetime obsessions. I can’t think of one of my movies that doesn’t fit neatly into one or more of these themes. Did you design this seemingly fun and innocent critical assignment as a psychological test? Oh wait, maybe that’s my paranoia talking again. To get Mythic Outsider Richard and Paranoid Hauntological Mike to lay bare our entire psyches in a list of 25 movies… that’s pretty damn devious.

Speaking of devious, paranoid personality tests, one of my five bubble films fits that bill perfectly:

The Godfather Part II (1974)
The Parallax View (1974)
The Ninth Configuration (1980)
Slacker (1990)
Uncut Gems (2019)

I may have agonized over these five as much as the previous 20. I think you guys may have seen an earlier version of this list in our shared document that had five completely different movies! The Godfather is, we must concede, a perfect movie, but I like Part II‘s overstuffed historical sprawl (and oblique nods to CIA-Mob parapolitics in Cuba and elsewhere) a tiny bit better, not to mention that John Cazale’s performance as Fredo beats any other performance in Coppola’s trilogy—and perhaps in the entirety of the 1970s—handily. I chose The Parallax View over All the President’s Men and Three Days of the Condor primarily for its higher quotient of Weirdness and its direct invocation of the American intelligence community’s complicity in the wave of domestic political assassinations in the 1960s. On that note, I was thinking Winter Kills (1979) for a while as well, but to my mind William Peter Blatty’s The Ninth Configuration is a better parable about how all our imperialist wars blow back onto the domestic front. I pondered Dazed and Confused for a bit until I realized that Richard Linklater has an even more rewatchable film in Slacker, and one that speaks to me far more personally (and generationally). And finally, one of the two movies I saw (along with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) in a theater before COVID hit, Uncut Gems, a great gritty New York City crime yarn in the tradition of my Scorsese and Coppola selections with a killer electronic score from Daniel Lopatin that rivals the aforementioned Vangelis soundtrack for Blade Runner.

One of my favorite parts of conceiving the Mutants book was coming up with all those great double features that may not have looked like they worked on paper… at least until we went on about them for three to five thousand words. I feel the same about these lists: they each offer a curriculum in filmmaking and film critique where the constituent movies inform, illuminate, and complement each other. One thing’s for sure: there are a bunch of films on Richard’s list I’ve never seen before as opposed to Kelly’s, where I’ve seen 23 or 24 of them. And just one more snipe here as I close things out, Richard: Soderbergh’s Solaris instead of Tarkovsky’s??? I can’t believe I missed that! What?

Linklater times two.

MCKENNA: It’s a fucking rocker, Mike! Obviously takes a very different tack to the Tarkovsky version (which I do love, but have to admit that—shallow fool that I am—overfamiliarity with Italian comedy Fantozzi has put an aesthetic crimp in for me, for reasons that will become obvious if you see it), but it’s a powerful, moving film about loss, love, and the nature of existence that captures the sadness and strangeness of the book, is aesthetically genuinely beautiful, and has a great cast and great (and much ripped-off) soundtrack by Cliff Martinez. And yes, it is another oneiric, unreliable world whose nebulous laws a cipher of a person tries to come to terms with—thanks for reducing my whole personality to this, Kelly. Anyway, along with Sex, Lies and Videotape, I think it’s Soderbergh’s best film and best real shot at movie immortality—it has such a beautiful elegiac mood. I think it suffered from people thinking it was trying to be a remake of the version by Tarkovsky—around whom an unfortunate aura of secular sainthood has ossified over the decades—as opposed to just a different attempt to adapt the book. But apparently Stanisław Lem hated both versions, which is pretty much standard Stanisław Lem.

Anyway, talking of realizing you’re a caricature, here’s my five extras. Note Orson Welles’s The Trial—how’s that for on the nose?

Mon oncle (1958)
The Trial (1962)
Judex (1963)
Aliens (1986)
American Movie (1999)

Ack, that was even more grueling than choosing 20. My main takeaway from this is how frustrating it is. There are so many films I love—some of which are absolute excrement—but when you sit down to try and create a canon, it’s hard not to get a bit stuffy. Plus, my memory’s atrocious: as soon as we post this, I’ll remember the films that I should have put in. Ah well, at least this nightmare’s nearly over.

Without wishing to get all solipsistic, it’s odd seeing our tastes laid out this cleanly and realizing the kind of triple Venn diagram the three of us form, with at its central intersection… I don’t know, a UFO? Where is it that we all overlap?

ROBERTS: I think the Solaris pick is clearly the worst of the lot—the only explanation I can think of is that Richard has a thing for Clooney, who has done roughly 800 better movies (including Soderbergh’s Out of Sight, which almost made my list). On the other hand, including the great American Movie—a riveting and hilarious documentary charting the life and death of the American Dream—in your final five is a stroke of genius. I kind of thought we would have more picks in common, to be honest! Mike and I have three (2001, Blade Runner, and The Big Lebowski), Richard and I have three (Alien, Aliens, and Jason and the Argonauts), and Mike and Richard have only one (Manhunter). The three of us? Womp womp. Zero! I blame this on both of you, because how could any mutant not include, at the very least, 2001, Alien, and Blade Runner? Well, as we’ve discovered, there’s no accounting for taste.

Is there a common theme? What’s the overlap? I think a UFO is close. The Stranger? The Visitor? The Outsider? I think “not belonging” is not exclusive to Richard’s list. From my out-of-town underdogs to Richard’s unquiet wanderers to Mike’s criminals, searchers, and bums, it’s clearly a condition that we all share. And a condition that compels us. And possibly renews us? (Speaking of compulsion and renewal, I’m surprised no one chose Logan’s Run!)

The second guessing lingers on. I swapped The Time Machine for Stalker at the last minute. Should I switch them back? I’ve got so much drama and so little comedy—what can I take out to get Midnight Run in the lineup? Or The Bad News Bears? Or The Nice Guys? Or the great Sullivan’s Travels, about why movies move us in the first place? Do I really like white people dancing as much as I think I do? 

Everybody relax. There’s no need to panic. We can watch any of these movies at any time. We don’t have to choose. It was just an experiment. It doesn’t mean anything. We’ll forget it ever happened…

Much like the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition and The Companions of Arthur for material set in Greg Stafford’s masterpiece of Arthurian legend and romance, Pendragon, the Jonstown Compendium for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha is a curated platform for user-made content, but for material set in Greg Stafford’s mythic universe of Glorantha. It enables creators to sell their own original content for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, 13th Age Glorantha, and HeroQuest Glorantha (Questworlds). This can include original scenarios, background material, cults, mythology, details of NPCs and monsters, and so on, but none of this content should be considered to be ‘canon’, but rather fall under ‘Your Glorantha Will Vary’. This means that there is still scope for the authors to create interesting and useful content that others can bring to their Glorantha-set campaigns.

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What is it?The Battle of Gavren Bridge is a short, supplementary scenario designed to be run during the first season of The Company of the Dragon.

“A 5 page plot with 2 parts” for use with RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha which presents a short mystery that the Game Master can run as a single session’s worth of play or possibly longer.

It is a fourteen page, full colour 3.16 MB PDF.

The layout is clean and tidy, but the artwork does vary in quality. The cartography is decent. It needs an edit.
The scenario hook is specifically designed for use with The Company of the Dragon, but it can be adapted to any pre-Dragonrise campaign.

It can be played through in a single session, but will probably take two.
Where is it set?The Battle of Gavren Bridge is set during the events of the Siege of Whitewall, 1619 ST to 1621 ST, as the Player Characters attempt to free Gavreena, Naiad of the Gavren, the river that runs below Whitewall, from the Lunars who are holding her in chains, as well as disrupt the flow of troops to the city from the Lunar Heartlands. By default, the events of this scenario should take place sometime during Sea, Fire, or Earth season of 1621.
Who do you play?
The Battle of Gavren Bridge does not suggest any specific character type, but as written, the Player Characters should be members of the Haraborn, the sundered Clan of the Black Stag.
What do you need?
The Battle of Gavren Bridge requires RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha only. Cults of RuneQuest: The Lunar Way and Armies and Enemies of Dragon Pass may also be useful.
What do you get?The Battle of Gavren Bridge is a strike mission. The Player Characters have to rescue Gavreena, Naiad of the Gavren, from her Lunar captors and in the process will gain a powerful ally. If used wisely, she will greatly aid in any attempt to stop the Lunar counterattack led by Iada of Kostaddi, a itch of Jakaleel. The scenario discusses the possible tactics that both Iada of Kostaddi and her allies, including some vile spirits (trapped and allied), a force of light cavalry and Danfive Xaron Penitent Legion Soldiers, as well as those that the Player Characters might also deploy. The ideal plan for the Player Characters is to ambush Iada of Kostaddi and her allies, preferably at the Gavren Bridge, just below the village of Gavren.

In the main, the scenario is combat focused. There will be some roleplaying involved in dealing with the suffering villagers in Gavren, who have too longer been under the Lunar heel, but ultimately, the scenario is about freeing the river spirit and unleashing its magic and that of the Player Characters upon the Lunars.
The Battle of Gavren Bridge can be run as is intended, a scenario that can be inserted in a The Company of the Dragon campaign, and in doing so, highlights the possibility of further scenarios not being written by Andrew Logan Montgomery, and added to the campaign. Alternatively it could be adjusted to another location or it could even be run as a flashaback.
Is it worth your time?Yes—The Battle of Gavren Bridge is a straightforward, easy to prepare scenario that slots easily into The Company of the Dragon campaign.No—The Battle of Gavren Bridge is set before the Dragonwise and a Game Master’s might all be about what happens after.Maybe—The Battle of Gavren Bridge is serviceable enough and is easy to add to a campaign, perhaps as a flashback or shifted to another river altogether.

Much like the Jonstown Compendium for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and The Companions of Arthur for material set in Greg Stafford’s masterpiece of Arthurian legend and romance, Pendragon, the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition is a curated platform for user-made content. It is thus, “...a new way for creators to publish and distribute their own original Call of Cthulhu content including scenarios, settings, spells and more…” To support the endeavours of their creators, Chaosium has provided templates and art packs, both free to use, so that the resulting releases can look and feel as professional as possible. To support the efforts of these contributors, Miskatonic Monday is an occasional series of reviews which will in turn examine an item drawn from the depths of the Miskatonic Repository.

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Name: The List of Historical & Fictional Figures Statted for Call of CthulhuPublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Andy Miller

Setting: All of time and spaceProduct: Supplement
What You Get: Seventy page, 9.76 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Who (or what) appeared where and when?Plot Hook: Have I got that scenario or supplement?Plot Support: No staging advice, actual NPCs, handouts, maps, Mythos artefacts, Mythos or occult tomes, Mythos entities, or indeed, plot (in the traditional sense, otherwise lots of NPCs and Mythos entities)Production Values: Plain
Pros# Annotated list of historical and fictional figures itemised by product from Call of Cthulhu, Third Edition to Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition# Listed separately by history and fiction # Index of all individuals, great old ones, gods, and unique entities listed in The List of Historical & Fictional Figures Statted for Call of Cthulhu# Engaging foreword and afterword# There does not appear to be a phobia of lists, but there really should be
Cons# Annotated list of historical and fictional figures itemised by product from Call of Cthulhu, Third Edition to Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition# Listed separately by history and fiction # Index of all individuals, great old ones, gods, and unique entities listed in The List of Historical & Fictional Figures Statted for Call of Cthulhu# There does not appear to be a phobia of lists, but there really should be# Highlights the fact that there really should be a similar product for scenarios
Conclusion# Exhaustive reference guide to everyone and every ‘thing’ that has appeared in Call of Cthulhu# Highlights the fact that there really should be a similar product for scenarios

The hunter rides the range, armed with a Sharps Model 1874 rifle in the .50-90 Sharps, a gun big enough to take down Nightcrawlers, the twenty-foot long earthworms that wear the skin of past prey and burrow out of the earth to take down their new. As the vampire-lord looms over her on the ground, the gunslinger loads her last Hellfire round that will surely send the undead monster and its soul into damnation. The inveterate gambler stands up from the table and points at Robo Doc, Joe Bones, of cheating and having a hidden card slot. At high noon, the duellists face off against each other, one ready to pull a Colt Single Action Army, but wondering how much of a threat his Kengu opponent is with its daishō, from which it will draw a katana. The Concord stagecoach rides along its regular route, the bearded veteran sitting alongside the driver, holding a shotgun in his lap, loaded with holy shot lest the vehicle lose a wheel or a horse throws a shoe and everyone be swarmed by the zombies that linger just off the trail. Secret Service agents fly the night skies in their black Zeppelin, ready to respond to descend on the latest threat to the United States. The US Marshal dukes it out with the Hex Gunner that raiding trains all along the transcontinental route, ducking and dodging as the servant of Hell snaps off one shot after another from its demonic six-shooter, the bullets smoking with necromantic energy and screaming with hellish fury when fired in search of more souls to collect and send to damnation! The Risen claws his way out of the grave, bearing a demonic brand on his chest and swearing to take vengeance upon his former comrades who put him in the ground. The frontier of the West might well have once been wild, but now it has definitely turned weird and horrifying. This is not the set-up for one game—though it could be, but a range of options, and more, presented in the pages of High Noon at Midnight.

High Noon at Midnight is a genre supplement for the Cypher System, first seen in Numenera in 2013. Published by Monte Cook Games as part of the Knights of Dust and Neon project on Backerkit, it is inspired by the films Cowboys & Aliens, Wild Wild West, and Back to the Future III, television series such as The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., West World, and Firefly, comic books like Jonah Hex and Preacher, and even roleplaying games such as Deadlands. It is interesting to see the inclusion of Deadlands mentioned in the list of inspirational reading and watching for High Noon at Midnight, since it is from a rival publisher and it is the obvious roleplaying game when anyone ever thinks of the term, ‘Weird West’. After all, Deadlands was the first to really coin the term—right in its very subtitle—and it has dominated the genre ever since it was published in 1996. So, the obvious question is, “Why even look at High Noon at Midnight when Deadlands is not only easily available, but also richly supported?” The simple answer is, ‘setting versus tools’. Deadlands is a genuinely great, genre defining, and iconic roleplaying game, it is its own thing and its own setting. High Noon at Midnight is not that, but rather offers the tools and means for the Game Master to create and run games in a weird west setting of her own devising. It can do magic, horror, advanced and even alien technology, steampunk, time travel, and so on in the way that the Game Master wants rather than is given. This is not to say that either option of tools versus setting is better or worse than the other, but rather that they offer different choices.

After some explanation of what High Noon at Midnight is, that it is a non-historical treatment of the period and the genre, combined weird, and what that Weird West could be through various other different media, the supplement really begins looking at the tools that the Game Master is going to need to create her own weird west. This includes borrowing from different sources, such as Deadwood or the James Bond films, creating a brand new series based on alternate history, and keeping a setting mostly historically accurate, whilst still being weird. It explores the classic themes of the Wild West, or Old West, genres, such as justice, vengeance, redemption, freedom, and survival, as well as weird themes like magic, magic versus technology, and horror. Throughout there are pointers and suggestions, and tables of options, and this continues throughout much of the book. For example, the ‘Weird West Game World’ table suggests ‘West Mars’, a “[S]parsley settled Martian frontier, six-shooters fire laser rounds, water is as valuable as gold, and terraforming gangs fight for primacy.” and ‘Camelot Gunslingers’ with “Law-sworn knights with long rifles pursue outlaw wizards, despot dragons, and malign fey beings.” Furter tables suggest inflection points when the West changed, how pervasive the Weird is, what the Player Characters do, and lots of plots seeds. The Game Master is free to pick or roll on these tables, or simply use them as inspiration.

The Game Master advice suggests that ‘A little Weird goes a long way’, but gives a lot of Weird for her to choose from. Instead of horses, the Player Characters might be riding water buffalo, lions, ostriches, or even stegosauruses, or ogres, griffons, or hellfire steeds, or jet packs, hover cycles, or motorcycles. There is discussion to, of other forms of travel, including train and aerial travel, and supported by lists of Intrusions—the means by which the Game Master can challenge a Player Character, make a situation more interesting, and the Player Character can earn Experience Points—that the Game Master can use. Options are suggested in terms of what groups might be operating in the weird west, including the law, outlaws, and indigenous groups. Traditional groups include US Marshals and train-robbing gangs, but added to this are weird west groups. For example, a weird version of the Secret Service might use advanced technology or magic to protect the president and other important people from assassination or harm, let alone protect the currency, whilst the Pinkerton Rail Agency which rides five rail cars to protect the railways, he Dawn Rangers, who wear grave-stone shaped badges inscribed with RIP and are known for their arrogance, hunt the undead, and the Skinless Six, outlaws who messed with the wrong treasure and now hunt and gamble for new skins! Guidance on the role of the Native Nations and including the indigenous peoples is also given. There is also a lengthy section on locations in the wild west, from uncanny saloons, alchemist’s shops, and uncanny jails to the Badlands, prairies, and mines, all also uncanny, which provides the Game Master with some great places to set her weird west campaign.

Optional rules in High Noon at Midnight enable the Game Master to run Poker games with multiple NPCs as well as the Player Characters, including handling player versus character skill (necessary since not everyone plays Poker and it is not as commonly played outside of the USA) and resolving a game with dice rather than dice. The Hands of Fate actually adds a Poker mechanic to play, each player drawing a personal Hand of Fate, consisting of two cards, at the beginning of each game day. These cards can be combined with community Hand of Fate cards for various effects. For example, a Straight Flush earns the Player Character a point of Experience, whilst a Full House replaces any roll of the twenty-sided die with a roll of twenty. This enforces the wild (or weird) west feel, but the Game Master can go even further by replacing the need to roll a twenty-sided die to determine the outcome of a situation with a deck of cards. The two do complement each other, but do make play more complex and outcomes less obvious in comparison to the standard Cypher System.

As well as curses and the benefits of telling tall tales, High Noon at Midnight adds several Paranormal Vices that the Player Characters or NPCs can suffer. These are similar to curses, but provide both benefits and banes. Every time a Player Character uses one of the abilities associated with the Paranormal Vice, a Connection roll is made. If a one is rolled, the Connection is made with the Paranormal cause behind the vice and the Player Character suffers an associated Repercussion. The range also increases from one to one to two, and so on, each time the Connection is made, until it reaches six and the Player Character is overcome with the Paranormal Vice. For example, the Drinking Paranormal Vice grants Inebriate abilities of ‘Deadeye’, ‘Hair-Trigger Reflexes’, ‘Iron Liver’, ‘Mean Drunk’, and ‘Unflinching’, which might require a Player Character to throw back a drink or two, but Repercussions might be that the Player Character goes ‘Blind in One Eye’ or suffer ‘Retching Summons’ in which he vomits up a pile of gelatinous goo that animates into a horrid thing! Other Paranormal Vices are gambling and swindling, which either case, gives advantages, but not without dangers of their own.

Threats include environmental ones alongside a bestiary of new creatures and a list of entries from the Cypher Bestiary, which are given abbreviated descriptions in this genre supplement. Old NPCs from the Cypher Bestiary include Gunfighters, whilst the new here include Alchemist, Hex Gunner, and Forgeborn golem. New creatures include the Death Binder, alchemists risen from the dead who invest their souls in the bullets in their Soul Pistols, which have devastating effects, but if the sixth and final shot is fired, so is the Death Binder, so they use their Alchemical Pistol instead; Frostwalkers—compacted snow over amalgams of bone, antlers, limbs, and heads of men and animals who died in the cold; and the Hollowed Ranger, a travelling portal to ‘elsewhere’, formed from an innocent gunned down in cold blood and dumped into a shallow grave, and returned to wreak vengeance on all and everyone!

In terms of character options High Noon at Midnight suggests ways in which classic Wild West characters can be created by adhering to the standard format that the Cypher System uses describe and encapsulate a Player Character. This is “I am a [adjective] [noun] who [verbs]”, where the noun is the character’s Type; the adjective a Descriptor, such as Clever or Swift, that defines the character and how he does things; and the verb is the Focus or what the character does that makes him unique. For example, “I am a Fast Warrior Who Needs No Weapons” or “I am a Clever Adept Who Commands Mental Powers”. Thus, a Lawman could be a Speaker with a combat flavour and a Swindler or Gambler could be an Explorer with a stealth flavour. Seven standard Descriptors and two Species Descriptors are added. The standard Descriptors are Grizzled, Laconic, Slick, Trailblazing, Trigger-Happy, Unforgiving, and Wily, whilst the Species Descriptors are Forgeborn and Risen. The Forgeborn is a figure of metal, reanimated flesh, or similar, often constructed by alchemists as guards, but since been emancipated or lost the desire to keep the alchemist safe. The Forgeborn is tough, but slow, hard to damage, but difficult to repair and knows its own kind well. The Risen has returned from the grave, bearing the sigil of a demon, tougher and able to comeback from the dead again, though not as supple and animals hate him.

Similarly, High Noon at Midnight provides new Foci as well as suggesting those suitable from the Cypher System. The new ones consist of ‘Blazes Paths’ (in the wilderness), ‘Collects Bounties’, ‘Gambles it All Away’, ‘Hits the Saloon’, ‘Rides Like the Wind’, ‘Spits Fire and Lead’, and ‘Strikes Like a Rattler’. ‘Spits Fire and Lead’ combines a love of fire (and possibly brimstone) with gunfighting, whilst with ‘Strikes Like a Rattler’, the Player Character has a supernatural connection to venomous snakes and applies that to his unarmed combat.

There is a full list of equipment in High Noon at Midnight, but more importantly it explains how Cyphers—the means by which the Cypher System awards Player Character one-time bonuses, whether potions or scrolls, software, luck, divine favour, or influence—can be brought into the Weird West genre of High Noon at Midnight. In this setting, there is no one way to handle Cyphers, but it depends how weird the Weird West that the Game Master wants to create and run actually is. Cyphers can either be Subtle, perhaps good fortune, inspiration, an occult or alien concept, a blessing, an ear worm, or the like, or Manifest, such as an alchemical potion, a clockwork device, a demonic scroll, and so on. A Weird West setting can use one or the other or a mix, and it is suggested that there is a geographical limit of Cyphers, Manifest Cyphers being harder to find in more remote locations rather than civilised ones. It also adds Power Words for one of the settings in the supplement as a memetic means of presenting Cyphers both Subtle and Manifest, and describes a range of different Cyphers, including a wide range of alchemical rounds and slugs, and Weird West Artifacts, such as the ‘Deck of Second Chances’, ‘Demon Pistol’, ‘Philosopher Gun’, and ‘Shadow Duster’. In fact, there are more Weird West Artifacts given than there are new Cyphers.

High Noon at Midnight details one setting, ‘The Ghost Range’. This is a Weird West setting, but not a historical one. Magic pervades The Ghost Range and demons, ghosts, and other supernatural creatures stalk its Badlands and beyond, whilst Dustfalls occur at night and can be predicted with some accuracy according to the almanacs owned by certain alchemists. Such Dustfalls are of Stardust, sometimes used as currency, but is mostly used by alchemists in their concoctions and designs. Where exactly Stardust originates and what it is, is the subject of much speculation, but prospectors go out of a night in search of it, knowing that its presence keeps demons away, though there is the danger of becoming mesmerised in an active Dustfall. In millennia past, two mysterious races, the Ilu and the Nihilal, warred with each other, and the Ilu left behind hollow cavities in the earth containing strange devices, weapons of war, and even prisoners still held captive. These are known as ‘Proscribed Zones’, and whilst access to them is not strictly prohibited, the indigenous peoples who on the range and beyond, even on the Moon, advise against it.

Midnight is the only city on the Ghost Range, notably home to the Trail’s End Cantina, where demons, vampires, and other supernatural creatures can be seen as long as they adhere to the Ghost Accords, which keeps them from being attacked. The city is nicely detailed as are the Outer Range and Otherlands which lie beyond its outskirts. In the latter can be found the Moon upon which can be seen a tribe of natives living there and the town of Perdition, populated by demons hiding behind a façade and which stands on Hell’s doorstep. Worse is the Tomb Moon, which rarely shares the same sky and never the same orbit, its appearance sparking off an outbreak of undead activity.

‘The Ghost Range’ setting is further supported by three full scenarios and two Cypher Shorts. They include being formed into a posse and investigating a shootout outside the premises of Midnight’s preeminent alchemist and following the trail out of the city in search of the outlaws responsible; getting involved in a poker tournament at the Trail’s End Cantina and investigating a treasure map; and even travel to the Tomb Moon to prevent a notorious warlock from bringing about the end of the world! The two Cypher Shorts are within the genre, but more generic in nature, though they could easily be used in ‘The Ghost Range’. One sees an undead outlaw return from the grave for revenge against the Player Characters, whilst the other casts the Player Characters as outlaws attempting to rob a train. Both Cypher Shorts could also be run as one-shots or even demonstration scenarios.

Overall, ‘The Ghost Range’ provides High Noon at Midnight with a detailed example of a non-historical Weird West setting. It is an intriguingly different setting that enables the exploration of the genre without of the potential controversies of a more historically based setting. Now whilst ‘The Ghost Range’ setting is well supported with plenty of detail and three decent scenarios, it does mean that there is no space given to other possible settings, so that High Noon at Midnight does not fully showcase the genre with examples as fully as it could have done. This does not mean that it does not suggest other possibilities, in fact, it suggests a lot of them through its many tables of prompts and ideas, but it does not develop them. As a consequence, High Noon at Midnight explores some of the genres associated with the Weird West genre better than others. These are horror and magic, both closely associated with the Weird West genre, whereas steampunk, Science Fiction, time travel, and so on, do not get as much attention. Although ‘The Ghost Range’ is done well, this is nevertheless disappointing and it would be interesting to see these other associated genres given their due in an anthology of settings for the Weird West.

Physically, High Noon at Midnight is very well presented. It is also well written and the artwork and cartography are both excellent.

High Noon at Midnight does showcase the potential of its genre in a well realised and supported setting in the form of ‘The Ghost Range’, but not quite as fully as it could have done. Nevertheless, High Noon at Midnight is a solid introduction to the Weird West genre and its potential with lots and lots of ideas.

It begins with an interview deep in the Rep-Detect Unit headquarters of the LAPD Tower. On one side of the table is a ‘Blade Runner’, an officer belonging to the unit dedicated to apprehending and retiring rogue replicants. On the other is suspected replicant, a service technician at the headquarters of the Wallace Corporation apprehended after breaking into the company’s Replicant Memory Vault. The suspect lacks a serial number which would indicate that he is a registered Nexus-8 or Nexus-9 model. Surely there cannot be any Nexus-6’s surviving? Unable to determine if the suspect is a Replicant, the officer has turned to an older method to detecting his status. A Voight-Kampff wheezes between the officer and the suspect. On the table is a list of questions the officer will put to the suspect. Quickly though, the suspect’s brazen refusal to engage with the emotional nature of the questions turns to violence and the interviewee turns on the interviewer. A bruising, bloody fracas ensues. The interviewer is bruised and battered, but his colleagues on the other side of the glass to the interview room were able to come to his help. The suspect is dead, his status is uncertain. Are there unregistered Replicants on the starts of LA?

This is the set-up to Blade Runner: The Roleplaying Game – Case File 02: Fiery Angels—and it is a great set-up, one that clearly echoes the begin of the film, Blade Runner, itself, when Blade Runner, Dave Holden, is seen conducting a Voight-Kampff test on Leon Kowalski. Dave Holden is, of course, by this time, the head of the Rep-Detect Unit, huffing and puffing through the replacement lungs that Kowalski shot out of him. Further, this is not the only reference to Blade Runner to be found during the course of the investigation. For example, the officers pay a visit to the Yukon Hotel on Hunterwasser Street where Leon Kowalski stayed, and both Ray McCoy and Runciter’s Live Animals appear from the 1997 Blade Runner video game from Westwood Studios. The Case File is littered with such references which the fan of Blade Runner will appreciate and which will also help to pull the players into the future of 2037. Such refences are not the only immersive elements in the Case File either, for just like ‘Case File 01: Electric Dreams’ in the Blade Runner – The Roleplaying Game Starter Set, the investigation is supported with numerous handouts that give points of reference and clues to the players and their characters. 

Blade Runner: The Roleplaying Game – Case File 02: Fiery Angels is a scenario for Blade Runner: The Roleplaying Game, published by Free League Publishing. Although it can be run on its own, it specifically designed as a sequel to ‘Case File 01: Electric Dreams’ in the Blade Runner – The Roleplaying Game Starter Set, being part of ‘The Immortal Game’ campaign arc. Even then, the Game Master may need to make some alterations to this new Case File as some NPCs who appear in ‘Case File 01: Electric Dreams’ may have died. Blade Runner: The Roleplaying Game – Case File 02: Fiery Angels comes as a boxed set which contains not only the sixty-page book for the case file, but also a set of fourteen Mugshot cards, seven maps depicting locations pertinent to the case, and a sturdy, buff envelope marked ‘RDU – LAPD REP–Detect’. This contains another eleven clues and Esper images that the Player Characters can search for clues. 

The interview and subsequent death of the service technician triggers an investigation into the possibility of there being rogue Replicants at large in LA and if so the possibility that someone else is using technology stolen from the Tyrell Corporation, technology that is now solely owned by the Wallace Corporation. The investigation is against the clock, just four days before the antagonists’ plans come to a fruition, with numerous leads to follow. As in Blade Runner: The Roleplaying Game, the investigation is carried out in shifts—four per day, with one required for Downtime—with the Player Characters, not just encouraged, but actually needing to split up to cover everything and everywhere. Information can be shared and updated between the Player Characters via their KIAs, Knowledge Integration Assistant units. The investigation is very well organised by NPCs and locations, clearly listing what the Player Characters might find should they interview the persons there and look at scenes. Some of the locations are not directly linked to the investigation, but may be places that a Player Character might go to speak to a contact.

In terms of structure, there are scenes in Blade Runner: The Roleplaying Game – Case File 02: Fiery Angels where the action and story are quite directed, even forced. This is intentional, designed to ramp up the tension and even set up events in the sequel to the scenario. One Player Character, ideally a Human, will also find himself in the spotlight for much of the scenario, his integrity and humanity much tested. Other than that, there are tables of Downtime Events for Player Characters, including a special set for the Player Character in the spotlight, plus a list of Promotion and Humanity awards. The Case File is designed to be played by between one and four Player Characters and if played by one, the single player will find his character placed in the spotlight in more ways than one. 

Blade Runner: The Roleplaying Game – Case File 02: Fiery Angels should provide two or three sessions’ worth of grim, grimy, and uncertain play. Although its Case File could be run as a standalone investigation, it works best as a continuation of  ‘Case File 01: Electric Dreams’ from the Blade Runner – The Roleplaying Game Starter Set, and as such, this is an in between scenario, which continues the overall plot, but does not finish it. The only difficulty really is making adjustments to take account of the changes between this Case File and ‘Case File 01: Electric Dreams’, primarily if certain NPCs were killed in ‘Case File 01: Electric Dreams’.

Physically, Blade Runner: The Roleplaying Game – Case File 02: Fiery Angels is superbly presented. It is a fantastic boxed with superb handouts and good maps, many of which could easily be used by the Game Master again for her own scenarios. The scenario is well written and organised and the artwork throughout is stunning, everywhere and everyone seeming to step out of the shadows in Film Noir fashion. 

The unfortunate truth is that there is not great deal of support for Blade Runner: The Roleplaying Game, but there can be no doubt that Blade Runner: The Roleplaying Game – Case File 02: Fiery Angels is a brilliant addition to what is a very short line. It explores identity and the nature of what it is to be human from start to finish, really placing one Player Character in the spotlight, and does so in an incredibly good looking package.

Now in its eighteenth year, Free RPG Day for 2025 took place on Saturday, June 21st. As per usual, Free RPG Day consisted of an array of new and interesting little releases, which are traditionally tasters for forthcoming games to be released at GenCon the following August, but others are support for existing RPGs or pieces of gaming ephemera or a quick-start. This included dice, miniatures, vouchers, and more. Thanks to the generosity of Waylands Forge in Birmingham, Reviews from R’lyeh was able to get hold of many of the titles released for Free RPG Day.

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The Well of Shadows is certainly not the weirdest item released for Free RPG Day 2025. That prize goes the Emergency D20! scratch card from Foam Brain Games, an idea so bizarre and superfluous it is barely worth consideration. That does not mean that The Well of Shadows is not weird. It is. Simply, it is not as weird as the Emergency D20! scratch card. No, The Well of Shadows is weird because of its format and the way that it is written. The Well of Shadows is an adventure for Tales of the Valiant, the alternative to Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition from Kobold Press. It designed to be played by a party of four Third Level Player Characters and it comes with a quick-start guide, the adventure itself, a wraparound map that hold the two together, and a band that holds them all together.

The Well of Shadows is also weird because of the Tales of the Valiant Quick Start Guide. This is because the Tales of the Valiant Quick Start Guide is not a quick-start in the traditional sense. A quick-start will explain the different aspects of a roleplaying game and how it is played. It will explain what a Player Character and what it looks like in the roleplaying game and it will provide advice for the Game Master on how to run the game and the included scenario in the quick-start. The Tales of the Valiant Quick Start Guide does some, but not all of this, radically de-emphasising the mechanical aspects of Tales of the Valiant. To be honest, it gets little beyond having to roll a twenty-sided die and get equal to, or above, a Difficulty Class, to achieve what a player and his character might want to do, with the other dice being rolled for damage and other effects. It does also include four pre-generated Player Characters at the end—an Elven Battle Mage, Human Cleric of Solana, Human Waysmith (Ranger), and a Minotaur Trooper (Fighter)—but it does not discuss them in any real detail. So, what then, does the Tales of the Valiant Quick Start Guide actually include?

Really, the Tales of the Valiant Quick Start Guide is an introduction to roleplaying games in general, in good play, and to the idea of playing Tails of the Valiant. It starts off by stating that Tales of the Valiant is gateway to other games. This is delightfully refreshing, since it is not trying to lock the reader into the one true Tails of the Valiant from the start. Its introduction to roleplaying is multi-faceted, explain that it is a game, that it is a shared experience, that it is a conversation, and so on. Along with a lengthy example of play, it makes clear that the play is meant to be fun, and it explains the basic elements of the hobby, ones that we take for granted. It also explains the role of the Game Master and how to be good one, as well as how to be a good player. Whilst it does stress the useful nature of safety tools, telling the reader that their use can make everyone’s experience at the table both comfortable and safe, it acknowledges too, that some people might not need them and says that this is okay too. This is a nice way of handling an issue that some see as contentious when it really does not have to be and this approach supports that. Overall, the focus in the Tales of the Valiant Quick Start Guide is very much on the player rather than the Game Master, though she is given good advice and should read through the rest of the introduction as well.

However, since the Tales of the Valiant Quick Start Guide is not really a quick-start in the traditional sense, the Game Master is going to need to the full Tales of the Valiant rules to run the accompanying adventure, ‘The Well of Shadows’. This is designed as an introductory scenario for four to five Player Characters of Third Level. The ones included in the Tales of the Valiant Quick Start Guide are suitable, though a Thief type might be useful. The setting for the scenario is the Labyrinth Worldbook for Tales of the Valiant in which the Player Characters are employed by the Concord of Stars to investigate the Fane of Mot, a shrine dedicated to Mot, the ancient god of death. The Concord of Stars previously sent agents—the two-headed Dragonborn Warlock, Daarzelyn and the Human Fighter, Verric Stormheart—to investigate and shut it down, but neither of them has returned or reported back. Some are not happy with the Concord of Stars hiring outsiders and a friend of Verric will confront the Player Characters before they set out to explore the shrine. This gives the opportunity for the players see the combat system in action as Verric’s friend is likely to want satisfaction from the best fighter amongst their number and see if they are worthy of the task. The fight though, is not to the death, and however it ends, the Player Characters will walk away with a little more information and perhaps better means of healing.

At the Fane of Mot, the Player Characters can learn some more information and perhaps purchase a magical scroll or potion, from a merchant (who though benign, is not quite what he seems) before entering. The Fane of Mot consists of seven locations, placed one after another, in a u-shape. What they find inside is a shrine to death that has long been abandoned, left to spread its blight to the immediate surrounds, but which is now occupied and guarded by Shadow Orcs. Further, it is being studied and perhaps in danger of being revived and returned to its original use. Ultimately, the Player Characters will need to clear the simple complex, defeat the guards, defeat the person they are guarding, and find a way of sealing the planar portal to the Dry Lands, home to Mot himself. There is advice through on staging and even on what might happen if one or more of the Player Characters ends up in the Dry Lands!

The plot to ‘The Well of Shadows’ is quite straightforward and the players should be able to work out what is going on relatively easily. There is the option to run it with miniatures as the wraparound cover to The Well of Shadows as a whole includes a map of the Fane of Mot on its inside. The scenario should take a single or so to play through.

Physically, The Well of Shadows is decently presented and well-written. The artwork is excellent and the map clear and easy to read.

The Well of Shadows is a disappointing in the sense that it is not really a quick-start in the true sense. A Game Master and her players will need The Tales of the Valiant Player’s Guide at the least to run it. That said, ‘The Well of Shadows’ is solid scenario, suitable for a single session, whether as a demonstration or not, and the Tales of the Valiant Quick Start Guide is an engaging introduction to roleplaying in general, let alone Tales of the Valiant.

‘Trouble down mine’ is the least of the problems facing the Player Characters in The Magonium Mine Murders, a scenario which details the many plots and mysteries that have beset the settlements of the Halbeck Valley. The kingdom in which the Halbeck Valley sits is moderately wealthy with an awareness of magic that sees it put to war in the long running conflict with the neighbouring barbarian tribes. The government is notoriously corrupt, its nobles and politicians accepting bribes and when not corrupt, likely incompetent. The war is unpopular, more so since conscript was instituted. Those workers dubbed essential are not subject to the draft and wear a magical token to indicate their exemption. This includes the workers at the mine in the Halbeck Valley where magonium ore, a rare mineral with magical properties important to the war, is dug out of the ground. Prisoners captured from the barbarian tribes are also made to work in the mines. There are reports of deaths in the mines, but the money that the actual miners are making from the extra demand for magonium has made them relatively wealthy and they are spending it in the taverns and brothel that have sprung to cater for them in a nearby village, turning it into a ‘new’ town, much to the annoyance of the villagers. There are rumours too, of bandits attacking travellers in the valley, and there is very much likely to be more than this going on, but now, there is news that Reith Alba, boss of the mine, has been found dead with a crossbow bolt in her back!

The Magonium Mine Murders is a scenario published by Gonzo History Project, better known as James Holloway, the host of the Monster Man podcast. It written for use with Old School Essentials, Necrotic Gnome’s interpretation and redesign of the 1981 revision of Basic Dungeons & Dragons by Tom Moldvay and its accompanying Expert Set by Dave Cook and Stephen M. Marsh. Designed to be played by a party of Second to Third Level Player Characters—up to Fourth Level—it is what the author calls a ‘Cluebox’. What this really means is that it combines elements of a murder mystery with a sandbox, so a “sandbox-style murder-mystery scenario” according to the author. The scenario requires some set-up in terms of the setting, primarily the two warring kingdoms and the importance of a magical ore and its associated industrialisation. Beyond that, the plots—of which the scenario has a total of seven—are easily adaptable. For example, The Magonium Mine Murders could be run in a Science Fiction or a Wild West setting with some retheming and some renaming, or the scenario could just simply be adapted to the fantasy roleplaying game of the Game Master’s choice.

Part of that is due to the easy presentation of the content. Two pages labelled ‘What’s Going on’ sum up the scenario’s many, varied, and highly interconnected plots, followed by pages that provide detailed summaries of the Halbeck Valley, the two towns—the old and the new, the mining camp, the mine itself, and more. The information is really very well organised and accessible for the Game Master. The starting point for the scenario is the page actually called ‘Getting Started’, which offers several hooks to pull the Player Characters into its plots. These include investigating Magonium poisoning in the river, infiltrating a gambling ring, delving into the mine to determine the cause of a recent spate of accidents, and even do some debt collection! Any one of these can be used as the initial hook and then the others introduced as necessary when the Player Characters interact with the associated NPCs. Alternatively, the hooks could be tailored to specific character types. For example, a Druid Player Character could be asked to investigate the Magonium polluting the river, a Thief Player Character instructed to collect the debt, a Dwarf Fighter hired to investigate the mine, and so on. This would provide the players and their characters with more individual hooks and motivations. Of course, the main hook for the scenario is the murder of the head of the mine.

The murder site is the office of the head of the mine and is one of the few detailed locations in the scenario. The others include the ruined temple where the bandits stash their loot and some caverns under the under the mine, though the former is not as pertinent to the scenario’s plots as the latter is. The investigation is supported by a series of events that occur over the course of the investigation and by details of some fifteen NPCs. Their descriptions are thumbnail in nature and include details of what they know and any activities or reasons that the Player Characters might become suspicious of them. Each is also accompanied by a portrait. These vary in quality and style, but in general suggest that the scenario is set during the Industrial Revolution. This is followed by rules for Magonium poisoning, handling the prize fights being run in the New Town, a bestiary with full stats for the NPCs, and the various items, magical and otherwise, to be found in the scenario. The rules for handling prize fights do not add anything mechanical, even though Old School Essentials and similar retroclones are poor at handling unarmed combat. (As an option, the Game Master might want to look at Brancalonia – SpaghettiFantasy Setting Book for its non-lethal combat rules.) Rather, they add narrative detail and track the course of the prize fights—which are, of course, rigged.

Rounding out The Magonium Mine Murders is advice on running the scenario, necessary, as the author points out, since the scenario is not a natural fit to Dungeons & Dragons-style adventures with its heavy emphasis on investigation. The advice primarily consists of letting the players drive the investigation, relying upon their descriptions of what their characters are doing rather than on dice rolls and being generous with the clues to keep the story and their investigation going. This even extends to possible solutions to the various situations in the Halbeck Valley. Although there is a solution as to who committed the murder of the mine chief, how the other plotlines in the scenario are concluded is really up to the Player Characters and that is even if they engage with a particular plotline. With so many, the Player Characters may not encounter all of them and even if they do, not always follow up on them.

Overall, what The Magonium Mine Murders presents is a set of plots, places, and NPCs that the Game Master can present to her players and their characters and have them pull and push on them as they like. In places though, the Game Master is likely going to wish that there were more detail. The towns in particular are underwritten and feel as if they are in need of colour, especially New Town, which has the rough and tumble feel of a frontier town that has struck it rich. The Game Master is going to want to add some incidental NPCs and events to add colour and flavour and so enforce a sense of place. This is less of an issue in the Old Town. Similarly, the NPC descriptions are a bit tight and with so many of them, the Game Master, will need to work hard to make them stand out from each other. What this means is that the Game Master will need to do development work in addition to the usual preparation effort.

Physically, The Magonium Mine Murders is decently presented and organised. Both artwork and cartography are serviceable, and the writing is decent, if terse in places. The format of the adventure is fanzine style, but is not fanzine in the traditional sense.

The Magonium Mine Murders is an interesting attempt to combine a sandbox with a murder mystery—and it is an attempt that does work. The Game Master is certainly given enough information to run it and its numerous plots from the page, but the scenario is underwritten and lacks colour in places. What this means is that the Game Master is probably going to want to develop and flesh out some aspects of the scenario to enhance its roleplaying aspects and make it come alive, at the very least. Despite possessing a tendency toward succinctness, The Magonium Mine Murders packs a lot of play into its pages and is likely to be a decent, player-driven investigation.

Fantasy Friday Edition

Exploration is one of the core pillars of fantasy roleplaying.

But what does it mean to explore?

In Dungeons & Dragons, especially old-school editions, exploration often means mapping the dungeon one corridor at a time, or the world one hex at a time. Every turn is a decision, every door a threat, every torch a precious hour of light. There’s danger in the dark, but also treasure, and secrets the surface world forgot. It’s a gritty, tactile kind of exploration, and I love it.

In Pathfinder, exploration becomes more dynamic and often more epic. You’re not just crawling through ruins, you’re mapping uncharted wilderness, navigating complex cultures, and solving arcane mysteries baked into the world’s DNA. There’s a heroic scale to it. You’re not just surviving, you’re discovering your place in a mythic world.

In the Wasted Lands, the world itself is still waking up. You explore not only geography, but myth. You carve stories into the world that future ages will only dimly remember. Here, the ruins aren’t ancient, they’re being made. Exploration becomes a spiritual act. When you cross into unknown territory, you’re not following in footsteps, you’re making them.

Daggerheart invites a more emotional kind of exploration. The stories live just as much in who your character is as in where they go. The haunted forest is scary, sure, but what you fear might not be the wolves in the woods; it’s the memory of why you ran from home. Exploration here isn’t just a map; it’s a mirror. That’s no less heroic, it’s just a different kind of bravery.

Even in cozy fantasy games or weird narrative indies, exploration plays a role. Maybe you’re uncovering your grandmother’s secret recipes in a magical bakery. Maybe you’re exploring forgotten traditions in a village steeped in folklore. Discovery isn’t always tied to danger, but it always brings change.

Because that’s what exploration does in fantasy RPGs:

 It changes things.

You can’t go into the unknown and come back the same. The world shifts.  The character grows.  The player remembers.

Whether you’re following a raven into the deep woods, stepping into a glowing portal, sailing beyond the edge of the map, or just opening a door labeled “Do Not,” you’re exploring.

And that, to me, is the heart of fantasy gaming.

Not killing monsters. Not hoarding gold. But going where you haven’t gone before, and discovering what you didn’t know you were looking for.

So wherever your players are headed tonight, whether it’s a dragon’s lair, a crumbling keep, or a roadside tavern with one too many shadows, remember this:

Every great story starts with someone deciding to go a little further than they should have.

Questions

What. Proud. Lesson.

What lesson made me proud? I think it was back when I was teaching my kids to play. They both started very young and I used it as a means to teach them simple math. I think my oldest was about 3 or so, and when he finally "got it" and was doing all the addition and subtraction in his head, it was an excellent time for both of us.

https://www.autocratik.com/ • https://www.castingshadowsblog.com/

Everyone has agreed that the best way of getting off the island is to build a raft. However, nobody can agree on the best way to build a raft, or even how to build a raft. Whilst everyone has also agreed that the best way to get off the island with their treasure is the raft, the raft is so rickety that it is in danger of collapsing and dumping everyone into the sea. Fortunately, there are no sharks, but when you fall into the sea, it is everyone for themselves as they try to rescue their treasure. It is perfectly possible to rescue your own treasure, but not the treasures belonging to your fellow raft builders, and if you lose their treasure, they will get mad at you and throw you off the raft! This is the set-up for Rafter Five, a fast-playing dexterity game for one to six players, ages seven and up. Published by Oink Games—best known for the games Scout and Deep Sea Rescue—Rafter Five is a game that uses all of its components, including the box lid and base, looks great on the table, plays in twenty minutes or so (but probably faster depending on the dexterity of the players), and surprisingly for an Oink Games title, is not a squeeze to get back in the box!

Rafter Five consists of five Rafters, forty-two Treasure Chests, six Penalty Boards, one Raft Card, forty-two Lumber Cards, and the rules leaflet. The Rafters are the game’s meeples, ones that the players will move around from one turn to the next. They are much larger than standard meeples and vary in size and shape, tall, fat, thin, short, and really help to give the game much of its character. Plus, they feel good in the hand. The Treasure Chests come in six colours, so that each player has a set of seven. The Penalty Boards also come in six colours to match the Treasure Chests and have five slots marked with an ‘X’. If a player’s Penalty Board is filled up with the Treasure Chests of the other players, he loses and is out of the game. The Raft card forms the base for the players’ raft, whilst the Lumber Cards are slightly wavey lengths of card, marked with the sea on one side and wood on the other.

Set up is simple. The game’s box is turned upside down, placed in the centre of the table, and the lid to the box is placed on top, also upside down. The Raft Card is put on top of the lid, as are all five Rafters. Each player receives the Penalty Board and Treasure Chests of his colour. In two- and three-player games, each player will be given Penalty Boards and Treasure Chests of multiple colours.

The aim of Rafter Five is to build as big a raft as possible, whilst loading it up with treasure, without it collapsing. When it does collapse, the player who caused the collapse receives all of the Treasure Chests tipped into the sea. He keeps his own Treasure Chests to place again, but Treasure Chests belonging to the other players must be put onto his Penalty Board. If a player accrues five Treasure Chests belonging to other players on his Penalty Board, the game ends, and he is the loser, whilst everyone else wins! The game also ends when there are no more Lumber cards to place or all of the players have put their Treasure Chests on the raft. In either case, the player with the most Treasure Chests belonging to other players on his Penalty Board is the loser and everyone else wins.

On his turn, a player does three things. He picks up a single Rafter from the raft and then a Lumber Card. He must then place the Lumber Card on the raft and the Rafter on top of that. The Lumber Card must be placed so that part of it is on top of another Lumber Card on the raft (except on the first turn, when a player is free to place the Lumber card how he wants). Lastly, he put one of his Treasure Chests anywhere on the Lumber Card he just placed.

Rafter Five is as simple as that, but the longer a game goes on and the more that Lumber Cards and Treasure Cards are added, the more precarious the splay of the Lumber cards that make up the poorly constructed raft grows. The Rafters are the balancing factor, acting as a counterweight to lengths of Lumber Card hanging over the edge of the raft with their Treasure Chests perched precariously on their lengths. Picking the right one can the key to a tense, but safe turn, but pick the wrong one and everything goes tumbling into the sea! Placing a Treasure Chest where it is more likely to tip into the sea, such as at the end of a Lumber Card, dangling over the edge, is a legitimate move, but this highlights the key aspect to Rafter Five. Most dexterity games are about placing one thing or removing one thing to a stack. Rafter Five is about placing three—the Rafter, the Lumber Card, and the Treasure Chest!

Physically, Rafter Five is very nicely presented and packaged. The components are of good quality and the Rafter pieces are nice and sturdy in the hand, and ever so cute! The simplicity of the game means that the rules are easy to read and grasp.

Rafter Five does include a solo-mode, but it is more of a stacking puzzle than a game, so consequently less interesting. That said, the game plays well at whatever player count, with four or five being about right, and it is suited to play by the family, being very easy to teach and learn. Rafter Five is a great filler game, easy to learn, quick to play, but full of tension that grows and grows as more Lumber Cards are added to the raft.