The London Spiritualist Society is threatened with scandal! Just three weeks ago, one of the society’s junior members died in the library under strange circumstances and if word got out, its austere and respected reputation as an upright and proper dedication with an interest in the occult and the burgeoning spiritualist movement would suffer greatly. Such is the worry that this will come to pass, that the board of the society has decided that the incident should be investigated properly and fully with the aim of confirming that the society itself was not to blame and that no suspicion of impropriety can be attached to the society. The investigators are of course to be discreet themselves, whilst also bring to bear their experiences in dealing with the occult and the outré. So begins The Strange Case of the Shadow Traveller, a short two-act scenario for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition. It is published by Stygian Fox Publishing, best known for the anthologies Things We leave Behind and Fear’s Sharp Little Needles: Twenty-Six Hunting Forays into Horror, as well as New Tales of the Miskatonic Valley, Second Edition, the return of a classic. As written, it is intended to be compatible with the publisher’s Hudson & Brand, Inquiry Agents of the Obscure, a Victorian Era setting supplement, published in 2017 when there no Cthulhu by Gaslight in print. However, in 2025, there is, and The Strange Case of the Shadow Traveller can be run with just Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition and then with the fourth edition of Cthulhu by Gaslight, and perhaps a little easier now than it can with Hudson & Brand, Inquiry Agents of the Obscure.

The Strange Case of the Shadow Traveller begins with the Investigators at the headquarters of the London Spiritualist Society. They can already be members or even associates, but they should all have some experience with spiritualism and the occult and certainly acquired a reputation for discretion. They are informed that three weeks before, a trio of younger members broke in the society’s library and attempted a ceremony, one in which the board member believes they attempted to summon some malevolent spirit. At the end of the ceremony, one of the three was dead, a second was so traumatised he had to be hospitalised in an asylum, and the third resigned from the society. Each of the three represents the Investigators’ opening lines of inquiry. Of course, one of them is dead, although the Investigators will be told where his grave is, but the other two, Sir Peter Wahlmesey and Miss Sarah Mulberry can be visited and both will recant what happened during the ceremony, though with varying degrees of reluctance. Miss Mulberry can be interviewed at her flat, whilst Sir Peter has been institutionalised for his own good. Pleasingly, the scenario actually points out that he is receiving—by standards of the day—very good care at the asylum, and further, the scenario nicely emphasises the fragility of his current state rather than it actually being horrified.

Although the Investigators can learn a certain amount from both participants in the ceremony, very little of pertains to subsequent events and what pushes the Investigators to investigate further in the second act does feel like a deus ex machina, an intervention signposting where they should go. This comes after a very violent encounter with a horse and carriage which points to the Investigators to the home of the man killed during the ceremony, Richard Keye. This is a small mansion, but one which has been turned into half a slaughterhouse, half haunted house, one marked with some classic horror house motifs, such as something lurking in the bathtub or body parts strangely protruding from the walls. Again, much like the encounter in the asylum, these are nicely underplayed and in some cases, benign in nature and intent, if not outcome. There are some nicely creepy scenes and encounters throughout the house, but ultimately, the scenario funnels the Investigators into a final confrontation with the threat at the heart of the scenario.

Physically, The Strange Case of the Shadow Traveller is short and tidy, neat little hardback like the publisher’s earlier Nightmare on the Necropolis Express. It is done in the style of a penny dreadful, though with some colour artwork, some of which is quite decent. The map is clear and easy to use, whilst the book does need an edit in places.

If The Strange Case of the Shadow Traveller presents its horror stoutly enough, it wavers when it comes to other them, that of impropriety and scandal. With the society of the Victorian Era, there is plenty of scope for it within the scenario, not just due to the death in the library of the London Spiritualist Society, but also because one of the NPCs is transgender. That the latter is included is not a criticism or issue in terms of the story, but The Strange Case of the Shadow Traveller does not explore or really what happens if information about becomes more widely known. Of course, the scenario was written before the publication of the new edition of Cthulhu by Gaslight, but the Cthulhu by Gaslight: Investigators’ Guide – Mysteries & Frights in the Victorian Age does include rules for reputation and suffering damage to it. Obviously, this is less of an issue if the scenario is run as a one-shot rather than being used in a campaign.

Although set in the Victorian era of Cthulhu by Gaslight, there is very little to stop the Keeper adapting The Strange Case of the Shadow Traveller to other time periods, and whatever the time period, its brevity means that it is easy to slot into an ongoing campaign. Whilst it does not concern the traditional Cthulhu Mythos in any way, its themes of spiritualism and propriety are appropriate to the period, though it does not go as far it could have done in examining the consequences of impropriety. Nevertheless, and although quite light on investigation, The Strange Case of the Shadow Traveller is an engaging one-session of body horror and possession.

Quick-starts are a means of trying out a roleplaying game before you buy. Each should provide a Game Master with sufficient background to introduce and explain the setting to her players, the rules to run the scenario included, and a set of ready-to-play, pre-generated characters that the players can pick up and understand almost as soon as they have sat down to play. The scenario itself should provide an introduction to the setting for the players as well as to the type of adventures that their characters will have and just an idea of some of the things their characters will be doing on said adventures. All of which should be packaged up in an easy-to-understand booklet whose contents, with a minimum of preparation upon the part of the Game Master, can be brought to the table and run for her gaming group in a single evening’s session—or perhaps two. And at the end of it, Game Master and players alike should ideally know whether they want to play the game again, perhaps purchasing another adventure or even the full rules for the roleplaying game.

Alternatively, if the Game Master already has the full rules for the roleplaying game the quick-start is for, then what it provides is a sample scenario that she still run as an introduction or even as part of her campaign for the roleplaying game. The ideal quick-start should entice and intrigue a playing group, but above all effectively introduce and teach the roleplaying game, as well as showcase both rules and setting.

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What is it?
Sisterhood – Quickstart Guide is the quick-start for Sisterhood, a roleplaying game of ‘nuns with guns’ who fight demonic possession, cults, and other occult activities that threaten the world. It is published by Parable Games, best known for the horror roleplaying game, Shiver – Role-playing Tales in the Strange & the Unknown.

It is a twenty-nine page, 2.88 MB full colour PDF.

How long will it take to play?
Sisterhood – Quickstart Guide is designed to be played through in a single session. Any longer than that and you are not punching the demons hard enough.
What else do you need to play?
The Sisterhood – Quickstart Guide needs a full set of standard polyhedral dice per player. Tokens (or possibly miniatures) are required to represent the Sisters and the cultists and demons they will face. In addition to the character sheets for the Sisters, the Mother Superior—as the Game Master in Sisterhood is known—will need to print out ‘The Way of the Cross’ battlemap.
Who do you play?
The four Player Characters—or kickarse Nuns—in the Sisterhood – Quickstart Guide consist of an ex-criminal, a seer, a brawler, and an ex-resistance fighter.
How is a Player Character defined?A Sister in Sisterhood – Quickstart Guide has four stats—Faith, Cunning, Empathy, and Fortitude. These represent a Sister’s spiritual power, logical thinking, emotional capability, and strength and resilience, and are measured by die size, from a six-sided to a ten-sided die. Body and Spirit represent her physical fortitude and the fortitude of her Soul respectively. Her ability to call upon divine intervention is measured in points of Divinity, which has a variety of uses. She also has several skills. One of these is her ‘Past Skill’, picked up during her life before she became a Nun and one is her ‘Divinity Recharge’ by which she can recharge her Divinity Points after having used them. For example, in her Past, Sister Agatha was a Criminal. Her ‘Past Skill’ is ‘Illicit Activity’, which grants a bonus to Empathy challenges when dealing with crooks and her ‘Divinity Recharge’ is triggered when she skills an enemy from Ambush or Vantage. Each Sister has two further skills in addition to these.
How do the mechanics work?
Mechanically, Sisterhood – Quickstart Guide uses a Dice Challenge system. When a player wants his Nun to undertake an action, he rolls one his stat dice, whilst the Mother Superior rolls a Challenge die, which varies in size according to the difficulty of the task. A four-sided die is ‘Trivial’, a six-sided die is normal, an eight-sided die is ‘Difficult’, and so on, all the way up to a twenty-sided die or ‘Apocalyptic’! Whomever rolls the highest succeeds. A Sister can gain more dice to roll if another Sister helps her, as well as from Skills, Relics, and Blessings. In general, if a Sister is ‘Blessed’, her player rolls the next highest size die, but the next lowest die size if she is ‘Cursed’. Alternatively, the Sister Superior could simply set a target or Difficulty Class that the player and his Sister has to beat.
Combat in Sisterhood works slightly differently to that found in other roleplaying games. It employs ‘The Way of the Cross’ and is played out on a battlemap made up of the ‘Cross’ and the ‘Pentagram’. Different areas within the ‘Cross’ and the ‘Pentagram’ are marked with terms such as ‘Hidden’, ‘Flank’, ‘Brawl’, and more, which represent manoeuvres and tactics that both sides can move into and make use of, as well as range. A Sister can undertake three actions per turn, such as ‘Reposition’, ‘Attack’, ‘Assist’, ‘Use’, and so on. The Nuns will start a fight from the ‘Cross’, whilst the demons and their servants start in the ‘Pentagram’. In general, combat in Sisterhood has a tactical, if slightly abstract feel.
How does combat work?
Combat in Sisterhood works slightly differently to that found in other roleplaying games. It employs ‘The Way of the Cross’ and is played out on a battlemap made up of the ‘Cross’ and the ‘Pentagram’. Different areas within the ‘Cross’ and the ‘Pentagram’ are marked with terms such as ‘Hidden’, ‘Flank’, ‘Brawl’, and more, which represent manoeuvres and tactics that both sides can move into and make use of, as well as range. A Sister can undertake three actions per turn, such as ‘Reposition’, ‘Attack’, ‘Assist’, ‘Use’, and so on. The Nuns will start a fight from the ‘Cross’, whilst the demons and their servants start in the ‘Pentagram’. In general, combat in Sisterhood has a tactical, if slightly abstract feel.
How Divine are the Sisters?
A Sister in Sisterhood has access to the Divine in the form of points of Divinity. She has three of these at First Level and will gain more when she acquires another Level. Divinity can be spent to gain ‘Divine Intervention’ and an extra six-sided die to a result in a challenge; to trigger certain skills; to gain a ‘Dice of Divinity’ or twenty-sided that replaces a Sister’s main die, which requires every Sister to expend a point of Divinity; and to power certain relics and holy weapons. Spent Divinity can be regained by resting, through prayer, and a Sister using her ‘Recharge Skill’.
What do you play?
The scenario in Sisterhood – Quickstart Guide is ‘The Lost Covent’. The Sisters are tasked with investigating a former, but isolated convent to determine if it is being used for cult activities, recover a relic left, and then cleanse the chapel. It is a quick affair, beginning with an investigation of the former convent before a confrontation with the cultists in the chapel. The Sisters will barely have a chance to recover before the chapel is assaulted by even more heavily armed cultists—including Cultist Rangers(!) and a Machine Gun Team(!)—attempting to stop them from consecrating the chapel once more. It is very combat focused and probably needed a bit more investigation and a bit more room for interaction and roleplaying.
Is there anything missing?
No. The Sisterhood – Quickstart Guide has everything the the Mother Superior and her Sisters will need to play.
Is it easy to prepare?
The core rules presented in the Sisterhood – Quickstart Guide are very easy to prepare. They are light and easy to use as much as they are to teach, although the players will need to to get used to ‘The Way of the Cross’ upon which combat is handled.
Is it worth it?
Yes—for the most part. The Sisterhood – Quickstart Guide presents everything you you need to play a brutal game of Nun-on-Demon action, with an emphasis on the action and combat and the tactics played out on the ‘The Way of the Cross’. However, this emphasis on action and combat means that there is more ‘nuns with guns’ than ‘nuns with anything else’ action in the scenario. More of the latter would have allowed the Sisters to shine out of combat and given scope for all of their past lives to be brought into play. The Sisterhood – Quickstart Guide is a fast and fun, but not quite all it could have been.
The Sisterhood – Quickstart Guide is published by Parable Games and is available to download here.

It is over a thousand years since the great wizard, Kavlov, drew upon his magics to bind and imprison Balthazar, a three-eyed demon of Uzran, in the Halls of Dread below the Dreaded Hills. It is said that he sacrificed himself to ensure that the demon would never again walk the mortal realm and spread his influence, for he was not seen again. This is not the case, for Kavlov not only drew upon his mighty magics to bind the demon in place, but he also bound himself to ensure that they did not fail. Yet failing they are and as the wizard’s power fades, so do the bindings that hold the demon in place. As they weaken, so the influence of Balthazar has spread once again, and many and diverse a group of men and monsters have found their way to the Dreaded Hills and there settle within the network of caves that thread out down the hill under which the demon’s bindings lie. Dread creatures and monstrous men are abroad in the forests and hills nearby, threatening those unwise to be travelling through the region and the nearby village of Sanctuary, noted as haven for the bereaved, its guilds and temples dedicated to ensuring that the deceased are accorded a proper burial. As darkness begins to spread and seep into the hearts of men, what will the Player Characters do? Strike a blow for the safety of all concerned and prevent those that still worship the demon from freeing him of his shackles or do they side with the demon and work to free him and so unleash his dark desires upon the world once again?

This is the set-up for K-1 Kavlov’s Sanctuary, a scenario and sandcrawl for use with Mörk Borg, the Swedish pre-apocalypse Old School Renaissance style roleplaying game designed by Ockult Örtmästare Games and Stockholm Kartell and published by Free League Publishing. Published by The Dungeon’s Key following successful Kickstarter campaign, K-1 Kavlov’s Sanctuary may well be written for use with Mörk Borg (there is also a version written for use with Necrotic Gnome’s Old School Essentials, the retroclone based on the 1980-81 version of Basic Dungeons & Dragons), but what it is inspired by, is a classic module for Basic Dungeons & Dragons. This is B2, Keep on the Borderlands, which presented a frontier base of operations—the keep of the title—from which the Player Characters could operate and the Caves of Chaos, the series of caves and caverns in which all manner of humanoid tribes could be found in service to the forces of evil. The inspiration then, provides for a base of operations, in this case, the settlement of Sanctuary, a wilderness area packed with danger, and a big threat, in this case, the caves under the Dreaded Hills, a set of thirteen mini-dungeons. K-1 Kavlov’s Sanctuary, though, manages to provide not just more than this, but ultimately and effectively less than this.

The book begins with seven Classes for Mörk Borg. These are the Flesh Weaver, which uses a bone needle and bloody sinew to alter the flesh of himself and others; the Blood Baron, who must drink the blood of others to retain his virility; the Degenerate Cannibal, whose own body is nutritious and restores Hit Points, but must eat the raw meat of other humanoids; the Mycotic Fiend, which grows on the body of its host and never needs to eat or drink; the Skinned Bastard, a former child abductee who can invade the dreams of others and whose toughened scar-tissue skin is resilient to damage from magical and physical resources; the Disgraced Court Alchemist, whose surprisingly continued royal patronage gives him advantage in gaining reagents and who is accompanied by a foul smelling, but loyal aide; and a Roach God Emissary, an undying servant to the deity who is sent spells each day by his god, each one scrawled on the wings of its cockroach servants. Bar the Disgraced Court Alchemist, there is a grotesque, even gruesome, quality to all of these Classes, all befitting Mörk Borg. Further, they lend themselves to a play style in which the Player Characters are freaks and monsters and do want Balthazar to be freed.

The given base of operations for the Player Characters is the village of Sanctuary, dominated by its guilds dedicated to mortuary services. They include the Grave Diggers’ Guild, Coffin Makers’ Guild, Embalmers’ Guild, and the Undertakers’ Guild. There is also the chapel, under which the devil (?) Balthazar is bound. The stones of the chapel weep the blood of the demon/devil, which is collected in a cistern underneath the chapel's basement and used in rituals or added to meals for the dying. The head of the chapel, the Master of Rituals leads the town, whilst his deputy, the Deacon, has been corrupted by Balthazar and is leading his acolytes in freeing the demon. The village also has tenement blocks, a general store, a traders, a bake shop, textiles shop, and a merchant bank, and almost none of it is presented in a way that makes it come to life or engage the interest. What is potentially of interest is one NPC is a werewolf, one heads the chapel and the village, and one is his deputy who is working against him. None of them are named and none of them are given suggestions as to what they might do over the course of the scenario or in response to the Player Characters’ actions. Further and putting aside the fact that the facilities feel more suited to an urban area than a rustic one, all of these facilities in the village are only protected by guards at a watchtower. There are no walls around the village so it feels as if Sanctuary could be overrun and raised to the ground at any minute, but the real problem is simply that the village does not feel lived in and none of its inhabitants feel like real people.

There are more interesting elements in the wilderness, like the Fey who lurk in the Deadwoods and instead of killing their victims, flay them and wear their skins. This is the source of Skinned Bastards Class earlier in the book, potentially setting up an interesting plot hook for a Skinned Bastard Player Character. Yet nothing is developed from this and there is no explanation of why the Fey do this. In comparison, the Bog Witch is more developed and thus more interesting, a crone who lives deep in a swamp and will sell interesting wares, such as a Wand of Health that costs one hundred dirty fingernails or a Potion of Verities which forces the imbiber to answer all questions truthfully for ten minutes and costs four flagons of wine and a bunch of spices. These wares are engagingly inventive and the Bog Witch will also ask potential purchasers for help in searching for her missing albino children. Yet again, the author fails to follow through in setting something interesting up as the entry for the Bog Witch does not tell the Game Master where those children might be found.

The thirteen dungeons range from a ‘Dwarfling Cave’ and the ‘Cannibals’ Den’ to the ‘Wight’s Crypt’ and the ‘Halls of the Dead’. Most are just four pages long and all have their maps repeated on each two-page spread for ease of reference. There are some entertaining dungeons amongst this devil’s dozen. For example, the ‘Gorgon Temple’ has an Egyptian-themed, sepulchral feel, whilst the ‘Hobgoblin Arena’ adds a little excitement in the form of gladiatorial games. Yet all of the dungeons appear to exist in a vacuum. There are connections between some of them, but they are very few and far between, and none of the occupants ever appear to interact with the occupants of another dungeon, and certainly never go outside since none of the occupants appear on any of the encounter tables. Further, none of the dungeons have explanations as to what they are, what their occupants are, and what those occupants do before the actual descriptions begin. Instead, K-1 Kavlov’s Sanctuary commits the cardinal sin of ‘Read to find out’ rather than telling the Game Master what she actually needs to know upfront. Even then, when she does find out, it is unlikely to make sense. For example, the ‘Wight’s Crypt’ has no Wights, but is instead full of Vampires and the ‘Cyclops’ lair’ is not just home to a Cyclops, but a gang of feral children who serve him. Why are they there and why do they not just run away? The Dreaded Hills even have ‘Leper Colony’ and a ‘Laboratory’, both places of butchery and torture rather of healing or study, recurring themes which run throughout many of the dungeons.

Physically, everything in K-1 Kavlov’s Sanctuary designed to help the Game Master just gets in the way. Both of the area maps in the scenario are designed to, and do, look like those of B2, Keep on the Borderlands. This is not a problem with the ‘Wilderness Map’, given a two-page spread, but the map of the Dreaded Hills, designed to look like the map of the Caves of Chaos from B2, Keep on the Borderlands, is laughably too small. It represents an area approximately 570 by 460 feet, is marked with entrances and caves of thirteen such cave complexes in that area, and is then fitted onto a single digest size page. It looks vaguely pretty, but is unreadable. What should they do to counteract that? Perhaps include excerpts of this map to use with each dungeon? Well, no, that would have been too obvious. Instead, each mini-dungeon has its own map, redrawn and done in white on muted colours to the blandest effect possible. The maps of each dungeon are functional and utterly lacking in terms of inspiration or style. Then there is the writing. It aims to be concise and to the point, but all too often it leaves the Game Master without any real idea as to what is going on. Over and over, thr Game Master to ‘Read to find out’.

K-1 Kavlov’s Sanctuary is overambitious, but underdeveloped and underwhelming. It attempts to bring the sensibilities of Mörk Borg to classic Basic Dungeons & Dragons-style play and classic Basic Dungeons & Dragons-style play to Mörk Borg. Although it succeeds tonally in bringing the sensibilities of Mörk Borg to classic Basic Dungeons & Dragons-style play, often overly so with its scenes of torture and other gruesomeness, it fails in too many other ways. It simply does not provide enough context and set things up sufficiently to enable the Game Master to run it effectively and engage her players and their characters with any ease, too many things are left unexplained, and tonally, it really only works if the Player Characters are working to release the demon rather than keep him bound under the earth—especially if the players decide to roleplay the new Classes included at the front of the book. Ultimately, K-1 Kavlov’s Sanctuary promises much, but fails to deliver fully and effectively on that promise.

In the not-too-distant future, 2020, civilisation is no more. It was wiped away by the falling of bombs, by the plagues that ran rampant, by rampant starvation, and the desperate, resulting scramble to survive. This was the Boom. It took place years, probably decades ago. What remains is the Waste, where communities cling together for support and protection, as well as access to supplies of clean food and water, hoping with withstand the predations of marauders, cannibals, and worse. One such community is Paradise City and in recent months, its inhabitants have suffered an outbreak of the plague known as Bleeding Fever. Fortunately, Paradise City’s leaders managed to obtain a cure from the Science Council of Heartbeat City. Unfortunately, the truck carrying the antidote was captured by the Saint, a local warlord who notoriously runs fights in her ‘domes of thunder’, or rather in electrified cages. Many communities send fighters to participate in these fights, but not Paradise City. Until now, that is… In order to get the antidote its citizens need, Paradise City is sending fighter for the first time, backed up with a team, the Saint’s next tournament, called ‘Lectric Buggalu’. However, the team is not there just to support the fighter, because if he does not win and cannot get the antidote back, the team is going to have to steal it and drive it all the way back to Paradise City.

The is the set-up for Domes of Thunder, a scenario and mini-supplement for ACE!—or the Awfully Cheerful Engine!—the roleplaying game of fast, cinematic, action comedy. Published by EN Publishing, best known for the W.O.I.N. or What’s Old is New roleplaying System, as used in Judge Dredd and the Worlds of 2000 AD and Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition. Some of the entries in the series have been expansive, such as Orcs & Oubliettes and Strange Science, providing a detailed setting and an scenario, whilst others in the series have tended to be one-shot, film night specials. As with other supplements for ACE!, both the genre and inspiration for Domes of Thunder are obvious. The genre is Post Apocalyptic and the inspiration is the Mad Max series of films, specifically, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. This is a setting where guns and bullets are scare, petrol (or gasoline) is precious, and leather and scrap armour along with a pink mohawk are the only thing seen as fashionable since before the boom. The book provides some basic background and some rules additions before leaping into the scenario itself, which makes up two thirds of the supplement.

Domes of Thunder starts by suggesting some old Roles suitable for setting, as well as giving some new ones. The old include the Barbarian, Bounty Hunter, Cowboy, Outlaw, and more, and these are joined by the Cyborg, Driver, Gladiator, Mechanic, Mutant, and Survivalist. Each has a simple benefit, such as the Cyborg being able to a Brawling attack and inflict double damage by spending a point of Karma, the Driver gains the Driving Focus for free in addition to his other Focus, and the Mechanic can spend Karma to scrounge enough metal and plastics and parts to restore the Health of any vehicle. Since this is a cinematic setting, it adheres to the ‘Rule of Cool’ when it comes to personal armour. If it looks cool, it provides personal protection. Vehicles in Domes of Thunder—automobiles, motorcycles, trucks, and armoured RVs—have all been scavenged, patched, and repaired again and again, and players need to roll at the beginning of every Act to see if their characters’ vehicles have enough fuel. A vehicle is defined by four stats—Health, Bash, Steering, and Plating. Health is the amount of damage a vehicle it can take, Bash how much it can deal out when ramming or sideswiping another vehicle, Steering is its manoeuvrability, and Plating how much damage it stops. A handful of vehicles are given stats, but the game does not really need any more than that.

One of the things that Domes of Thunder makes clear is that it is not a setting in which speed matters. In fact, none of the vehicle have a speed rating. There are two reasons for this. One narrative, one physical. The physical is that the roads are strangely still maintained, but being marked by cracks and potholes, it is impossible to go too fact. The narrative is that all the interesting things happen when vehicles get close to each other, rather than one racing away simply because it is faster. It is possible to get away from another vehicle in a chase and catch up with another vehicle in a chase, but in Domes of Thunder, what determines this is the narrative and manoeuvring rolls. This is about as far as the driving rules and driving duel rules go in Domes of Thunder, essentially keeping them simple and fast.

The ‘Domes of Thunder’ adventure begins in the post-apocalyptic equivalent of the tavern in fantasy roleplaying—an old rest stop, now barricaded and fortified. The Player Characters are hired by the fighter from Paradise City and his manager to provide support and back-up on their journey to Saint’s Compound and help in getting the antidote out if things go wrong. And since, Domes of Thunder is effectively a one-shot, film night special, things are definitely going to go wrong. This starts with the Paradise City fighter being challenged by a rival fighter and ultimately ending up dead the next morning. Which also makes things more complex as one of the Player Characters will have to enter the ‘dome of thunder’ as the fighter representing Paradise City. There are other complications, but they are just bumps in the road. The main action takes place at Saint’s Compound, which turns out to be more like ‘Santa’s Compound’ if it was protected by armed ORCs and Elves. This is because it used to be a shopping mall and it was the mall’s Christmas Santa who fortified the mall not long after the Boom.

Apart from the Player Character who is going to fight in the dome, the other Player Characters are going to have to sneak around and investigate Saint’s Compound in search of the truck with the antidote for Bleeding Fever, try not to get caught—but hey, it is definitely more dramatic if they do as they have to escape the Saint’s (prison) workshop and then have to escape her compound too, and eventually race out of there in the truck with the antidote. It is fairly freeform in its structure and there is scope for the Game Master to add her own encounters and situations or simply play out the story to see where it goes. Ultimately, the scenario will end with the Player Characters with the truck containing the antidote driving hell for leather to Paradise City. There is good reason for this—the Saint is very annoyed with the Player Characters and she unleashes her dragon on them! This is not a dragon, but a helicopter, but it is so unfamiliar to the Player Characters that it might as well be. Finish the ‘dragon’ off, and the Player Characters can ride off into the sunset…

The ‘Domes of Thunder’ adventure is straightforward and should take a session or two to complete. If there are issues, it is that it introduces an NPC under one name and them changes it and that it skirts around what the nature of the apocalypse is. There are mutants and there is prejudice against them. For example, only pure strain humans with neither mutation or nor mechanical modification can participate in the games. Further, the scenario does play around with the fantasy genre a little so it may not be clear to players in particular, if the setting embraces elements of fantasy as well, and if so, quite how far. This is because the security for the Saint’s Compound are called ORCs and Saint’s infiltrators are called Elves. The ORCs are derived from the name of the shopping mall, which was the Odessa Retail Centre, whilst the Elves are essentially Santa’s ‘little helpers’. Nominally, the scenario actually be taking place at Christmas, but that is not entirely clear. So, tonally, Domes of Thunder feels slightly odd in places, but not enough to disrupt the scenario.

Physically, Domes of Thunder is well presented with reasonable artwork. It needs a slight edit in places.
Domes of Thunder is as straightforward an adventure as you want it to be. The plot is none too complex and what the Player Characters have to do is easy to grasp. Where the the complication comes in is whatever mess the Player Characters get themselves into. There is plenty of room for Game Master to add her own content, but as is, Domes of Thunder is easy to prepare and bring to the table for a session or two’s worth of uncomplicated post-apocalyptic, cinematic action.

Much like the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, the Jonstown Compendium 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 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?
Runequest: Rings of Glorantha is a short supplement for for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. It is by the same author of GLORANTHA: Trinkets from Dragon Pass.

It is a four page, full colour, 893.15 KB PDF.

Runequest: Rings of Glorantha is decently presented, but it could have been better organised. It needs a slight edit.

Where is it set?
Dragon Pass.

Who do you play?
Adventurers of all types who could come across these rare items.

What do you need?
RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. It can also be run using the RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha – QuickStart Rules and Adventure.

What do you get?
Runequest: Rings of Glorantha is a description of seven rings which might be found in the world of Glorantha. However, it begins by noting that finger rings are rare in Glorantha, where rings are worn through the nose or around the arm. Thus magical rings are even rarer and more so in a world and setting in which magic is common, but magical items to be note rather than just functional.

The seven rings in this supplement each come with publicly sourced image and two short paragraphs, one giving its description and the other its effects when worn. The rings are divided between two types. The first suggests that many copies of it have been produced. For example, the Ring of Green Power is one of the Earth Goddesses’ implements of war and is made of tiny, solidified leaves with an emerald stone. Found very occasionally on former battle fields where the Goddesses’ worshipers fought Chaos, it must be worn on the thumb of the right hand and an axe wielded in the same hand for its power to work. This consists of a magical bonus to damage inflicted on creatures with a high affinity for the Chaos Rune or have one or more Chaotic Features.

The second type is unique, there being only one of its type in existence. For example, Charred Hope is ancient Elvish treasure that survived the Moonburn. It is found in Rist by those opposing the Lunar Empire. When worn, the wearer suffers less damage from spells that inflict damage and are connected to the Moon Rune.

The rings detailed in Runequest: Rings of Glorantha do feel as if their powers fit their descriptions and none of the powers they grant are overly powerful, often working only under certain conditions. However, more description of their histories and their legends would have been welcome as that would potentially make each ring more interesting and more special beyond simply its rarity.

Is it worth your time?
Yes. Runequest: Rings of Glorantha is an inexpensive way of adding more magic to give Player Characters or NPCs minor powers that will enhance their legends.
No. Runequest: Rings of Glorantha is simply too expensive for what you get and the Game Master could create her own with a little bit of research which are just as good.
Maybe. Runequest: Rings of Glorantha is expensive for what you get, but the Game Master might want to add a little variety to the treasure found or perhaps take inspiration from the rings presented here and either develop more of their legend or create new ones of her own.

Much like the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, the Jonstown Compendium 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.

—oOo—
What is it?
Fires of Mingai: Hero Wars in the East Isles – Volume 2 is anthology of scenarios and the beginnings of a campaign for use with Korolan Islands: Hero Wars in the East Isles – Volume 1, both written for use with RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha.

It is a one-hundred-and-twenty-nine page, full colour, 50.60 MB PDF.

The layout is clean and tidy, but the text feels disorganised in places and requires an edit. The artwork varies in quality, but some of it is decent.

Where is it set?
Fires of Mingai: Hero Wars in the East Isles – Volume 2 is set on Mingai and Sitoro, two of the five Korolan Islands that make up the Korolan Isles which lie in the Jeweled Islands, the Islands of Wonder that lie to the east.

Who do you play?Fires of Mingai: Hero Wars in the East Isles – Volume 2 is designed to be used with Player Characters who are native to the Korolan Islands. (The possibility of outsiders playing the scenarios is acknowledged, but not developed to any great depth.)
What do you need?Fires of Mingai: Hero Wars in the East Isles – Volume 2 requires Korolan Islands: Hero Wars in the East Isles – Volume 1, RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, the Glorantha Bestiary, and The Red Book of Magic. In addition, the Guide to Glorantha and The Stafford Library – Vol VI Revealed Mythologies may be useful.
What do you get?Fires of Mingai: Hero Wars in the East Isles – Volume 2 is anthology of scenarios set on two islands previously detailed in Korolan Islands: Hero Wars in the East Isles – Volume 1. More specific setting information is provided for both islands, including settlements, major landmarks, and NPCs minor and major. Thus, for Mingai, this is the village of Verena; the Crack of Fire, sacred place to the women of Mingemelor cult; and Red Top Hill, renowned for its red rocks and the former occupant, a wizard called Red Top. Particular attention is paid to the village of Serena, since Mingai is the setting for three of the scenarios in the anthology. Whilst, for Sitoro Island, this the Senate House of Sitoro, seat of the Korolan senate, and the Dream Canal, which flows down from Laughing Plateau, and if paddled up to the waterfall at its far reaches, a gateway to the Dreamworld may be found and entered. Only the one scenario, the third, is set on Sitoro Island.
The adventures themselves involve a good mix of physical action, interaction, and spiritual confrontation. The latter in particular, figures prominently in the confrontations in two of the four scenarios and the Player Characters do need to be prepared to face such threats. ‘The Nest’ is the first scenario of the quartet and quickly involves the Player Characters in the politics of the Almainas, the women who led the island. The Player Characters are engaged to investigate and deal with the presence of a Roc, recently arrived on the island and having built a nest, causing consternation and havoc by eating too many goats. However, none of the Almainas can quite decide what is the best course of action—kill the gigantic bird, charm it, drive it off, and so on. Ultimately, it will be up to the players and their characters to decide, but the Almainas do provide the characters with means to communicate with the creature. Climbing to the nest is a challenge in itself and the Player Characters are not the only ones interested in the contents of the nest. All possibilities are explored and there are some decent rewards for the Player Characters whatever action they decide to do. Overall, this is a fun scenario with a good mix of action and combat.
‘The Nest’ is followed by ‘The Hill of Red Top’. Here, the Player Characters are employed to climb up to the Hill of Red Top and there investigate Red Top Tower, abandoned years ago by a wizard and then his servants, and said to be cursed. It is damaged, but occupied still, by a very strange creature. This is a Keet, one of the avian species similar to the Ducks, but who can be found in separate albatross, cormorant, gull, mallard, pelican, puffin, seagull, tern, and other tribes throughout the East Isles, who has been maddened by spirits and who may hinder or help the Player Characters—and who in the long term may actually join them as a companion. ‘The Hill of Red Top’ has the feel of a classic wizard’s tower of fantasy roleplaying, full of secrets and some nasty encounters with spirits. The secrets hint at the island’s dark past, both relatively recent and in the long past. Uncovering these secrets will put the Player Characters in deadly danger and some of those secrets have ramifications that will not come into play until the fourth scenario in the anthology. There is a certain grubbiness to the scenario and it may end not only with the Player Characters not only being joined by an odd companion, but by their cementing a place in the community of the village of Verena.
Taking place on the island of Sitoro, ‘The Korolan Games’ involves another classic gaming situation—a competition. An annual event which takes place between all of the Korolan Islands and serves two purposes. One is to funnel the energy of the islands’ youth into peaceful activities rather than raiding and the other is to determine who will be the king or queen of the islands for a year with the winning island also exempt from paying tax for a year. So, it is not just a matter of winning individual competitions, but winning as many as possible. The Player Characters get to both attend and participate in the individual events, each played on a single day. There are generous rewards for the winners as well as reputation gains aplenty. However, because the competition has political ramifications, the event is far from clean and fair. There are many willing to cheat and resort to other acts of skullduggery to win. Thus, the Player Characters will kept involved investigating the various machinations going on behind the scenes as much as they are participating in the athletics competitions. ‘The Korolan Games’ is a busy affair with a lot to keep track of and the Game Master will need to prepare the scenario with care.
The last scenario in the anthology is ‘Fires of Mingai’. The Player Characters are asked to investigate after a fiery ghost has arisen from the ashes and lava of the Crack of Fire and fires are spreading across the island, destroying farms and endangering life. Stranger still, the Mingemelor’s cult spirits seem to have done nothing about this interloper. The scenario has an epic feel as the Player Characters go in search of more information, including consulting an ancient and dipsomaniac Gibbon shaman, and potentially help, before a confrontation with powerful fire spirits which will reveal some dark truths—hinted at in the second scenario, ‘The Hill of Red Top’—brings the anthology to a close.
One fundamental issue with Fires of Mingai: Hero Wars in the East Isles – Volume 2 is the lack of pre-generated Player Characters. The authors instead suggesting that NPCs could be used from amongst the competitors for the Korolan Games in the second scenario, ‘The Korolan Games’. Many of these are also NPCs tied to the four scenarios in the anthology, so not necessarily suitable. Further, given the differences between the setting of Dragon Pass and the Korolan Islands, pre-generated Player Characters would serve as a way to ease the players into and past those differences, showcasing the different Occupations and Cults. It would also make the four scenarios in the anthology easier to run.
Is it worth your time?Yes—Fires of Mingai: Hero Wars in the East Isles – Volume 2, with its four engaging scenarios, puts the setting detailed in Korolan Islands: Hero Wars in the East Isles – Volume 1 into action and enables the players to explore RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha from a different cultural perspective in a dispersed island setting.No—Fires of Mingai: Hero Wars in the East Isles – Volume 2 is too location specific and too radical a change in cultural outlook to be of use in a general RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha campaign.Maybe—Fires of Mingai: Hero Wars in the East Isles – Volume 2 is too location specific and too radical a change in cultural outlook to be of use in a general RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha campaign, but its scenarios could be used to explore a clash of cultures.

When it comes to the Old School Renaissance, there are plenty of retroclones and microclones and other roleplaying games designed to emulate the play and feel of retroclones, but without being directly derived from Dungeons & Dragons. Further, in the two decades of the Old School Renaissance, there have been plenty of gaming darlings, designs that have garnered praise, play, and support from both within and without the Old School Renaissance. 2010’s Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying from Lamentations of the Flame Princess, was one of the first, bringing an adult sensibility to the hobby in terms of content, tone, and horror, whilst in 2019, Necrotic Gnome’s Old School Essentials presented a very clean and elegantly accessible version of the Moldvay/Cook 1980/81 version of Dungeons & Dragons. More recently, Mörk Borg, the Swedish pre-apocalypse Old School Renaissance style roleplaying game designed by Ockult Örtmästare Games and Stockholm Kartell and published by Free League Publishing made a splash with its doom punk attitude combined with its artpunk style. In each case, these offered a combination of the familiar play of Dungeons & Dragons-style roleplaying games with their own unique selling point. So, if Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying offered adult horror and Dungeons & Dragons, and Old School Essentials offered accessibility and elegance in a new version of Basic Dungeons & Dragons, and Mörk Borg offered doom metal sensibility alongside a splash of chromium yellow and neon pink, what does the latest darling of the Old School Renaissance, Shadowdark, have to offer in terms of its unique selling point?

Shadowdark is published by The Arcane Library following a successful Kickstarter campaign. Its claim was that it would be ‘Old School Gaming’, but modernised, and presented in a way that devotees of the Old School Renaissance and players of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. And in the case of the latter, a means of entering the Old School Renaissance sector of the hobby. So, what is Shadowdark? The publisher describes Shadowdark as, “…[W]hat an old-school fantasy adventure game would look like after being redesigned with 50 years of innovation.” And certainly, there is some truth in that, since what Shadowdark offers is Dungeons & Dragons-style play, but with many rules and mechanics that are modern, having been derived from the more recent iterations of Dungeons & Dragons rules. So, what it uses is the key d20 System mechanic of rolling a twenty-sided die and aiming to roll high to beat a difficulty class and ascending Armour Class, both drawn from Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition; the Advantage and Disadvantage mechanic from Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition; and the slot-based inventory system of microclones such as Knave. Thus, there is a lot here that a player of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition will recognise.

What the player of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition will not recognise is the replacement in Shadowdark of the Vancian ‘cast & forget’ style of spellcasting by having players of Wizards and Priests roll to cast magic. Then again, neither will the devotee of the Old School Renaissance. However, said devotee will recognise the standard attributes—rolled for in order, the relatively low Hit Points, standard Alignments of Law, Chaos, and Neutrality, Experience Points being awarded for treasure found, and certainly, a lot of content and tables designed to be used at the table and support developing play.

Shadowdark is a Class and Level roleplaying a la Dungeons & Dragons. In the game, players take on the roles of Crawlers, who will use their magic, iron, and cleverness to delve into and explore mysterious ruins, lost cities, and monster-infested depths. They will overcome traps, face monsters, and the constant threat of danger and calamity, but they will find gold and gems, amazing magic, and ancient, forgotten secrets, and with luck, survive to return to civilisation. As well as luck, they need light, and if ever it goes out, they are in danger of being attacked by those creatures and monsters who can see in the dark, of wandering into traps and chasms unseen, and getting lost in the depths of the Shadowdark!

A Crawler is defined by his stats, Class and Ancestry, Background and Talents, Armour Class, Hit Points, what he can carry, and more. The stats are the six standards—Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. There are four Classes—Fighter, Priest, Thief, and Wizard, and six Ancestries—Dwarf, Elf, Goblin, Half-Orc, Halfling, and Human. Each Ancestry provides a single benefit. The Dwarf gains more Hit Points and rolls with Advantage at each Level to increase them; the Elf has a bonus to either ranged weapon attacks or his spellcasting checks; the Goblin cannot be surprised; the Half-Orc is better at fighting with melee weapons; the Halfling can turn invisible once per day; and the Human gains an extra Talent from his Class at First Level. What none of the non-Human Ancestries have is anything akin to Infravision or Darkvision. Thus, no Player Character can naturally see in the dark. This is by intent and it has major ramifications in play.

Each Class determines the arms and armour a Player Character can wield and wear, several Class abilities, and access to Class Talents. Each Class has a table of these, rolled for randomly at First Level and then every other Level. So, the Fighter can use all arms and armour, can carry more if his Constitution is higher, can master a weapon, and gains Advantage on either Strength or Dexterity checks to overcome an opposing force. The Talents include mastering another weapon, gaining a bonus to hit on all weapons, increasing a stat, improving Armour Class for one type of armour, and so on. These Talents can be rolled again and again as the Player Character acquires Levels.

Of the three other Classes, the Priest can Turn Undead and cast Priest spells, and generally gets better at spellcasting through his Talents. The Thief can Backstab and has Advantage on Climbing, Sneaking and Hiding, Disguises, Finding and Disabling Traps, and Picking Pockets and Locks. The use of the latter does not get batter through Talents, the Thief improving his Backstab Ability and combat prowess. The Wizard can learn spells from a scroll and cast spells, whilst his Talents include being able to make a random magic item get better at casting magic. Backgrounds range from Urchin, Wanted, and Cult Initiate to Scholar, Noble, and Chirurgeon. These provide no mechanical benefit; the player and Game Master being expected to work out when they provide a benefit or a penalty during play. Essentially, roleplay their use and provide an on-the-spot bonus or penalty, the most obvious being Advantage or Disadvantage.

Player Character creation is simple. Stats are rolled for in order—a complete new set can be rolled for if no stat is fourteen or higher—and the player then selects an Ancestry and Class, rolling for a Talent for the latter. He also chooses Alignment and purchases equipment.

Name: Brak
Class: Thief (Robber)
Ancestry: Goblin
Level: First
Alignment: Neutral

Strength 13 (+1) Dexterity 17 (+3) Constitution 14 (+2)
Intelligence 13 (+1) Wisdom 12 (+0) Charisma 05 (-3)

Armour Class: 14
Hit Points: 6

Abilities: Backstab, Thievery, Cannot Be Surprised
Talents: +2 Dexterity
Background: Sailor

Equipment: Crawling Kit, Leather Armour, Daggers, Lantern, Flint & Steel, Oil Flasks, Crowbar

Mechanically, to have his character perform a task, a player rolls a twenty-sided die and adds any Stat modifier and bonus from a Talent to the result. The Difficulty Classes are standardised to nine for Easy, twelve for Normal, fifteen for hard, and eighteen for extreme. It is possible to roll a critical hit or fumble, which will require interpretation in play. In combat, a critical hit will typically double damage, but if spellcasting, it will double one aspect of the spell. Combat plays out as you would expect for a Dungeons & Dragons-style roleplaying game.

Magic works the same way for Priests and Wizards. To have his spellcaster cast a spell, a player rolls a twenty-sided die and adds a Stat bonus to the result. This is either from Intelligence for Wizards or Wisdom for Priests. The Difficulty Class for spells is ten plus the tier of the spell. So, to cast a First-Tier spell, a player must roll against a Difficulty Class of eleven, then twelve for Second Tier spells, and so on. A spellcaster will know a number of spells and during an adventure can cast as many and as often as he likes. Once cast, he does not forget them. However, if the spellcasting roll is a failure, the spell cannot be cast again until the spellcaster has had a rest. If the roll is a one, or critical failure, then the spellcaster will not only forget the spell until he has had a rest, but also roll on the Wizard Mishap table if the spellcaster is a Wizard or complete a ritualistic penance if a Priest.

The players and their character also have access to Luck Tokens. These are awarded by the Game Master for good roleplaying, character heroism, and so on. Effectively, they are reroll tokens, which allow a player to reroll his dice. A player may only hold one Luck Token at any one time.

So far, so good. Shadowdark reads and sounds like a standard Dungeons & Dragons-style roleplaying game, but done in a very accessible style and with some tweaks. However, the play of it is radically different to most retroclones in two major ways. The first is Initiative. In almost every other roleplaying game, Initiative is determined at the start of a fight or the action. In Shadowdark, it is determined at the start of play and play progresses in turn order for the rest of the session like that, though it may be rerolled for combat and a Game Master can decide not to adhere to it all the time, allowing for more freeform play. When it is in effect, what it means is that the players and their characters are always on. There is no let up to the tension. They are Crawling through the dungeon or the temple or the caves and so they are in a dangerous place and anything can go wrong or happen at any moment.

The way is light. No Player Character has Infravision and can see in the dark, no matter what their Ancestry. Therefore, a party must keep a torch lit at all times. A torch or a lantern, only lasts for a single hour—and that is an hour of real time, not game time. At the end of the hour, the torch (or lantern) goes out and the Player Characters are in the dark. Now they can move and act in the dark, but it is difficult and dangerous. All actions are at a Disadvantage—including lighting a new torch—and the Danger Level of the location where the Player Characters are, rises to ‘Deadly’. The higher the Danger Level, the more chance of a random encounter. Plus, if there is a random encounter, the monsters are going to be able to see in the dark. Now simply changing one torch for another is not going to matter in most cases, but there will be moments when a light source being extinguished turns the situation into one of dread and fear. Imagine being in a fight and the light source goes out or fleeing from a cave-in and the light goes out…

For the Game Master there is excellent advice on running the game, always direct and the point. Providing information to the players so that they can make informed choices, telegraphing danger, dropping tells for traps, being the neutral arbiter, letting the players learn as their characters do through play, and so on. There is a brevity to all of the advice given, that makes it easy to grasp. Advice particular to Shadowdark suggests ways in which the Player Character’s light source can be ‘attacked’, whether by monsters or the environment, so that as well as the Player Characters needing to watch the clock for when the light goes out, they have to protect it too. There are suggestions for different modes of play, such as halving the time for which a torch remains alight for ‘Blitz Mode’ or ‘Momentum Mode’ that gives Advantage on repeated tasks and makes damage dice explode. There notes too, on running Shadowdark in ‘The Gauntlet’, a starting type of adventure for Zero Level Player Characters in which the survivors will rise to First Level much like the Character Funnel of the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game. To support this, there are tables upon tables, covering everything. A random ‘Something Happens!’ table, ‘NPCs’ and ‘Rival Crawler’ tables, tables for creating maps of the Shadowdark below and for Overland travel, ‘Settlement’ tables accompanied with ‘Taverns’ and ‘Shops’ tables, plus encounter tables for a variety of environments. One of the fun activities that the Player Characters can do during their Downtime is carouse and there is a fun table of outcomes which will often reward them with bonuses and Experiences. Plus, they might engage in a game of Wizards & Thieves, a gambling game whose rules are included overleaf!

There is not just a set of tables for generating monsters, but a good bestiary of monsters. From Aboleth, Acolyte, and Angels to Wraith, Wyvern, and Zombie, there will be a great that is familiar here from any Dungeons & Dragons-style game. Alongside the more well-known entries are more individual threats. These are given full page write-up as opposed to the thumbnail descriptions accorded most creatures, such as ‘Mordanticus the Flayed’, a skinless mummy-lich who lives in secret in the sanctum of Gehemna’s archmage and ‘The Ten-Eyed Oracle’, a barnacle-encrusted mass with ten writhing eyestalks that shoot out random damaging rays and which stalks the Shadowdark…

Rounding out Shadowdark is a further section of tables for generating treasure, which supports the ‘treasure as Experience Point award’ aspect of the roleplaying game. Included here are boons such as oaths, secrets, and blessings, for non-tangible treasures, plus all manner of tables for creating simple, but interesting magical items. For example, a shield with blurry indistinct edges that once per day deflects a ranged attack against the wielder or a dagger that trails sparkles and when it hits a target enables the wielder to learn the target’s true name. The notes on creating magical items are short, but do advise against creating items that grant Darkvision or light or increase the number of Inventory slots a Player Character has. Both of these adversely affect the core features of Shadowdark’s game play. The section is followed by a selection of ready-made magical items.

There are a lot of things that the Player Characters do in roleplaying and Dungeon & Dragons in particular with its procedural play that are conveniently glossed over and forgotten, it being assumed that the Player Characters automatically do it. This includes the lighting of torches and the maintenance of their upkeep or replacement. Shadowdark does away with that for a profound effect on game play and constantly highlighting the danger that the Player Characters are in. How much that game play of constantly being alert and of constantly watching the torches is going to last in the long term is another matter. At what Level does it become a tedious part of play? This is not something that is addressed in Shadowdark, but it may well be something that the Game Master wants to bear in mind as her campaign progresses.

Physically, Shadowdark is very well presented. The artwork is excellent and notably, the book is written in a short, punchy and concise style. Rarely is a paragraph more than a couple of sentences long. It is a thick, little hardback, but the formatting makes the content easy to read and quick to grasp and there are fewer rules in its pages than might be first imagined. Anyone coming to Shadowdark from a longer, more verbose roleplaying game will be very surprised by its brevity. However, some of the phrasing could have been clearer in places and marking of text in bold for some terms does not always work. Lastly, the roleplaying game is missing an index and a glossary might have helped.

If anything, Shadowdark has the feel of a Basic Dungeons & Dragons-style game at its core, but with modern additions that do not impede that feel or its play. What impedes its play—or rather what the players have to get used to—in comparison to other Dungeons & Dragons-style games are the rules for light and time. They need to adjust to never forgetting that their torch might go out at any time and that they are always on the clock and always in danger when Crawling. This is what Shadowdark has to offer the Old School Renaissance and players of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, its unique selling point—time and tension.

With the publication of Star Trek Adventures by Modiphius Entertainment in 2017, there have been a total of ten roleplaying games based on the Science Fiction franchise created by Gene Roddenberry. In the past eight years, the publisher has provided solid support for the franchise across three different series of Star Trek. In turn, Star Trek: The Original Series, Star Trek: The Generation and by extension, Star Trek: Deep Space 9 and Star Trek: Voyager, as well as Star Trek: Enterprise. In addition, the publisher has expanded setting with details of the Shackleton Expanse, whilst also encompassing the expanding settings for Star Trek with the StarTrek Adventures Star Trek: Lower Decks Campaign Guide for Star Trek: Lower Decks and the Star Trek Adventures Star Trek: Discovery(2256-2258) Campaign Guide and Star Trek Adventures The Federation-Klingon War Tactical Campaign for Star Trek: Discovery. With the further expansion of Star Trek with Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and Picard, so too does Star Trek Adventures change, with a second edition.

The Star Trek Adventures – Second Edition – Starter Set provides an introduction to Star Trek Adventures – Second Edition. It comes as a handsome boxed set containing two booklets—the forty-eight page ‘Rules Booklet’ and the sixty-page ‘Campaign Booklet’, four Reference Sheets, a Ship Sheet, seven pre-generated Player Character Sheets, a sheet of forty-four tokens, and a set of five twenty-sided dice. The Ship Sheet is for the U.S.S. Challenger, a Constitution Class multirole explorer. The seven pre-generated Player Character Sheets are for the ship’s captain, a Joined Trill; an Andorian security officer; a Vulcan physician; a Tellarite engineer; a Human Scientist; a Human Helmsman; and a Betazoid Engineer. These are all done on stiff cardboard and on the back of the character sheets there is a list of tasks and targets particular to their roles.

What is noticeable about this, is that the books and the reference and characters sheets are all done on a white background rather than the LCARS black background of the first edition of Star Trek Adventures. This makes everything very easy to ready and gives the whole Star Trek Adventures – Second Edition – Starter Set a very shiny, clean look and feel. The adventure for Star Trek Adventures – Second Edition – Starter Set is set in 2259, the era of Star Trek: The Original Series, but the changes necessary to run its mini-campaign, whether to Star Trek: The Generation or Enterprise, are merely cosmetic.

A Player Character in Star Trek Adventures – Second Edition – Starter Set is defined by Attributes, Disciplines, Focuses, Traits, Talents, and Values and Dictates. The six Attributes—Control, Daring, Fitness, Insight, Presence, and Reason—represent ways of or approaches to doing things as well as intrinsic capabilities. They are rated between seven and twelve. The six Disciplines—Command, Conn, Engineering, Security, Science, and Medicine—are skills, knowledges, and areas of training representing the wide roles aboard a starship. They are rated between one and five. Focuses represent narrow areas of study or skill specialities, for example, Astrophysics, Xenobiology, or Warp Field Dynamics. Traits and Talents represent anything from what a character believes, is motivated by, intrinsic abilities, ways of doing things, and so on. They come from a character’s species, upbringing, training, and life experience.

Star Trek Adventures – Second Edition employs the 2d20 System previously used in the publisher’s Mutant Chronicles: Techno Fantasy Roleplaying Game and Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of, as well, of course, as the first edition of Star Trek Adventures. To undertake an action, a character’s player rolls two twenty-sided dice, aiming to have both roll under the total of an Attribute and a Discipline. Each roll under this total counts as a success, an average task requiring two successes. Rolls of one count as two successes and if a character has an appropriate Focus, rolls under the value of the Discipline also count as two successes. Target difficulties range from one to five, and if a player rolls more successes than is necessary to beat the difficulty, they are converted to Momentum.

Momentum can be spent for various effects. These consist of ‘Create Opportunity’ to purchase more twenty-sided dice to roll, up to a total of five; to ‘Create a Trait’ in a scene; to ‘Keep the Initiative’ in an action scene; to ‘Obtain Information’ by asking the Game Master questions; ‘Reduce Time’ to achieve objectives faster; and to have an ‘Extra Major Action’ or ‘Extra Minor Action’. There is a maximum amount of Momentum that the Player Characters can have and any excess is lost. So, the players are encouraged to spend Momentum rather than save it.

Main characters like the Player Characters possess Determination, which works with their Values or with the Values of the mission. A Value can either be challenged once per session in a negative or difficult situation to gain Determination or invoked once per session to spend Determination to gain an extra die for a check (a ‘Perfect Opportunity’) or to get a reroll of the dice in a check (‘Moment of Inspiration’). They also have Talents and Traits which will grant a character an advantage in certain situations. So Bold (Engineering) enables a player to reroll a single twenty-sided die for his character if he has purchased extra dice by adding to the Game Master’s Threat pool.

Now where the players generate Momentum to spend on their characters, the Game Master has Threat which can be spent on similar things for the NPCs as well as to trigger their special abilities. She begins each session with a pool of Threat, but can gain more through various circumstances. These include a player purchasing extra dice to roll on a test, a player rolling a natural twenty and so adding two Threat (instead of the usual Complication), the situation itself being threatening, or NPCs rolling well and generating Momentum and so adding that to Threat pool. In return, the Gamemaster can spend it on minor inconveniences, complications, and serious complications to inflict upon the player characters, as well as triggering NPC special abilities, having NPCs seize the initiative, and bringing the environment dramatically into play.

What the Momentum and Threat mechanics do is set up a pair of parallel economies with Threat being fed in part by Momentum, but Momentum in the main being used to overcome the complications and circumstances which the expenditure of Threat can bring into play. The primary use of Threat though, is to ratchet up the tension and the challenge, whereas the primary use of Momentum is to enable the player characters to overcome this challenge and in action, be larger than life.

Conflict uses the same mechanics, but offers more options in terms of what Momentum can be spent on, which includes both social and combat. Obviously for combat, includes doing extra damage, disarming an opponent, keeping the initiative—initiative works by alternating between the player characters and the NPCs and keeping it allows two player characters to act before an NPC does, avoid an injury, and so on. Now, in the first edition of Star Trek Adventures this damage would have been rolled for using Challenge Dice, but these are not used in the second edition. Instead, the attacker determines the base amount of damage inflicted and can increase its Severity by spending Momentum, whilst the defender decides to either accept the damage and suffer an Injury, which would take him out of the action or combat, attempt to avoid the injury and suffer Stress. This combination of a lack of dice rolled for effect and increased player choice streamlines the combat process.

Starships are treated in a similar fashion to Player Characters, but have Communications, Computers, Engines, Sensors, Structure, and Weapons rather than Control, Daring, Fitness, Insight, Presence, and Reason. There is advice on how to use each of them and each of them actually serves as a Focus when used by a Player Character. The various aspects of a ship, such as resistance, shields, crew support, and more are described before starship combat is explained. Typically, a Player Character can only conduct a single major action during each turn of a starship combat and each Player Character will have a role during this according to his position aboard ship and the appropriate Discipline—Command, Conn, Engineering, Security, Science, or Medicine. Starship combat is kept relatively brief, but the rules suggest the same degree of streamlining as in personal combat. However, personal combat is the easier of the two to grasp, though the inclusion of a dedicated example of starship does help the Game Master understand how it works.

The ’Campaign Book’ provides a big three-part mini-campaign called ‘INFINITE Combinations’. It begins with the crew of the U.S.S. Challenger answering a distress call from a mining city floating in the atmosphere of Kizomic VI. The city is under attack by a bizarre, tentacled alien lifeform and its inhabitants are calling for evacuation. There is lots of physical action in this first part as rescues are performed, alien attacks are held off, and desperate shuttlecraft missions are flown through a flurry of attacks and flying debris. There is some planning too, as to how to conduct the evacuation safely, involved, and a minor dilemma over the Prime Directive. The second scenario is shipbound, but again drives to an excitingly different climax after U.S.S. Challenger is stranded in the asteroid field it was meant be surveying and an extra-dimensional invader threatens the safety of the ship and the Player Characters have to race to make the repairs necessary to get away. Armed with some information as who might be responsible for the alien invasions, the crew of the U.S.S. Challenger track his movements to Starbase 23 and from there into an area of space disputed by Nausicaans, Klingons, and Gorn! The Away Team will make some amazing discoveries, but there is still the alien invasion from another dimension to contend with as well as the arrival of a small Nausicaan warship wanting to take control of the discoveries. The climax to the campaign is thus twofold, ideally with the action switching back and forth between the Away Team on planet and their starship above.

Overall ‘INFINITE Combinations’ is a decent mini-campaign, each scenario taking two or three sessions to complete and providing a good mix of action and combat with investigation and interaction thrown in. Plus, the ’Campaign Book’ adds three ‘Mission Briefs’ tied into the events and background to the campaign, so that the Game Master can develop them and add them to her campaign.

Physically, the Star Trek Adventures – Second Edition – Starter Set is very nicely presented. The books are clear and easy to read, with plenty of illustrations inspired by classic moments from Star Trek, though there is a scene from Lower Decks as well. The dice are decent and there are plenty of reference sheets for the players’ use.

The Star Trek Adventures – Second Edition – Starter Set is easy to pick up and then run and play if the Game Master has run Star Trek Adventures before, the rules changes consisting primarily of streamlining rather than a heavy rework. It will be harder for the Game Master new to the role, but the Star Trek Adventures – Second Edition – Starter Set does a good job of explaining things and providing tips and advice throughout, and then providing a good, solid Star Trek style adventure with lots of action and excitement and a moral dilemma or two thrown in along the way.

Weird Discoveries: Ten Instant Adventures for Numenera does something interesting and it does it very quickly. In fact, it has been designed to do it quickly. It is a supplement for Numenera, the Origins Award-winning Science Fantasy roleplaying game of exploration and adventure in the very far future, originally published in 2013 by Monte Cook Games. What it does is set out to solve the problem of wanting to roleplay and not having time to prepare to roleplay. It wants to do what board games allow, which is easy set up and readiness to play straight out of the box—or in the case of Weird Discoveries, off the page. To do this, it presents scenarios that can be read through and set up in the same time as it takes to grab a board game off the shelf, open the box, and set everything up. Once done, each scenario will provide a single evening or session’s worth of gaming as a board game would. Or in this case, roleplaying. Now it should be noted that Weird Discoveries: Ten Instant Adventures for Numenera is published for use with the first edition of Numenera, but the simplicity of the Cypher System, means that adapting or adjusting the supplement’s ten scenarios to Numenera Discovery.

All ten scenarios in Weird Discoveries: Ten Instant Adventures for Numenera follow the same format. Each opens with a brief summary followed by the details and the scenario’s salient points, before describing the scenario’s starting point for the Player Characters and the wrap-up, how it can be ended. Also detailed are the scenario keys, the clues and the MacGuffins or objects, that the Player Characters need to find to push the scenario’s plot onwards. This is followed by the scenario itself. Each scenario is constructed around a map or a plot, which always has links to further details, such as location and NPC descriptions, as well as stats. They include descriptions of the possible GM Intrusions, the means by the Game Master challenges, imperils, and rewards the Player Characters.

Some of the locations or plot points are marked with symbols for the scenario’s keys. Depending on the scenario, these can be a set place or the Game Master is given the option to place them a choice of different locations. The layout is always simple, clear, and easy to use straight from the page. The scenario proper is followed by ‘More Details’. These are not necessary to actually run the scenario, but if the Game Master has time to read through them, provide her with extra information which enables her to expand the scenario. This is not just with details that will enliven her portrayal of the scenario, but advice on how to insert the scenario into an ongoing campaign, including a map of where it might be located in the Ninth World, and lastly, the Experience Awards for completing the adventure as well as possible further ramifications. The Experience Awards are the only thing that the Game Master needs for this section if she does not have time to read through this third section.

Further support for all ten scenarios comes in the form of ‘Show ’Ems’, twenty full colour illustrations designed to be shown to the players as they roleplay through each scenario. There is also a ‘Numenera Cheat Sheet’ for ready rules reference and a set of six ready-to-play Player Characters. The handouts help bring the scenarios to life, whilst the pre-generated Player Characters enhance the ready-to-play nature of the anthology. There is also a list of possible Cyphers—the devices and unguents and gases and concoctions—that the Player Characters can find to enhance themselves temporarily during a scenario. Further support comes in the form of an excellent introductory guide to improvised Game Mastering. Overall, the combination of format and support makes the scenarios in the anthology both easier to prepare and develop beyond the single session game play they are designed for.

The decade opens with ‘Beneath The Pyramid’ in which the Player Characters track down missing beasts to gigantic black pyramid floating over a ruined city and try find their way in from below. Simple enough, it is followed by the more complex, ‘Inside the Horror Pyramid’. These are the only two directly connected scenarios in the anthology, but the second is a much nastier affair, the Player Characters finding themselves trapped within the pyramid and stalked by dangerous energy creature with a penchant for eyes! The Player Characters need to find the means to get through a sealed door and then out of the Pyramid, hopefully eyes intact. ‘Natural And Unnatural’ places a village in peril when the device it relies upon for clean water disappears and the Player Characters have to find out where it has gone. Should the Game Master want to, the scenario has ways to expand by adding links to other entries in the supplement. Divine right versus divine reputation clash in ‘The Spider Knight’ when the Player Characters give aid to a young women who claims her throne has been usurped and potentially discover how far she will go to reclaim her family seat. ‘Please Help Us’ opens with the Player Characters being asked to help free a group of explorers trapped in a Cypher device, but doing so means angering a nearby group of religious Inhumans.

The sixth adventure, ‘Guilty!’ does something usefully far more complex, but in the two-page spread format of Weird Discoveries. It is a murder mystery set in a town divided by a river in which members of the Varjellen community from one side of the river are being murdered by humans from on the other side. Of course, there is more to it than simply that, but it is neatly presented as an elegant little plot flowchart with all of the various details in just the place both narratively and geographically. It is the most pleasing of all the entries in Weird Discoveries. A daughter has gone missing in ‘Lost in the Swamp’, but what if she does not want to come back? Whilst in ‘Mother Machine’, the inhabitants of another village are under attack, but nobody knows why. There is a surprisingly good reason though… ‘From Here To Sanguinity’ reveals the perils of worship in the Ninth Age, whilst in the last entry, ‘Escape from the Obelisk’, the Player Characters find themselves trapped in another floating object and have to find a way out. This time though, they are up against a deadline as they have been infected by a scientist to see how they react and need to find a cure before they can escape. It still feels a little like the second scenario, and perhaps actually setting in the Black Pyramid of ‘Beneath The Pyramid’ and ‘Inside the Horror Pyramid’ would have been a nice call back.

Overall, the scenarios in Weird Discoveries: Ten Instant Adventures for Numenera are short and solid, rather than amazing or epic. That is not the aim of the anthology after all, which is to provide easy-to-prepare scenarios that showcase the weirdness of the Ninth Age in short sharp packages. Of the ten, ‘Guilty!’ stands out as the most interesting.

Physically, Weird Discoveries: Ten Instant Adventures for Numenera is very well presented. The maps are clear and the artwork is excellent, whilst sidebars give links and notes for the Game Master to add further to the scenarios. Notably, the two-page spread for the scenarios—one two-page spread for the introduction and background, one for the scenario itself, and one for the extra content, keep everything handily organised and accessible.

Weird Discoveries: Ten Instant Adventures for Numenera is exactly as advertised. A very serviceable, very useful, and superbly supported anthology that provides the means for the Game Master to bring a scenario to the table in mere minutes, but if he has the time, also the scope to expand each scenario and set it up in previous sessions. Overall, Weird Discoveries: Ten Instant Adventures for Numenera is such a good idea that you wish more roleplaying game settings had a supplement like this.

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.

Echoes of Ebonthul is the fifth 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. Designed for Fifth Level Player Characters, the scenario embraces the Science Fantasy and horror elements of the Swords & Sorcery genre combining a lost city with advanced technology and cosmic horror. In its scant few pages, it has the feel of I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City, but of course, without the expansiveness of that classic module for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition.
The scenario begins en media res. The Player Characters are aboard a sea vessel approaching the alien and foreboding ruins of the city of Ebonthul, long abandoned and left to ruin. They have come to the ruined city in search of companions and fellow adventurers, of whom nothing has been heard since they departed for the city. This is only the broadest of reasons, the Dungeon Master expected to prompt her players each to who they have specifically come to Ebonthul to search and why. This provides a little more personal motivation before the action begins. A gargantuan being with a single, gem-like eye rises from the sea and lashes out with a beam of fiery energy from its eye. Suddenly, the ship is on fire and leaking! Can the Player Characters extinguish the flames and patch the hole before the ship sinks and actually puts the flames out?
Fortunately, the gargantuan being sinks beneath the waves, enabling the Player Characters to come ashore—either by weighing anchor if the ship is still afloat or swimming or in boats if not. The city skyline is dominated by a great statue reaching to the sky and a ziggurat with a locked metal door marked with a strange constellation missing a single gem. Investigating the island will eventually reveal the means to access the ziggurat and likely the bodies of one or more of the adventurers that the Player Characters have come to find.
The grand finale of the adventure takes place in the ziggurat, depicted on the inside of the folded-out sheet. Here, the Player Characters will encounter the gargantuan being that fired upon their ship for a second time, but this time, thankfully inert. Here it is revealed to be no monster, but a construct, one that appears to have docked inside the ziggurat and which the Player Characters can then enter. Inside the gargantuan being, they will find the last of the adventurers and treasure, as well as ‘things’ from another dimension, amorphous, slithering, and definitely wanting to replace the Player Characters. There are overtones of cosmic horror here, but not much in the way of explanation.
It is this lack of explanation which leaves the reader with an underwhelming sense of threat and any real story. With just three locations detailed, the gargantuan construct feels small and the threat inconsequential. The last surviving adventurer is terrified, believing the Player Characters to have been driven mad by the Voice emanating from a Stone that the ‘things’ have moved and are conducting a ritual on. Their motives are never clearly explained and nor is what would happen if the stone was restored to its rightful mounting.
If what is presented in Echoes of Ebonthul is underwhelming as written, it at least leaves plenty of scope for the Dungeon Master to develop and add to it as is her wont. One possibility is to develop the terror of the surviving adventurer and one of the ‘things’ already impersonating one of his companions, ready to instill a little paranoia into the adventure. For further ideas, the authors has some development notes here.

Physically, Echoes of Ebonthul is very nicely presented, being more drawn than actually written. It has a nice sense of scale, but lacks the humour of the previous releases in the Pocket Perils series. The combination of having been drawn and the cartoonish artwork with the high quality of the paper stock also gives Echoes of Ebonthul a physical feel which feels genuinely good in the hand. Its small size means that it is very easy to transport.

Ultimately, the plot of Echoes of Ebonthul is short, simple, and disappointing, though the whole thing can be run and played in a single session. It is not as sophisticated or as engaging as previous entries in the Pocket Perils series, and whilst it is very easy to set up and run, it needs more development upon the part of the Dungeon Master to make it memorable. Unfortunately, in scaling up the scenario, Echoes of Ebonthul scales down the story.

Deep in the rainforests of Central America, there are many animals, both rare and common, to be found, counted, and photographed. The common Basilisk Lizard and the rare Red-eyed Stream Frog on the coast and in the wetlands. The common Capuchin Monkey and the rare Rhinoceros Beetle in the forest. The common Chestnut-mandibled Toucan and the rare Jaguar in the mountains. Multiple expeditions have been launched to count all of these animals, each competing to not only spot as many as they can, but also to try and spot one of each. Each expedition leader can decide to explore where he wants and as far as he wants, but push too far and he might get bitten by mosquitoes ending the expedition. Or the others in his group might choose to end the expedition early and take all the credit for what has been found so far.

This is the set-up for Costa Rica: Reveal the Rainforest, a light, push-your-luck game published by Mayfair Games designed to be played by between two and five players, aged eight and up. The game consists of seventy-tiles, thirty Explorers, an Expedition Leader, five Play Aids, and an eight-page rulebook. The tiles depict a type of terrain on the back, either coast/wetlands, forest, or mountains, and a photograph of an animal on the front. Sometimes two animals and sometimes a Threat symbol of a mosquito as well. The Explorers, meeples complete with broadbrimmed hat, come in five colours, six of each, whilst the Expedition Leader is a solid black piece. The Play Aids indicate both how many points a player will score based on the number of each type of animals his expedition has photographed and for photographing all of them and their rarity according to terrain type. Lastly, the rules both explain the rules to the game and give a little background on each of the game’s six animals and Costa Rica itself. Although the rulebook is eight pages long, half of it is in German, so the rules themselves are short and easy to learn.

The aim of the game is to score as many points as possible. This is done by collecting as many tiles—each of which depicts one or two animals—as possible and scoring points for the animals shown on them and for collecting tiles which all together show all six animals in the game. The player with the most points is the winner and the game plays through in about thirty minutes or so.

The set-up for Costa Rica is simple. Sixty-four of the tiles are laid out, face down, in a grid, forming a hexagon, five tiles per side. The remaining tiles are put aside. This adds a further degree of randomisation. Each player places one of his Explorers at each corner of the play area. Together, the group of Explorers made up of one from each player forms an Expedition so that there are six Expeditions in total. The Expedition Leader piece is given to the starting player—either determined randomly or given to the player who has most recently been to Costa Rica. The starting player picks an Expedition and the game begins.

On a turn, a player picks an Expedition and turns over a tile adjacent to the Expedition. This will reveal either one or two animals and also a Threat or mosquito symbol. The player can decide to take the newly revealed tile or continue moving on. If he takes the tile, he adds to the collection in front of him and removes his Explorer from that Expedition. He cannot move that Expedition on subsequent turns. If he decides not to take the tile and instead move on, he first offers the other players the opportunity to take the tile, going round the table one-by-one. If another player accepts this opportunity, then he takes the tile, adds it to his collection, and removes his Explorer from that Expedition. The turn for the current player then ends. However, if nobody decides to accept the tile, the current player continues turning over adjacent tiles, repeating the same process each time.

A player’s turn can also end in another way—too many Threats. If the current player turns over two tiles on his turn that have mosquito or Threat symbol on them, his turn is over and his Explorer is removed from play. He still gains the tiles that have been previously revealed, whilst those with the two Threats on them are discarded. If only one Threat has been revealed when a player collects tiles, its tile is not discarded.

Each player is attempting to push further into the rainforest in search of rarer animals to count. Since he has an Explorer in every Expedition, he has multiple ways of finding them. However, because every Expedition has an Explorer from every player, there is always the chance that if a player decides to push on and explore further in search of better tiles, another player will collect them before the current player has a chance to advance further, undoing all of the current player’s efforts and adding to his score rather than them going toward the current player’s score. This is the ‘push-your-luck’ element of Costa Rica, a player needing to find the balance between the tiles that he has revealed and can take now and tiles that he might turn over if he continues exploring, but in doing so gives the other players the opportunity take what he has already revealed.

On subsequent turns, a player can move any of the Expeditions in which he still has an Explorer. This will decrease as the game goes on and his Explorers return from their Expeditions laden with tiles. If an Expedition consists of just one Explorer, this gives its player a lot of freedom to move and collect tiles as there is no-one to collect the ones revealed before he does.

There is another way in which a player can impede the other players. This is to cut them off in the rainforest. The core game play is all about exploring deeper into the rainforest in search of more animals to count, but a player could choose to lead an Expedition back out of the rainforest. If an Expedition has no adjacent tiles to reveal, it is cutoff and cannot continue exploring. In which case, all of its Explorers go back to their respective players. This can be a devastating tactic, especially if an Expedition contains multiple Explorers as it will hinder the score of multiple players.

The game ends when the last Explorer has finished moving and tiles have been taken. Everyone totals the score for their tiles collected and thus animals counted, and the player with the highest score is the winner.

Costa Rica is simple and straightforward, and both easy to teach and play. Games tend to be quite tight in terms of scoring, but different in terms of collecting tiles, depending upon the number of players. With two or three players, more tiles are going to be collected and scores higher as there is going to be less competition to collect them, whilst game play is tighter and more competitive with four or five players as there are more players competing for the same number of tiles. In general, the game plays best with three or four players as the competition for tiles is not quite so desperate.

Physically, Costa Rica is nicely presented. The Explorer meeples are decent and tiles of sturdy card with pleasing illustrations of the creatures on the front. The rules are written and the extra background is a nice bonus.

There is a pleasing clarity to Costa Rica in its game play. There is no hidden complexity or nuance to the game. It is easy to learn and teach, and barring the possibility of cutting off an Expedition, there is no ‘take that!’ element to the game. Meaning it is suitable to be played by both adults and younger players. A solidly simple, straightforward filler suitable for the family.

Much like the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition and the Jonstown Compendium for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, The Companions of Arthur is a curated platform for user-made content, but for material set in Greg Stafford’s masterpiece of Arthurian legend and romance, Pendragon. It enables creators to sell their own original content for use with Pendragon, Sixth Edition. This can be original scenarios, background material, alternate Arthurian settings, and more, but none of this content should be considered to be ‘canon’, but rather fall under ‘Your Pendragon Will Vary’. This means that there is still scope for the authors to create interesting and useful content that others can bring to their Pendragon campaigns.

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What is the Nature of the Quest?Heirs & Spares is a supplement for use with Pendragon, Sixth Edition.

It is a full colour, Seventy-six page, 97.90 MB PDF.

The layout is tidy and it is nicely illustrated.

Where is the Quest Set?Heirs & Spares is suitable to run with any campaign for Pendragon, Sixth Edition, but has content specific to the Pendragon Starter Set.
Who should go on this Quest?
Heirs & Spares is suitable for knights of all types, works exceedingly well with the Knights provided as pre-generated Player-knights in the Pendragon Starter Set.
What does the Quest require?
Heirs & Spares requires the Pendragon, Sixth Edition rules or use it at its fullest the Pendragon Starter Set. In addition, Squires Rampant may also be useful.
Where will the Quest take the Knights?
One of the key aspects of Pendragon is the lethality of its combat combined with dynastic play. Players are expected to not just roleplay their characters, but the sons and daughters of those characters, and in turn, the grandsons and granddaughters of those characters, and so on, over the course of several decades. As knights and thus members of the nobility, it is important that the Player-knights not only have designated heirs, but also spares. The heir is the one who will inherit a Player-knight’s mantle and position as well as his wealth and his duties, should something catastrophic happen to the Player-knight. The spare—a slightly dismissive term suggesting a certain uselessness—is there should something terrible happen to the heir. Thus, it is both vitally important that a Player-knight should have an heir and a spare to continue the family line and honour and full of potential in terms of storytelling.
Heirs & Spares is a supplement which explores these roles in Pendragon, Sixth Edition, but goes further than this by examining in greater depth their role and place in the lives of the Player-knights given as pre-generated Player Characters in the Pendragon Starter Set. In addition, it gives advice on how to integrate these heirs and spares to the Player-knights into the campaign—which will lead from the Pendragon Starter Set and into The Grey Knight and beyond—and provides plot hooks and story seeds for all eight pre-generated Player-knights and their heirs and spares. There is a wealth information and detail in this supplement that will add depth to the lives of the Player-knights and the beginnings of the official Great Pendragon Campaign as whole. However, although the content is very much tied to the pre-generated Player-knights, it is important to stress that none of it is official and that it definitely falls under the purview of ‘Your Pendragon Will Vary’.

Heirs & Spares opens with a discussion of the nature of both roles and where they can be drawn from in game terms. From the backgrounds of pre-generated Player-knights and families of Player-knights, with glance at simply replacing the deceased with someone unconnected and wholly new. It also looks at the degree of Player-knight creation, either taking a pre-generated Player-knight—as is presented for the Player-knights from the Pendragon Starter Set in Heirs & Spares, simply cloning an existing Player-knight (even one of the Player-knight who has just died), or full character generation. It notes the limited scope for this using just the Pendragon Starter Set and the Game master will need the Pendragon Core Rulebook.
The largest section in Heirs & Spares is devoted to the eight Player-knights from the Pendragon Starter Set, providing an overview of why each is interesting to play before detailing their heirs and spares. It is followed by a timeline of their family history. All expand their backgrounds in interesting ways. For example, Dame Lynelle and her squire, Booth, share a history, but are not related, and so technically, she has no family heir. Further, it is suggested that Lynelle’s younger brother and actual heir, might still be alive. Were he to be found, then he would become her heir and Booth, her spare. The heir to Asterius, the Byzantine knight, is his cousin, Callinicus, described as “the Slippery Exile”, more courtier than knight who fled Byzantium after his father was arrested by the emperor for corruption. Dame Cwenhild’s family is expanded with the addition of a half-brother, Oswain, but more Cymric than Saxon like Cwenhild, whilst their cousin, Eahild, whom Cwenhild regards as a younger sister, follows in her footsteps in wielding a heavy axe and a vengeful nature. All eight Player-knights are explored and expanded in this fashion.
The Player-knights and their heirs and spares are supported with advice for the Game Master on how to use them, primarily as NPCs, as well as suggesting alternatives to their respective Luck Benefits. Each Player-knight is given two pages of plot hooks and story seeds, the most obvious being to explore whether or not Dame Lynelle reveals her lack of status as a knight and potentially, her attempt to reclaim her family seat. To that end, her estate is detailed. Dame Cwenhild’s story hooks examine the politics and bureaucracy of Londinium, Dame Tamura her connection with the Ladies of the Lake, and so on. Of course, these will need development, but all are worth looking at, if only for their ideas. Lastly, Heirs & Spares details three NPCs that can be added to a campaign. Morcades of the White Tower is the daughter of the Constable of the White Tower in Londinium, renowned as a nunnery-raised, literate tomboy healer with an independent streak a mile wide, who could become firm friends with a female Player-knight, appear as part of Londinium-based adventures, and be the subject of courtship attempts by other Player-knights despite her father’s protestations! Her father is also detailed. The other two consist of Griflet de Carduel, actually a squire in the Pendragon Starter Set, and his sister, Lore de Carduel, both of whom are secondary characters in the Arthurian canon. Their detail enables the Game Master to bring them into play and so further the Player-knights’ involvement in telling the chronicles of King Arthur’s legend.
Should the Knights ride out on this Quest?The usefulness of Heirs & Spares depends very much upon if the Game Master is running the campaign in the Pendragon Starter Set with the included pre-generated Player-knights or not. If not, Heirs & Spares will be of limited use and application, perhaps best serving as a ready source of NPCs and replacement Player-knights, plus associated story hooks and plots.
However, if the Game Master is running the campaign in the Pendragon Starter Set with the included pre-generated Player-knights, then Heirs & Spares is very, very useful. It expands greatly upon the backgrounds of the eight Player-knights, giving them heirs and spares when it even seemed unlikely that they would have any, and in the process, adding a wealth of story possibilities that can be told alongside the events of the great chronicle that makes up Pendragon. The fact that Heirs & Spares falls under ‘Your Pendragon Will Vary’ is actually disappointing. The content in the pages of Heirs & Spares is not only useful in terms of what it will add to a Game Master’s Pendragon campaign, but also so well developed and thought out that it will enrich the lives of the Player-knights and the campaign as a whole. Heirs & Spares may not be official, but it is very good and it is the companion to the Pendragon Starter Set—and beyond—that Pendragon, Sixth Edition did not know it needed.

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: Omega Kappa DIE!!! – A Highly Inebriated, Modern(ish) Horror-Comedy Scenario For Call of CthulhuPublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author Colin Richards

Setting: USA, 1930 and 1999Product: One-shot
What You Get: Seven page, 877.91 KB PDFElevator Pitch: Animal House meets Call of CthulhuPlot Hook: “’Cause they say2000, zero-zero, party over, oops, out of timeSo tonight, I’m gonna party like it’s 1999” – 1999, PrincePlot Support: Staging advice, ten pre-generated Investigators, eight handouts, one set of floorplans, six NPCs, a robot, three Mythos monsters, and a goat.Production Values: Excellent.
Pros# Thematically brilliant design# Good handouts# Inventively macabre description of the ritual# En media res action# Every player gets a Drunkometer# Dipsophobia# Social anxiety disorder# Phasmophobia
Cons# Astrology or Astronomy?# A lot of mature elements and the caveats are deserved# Some scenes are going make you go, “Ick!”, let alone the players# “Nyarlathogoat”
Conclusion# Don’t say Omega Kappa Pi, say Omega Kappa DIE!# An orgy of witting nastiness that highlights the horror of the Mythos # Reviews from R’lyeh Recommends & Discommends

The set-up for Capers: A Super-Powered Game of Gangsters in the Roaring Twenties is really simple. It is the 1920s. It is the USA. Prohibition is in full swing and under the terms of the Volstead Act, the sale of alcohol is outlawed. Which means there is money to be made from making the stuff in illegal stills or smuggling it across the border from Canada. Which means criminals are getting rich from making people happy and officials and cops are topping up their pensions by looking the other way. However, not every cop or bureau agent is on the take. Some want to enforce the law and are brave enough to do it. Some even have the power to back it up, not just with a sense of fairness and justice and a Smith & Wesson .38 Special Model 1899 Military and Police Hand Ejector, but the ability to fly or create a stream of acid or pick up things up with their hair or manipulate probability or control small objects. Used at the right time and in the right fashion, any one of these abilities can help the law bust criminal activities or arrest a crook. However, the life of a law enforcement Caper—as these powered individuals are known—is not that easy, because just as a would-be Caper is drawn to uphold the law, another Caper is drawn to break it. There are Capers protecting gangs and syndicates, running numbers games, cooking the books, bootlegging, and bringing the number one prohibited substance into the country—alcohol.

Capers: A Super-Powered Game of Gangsters in the Roaring Twenties is published by Nedburger Games, following a successful Kickstarter campaign. It is a super-powered roleplaying set in a Jazz Age, but not a Jazz Age that we would fully recognise. Capers are a known and recognised phenomenon, appearing in newspapers and news reports, many stories being of a sensationalist nature, whilst the Department of Justice has established a Registry of Abnormal Persons and begun tracking their locations and activities. Currently, registration is voluntary. Capers may face religious intolerance and there are doctors and hospitals who will not treat them, but the US Army is actively recruiting them and the media loves them! Elsewhere, Carla ‘Lucky’ Luciano is the right-hand-woman to New York Boss Arnold Rothstein and Al Capone’s mentor is Giada Torrio, and a broader range of ethnicities and genders are accepted at all levels of society. It is thus ahistorical, rather than truly historical and more representative of modern sensibilities. As is the feel of the roleplaying game and its look, is more akin to a cartoon show. A cartoon show that can be told from two different angles. One is with the cast of Capers as members of law enforcement and the other is with the cast of Capers as members of a criminal gang or organisation. In that, it shares some resemblance with the set-up in TSR, Inc.’s Gangbusters: 1920’s Role-Playing Adventure. However, as a super-powered roleplaying game, Capers: A Super-Powered Game of Gangsters in the Roaring Twenties is very much a ‘Street Level’ campaign and very much not a ‘Four Colour’ setting. Essentially, this is not a traditional cowl and capes style of superhero roleplaying game, but a setting more akin to the masked adventurers style of the following decade of the thirties—and that is even if the Caper wears a costume at all. All of which is detailed in a simple, easy to grasp introduction that explains its situation within a few pages.

A Player Character in Capers: A Super-Powered Game of Gangsters in the Roaring Twenties is either an Exceptional or an actual Caper. There are also Regulars, but these are normal people and so not what a player will be typically roleplaying. An Exceptional will not have full superpowers, but will instead have Perks, such as ‘Lucky’, ‘Power-Resistant’, or ‘Speciality Skill’. There are only nine Perks given in the roleplaying game, as compared to the thirty-nine major and minor powers. What an Exceptional makes up for in terms of a limited choice of Perks is having a wider choice of general abilities, whereas a Caper will have a limited choice of general abilities and more powers. Beyond a concept, such as gangster, enforcer, bounty hunter, journalist, or federal agent, a Player Character has three Anchors. Consisting of Identity, Virtue, and Vice, these define who the Player Character is, and by roleplaying them, provide a means of the Player Character regaining Moxie. He also has six Traits—Charisma, Agility, Perception, Expertise, Resilience, and Strength—which are rated between one and three for Regulars, but can go as high as four or five for Capers. Each Trait has an associated Defence value, which is sets how difficult it is for an opponent to overcome a Player Character. He will have between three and five skills, and if a Caper either one or two Minor Powers or one Major Power, whilst if an Exceptional, a combination of either Perks or Trem-Gear. The latter consists of devices, weapons, and suits powered by the previously unknown radioactive element called Trembium, which is also found in the blood of Capers. It is possible to be injected with Trembium and temporarily gain powers, but similarly, it is possible to be injected with Anti-Trembium and Powers be temporarily negated. This sets up some interesting story possibilities, whilst the quick guide Trem-Gear in the book, with careful adjudication upon the part of the Game Master, might lend itself to some possible gadgeteering.

In general, skills are fairly broad, so Conveyances covers all vehicles, Sciences all of the sciences, and so on. How they are used varies though, depending on what a Player Character wants to do. To perform an impressive driving feat, for example, a bootlegger reverse, a player might combine his character’s Charisma Trait with his Conveyances skill, whilst attempting to drive into a narrow alley at high speed would use Agility and Conveyances instead. Notably, there is no Gambling skill or Performance skill, so the Game Master and player will need to work together to get skill and Trait combinations that work.

In comparison, Perks and Powers in Capers: A Super-Powered Game of Gangsters in the Roaring Twenties are much narrower in scope. Perks tend to provide better protection against an Exceptional’s powers than a Regular has. Minor Powers are more tightly focused and flashier in their use, and include Acid Stream, Body Armour, Concussion Beam, Dimensional Manipulation, Force Field, Mental Shield, and more. Major Powers are broader and include Dimension Step, Elasticity, Invisibility, Mimic, Speedster, and many enhancement to Traits, like Super Expertise or Super Strength. Some Powers are simply active all the time, whilst others require a Power Check to activate. Many also provide a range of different effects or Boosts. For example, the Speedster Major Power has the Chaperone Boost, the Damage Boost, the Lightning Boost, the Speed Boost, the Water Walk Boost, and the Whirlwind Boost. When creating his character, a player selects one of these Boosts as the standard effect for that Power. He can still do the others, but they are not as easy for him to do.
Creating an Exceptional or a Caper is a matter of making choices and assigning a few points to the Player Character’s Traits. The only random element is determining his Anchors—done by drawing cards from an ordinary deck of playing cards, but even this does not need to be done randomly.

Our example Caper is Arabella Bellange. She is a former magician’s assistant who graduated to stage magician when the magician had an unfortunate accident that meant he could not perform for a few months. Not Arabella’s doing, but rather he was unlucky and she was lucky. It seems that life goes that way for Arabella. She looks good on stage or when doing close-up tricks, but things just seem to go her way—and that includes the cards. Which suits her fine. She wants fame and money and she has the ambition to drive her into crime if she met the right person. She might come out of whatever they do smelling of roses, but her friend might not be so lucky…

Name: Arabella Bellange
Type: Caper
Identity: Leader
Virtue: Moderate
Vice: Vain

Body 9 Mind 9 Hits 14
Speed 30’
Level 1

TRAITS
Charisma 3 (Defence 10) Agility 2 (Defence 9) Perception 2 (Defence 9)
Expertise 2 (Defence 9) Resilience 2 (Defence 9) Strength 1 (Defence 8)

SKILLS
Deception, Insight, Sciences, Sleight of Hand

POWER
Minor – Probability Manipulation (Rank 1)
Minor – Hypnosis (Rank 1)

Mechanically, Capers: A Super-Powered Game of Gangsters in the Roaring Twenties uses decks of ordinary playing cards and every player needs to have a deck of his own. Whenever a player wants his character to act, he flips over a card. The value of the card, its suit, and its colour determines the outcome and specific effects from the desired action. The value of the card determines if the action is a success or a failure, ranging from a Task Difficulty of Routine or four to Incredible or Ace. The Task Difficulty is set by the Game Master and kept secret until the Player Character succeeds or fails. The suit of the card will determine the degree of the success or failure, with Spades cards being the best and Clubs cards being the worst. So, if the value of the card indicates the action is successful and its suit is Spades, it is a ‘Success with a Boon’, but a ‘Success with a Complication’ if the suit is Clubs. Conversely, if the value of the card indicates the action is a failure and its suit is Spades, it is a ‘Failure with a Motivation’, but a ‘Botch’ if the suit is Clubs. The ‘Failure with a Motivation’ result means that the Player Character is pushed to try again and receive a point of Moxie to use on his next action. Drawing an Ace means that the Player Character succeeds with a Boon, or two, if the Ace of Spades. Drawing the red Joker will end the player’s turn and means the Player Character suffers a botch, but the black Joker means the Player Character succeeds with a boon and can take another action.

This is drawing just the one card, but a player can draw more. His Caper or Exceptional has a Card Count equal to the Trait being used. If using an appropriate skill, the Card Count will increase by one and if the Game Master grants Advantage on the action, it increases by one again. (Conversely, having Disadvantage on an action will decrease it by one and if the card Count is reduced to zero, the action cannot be attempted.) Each extra card flipped after the first replaces the previous card, the aim being to draw the best card possible, effectively turning every action into a gamble! A player’s deck is typically reshuffled after the end of a fight or significant scene.

For most actions, a player will determine the Card Count from a Trait or a combination of a Trait and an appropriate Skill if his character has one. For a Power Check, when a player wants his character to use a Power, the Card Count is equal to the Rank of the Power.

In addition, a Player Character has access to Moxie. It can be spent to increase the Card Count on an action, reduce incoming damage, gain a Boon, shape the narrative, take an extra action related to a Trait, recall a card (which must be a card used in current action rather than a previous one), reshuffle the deck immediately, and to have an Exceptional or a Caper commit an act of self-sacrifice, meaning that he takes damage from an attack rather than a colleague or NPC. Moxie is gained at the end of significant encounters, a player roleplaying his character’s Anchors—such as staying true to a Virtue or suffering a complication due to a Vice, or his character doing something cool or entertaining.
For example, Arabella Bellange is playing a high stakes Poker game. If she wins, she gets top billing at the speakeasy where she has been performing. If she loses, she has to work for the owner, Domenic ‘Peanuts’ Conigliaro, in the speakeasy for free for a year. Arabella wants to play this as straight possible, since she does not want to suffer any slight to her reputation that an accusation of cheating would cause, so is counting the cards and working the odds rather than resorting to deception. This will use her Expertise Trait, which gives her a base Card Count of two. Her Sciences skill will increase this by one to a total of three. The Game Master sets the Task Difficulty at Challenging or ten.

Arabella’s player turns over the top card of her deck. The card is a three of Hearts. This is not good enough to beat Arabella’s boss’ hand, so her player draws a second card, the nine of Spades, followed by the seven of Spades. Again, not enough. Arabella’s player decides to spend some Moxie. First to increase her Card Count by one. This means she can draw another card, but she spends a second to reshuffle her deck. Then she uses Probability Manipulation Power and its Control Boost to look at the top three cards of her deck and rearrange them. The cards are the ten of Diamonds, the eight of Clubs, and the Ace of Hearts in that order. Now the ten of Diamonds is enough to win the Poker game, but the Ace of Hearts is a surefire win and it grants Arabella a boon. She moves this to the top of her deck and with her last card drawn because of her increased Card Count draws the Ace of Hearts. Arabella’s boon is not only top billing at the speakeasy, but a better clothing allowance because a girl has to look her best… The Game Master agrees to this, but also because this ties in with her Vice of Vanity, awards her a point of Moxie.Combat in Capers: A Super-Powered Game of Gangsters in the Roaring Twenties uses the same mechanic. Each participant will make an Agility/Sense Reaction Check to determine his place in the Initiative order, whilst Agility/Guns or Agility/Ranged Weapons are used for ranged attacks and Strength/Fisticuffs or Strength/Melee Weapons are used for melee combat. In either case, the Target Difficulty for the attacker is equal to the Defence value of the defender’s Body value. The amount of damage inflicted is determined by the Suit and Colour of the card used for the attack, Black and Spades inflicting the most damage. Damage typically ranges between one and six points, but can be higher, as the weapon used will modify this. If a Player Character’s Hits are reduced to zero, he is either temporarily removed from the story or dead, player’s choice. If a player chooses to have his character die, then he gets one final turn in which he can use all of his Moxie to affect the narrative. Similarly, if a character reduces an enemy to zero Hits, his player get to decide whether he is merely knocked unconscious or is killed.

An important or unexpected fight can be preceded by a standoff, in which the participants stare each other out and attempt to assess the abilities of their would-be opponents. Played out over three rounds, it can gain a Player Character the initiative and more cards to play on the resulting action check. Other actions include assessing an opponent, intimidating him, or using a Power to boost the Player Character.

Overall, there is pleasing depth to game play, with players not just aiming to draw cards of a value sufficient to overcome a challenge or inflict damage, but also of the right colour and suit to get a more beneficial outcome. Although a player will mainly be relying upon better Card Counts to increase the possibility of drawing better cards, the use of Moxie allows for some limited manipulation of the cards , hopefully, towards a better outcome.

In terms of setting, Capers: A Super-Powered Game of Gangsters in the Roaring Twenties provides a short section of goods and services that noticeably includes prices for speakeasies, breweries, casinos, and hotels for gangster Exceptionals and Capers who want something to invest their ill-gotten gains in, as well as thirteen different Backdrops in which the Game Master can set her campaign. These are the big cities of the USA, notorious for their criminal underworlds during the era of Prohibition. Atlantic City, Chicago, and New York have several pages devoted to them each, covering recent history and the current state in the city, notable organisations and places, and people of note. Plus, stats are provided for the latter as well as a map of the city and story hooks for both law enforcement and gangster campaigns. The others, including Atlanta, Boston, Cincinnati, and Miami, only receive a page each, so will require some development upon the part of the Game Master to bring into play, especially if she wants to base her campaign in any one of them. The main three though, are very playable location write-ups ready for a campaign.

Similarly, law enforcement is given a broad overview before the Capers: A Super-Powered Game of Gangsters in the Roaring Twenties delves into a toolbox containing all manner of strange elements to bring into play. These include a selection of alternative earths, like ‘Capek’s Earth’ where automata have become part of everyday society; ‘Flipside’ where anyone from Principal Earth occupies the mind of their counterpart on this openly violent world where Al Capone is already dead; and ‘Madworld’, where the Central Powers used Capers to slaughter thousands in France, Capers in the USA are hated, hunted, and outlawed. These are all given the same degree of detail as the Backdrops of Atlantic City, Chicago, and New York, and together expand the storytelling possibilities of a campaign set in the world of Capers: A Super-Powered Game of Gangsters in the Roaring Twenties. There is a lot here that the Game Master can play around with in combining classic superhero style stories and elements with the cop with powers versus robbers powers nature of the setting. There is even Stone Island Beach, a secure island prison off the coast of New York for Capers, much like The Raft from the Marvel Universe.

All of this supported with advice for the Game Master on how to run the game, allow scope for player agency and input, adjudicate the rules, design adventures and encounters, and even on how to give animals powers and set up ‘events’ in which more people—either around the world or in one city—suddenly become Capers and explore the consequences that ensue. It is good solid advice, but there is a certain brevity to it. What it does not do is look at long term play in any of the roleplaying game’s three genres—law enforcement, crime, or superheroes—and the differences between them. What does a campaign look like? After all, a law enforcement campaign is going to be different from a criminal enterprise gang. The first is all about investigating criminal empires and tearing them down, whilst the second is all about building criminal empires up and preventing them from being torn down. The bibliography will provide some inspiration, as will familiarity with the genres, but this is definitely where the Game Master wanting to run a longer game of Capers: A Super-Powered Game of Gangsters could have done with more help and advice.

Physically, Capers: A Super-Powered Game of Gangsters in the Roaring Twenties is neatly, cleanly presented. The artwork has a cartoon style, and there is a short, but engaging cartoon strip in the middle of the book.

Capers: A Super-Powered Game of Gangsters in the Roaring Twenties has a setting that is actually unique and sounds cool—superheroes and supervillains in the Roaring Twenties fighting for law and order or crime and corruption. The addition of superpowers is the game changer, of course, both in terms of the setting and play, but the various abilities feel suitably low key and never like they are going to overwhelm the setting or the storytelling. This is helped by the fact that the card-based always make the game play feel as if the players and their characters are pushing their luck and gambling on the outcome. If underdeveloped with regard to long term play, Capers: A Super-Powered Game of Gangsters in the Roaring Twenties offers a breezy, fast-paced, and intriguingly different combination of genres in a familiar setting.

To be upfront and absolutely clear, the World Builder and Game Master’s Guide is not necessary to run Savage Worlds. It is not, in the traditional roleplaying sense, a guide to being a Game Master. All the advice that the Savage Worlds Game Master needs to run Savage Worlds Adventure Edition, or ‘SWADE’, is in the core rulebook. If it is not a traditional guide to being a Game Master for Savage Worlds, what then is the World Builder and Game Master’s Guide? This is the book for the Savage Worlds Game Master who wants to go a bit further than simply running the game for her friends on a week-by-week basis. The book is a collection of articles divided into three categories—guides to world building and writing content for Savage Worlds, running the game in situations other than at home, and advice on tweaking the game here and there, plus a handful of anecdotes that capture how fun Savage Worlds is to play and run. Published by Pinnacle Entertainment Group [https://peginc.com/], the World Builder and Game Master’s Guide is written by the publisher’s members of staff as well as freelancers and Game Masters who have writing and running Savage Worlds for more than a decade.

The World Builder and Game Master’s Guide opens with ‘World Building’, the first of the two articles on world building and writing content for Savage Worlds. The uncredited article explores how a Game Master might go about creating worlds and settings of her own. It is not extensive article—indeed whole books have dedicated to the subject—but it does boil the process down to a handful of questions such as what makes this new world special and exciting? What is its genre? Or as in the case of so many worlds for Savage Worlds, its genres? It suggests summing this up in an elevator pitch before discussing the various elements that make up the setting. Naturally, this is done through the lens of Savage Worlds, so looks at Edges and Hindrances, various types of adventure, and of course, Plot Point campaigns. These are Pinnacle Entertainment Group’s signature campaign format, providing a means to tell a big story in a setting, but also explore different aspects of the setting as well. Backed up with the ‘Pinnacle Style Guide’, this is a solid introduction to world creation, especially for Savage Worlds. Beyond this, the Game Master will likely want more detailed advice.

Some of that does come in Richard Woolcock’s ‘Turning Ideas into SWAG’. This gives advice on how the prospective author can create his own content and then publish it as part of the Savage Worlds Adventurer’s Guild, Pinnacle Entertainment Group’s community content programme. It covers first principles in terms of the working process, structuring the setting and the wordcount, editing and proofreading, playtesting and feedback, and so on, all the way up to making it available as Print on Demand, marketing the release, and even setting a price. The specifics do relate to Savage Worlds as you would expect, but there is advice here too that applies to any of the community content programmes that feature on DriveThruRPG. Combined with the first article in the supplement and the ‘Pinnacle Style Guide’, and this is a good introduction to the process of getting published.

Jodi Black’s ‘Savage Worlds For All Ages’ is the first of two articles which look at running Savage Worlds under different circumstances. As its title suggests, this one looks at the challenges of running Savage Worlds and gives tips on how to prepare a game, run a game, and keep player interest in a game going for different ages, from six years old to sixty-five and older, as well as groups of mixed ages. There are houses rules for each age group, such as for players aged six and up, awarding Bennies for good manners, initiative run in seating order rather than drawing cards, and the need for ‘wiggle breaks’ when the players get restless, as well as suggested plots. For example, making them feel epic in terms of scope for those aged between fifteen and twenty-five who have more time for this sort of game. Accompanied by the author’s guide to running a game club at her school, this is the best article in the supplement, applying to any roleplaying game and not just Savage Worlds. Of all the articles in the World Builder and Game Master’s Guide, this should be freely available.

The other article on running Savage Worlds under different circumstances is ‘Building Your Tribe’ by Chris Fuchs and Chris Landauer. This charts their establishment of the Rocky Mountain Savages, a team of Game Masters that run Savage Worlds at conventions. There are numerous teams that do this, not necessarily for single games or just Savage Worlds, and some actually handle the demonstration games for various publishers. At conventions, these groups and their Game Masters have become part of the public face for the publishers in question, such as the Rocky Mountain Savages for Pinnacle Entertainment Group. It is not just a guide on how to create and run a team of semi-professional Game Masters, but also how to run games at conventions and how to play in games at conventions. The latter gives the article a surprising third strand to its advice, but one that has a broader application than the other two strands since most roleplayers are more likely to play at a convention than be the Game Master or set up a Game Master group. Nevertheless, despite the limited application of the other advice in the article—an aspect common to the supplement as a whole—this is all good advice.

Despite it not being a supplement of general advice on running Savage Worlds, there is still advice to do so in World Builder and Game Master’s Guide. This starts with Owen Lean’s ‘Risks & Reversals’, which is all about the benefits of risk in a game, that essentially, it makes it exciting and whatever the outcome, often memorable. Together with its discussion of ‘reversals’, the joy of going from success to failure and back again as a situation changes, the article throws a bucket-load of examples at the reader, all taken from films with which he is very likely familiar—Pirates of the Caribbean, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and so on—that illustrate both situations. He neatly scales this up from scenes to adventures and campaigns to show how reversals work on that bigger scale. The scaling up continues with ‘High Powered Games’ by Tracy Sizemore. This examines the power progression in Savage Worlds, from Player Characters rising in power vertically initially and then horizontally as their power broadens in application before offering advice on how to use the rules and mechanics of Savage Worlds to adjust to the play and lethality of high-powered play. This includes setting a Wound Cap to limit the amount of damage a Player Character will suffer, but also using the Gritty Damage Setting for deadlier games. It also looks at the unpredictability of the core mechanic to Savage Worlds, how the dice results can swing wildly from one roll to the next, potentially causing disappointment and excitement from one round to the next, and how that can be managed. Suggestions include creating non-combat goals, making villains complex and interesting to give them a role other than wanting to destroy the Player Characters, and so on. There are numerous options and ideas here which support both high-powered play and high-end play.

In ‘The Long Game’, Shane Hensley charts the history of how Deadlands came about and its development over the years, and how the game has been kept fresh since its publication in 1996 and how a Game Master’s campaign can be kept going. Lastly, World Builder and Game Master’s Guide, ‘Anecdotes’ offers not a selection of stories and memories as the title suggests, but further advice on a variety of differing aspects of running Savage Worlds, such as ‘The Art of the Celebrity Con Game’ by Ed Wetterman on running audience participation games with celebrity players, Sean Patrick Fannon on ‘Running the Big Game’ with eight to sixteen players, and recording and making available your game play with Jordan Caves-Callarman’s ‘Savage Steaming’. None of these sections of advice is bad and some of it is useful, but not one of them is an ‘anecdote’, not one of them is story, and labelling them as such is an annoyingly misleading misnomer. Lastly, Clint Black gets ‘Under the Hood’ and discusses ideas on how the Game Master and player might tweak their Savage Worlds game, bringing the supplement to close with the broadest of advice.

Physically, World Builder and Game Master’s Guide is well presented, easy to read, and a nice-looking book.

Ultimately, the World Builder and Game Master’s Guide is not a book that is essential for any Savage Worlds Game Master. There is no denying that there is plenty of advice within its pages, but it is too specialised to be of general use to the average Savage Worlds Game Master. For the Game Master looking to do more than run the game for her friends, then the World Builder and Game Master’s Guide has the possibility of being useful and have the advice that she wants—and if so, then it is useful, it is good, it is helpful. Otherwise, the World Builder and Game Master’s Guide is too specific and too specialised for the average Game Master’s needs.

Quick-starts are a means of trying out a roleplaying game before you buy. Each should provide a Game Master with sufficient background to introduce and explain the setting to her players, the rules to run the scenario included, and a set of ready-to-play, pre-generated characters that the players can pick up and understand almost as soon as they have sat down to play. The scenario itself should provide an introduction to the setting for the players as well as to the type of adventures that their characters will have and just an idea of some of the things their characters will be doing on said adventures. All of which should be packaged up in an easy-to-understand booklet whose contents, with a minimum of preparation upon the part of the Game Master, can be brought to the table and run for her gaming group in a single evening’s session—or perhaps two. And at the end of it, Game Master and players alike should ideally know whether they want to play the game again, perhaps purchasing another adventure or even the full rules for the roleplaying game.

Alternatively, if the Game Master already has the full rules for the roleplaying game the quick-start is for, then what it provides is a sample scenario that she still run as an introduction or even as part of her campaign for the roleplaying game. The ideal quick-start should entice and intrigue a playing group, but above all effectively introduce and teach the roleplaying game, as well as showcase both rules and setting.

—oOo—

What is it?
The Smurfs Roleplaying Game – Quick-start Guide is the quick-start for The Smurfs Roleplaying Game, based on the Belgian comic created by Peyo and The Smurfs cartoon series produced by Hanna-Barbera Productions and broadcast between 1981 and 1989. It is published by Maestro Media Ventures.

It is a twenty-page, 5.24 MB full colour PDF.

How long will it take to play?
The Smurfs Roleplaying Game – Quick-start Guide is designed to be played through in a single session, two at most.
What else do you need to play?
The Smurfs Roleplaying Game – Quick-start Guide needs five six-sided dice per player.
Who do you play?
The five Player Characters—or Smurfs—in The Smurfs Roleplaying Game – Quick-start Guide consist of Smurfette, Hefty, Jokey, Smurflily, and Clumsy Smurf.
How is a Player Character defined?A Smurf in The Smurfs Roleplaying Game – Quick-start Guide is defined by his name which provides a broad description of him and a motivation which explains how he thinks. A Smurf also has an Advantage, a special power which ties into his name or motivation. Each Advantage provides a bonus which applies to certain situations, modifies action rolls, or grants access to certain equipment. For example, Hefty has an Advantage that grants a bonus to any test of strength, whilst Smurflily, who has the Motivation of, “I will do my best to be friends with, and not hurt, any Smurf or other creature.” has an Advantage that reduces the difficulty of skill tests to persuade, calm, or befriend any NPC. Each Smurf also has four attributes—Quick, Brawn, Mind, and Heart—rated between four and twelve.
How do the mechanics work?
Mechanically, The Smurfs Roleplaying Game – Quick-start Guide uses the BURN 2d6 published by Saltheart RPG. To have his Smurf undertake an action, a player rolls two or more six-sided dice, aiming to roll under the appropriate attribute. If the roll is under the attribute value, the action succeeds, but if it is equal to the attribute value, it is only a partial success. A roll higher than the attribute is a failure. Bonuses can come from equipment, Advantages, and Smurfberries.

The difficulty of the action is set by the number of dice a player has to roll. This ranges from two for a Challenging difficulty to five dice for an Impossible difficulty. The Storyteller can make an action more challenging by adding another die, whilst a player can add another die if he wants the outcome of the action to have greater effect. A player can also reduce the number of dice ha has to roll by spending Effort. Each attribute has a number of points of Effort equal to its value and they can only be spent on actions related to that attribute. If a Smurf runs out of Effort for a single attribute, all of his actions are penalised an extra die. If Effect is exhausted for a second attribute, a Smurf falls unconscious or rather, is smurfed...

To avoid this and other dangerous situations, for example, a dragon breathing fire on a Smurf or a Smurf falling from a great height, a player can make a Safety Roll. It is rolled on two six-sided dice and difficulty for is determined by the Smurf’s own Smurf House (but is set to three for the purposes of The Smurfs Roleplaying Game – Quick-start Guide). If the Safety Roll is successful, the Smurf wakes up in his bed, fully refreshed, but with no idea of how he got there. If a failure, the Smurf will probably start the next session in dire circumstances.
In addition to Advantages, bonuses to any action can come from equipment and Smurfberries. Smurfberries are enjoyed by every Smurf and by every player because they are rewarded for good roleplaying. Each Smurf begins play with one and their primary use is to give a player a one-point advantage on any roll. Their secondary use is to restore a point of Effort to a single attribute. This can be for the player’s Smurf or the Smurf of another player, and is more expensive, costing three Smurfberries.
Lastly, each Smurf has access to Smurf Power! This is represented by the Smurf Power Die, and can be used in one of two ways. When rolled, it replaces one of the standard dice a Smurf’s player rolls for any action. It is a standard six-sided die, but marked with the Smurf Symbol on five of its six faces and the Smurf Critical symbol on the one face. It does not add anything to a roll, but when the Smurf Critical symbol is rolled, one of two things can happen. If the roll is a success, with the Smurf Critical symbol, it becomes an amazing absolutely smurfy success. However, if a failure, it becomes the unsmurfiest of failures possible. Alternatively, it can be used to add a narrative element to the play of the game. The ability to roll or use the Smurf Power Die becomes possible once a player rolls all sixes on a previous roll. Otherwise, it is inactive.
Besides the possibility of a critical failure, there is another downside to using the Smurf Power Die. This is that when used, it grants the Game Master a Thorn, which she can then use to make the lives of the Smurfs that much more difficult. This can be by describing a change in circumstances and adding an extra die to a roll, adding a complication by adding or removing a story element, allowing an opponent to act first (as Smurfs always act first otherwise), or cause a piece of equipment to become lost.
Mechanically, The Smurfs Roleplaying Game – Quick-start Guide is player-facing. This means that the players make all the dice rolls rather than the Game Master.
How does combat work?
Combat? In a roleplaying game about Smurfs?

What do you play?
The scenario in The Smurfs Roleplaying Game – Quick-start Guide is ‘Papa Smurf Goes Missing: An Introductory Adventure for The Smurfs RPG’. The adventure begins when the Smurfs wake up to find that Papa Smurf and his Mushroom House has gone missing, leaving a big hole in the ground where it stood the previous day. Investigating the hole reveals the wreckage of his house at the bottom and a tunnel leading deep into the earth! Where will lead and where has Papa Smurf gone? The adventure is quite straightforward, primarily involving a mixture of stealth and exploration. It also comes with plenty of staging advice that the Game Master can use simply as examples of play or inspiration for when she runs the scenario. It playable in a single session.
Is there anything missing?
Yes. The Smurfs Roleplaying Game – Quick-start Guide does not come with a Smurf Power die, so the Game Master will need to provide something in its stead.
Is it easy to prepare?
The core rules presented in The Smurfs Roleplaying Game – Quick-start Guide are very easy to prepare. They are light and easy to use as much as they are to teach, making them and the quick-start as a whole suitable for running for a younger audience.
Is it worth it?
Yes. The Smurfs Roleplaying Game – Quick-start Guide presents everything you you need to play a fun, happy-go-lucky session of Smurfiness, with a little dash of mild peril. The rules are easy to grasp and teach and the scenario is an uncomplicated affair. However, this is a quick-start (and a roleplaying game) for fans of The Smurfs rather than the casual player necessarily and they are likely to get more out of this than the said casual player. Otherwise, this is a well done quick-start, one that roleplaying fans of The Smurfs will pick up with ease and enjoy. Plus, if there are younger fans of The Smurfs, this is something that they will enjoy playing and being run for them.
The Smurfs Roleplaying Game – Quick-start Guide is published by Maestro Media and is available to download here.

The village of Hirot stands besieged, its inhabitants cowering and scared at who they might have to give up next. Standing atop a hillock, jutting up above windswept moors and rain sodden forests, for the past six months a monster, a devil-hound, has climbed over its palisade walls every night and stalked its few streets looking for victims. Once found, the creature from hell butchers and plays with their corpses, before vanishing into the mists leaving a bloody and rent corpse for the survivors to render funeral rites to. No one is safe and to date, neither the Jarl, master of Hirot, nor his thegns, have been able to kill the best, for every time they do, it quickly returns another night to kill yet another victim. The Jarl’s seer, Sylle Ru, has advised that a random villager should be sacrificed to the killer very third day and this has been taking place over the past few weeks, reducing the population of the village by a third. It is one of these sacrifices, being driven forward by a village mob and overseen by the Jarl and his thegns, to be placed upon ancient altar stones, that the Player Characters come across at the start of Dungeon Crawl Classics #66.5: Doom of the Savage Kings, a scenario for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game published by Goodman Games.

Dungeon Crawl Classics #66.5: Doom of the Savage Kings is a special scenario for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game. For although it was not the first to be published as a standalone scenario—that would be Dungeon Crawl Classics #67: Sailors on the Starless Sea—Dungeon Crawl Classics #66.5: Doom of the Savage Kings was the first scenario that many players roleplayed, for it was included as a separate item in the rulebook for Dungeon Crawl Classics as the first scenario to be played after they had played through the roleplaying game’s signature feature, a ‘Character Funnel’. Written by Harley Stroh, It is designed to be played by between six and twelve First Player Characters and mixes the classic ‘village in peril’ set-up of so many a fantasy roleplaying scenario with the classic tale of Beowulf and the Sherlock Holmes novel, The Hound of the Baskervilles with more than a dash of Hammer Horror. Much like the author’s later Dungeon Crawl Classics #72: Beyond the Black Gate, it has a grim, northern European feel to it that suggests Saxon or Scandinavian influences upon its dark Swords & Sorcery.

When the Player Characters offer to help deal with the creature, nicknamed the ‘Hound of Hirot’, the Jarl seems oddly disinterested in offer of aid, rebuking them for their meddling and suggesting instead that giving themselves as sacrifices to the creature is the best thing that they can do. In comparison—and despite their pessimism, the thegns and the commoners will be welcoming, looking to the Player Characters for hope and perhaps a solution to the ghastly situation in which the village and its inhabitants find themselves in. Both Jarl and his thegns will tell the Player Characters why the situation is hopeless. Simply that the ‘Hound of Hirot’ cannot be killed. Of course, this is not the case, because the creature can be dealt with. It is not easy though, and will require some investigation and interaction, some exploration, and some brute strength upon the part of the Player Characters. Or combination of all three. The scenario provides multiple means—shackles woven from the hair of the dead that will bind the hound, the Wolf-spear of Ulfheonar which can pin the creature in place, and simply wrestling with it—and it is just up to the Player Characters to find out about these methods and decide which ones they want to use. Of course, in the first means, they will need to find some dead men with hair still on their heads and bring it back, whilst in the latter, they need to find where the Wolf-spear of Ulfheonar is and how they can get it.

The scenario consists of three distinct acts. In the first, the Player Characters arrive at Hirot and investigate the village, talking to the inhabitants, and winkling out some rumours and secrets that might help them defeat the beast. To that end, the Judge is furnished with a table of ready rumours and a detailed description of the village and its inhabitants. The descriptions nicely brings to life the morose sense of hopelessness that pervades Hirot whilst also providing the players with plenty of opportunities to roleplay. The encounter with the village’s old crone, known as the mad widow, is a delight and has a fantastic payoff at the end of the scenario. What is also great about the encounters in the village is that none of the NPCs are truly evil. Venal, desperate, resigned, and most of all, fearful, but not evil.

If the emphasis in the first act is on investigation and interaction in the village of Hirot, the second is on exploration of the ‘Tomb of the Ulfheonar’, where hopefully the Player Characters will be able to find the other primary means of defeating the ‘Hound of Hirot’, the Wolf-spear of Ulfheonar. The barrow-mound is quite sparse in look and feel, all rough stone slabs and earth and roots. It is quite small and barely—and only recently—inhabited by a nasty trio of monsters, that lurk in the dark ready to ambush intruders. The tomb also narrows towards the end setting up a really nasty, claustrophobic ambush that should really scare the players, let alone their characters. Combined with a deadly trap at the end—this being a tomb after all—the Player Characters will likely be very relieved to get out of the tomb. And the moment when they exit is when the Jarl strikes, ambushing them as threat to even the dark situation and his hold over it in the village of Hirot. Of course, if the Player Characters decide not to hunt for the Wolf-spear of Ulfheonar, then the entire dungeon is optional. (In some ways, this spoils the adventure for the Judge, denying her the opportunity to throw some horrible little encounters at her players, but that does not stop her from repurposing the dungeon-tomb and placing it elsewhere in another adventure.)

The third act of the scenario is the confrontation with the beast, using whatever means the Player Characters have gathered. Here the emphasis is on exploration and combat, a slog through the mire of a foul swamp and down into the maw of the creature’s lair. The sinkhole is a nasty place to have a fight, but it makes a great scene for a grand climax.

Physically, Dungeon Crawl Classics #66.5: Doom of the Savage Kings is a good-looking book. For the most part, the artwork is good, but the cartography is excellent. The adventure is well written and explained, making it easy to prepare.

Dungeon Crawl Classics #66.5: Doom of the Savage Kings packs a lot of adventure, a good monster, and plenty of decent NPCs into its sixteen pages. It also includes quite a bit of treasure, all nicely unique and different as well as lots of little details that might play out well beyond the pages of the scenario. Finally, Dungeon Crawl Classics #66.5: Doom of the Savage Kings has atmosphere aplenty, grim and foreboding, a genuinely epic mini-saga for First Level Player Characters.

It has been over six hundred years since the First Prophecy of Fatuma came to pass. The SIX, the Disciples of Fatuma, who following the prophecies put down in the Book of Fatuma, made a pilgrimage to the Primordial Mausoleum of THEY and deployed the Power of Tributes to decrypt the Mystical Lock sealing the Mausoleum. It was then that the They drew in the stale air of the Mausoleum, becoming one with the THEY and breathing out the parasites. The Six scattered, bringing the word and the infection of THEY to every corner of the ’verse. Then the Gnawing began. The parasites of THEY gnawed their way out of the infected. They spread. They gnawed their way out of planets. They spread. The infected split open. The planets split apart. Now mankind clings to life, looking out for any signs of THEY or hiding it inside them in the hope that it never erupts and spreads… The Earth is gone. Shattered into large pieces. There are places and planets where the remnants of Mankind survive, squabbling over resources and power, fearing the parasitical infectious word of THEY, but not without hope. There are whispers of a means to escape the end of this universe by entering another, one entirely free of THEY. It is called the Gate of Infinite Stars. Yet time is running out. The First Prophecy of Fatuma came to pass and so has every other Prophecy of Fatuma since. Except the last Seven Torments. Will the last Seven Torments come to pass and allow the Würms and the Grimm to consume the ’verse and with it, the last of Mankind? Or will the lucky few find their way to the Gate of Infinite Stars and at last be free of the Würms and the Grimm in a better, brighter future? That is, of course, if everyone fleeing through the Gate of Infinite Stars is free of the gnawing…
This is the set-up for Vast Grimm. Published by Infinite Black, it is a pre-apocalypse Science Fiction roleplaying game compatible in tone and structure with Mörk Borg, the Swedish pre-apocalypse Old School Renaissance style roleplaying game designed by Ockult Örtmästare Games and Stockholm Kartell and published by Free League Publishing. To get around the shattered solar system of the Vast Grimm’s ghastly future, let alone out into ’verse, the survivors are going to need transport and places to go. This is where Vast Grimm: Space Cruisers comes to the fore.
Vast Grimm: Space Cruisers expands on the rules for starships given in Vast Grimm. It provides the means to both create and modify them, gives rules for starship combat, and it describes three new locations that the Game Master can add to her game and her Player Characters can visit. Lastly, it includes rules for generating abandoned starships. The latter is particularly useful as it adds further uncertainty to the setting, provides somewhere for the Player Characters to explore, investigate, and loot. Effectively, mini-dungeons in space, if you will. Further, such vessels also serve as a ready source of parts and resources to scavenge, as well as potential replacement starships. The latter is important because the last starship to roll out of the shipyards was three hundred years ago. In a universe where the Grimm are the biggest threat that Mankind had ever faced, building the then current spaceship models and developing new spaceship designs was very quickly low on everyone’s priorities. Which means that the Player Characters may start play with one starship and end up with another and then another, just due to wear and tear and use and a lack of parts.

Creating a starship for Vast Grimm is quick and easy. It involves choosing or rolling for a Starship Class and following the various steps listed for each Starship Class in terms of capabilities, equipment, and modifications. Then rolls are made for the Starship’s Abilities, Hit Points, characteristics, battle scars, and Modifications. There are six Starship Classes and there are six options given for each. These are ‘Minimal Crew’, ‘Transports’, ‘Cruisers’, ‘Freighters’, ‘Warships’, and ‘Shotrods’, the latter being intergalactic hotrods. The ‘Minimal Crew’ Class includes ‘Family Truckster’, ‘Intergalactic Trucker’, and ‘DIY Death Trap’; ‘Transports’ like a ‘Yachthole’ or ‘Jailboat’; ‘Cruisers’ such as a ‘Light Cruiser’ or ‘Ram Jam’; ‘Freighters’ include ‘Garbage Getter’ and ‘Crowdfunded Slow Boat’; ‘Warships’ such as a ‘Frackin’ Frigate’ or ‘Dreadnought’; and ‘Chopper’ and ‘Domed Disc’ for the ‘Shotrods’. Starship Abilities consist of Manoeuvre, Accuracy, Fortitude, and Power, ranging in value from three to eight, modified by Class.

Most Starships have an A.I. on board, but it is possible to purchase the code to install a new one or replace an old, possibly damaged one. There is a table of A.I. personalities included, but these is quite short at six entries, especially given the Starship-hopping/Starship-scavenging nature of play. The likelihood is that the Game Master is going to run out of A.I. personalities quickly.

Name: The Slim Grimm ExpressClass: Transport
Type: Galaxy Express
Size: 1 Speed: 2 Crew: 2Armour: Tier 6 (-2d6)Hit Points: 35
Pilot Presence dR12Well-Engineered
Starship’s Log: A.I. Overkill (each section of the starship is controlled by a different A.I. personality)
Battle Scars: All original seating gutted. Replaced with lawn furniture.Modifications: Escape Pod, Surge Protector, Armour (Tier 2), Slam ShockerWeapon: Laser Turret (3d8 damage)Manoeuvre 7 (-2) Accuracy 13 (+1) Fortitude 15 (+3) Power 18 (+4)

The process is not difficult and provides a total of thirty-six Starship types from which to choose or generate. Consequently, the likelihood of the Player Characters finding a similar ship to their own is quite low and even if they do, it will still be very different. Starship operation requires minimum Power to operate and also use weapons and other capabilities. A Power Core can be recharged, but can also be scavenged from other Starships.
Starship combat is played out on a hex grid. One player takes the role of Captain, who is then responsible for manoeuvring the starship in combat. Possible other actions available to the Player Characters include using a weapon, a capability, activating a Tribute (data chips containing the Neuromantic energy released at the same time as the Grimm when THEY opened the Primordial Mausoleum of THEY and used for various effects), defending the Starship, conducting repairs, and even a launching a raiding party if the two Starships are close enough. Although the combatants do roll for initiative, damage occurs simultaneously. Critical rolls inflict double damage and reduce the target Starship’s armour by a tier, whilst on a critical Defence roll, the damage bounces back and inflicts damage on the attacker or the attack is Evaded, and the defending Starship manoeuvre’s away. Fumbles include temporary weapon malfunctions, a Player Character spilling a drink on a console and having to clean it up before it works again, and so on. If the Hit Points of a Starship are reduced to zero, then the Starship is broken, possibly leading to a loss of oxygen, all systems shutting down to maintain life support, and worse. If the damage is reduced to below zero, the damage is worse.
In addition to the rules for Starships and Starship combat, Vast Grimm: Space Cruisers details three locations that the Player Characters can visit in their vessel. They include ‘Guthrie’s Fuel & Fix’, a former waste barge turned travelling station and source of parts, repairs, and fuel. There are tables for Power Core recharge rates, availability of parts, and so on, plus stats for its operator, a short and rusty service bot that records everything. ‘Tangle Station’ is a small planetoid run by the necrotic cyborg Kid Arachnid—the only non-robot on the facility—and dedicated to keeping the Netwürk running. He will sell all sorts of information to any manner of buyers, though not all of it is safe. The ‘Roach Coach 2’ is probably the last place that anyone might want to eat, what with its ‘Mystery Meat pie’, ‘Sautéed Gooey Gland’, and ‘Crunchy Sugar Larvae’ on its menu and the fact that it is run by Cockroach Karl, Jr. Then there are the side effects, which might be positive, might be negative…
There is a brevity to the content of Vast Grimm: Space Cruisers, but in many cases that makes the content easy to grasp and use in play, even when rolling at the table. It also leaves scope for the Game Master to develop that content herself and tailor it to fit her campaign. This is made all the easier by the engaging and entertaining nature of the content.
Lastly, Vast Grimm: Space Cruisers comes with lots of tables. The main set will help the Game master determine the appearance, current occupiers, and some sample rooms that might be found aboard a seemingly abandoned Starship. Others include a table of parts that might break down on a trip and tables of things and person who might be found on a Starship.
Physically, Vast Grimm: Space Cruisers adheres to the Artpunk aesthetic of both Vast Grimm and Mörk Borg, with its use of vibrant, often neon colours and heavy typefaces. It looks amazing, a swirling riot of colour that wants to reach out and infect everything, but where the core rules were not always the easiest to read, the simplicity of the content in this supplement make it easier to read and use.

Mechanically, Vast Grimm: Space Cruisers is not as easily explained as it could have been, especially when it comes to Starship combat. Another page and probably an example of play would not have gone amiss and it would make the grasping of what should be relatively straightforward rules that much easier. This is not to say that they are difficult, but that the explanation could have been clearer. besides that, Vast Grimm: Space Cruisers neatly expands on the single aspect of the dark future that is Vast Grimm and provides the means for the Game Master to bring Starships into her campaign in greater and more entertaining fashion.

 I am at Gary Con!

Come by the Elf Lair Game booth to say hi. Both #119.

We have NIGHT SHIFT, Wasted Lands, Thirteen Parsecs, and Jason's newest one Cd8.

Come on by, say hi, buy some books.

 I just watched the Netflix series Trese. I really, really enjoyed it—more so than I was expecting to. 

I also watched a documentary about the show, which increased my appreciation.

The show focuses on the magic detective Alexandra Trese. She was inspired by detectives like Constantine and Fox Mulder and based on Filipino myths and legends.  

My knowledge of Filipino myths is, well, not great. Maybe better than most, but certainly by no means great. But this show does not penalize people for not knowing. The story-telling and animation are so rich and evocative that you are brought along for the ride. 

The documentary covers not just the monsters featured in the anime (and the comic) but also the locations in Manila. Also nearly everyone involved in the show was Filipino which is rather cool.  Also, they tend to refer to characters with AD&D alignments which was fun.

Of course, there is the big question about Alexandra Trese. Is she a witch? Well, she does use magic; she is the 6th child of a 6th child. She is also a healer and the representative of humans to the supernatural world. She even has a ritual dagger. Plus, she wears all black, her hairstyle reminds me of devil horns, and her name, "Trese," means "Thirteen" in Filipino. 

While it is not an anime per se (it is Filipino, not Japanese), it does have a solid Witch Hunter Robin vibe to it.

Now I need to check out the comics for it. 

Of course, it would be perfect to build for NIGHT SHIFT. Alexandra could be better suited as a Chosen One with some spell-casting ability.