Between October 2003 and October 2013, Chaosium, Inc. published a series of books for Call of Cthulhu under the Miskatonic University Library Association brand. Whether a sourcebook, scenario, anthology, or campaign, each was a showcase for their authors—amateur rather than professional, but fans of Call of Cthulhu nonetheless—to put forward their ideas and share with others. The programme was notable for having launched the writing careers of several authors, but for every Cthulhu Invictus, The Pastores, Primal State, Ripples from Carcosa, and Halloween Horror, there was Five Go Mad in Egypt, Return of the Ripper, Rise of the Dead, Rise of the Dead II: The Raid, and more...

The Miskatonic University Library Association brand is no more, alas, but what we have in its stead is the Miskatonic Repository, based on the same format as the DM’s Guild for Dungeons & Dragons. 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.

—oOo—
Name: The Cult of Gl’thol’ticPublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Jess Charle

Setting: Jazz Age Massachusetts
Product: ScenarioWhat You Get: Thirteen-page, 39.00 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Small town murder mystery, plus the MythosPlot Hook: Can your god be summoned before they come for you?Plot Support: Two handouts, five NPCs, and one map.Production Values: Plain.
Pros# The very definition of a ‘fixer-upper’ scenario# One-shot with the players as cultists# Call of Cthulhu Investigators as the enemy# Small town mini-murder mystery# Pretty map# Paranoia# Capiophobia
Cons# Needs an edit# Player Characters are not supposed to know they are cultists# Murder mystery mostly incidental# No staging advice# No sense of the Player Characters being investigated# No option for the Player Characters to act against the Investigators# No pre-generated Player Cultists# Bryce Wane. Millionaire Vigilante. Industrialist. Notorious playboy. Fights crime as ‘Rat Man’.# Yes. You read that correctly.# Bryce Wane. Millionaire Vigilante. Industrialist. Notorious playboy. Fights crime as ‘Rat Man’.# No. Not kidding. Really is an NPC in the scenario.
Conclusion# Potentially interesting scenario with Player Characters as cultists undone by severe lack of development# Lack of pre-generated Player Cultists significant omission # Bryce Wane. Millionaire Vigilante. Industrialist. Notorious playboy. Fights crime as ‘Rat Man’. 

In almost forty years of The Terminator films as a franchise and intellectual property, it is surprising to note that there has never been a roleplaying game based on them. After all, the concept is pretty simple—an unstoppable killing machine comes back from the future to kill the mother of the resistance leader who will defeat its A.I. master in the future—such that it is probably one of the easiest Science Fiction/horror time travel plots to adapt to the system of the Game Master’s choice. Yet still no roleplaying game when there have been two roleplaying games—one from Leading Edge Games and another from Free League Publishing—based upon the Alien franchise. Leading Edge Games did manage a set of miniatures wargaming rules, TERMINATOR 2 Year of Darkness – Miniatures Combat System and several sets of miniatures, but not a roleplaying game. Fortunately, Scottish roleplaying publisher, Nightfall Games, best known for the dystopian roleplaying game of corporate horror, SLA Industries, gained the licence in 2020 and following a successful Kickstarter campaign, published The Terminator RPG and The Terminator RPG Campaign Book, plus The Terminator RPG Quick Start. One notable inclusion in the writing team for The Terminator RPG is Andrew E.C. Gaska, the franchise consultant for 20th Century Studios on Alien, Predator, and Planet of the Apes, who was also on the writing team for the Alien: The Roleplaying Game.

The Terminator RPG is based upon The Terminator, the original film by James Cameron from 1984 and then on the seventeen or so comic book storylines published by Dark Horse Comics between 1990 and 2019. The Science Fiction horror roleplaying game enables play in two time periods. The first is the future of the here and now, or at least an alternative here and now. This is the future of Judgement Day, in which the A.I. Skynet attempted to destroy its creators and the rest of humanity in nuclear, biological, and chemical conflagration before sending out increasingly sophisticated machines to wipe out humanity, whether through brute force or infiltration followed by brute force. The Resistance arose, led by those who had been preparing for Judgement Day and the rise of the robots, most notably, John Connor, to defeat Skynet and its forces. By the end of the 2020s, the Resistance would prevail, but not before Skynet developed temporal technology with Time Displacement Equipment, enabling it to send Terminator units back into the past and attack those who would become a danger to it in the future. Thus, the war against the machines became not a war of resistance and rebellion against Skynet, but a war through time, a hunt for Skynet’s agents across the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This opens up the second time period, the 1980s, and whilst it would be possible to run campaigns in both periods without any crossover, travelling back from the 2020s opens up the possibility of some entertaining ‘fish out of water’ style roleplaying. In general, the emphasis in The Terminator RPG is on the period of the 2020s, but there is still plenty of information about the 1980s to run a campaign set there.

A Resistance Fighter in The Terminator RPG has a Role, such as Engineer, Hacker, or Scout. This provides a Resistance Fighter’s initial stats and a Resistance Ability. For example, the Grunt has ‘Physical Training’ which enables the Resistance Fighter to trade in a Skill die on a Strength or Dexterity related Skill Test and ensure that the result on the Success die is always a ‘Messy Success’ whatever is rolled. The Grunt also has extra Hit points. The Pilot, for example, has ‘Mechanised Warrior’, which enables the Pilot to control a vehicle passively and specialise in a particular type of vehicle. The Resistance Fighter has six stats—Strength, Dexterity, Knowledge, Concentration, Charisma, and Cool. Stats are rated between zero and six, whilst the skills are rated between one and four. A Resistance Fighter also has FATE, a replenishable representation of his luck, and he can have Traits, such as Addiction, Arrogant, Exceedingly Cool, or Vision (Good). He also has Hope Points, which are divided between three categories—Body, Brains, and Bravado—and indicate the ways in which a Resistance Fighter can emulate the cinematic style of The Terminator. For example, with Body 2, Brains 3, and Bravado 1, Minguez the strategist could ‘Go Crashing In’ to dive into a room and gain a single charge or ranged action before combat begins, to make a ‘Luck Guess’ and gain a free bonus to a Knowledge or Concentration skill roll, or ‘Lead From The Front’ to lead soldiers into battle and bolster their morale. To create a character, a player selects a Role, assigns seven points to the stats, receives the base skill ranks for the Role and spends thirty-six points to purchase more skill ranks, and selects traits—both negative and positive so that they balance. A Resistance Fighter does not have to have any traits and there are relatively few of them, with fifteen negative traits versus only seven positive traits.

Name: David Renko
Role: Historian
STATS
Strength 1 Dexterity 1 Knowledge 5
Concentration 1 Charisma 2 Cool 1
FATE 1/1
HOPE
Brain 2 Bravado 1
Hit Points: 16 Willpower: 16
MOVEMENT
Closing: 2 Rushing 5 Encumbrance: 4 Initiative: 3
Resistance Ability: Natural Academic
SKILLS
Diplomacy 3, Education: Academic (Mathematics) 4, Education: Natural (Physics) 3, Endurance 1, Interrogate 1, Language: Russian 3, Lore: Skynet 3, Melee Weapons 1, Oratory 2, Pistol 1, Rifle 1, Stealth 1, Survival 1, Tactics 1, Time Science 1, Unarmed Combat 1
TRAITS
Anxiety (Rank 1), Natural Aptitude: Time Science (Rank 1)

The Terminator RPG allows for two further Resistance Fighter types. One is the Cyborg as per Terminator 2: Judgement Day. There are no specific rules for creating this Resistance Fighter type, but guidelines suggest building it as a Grunt with the additional traits of ‘Learning to Run’, ‘All Hope is Gone’, and ‘Unstoppable’. The other is the Fated. They are NPCs or Resistance Fighters already known to Skynet (and so cannot have the associated negative trait) and worse, are in its crosshairs. The obvious character from The Terminator for this is Sarah Connor.

Mechanically, The Terminator RPG uses the ‘S5S’ System first seen in SLA Industries, Second Edition. This is a dice pool system which uses ten-sided dice. The dice pool consists of one ten-sided die, called the Success Die, and Skill Dice equal to the skill being used, plus one. The Success Die should be of a different colour from the Skill Dice. The results of the dice roll are not added, but counted separately. Thus, to each roll is added the value of the Skill being rolled, plus its associated stat. If the result on the Success Die is equal to or greater than the Target Number, ranging from eight and Challenging to sixteen and Insane, then the Operative has succeeded. If the results of the Skill Dice also equal or exceed the Target Number, this improves the quality of the successful skill attempt. However, if the roll on the Success Die does not equal or exceed the Target Number, the attempt fails, even if multiple rolls on the Success Dice do. FATE can be spent to reroll the Success Die or any of the Skill Dice. It can also be spent to add a modifier to a Skill Test or a Resistance Test.
For example, David Renko is part of a resistance squad which has broken into a Skynet facility and discovered that it has Time Displacement Equipment or TDE. Unfortunately, the TDE was partially damaged in the assault on the facility and the date to when the Terminators have been sent back is not readily accessible. The resistance squad’s hacker has already managed to get the TDE computer working and Renko needs to determine the date from the accessible data. The Director—as the Game Master is known in The Terminator RPG—sets the Difficulty of the Skill Test at Challenging or 11. Renko’s player assembles his dice pool. This consists of the Success Die plus a Skill Die for his Skill rank of one in Time Science plus an extra Skill Die. To the result of each die, Renko’s player will add the Skill rank of one in Time Science. Renko’s player rolls five on the Success Die, and three and five on the Skill dice. This a serious failure as none of the dice rolled a success. Renko’s player decides to use Renko’s of Natural Aptitude: Time Science, which at Rank 1, allows him a reroll in the skill. This time he rolls an eleven on the Success Die and a nine and a five on the Skill Dice. This is a Messy Success, which means that Renko can identify which year the Terminator units travelled back to, but no more. So, his player uses a point of FATE to reroll the Skill Dice. He rolls both of them and gets an eight and a ten. Adjusting the results with Renko’s Skill Rank of 1 in Time Science, the results are eleven on the Success Die and on one of the Skill Dice. This counts as a Solid Success and narrows the temporal destination for the Terminator down to a month.In terms of the rules, The Terminator RPG runs implacably through the key elements of the setting, starting with combat. This is a major aspect of the setting so receives no little attention here, and is designed to be deadly, fraught, and highly tactical. It takes into account offensive and defensive manoeuvres, rate of fire, recoil, damage inflicted on armour, cover, aiming, and so on. Against ordinary opponents, combat is designed to be desperate and dangerous, but this only escalates when Terminator units become involved. As well as being physically dangerous, the unstoppably callous nature of Terminator units is extremely stressful and frightening, which can trigger Fear Tests, which typically occur when the Fear Rating of the situation is above a Resistance Fighter’s Cool stat. Failed Fear Tests lead to a loss of Willpower. As well as seeing a Terminator, being trapped or attacked, witnessing the brutality of Skynet, the loss of a close one, can all lead to Fear Tests if their Fear Rating is high enough. The rules also cover vehicle combat, traps, biological warfare and toxicants, and more, whilst the rules for traps cover disarming them as much as building them, so that the Resistance Fighters can lay traps as much as disarm them. Similarly, particular attention is paid to infiltration and exfiltration, as stealth is a key part to survival and moving around in the wasted world of the future as well as learning to get by in the bright and brazen world of the eighties.

Another major feature of The Terminator RPG is Hacking. The rules cover hacking and computers in both the past and the future and the radical differences in terms of technology. One of the given Roles in the roleplaying game is the Hacker and he will primarily be hacking electronic devices and computer systems. In general, hacking small systems requires only a simple skill test, but for bigger systems and where it is narratively appropriate, the hacker can attempt to infiltrate a system consisting of a series of connected nodes represented by a ‘Network Architecture Diagrams’. The player rolls Computer skill tests to generate points of Progress which can be expended to move deeper into the network, create a backdoor, capture a node, exploit a subroutine. If alerted, Network Security, or ‘NetSec’, will spread through the system attempting to locate the hacker and halt his progress, the Director rolling for and handling this process. In effect, hacking is in effect a two-player mini-game between the Hacker’s player and the Director. Fortunately, it is intended to take place at the same pace as combat rounds do, so it can be run in parallel with them if need be. It needs careful study by both the Hacker’s player and the Game Master, and although there is an example hacking attempt given of the system included, it would be a good idea for the Director to run through this at least once to understand it before bringing it into play.

In terms of technology, The Terminator RPG has lengthy sections devoted to both equipment and the machines of Skynet, the latter longer than the former. One nice touch is the equipment is organised not by name or type, but by the skill required to use each item, thus combining their description, the rules for their use, and their effects effectively under they are used. So, for example, dogs are listed under Animal Management, Time Displacement Equipment under Time Science, and everything from a flatbed truck to a main battle tank under Vehicles. Also covered are beam weapons, particle beam weapons, and other weapons deployed by Skynet. Then when it comes to the machines of The Terminator setting, The Terminator RPG covers much more than seen in the original film. So obviously the HK-Tank, HK-Drone, and T-800 Terminator, but The Terminator RPG also draws deeply from the comic book series published by Dark Horse Comics. So there are basic T-000 models, humanoid Hunter-Killers, as well as T-700 or ‘Data Junkies’, which pose as the homeless and are sent back into the past to collect data and then hide until after Judgement Day; the T-K90 or ‘Labrador Deceivers’, which hide amongst the Resistance’s dogs and acclimatise them to the presence of metal; and even T-R80 or ‘Cyberbats’, used as reconnaissance units. This offers a wide variety of threats and suggests possible story ideas for the Director to use and develop. This is all backed up by the discussion of the various components, features, and design of Skynet’s machines, so that the Director can understand how they work. Unsurprisingly, there is a focus on the T-800 as seen in The Terminator, including what happens when one loses various components. All of the machines given have game statistics as per a Resistance Fighter, but with high armour values and special rules which vary from model to model. Notable amongst the models are those developed by MIR, the Soviet Union’s answer to Skynet, which has an interesting relationship with its American counterpart.

In terms of background, The Terminator RPG also explores the rapid technological progress of the late twentieth century which ultimately led to the development of Skynet. This includes other corporations which contributed technologies later incorporated by Skynet, giving the Resistance another set of targets in the past. Numerous NPCs, drawn from both film and comic, are also given, complete with full stats, starting with Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese in 1984, John Connor in 2029, Lieutenant Ed Traxler, LAPD, in 1984, and more. If there is a potential issue here is that a lot of these NPCs will be unfamiliar to the players and the Director—especially the Director, forcing her to scurry off in search of the Dark Horse Comics. A nice touch is that every NPC entry includes notes made by Doctor Peter Silberman, providing an often-deluded psychological profile for each person, as well as an assessment by Skynet itself. The Director gets to choose which of the two assessments is worse…

The Terminator RPG terminates with not one, but two missions for the Director to run. Neither is original. The first, ‘The Phone Book Killer’, is based on the story seen in The Terminator, whilst the second, ‘The Killer in Me’, is based on the graphic novel, The Enemy Within. In both cases, the missions are designed to emulate rather than simulate the stories on which they are based. Thus in ‘The Phone Book Killer’, set in 1984, the Player Characters can be members of the LAPD investigating the case of the Sarah Connor murder spree or as Resistance Fighters sent back to stop the T-800. In the case of the latter, this will mean the players taking the roles of Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese, and essentially roleplaying the events out to see how they might differ, though there is scope for other Player Characters to get involved too. As a police investigation, the key Player Characters are Ed Traxler and Hal Vukovich, but again more Player Characters can be added, including Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese. Essentially, this is more of a toolkit to set up and explore the events of the story.

‘The Killer in Me’, the second mission is much more straightforward in its set-up and plot and is not the toolkit to set up and explore the events of its story that ‘The Phone Book Killer’ is. However, it does have the benefit of unfamiliarity, so the players and their Resistance Fighters can come to it unaware of its plot. Set in the 2020s, the Resistance Fighters are assigned to Lompoc Base, north of Los Angeles. The base is in danger of being overrun by Skynet, so when the base receives a message from a missing comrade that he has a cache of weapons and some survivors, both of which can help the base, its commander orders the Resistance Fighters to investigate. This requires a 150-mile trip, not through enemy territory, but under it via the sewerage tunnels. As the title of the mission suggests, this is a far more dangerous assignment than the Resistance Fighters will expect.

Physically, The Terminator RPG is very well presented. It is well written, the artwork is really good—the depictions of the various NPCs look right and the Terminators look scary, and throughout, there are plenty of examples of the rules and suggestions for the Director.

If there are issues with The Terminator RPG, they are relatively minor. For example, the list of Traits for Resistance Fighter creation seems paltry at best, and having ‘The Phone Book Killer’ as one of the two missions could also be seen as a cheap cop-out. Arguably, the former is more of an issue than the latter, limiting options in terms of Resistance Fighter creation, whereas the inclusion of The Terminator storyline as a playable scenario lets you roleplay and explore a situation which many a gaming group has already done inspired by the events of the film already, but do it with proper guidance and advice on how to do it differently. The inclusion of ‘The Phone Book Killer’ essentially lets you roleplay a story or situation you have been waiting forty years to do and do it with the licenced roleplaying rules.

Perhaps more problematically, is the roleplaying game’s complexity. The Terminator RPG looks complex and in some places it is. Then again, it has to be. This is roleplaying game and setting which involves near-unstoppable killing machines, which take tactics and ingenuity to destroy rather than brute force; computer systems which require infiltration against a faster, better, more capable enemy; and both desperation and courage. Yet, The Terminator RPG is not overly complex by the standards of most roleplaying games, simply requiring patience to learn and get used to the mechanics. (As an aside, the most obvious licensee back in the day would have been Leading Edge Games, since it had the licence for the TERMINATOR 2 Year of Darkness – Miniatures Combat System. However, it would have produced a roleplaying game based on The Terminator akin to its Aliens Adventure Game and that would have been complex. So, complexity is relative.

If there is a complex aspect of the roleplaying game, it is in the hacking rules, and that is to be expected. Hacking computers is not simple, especially if they are designed by an advanced A.I. Even then, the hacking rules are not that complex in comparison to other roleplaying games, but they do require attention and they do need to be learned how they work lest their inclusion slow play down.

Lastly, there is the issue of the source material for The Terminator RPG. The original film is readily available. The comic books from Dark Horse Comics not so readily. The Director will probably need to track them down. The inclusion of a bibliography would have been useful to that end, let alone for reference. That is the single real omission The Terminator RPG. However, the lack of relatively ready availability of the collected comics means that the Director’s players are unlikely to be as familiar with them and so she can easily plunder them for story ideas.

The Terminator RPG includes everything that a Director and her players need to run a game inspired by the original film—campaign ideas and advice, full stats and details on numerous killing machines, guidance on handling time travel, and fear in the face of the Terminators! The Terminator RPG is the roleplaying game we have been waiting for, for almost four decades, enabling us to enter the future and past of James Cameron’s Science Fiction dystopia, overcome our fear in facing the Terminators and take the fight to Skynet.

Long ago, at the beginning of the 13th Age, war raged between the Elves and the Dwarves. The Elf Queen commanded the magic of the wild and the fey capable of defeating her people’s enemy, but could not truly control it. Liris, a nature goddess, voluntarily underwent a ritual to contain this magic by binding her into a vault. The ritual was a success and it bound both the magic and the three elven districts—Greenwood, Darkwood, and Lightwood—to the Elf Queen’s own Thronewood. With the magic, the Elf Queen helped withstand the Dwarven assault and as time passed, the relationship between the Elves and the Dwarves eased and they became allies. Yet the power which Liris helped contain and control and so save the Elves corrupted her and drove her to attempt escape and wreak revenge upon those she blamed for her imprisonment—even though it had been voluntary upon her part. The Elf Queen and her greatest spellcasters from all three districts offered a Key up to perform a great ritual which would ensure that the vault imprisoning Liris would remain closed. Then the Keys were returned to their respective districts and placed in three mystical towers, hidden from those who did not know the means or routes to find them. More recently, the Elf Queen senses that the ritual keeping the vault containing Liris is weakening and needs to be performed again. For that, she needs the three Keys from each of the three districts, but relationships between the Elf Queen and the three districts were not they once were and many of those who readily knew the locations of the three towers have long since died. As the magical bindings on Liris’ vault weaken, her dark influence is being felt across the Thronewood and beyond as shadows and sorrow deepen. With her strength dedicated to withstanding Liris’ influence and preparing for the forthcoming ritual, the Elf Queen needs agents she can trust to find the three mystical towers, assail their heights (or depths), and return in time for her to perform the ritual which will save her kingdom.
This is the set-up for Elven Towers, an adventure for the Champion Tier for 13th Age, the roleplaying game from Pelgrane Press which combines the best elements of both Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition and Dungeons & Dragons, Fourth Edition to give high action combat, strong narrative ties, and exciting play. The adventure requires access to both 13 True Ways and the 13th Age Bestiary to play and mostly obviously, will hook in Player Characters with Icon relationships with the Elf Queen or her allies. Options though are suggested for involving Player Characters with other Icon relationships, even ones so adverse to the Elf Queen that they would be prepared to betray both her and the efforts of their fellow adventurers should the need arise! Several ways of handling the interaction of the Player Characters with Court of Stars are offered, each of varying complexity or detail. The simplest is to run it as a group test, but alternatively, the Player Characters can attend the court and get involved in its activities and events, fully interacting with the various courtiers and hangers-on. There are plenty of NPCs detailed here as well as some nice means of handling the effects of Liris’ growing influence and the Player Characters being unsuccessful in their interactions with the Court of Stars. This includes increasing the amount of time it takes to get information, temporary penalties to saving throws, and temporarily delaying the increase of the Escalation Die in combat.
Once the Player Characters have worked out where the three Keys are located, they can set out to each of the locations. Consisting of the Tower of Memory in Greenwood, the Tower of Dreams in the Darkwood, and the Tower of Fate in the Lightwood, they can be tackled in any order, but they all adhere to the same format—a montage travel scene followed by three or four encounters between the Court of Stars and each tower, and each tower consists of four encounters before a finale. The encounters, inside the tower or outside of the tower, are essentially big set pieces, each different, but themed along the lines of the region the Player Characters are travelling through and the tower they are trying to reach. The format provides room for the Game Master to insert encounters of her own, if thematically appropriate, but to fair, the given encounters will be challenge enough. The Tower of Memory and the Greenwood are home to the Wood Elves and are forest-themed with the Tower of Memory being a giant tree. The Tower of Dreams and the Darkwood are home to the Dark Elves—or Drow depending upon the Game Master’s campaign—and the Tower of Dreams may be entered via a tree, but is actually in a spire protruding down into the Underworld. Many of its encounters veer between dreams and nightmares. The Tower of Fate is in the Lightwood and is home to the High Elves, with the Tower of the fate ascending to the Overworld. Many of the encounters in the Lightwood and the Tower of Fate relate to oracles, fate, and destiny.
The design of the scenarios as a series of big set pieces, means that the author gets to be inventive. For example, in the Tower of Memory, the Player Characters have to race across a rope bridge high above the forest floor, the missing slats of the rope bridge hidden by illusion, harassed by a Pixie knight and a Drunken Sprite Swarm; on the way the Tower of Dreams in the Darkwood, an ambush involves a Player Character being dragging back and forth behind an enraged wild boar and then back again after confronting equally enraged Owlbears, the whole encounter threatening to collapse into chaos; and a surprisingly creepy encounter in the Tower of Fate in the Lightwood in a cave of birthing pools left over from the Elves’ first creation of the Orcs a very long time ago, that should really resonate with any Half-Orc Player Character or Player Character with Icon Relationships with the Orc. The final encounter atop each tower always includes facing agents of one or more of the other Icons and there are stats and suggestions on how to tailor the forces of each Icon to each encounter. This allows the wider involvement of the Player Characters’ Icon Relationships, including both those with Icons who oppose the Elf Queen and those who might have interest in limiting or disrupting her power and influence.
Not all of the encounters in Elven Towers involve combat, though most of them do or will result in combat. Answering riddles or sharing secrets are a common feature, and is making trades. The sharing of secrets involves a roleplaying upon the part of the players, whilst riddles some deductive reasoning, though rules are given for skill checks and rolling dice for those players adverse to riddles. Trades will often see the Player Characters give up minor magical items, Revives, even Icon Relationship rolls—temporally!—and more. All of the encounters include advice on staging them and if necessarily, scaling them up to make a tougher battle.
Finally, the Player Characters will return to the Court of Stars with the three Keys—or not. The Player Characters may not necessarily gain all three Keys to Liris’ vault and the fewer Keys they have, the more difficult and dangerous the ritual that Elf Queen has to perform, becomes. The Player Characters get invited to a big party before the ritual to celebrate their success in obtaining the Keys and an even bigger party if the ritual is a success. The Player Characters are, of course, invited—or is that expected?—to help defend the ritual, which leads to a big boss, end of adventure-level fight. There is scope here too, for the Player Characters to betray the Elf Queen, if that is what their Icon Relationships demand. How that plays out is down to the Game Master, but if the betrayal succeeds, or the ritual as a whole fails, there could actually be a change in one of the Icons! However, if the ritual succeeds, there are rewards aplenty, including powerful magical items, the Elf Queen’s favour—which mostly means she will use them as her agents again, no matter what their Icon Relationships are, and even gaining or improving an Icon Relationship with the Elf Queen.
Physically, Elven Towers is well presented. The artwork is excellent and individual encounters are all easy to use and reference. However, some of the maps are a little dark and murky; the text requires a slight edit in places (one monster inflicts over three hundred points of damage, when it should be just over thirty); and an index would have helped. There are lists with page numbers for all of the monsters.
Elven Towers is an adventure that the Game Master will want to run if she has an Elf amongst her Player Characters or a Player Character with a strong Icon Relationship with the Elf Queen. The adventure is harder to run without either of these, but once involved in the adventure, Elven Towers is an entertaining, often exciting affair, with plenty of opportunities for roleplaying alongside the big, sometimes bigger, fights. Elven Towersis a grand quest in traditional fantasy and fantasy roleplaying style, well designed and executed with plenty of variation that reveals some of the secrets and nature of the Elf Queen and her realm.

—oOo—


Pelgrane Press will be at UK Games Expofrom Friday 2nd to Sunday 4th, 2023.

There is a big difference between making ends meet and making a living when it comes to operating a starship. With expansive docking fees, fuel costs, and repairs to be made, let alone paying the crew, making a profit is never easy, unless that is, you pick up a contract from a crime boss. A crime boss like Algoth Nieminen, who just happened to take over and expand the Jitana Syndicate to the point where it is the primary crime organisation in the binary. Now he has a cargo which he needs transporting both carefully and speedily and he is short of his usual ships and crews. He will not say what it is, but it is sensitive and highly illegal. He will, however, say where it is. The cargo is aboard a ship which has been impounded and the held at the impound yard in orbit around Kandhara. So all the crew has to do is, fly to the Shan system, infiltrate the Kandhara Independent Impound yard, get aboard the ship, steal the cargo, and deliver it as Algoth Nieminen, as promised, right? Wrong. We not entirely wrong. The crew do have to fly to the Shan system, infiltrate the Kandhara Independent Impound yard, get aboard the ship, steal the cargo, and deliver it as Algoth Nieminen promised, but it is nowhere as simple as that. First, there are three ships and crews who worked for Algoth Nieminen in the impound and one of them has the cargo. Second, Algoth Nieminen has hired four other crews to retrieve the cargo and will only pay the bonus to the crew which successfully retrieves the cargo. Third, there is a detective who wants to make a name for himself—and if that means arresting Algoth Nieminen and breaking up the Jitana Syndicate, then all the better.
This is the set-up for The Kandhara Contraband: A System Agnostic Sci-Fi Adventure. Published by LunarShadow Designs, this as the title suggests is a rules free, mechanics free, stats free scenario for the Science Fiction genre. So more plot than numbers—and more set-up than plot—this is also a scenario which involves space crime. Which narrows it down to the types of roleplaying game it will work with. In terms of generic roleplaying games, Savage Worlds or GURPS or FATE Core would all work easily with this plot. In terms of setting, the set-up and theme points to two obvious choices. Star Wars is the most obvious, whether that is the D6 System version from West End Games or Fantasy Flight Games’ Star Wars: Edge of the Empire. The other option is the Firefly Roleplaying Game published by Margaret Weis Productions. But whichever system or setting the Game Master decides to run The Kandhara Contraband, the key elements are crime and space travel.

Half of The Kandhara Contraband is dedicated to the set-up and describing the other interested parties in the adventure. This includes the three syndicate ships and their captains who got impounded, as well as the four rival ships and their captains that Algoth Nieminen has also hired to retrieve the cargo, plus of course, the police detective. These are all given a good paragraph or two’s worth of description, which in most cases is accompanied by a question, which the Game Master has to put to her players. For example, Jacinda Sedius is the captain of The Icarus, a ship which though the same make and model as the Player Characters’, but is often on the verge of breaking down and in need of much maintenance. Captain Jacinda and her crew has suffered a rash of bad luck and really needs the payout that successfully retrieving Algoth Nieminen’s cargo would bring. The accompanying question is, “Ask the PCs about a time they have previously helped Jacinda and her crew. How many drinks does he owe them?” The Kandhara Contraband asks similar questions for each of the NPCs in the scenario, as well as at Kandhara Station, the orbital station. The effects of this are twofold. First, it involves the players in the creation of elements of the scenario, tying locations and NPCs to their characters and into the setting or game that the Game Master is running, and in the process setting up background details and roleplaying hooks. Second, if The Kandhara Contraband is run as a convention scenario—and it is about the right length to do that, even if there are no suggestions as to how to that or pace the scenario—each time it is run, it will be different for the Game Master.

The second half of The Kandhara Contraband is devoted to the scenario’s locations, which consist of the barren mining world of Shan, Kandhara Station, the orbital station above Shan, and the Kandhara Independent Impound Yard, and the final destination for the cargo. Here individuals, facilities aboard Kandhara Station, and events are all described. Most of the detail is spent on Kandhara Station, as it is here that the Player Characters will find the crews of the impounded ships and learn more about the cargo—which is very much far from ordinary.

Physically, The Kandhara Contraband is a plain and simple affair. Behind the decent cover, the scenario is unaccompanied by either maps or illustrations. Otherwise, the layout is tidy and the booklet a clean affair.

The advice for the Game Master in The Kandhara Contraband is brief. For the Game Master with experience of running a fairly improvised scenario, this should not be an issue. A less experienced Game Master might well have wanted more help and advice, or at least a summary of the events and hooks which help her more readily prepare the scenario and give her some idea as to what might happen once the players and their characters get involved.

The Kandhara Contraband: A System Agnostic Sci-Fi Adventure is plot and set-up. Both though, are more than enough to get a good session or two’s worth of Sci-Fi action and intrigue going, as well as provide content that the Game Master can easily add to her campaign and the players add to their characters’ backgrounds. Of course, it is going to need some effort upon the part of the Game Master to supply the stats, but once she has that, the Game Master is ready to run her Player Characters into trouble and hopefully, back out again, hopefully with The Kandhara Contraband in their cargo hold and out again.

. Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #1: Gang Lords of Lankhmar is a scenario for Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game and the first scenario for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar Boxed Set. Scenarios for Dungeon Crawl Classics tend be darker, gimmer, and even pulpier than traditional Dungeons & Dragons scenarios, even veering close to the Swords & Sorcery subgenre. Scenarios for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar Boxed Set are set in and around the City of the Black Toga, Lankhmar, the home to the adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, the creation of author Fritz Leiber. The city is described as an urban jungle, rife with cutpurses and corruption, guilds and graft, temples and trouble, whores and wonders, and more. Under the cover the frequent fogs and smogs, the streets of the city are home to thieves, pickpockets, burglars, cutpurses, muggers, and anyone else who would skulk in the night! Which includes the Player Characters. And it is these roles which the Player Characters get to be in the Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #1: Gang Lords of Lankhmar, in which they they get recruited by a gang and that gang goes to war with the rival gangs on its block. As the situation escalates and the tit-for-tat situation turns bloody, can the Player Characters keep their gang safe and avoid the attention of either the Thieves’ Guild or the Overlord’s constabulary before either starts handing out bloody lessons?
Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #1: Gang Lords of Lankhmar is designed for First Level Player Characters and it is as different from other Dungeon Crawl Classics scenarios as could be. In a typical Dungeon Crawl Classics scenario, there is an issue which threatens a tribe, a village, or some other organisation, and the Player Characters are instructed to go out and either deal with it or investigate it. In Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #1: Gang Lords of Lankhmar, the Player Characters help initiate a situation and then manipulate it, before trying to weather the consequences and come out on top. Consequently, there is a sophistication to the scenario and more moving parts than us usually found in the average scenario for Dungeon Crawl Classics. The scenario takes place in the slums between the Old Slave Barracks on Chapel Street, Rookery Way, the Shrine of the Rat God on Squalor Row, and Pimp Street. Here, three gangs run the roofs and work the streets with smalltime protection rackets, gambling dens, pickpocketing, and more. They are the Knife Twisters, the Pimp Street Scuttlers, and the Forty Owlets. All three are consist of petty criminals and crooks and strictly small fry, not worth the notice of the Thieves’ Guild or the Overlord’s constabulary, but that is about to change.

The scenario begins with the Player Characters coming to the notice of, and being hired by, King Korvul—perhaps after their Meet in the scenario, ‘Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #0: No Small Crimes in Lankhmar’, to be found in the Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar Boxed Set. King Korvul wants the Player Characters as part of his gang because he wants to be boss of the block, which means taking out the Pimp Street Scuttlers, and the Forty Owlets and taking over their operations. The Player Characters are disrupt the operations of the Scuttlers, play one gang off against each other, and protect the gang against reprisals. If the Player Characters can put up with King Korvul’s ego, then this is a pretty good deal. However, once the other gangs get wind of his aims, things do not go to plan and the Player Characters are going to firmly in the crosshairs.
The play of Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #1: Gang Lords of Lankhmar is built around three moving parts. The first of these is a timeline of detailed encounters which take place over the course of eight days. The second is a  ‘Neighbourhood Tension Tracker’ which presents a series of consequences which can occur as the shadow war between the gangs escalates and the bloody feuds break out into violence on the streets and action in the alleys. These consequences can come multiple sources, including the other gangs, and the Thieves’ Guild and the Overlord’s constabulary. Neighbourhood Tension begins at three and can rise to above forty or more, driven by assaults on other gangs, deaths of other gang members, acts of arson, and more. Bribes will alleviate it though, at least as far as the constabulary is concerned. So at a Neighbourhood Tension of eight or more, members of the rival gangs prowl the neighbourhood spoiling for a brawl with the Player Characters, whilst the Player Characters begin hearing that there are strangers about, asking questions about them. At thirty-five or more, the Thieves’ Guild dispatches assassins to kill the Player Characters, who are also declared enemies of Overlord and Wanted posters are put up with their names and faces on them!
 Third is the encounter areas, which in turn detail the major locations for the area where the scenario is set. This includes the bases of operation for all three gangs and the Dogfish, a dive bar roughly equidistant between them, all complete with maps, as well as other locations. There is also a table to randomly detail and populate (or not) the other tenement blocks in between, this being the city of Lankhmar, details of the roofs above and sewers below. pride of place though goes the centerfold map of the neighbourhood, which the Judge really needs to copy and put out on the table in front of her players so that they can plan their campaign against the other rival gangs.

There is a problem with the set-up in Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #1: Gang Lords of Lankhmar and that is that the Player Characters have to join the Knife Twisters for the scenario to really get going. What if the Player Characters wanted to join the Pimp Street Scuttlers or the Forty Owlets instead? The Forty Owlets is less of an option because it is an all-female gang, but not so the Pimp Street Scuttlers. The players and their characters may be put off by King Korvul being such an oligeaniously odious man and might want to side with another gang. This is not an option that the scenario explores, but had it done so, the scenario could have been a more rounded toolkit. However, there are enough details given that the Judge could make this change if necessary, but it would take some effort upon her part.

In play Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #1: Gang Lords of Lankhmar is a busy scenario with a lot going on in comparison to other scenarios for Dungeon Crawl Classics. This is both in terms of the Player Character actions—the scenario is very player-led—and NPC reactions, and there is a lot of interplay back and forth between the two. So the Judge is going to need to track both and the result of the ‘Neighbourhood Tension Tracker’.

Physically, Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #1: Gang Lords of Lankhmar is decently presented. The scenario in general, well written, the maps clear, and artwork constantly captures the grimy and grimy nature of life on the streets of Lankhmar.

Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #1: Gang Lords of Lankhmar is a busy scenario and a different scenario. It is primarily player-led, it focuses upon one small location which the Judge can bring to life, and potentially, it sets the Player Characters up with a base of operations in Lankhmar, gives them a small source of income, and provides them with something to care about with both the gang and the neighbourhood—if only as petty crooks. Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #1: Gang Lords of Lankhmar is great first scenario for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar Boxed Set, which rightly focuses on crime in the City of Sevenscore Thousand Smokes. In the process, it provides opportunity aplenty for action, roleplaying, and skullduggery for Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar.
—oOo—


Goodman Games will be at UK Games Expofrom Friday 2nd to Sunday 4th, 2023.

The world of Okkorim was rich and verdant. Then the Empire of Ydrissid rose and fell and so we have the Blighted Lands. The sorcerers of the Empire of Ydrissid commanded great magic and not only established dominion over Okkorim, but also out onto other planes. Key to their power were the ‘eanifisilat’ or ‘dragoncoils’, the focal points where magical power coalesced around slumbering elemental dragons. Yet over time, the power of the ‘eanifisilat’ began to fade, eventually dwindling to nothing and the sorcerer god-kings of the empire sought other means to maintain their arcane power. They could not recreate the ‘eanifisilat’ which had enabled them at their height, to send whole armies across the empire in the blink of an eye, but they could create artifacts imbued with the power of the elemental dragons—air, earth, fire, and water. One of these artefacts is the Occulus of Senrahbah. Like many of its type, it would lost in the years that followed the collapse of the Empire of Ydrissid due to the Wrath which turned its territories into the Blighted Lands and many lesser empires and nations rose and fell. Several factions in the port city of Chentoufi believe they have determined the location of the Occulus of Senrahbah. If there is even the slimmest possibility of holding a sliver of the power of the sorcerer god-kings of the Empire of Ydrissid, then these factions will do their utmost to either obtain it, or prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. Enter the Player Characters…

This is the set-up for OS1 The Eye of Chentoufi, an adventure compatible with Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition which saw the Player Characters cross back and forth across the city of Chentoufi and then finally below it in order to locate the ‘Occulus of Senrahba’, also known as the ‘Eye of Chentoufi’. Having outraced several factions either wanting to obtain the Eye of Chentoufi for themselves or deny it to everyone, they encountered and defeated Yusepefesos, the greater water jinn, supposedly protecting the location of the ‘Occulus of Senrahba’ and there the scenario came to a conclusion. OS1 The Eye of Chentoufi is notable for several things. First and foremost, it is set in ‘Luke Gygax’s World of Okkorim’ and thus co-authored by Luke Gygax, the son of E. Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons and thus the hobby itself. Second, it is the first part of a trilogy, which will continue with OS2 The Heart of Chentoufi and OS3 The Fate of Chentoufi. Third, it can be run as a tournament scenario, in just a single four-hour session, and there are notes and points awards so that the players’ progress can be tracked and scores compared at the end of the tournament. Alternatively, it can played through in two or more sessions with the addition of the scenario’s optional scenes. Fourth, it was written as a special tournament scenario for Gary Con XIII, the convention held each March in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.
OS2 The Heart of Chentoufi picks up where left OS1 The Eye of Chentoufi off. Designed for a party of Seventh to Ninth Level Player Characters, it is also a tournament scenario, having been run at Gary Con XV. A portal behind the body of Yusepefesos opens up on some stairs that lead deep into the earth under the city of Chentoufi. Across its three acts, the adventure will take the Player Characters not only deeper below the city, but deeper into its past and that of the Empire of Ydrissid and its secrets. The Player Characters first discover an imperial prison followed by a series of giant-worm chewed tunnels, known as the ‘Carve’, and below that, the ‘Dahloom’ or ‘Everdark’. This is akin to the Underdark of the Forgotten Realms and the scenario plays up its alien nature, being damp, even sometimes wet, unlike the Blighted Lands of the surface world above.

The majority of the encounters in the adventure are combat related. The Dungeon Master though, with have fun roleplaying ‘Varneezer’, a crotchety old Halfling adventurer, who is very much out of his depth. He is not, rather just out of his time, and there are some nicely done clues included in his suggested dialogue. The combat encounters tend towards the epic, each of the three parts of the scenario involving or ending in a big fight. Ultimately, the scenario ends with the Player Characters still in the hunt for ‘Eye of Chentoufi’. Their reward for their efforts feels much bigger than that of OS1 The Eye of Chentoufi, they are none the wiser as to the location of the trilogy’s MacGuffin.

Unfortunately, OS2 The Heart of Chentoufi suffers from many of the same issues as OS1 The Eye of Chentoufi. The primary problem is that there is not enough context for the benefit of the players and their characters. There is no background information that is readily presentable to the players, whether on the Blighted Lands or the city of Chentoufi. So, the players will have difficulty getting a feel for the setting as a place, let alone motivation for their Player Characters. This starts with the beginning of the scenario—en media res, and in context of being a direct sequel to OS1 The Eye of Chentoufi, that is fine if the players have played it. Not though as a standalone scenario which it is suggested that OS2 The Heart of Chentoufi could be run as, because not enough attention is paid to why the Player Characters are there and what they are doing. Some of this could have been alleviated with some pre-generated Player Characters, but there are none. Which makes no sense for a tournament scenario, especially one set in a background which is not vanilla fantasy. The background to Okkorim, the Blighted Lands, and Chentoufi all have an Arabic or Middle Eastern feel, much like Al-Qadim: Land of Fate. Some of this information could have been presented in a set of pre-generated Player Characters, which could also been used to provide motivation for the players and their characters and have been used to showcase what can be played in the ‘Luke Gygax’s World of Okkorim’ and its differences between it and Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. This is a missed opportunity—though Luke Gygax does promise that the setting of Okkorim will be presented in a supplement of its own.
The scenario also starts of in an underwheming fashion. Or rather with a puzzle whose solution defaults to either a skill roll or a Comprehend Languages spell. The puzzles were the highlight in OS1 The Eye of Chentoufi, so why not present the first puzzle as a puzzle rather than a mechanical problem which does not serve the story? That way, the players could have been rewarded with points in the tournament for their deductive skills rather than combative skills. Further, whilst the highlights of OS1 The Eye of Chentoufi were its big puzzle encounter, this is really the only puzzle in the scenario, which makes it all the more disappointing. Further, in comparison to OS1 The Eye of Chentoufi, there are far fewer optional scenes in OS2 The Heart of Chentoufi. In fact, there is only one, and arguably, that scene is not optional, since it provides information about what happened to ‘Eye of Chentoufi’ and who was responsible, thus setting up event for OS3 The Fate of Chentoufi.
OS2 The Heart of Chentoufi has some great features, much like OS1 The Eye of Chentoufi. Each of its three acts starts with a summary of the plot for that act; there are suggestions as to what music to play during various scenes (with links to YouTube for the PDF version of the scenario); and both the monsters and the treasures are decently done. opportunity.
Physically, OS2 The Heart of Chentoufi is hit and miss. The artwork is excellent, as is the cartography, and on the whole, the scenario is a fine-looking book. However, the editing is inconsistent.

OS2 The Heart of Chentoufi is simply not as good a a scenario as OS1 The Eye of Chentoufi. It is too linear, there are far fewer optional scenes which helped add detail and colour to the first scenario in the trilogy, the scenes are all combat-orientated, and its lacks the puzzle scenes which were the best feature of OS1 The Eye of Chentoufi. Instead, OS2 The Heart of Chentoufi does have a fun NPC for the Dungeon Master to portray. Some of the issues with the scenario are due to it being designed as a tournament scenario, others not, but ultimately, OS2 The Heart of Chentoufi is the middle part of a trilogy and feels like it, connecting the beginning and end parts of the trilogy, and not necessarily in an interesting way.
—oOo—

Luke Gygax will be at UK Games Expofrom Friday 2nd to Sunday 4th, 2023.

Between October 2003 and October 2013, Chaosium, Inc. published a series of books for Call of Cthulhu under the Miskatonic University Library Association brand. Whether a sourcebook, scenario, anthology, or campaign, each was a showcase for their authors—amateur rather than professional, but fans of Call of Cthulhu nonetheless—to put forward their ideas and share with others. The programme was notable for having launched the writing careers of several authors, but for every Cthulhu Invictus, The Pastores, Primal State, Ripples from Carcosa, and Halloween Horror, there was Five Go Mad in Egypt, Return of the Ripper, Rise of the Dead, Rise of the Dead II: The Raid, and more...

The Miskatonic University Library Association brand is no more, alas, but what we have in its stead is the Miskatonic Repository, based on the same format as the DM’s Guild for Dungeons & Dragons. 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.

—oOo—
Name: Twelve Black FeathersPublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: C.M. Arnold

Setting: 1890s Baltimore
Product: ScenarioWhat You Get: Thirty-two-page, 8.03 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Ravens & Resurrectionists in 1890s The X-Files stylePlot Hook: A murder of ravensPlot Support: Staging advice, four pre-generated Investigators, nine handouts, one map, several NPCs, and one non-Mythos monster, non-monster monster.Production Values: High.
Pros# Scenario for Cthulhu by Gaslight# High production values and excellent photographs# One-shot or an X-Files style campaign starter# Nicely thematic mystery# Non-Mythos, Mythos scenario# Introduces the ‘Department of Concurrence’# Kabourophobia# Pteronophobia# Ornithophobia# Gynophobia
Cons# Needs a slight edit# Clue links not as clear as they should be# The ‘Department of Concurrence’ undeveloped# Baltimore... it had to be ravens.# Non-Mythos, Mythos scenario
Conclusion# X-Files: Life on the Street style one-shot or campaign starter# Solid, but short mystery which needs a little more development beyond its high production values

In all of the eleven roleplaying games based on Star Trek, it is surprising to note that there have exactly three setting supplements between all of them. Of course, it could be argued that the future depicted in Star Trek is a setting in itself, but as to specific supplements which focus on a setting or location for play, well, still three. For FASA’s Star Trek: TheRole Playing Game, the Trader Captains and Merchant Princes supplement introduced the lawless region of The Triangle, caught between the United Federation of Planets, the Klingon Empire, and the Romulan Star Empire, and then developed properly, in The Triangle supplement. For Last Unicorn Games, there was the Starfleet Academy boxed set, which enabled players to roleplay a campaign at the academy and beyond. That then is two of them, but Star Trek Adventures, the Star Trek roleplaying game from Modiphius Entertainment has a setting supplement of its own and it is literally bigger and more expansive than the other two. This is the Shackleton Expanse Campaign Guide.
The Shackleton Expanse Campaign Guide is set far beyond Federation and Klingon space, in the Beta Quadrant. This presents a barely explored region of space, known for its strange spatial phenomena and rumours of an ancient, lost civilisation, which is being opened up to exploration, colonisation, and trade. Here on the edge of the Expanse, the Federation and the Klingons have built and established Starbase 364, also known as Narendra Station in tribute to the Klingon colonists massacred by a Romulan sneak attack at the Narendra III outpost in 2344 and the heroic sacrifice of the USS Enterprise-C in defending them. The Federation and the Klingons jointly run the station. In game terms, this set-up leads to some fantastic campaign possibilities. At its heart, the Shackleton Expanse Campaign Guide is a station-based campaign, much in the mode of Deep Space 9, although the Player Characters are going to have their own starship too. The setting can be run with an all-Federation crew or an all-Klingon crew, or even a mixed crew, further supporting the joint nature of Narendra Station. With some development upon the part of the Game Master, a campaign could be run which does not focus upon a Federation or Klingon crew, but instead around themes such as trade—the Ferengi and the Orions are active in the area, espionage—the Romulans have interest in activities on their border and the technological secrets to be found in the Shackleton Expanse, or even crime—the Orion Syndicate known to be operating in the region. Whichever way a Game Master decides to use the Shackleton Expanse Campaign Guide, the Star Trek Adventures: The Klingon Empire roleplaying game will be useful. Also useful will be the Beta Quadrant Sourcebook which covers the background and broad history of the whole of the quadrant as well as first mentioning the Shackleton Expanse.
The Shackleton Expanse Campaign Guide presents a whole new setting for the Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation periods of Star Trek Adventures. This includes, a region guide and an explanation of the strange spatial, spectral, and gravimetric phenomena which can disrupt ship’s systems or even destroy a ship completely; five new playable species, including four indigenous to the setting and one found everywhere; details of both NPCs and starships to be found in the region; and advice on running a campaign in the setting. The highlight of the supplement is ‘The Tilikaal Saga’, a complete ten-part campaign that spans the Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation eras and through the actions of the Player Characters, will profoundly affect the future of the Shackleton Expanse. All of this is supported with historical excerpts, personal logs, and intercepted communications that add flavour and detail as well as differing points of view—the Klingon security report on the Orions and the Orion Syndicate is most amusing.
The Shackleton Expanse Campaign Guide opens with an overview of the region and its known history, highlighting the lack of knowledge that the Federation has about the Shackleton Expanse, an explanation of the push to explore and open up the region, a description of Starbase 364 or Narendra Station, the spatial phenomena which makes travel so dangerous and exploration so intriguing, and the various factions known to be active in the region. The history begins with the initial exploration by the U.S.S. Lexington in 2269, which would see one world quarantined and limit Federation activity in the region for almost a century. A combination of closer Klingon co-operation and increased scientific interest has spurred the construction of a permanent base and support for further exploration (which is where the Player Characters and their starship come in). The description of Narendra Station is detailed enough to bring it alive, but still leave plenty of room for the Game Master to add extra details, especially if she wants to run adventures Deep Space 9 style on the station. The factions covered include the United Federation of Planets, the Klingon Empire, the Romulan Star Empire, and the Orion Syndicate, as well as four species native to the Shackleton Expanse, which the Federation has either limited contact with or is monitoring under the terms of the Prime Directive. These include the Akaru, a humanoid species which combine the best of Vulcan and Romulan traits and are highly efficient; the Cal-Mirran, a crystalline species which communicates via light and has the capacity to distort time and look into the past or the future; the Qofuari, Otter-like centauroids who can mentally image, model, and test technologies and theories; and the VinShari, a dominate humanoid species with powerful vocal abilities which can be deadly. Full stats are provided for all four species, as well as the Orions later in the supplement, enabling their creation as both Player Characters and NPCs. However, since contact is initially limited with the four native species, they are best used as NPCs at first, and then as possible Player Characters once they have been encountered and reasons developed as why they can become Player Characters. The VinShari are likely to be the aggressive species for any campaign, but all four species are nicely detailed and feel alien to one degree or another.
All this leads up to the Tilikaal and ‘The Tilikaal Saga’. The Tilikaal are an ancient race, akin to the Preservers, Iconians, and Organians, who disappeared long ago leaving behind worlds with strange machinery built deep into their bowels or massive structures that cover the whole of the planetary surface, as well as spectral phenomena which defy known science in 2269, let alone 2371. The Tilikaal themselves and then their known worlds and their technology are described in detail before delving into the campaign. This begins in the Star Trek: The Original Series era with the first two parts, before moving onto the Star Trek: The Next Generation era for the remaining eight. Thus, from the start there is an imbalance to the campaign, particularly for a group playing in the Star Trek: The Original Series era, who get less time in the campaign. There are suggestions for involving the Star Trek: The Original Series era, who are intended to be crewmembers aboard the U.S.S. Lexington, in the rest of the campaign in the Star Trek: The Next Generation era, such as time travel or particularly long-lived characters, such as Vulcans. The methods suggested do feel forced though and whilst the first two parts of the campaign are integral to the whole, they feel like an introduction to the main campaign in the Star Trek: The Next Generation era.
‘The Tilikaal Saga’ will see the Player Characters ranging back and forth across the Shackleton Expanse. They will not only be examining the effects of the spatial phenomena and their causes and following on further clues as to the nature of the Tilikaal and their technology, but they will also be encountering the new species across the Shackleton Expanse and interreacting with both them and members of the other factions with an interest in the region. There are some great scenes throughout the campaign as the Player Characters and their starship travel to pocket dimensions; lead a flotilla simultaneously holding off a Romulan squadron, land a starship on a planet to conduct an evacuation, and delaying one planet from crashing into another—which is all incredibly epic; and more.

Having originated as a Living Campaign released as a series of PDFs, ‘The Tilikaal Saga’ has an episodic structure, enabling the Game Master to slot other scenarios in between the main episodes. To that end, the supplement includes ten one-page scenario outlines or Mission Briefs for the Star Trek: The Original Series era and twenty-seven for the Star Trek: The Next Generation era. Again, there is an imbalance between the two eras, but the inclusion of the Mission Briefs for the Star Trek: The Original Series era does at least offset the short length of the era’s involvement in the campaign. Each of the Mission Briefs is nicely done with suggested spotlight role for each one, plus the story beats—major and minor, NPCs involved, and suggestions as to when to run into between the episodes of the campaign. All of which is supported by general advice on running the campaign and story arcs in the Shackleton Expanse.
To support the Game Master, the Shackleton Expanse Campaign Guide includes details for the various NPCs, adversaries and allies, involved in both campaign and setting. These include the staff aboard Narendra Station, as well as NPCs for the Star Trek: The Original Series era, and then Klingons, Orions, and NPCs from across the Shackleton Expanse. Details are also provided for the various vessels involved. This includes the U.S.S. Lexington for the Star Trek: The Original Series era, and then an Akira-Class, Galaxy-Class, and Intrepid-Class vessel for the Star Trek: The Next Generation era. These are the U.S.S. Thunderchild, the U.S.S. Venture, and the U.S.S. Bellerophon respectively, and each comes its own history and background. There are plenty of other vessels from across the region too. Lastly, there are notes for Game Master if she wants to create her version of the Shackleton Expanse.
Physically, behind the lovely cover, the Shackleton Expanse Campaign Guide has some of the same problems as Star Trek Adventures: The Roleplaying Game core rulebook—the use of the LCARS—Library Computer Access/Retrieval System—operating system as a style template. Again, the mix of white text and pastel colours on black is not easy to read. (This does not apply to the Mission Briefs for the Star Trek: The Original Series era, so they are easy to read.) Nor do the maps look particularly good on the black background and they not particularly interesting maps at that. However, the Shackleton Expanse Campaign Guide does not feel as compact a book in places and so is easier to read.
Noticeable also, is the range of artwork on show. This is a completely new supplement with completely new species and setting and so the supplement gives new artwork to depict both them and the setting. Unfortunately, though, not all of the NPCs are illustrated, which will be a problem for the Game Master to present in play.
The Shackleton Expanse Campaign Guide is Federation-focused and thus Starfleet-focused. Which means that although there is advice for running the campaign and individual scenarios with an all-Klingon crew and starship, this comes off as second best by comparison. It always feels as if Klingon interests are aligned with the Federation interests and that is not always true. Perhaps a scenario or two, or a Mission Brief could have been included designed to be played by Klingons, but with notes for running its using Starfleet Player Characters rather than the other way around. Another area where the Shackleton Expanse Campaign Guide is at its weakest is in advice for the Game Master. The advice on running the campaign and individual scenarios is fine, but there is no advice on running campaigns with a fixed point of reference, in this case, a starbase like that of Deep Space 9. Essentially, the Game Master will need to await a supplement dedicated to Deep Space 9 or starbase-style campaigns for that advice.
The Shackleton Expanse Campaign Guide covers a lot of setting and a lot of adventure. In fact, ‘The Tilikaal Saga’ will provide months’ worth of play, especially if the Game Master includes the numerous Mission Briefs to round out the campaign and structure it more like a season or two of a Star Trek series. After all, with the ten parts of the campaign and the almost forty Mission Briefs there is enough here for that, plus whatever the Game Master adds. In addition, the Shackleton Expanse Campaign Guide and ‘The Tilikaal Saga’ together open up Star Trek Adventures to more than just what is portrayed on screen, not only expanding the setting of Star Trek, but also providing content that is unique to the Modiphius Entertainment roleplaying game.
The Shackleton Expanse Campaign Guide provides Star Trek Adventures with an all-new setting and the epic campaign it has been waiting for. In fact, first campaign for any Star Trek roleplaying game! The Game Master will find everything she needs to run this campaign and her own in its pages for a whole season of Star Trek roleplaying—if not more.
—oOo—


Modiphius Entertainment will be at UK Games Expofrom Friday 2nd to Sunday 4th, 2023.

The two great features of the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Starter Set were twofold. First, in ‘A Guide to Ubersreik’, it introduced Ubersreik, the fortress-town in the south of the Reikland, and its surrounding duchy that are in turmoil after an announcement from the emperor that unseated the ruling House Jungfreud. It left the town’s burghers and minor members of the nobility spotting an opportunity to take control themselves and much of this was explored in ‘The Adventure Book’, which provided a five-part mini-campaign and more story hooks. This was the second great thing about the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Starter Set—lots to roleplay. Although Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Starter Set was in part designed to set the Game Master and her players up reader for the majestic The Enemy Within campaign—after all, almost everything is in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Fourth Edition is—what if instead of leaping into that campaign, the Player Characters wanted to stay in and around Ubersreik? Fortunately, and almost immediately, publisher Cubicle Seven Entertainment began publishing scenarios set in and around the Duchy of Ubersreik, so the Player Characters could not only continue their involvement in the political upheaval in the town, but also explore its surrounds.

Ubersreik Adventures: Six Grim and Perilous Scenarios in the Duchy of Ubersreik is a handsome hardback which collects the first six scenarios in the series. These take the Player Characters across the duchy, facing monsters and villains, hunting beasts and employment, solving mysteries and secrets, and more. The scenarios are flexible. All can be taken and dropped into the Game Master’s campaign, used in conjunction with the Rough Nights & Hard Days campaign anthology, or again used as a lead into The Enemy Within. Ultimately, Ubersreik Adventures is designed to do that, but not necessarily, since it has a sequel of its own in the form of Ubersreik Adventures II: Grim and Perilous Adventures in the Duchy of Ubersreik, a further collection of scenarios previously published as a series of PDFs. In addition, every scenario in Ubersreik Adventures includes its own ‘Shaking Things Up’ appendix with advice for the Game Master on running the scenario, alternative hooks to get the Player Characters involved, and a list of possible connects to not only the other five scenarios in the volume, but also other parts of the Empire. This gives the Game Master set up each scenario as she wants and tie it into a campaign in and around Ubersreik. Lastly, the six scenarios in Ubersreik Adventures: Six Grim and Perilous Scenarios in the Duchy of Ubersreik can be run on their own, but they do work better in conjunction with the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Starter Set.

The anthology opens with ‘If Looks Could Kill’. The Player Characters are tasked with helping deliver some supplies to the construction site of the new mill down river from Ubersreik. Unfortunately, a miasma has settled on the site and dampened the mood, but the situation turns ugly when the Player Characters are employed to clear some standing stones nearby—because that never goes well—and then one of the partners in the project turns up dead. Tracks point to much feared, legendary Beast of Orschlamm and the Player Characters are directed by the other partner to track it down. However, there is more going on than simple monster hunt as astute Player Characters will quickly work out. There is still the beast though, a fearsome creature, which fortunately is elderly enough that it will not kill them outright! It is a nicely judged and scaled encounter and the scenario fully explores the consequences of its death in no little detail. ‘If Looks Could Kill’ is an excellent starting scenario, with plenty going on, but not too much.

‘The Mad Men of Gotheim’ is the second scenario and although it involves a monster hunt, it is all together a different beast. It starts in classic fantasy roleplaying fashion with the Player Characters coming across a village which has been attacked and a monster remains on the loose, ready to attack again. The village of Gotheim lies in ruins and the villagers have all been driven mad to one degree or another. They hold vital information about the nature of the beast and possibly the means to help kill it, but Player Characters must work hard and fast in order to calm the villagers down, get them to reveal what has happened, and perhaps the means to kill the creature. ‘The Mad Men of Gotheim’ is short and surprisingly complex, and although the Player Characters may not know it, they are up against a time limit before the creature—which intentionally has the feel of Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky (both poem and film)—goes on another rampage. There is a brilliantly Lovecraftian feel to the horror in the devastation and derangement which the monster has left in the wake of its first attack in this scenario which is genuinely grim and perilous.

‘Heart of Glass’ is a murder mystery which becomes a bit of a romp. Ubersreik remains divided between those loyal to House Jungfreud and those favouring the new administration from the capital, Altdorf. So, when a corporal in the new town guard is found dead under mysterious circumstances, the Imperial Herald would like the cause and culprits found lest it leads to further unrest. Enter the Player Characters. Hired—potentially under duress—to investigate. The trail of clues leads in an odd direction, a direction so odd that it puts a Witch Finder on the Player Characters’ trail and then it gets even weirder. This is definitely a scenario where a Wizard, or at least a Wizard’s Apprentice, will have chance to get involved, if not necessarily shine. Like the other scenarios in the anthology, ‘Heart of Glass’ is not necessarily going to end very neatly, if at all, and it does leave a lot of questions unanswered as far as the Player Characters are concerned and a lot of loose ends for the Game Master to develop if necessary.

‘Slaughter in Spittlefeld’ is a locked-room affair. Well to be fair, the room is a ramshackle, squalid tenement block and although there is no murderer or murder victim, there is a disease. The scenario begins en media res with the Player Characters waking up in a tenement building in the worst slums in the town and the doors and windows are being nailed shut to keep the plague in! It is a brilliant set-up—even if the players are likely to grumble about their characters getting there—and once the Player Characters ferret a few clues out of the tenement’s tenants, perhaps with help of lumbering and very shouty Ogre landlord, they can work out cause of the disease. The situation is, of course, horribly prescient, but still an entertaining adventure. It will take them to the top of the tenement block and back down in a claustrophobically fraught affair race to save the day.
‘Bait and Witch’ begins with its clever title. ‘Slaughter in Spittlefeld’ could be played through in a single session, but ‘Bait and Witch’ is specifically designed to do that. It takes place in a few streets and buildings of Ubersreik as the Player Characters are asked for a favour by an apothecary—confront the two ne’er-do-wells watching her shop. This is a classic mix-up, if not of identities, then motivations and the Player Characters will have to come to the rescue if they are to untangle them all. If they do and they do save the day, the apothecary will prove a useful ally and contact in the long terms.

The last scenario in the anthology is ‘The Guilty Party’ and it begins with a bang before throwing the Player Characters into a classic Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay situation—a road trip! Or rather, a coach journey. After coming to the rescue of man set upon by some thugs, he offers them a job. Can they find proof of sabotage of the coaches running between Ubersreik and Altdorf? Of course, they can and before they know, they are on a trip into trouble. A coach trip means that the adventure is linear, but there are lots of extra scenarios for the Game Master to throw into the narrative along the way, making every stop an interesting encounter. In this way, ‘The Guilty Party’ prefigures the opening sessions of The Enemy Within campaign and indeed, is designed to get the Player Characters to the beginning of that campaign. Consequently, it feels forced, but climb aboard and this a fun affair, even if ultimately, it leaves them high and dry without really resolving the scenario or even getting paid. In fact, the lack of resolution is the point as it drives the Player Characters to look for other work and so onto one of the greatest roleplaying campaigns in the roleplaying hobby. However, if the Player Characters decide not to pursue that, then the scenario leaves the high and dry without really resolving the scenario to rather unsatisfactory effect. If it had explored the other option, the scenario would have been rounded and easier to use rather than the one application it suggests. (This is even more of an issue given that Ubersreik Adventures II: Grim and Perilous Adventures in the Duchy of Ubersreik is also available.)

Physically, Ubersreik Adventures: Six Grim and Perilous Scenarios in the Duchy of Ubersreik is very well presented. The book itself is a handsome hardback and the book’s artwork—especially in its depiction of the NPCs—and cartography are both well done. The plotting could have been clearer upfront in some places, and although it needs a slight edit in places, the anthology is well written and enjoyable to read.

Ubersreik Adventures: Six Grim and Perilous Scenarios in the Duchy of Ubersreik is a solidly impressive collection of adventures. None of them is overly complex in terms of structure or plot, making them easy to run for anyone new to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, but there are some pleasingly complex and subtle situations still, such as dealing with the unfortunate survivors of ‘The Mad Men of Gotheim’, driven mad by their encounters with the creature. In addition, the Game Master is given plenty of options to work the scenario into her campaign and in turn is given numerous NPCs, all of whom are decently portrayed, that she can add to her campaign. Ubersreik Adventures: Six Grim and Perilous Scenarios in the Duchy of Ubersreik is a good book of sequels to the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Starter Set and a solid anthology of scenarios for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay in general.
—oOo—

Cubicle Seven Entertainment will be at UK Games Expofrom Friday 2nd to Sunday 4th, 2023.

Dungeons & Dragons and its various iterations informed our fantasy and showed how explore new worlds, including the virtual ones we can view and interact with via our computer screens and our television screens. In turn the fantasy of those virtual worlds is having an influence upon the roleplaying games we bring to the table—even Dungeons & Dragons in the form of Dungeons & Dragons, Fourth Edition. More recent entries in this computer fantasy game influenced genre have included the Fabula Ultima TTPG and BREAK!! In between, there is a smaller roleplaying called .Dungeon – an alternate reality RPG. This is a fantasy roleplaying game inspired by computer games such as The Legend of Zelda series, the Final Fantasy series—especially the earlier ones, and even World of Warcraft. As much as it takes inspiration from the virtual world of these computer games and MMORPGs, .Dungeon is intended to be influenced by the real world around the World—as the Game Master is known in .Dungeon. What this means is that whilst there is a structure to the world of Annwn, as the setting of .Dungeon is known, and that structure is fundamentally an icosahedron, the World can literally look at the world around her and use it as inspiration. This can be from her bookshelf, her games shelf, newspapers, or even the computer games she is playing, and for each item she takes as inspiration, it is mapped onto one of the twenty faces of Annwn.
.Dungeon is both a virtual world and a shared world. This is perhaps the most important aspect of .Dungeon for there are actually three types of character in the roleplaying game, two of whom share the world. Here is where .Dungeon gets weird and straddles the virtual world and the real world. First, there are the players. They are roleplaying their own avatars in Annwn and are known as the Players. Essentially, they are sat round the table roleplaying a game called .Dungeon. Then there are players who not sat round the table roleplaying a game called .Dungeon, but are playing a MMORPG set in the world of Annwn. They are the equal of the Players and have their own motivations which they bring with them from the real world. They also share the world of Annwn with the Players. Lastly, there are the traditional NPCs of such games, who are almost present with the exclamation and question marks over their heads. The world is also shared in that the Players game together and share the same pool of the equivalent of Hit Points. This is Connection, representing both their internet connection to the game, and ultimately the time they can devote to the game. As play progresses and any time a Player fails a roll, the Players collectively lose Connection, until they have no more Connection, have to stop playing and must go back to school, get a job, and the like…

A Player in .Dungeon is defined by six stats—RNG, Meta, System, Tilt, Charm, and Perception. RNG is a Player’s relationship with the programming of the virtual world and its will, covering reaction rolls, loot, and random chance; Meta is the Player’s knowledge of the world of Annwn; System is the Player’s skill over the game, including fighting and climbing; Tilt is the Player’s capacity to keep calm; Charm is the ability to invoke the player’s real-world presence in the virtual world of Annwn; and Perception the Player’s physical senses. These are rated by die type, from a four-sided to a twenty-sided die. To create a Player, a player assigns a single die to each stat, decides upon his screen name, and notes down the player’s actual job. If ever this comes up in game, it grants a second die to roll and choose from in a task. Depending upon the nature of the world created by the World, this can either be very useful or utterly useless. The players are often going to work hard to apply jobs such as editor or barista or bus driver to the fantasy of Annwn. A player also has to decide upon his Player’s hair, body type, outfit, and other details.
A Player in .Dungeon also has a Class. There are ten given. These are the Knight, the Hacker, the Beast, the Mage, the Witch, the Leader, the Artist, the Troll, the Dungeoneer, and the Bard. These are lightly drawn though highly specialised. These often play around with their archetypes as much they do the virtual nature of the world of Annwn. For example, the Dungeoneer builds on what he learns of dungeons and settlements, gaining an Understanding each time. These can be spent to add details to a settlement or dungeon, but also saved and exchanged for a Rest Die. The Troll can rage and so roll percentile dice for all physical Contests, whilst losing less Connection. The Troll is also encouraged to make exaggerated, if false statements about the world, obliging NPCs and Player Characters, and even other Players to correct him in a patronising manner. This can be played for the humour, but also played to learn information about the world, because after all, the Troll is being corrected. The Leader gives gifts, such as a sincere compliment, a trinket, a hug—consenting, and if accepted also gives that Player a die type to add to a Contest. The Leader can also roll a Meta Contest against anything Annwn. If the player wins, the Leader can find the information he seeks in the manual for game (thus forcing him to do the one thing nobody does and that is read the manual!). There is the sense that a lot of the Classes are playing with aspects within the game and outside of it. A Player also has equipment, which simply adds flavour rather than mechanical benefit, and some gold. This can be spent on further gear, legendary gear if he has enough. Legendary gear can also come from quests. Gold can also be spent to fast travel across a world. Lastly, it is possible for the Players to have skills, but to learn a skill, a Player must find a teacher who willing to teach him.

Mechanically Player actions are handled through contests. Contests are opposed rolls, with the highest result winning the situation. In combat, this can be to deal damage to the opponent’s Connection, equal to difference between what the player rolled and the World rolled. Losing a Contest means two things. First, the action takes more time, and second, the loss of Connection in combat. Player can team up to achieve objectives and combine the rolls, but then so can the opposition! Reducing an opponent’s Connection removes them from the world, there are situations too, which might cause a Player to respawn. For example, this might be in a big boss fight or some other tasks, and is designed to complicate a situation rather than punish a player and his character. Every twenty points of Connection lost grants a Rest Die, which can be rolled to restore Connection.

Advice for the World is relatively light, but does suggest Contest difficulties and suggests ways in which scenarios for roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons can be incorporated into .Dungeon. It also details how to populate the twenty worlds of Annwn. However, the World populates the various faces, each has its own settlement, complete with common knowledge, history, and secrets, quests, and both a Princess and a Knight, each of whom is also a Player Character. Player Characters are other players in the game and do not have to act as supinely as NPCs do. They can act however they want and they have reasons to be playing which can influence their portrayal in game by the World. Further, each Player Character has hidden depths, represented in play by a mini-dungeon of shared moments and experiences that the player is not necessarily aware that he is exploring alongside his exploration of Annwn. This organises and elevates emotional interaction and exploration within the game as well as the virtual. Rounding out .Dungeon are notes for solo play, which feel more complex than the rest of the roleplaying game does.

Physically, .Dungeon is notably for being a small, slim book presented in landscape rather than portrait format. The cover has strong colours which are also used inside the book’s pages. The book uses a bitmapped style font for its titles which are often done in the style of a programming language.

.Dungeon – an alternate reality RPG is a storytelling game, but it hides this and its potential for emotional engagement under the familiarity of its double genre of a roleplaying game and a computer roleplaying game and virtual world format. However, the simplicity of .Dungeon in terms of mechanics and inspiration make running the roleplaying game not only easy to run, but also easy to run with a minimum of preparation. It requires knowledge of the language and play style of certain type computer or console fantasy games, but most players in coming to .Dungeon will have a familiarity with both, making itself easy to grasp. However, with that knowledge there is definitely a sense of a world shared, not just between the Players, but also the Player Characters. Every roleplaying game is a shared experience, but .Dungeon extends that by making us draw upon already shared references and experiences in the World’s creation of her Annwn and then not only share its exploration around the table, but literally share an exploration of the lives and emotions of others exploring the same world—just not at the table.

Every city is built on the ruins of a previous city. Buildings are torn down and new ones built in their stead. As the decades pass, a city changes. The torn down buildings are forgotten and their histories lost, and the new city continues to build upwards and over. What is left underneath are cellars and tunnels and sewers and the imprints of the previous buildings. Deep in the bowels below the ancient city of Galgenbeck lies the sunken chapel that houses Niduk, the Troll King, exiled long ago and driven into the darkness, to rot, wither, and be forgotten. Whilst the existence of the Troll King has passed into legend, the existence of his treasure has not. Whether you are dying and believe a cure to your malady might be found amongst his hoard, you have a debt to pay and his hoard is ready source of coins, you leapt into the sewers and ran into Niduk by mistake, or you simply want to rob him, somehow, you found your way into the foetid, stinking tunnels below the oldest parts of the city of Galgenbeck, in the land of Tveland, hemmed in by the tunnel walls and the ordure from the city above, but desperate and determined to find the chapel of Niduk, the Troll King, and get out again.
This is the set-up for Treasures Of The Troll King, a sewer-crawl and dungeon for use with Mörk Borg, the Swedish pre-apocalypse Old School Renaissance retroclone designed by Ockult Örtmästare Games and Stockholm Kartell and published by Free League Publishing. The adventure itself is published by Loot the Room, following a successful Kickstarter campaign and is a relatively short, one or two-session scenario keyed around five locations—one major and five minor. The five minor locations include a collapsed building where the Player Characters are likely to encounter Niduk for the first time, a well, a graffitied gallery, and a hanging garden—the latter consisting of roots hanging down from the ceiling. The majority of these described in a succinct style, but the well is expanded upon to brilliant effect. It is not just a well, but a wishing well and a wishing with a pile of coins each with an associated unfulfilled wish. If any of the Player Characters pilfer the coins, then they become responsible for the wishes and are cursed to fulfil them. This carries on after the Treasures Of The Troll King has been played through, potentially setting up a campaign of the Player Characters being forced do ‘good’ things as they attempt to deal with all of the wishes. There is a table to randomise the wishes, but this almost deserves a book of its own.

The main room area consists of the chapel where Niduk has been hiding out all of this time. This has the feel of a dungeon, an ancient ruin strewn with the dead and detritus, half-haunted temple, half-charnel chapel. It consists of just eleven locations each described in detail, but without overwhelming the Game Master. The chapel is damp, dank, grim and grimy, haunted by ghosts and the undead, its slide into sewage-soaked ruin transcends the traditional depiction of the gothic church. There are hints of its former grandeur and gothic edifice behind all of the dirt and the decay, but they are long faded and despoiled. With only a few rooms, there are relatively few encounters to be had in the chapel, and even fewer random ones, but the ultimate encounter is of course, with Niduk, the Troll-King, himself. He receives a two-page spread of his, as does his den, for he may encountered slumbering there, or if their activities have alerted him to their presence, stalking the Player Characters. He is a great behemoth of a beast with feats capable of pulverising a Player Character in one blow. The Player Characters will be very lucky to defeat him—and that is on their second encounter.

If the Chapel of Niduk, the Troll King, is the ultimate destination in Treasures Of The Troll King, the first part of Treasures Of The Troll King is all about getting there. The route is not mapped out. In fact, there is no route. Instead, the Player Characters engage in a point-crawl—or even ‘sewer-crawl’—with even the points, or rather, the ‘spaces’ as Treasures Of The Troll King calls them, randomly encountered. The spaces of the point-crawl themselves are the aforementioned minor locations, the collapsed building where Niduk’s Banquet can be found, the graffitied gallery, the hanging garden, and the well. Of these, only Niduk’s Banquet is mandatory as an encounter, intended to provide the Player Characters with a foreshadowing of the nature of the creature they hunt. In between the spaces, the Game Master rolls for random encounters, with two small tables providing a mix of reusable and once-only encounters. Effectively, Treasures Of The Troll King is a linear adventure, though it will not feel like that in play.

In addition, Treasures Of The Troll King provides tables of reasons for the Player Characters to go looking, rumours, treasures to be found, new scrolls—both clean and unclean, and a table of sewer features to add flavour and detail to the tunnels as the Player Characters explore.

Physically, Treasures Of The Troll King is surprising. It approaches the artpunk style of Mörk Borg, but never steps over the line into the artpunk style. Consequently, the scenario is actually a little less busy and a lot more accessible, and thus easier to run from the page. The scenario is also written with some fantastic descriptions and details that add to the muck and the mire, and then twist it further in short fashion.

Treasures Of The Troll King combines the doom-laden artpunk style Mörk Borg with the pairing of a flavoursomely procedurally-created point crawl and some loathsome locations. The chapel itself is signature location of course, but the brilliance of the well of unfulfilled wishes almost equals it in terms of play potential—though that play will become apparent after the ‘Treasures of the Troll King’ have been stolen and the Player Characters have returned to the surface. Treasures Of The Troll King is an excellent and easy to run mini-dungeon, atmospherically foul, and easy to run in any Mörk Borg campaign.

The gaming magazine is dead. After all, when was the last time that you were able to purchase a gaming magazine at your nearest newsagent? Games Workshop’s White Dwarf is of course the exception, but it has been over a decade since Dragon appeared in print. However, in more recent times, the hobby has found other means to bring the magazine format to the market. Digitally, of course, but publishers have also created their own in-house titles and sold them direct or through distribution. Another vehicle has been Kickststarter.com, which has allowed amateurs to write, create, fund, and publish titles of their own, much like the fanzines of Kickstarter’s ZineQuest. The resulting titles are not fanzines though, being longer, tackling broader subject matters, and more professional in terms of their layout and design.

—oOo—
Senet—named for the Ancient Egyptian board game, Senet—is a print magazine about the craft, creativity, and community of board gaming. Bearing the tagline of “Board games are beautiful”, it is about the play and the experience of board games, it is about the creative thoughts and processes which go into each and every board game, and it is about board games as both artistry and art form. Published by Senet Magazine Limited, each issue promises previews of forthcoming, interesting titles, features which explore how and why we play, interviews with those involved in the process of creating a game, and reviews of the latest and most interesting releases.

Senet Issue 5 was published in the Summer of 2021 and heralded the then return to a degree of normality following the extended periods of lockdown and limited social interaction due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The elaborate lock and key cover hints at this, but the editorial expands upon it, highlighting how the pandemic kept us apart and kept us from socialising through the play of board games and in that welcoming everyone back to the gaming table, it should be that everyone is welcome. As is usual, the issue opens with ‘Behold’, a preview of some of the then-forthcoming board game titles. Unlike in Senet Issue 4, none of the titles truly stand out, although League of the Lexicon from Crazy Clever Games looks to be least interesting if you like your words as it explores the history of words, letters, and punctuation, whilst Keymaster Games’ Caper: Europe could be a decent filler game after the depth of the publisher’s well received Parks.

‘Points’, the regular column of readers’ letters, calls back to the editorial and the sense of community and togetherness that playing games engenders. The first letter discusses whether or not it is appropriate to call the end regular department in Senet the ‘Shelf of Shame’ or not. The correspondent makes the point that she does not associate the gaming hobby with a sense of shame, and whilst possible to sympathise with her, it is clear that the use of the term is lighthearted and other than exclusionary. It is also clear that, whilst he listened and symphonized with her, the editor has not made the change in subsequent issues, although this is the first real point of contention in any of the issues to date. Were it not revisited later in the actual ‘Shelf of Shame’ it might not been have rated as even that. In ‘For Love of the Game’, Tristian Hall continues his designer’s journey towards Gloom of Kilforth. In previous issues he explored how the game became a vehicle for roleplaying and storytelling and used the mechanics to bring the game and its background to life, but in this issue, he looks at marketing and how his friends helped him market the game. In so drawing upon his community contacts as the basis of his marketing campaign, it matches with the theme’s issue of togetherness.

Each issue of Senet explores a theme found in board games, its history and the the games that showcase it to best effect. This issue, the theme is one that refuses to stay dead—zombies! In ‘Turn of the Living Dead’, Own Duffy explores the origins of the genre in George A. Romero’s 1968 classic, Night of the Living Dead, before looking at the appearance of the genre in board games, beginning really with Twilight Creations, Inc.’s Zombies!!! Although Night of the Living Dead got its own board game in 2020, it clear that the dominant game line since 2012 has been the Zombicide series, and even the Night of the Living Dead game is a Zombicide game! Zombicide also highlights zombie-themed games tend to be action orientated and so the author has to pick and choose with some care to really to look for something deeper and finds it in Dead of Winter, the 2014 game from Plaid Hat Games, where survival involves negotiation with the survivors as much as building barricades against the zombie attack and attempting to stop them. Duffy works hard to explore the genre in board gaming, but the thematical limits of the genre are quickly reached.

The first of the two interviews in Senet Issue 5 is with artist Catherine Hamilton, whose near death reaction to the oil paints she had been using lead to a change in mediums and subject matters. Now painting in water colours, her works have been best showcased in the board game Evolution, but here we not only see some of Hamilton’s favourite pieces, each and every one receives a short commentary too. Senet as a magazine has really given a space for board game artists to show off some their board game illustrations, and in ‘Call of the Wild’, Senet Issue 5 is no exception. Her art stands out all the more because it is done in an unfamiliar medium for the hobby, but is no less stunning than if had been done in oils. The second interview is in ‘Boxing Clever’ and is with Isaac Childres, the creator of Gloomhaven, one of the most popular board games of recent times. The interview explores the development of and comparisons with Gloomhaven and its sequel, Frosthaven, as well as Childres’ history with board games and working outside of the ‘Havneverse’ setting. The interview is interesting and informative and overall, a decent read.

For its mechanic, having done deck-building in Senet Issue 2, ‘Roll-and-Write’ in Senet Issue 3, and tile-laying in Senet Issue 4, Senet Issue 5 turns to a lesser device—the ‘rondel’—in ‘Full Circle’ by Alexandra Sonechkina. The rondel is a wheel-shaped game mechanism which provides numerous options, but limits player choice by forcing them to move around the rondel and onto to other options instead of repeatedly performing the same option again and again. It turns out that this device is relatively recent, having been invented in the early eighties by designer, Walther ‘Mac’ Gerdts, and really implemented for the first time in the civilisation style game, Antike. Whilst it is interesting to explore the history of a mechanic so new and have a chance to discuss it with its creator, writing about the rondel proves to be slightly difficult. This is because as a design it has not caught as a possible mechanic and its use to date has been limited. This does not stop the author examining as many games that do use it as she can, not only including Antike and its sequel, Antike II, but also board games like Vikings and Shipyard. The feeling is that author had to dig deep to find these and much like the earlier ‘Turn of the Living Dead’, ‘Full Circle’ feels as if it exhausts the limits of its subject matter, whereas previous articles on game mechanics have felt more expansive.

As ever, the ‘Unboxing’ section of Senet Issue 5 covers only a relative handful of games, but the choice is as ever interesting and covers a range of games, not just the big Euro-style titles. The big review is saved for Oath: Chronicles of Empire and Exile, which is rated as ‘Senet’s Top Choice’, a sprawling civilisation style game designed to be played again and again if its depths are to be fully reached. Other interesting games include Surrealist Dinner Party, a drafting game with an off-the-wall theme and absolutely beautiful artwork, and Cryo, a worker placement game about the crew of crash-landed spaceship that must survive on an icy world. None of the reviews are unnecessarily long and they are all beautifully illustrated with shots of the games and their components, and again, the issue manages to maintain a decent balance of titles and types of game being reviewed.

Rounding out the issue is Sara Elsam’s ‘From Turntable to Tabletop: How to Playlist’, which looks at the idea of using music to enhance game play. This is common enough in roleplaying, but board games? It turns out to be the case, with not only board games receiving their soundtracks, such as Escape the Dark Sector: The Game of Deep Space Adventure, but players putting together their own playlists for particular games and genres. The article is a solid introduction to the concept with some suggestions and handy hints. Lastly, in the ‘Shelf of Shame’, the hosts of Our Family Plays Games pull a game off their shelf that they have not yet played and try it out. The game is Paris: La Cité de la Lumière, a game which once on the same table, they enjoy. However they make the point that no game of theirs sits on a ‘Shelf of Shame’, but rather a shelf of opportunities to learn something new. 

Physically, Senet Issue 5 is very professionally presented. It looks and feels as good as previous issues of the magazine.

Yet again Senet Issue 5 contains an excellent mix of articles, interviews, previews, and reviews, but much like the Senet Issue 4, the articles often feel limited in their subject matter. In the previous issues, the reader always knew that he could go beyond the subjects matters explored in the issue and make discoveries for himself. With Senet Issue 5 that is not necessarily the case, whether that is true of the mechanic explored or the theme. Nevertheless, the quality of the magazine and its writing continues to be excellent, maintaining its place as vehicle to show off and explore some of the best ideas, contributors, and games in the hobby.

—oOo—

Senet magazine will be at UK Games Expofrom Friday 2nd to Sunday 4th, 2023.

 I am now coming up on the next wave of Doctor Who RPGs. All from Cubicle 7. 

While there are technically three RPGs, they are all related.

First is the Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space. This is the one I have talked about here a lot already.

Second is the new Second Edition of the RPG, now just The Doctor Who Roleplaying Game.

And finally, we have Doctors & Daleks, a game based on the previous two, but using the 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons OGC rules.

One thing that strikes me is despite all I have said about this game line over the years I have never really given it a proper full review.  Well I will change that next week.

In the meantime, here are some characters I have stated up for the Doctor Who RPG (1st Edition so far).

• Sherlock Holmes and John Watson (from Sherlock)
• Madam Vastra and Jenny Flint (before we had official stats)
• Mary Poppins
• Willow and Tara

I'll spend the rest of May with this system.

 One of the "bed rooms" (Room #17) has a larger open corridor that leads to another similar room. This room however only has one bed in the very center.  

Pressing any buttons will cause different colored lights to shine with an accompanying tone. If the characters are within the 10' area (with the central bed in the center) then the following happens:

White - Sanitizing, everything becomes clean, dirt falls to the ground.
Green - Healing, minor wounds are healed for 1d6+1 hp of damage
Red - Warming, gets uncomfortably hot. 
Orange/Yellow - very bright, blinds as per the Light spell.

There are no creatures or treasures here.

--

This a surgery center. The lights are great if you are an Ophidian, not so much for humans.

The rules for the Time Lord game are lite on character creation, but that doesn't mean it can't be done. The Appendices in the Print and PDF versions give some guidelines but with 7 Doctors, 29 companions and more NPCs, putting together a new character is not very difficult.  Let's see how this game fares in recreating two characters we have already seen; Jenny Everywhere and my witch Larina.

Jenny Everywhere

Again, I am having Jenny stand in for our Time Lord character. The Time Lord RPG is thin on character creation and even thinner on creating new Time Lords and Gallifreyians.  Jenny makes a good stand-in. Again I am making the claim here that this Jenny is Gallifreyian/Human, raised mostly as a human. I am also going to speculate that there are other Gallifreyian/Humans out there, this may explain Henry DeTamble of "The Time Traveler's Wife" (It can't be a coincidence that Henry was born in 1963.)

As always, I must include her license:

"The character of Jenny Everywhere is available for use by anyone, with only one condition. This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Everywhere, in order that others may use this property as they wish. All rights reversed."

Jenny EverywhereJENNY EVERYWHERE

Apparent age: Mid-20s
Species: Gallifreyan/Human
Equipment: Scarf, Cool Goggles, bike messenger bag

Strength: 3, Cheat Death 2, Iron Constitution 2, Regenerative Powers 3
Control: 4, Escapology 1,  Blunt Weapons 2, Brawling 2, Edged Weapons 2, Marksmanship 2, Sleight of Hand 2, Stealth 1
Size: 3
Weight: 3
Move: 3, Running 1
Knowledge: 5, Computing 1, First Aid 1, MacGuffin 2, Pseudoscience 3, Science  3, TARDIS 1,  Temporal Science 2
Determination: 5
Awareness: 4, Bureaucracy 1, Resourceful Pockets 2, Serendipity 1, Striking Appearance 1

Attack: 4, 6, 6, 6, 6
Basic Defense: 3

I am unsure if this is the same Jenny from the FASA game. This one feels a little different, but I can't explain why. I mean they could be different and yet aware of each other all the same. 

Larina "Nix" Nichols

As with the FASA game (and every game I try her out in), I go outside the strict rules for character creation. Based on what I did for the FASA game, this is Larina after she had been in contact with one of the blue crystals from Metebelis 3. This was the start of her adventures. The Larina for the FASA Who game was a Welsh girl. Since this game takes place in 1991, I will use a version of her that I was using in back in the 1990s, an American foreign exchange student living in Scotland at the time. 

Edited to add: OR if this takes place in 1996 this is an older (25 years old) Larina back in the US. In my timeline for her, this would be right after her divorce. 

Larina "Nix" NicholsLARINA NICHOLS

Apparent age: Early/Mid-20s
Species: Human
Equipment: Small knife, tarot cards,

Strength: 3, Cheat Death 1, 
Control: 3, Edged Weapons 1, Stealth 2
Size: 3
Weight: 3
Move: 3, Running 1
Knowledge: 4, First Aid 2, History 2, Occultism 4, Science 1
Determination: 5, Independent Spirit 1, Psychic Shield 2, Telekinesis 1, Telepathy 1
Awareness: 4, Striking Appearance 2

Attack: 3, 4
Basic Defense: 3

Ok. I do like these builds much more than I thought I would when I picked this one back up. Jenny is a very flexible character and any differences between this version of her and others is honestly part of her character design. That is, there are supposed to be differences. 

For Larina, well, her job is to stick as close to the Rules-As-Written as I can and yet still get the character I want. My concept of her is a "witch", writ large, and maybe even stereotypically. How can I make that work in a game where so far everything has a scientific explanation.  Though I will point out that this game has an "Occultism" ability and it says this:

Occultism [Knowledge]

A character with Occultism knows about the white and black magic practices of witches, druids and the like. The ability also implies a familiarity with superstitions and old sayings.

So there is a solid hook here, AND I will point out that no other characters (companions, NPCs, or monsters) have this skill on their sheets. 

The real question now becomes, are these two traveling together? I like the idea of the Doctor being involved, particularly Sylvester McCoy's Seventh Doctor.  That is if I go with 1991, when the rules were in print. I could very easily go with 1996, the year that the game was released on the Internet, AND when the Paul McGann Doctor Who movie came out. That is also the same year that "The Craft" came out so using the logic of the TV series, the Eight Doctor is traveling with a young American witch. I don't hate the idea, certainly. 

Yeah...I don't hate this idea at all really. Maybe the bike messenger bag that Jenny has in my build above she gives to the Eighth Doctor for his Big Finish audio dramas. The Eighth Doctor's time is ripe for all sorts of shenanigans to be honest.

I'll have to consider this one more, but I like these builds and would use them to give the Time Lord rules a go. 

 Going back and this time taking the far left hallway leads to another corridor and collection of connected rooms.

These four rooms are larger than the ones on the far right. There are plenty of flickering lights with writing that doesn't not translate. There are plenty of beds in these rooms. One has a skeleton of the snake people on it.

There are no creatures, but there are more (1d10+10) more of those "healing wands" here but only 1d6+3 still work.

--

This is the ship's sick bay. It is designed for Ophidian life, so even if anything was working it would not be good for humans.

The year is 1991, and the FASA Doctor Who game is out of print. Equally less likely to see a resurgence is the Doctor Who series. In 1989 Sylvester McCoy, who had signed on as the 7th Doctor in 1987, was featured in the last "Classic" Doctor Who episode, "Survival."  The Doctor's future on BBC Television was in serious doubt.  

The Doctor had seen something of a resurgence in the Sylvester McCoy years leading to Virgin Books (founded by Richard Branson) to continue the story of the Doctor and Ace in the "New Adventures" series. The novels were very popular among Doctor Who fans, even if they took some liberties with the established lore of the show. Though some ideas (like the Time War and Other) would find new life in the 2005 reboot of the series.  But that is for another discussion.

While Virgin saw success with the novels, they found getting into the RPG market a little more difficult. They released Doctor Who Time Lord with the subtitle Create your own adventures in time and space in 1991. The book was in an A5 (148.5 x 210 mm or 5.8 x 8.3 inches) format as a novel. The authors were Ian Marsh and Peter Darvill-Evans. Both of whom had solid RPG and Doctor Who credentials.  The game has been out of print for a while, but the authors had released a copy of it online. You can still find it if you know where to look. I compared it to my print copy, and they were identical save for some updates to include the then-new Eighth Doctor. 

Time Lord

1991. 288 pages, A5. Color covers, black & white interior art and photos.

The presentation for this game is an odd one, since it came from a novel publisher rather than an RPG one. 

PART ONE: DOCTOR WHO: A Legend In Its Own Primetime

This covers the history of the Doctor Who programme from 1963 to 1989. It gives us details on the seven actors to play the Doctor. We are introduced to some concepts in Doctor Who like the TARDIS and the Companions as well. There is also a short story, The Necromancers, that is referred too later in examples. 

PART TWO: Role-Playing: What It Is And How To Do It

This covers the basics of RPGS including a history lesson complete with nods to Dungeons & Dragons. It is not a bad overview really. Designed mostly I think for Doctor Who fans that are not roleplayers already. There is a solitare adventure you can play, Switchback, with the characters Jamie and Tegan as your examples. I am just trying to imagine a situation where these two would be working together. It is more or less like a "Choose your own Adventure" sort of deal. Similar to the one found in the D&D BECMI Basic book, but you won't be carrying Tegan's lifeless body back when you are done.

PART THREE: How To Role-Play A DOCTOR WHO Adventure

This covers the basic rules of Time Lord. The system uses two six-sided dice (like the other DW RPGs) but in this one you take the difference to get your number.  So the results will be 0 to 5, with 5 (6-1) being the best role. You compare an ability to a difficulty set by the Referee. If your Ability score is lower than the difficulty score then you must roll and score higher than the difference.  So if your ability is Strength 3 (average) and the difficulty for a test of strength is a 5 then you need to roll a 2 or better. Difficulty can be adjusted as the Referee needs. There are some examples given in the book and appendix.

The Abilities include Strength, Control, Size, Weight, Move, Knowledge, Determination, and Awareness.  All (save Weight) have special abilities attached to them. The special abilities are all detailed and work like a combination of skills and advantages. 

Combat is covered, though Doctor Who is not a combat-focused game in any iteration, there is some here. It should be noted that in Time Lord, unless you are the Doctor, death is permanent. 

PART FOUR: The Cast of Thousands

This section might be where Time Lord shines above FASA's Doctor Who game. Here we have stats for all Seven of the Doctor's incarnations and all 29 of his companions, from Ace to Zoe. We also get a lot of aliens andvillains (though not sure why Sabalom Glitz is here, he is more of a comic-relief character). The Master and the Monk are two separate figures in this game.

There is some coverage on various vehicles including space and time travel ones. Special attention is given over to the TARDIS as expected. 

There is even a section called "500 Year Diary" (something that just popped up in a recent Doctor Who episode I was watching too!) that briefly covers a few topics.

PART FIVE: The Never-Ending Script

This covers running a game. It also gives good examples of what the various levels of Abilities are. While humans range from 1 to 5, with 3 being average, the scale does go to 10. So for example a "comic book superhero" has Control 7 and a Time Lord like Rassilon has Knowledge 9.

There are plenty of examples of Difficulty modifiers and relative percents. So really there are some really great details here.  There are details and tips on creating your own adventures and a sample adventure The Templar Throne (or Curse of the Cyclops in the PDF) is provided.

APPENDIX 1: CREATING COMPANIONS

There are no character creation rules really in this game. The rule expects you will be playing the parts of one of the Doctors and his various companions. This Appendix though does give you guidelines on how to create your own companions. A sample companion, Alison, is given.

APPENDIX 2: SAFE COMBAT

This covers how to tone down the lethal-ness of combat.

APPENDIX 3: DESIGNER’S NOTES

Now this is pretty interesting. The designers talk about why the made the game the way they did and how to want to appeal to both sorts of fans, Doctor Who and RPG players. 

APPENDIX 4: ADVANCED CHARACTER CREATION

Now this is from the PDF version only. The print version does not have this. This addresses the original criticism that the game did not feature character generation rules. This takes the guidelines found in Appendix 1 and expands them to includes combined a point spread generation and a random number generation. This produces characters that are all roughly of the same sort of spread with some exceptional abilities thrown in. Much like the companions themselves.

Note: There are still no rules here for generating a Time Lord character. Unless that character is a Gallifreyian and a companion of the Doctor, like Susan or Romana. 

Both end with blank character sheets. The book also includes blank sheets for Aliens and Villian NPCs. 

I had grabbed this PDF back in the dawn of the Internet and held on to it for years, not really knowing what I had had. It wasn't until I saw the Virgin book on sale that I finally put it all together.

The Time Lord game is very much a product of the 90s and the Virgin New Adventures here really shine through. Granted that could just be me reading into it all. I had a rather nice collection of those books, and it colored my view of the Seventh Doctor (for the better really). 

The game is not groundbreaking by any stretch, but it is much better than I originally gave it credit for and would have been great fun in the dry years following the Fox Doctor Who movie. 

Given the use of two d6s instead of grabbing them from your "Monopoly or Risk" games as the book suggests you can borrow some from it's sibling games that also use d6s.

Taking the far hallway on the right leads to another corridor with four doors. Each door opens to similar rooms.

Each room is dark with a large vat full of green liquid as the centerpiece.  In two of these, the vats are empty of liquid and there are skeletons at the bottom.  The glass is broken.

In room 16a there is a vat with a Saurian floating inside. If the glass is broken and the liquid drained the saurian will revive in 1d4+1 turns. The saurian (a Warrior) will be enraged and quite insane. It will attack the party right away.

In room 16c the vat has a human male. If this vat is drained the human will revive in 1d6+1 turns, scream incoherently at the party and then promptly die.

--

These are abductees of the Ophidians. They have been here for centuries kept alive and awake for all this time. The Necromancers kept these two to come back to later but never did.  The controls for the life support are damaged, so there is no way to put the victims back.

Another sci-fi staple today and one that also fits in well with Doctor Who, Star Trek, and yes D&D.  Today I want to discuss the Saurians. 

Now these guys go by a variety of names, saurians, saurials, reptoids, reptilians, and more. But for the sake of argument I am making a distinction between these guys and the Ophidians of last week. While I typically cast the ophidians as typically all evil and descended from human snake cultists, the saurians (just to use one name) are mostly neutral, cold and calculating, and largely descended from the same era that gave us dinosaurs.

I do admit that I took a lot of notes from Professor Dale A. Russell's idea of a "Dinosauriod" creature.  IT hit me at a very fertile time in my imagination; my growing love of all things science, my curiosity about UFOs and alien abduction theories, and of course, my love for D&D which was at an all-time high then. Throw in healthy amounts of Doctor Who (Silurians, Sea Devils, Draconians), Land of the Lost (Sleestaks), and Star Trek (Gorn, Saurians), and it makes a heady brew.  I also discuss them, or their near-kin, in my various posts last year on Conspiracy Theories (Ancient Aliens, Cryptoterrestrial Hypothesis, Extraterrestrials on Earth).

D&D already had Lizard Men and, to a degree, other reptilians. They would later move Kobolds over to be more reptile-like (something I have worked around) and introduce more reptilian races that are even closer to this idea (Saurian, Saurial).  We also get one of the "Big Bads" of the BECMI D&D line, the Carnifex, who works with this idea.

I used these guys for years but mostly just used Lizard Man stats. Over time I adapted them and changed them to what I mostly use today.

Saurian

Saurians are a reptilian race that came about around the time dinosaurs walked the world. They appear to be humanoid, but this is a case of convergent evolution; they have no biological relationship to the other humanoid species found in the world. 

Saurians are divided into castes based on their roles in society. These castes are purely functional in nature, and while each caste feels they contribute more to their society than the others, all are required to make their society function.

• Workers - These are the vast bulk of the Saurian society. They perform the labor and all the tasks needed. They average 5' to 5½' in height and weigh 80lbs to 100lbs.
• Warrior - These Saurians are dedicated to battle and defending the Saurian tribes. They are prone to battle frenzy and blood lust. They average 7' to 8' in height and 250lbs to 325lbs.
• Noble - The ruling class of Saurians. Stand around 6' high and weigh 150lbs.
• Scientist - nearly indistinguishable from the Noble caste. Noted for the high intelligence.
• Psionicists - on the surface, they look like a Worker or Noble but are characterized by advanced psionic powers.

All saurians are reptilian with large forward-facing eyes. They have three fingers and a thumb on each hand. They also have broad, three-toed feet. Their skin tones can vary from green to pale to even near-pink. There is no color combination between castes; any color saurian can be born to any caste. 

Females are slightly larger than males. There are no mammalian sexual characteristics, Saurians do not nurse their young, and males do tend to be more brightly colored. In the vision range of the Saurian eye these color differences are far more pronounced. Creatures with infravision can see these differences.

While many perceive the Saurians as evil, they are, in truth just very amoral when it comes to other life. They see all mammals as potential enemies and/or food.

Saurians are ancient enemies of the Ophidians and the Dragonborn. 

Saurian Minds

Saurian reptilian brains work differently from that of mammals. This has a few effects when in regards to other creatures. 

This makes giving them an alignment trickier. Slaughtering a group of humanoids, including the very young and very old, would be seen as an evil act by most creatures, but for the Saurians, it would be a necessary part of remaining alive and providing for their own tribe; an act they would view as good, even lawful.  Many humanoids would chafe under their rigid caste system, but to a Saurian, it ensures that individuals are living up to their greatest potential. No Saurian would want a Scientist as a Warrior or a Noble as a Worker since they would all be very ill-suited for the jobs. 

The other effect is one of magic.  All saurians, regardless of caste, have a +2 bonus to saving throws on all mind-affecting magics. This includes Charm, Hold, Illusions, and Sleep spells. It also means they have a +1 on all saves on other magic except for those that deal direct damage. Even a healing spell cast on a Saurian must first be subject to a saving throw. If they make the save they are not healed.

Consequently, Saurians are not able to take levels in any magic using classes like Cleric, Magic-user, or Witch.

Saurian (Worker, Scientist, Noble)

Armor Class: 7
Hit Dice: 2+2 (11 hp), 3+3 (17 hp), 4+4 (22 hp)
Move: 120 (40)
Attacks: 1 by weapon
Damage: 1d6
No. Appearing: 2d10, 1d8, 1d6
Morale: 8, 10, 10
Treasure Type: None
Alignment: Neutral (True Neutral/Unaligned) 

Saurians are a reptilian race of humanoids. They are born into a rigid caste system based on their biology. Each caste feels they contribute the most to their society, so inter-caste conflict is much rarer than intra-caste conflict. 

The Worker, Scientist, and Noble castes are largely indistinguishable from each other to outsiders. The worker caste is the most numerous, and the nobles are a little taller. 

Workers: These laborers handle all the labor in a Saurian tribe. This includes everyone from the ones that build homes to healers to those that care for eggs and hatchlings.

Scientists: Generalized by their higher intelligence and pursuit of ways to improve the Saurian people.

Nobles: The ruling caste of Saurians.

Since all saurian eggs are kept in hatcheries, there are no parent-child bonds but hatchmate bonds. So in this manner, a worker can claim kinship to a noble and visa-versa. These bonds are just as strong as any mammalian parent or sibling bond.

Saurian, Warrior

Armor Class: 7
Hit Dice: 8+2 (56 hp)
Move: 120 (40)
Attacks: 2 by weapon
Damage: 1d8+3 x2
No. Appearing: 1d8 (3d6)
Morale: 12
Treasure Type: None
Alignment: Neutral (True Neutral/Unaligned) 

Saurian warriors are a caste unto themselves. The largest and healthiest hatchlings are trained from birth to be warriors whose only purpose in life is to defend the Saurian tribes. Warriors will fight among themselves to establish dominance and access to resources, but they will never attack anyone of the other castes. They find such ideas repugnant.  

However, a Saurian warrior will have no qualms attacking a group of humanoids; young or old, as they only see mammals as potential food. 

Hatchmate bonding is the strongest among the Warrior caste, with warrior Saurians dedicating their lives to protect their hatchmates.

Saurian, Psionist

Armor Class: 7
Hit Dice: 4 (18 hp)
Move: 120 (40)
Attacks: 1 by psychic attack
Damage: see below
Special: Psychic powers
No. Appearing: 1 (1d4)
Morale: 12
Treasure Type: None
Alignment: Neutral (True Neutral/Unaligned) 

Psionic Saurians are the rarest and sit somewhat outside the Saurian caste system. They look like Noble or Scientist Saurians, if somewhat smaller. They are identified early, taken from their hatcheries, and raised only with other Psionic Saurians. Thus they have the weakest hatchmate bonds of all Saurians, and intra-caste violence between psionics is the highest of all castes. 

Saurian Psionists have the following powers. These are not magic powers but instead are psychic in nature.  

• At will: Detect thoughts & emotions
• 3 times/day: Detect Invisible, Detect Magic
• 1 time/day: Charm Person, Clairvoyance, ESP, Telekinesis (up to 100 cn weight)

There are stronger psionists with more powers.

Note: The powers are not magical and cannot be detected or countered by magical means.

Between October 2003 and October 2013, Chaosium, Inc. published a series of books for Call of Cthulhu under the Miskatonic University Library Association brand. Whether a sourcebook, scenario, anthology, or campaign, each was a showcase for their authors—amateur rather than professional, but fans of Call of Cthulhu nonetheless—to put forward their ideas and share with others. The programme was notable for having launched the writing careers of several authors, but for every Cthulhu Invictus, The Pastores, Primal State, Ripples from Carcosa, and Halloween Horror, there was Five Go Mad in Egypt, Return of the Ripper, Rise of the Dead, Rise of the Dead II: The Raid, and more...

The Miskatonic University Library Association brand is no more, alas, but what we have in its stead is the Miskatonic Repository, based on the same format as the DM’s Guild for Dungeons & Dragons. 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.

—oOo—
Name: The Well of All FearPublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Kat Clay

Setting: Regency Cthulhu: Dark Designs in Jane Austen’s England
Product: ScenarioWhat You Get: Eighty-two-page, 15.98 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Sometimes it is not enough to take the waters, sometimes you have to give backPlot Hook: A missing brother, and of course, scandal!Plot Support: Staging advice, five pre-generated Investigators, eighteen handouts including five maps and floor plans, and nine NPCs.Production Values: Excellent.
Pros# Fully plotted, period piece# Well written mystery# Excellent handouts# A spa town other than Bath!# Non-Mythos, Mythos scenario# Derbyshire without the lycanthropy!# Kefalitemnophobia# Aquaphobia# J9dobphobia# Gynophobia# Arithmophobia
Cons# A spa town other than Bath!# Needs a slight edit# Buxton underwritten# All spa’d out# Non-Mythos, Mythos scenario
Conclusion# Stravinsky has nothing on this scandal—though the scandal and its scenario has much to recommend it!# Bounders, blackmail, and badasses in Buxton in a thorough,  Austentatiously detailed and enjoyable investigation which takes Regency Cthulhu up north