It is not Christmas until Hans Gruber has fallen from the executive floor of Nakatomi Plaza to his death on the ground below. In Die Hard: The Nakatomi Heist Board Game, you do not only get to make sure that Hans Gruber falls from the executive floor of Nakatomi Plaza to his death on the ground below every Christmas, but also very time you play Die Hard: The Nakatomi Heist Board Game. Published by The Op Games, Die Hard: The Nakatomi Heist Board Game is the board game adaptation of the 1988 anti-heist thriller directed by John McTiernan and starring Bruce Willis, Alan Rickman, Alexander Godunov, Bonnie Bedelia, and Reginald VelJohnson. Designed for two to four players, aged fifteen and over, and playable in sixty to ninety minutes, Die Hard: The Nakatomi Heist Board Game is an asymmetrical board game in which one player takes the role of New York detective John McClane and up to three other players take the role of the Thieves attempting to rob the Nakatomi corporation of $640 million in bearer bonds. For the players who control the Thieves, the game is co-operative. The game is played in three acts on three different sections of the board, the board unfolding to reflect this, and both John McClane and the Thieves having different objectives to achieve in each act. In general, John McClane is trying to achieve his objectives to get to the next floor and the Thieves are not only trying to stop him, but also working together to unlock the vault holding the bearer bonds. John McClane wins if he get to Act III and kill Hans Gruber, but the Thieves win at any time if John McClane dies—by running out of Action Cards, or they break into the vault.

Die Hard: The Nakatomi Heist Board Game comes with a double-sided board game, eighty Action Cards for John McClane, forty Action Cards for the Thieves, twenty-five Lock cards, a John McClane Player Board, Lock Tracker Card, figures for John McClane, Hans Gruber, and seven Thieves, a Combat Die, and then various cubes, tokens, and tiles, plus the rulebook. The board depicts three different floors of Nakatomi Plaza, one for each act. Each floor is marked with spots where Objective Tokens can be found for both John McClane and the Thieves. Both will have to search for these in order to complete objectives which vary from act to act. In Act I, John McClane must ‘Find the Machine Gun’, ‘Find the Radio’, and ‘Acquire the Shoes (that don’t fit)’. In Act II, he must ‘Find the Detonators and Explosives’, ‘Drop the Detonators and Explosives down the Elevator Shaft’, and ‘Kill a Thief, and throw him out a window’. In Act III, he must ‘Scare the Hostages off of the Roof’, ‘Swing on the Fire Hose’, and of course, ‘Kill Hans Gruber’. Complete the objectives in each act and John McClane and the game can progress to the next.

Whereas the Thieves have one objective that does not vary from act to act and then objectives that do. The ‘Draw Blood’ objective does not vary from act to act, the Thieves constantly attempting to punch or shoot John McClane. In Act I, their other objectives are to ‘Track McClane’ and ‘Capture 3 Hostages’. In Act II, they ‘Shoot the Glass’ and ‘Fire the Rocket’. In Act III, they are ‘Open the Sixth Lock’ and ‘Trigger the Roof Explosion’. Most of John McClane’s objectives will grant him specific bonuses, whereas the Thieves’ objectives grant extra attempts to unlock the Vault. All of the objectives match things that happen in the film, whether done by John McClane or by the Thieves.

The John McClane player receives a deck of Action Cards per act, but the cards he plays are carried over into the next act, whereas those he discards are not. Thus, he needs to be doubly careful in what cards he decides to play, whether for effect in the current act or subsequent acts. An Action card will give him options to Move, Sneak, Punch, Shoot, Support, Shove, and Recover. All movement and attacks are orthogonal, not diagonal; any damage done to a Thief kills him, whilst John McClane loses an Action Card and further fulfils the Thieves’ ‘Draw Blood’ action; Shove lets John McClane push a Thief; Recover allows the John McClane player to draw from the discard pile; and Support lets John McClane talk to Sergeant Powell to further fill the ‘Find Radio’ objective, granting a combat bonus when completely filled up. An Action will give John McClane one or more actions, and these can be done in any order. In a round, the John McClane will draw five Action Cards, play three of them and discard the other two. In addition, John McClane can freely use the vents to move around each floor.

The Thief players draw from a shared deck of Action Cards and have five Actions. These are Lock, Move, Punch, Shoot, and Reinforcements. The Reinforcements Action enables the Thief players to return a Thief figure to play if one has been killed. However, this is at the loss of all other actions and it hinders the Thieves’ action to unlock the vault. The Lock Action enables a Thief to cover up a numbered space on the current Vault Lock. The Vault Lock is represented by a series of Lock Vault Cards. Each Lock Vault Card shows a row of four numbers, these being the odd numbers from one to nine. These are arranged in a series of grids, which get increasingly larger as the Thieves crack each Lock, from two-by-four all the way up to four-by-four for the sixth and final Lock.

Each turn, the Thief players will be working together to try and crack the code on each Lock. To do this they try and match the numbers on their played Action Cards to the numbers on the grid. This is done with the highest and lowest on the Action Cards they collectively play to not only match the numbers on the current Lock Vault Cards, but do so for adjacent numbers. These can be horizontal or vertical, but they have to be orthogonal. How they do this plays slightly differently depending on the number of players. With one Thief player, he will draw a separate Action Card, look at its number and place the card face down before playing an Action Card from his hand, also face down, and then turn it over to reveal whether he has a solved part of the Lock Vault Code. With multiple Thief players, the Thief players take in turns to be lead thief. If two Thieves, the lead Thief player will draw an Action Card from the Action deck and show it to the other player before placing it face down. They both then play cards from their hand alongside the face down card. If there are three Thieves, the lead Thief player selects a card from his hand, shows it to the other two Thieves, and then play cards from their hands alongside the face down card. The key here is that the beyond the lead Thief showing the other Thieves the first Action, none of the Thief players communicate with each other. When the cards are revealed, the highest and lowest numbers on the cards are hopefully matched on the Lock Vault Code, whilst the card with the middle value is used to determine the actions for the Thieves that turn.

Breaking open the vault is key for the Thieves to win and whilst it is mainly going on in the background of the film, in Die Hard: The Nakatomi Heist Board Game, it is moved to fore. It becomes central to play with the secret, semi-co-operative aspect of its play as the Thief players try to communicate effectively with each other using the Action Cards, emphasising how disruptive John McClane becomes in upsetting their plans and distracting them. At the same time, they want to be working towards their own objectives for the bonuses they grant and attempting to stop John McClane from achieving his as well as inflicting as much damage on him as possible.

Meanwhile, as the game progresses, John McClane goes from New York cop in the dark to action-hero-in-the-know as he works out what is going on and gains more and better Action Cards with each subsequent act after the first. At the same time, John McClane’s player needs to be aware of how many Action Cards he has still to play. Lose them all and he will be killed and the Thieves will win.

Physically, Die Hard: The Nakatomi Heist Board Game is well presented. However, despite being a licensed board game, that only extends to the intellectual property and not the images of the actors. This means that the John McClane, Hans Gruber, and Thief figures are bland in addition to being small, and the artist has had to illustrate the Action Cards in greyscale with lots of silhouettes in black and grey shadows. Yet this works surprisingly well, making Die Hard a black and white film instead of colour and giving it film noir atmosphere. The rulebook is large, but not lengthy, explains everything well and gives good advice as to what both the John McClane and the Thief players have to do.

There is a lot to like about the Die Hard: The Nakatomi Heist Board Game. It actually feels like you are playing Die Hard with John McClane having to find the radio and talk to Sergeant Powell and feeling better for doing so; the Thieves being able to shoot out the glass in Act II, making it difficult for John McClane to move around because of his lack of shoes, which he has to find (and will be too small); finding a machine gun; and lastly, shoot, punch, and shove Hans Gruber off the roof! On the other side, the Thief players constantly have to think about stopping John McClane at the same time as breaking open the vault and the rules for the latter add further uncertainty because they cannot communicate with each other as effectively as they would like. This comes to the fore with three players as the Thieves and ideally Die Hard: The Nakatomi Heist Board Game should be played with all three.

Yet as much as the Die Hard: The Nakatomi Heist Board Game feels like you are playing film it is based on; it feels too much like you are playing the film it is based on. There is no variation in the game from one playthrough to the next. The objectives are always the same and once you have played through it once as John McClane and won and then played through it as the Thieves and won, it becomes less of a game and more of a puzzle because of that lack of variability. Ultimately, despite the incredible theming in Die Hard: The Nakatomi Heist Board Game which is going to get you cheering as John McClane succeeds and groaning as one more film quote is made, this is a board game you probably only want to play at Christmas.

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

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What is the Nature of the Quest?The Adventure of the Phantom Bell is a scenario for use with Pendragon, Sixth Edition.

It is a full colour, eighteen page, 3.0 MB PDF.

The layout is tidy, though it does need a slight edit.
Where is the Quest Set?The Adventure of the Phantom Bell is a scenario for Pendragon, Sixth Edition. It can be set in any year, though ideally in early spring or late autumn.
Who should go on this Quest?
Knights of any type are suitable for The Adventure of the Phantom Bell, though they should at least be household or mercenary knights in service to a liege lord. Awareness,First Aid, Folklore, Hunting, Play Instrument, Sing, Bow, and Horsemanship skills will be useful as will combat skills.
What does the Quest require?
The Adventure of the Phantom Bell requires the Pendragon, Sixth Edition Core Rulebook and the Pendragon: Gamemaster’s Handbook.

Where will the Quest take the Knights?
The Player-knights are tasked by their liege lord to attend to Greenway, a remote village where several people have gone missing. He suspects that Picts or Saxons might be responsible, but wants the disappearances investigated and put a stop to. The disappearances have been happening at regular intervals, so the Player-knights only have a few days before another one occurs. The scenario is linear is nature, the players have a choice of routes, a short one and a long one, with the former being more challenging. Taking the short gives the Player-knights more time in Greenway before the next person goes missing. Either way, the scenario tightens up a little as the impending disappearance grows near, and moves towards a confrontation with those responsible. This is nicely handled with the various possible situations being covered in a nasty combat with a surprisingly tough opponent.
The presents one or two interesting dilemmas to the Player-knights that test their Personality Traits in different ways. Some of these do stray into ‘Your Pendragon May Vary’ territory, so the Game Master is free to use them or not, as is her wont.
Throughout the scenario, the Player-knights will encounter a fair and mysterious hunter, ‘Eanswith, the Swan Maiden’, who will aid them on their journey to Greenway, in giving clues as to who—or what—might be responsible for the abductions, and if necessary, aiding them in killing it. Unfortunately, she is not only an intriguing figure for the knights and their players, but also for the Game Master. Simply put, she is not portrayed strongly enough and her motivations and interactions with the Player-knights are underwritten. The Game Master will at least want to develop a little more dialogue so that her portrayal can be easier.
Should the Knights ride out on this Quest?The Adventure of the Phantom Bell is a relatively easy and straightforward adventure to run and play, and ultimately, insert into a campaign. It needs a bit more development, but that should not be beyond the skills of any good Game Master.

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

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Name: Desperate MeasuresPublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Keith Craig

Setting: Modern day Lincoln, NebraskaProduct: Scenario
What You Get: Fifteen page, 1.30 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch:“Can calm despair and wild unrest / Be tenants of a single breast, / Or sorrow such a changeling be?”— Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam A.H.H.Plot Hook: How can a woman turn up dead when she died seventeen years before, less than a year old?Plot Support: Staging advice, one NPC, two handouts, and two Mythos monsters.Production Values: Plain
Pros# Detailed, but uncomplicated plot
# Easy to add to a campaign# Easy to relocate# Would work easily with with Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game# Standard Mythos cemetery monsters, but not a funeral home in sight!# Pedophobia# Ososphobia# Athazagoraphobia
Cons# Needs an edit
# Needs some Sanity losses
Conclusion# Short, sharp modern day investigation# Easy to prepare and run

Achtung! Cthulhu is the roleplaying game of fast-paced pulp action and Mythos magic published by Modiphius Entertainment. It is pitches the Allied Agents of the Britain’s Section M, the United States’ Majestic, and the brave Resistance into a Secret War against those Nazi Agents and organisations which would command and entreat with the occult and forces beyond the understanding of mankind. They are willing to risk their lives and their sanity against malicious Nazi villains and the unfathomable gods and monsters of the Mythos themselves, each striving for supremacy in mankind’s darkest yet finest hour! Yet even the darkest of drives to take advantage of the Mythos is riven by differing ideologies and approaches pandering to Hitler’s whims. The Black Sun consists of Nazi warrior-sorcerers supreme who use foul magic and summoned creatures from nameless dimensions to dominate the battlefields of men, whilst Nachtwölfe, the Night Wolves, utilise technology, biological enhancements, and wunderwaffen (wonder weapons) to win the war for Germany. Ultimately, both utilise and fall under the malign influence of the Mythos, the forces of which have their own unknowable designs…

Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Forest of Fear is the seventh release for Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20, and the second campaign following on from Achtung! Cthulhu: Shadows of Atlantis. It shifts the action forward by three years as previous releases for the roleplaying game are set earlier in the war, even during part of the Phony War, in 1939, 1940, and 1941. It is set in the Ardennes, in the weeks and days leading up to the Battle of the Bulge in late November and early December of 1944. It is also a sequel of sorts, to Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Assault on the Führer Train, which the Game Master can run as prologue to the main campaign, although that will be with pre-generated Player Characters, or Agents. The campaign, presented in eleven parts, requires experienced Agents with a good range of skills, including ideally, an Occultist with the ability to cast magic. At several points in the campaign, there are scenes of mass combat, so the Game Master may want to check the rules for handling such incidents in the Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Gamemaster’s Guide. The campaign also differs from more traditional campaigns of Lovecraftian investigative horror in four ways. First, it is heavily directed. Being a military-style campaign, the Agents will find themselves being either ordered to investigate and act by their superiors or being asked for help by the forces of local Resistance, rather than directing or leading the investigation themselves. Second, the campaign environs are limited to under the canopy and under the ground of the forests of Ardennes. This gives it much more of a localised feel than the traditional globetrotting campaign, which is what Achtung! Cthulhu: Shadows of Atlantis is. Third, the campaign develops into two parallel plot strands, one of which explores the relatively recent—in Mythos terms—history of the Ardennes as the German factions in the Secret War—Nachtwölfe and Black Sun, dig and in some cases, quite literally, bulldoze their way into the region’s prehistoric past. Four, the Agents will find themselves making alliances with some very strange bedfellows…

The set-up for the campaign echoes that of the Ardennes Offensive launched by Nazi Germany at the end of 1944 to stop further Allied advances and attempt to bring them to the table to negotiate. The desperation of Germany extends to its two factions in the Secret War—Nachtwölfe and Black Sun, and despite having been rivals for years, the need to defeat the Allies has driven them to do the unthinkable, that is, to co-operate. Their plan is known as Operation Brute Stärke, or Brute Strength, a secret coda to Hitler’s Operation Watch on the Rhine. The Agents are operatives for the British Section M sent to a field base ten miles behind Allied lines. There, Major Archibald Strang, codenamed Hunter, will brief them about the disappearance of Resistance leader Marta Archambaud—as detailed in Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Assault on the Führer Train, about the sightings and co-operation of Nachtwölfe and Black Sun, and the lack of intelligence about the region coming from Majestic, the American equivalent to Section M. Could the Americans be up to something? Major Strang would appreciate anything that the Agents can learn, but their primary orders are to investigate Nazi activities behind enemy lines in conjunction with the Resistance.

Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Forest of Fear starts with a good introduction to and explanation of the campaign and its background, along with some decent staging advice. The campaign proper begins with the Agents being sent behind enemy lines to ascertain enemy activity in the region. After making contact with the Resistance, they will be led to a remote farmhouse that serves as their base of operations for the campaign. In comparison to the missions to come, it is an intentionally quiet opener, but the Game Master is given several adventures to enliven the Agents’ stay at the farmhouse or visits to the nearby village. These can be used throughout the campaign, although the timeframe does tighten up near the end. The majority of the missions call upon the Agents to investigate archaeological sites, castles, ritual sites, and so on, often hiding entrances to cave networks that lead deep underground to the discovery of the Elder Thing undercity of Karvarteeli, which the Nazis have been surveying and plundering. The Agents will often find the Nazi efforts in disarray, the enemy either under attack by or having been attacked by eldritch forces. The often-brute force method of the Nazis have unleashed the dread servants of the Elder Things—the Shoggoth! Later in the campaign, it will become apparent that the Shoggoth—or at least the means to manufacture them—are what the Nazis are after, as well as the fact that not all of the Shoggoth are loyal to their former masters. There is even the possibility that the Agents might be able to communicate with the rebels, with one of the more horrifying moments in the campaign being faced by a Shoggoth holding a German soldier up like a puppet and having penetrated its brain, using him as a communications device!

In addition to investigating Nazi activities, the Agents are asked by their Resistance contact, Gaston Moreau, a Druid and secret follower of the goddess Arduinna, to help him in the ongoing fight between the Ardui, Ardenne Forest’s native Celtic deities, and the Crimson Brothers, a cult of evil monks, led by the Cowled Sorcerer, who want to free the Sleeping Horror, Chartotharkis, a godling imprisoned within the catacombs of a nearby ruined abbey. This is the second strand to the campaign, with the missions alternating between the two over its eleven missions, including the Agents actually meeting the Goddess Arduinna and the Ardui in person in their Sacred Grove (though this does involve a fair amount of exposition). The primary aim of the Ardui followers is to prevent the Crimson Brothers from succeeding and securing possession of three artefacts sacred to the Ardui—The Cauldron Which Never Empties, Flesh Drinker Sword, and Trident of the Dark Lake. One problem here is that the Agents cannot succeed in this. The Crimson Brothers do get hold of all three despite the Agents’ efforts and only in the final confrontation do they have a chance to reclaim all three.

The addition of the Ardui is not out of place in Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Forest of Fear as Achtung! Cthulhu has always had a folkloric and pagan element whose traditions have run parallel to that of the Mythos and which an Agent Occultist has been able to draw upon to be able to cast spells of his own. Often based upon Celtic and Viking traditions, as well as Hermetic traditions, the presence of the Ardui in the campaign brings this aspect of the roleplaying game to the fore and enables the Agent Occultist to interact more directly with those he owes fealty to—especially if he follows Celtic traditions.

The final confrontation with the Crimson Brothers also suggests an interesting interaction with the Nazis as an option. This is to form a temporary alliance with them in order to defeat the Crimson Brothers. It is suggested that this will add extra spice and roleplaying opportunities, the latter in a campaign where roleplaying and interaction with NPCs and the enemy is underplayed in favour of exploration, stealth, and combat. Of course, that is the nature of a more action-focused and combat driven roleplaying game like Achtung! Cthulhu. Nevertheless, it also highlights the underwritten nature of the campaign’s enemy NPCs in terms of roleplaying and their portrayal. Ultimately, if the Agents can help defeat the Crimson Brothers and prevent the summoning of Chartotharkis, they will gain the aid of Ardui in the final confrontation with the Nazis.

Penultimately, the Agents do have a chance to rescue Resistance leader Marta Archambaud, who was captured as detailed in Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Assault on the Führer Train. This is a big battle, potentially one of the most confusing ones to stage in the whole campaign as it involves a lot of forces. However, much of the battle takes place just slightly offstage to the Agents, so the Game Master could simply narrate it or she cut back and forth between the action. This would work well if the players were given control of the different forces on the Allied side. This also involves the Americans and forces from Majestic, the only time they appear in the campaign and even then, the mystery of what the Americans and Majestic are up to in the region, alluded to as a potential issue at the start of the campaign is never really explored—here or in the rest of the campaign. The campaign itself will come to a climax in a Nazi base atop a mountain, complete with cable car, so it ends more in the style of Where Eagles Dare than the style of the Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade that pervades the rest of the campaign.

Each mission follows the same format. Each starts with an introduction and a brief summary, before breaking the mission down scene by scene. There are typically details of encounters along the way, scene Threat spends for the Game Master, lists of adversaries, details of Truths that can come into play, and perhaps most importantly, the ‘Key Intelligence’, which summarises the important information that the Agents will learn as result of their completing the mission. Throughout there are also ‘GM Tip’ sections which give further information and advice. Some of these can quite extensive.

Rounding out Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Forest of Fear is set of six appendices. These in turn list all of the spells and spellbooks; treasures, artefacts, and tomes; arcane and esoteric technology; both allies and adversaries of the Ardennes; and handouts. The ‘Treasures, Artefacts, and Tomes’ in particular provides the details of artefacts sacred to the Ardui—The Cauldron Which Never Empties, Flesh Drinker Sword, and Trident of the Dark Lake, whilst the ‘Arcane & Esoteric Technology’ includes numerous Elder Thing devices which the Agents can recover, such as the Sensory Augmenter, Stasis Field Projector, and Ultrasonic Wardstone. For the Nazis, there are detailed write-ups of the Grendel Earth Mover, which Nachtwölfe used to bulldoze into the ruins and cavern systems of the Ardennes, and the Panzer VII Sabre Tooth Tiger, with which Nachtwölfe and Black Sun aim to stop the Allied advance on Germany. The handouts consist primarily of maps of locations where the action of the campaign takes place. All together the six appendices take up a fifth of the book.

Physically, Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Forest of Fear is cleanly and tidily laid out. The illustrations and the maps are excellent. However, there are two omissions in terms of the campaign’s items and NPCs. None of the new items and certainly none of the NPCs, whether an ally or an adversary, is actually illustrated. This is a less of a problem for the various items, but for the NPC, it is more of a problem, especially for the campaign’s main villains. It does not help that their physical descriptions are limited, leaving a lot for the Game Master to do in trying to impart to her players what their Agents’ foes look like.

Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Forest of Fear is a big bruising campaign, played out on an ever-bigger scale even though it is geographically limited to the Ardennes forest. The authors admit the campaign is linear and that is certainly true. This is very much a campaign where the players and their Agents are not going to direct the action, rather the reverse, being directed on missions and then fighting out the action. Once at a location, the Agents will have more agency, but on a strategic level, none at all. This has the possibility of frustrating players and it is not helped by the occasional heavy doses of exposition and travelogues before their Agents can get to the action. In effect, Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Forest of Fear is more a series of connected big scenes and confrontations in which the Agents get to battle it out with ever bigger threats. If the players are happy uncovering ever nastier secrets and punching out ever nastier Nazi threats, then there can be no doubt that Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Forest of Fear delivers that and delivers that very well, but any Game Master or player wanting more will be disappointed.

There have been times when it was very hard to find any support for SLA Industries and times when it was hard to support SLA Industries. The roleplaying game set in a far future dystopia of corporate greed, commodification of ultraviolence, the mediatisation of murder, conspiracy, and urban horror, and serial killer sensationalism, has had a somewhat roving publishing history, but back in 2020, when the publisher, Nightfall Games, just as it was preparing SLA Industries, Second Edition, COVID-19 struck. In response, the publisher released Ex-Mass, a PDF supplement of support that fans of the roleplaying game could play quickly and easily with relatively little preparation. This was followed up with a new series, Progress Reports, which provided further support for the World of Progress, in the form of BPNs, campaigns, threats, and more. By 2022, Nightfall Games had managed to publish SLA Industries, Second Edition and would continue to publish further Progress Reports through the COVID-19 lockdowns and beyond. Today, Nightfall Games has classified the first, Ex-Mass, as a Progress Report, and collected it into a slim volume of its own, Progress Reports Codified – Zero to Five. They are each separate in the supplement, so they come complete with their editorials as they originally appeared, so they feel just a little like time capsules from a very strange time.

Progress Reports Codified – Zero to Five opens with what was Ex-Mass, but is now SLA Industries 2nd Edition: Progress Report Issue Zero, a short piece which offers a Hunter Sheet, ‘Copycat Jack’, in which the Operatives are tasked with tackling a vandal, dressed like a cartoon version of Halloween Jack, who has gone from being a nuisance to a danger. The scenario is built around Halloween as a festival and event on the Contract Circuit, which is popular across the whole of Mort, and is short, but escalates in a surprising, though in both an annoying and a challenging way. Accompanying this is a short history of the battle taxi, which does feel too short, but still informative. A picture or two, would have been useful too, but it is a nice little article.

SLA Industries 2nd Edition: Progress Report Issue One, steps up and provides the Game Master with a campaign. This is ‘The Uptown Funk’, which gets down and dirty and into the Mort’s sex trade—one of several adult themes which run throughout the supplement. Involving a private member’s club and extortion, this is as dark and seedy as you would imagine, and has a nasty sting in the tale for one Player Character. Accompanying it is ‘Family Ties’, an updated scenario that originally appeared in Role Player Independent Volume 1, Issue 12. It opens with the Player Characters working for the Department of Investigation to investigate the death of an Operative. It haphazardly (by intent) shifts into a hunt for a serial killer. The hunt is made all the more challenging by the nature of the serial killer, although it will help if one of the Operative is an Ebon. The scenario is nicely detailed and the updating has been handled well. Rounding out the issue are two NPCs, a Shaktar Operative who is not a warrior as is traditional for his people, but a medic—and one with an embarrassing secret, whilst the other is Wraithen sniper with a sense of humour. Full stats are provided and they can be used as replacement Player Characters too.

SLA Industries 2nd Edition: Progress Report Issue Two expands in size and content, focusing now on new additions for the then new second edition of SLA Industries. Here it is upon the Carrien and the Cannibals and their activities, previously explored in detail in the superb Cannibal Sector 1. First, the idea that the Carrien each might collect trinkets and keep them in boxes is weird and quirky, but ‘Sector Treasures’ shows that they do and provides tables for what might be found in their trinket boxes. Second, the Harridan is a new type of Cannibal, previously unseen, which has been penetrating Inner Downtown where it has been leading cults dedicated to Rawhead. Her description is accompanied by four BPNs that if played through, reveal more and more about the Harridan. ‘Old Meg Rattlebones’ has a folkloric feel, with children in a Downtown Sector telling tales of a hideous witch lurking at their bedroom windows at night, her entry foiled by a cat skull placed on the windowsill. Of course, the authorities have been ignoring such bedtime stories and now it is too late! There are more BPNs in ‘The BPN Cookbook’, ten hooks that the Game Master can develop into fuller missions. ‘Red Head’ is one of several pieces of dark fiction the Progress Reports and Progress Reports Codified – Zero to Five that shows how bad or at least, how bleak, life on Mort is.

SLA Industries 2nd Edition: Progress Report Issue Three carries on from SLA Industries 2nd Edition: Progress Report Issue Two with the second half of ‘The BPN Cookbook’, adding a further six missions for the Game Master to develop. However, the most interesting entry here is ‘Vevaphon: The End’ which explains why the Vevaphon is no longer in SLA Industries, having been introduced in the Karma Sourcebook, published by Wizards of the Coast in 1994. This is an in-game explanation that also charts the rise of the Doppelganger Institute that developed the Vevaphon and not only its fall from grace with the failure of the programme, the efforts of SLA Industries to disavow its sponsorship of the programme and destroy all the remaining Vevaphon. It is an engaging colour piece that is backed up with a campaign seed that begins with a Hunter Sheet for a rogue Manchine and leads into revelations about the last of the reviled and sad creatures. It also enables the game Master to use the Vevaphon in her own campaign. The issue also describes The Pit, the premier, most famous and infamous, night club in Mort, open to SLA Operatives, and a detailed scenario, ‘Beyond the Wall, which needs expanding, but takes the Player Characters on what is supposed to be a milk run into Cannibal Sector 1 to provide protection for a documentary crew. Of course, it goes wrong and the Player Characters find themselves stranded and long way from the wall that separates Mort from Cannibal Sector 1. The issue comes to a close with some good NPCs, including a very pushy Soft Company salesperson, an overly helpful young ganger, and more!

SLA Industries does focus on Cannibal Sector 1, so it is good to see coverage of Cannibal Sector 2 in SLA Industries 2nd Edition: Progress Report Issue Four. However, its description of a former industrial site dedicated to provision of water to Mort is not nearly as interesting as the wealth of information and background given in Cannibal Sector 1. There is much more development required here before the Game Master can use this in her campaign, but she is helped by the addition of stats for common threats and some mission ideas. Overall, a good introduction to the area. ‘Conflict Aliens – Cyclones’ introduces one of the species that SLA Industries is in long term conflict as part of the ongoing wars and their response which would ultimately result in a bioengineered virus being unleashed upon Mort. This is the ‘Cyconaviridae’ virus, which quickly transforms the infected into an enhanced member of a collective that together methodically and quietly works to further spread the infection. It is accompanied with some scenario hooks such as having a viral outbreak amongst a Shiver outpost at a Bridgehead in Cannibal Sector 1 or an accidental outbreak in Downtown. There are no specific BPNs attached to the ideas, but the ideas are very workable if the Game Master wants to bring the horror of infection and loss of personality into her campaign. More light-hearted are ‘Making a Killing’ and ‘Cannibal Run’, although neither sound it! The former discusses the trade in BPN Coins, rewards from SLA Industries for completing missions that Operatives can purchase and if they want, subsequently sell to the thriving market of civilian collectors. It provides another revenue stream for the financially strapped Operative and adds yet more flavour to the World of Progress. The latter, ‘Cannibal Run’, makes entire sense given that one of the SLA Industries authors is a very dedicated racing fan and provides some suggestions races might be run in Cannibal Sector 1. The Game Master will need to develop them further and flesh events with more detail, but the concept is perfect for the Operative with a high Drive skill.

Progress Reports Codified – Zero to Five comes to a close with SLA Industries 2nd Edition: Progress Report Issue Five. It opens on a sombre note, highlighting the sad death of Morton T. Smith, one of the earliest contributors to SLA Industries, at the age of 53. Likewise, it ends on a typically bleak note with ‘The Murder of Croaks’, the last fiction in the issue and the anthology. The issue consists of the single scenario, ‘Here Piggy, Piggy!’. This exposes the Operatives to corporate shenanigans at Bonk!, a soft company specialising in advertising. The ventilation tunnels of the Bonk! Offices have become infested Landorian Bullet Pigs and the managing director has already been attacked. The Operatives are assigned by the Department of Sanitation to clear out the contamination and present the invoice to those responsible! This is an entertainingly detailed scenario with an emphasise on interaction and investigation whose possible outcomes are explored in similar detail. This includes advice on sponsorship and the use of catchphrases in game. Overall, this is a real change of tone from the horror and combat typical of other BPNs and is a really fun scenario.

Physically, Progress Reports Codified – Zero to Five is very well-presented. It needs a slight edit in places, but the artwork is as good as to be expected for a SLA Industries supplement, the writing is decent, and it gets away with not needing an index with its relatively short page length.

Even if the Game Master has the individual issues of the Progress Reports, it is still great to have them in print and all in one place in Progress Reports Codified – Zero to Five. This is a great looking book that really is replete with highly gameable content as well as content that the Game Master can further develop herself. Elsewhere, ‘Vevaphon: The End’ is a terrific piece of world building that also neatly explains a change in SLA Industries, Second Edition, whilst ‘Making a Killing’ adds colour and flavour. Progress Reports Codified – Zero to Five is a miscellany that every SLA Industries Game Master is genuinely going to find useful and want to have with so much playable material in its pages.

SoloDark brings the means to solo adventures to the rules of ShadowDark, the fantasy roleplaying game which combines elements of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition with those of the Old School Renaissance. He will control both the fate of his characters and those of the NPCs and monsters they encounter in the course of their adventures. Like solo rules for other roleplaying games, it uses an Oracle to generate answers to questions, whilst also making changes to accommodate for the fact that there is only the one player. These include creating between two and four Player Characters instead of just the one that solo play suggests, having group initiative and play in Chaos Mode meaning that it rolled at the beginning of every combat round, and that Luck is earned on any roll of a natural twenty. Perhaps the biggest change is that light sources last ten rounds of game play rather than an hour of real time. Both the presence and absence of light have a significant influence on game play in ShadowDark. Once a torch or lantern goes out, there is always a rough scramble to get a new one lit and in the meantime, there is the fear of the dark and the fear of something attacking out of the dark, since random encounters are suddenly more frequent!

Surprisingly, as SoloDark only runs to ten pages, two of those are devoted to a list of possible sources for further play. One-part sources of help and advice, one-part recommended locations—both dungeons and wildernesses—to play, and one-part suggested resources whether the player needs a monster, NPC, treasure, or encounter, that he can grab and add to his game straight away. Thus, there are links to The Arcane Library where the roleplaying game’s designer runs through some sample solo play and Me, Myself and Die! also offering solo play sessions such as with Free League Publishing’s Dragonbane. In addition to referencing ShadowDark for monsters, NPCs, treasures, encounters, dungeons, and wildernesses, SoloDark also points to Knave, Masks: 1,000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game from Encoded Designs, Ensorcelled Loot from Philip Reed Games, and City Encounters for Swords & Wizardry by Mythmere Games. Plus, dungeons like Dying Stylishly Games’ The Gardens Of Ynn and wildernesses such as The Hexanomicon #1. Overall, this provides not only a solid, useful set of references, but also highlights other authors too.

The next part of SoloDark is not quite so useful, being a table for creating dungeon names such as the ‘Palace of the Draconic Hunter’ or the ‘Asylum of the Fungal Sorcerer’. If there an associated set of tables to generate dungeons in SoloDark, the table might have been more useful. What is useful is the Oracle. This the means by which the player will generate yes and no answers to his questions and there is short simple advice on best practices, such as keeping questions plausible, rely on game rules, asking positive questions, and limiting the number of questions. To use, it the player determines the odds, rolling with advantage or disadvantage depending on the difficulty of getting a ‘yes’ answer. It is possible to roll a critical or a fumble on the Oracle check, leading to extreme results, but the results can be quite nuanced, allowing for a ‘yes, but…’ or ‘no, but…’ answer. If the player needs further clarification, including if he rolls an unexpected twist, the following table of ‘Prompts’, which encompasses a wide array of verbs and nouns, is there to provide more nuance.
Physically, SoloDark is decently presented and written. Lightly illustrated, the artwork is excellent.

SoloDark requires more experience of ShadowDark and running solo sessions of any roleplaying, let alone ShadowDark, than is included in its pages. There is no example of play and perhaps there should have been. Of course, the point of including a suggestion to check a YouTube video is there to alleviate that need, but its inclusion would have been nice and given SoloDark some permeance rather than just saying, look at this or look at that. Still the suggestions are useful and in some cases do show how the designer uses SoloDark and how other players play their games. For the more experienced player, none of this should be an issue and SoloDark should get them delving almost as soon as he has characters ready to play. SoloDark is free and a more than decent aid to venturing into the dark alone.

The world stands on the precipice of doom and those dedicated to the forces of darkness that lie beyond the veil, long ripping at the walls that separate them from the mortal realms, claw at the boundaries that have kept them imprisoned for time immemorial tear at them with renewed vigour. The news refreshes anew the ambitions of their servants, members of cults dedicated to the ‘Dark One’, as they congregate to sing and sacrifice to their master… As the omens gather and signal his return, the Archivist Order rush to investigate. Perhaps to gather the knowledge to prevent his return, perhaps to gather the knowledge necessary to welcome his return. The order launched an expeditionary fleet to set sail form the southern peninsula of the Wracked Coast away to the Arcana of the Temples in the East, on the sixth day of its voyage, the second ship of the expeditionary fleet was caught in raging storm in the ice waters of the Maelstrom. Neither the skill of her sailors nor the sturdiness of her hull was enough for the ship to avoid being dashed ashore at the base of a rocky island on the archipelago that was not marked on any map. Thrown into the sea or picked up by the one boat that rowed free of the wreckage, the few survivors find themselves at an ancient carved landing from which narrow, steep steps cut their way through the rock to the top of the island.

This is the beginning of Dread Shores & Black Horizons, a scenario published by Archon Games. Originally funded via a Kickstarter campaign as part of ZineQuest #4, its production values have been elevated beyond that of a simple fanzine. And even then, it is very much a scenario and not a fanzine in the traditional sense. It is a systems-agnostic grim, dark fantasy that could be run in a very minimalist fashion with the included Player Characters and the Game Master improvising, it could be adapted to the fantasy roleplaying game of the Game Master’s choice. There is almost not a single fantasy roleplaying game which Dread Shores & Black Horizons could be adapted to, from Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy and ShadowDark to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Fourth Edition and the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game. The provided Player Characters, each accompanied by an illustration, includes an eager relic hunter, a seasoned and patient guide and tracker, a loyal guard, an out of their element scribe, a steadfast boatman, and an astronomer with a dark secret.
Once the Player Characters reach the top, they discover a sparse garden and a beacon tower… The door to the tower is locked and the single inhabitant, later to be revealed to be a bruised, battered, and crotchety old man, refuses to let them in. The question is, if this is a beacon tower, why was it not lit when the ship the Player Characters were aboard sailed past? Once the Player Characters get to talk to the beacon keeper, he will explain that its wick will not stay alight and the oil has run out. He will suggest that they descend the steps at the rear of the island to the storerooms there to get more. The way down is blocked by barnacles, but once past these, the storerooms prove strangely to be empty of the needed supplies. Perhaps they could have been taken through the grate in the floor that the beacon keeper kindly provided the key to? Unlocking the grate and descending deeper into the island reveals that it is not a beacon station to warn ships during storms, but a prison for Siren, a Fiend of the Dark One, one that will taunt the Player Characters even as they scramble to gather supplies and escape the thralls that protect the fiend. Fortunately, the Player Characters can escape their clutches and get back to the beacon tower. They need to persuade the beacon keeper to let them in and actually repair the beacon, but it can be kept burning throughout the night, even as the thralls clamour at the door to the beacon tower. Whilst they cannot get in, there is nothing to stop the cultists who arrive in the morning in answer to the call of the fiend below the island. At which point, the Player Characters have a choice. Swear fealty to the Dark One and live or refuse and die…

And that really is it as far as Dread Shores & Black Horizons goes. It is so straightforward as to be described as linear and there really is very little that the Player Characters can do to affect the outcome. There is a hint of something unsettling to the bleakness of the setting, but the scenario never really develops that, never puts the Player Characters in peril over the course of the night, never has the thralls climbing the walls to capture them or the Siren taunt them from below. Perhaps it could be run as a character piece, focusing on the interaction between the pre-generated Player Characters, but their backgrounds do not include details of their knowledge of each other, let alone their relationships, and only one of them has a secret.

Physically, Dread Shores & Black Horizons is very well presented. The scenario itself is short, but packed with decent artwork and maps, all in black and white. It comes in a boxed set that includes a large cloth map giving a cross section of the island that is not in the book and a sheaf of seventeen cards that give the character details and illustrations as in the book, maps—unmarked for the player and marked for the Game Master, and a cross section of the island from the cloth map. Yet whilst it is clearly written, it is overwritten in terms of its directions and advice for the Game Master, yet often underwritten in terms of its explanation.

With its high production values, Dread Shores & Black Horizons promises a lot. It is certainly an eye-catching boxed scenario. However, the intriguing promise of its stark black and white look and hints of horror, remained disappointingly unfulfilled with its underwhelming plotting and character design. There is potential here for a session’s worth of cramped and uneasy tension against a growing sense of dread as a horror slithers up from inside the island where it was imprisoned, to taunt and terrorise the shipwrecked survivors. Yet not as written and not as developed. The high production values of Dread Shores & Black Horizons means that it deserves—or needs—a re-write or more development to really live up to them, but until that happens or a Game Master does the work herself, it remains a bafflingly missed opportunity.

It has been over six hundred years since the First Prophecy of Fatuma came to pass. The SIX, the Disciples of Fatuma, who following the prophecies put down in the Book of Fatuma, made a pilgrimage to the Primordial Mausoleum of THEY and deployed the Power of Tributes to decrypt the Mystical Lock sealing the Mausoleum. It was then that the They drew in the stale air of the Mausoleum, becoming one with the THEY and breathing out the parasites. The Six scattered, bringing the word and the infection of THEY to every corner of the ’verse. Then the Gnawing began. The parasites of THEY gnawed their way out of the infected. They spread. They gnawed their way out of planets. They spread. The infected split open. The planets split apart. Now mankind clings to life, looking out for any signs of THEY or hiding it inside them in the hope that it never erupts and spreads… The Earth is gone. Shattered into large pieces. There are places and planets where the remnants of Mankind survive, squabbling over resources and power, fearing the parasitical infectious word of THEY, but not without hope. There are whispers of a means to escape the end of this universe by entering another, one entirely free of THEY. It is called the Gate of Infinite Stars. Yet time is running out. The First Prophecy of Fatuma came to pass and so has every other Prophecy of Fatuma since. Except the last Seven Torments. Will the last Seven Torments come to pass and allow the Würms and the Grimm to consume the ’verse and with it, the last of Mankind? Or will the lucky few find their way to the Gate of Infinite Stars and at last be free of the Würms and the Grimm in a better, brighter future? That is, of course, if everyone fleeing through the Gate of Infinite Stars is free of the gnawing…
This is the set-up for Vast Grimm. Published by Infinite Black, it is a pre-apocalypse Science Fiction roleplaying game compatible in tone and structure with Mörk Borg, the Swedish pre-apocalypse Old School Renaissance style roleplaying game designed by Ockult Örtmästare Games and Stockholm Kartell and published by Free League Publishing. Yet there is news of an incident that threatens the future of the survivors even as the ’Verse is abuzz with word of another Torment about to come to pass. Doctor Hellina Hazel, lead quantum scientist working on the Gate of Infinite Stars, has been kidnapped! Although multiple factions have claimed responsibility, the abductors have been identified as members of an elite sect of the Devout. Worse, rumours over the Netwürk suggest that she has been transported to the Mausoleum of They where she will be sacrificed to a giant würm. Without Doctor Hazel’s knowledge, the likelihood is that the Gate of Infinite Stars will never be completed and thus all hope will be lost for mankind.

This is the set-up for Vast Grimm – Blood Altared, a scenario and setting supplement that expands the future depicted in Vast Grimm. The setting is the planet of K2-116B, a bare red-oxide rock renowned for its highly toxic atmosphere. The kidnapping of Doctor Hazel is not necessarily the only reason for the Player Characters to make the trip to the hellhole that is K2-116B—several other reasons are given, which makes the journey much more personal. These can be backed up with Netwürk chatter, but either way, the Player Characters find themselves on a Fatumite colony at the foot of the monolithic Mausoleum of THEY, surrounded by a Rotting Forest. Guile or stealth is required to get past the Devout of the colony and climb the giant würm bones of the tower temple. This is a race against time, a brutal brawl and trawl against fanatics dedicated to preventing anyone from stopping their divine purpose from coming to pass. Should the Player Characters fail, the ramifications are quite literally colossal and campaign changing… The Mausoleum of THEY is linear in structure, and so straightforward to run. Ultimately, the play of the scenario will vary upon how the players and their characters decide to approach it, stealth or out and out attack…
Interestingly, there is another way of running the scenario—and that is defence. There is no scenario for this given in Vast Grimm – Blood Altared, but it is difficult to imagine quite what to do otherwise with the new options for Player Characters given in the supplement. They include the Devoibot, reprogrammed to protect the Fatumites on K2-116B, though they are actually quite cynical about doing so. The character type includes reason why the Devoibots are on the planet and suggest skills such as a Big Databrain which has greater knowledge of THEY, a Blaster Bot with the blaster in its hand, or a Jammer Jaw that emits a high frequency signal that blocks all nearby electronics. The Disciplined Devout is a host to a würm and so might be able to smell the blood of those also infected by the würm, gain a temporary adrenal boost, or have it act as a back brace to increase his armour. The Rotter are descendants of the early missionaries who came to the poisonous world of K2-116B who are inured to its toxic environment, but must take and imbibe the red oxide of the world with them to survive. The Rotter might have toxic spores in his lungs that he can cough at others, an understanding of Tributes so deep that he might be able to understand encrypted tributes, or even possess his father’s skull and talk to it for advice! The Sword of Fatuma is a trained soldier of THEY, who might be tough as nails and survive situations that would kill others, wear a gauntlet made from the plated skull of a würm and bearing the mark of Fatuma, and possess battery-powered that make his eyes shine in a bioluminescent blue and thus look like one of their to the Grimm.
Numerous weapons like the Body Burner—a flamethrower fuelled by decomposing bodies, and Sonic Scream Sticks which cause the blood vessels of victims to pop when struck are detailed, as are cosmic treasures, including Fatuma’s Mitre and the Fang of Fatuma. Stats are provided for Fatumites as monsters as are the Fiendhünds, invisible hounds that hunt the wastes of K2-116B, and Rocnars, insectoid creatures that paralyse prey with a stinger, often multiple times, and then feed on their decaying flesh.
The Mausoleum of THEY, the Fatumite colony, and the surrounding Rotting Forest, are not the only places of interest on K2-116B—or rather under it. A network of caverns is home to the Rotters, those who were born and have adapted to the harsh environment of K2-116B and Teginoids, genetically and necromantically engineered humanoids. The cavern network and its Rotter colony are described in some detail, as some quite nasty weapons, like a blow gun used to target victims with the pellets of compressed Rotting Forest tree bark which causes the terrible, terrible itching, known as the ‘Scratch & Sniff’, that becomes increasingly difficult to resist… The Teginoids are the descendants of experiments which combined Würm and human DNA which live alongside the Rotters and which worship their Würm ancestors and all Würms. They are hostile to non-Rotters.
The caverns are not somewhere that the Player Characters are likely to visit readily. Though that might change by ‘Rotters on Board’, a scenario triggered by the landing of the Player Characters’ ship on K2-116B. Four Rotters board their vessel, perhaps attempting to stow away, steal parts and cargo, or even steal the ship. This could happen whilst the Player Characters are attempting to assault the Mausoleum of THEY, adding a complication to their attempts to get off world, likely in a hurry whether they have saved Doctor Hazel or not.
Physically, Vast Grimm – Blood Altared adheres to the Artpunk aesthetic of both Vast Grimm and Mörk Borg, with its use of vibrant, often neon colours and heavy typefaces. It looks amazing, a swirling riot of colour that wants to reach out and infect everything, but where the core rules were not always the easiest to read, the simplicity of the content in this supplement make it easier to read and use.

There is a weird dissonance in terms of scale in Vast Grimm – Blood Altared, with a big, bruisingly desperate strike mission against the clock to rescue an important scientist at one end of that scale, and the minor, irritating matter of potential stowaways or thieves getting aboard the Player Characters’ starship at the other end of the scale. If the Game Master runs the first mission, there is relatively little reason for the Player Characters to return and potentially encounter the second. There are a handful of adventure sparks which the Game Master can use to get the Player Characters to K2-116B, but will need to develop. Then are the Fatumites as Player Characters, just what is the Game Master to do with them when it is difficult for many of them to even leave K2-116B due to their need to inhale the planet’s toxins? Let alone the fact that they are normally the enemy in the world of Vast Grimm? Ultimately, whilst rescue mission into the Mausoleum of THEY is the selling point of Vast Grimm – Blood Altared, it really should have come at the back of the book and thus be the last thing that the Game Master sees and runs from it, enabling a campaign to build up to its momentous nature and giving to a chance for the Player Characters to explore the vileness of K2-116B a little bit first…

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

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Name: The Haunted Swamp: A 1920s ghost story in Tropical QueenslandPublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Jane Routley

Setting: Queensland, AustraliaProduct: Scenario
What You Get: Twenty-seven page, 5.52 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: “Modern morality and manners suppress all natural instincts, keep people ignorant of the facts of nature and make them fighting drunk on bogey tales.” – Aleister CrowleyPlot Hook: Drain the swamp of its crocodiles and its secretsPlot Support: Staging advice, four pre-generated Investigators, six NPCs, five handouts, one map, one supernatural monster, and lots and lots of crocodiles.Production Values: Reasonable
Pros# Detailed NPCs
# Easy to adjust to other eras# Straightforward investigation# Great cover# Phasmophobia# Herpetophobia# Limnophobia
Cons# Needs an edit
# Needs some Sanity losses# Would work better with more developed Investigator backgrounds
Conclusion# Queensland Gothic ghost story# Straightforward, easy-to-run investigation that is heavy on the interaction

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

—oOo—

Name: Smoke on the Huangpu: A 1930s one-shot in Old ShanghaiPublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Matthew Morris

Setting: Shanghai, 1931Product: Scenario
What You Get: Thirty-six page, 19.85 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: “Nobody will laugh long who deals much with opium: its pleasures even are of a grave and solemn complexion.” – Thomas de QuinceyPlot Hook: Murder on the banks of the Shanghai leads to the ‘insanity’ of additionPlot Support: Staging advice, Spotify playlist, four pre-generated Investigators, three NPCs, seven handouts, two maps, one Mythos tome, one Mythos spell, and two Mythos monsters.Production Values: Excellent
Pros# Single-session Shanghai investigation
# Decent pre-generated Investigators# Well organised investigation# Solid addition to a Shanghai-set campaign# Works as well with two as with three or four# Pharmacophobia# Submechanophobia# Speirophobia
Cons# Single-session Shanghai investigation# May drive an Investigator to addiction
Conclusion# Suitably squalid investigation in the seamier side of Shanghai# Feels like it should be longer, or there should be sequels

Tales of Argosa: Sword & Sorcery Adventure pitches itself as a Swords & Sorcery roleplaying game designed for short, sharp adventures built around emergent play. There is no set story, or indeed setting in the roleplaying game, but the intention is that the story and the play will develop from the choices made by the players and the actions of their characters. The Game Master will present to her players the hooks and rumours that their characters will respond to and thus follow up, deciding where to go, what to do, what to investigate, what to explore, who to interact with, and so on. What the player and their characters will discover is a sandbox world full of savage wilderness, treacherous cities, murderous monsters, mysterious ruins, fierce battles, ruinous magic, fabulous treasures, and cosmic weirdness. Wherever they go and whatever they do, fights are fast and brutal and magic is dark and definitely dangerous, and their goal is fortune and glory rather than some heroic cause necessarily.

Tales of Argosa is published by Pickpocket Press, following a successful Kickstarter campaign. An updating of the earlier Low Fantasy Gaming—effectively a second edition—Tales of Argosa is an Old School Renaissance retroclone that draws from Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, but shifts mechanically back to some older editions of the venerable roleplaying game whilst maintaining some modern mechanics. In addition, there are some quite startling changes that make the tone and play of the game a whole lot grimmer than the average retroclone. What this means is that there is a lot that is going to be familiar about Tales of Argosa—attributes, Races, Classes, monsters, types of combat, monsters, and treasures. However, there is a lot in Tales of Argosa that is going to be different and unfamiliar. Much of it is good, but some of it is not so much bad, as irksome—and even then, not for everyone.

So, what are the changes in Tales of Argosa? They start with a level cap—Player Characters can only achieve Ninth Level before they retire. Hit Points are low and remain low in comparison to other Dungeons & Dragons-style roleplaying games, even at Ninth Level. The Saving Throw is replaced by a Luck roll every time the Player Character would be damaged by an effect or the environment, but Luck diminishes each time it is tested. Encounters are designed to be unbalanced and dangerous, forcing the Player Characters when to fight and when to run. Healing takes minutes, not seconds, so it always takes place at the end of combat, by which time, a Player Character could be dead… Magic is dark and dangerous and if it goes wrong can cause madness and mutations, unleash monsters from the Veil, and worse! On the other hand, at each Third Level, a player can design an ability unique to his character (or pick one of the options in the book), so there is scope for customisation. Exploits—Minor, Major, and Rescue—that work alongside damage inflicted enable heroic action upon the part of the Player Characters. There are Exploits too for combat, plus effects for ‘Nat 19’ and Critical rolls, which when combined with Fumble ripostes, Morale checks, and Trauma rolls, give a Player Character more choices and lend themselves to exciting and action-packed battles! Some damage dice can explode depending upon the weapon type and situation. These are not the only changes in Tales of Argosa, or indeed, the only features. They do, however, impart much of the tone of the roleplaying game.

A Player Character has a Race, Class, seven Attributes, and a Background. The five Races are Human, Dwarf, Elf, Halfling, and Half Skorn. Called halfmen or beastmen, Skorn are heavy set, pink skinned proto-humans, whilst Half Skorn are strong and hard-to-kill and inclined to war and conquest, but suffer from poor memory and analytical ability. The Classes are the Artificer, Bard,

Fighter, Barbarian, Monk, Ranger, Rogue, Cultist, and Magic User. The Cultist is the equivalent of the Cleric, with five suggestions given in terms of gods worshipped and the benefits and strictures of doing so, whilst the Artificer can be an expert alchemist, forge master, gear priest, or black powder savant. He gains access to alchemy and mechanica, inventions that he can use once per day per Level. The inventions include a Black Powder Weapon, Chaintooth Weapon, Breathing Mask, Corroding Spray, Ironward, Thunder Gauntlet, Truth Serum, X-ray Goggles, and more. He can also jury rig a device or concoct a mixture a number of times equal to his Intelligence modifier per day to bypass a current obstacle, disarm a trap, or assist the party in some other way. The seven attributes are Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Willpower, Perception, and Charisma. Initiative is derived from Dexterity and Intelligence, whilst Perception is also used to determine ranged attack bonuses. A Background provides an attribute bonus, a skill, and an item. For example, the Rat Catcher Background improves a Player Character Dexterity by one and gives him a wedge of cheese, whilst a Hangman gains a bonus to his Willpower, the Leadership skill, and thirty feet of rope.

Notably, at Third, Sixth, and Ninth Level, a Player Character can have a ‘Unique Feature’, the equivalent of a Feat. These can be created by the player, but Tales of Argosa offers a set of off-the-shelf options. Many of these are ‘Cross Class’ Unique Features, enabling a Player Character of one Class to take an ability of another, such as ‘Alchemy & Mechanica (Cross Class)’, which grants a Player Character one invention from the Artificer’s list and limited use of it. Many also have multiple tiers, meaning that they can be selected three times. For example, with ‘Pilfer Pouch’, a Player Character has wandering hands and is always picking up things and putting them in his pouch. At Tier 1, the player rolls percentile dice to randomly draw an interesting—and hopefully useful item—such as a Skorn tooth or a jar of bees—from the pouch; at Tier 2, the player can reroll; and at Tier 3, the player can make a Luck check to pick an item from the table.

To create a character, a player rolls for his Race and Background. He then rolls three six-sided dice for his attributes, one of which must be fifteen or higher, and another thirteen or higher. He can raise stats to these values if necessary. He selects a Class and takes (or rolls) its options at First Level, and also rolls for a Party Bond, which explains why the Player Characters are together. Everything is either set or derived, notably Hit Points are equal to a Player Character’s Constitution, plus a modifier determined by Class. For example, the Barbarian’s Hit Points are equal to his Constitution plus twice his Level, whilst the Magic-User’s is only equal to his Constitution plus Level. Equipment is a mixture of Battle Gear Slots and Pack Gear, but each Class offers some equipment, including arms and armour, as well as some coins.

Donoso
Class: Magic-User
Level: 1 Age: 30
Background: Prisoner
Strength 14 (+1) Dexterity 07 (-1) Constitution 07 (-1)
Intelligence 16 (+2) Willpower 16 (+2) Perception 16 (+2)
Charisma 14 (+1) Luck 11

Armour Class: 10
Initiative: 12 (+0)
Attack Bonus: +1 Ranged Bonus: +2
Rerolls: 2
Hit Points: 8
Death Save: 12

Abilities: Spellcraft, Sense Magic
Spells Known: Hex of Volcanic Steel (Heat Metal), Whispers of the Watchers (Locate Object)
Skills: Animal Lore, Arcane Lore, Apothecary, Deception, Persuasion, Sleight of Hand
Battle Gear: spellbook, longsword (1d8), leather armour (+1 AC)
Pack Gear: torch, bedroll, rations (5 days), manacles, and tinderbox
Coins: 10 sp

Of the Classes, the Artificer is the outlier. It adds technology such as the Black Powder Weapon and Chaintooth Weapon—the latter effectively a chainsword—that the Game Master may not want in her campaign and do not necessarily fit the swords & sorcery genre. The option is given to make the Class more like the Alchemist, with Poison replacing both weapons, but why not do it the other way round? Make the Alchemist Class the default as it does more readily fit the genre and the Artificer the option?

Mechanically, Tales of Argosa uses a number of different systems. The first is Luck. A Luck roll is a roll against, rolling under the value, typically to resist serious adverse effects such as spells, traps, special enemy attacks, or major environmental hazards, or to perform a Major Exploit, Rescue, or Party Retreat, which rely on the Luck resource to pull off. Depending upon the nature of the situation, a Luck roll can be modified by an attribute. However, each time a Player Character succeeds on a Luck roll, his Luck attribute is reduced by one to a minimum of five.

As with the Luck roll, skill checks and attribute checks are rolled under an attribute. A skill increases the attribute value by one for the skill check. A Player Character has a number of Rerolls, determined by Level, which can be used on Attribute checks, Luck checks, Death saves, and so on. Humans have one more Reroll than other Races. It is possible to roll a Great Success or a Terrible Failure on an Attribute or Skill check. A roll that is equal to half or less of the Attribute or Skill is a Great Success, whereas, a roll equal to or greater than one-and-a-half times the Attribute or Skill is a Terrible Fail. Thus, for example, for Donoso’s Dexterity of seven, a Great Success would be three or less, but a Terrible Failure, eleven or more, whereas for Intelligence, a Great Success would be eight or less, a Terrible Failure, twenty only. Modifiers to skill checks and attribute checks, can be a few points either way, but instead of major modifiers, Advantage and Disadvantage is used instead. There are other difficulty mechanics present in Tales of Argosa which seem to apply to Montage rules, but these are not readily explained.

Combat in Tales of Argosa uses group initiative, rolled against one Player Character’s Initiative. If successful, the Player Characters attack before the enemy and on a Great Success, before any boss or heavy monsters or other enemy. The players take it in turns to roll it, so that it is not always the player with the character with highest initiative always rolling. On a round, a Player Character can act and move once. Most fights are not to the death, but rather to the point when one side’s morale breaks. Typically, an action is an attack, casting a spell, dodging, and so on. Where an Attribute or Skill check requires a low roll on a twenty-sided die, combat requires a high roll to equal or better an Armour Class. A natural twenty inflicts maximum damage plus half the attacker’s Level—rounding up, rather than rounding down as in most situations. A Fumble results on a roll of one, potentially opening the fumbler up to a free attack.

Most weapons have properties that can also be triggered on a roll of a ‘Nat 19’, that is, a natural roll of nineteen. For example, a light mace or hammer inflicts 1d10 damage on a ‘Nat 19’, instead of the standard 1d6. The result of a ‘Nat 19’ gives a player two choices, one is a roll on the ‘Blunt Trauma’ table, the other is pushing a defender back a short distance or knocking him prone. To this, a player can also add an Exploit, which can be Major or Minor. Both require a player to hit and inflict damage, but a Minor Exploit might be to knock an opponent off his feet, drive him backwards, throw him through a window, throw dirt in his eyes, and so on. A Major Exploit might be to shatter a foe’s weapon, grab an enemy in each hand and crack their skulls together to stun them both, cut off a dragon’s wing, or decapitate the head of an orc. A Major Exploit does not increase damage to a single target, but might affect multiple targets, and nor can a Major Exploit kill or incapacitate a target, unless they are particularly weak. Similar rules work for Rescue Exploits, but Exploits in general, bring a narrative element into play as well as the standard rules. Other situations covered under combat include chases—complete with a table of chase events, as well as different fighting styles, knockouts, flanking, and aerial and underwater combat.

Damage, from any source, is deducted from a Player Character’s Hit Points. A combatant who is reduced to half his Hit Points is regarded as Wounded. This does not affect the Player Character, but it does certain monsters. For example, the Banshee’s ‘Death Wail’ recharges when it is Wounded. When a Player Character’s Hit Points are reduced to zero, he is dead or dying, but he and his fellow adventurers only find out which after the battle. At this point, a Death Save is made. If failed, the Player Character is dead, if successful, he is merely dying. At this point, healing can be rendered from any source and the player must still roll on the ‘Injuries & Setbacks’ table to determine the effects of being brought to near death. This can be as simple as a sprained ankle that limits his movement and mobility temporarily or it could be a broken or even a lost leg! Non-magical healing requires Willpower checks for a Short Rest, typically only one Hit Point is recovered following a night’s sleep, and a Long Rest takes a week!

Sorcery requires an Intelligence (Arcane Lore) check to cast, followed by a ‘Dark & Dangerous Magic’ check. If the Intelligence (Arcane Lore) check results in a ‘Great Success’ result, the spell is extra potent, gaining an extra effect as detailed in the spell. For example, A Wisp Unseen, which grants invisibility, lets the caster make a second person invisible too. However, on a ‘Terrible Failure’, both the spell and the ‘Dark & Dangerous Magic’ check fails. A Magic-User cannot cast the same spell more times than his Intelligence modifier per day. A Magic-User casting a spell is not the only situation in which a ‘Dark & Dangerous Magic’ check is required. It is also made when a Cultist invokes a Blessing without Favour from his god, gained from adhering to his deity’s strictures. A Cultist either has Favour or he does not and he can gain it multiple times per day, but the more times he uses it, the harder it becomes to gain. Whilst a ‘Dark & Dangerous Magic’ check may be required due to some magical aspect of a scenario or situation, the other reason why it might be required for a Player Character other than a Magic-User or Cultist is when a magic item is used.

A ‘Dark & Dangerous Magic’ check requires a simple die roll. Initially an eight-sided die, but then a ten-sided and a twelve-sided die as the Magic-User or Cultist goes up in Level. Using a magic item necessitates the rolling of a twenty-sided die. Whatever the die type, on a roll of one, the ‘Dark & Dangerous Magic’ effect is triggered and a roll on the ‘Dark & Dangerous Magic’ table is required, or the ‘Divine Rebuke’ table if a Cultist. The result might be “Fell Fingers – Your fingers turn into tentacles, serpents, leeches or something similarly creepy for 1d6 minutes. You cannot cast spells during this time. You count as Two Weapon Fighting and cause 2d6 acid or poison-based damage on a hit.” or “Plague of Flies – Lingering in the open attracts an abundance of flies, gnats, mosquitoes, locusts, etc, to your person. Atonement ends the rebuke.” There is a table of Atonements for the Cultist. However, if the ‘Dark & Dangerous Magic’ check succeeds, its threshold rises by one until either it is triggered or a new adventure begins and it can be reset.

Tales of Argosa lists some fifty spells, from A Wisp Unseen, Abjure the Unnatural, and Arcane Aegis to Whispers of the Watchers, Wings of the Raven King, and Witchblade. Most of them are familiar, but are renamed. For example, Dark Slumber is Sleep and Riddle of Bones is Speak with Undead. This both adds flavour, but it also confuses somewhat.

Beyond adventuring, the Player Characters are given numerous options for their downtime. Of course, this includes advancement, but it also covers buying or constructing buildings, black market trading, carousing, gambling, training pets—including monstrous pets, brewing potions, recovery—from addiction, madness, and injuries, conducting research, inscribing scrolls, and rumour mongering. For the Game Master, there is guidance on running wilderness and dungeon adventures, supported by encounter tables for both, hireling creation tables, running mass battles, and handling madness. This is typically suffered after encountering monstrosities, aberrations, and demons, or reading forbidden lore and requires a Luck (Willpower) check to resist. Symptoms manifest in acute episodes once per symptom per adventure and cannot be cured by magic, only through recovery during downtime.

Tales of Argosa includes an extensive bestiary of monsters with guidance on customisation and set of templates that will turn a monster into a boss, demon, heavy, lycanthrope, and more. Again, most of the entries will be familiar from other Dungeons & Dragons-style roleplaying games, but many also have scope for customisation. Rounding out the roleplaying game are sample traps and an extensive list of magic items. There is also a set of Oracle Tools, intended for use as ‘quintessential improv enablers’ and which make use of The Bones or Deck of Signs. They work well, but they feel out of place in a retroclone, more so because they require a completely separate set of dice to the standard polyhedral dice or cards. Obviously, they are also available online, but that adds complexity when Tales of Argosa is played at the table. There are rules too for solo play and a dungeon generator to work with normal and solo play.

Physically, Tales of Argosa is cleanly, but occasionally, tightly laid out. In general, it is well written and apart from the occasional piece that feels out of place, the artwork—all black and white—is excellent, a mix of classic Dungeons & Dragons combined with swords & sorcery.

Tales of Argosa is an attempt to create a grimmer and more perilous version of Dungeons & Dragons-style play, and in this, it succeeds. This is primarily through the lower number of Hit Points, the lack of immediacy of healing in combat, reliance on a diminishing luck resource rather than standard Saving Throws, and spellcasting being ‘Dark & Dangerous Magic’. Yet this comes with a complexity that echoes Advanced Dungeons & Dragons more than it does any other edition. None of the roleplaying game’s various subsystems is necessarily complex in themselves, but the roll low for Attribute, Luck, and Skill checks versus the roll high for combat versus the roll low for ‘Dark & Dangerous Magic’ check is outmoded, counterintuitive, and adds unnecessary complexity. Similarly, the roll of a natural twenty versus a ‘Nat 19’ is counterintuitive and in the case of the latter adds further complexity, as well as forcing the question, “Which is the better result?” Or rather, which has the more interesting result? Invariably, it is the ‘Nat 19’ result because the player gets to roll on the various trauma, or critical hit, tables. The inclusion of Exploits add an extra narrative effect as well, and then the Oracle Tools seem to have been dropped into the roleplaying game from an entirely different game and age. And yet…

Not every player or Game Master is going to have an issue with the differing subsystems in Tales of Argosa, but there will also be those that do. It simply means that Tales of Argosa is not for them. Yet to be fair, they all add flavour and detail to play as well as enforcing the fact that adventuring is dangerous and for the foolish. Tales of Argosa: Sword & Sorcery Adventure is undoubtedly an entertaining roleplaying game, but Game Master and player alike are going to have to adjust to its complexities to get to the entertaining part of play.

A new life awaits you in the far reaches of the galaxy! A chance to begin a life of adventure and excitement in a dark region of opportunity and adventure! There is no future for you at the heart of civilisation, let alone on some backwater planet. You can take the government scrip and the government slop and live an existence of hopeless lassitude. Or you can sign up with the Extracsa Conglomerate and receive training that will make you useful to the corporation and to society, contributing to the future of humanity. The operations of the Extracsa Conglomerate are expanding into the far reaches of the galaxy, a bleak region of space, dominated by a golden scar-like object known as the Glitch. Having completed your training, you have been assigned to this expansion area for the period of your indenture. Rumours swirl about your assignment, that the region is somewhere where life, technology and reality can become twisted and wrong. This is the set-up for Cosmic Dark, is a game of weird space horror from the designer of Cthulhu Dark and the highly regarded Stealing Cthulhu.

Cosmic Dark is a storytelling game of cosmic and Science Fiction horror that is significant in three ways. First, it offers a complete six-part campaign that can be played through in roughly twelve or so sessions. Second, it provides complete guidance for the Director—as the Game Master is known—to create more scenarios of her own. Third, it is designed to be played straight from the page with a minimum of effort, using a very light set of mechanics. The players learn the rules of the roleplaying game as they play, including Employee generation, although the Director will still need to read the rules and the scenario beforehand to get the best out of the story. Thankfully, the core rules run to just seven pages, requiring no more than some six-sided dice, preferably of different colours.

A Player Character—or Employee—is very simply designed. He has a Specialism, such as Medical Officer, Mining Engineer, Geologist, Comms Officer, and Team Leader, and then a series of stats on a one-to-six range. Changed represents how much space affects an Employee. It is rolled every time an Employee is hurt or something weird happens to him, and when it reaches six, he is broken and their story is over. In addition, he has a Reality Die and a Specialism Die. These are rolled when the Employee wants to investigate something. The highest result determines the amount of information the Employee gains. This is the bare minimum on a roll of one and everything the Employee can be expected to discover on a four. In addition, the Employee can also gain access to Records from Extracsa’s databases on a roll of five, but on a six, the Employee learns all of this and worse, gains a glimpse of the Anomaly, which may trigger a Changed roll. (The Director can hold a five or six if there is nothing appropriate in a scene.) If someone—which can be another player or the Director—thinks the story would be more interesting if the Employee failed, they roll a Failure Die against the Employee’ player. If the Failure Die rolls higher than the Employee’s die, the Employee fails. Combat is handled in this way, failure triggering a Changed roll. However, it should be noted that the focus of Cosmic Dark and its campaign is upon interaction and exploration and discovery, and not on combat.

In the long term, it is possible for an Employee to reduce his Changed. This might be through surgery, drugs, Memory Anaesthetic, or something else, but it is not guaranteed to work. However, an Employee’s Changed does reset to one at the end of an assignment. He also gains a new attribute, Burnout. This starts at one and is gained between assignments and potentially from moments when his mistrust in Extracsa Conglomerate is triggered or grows. If an Employee’s Burnout reaches six, he is unable to work anymore, gains one more scene, and he retires.

Mechanically then, Cosmic Dark is fast and simple. Obviously, this means that it leaves space for the Director to focus on the narrative and presenting the story and the setting.

The campaign of Cosmic Dark consists of six parts. Each part consists of a different assignment by the Extracsa Conglomerate. The first assignment, ‘Extraction’, begins by establishing who the Employees are, where they all grew up together, and more, elements of which will be reinforced again and again at the beginning of each assignment, and then pushes the players to use the rules to Comic Dark. This is intended as a learning process, though the Director should read through the rules at the end of the book as it is more directly presented. The Employees are assigned to excavate a never before mined asteroid and find it strangely invasive. They also find signs that it is not as pristine as promised. ‘Time Murder’ is a weird murder mystery where the Employees are assigned to sister-company to help harvest energy, whilst in ‘Transparency’ they are given a twenty-four-hour window to salvage what they can aboard an Extracsa Conglomerate starship. To their surprise, the Employees find survivors, but ones with unreliable memories of what happened to the starship. This Assignment does get gory in places, but it is a decently cosmic twist upon the ship in peril set-up. The fourth and fifth Assignments—‘Every Sunrise’ and ‘Every Sunset’—parallel and mirror each other, and can be played in any order, although they work slightly better in the order given. They explore the same or similar planets from different angles, one a desperate evacuation mission, the other a terraforming mission. The campaign comes to a close in ‘The Invisible Hand’ in which past discoveries give a chance for the Employees to put their employer on a different path—or has that already happened?

Cosmic Dark is a roleplaying game of weird space horror, in which life, technology, and reality break down, change, and go wrong. When not describing the situations that Employees find themselves and the outcomes of their actions, the Director is in many ways exactly that, someone who ‘directs’, and who does this through direct questions and prompts intended to provoke an emotional response, such as “What scares you most about space?” or “What is your most painful memory?” The advice for the Director suggests ways in which to do this and enhance the horror, building from the players’ answers to the prompts, but is also on how to write scenarios for Cosmic Dark as well as run it. Here the advice suggests creating situations that the Employees cannot correct and giving them choices where the only options are bad ones. Just as the questions to the players and their Employees are very direct, so too is the advice to the Director, pointedly telling her what to do as she takes the players and their Employees through the stages of a Cosmic Dark Assignment, first ‘Weird’, then ‘Dangerous’, before escalating into ‘Deadly’. All three stages are explored as are a variety of different situations, such as the Employees contacting the Extracsa Conglomerate, using the preceding scenarios as examples. What is clear from the advice throughout is that in each of the Assignments in Cosmic Dark there is a story to be told, one that the players and their Employees cannot easily deviate from or disengage from. In the case of the former, although the ending of any one story is not set in stone, there is still room to explore and investigate, and even add details to the world around the Employees, whilst in the case of the latter, the Director is told to make it clear when certain actions simply will simply not work. Conversely, where necessary—and especially if it enhances the horror—the Director is encouraged to work player suggestions into the story. Overall, the advice is strong and to the point.

Physically, Cosmic Dark is well presented with a clean and tidy layout. The book is black and white and lightly illustrated, but the artwork is starkly appropriate. As with previous books by the author, his voice shines through, especially in the advice for the Director.

To be clear, Cosmic Dark is in no way Lovecraftian in its cosmic horror. Its horror is environmental in nature, born of the clash between the alien spaces the Employees are instructed to explore and in the case of the Employees, the need to first understand them and then second, survive them, whilst in the case of the Extracsa Conglomerate, to exploit them. The Extracsa Conglomerate is not necessarily evil, but it is a corporate entity with all of the dispassionate, self-serving drive and scientific pride you would expect. The play of Cosmic Dark is interactive and investigative in nature, but also introspective given the number of questions that the Assignments and thus the Director is ordered to ask. Here it feels as if the author himself is asking them, but were it not for these questions, there would be an overwhelming sense of depersonalisation of each Employee by the Extracsa Conglomerate. What remains still serves to enhance the disconnection that the players and their Employees are likely to feel in the face of the Glitch as they are bounced from one Assignment to the next.

As a roleplaying game, Cosmic Dark is a simple set of rules combined with good advice and suggestions as to how to use prompts to elicit responses from the players and their Employees to drive good storytelling. As a campaign, Cosmic Dark depicts an uncaring universe and the consequences of Humanity interacting, unwittingly or not, with it. Together they showcase each other. Ultimately, Cosmic Dark presents a campaign of Science Fiction horror in which the only compassion belongs to the Employees and the real monsters might be humanity and its drive to explore and exploit.

—oOo—
Cosmic Dark is currently being funded via Kickstarter.

The year is 1395. The Hundred Years War has long been over, but neither Europe, or indeed, Christendom is stable. The Crusades continue in the Levant to the great cost of Europe’s great kingdoms. Outbreaks of the Black Death are all too frequent. The peasantry and the labouring classes bristle against the continued abuse of privilege and ill-treatment they suffer at the hands of both government and nobility, resulting in civil unrest and uprisings. Trade and production are held in the vice-like grip of mercantile and craft guilds, limiting scope for growth, enrichment, and improvement. And the Papacy is itself riven in two. In the past, unrest in the Holy See and Rome forced the Pope to flee to the French city of Avignon. Now there are two members of the church claiming to be the Bishop of Rome and thus head of the church. Pope Boniface IX sits in Rome, whilst Benedict XIII sits in Avignon. Which of the incumbents has the right to call himself the Holy Father? Which of the incumbents is ready to accept the other as the rightful Pope? Which of the incumbents is willing to resign, so that a new Pope can be elected and so reunite the church? It does not matter, for now Pope Benedict XIII fears the influence of the other Pope and outside influences, undermining his authority and that of the faithful. In the city of Avignon, made grand by his beneficence and that of his predecessors, all legitimate Popes, the paranoia of Pope Benedict XIII runs deep. The security and integrity of the Papal Court must be maintained in the face of continuing subversion, greedy priests, proud kings, angry mercenaries, lazy clerks, not said the neuroticism of the Pope, and so Papal Investigators must be deployed.

This is the set-up for Ship of Fools, a ‘Genre Set-Up’ for Sanction: A Tabletop Roleplaying Game of Challenges & Hacks. Published by Just Crunch Games, this is setting in which the Player Characters are members of the Office of Papal Investigation charged with finding peaceful—or at least the least disruptive—solutions to the issues that the Avignon papacy faces, ensuring the safety of the Pope, and enforcing the pronouncements and decrees made by Pope Benedict XIII. The setting is based upon historical research, its bibliography referencing The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco and Ars Magica by Jonathan Tweet, let alone books on the Avignon Papacy and the Medieval world. In tone it suggests the setting is Father Ted meets Kafka’s The Trial, but add to that the roleplaying game Paranoia and the animated Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. The degree of research shows succinctly in the first few pages, which in turn describe the world of Avignon, the papal palace, the ladder of stations—from Pope all the way down to the Monk and the layman—in the Catholic Church, and its world in turmoil.
A Papal Investigator in Ship of Fools has three Resources, here called Influence, Eminence, and Passion, the equivalent of Charisma, Reputation, and Willpower (or faith). These are not necessarily physical abilities, although there is nothing to stop a Papal Investigator from applying them to physical situation, but rather ways in which a Papal Investigator can apply his standing and belief in his standing in the church—that belief being his own and that of the NPCs around him. He also has three Abilities, one for each of his three Lifepaths. One Lifepath is his Curia Role, what was his original assignment within the Avignon court before being appointed to the Office of Papal Investigations; one is from his Secret Order which gives him secret purpose; and one from his Papal Duties, the training that marks him as a Papal Investigator. There are eight orders of the Curia, which together run the church. For example, the Camera Apostolica, whose lawyers extract taxes, whilst their most devout examine and catalogue relics for signs of their divinity; the Hospitallers protect the church, but their lack of faith is  doubted by the Inquisition; and the Transitus maintains the Papacy’s means and lines of communication across Europe, leading to rivalry with the Supportare, which maintains the infrastructure of the Papacy and Avignon. The other Curia include the Chancery, Dominican Order, Roman Inquisition, Apostolic Penitentiary, and the Supportare. The Secret Orders consist of the Adminsitratum, Anarcho-Syndicalists, Black Friars, Clementines, Committee, Free Spirits, Gardeners, Knights of the Holy Ghost, Metéora, Mumblers, and Occamites, whilst the Papal Duties include Barber Surgeon, Cellarer, Lector, Sacrist, Almoner, Financial Steward, and Liturgist.
In addition to two devices and pieces of equipage, the Papal Investigator has Corruption. This is a measure of his lack of Piety. It begins play at one and can go as high as ten. When his player fails a Challenge, that is, rolling one or two on a Challenge, the Papal Investigator suffers doubts and his piety is tested, requiring a roll higher than his current Corruption score. Calling upon a relic for its divine power or making a confession—as every Papal Investigator must do at the end of a Calling—also requires a similar test. If failed, the Papal Investigator gives into a sin or Folly, such as pride, sloth, deceit, or petulance. One point of Corruption and its associated Folly can be expunged between adventures, but a Papal Investigator can also beg an indulgence of another Papal Investigator (though if this fails, both suffer more Corruption) or pay a penance to remove more.
Although the Camera Apostolica controls the vast archive of holy relics held by the papacy and access to them, each Papal Investigator has his own that he can pray on and draw inspiration from. He may even find more in play, though not all of them may be ‘holy’. A Papal Investigator’s Relic is supplied by his Secret Order. Each Relic grants a particular power, but the Game Moderator is encouraged to create and fully develop Relics to make them interesting and unique. Several sample Relics, all nicely detailed, are provided. (The Game Moderator might want to look at Burgs & Bailiffs: Trinity – The Poor Pilgrim’s Almanack for more information on Relics.)
Catalina the BenignantOrigins: ToledoInfluence D8 Eminence D4 Passion D6Curia Role: ChancerySecret Order: ClementinesPapal Duties: Barber SurgeonAbilities: Ciphers, Dance, Craft (Tailor)Pressure Track: 0Equipment: Vial, Medicinal Cordial, Scribe’s KitHits: 3Corruption: 1Relic: Candle of St. Thomas (Extinguish: Fervour)
An adventure or assignment in Ship of Fools is known as a ‘Calling’. There is a little discussion on what a ‘Calling’ is, as well as an example as a suggested opening. At the start of a Calling, one Papal Investigator is appointed the leader, or Prior. He has two Fortune which can be sued on anyone’s roll, but at the end of the Calling, his player assesses the other Papal Investigators and rates them. The Game Moderator then tests their Corruption on this basis. This adds a tense and slightly adversarial element to play, the feeling that the Papal Investigators are constantly being monitored. To balance this, the Papal Investigators can take turns being the Prior.
Rounding out Ship of Fools is a set of short, sample Calling hooks and five sample pre-generated Papal Investigators, some enemies, and a complete Calling. This is ‘The Relic, The Ruse, and The Ridiculous’ in which the Papal Investigators are tasked with locating a missing relic. It is an entertaining affair which can be played through in a single session, perhaps two. The final pages discuss what might happen in the future of the twin Papacy.
Physically, Ship of Fools is well presented, but lightly illustrated with nicely period artwork. The supplement is a pleasing read.
Ship of Fools is a thoroughly engaging and enticing setting. The idea of playing papal investigators in a world of apostolic bureaucracy, religious dogma, and papal perturbation is a delight. This setting definitely deserves more content and even a campaign, but in the meantime, Ship of Fools is a very good introduction to a world of papal paranoia and sacred shambles.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the city of Stockton, California, was beset by a rash of strange deaths amongst its Hmong community. The Hmong were refugees from the Vietnam War and subsequent conflicts in southeast Asia. A total of one-hundred-and-seventeen immigrants and their descendants died under strange circumstances in their sleep, suffering from what doctors called ‘Sudden Unexpected Death Syndrome’ or ‘SUNDS’. However, the community did put these deaths down to medical causes, but to a supernatural creature that had accompanied individual families to the USA, continuing to prey upon the men of the families as they slept, literally pressing upon their chests and paralysing them in waking nightmares and feeding upon their terror, killing them in the process, whilst to outsiders making it appear as if they died in their sleep. The Hmong call this creature the ‘Dab Tsog’. That was decades ago, but now the city and its Hmong community has once again been beset by an outbreak of deaths due ‘sleep paralysis’. Could the Dab Tsog have returned to prey on the Hmong community? After losing one of her patients to these nightmares, Dr. Maria Vicente, who conducts studies at a sleep clinic, is beginning to suspect that something is stalking the sleep of her patients and so asks for help from anthropologists, folklorists, and investigators. Published by Yeti Spaghetti and Friends, The Nightmare is a short, one-night horror scenario, part of and third in the publisher’s ‘Frightshow Classics’ line. Ostensibly written for use with Chill or Cryptworld: Chilling Adventures into the Unexplained, the percentile mechanics of the scenario mean that it could easily be adapted to run with Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition and similar roleplaying games.

The Nightmare, like the first in the ‘Frightshow Classics’ line, Horror in Hopkinsville, before it, is inspired by a real incident, one that also inspired the Nightmare on Elm Street series of horror films. It returns to the story in Stockton and opens with the Player Characters attending Dr. Vicente’s sleep clinic where she is attempting to study the disrupted sleep patterns of a young boy. The Player Characters will have had the opportunity to conduct some research about Stockton, the deaths amongst the Hmong, and the community’s belief that a Dab Tsog was responsible. They will also have discovered that strange lights have been seen in the city as well, but most notably they will have made the link between the Dab Tsog and figure of the ‘Night Hag’ found in other cultures. Thus, the scenario really sets the players and their characters up with what they need to know right from the start. After an encounter in which Dr. Vicente’s young patient has his sleep interrupted in a frighteningly scary fashion and one, if not more, of the Player Characters are lured away, the narrative in the scenario is not to discover that there is supernatural threat abroad in Stockton, but rather to confirm what the Player Characters already think it to be. To do this, they will need to visit the Hmong and ask some questions of the not always trusting members of the community, calling for some good roleplaying.
The Nightmare is a three-act story. In the first, the Player Characters ‘witness’, or at least, experience someone suffering from the predations of the Dab Tsog and the second investigating the reactions of the community. The third brings the story to a climax back at the sleep clinic where, with local help, the Player Characters can lure the Dab Tsog into striking and thus revealing her presence and making her vulnerable. This will result in an intense physical battle in which the Player Characters have very little time in which to attack—so they had better be prepared. She is not the only threat that the Player Characters may face, but she is the toughest one.
In terms of support, the scenario includes a handful of handouts and eight pre-generated Player Characters. They represent a good mix of ages and backgrounds, several have the Investigation skill, others the Paranormal Folklore skill, and a couple the Sense Monsters Paranormal ability. The latter will be very useful, whilst one is a very dab hand with the dagger, which will be extremely useful in the final encounter.
Physically, behind its creepy cover, The Nightmare is decently presented. The artwork is decent and is dark and foreboding throughout, whilst the floorplans of the sleep clinic are nicely done (though oddly, there is no toilet on the floor where it is located). Although the handouts are plain, the pre-generated Player Characters portraits are good.
The Nightmare is short and direct, no surprise given that it is intended to be played in a single session. Like The Blood Countess before it, the scenario very much has the feel of an episode of a television series. For The Blood Countess, this was Kolchak: The Night Stalker, but for The Nightmare this is The X-Files, though a standalone episode, not one tied to the Series’ ongoing plot to do with UFOs and aliens. Overall, The Nightmare is easy to prepare and will provide a good sessions’ worth of creepy horror that might put the players, let alone the characters, off their sleep.

Dreams of a beautiful dark-skinned woman asking to be returned to the ocean and a temple hidden within its depths. A local coastline being beset by deadly storms and attacks by monsters and spirits which rise from the deep. A scholar wanting to visit an ancient subaquatic site as part of his research and asking the adventurers to help him locate it. A strange bleaching is spreading along the coast, destroying ships, marking fish stocks, and spreading panic, and merchants want to hire some to determine the cause and put an end to it. An ancient, underwater temple is said to be home to a great jewel called the Ocean Jewel, said to grant great powers to the user when at sea or under the water. One, more, or all of these are reasons to visit the ‘Temple of the Forgotten Depths’, an ancient temple said to have collapsed into the sea decades ago and become a beacon for drowned souls and those who would turn upon any and all seafarers! They are also the hooks for Temple of Forgotten Depths.

Temple of the Forgotten Depths is an adventure written for use with ‘5E+’, so Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition and Dungeons & Dragons 2024. It is a playtest adventure, the first, in an anthology of scenarios published by No Short Rests! called One Room One Shots. Each entry in the collection is a short adventure themed around a single room or structure and intended to be slotted readily into a campaign or more readily, played in a single session with either no preparation or preparation required beforehand. This might be because some of a group’s players are unable to attend; because they want to play, but not want to commit to a longer scenario or campaign; or because a group wants to introduce new players to the roleplaying game. Temple of the Forgotten Depths is written for a group of Player Characters of Fifth Level. The scenario has no other requirements beyond this and its setting, but knowledge of the Aquan language will be useful or any ability to speak other languages.

However they are drawn to the ‘Temple of the Forgotten Depths’, the Player Characters begin the encounter after having swum down from the surface, having imbibed a Potion of Water Breathing. However, once inside the temple, apart from certain locations, they will not need this as there is air. The temple is a giant dome constructed of stone and coral that is no longer as magnificent as it once was. This is due to the coral having been bleached through exposure to corruption and this bleaching has not only affected some of the inhabitants of the temple, it can also affect the Player Characters like a cosmetic curse. The location of the temple’s treasure, the Ocean Jewel is easy to discern, but getting to it is less obvious. Although they will receive some hints from an intriguing variant of the mermaid drawn from African mythology, the Player Character’ progress will be hampered by the temple itself corrupted as it is from dark influences and that dark influence’s attempts to stop them. Throughout the scenario there are some encounters with some nicely thematic monsters like the Drowned Ones, the spirits of those who died at sea, and the malign influence behind the temple’s corruption. In this, any Warlock should beware. Contact with this malign influence may result in the Warlock’s pact suddenly shifting, though this is not explored in the scenario.

Penultimately, the Player Characters will get within sight of the Ocean Jewel, but to get to it with any ease, they will need to solve three highly thematic and decent puzzles. This will enable access to the Ocean Jewel, but not before the threat at the heart of the scenario and the threat to the temple reveals itself. The climax of the scenario is a big boss fight against the Hydra of the Deep, a huge monstrosity with multiple Hit Points per head, its own Mythos Actions, which escalate into Legendary Actions if it loses two many heads! It is an appropriately challenging fight for both the environment and the scenario. Once the creature is defeated, the Player Characters can decide what to do with the Ocean Jewel. Several options are given for this and they are discussed in detail. Temple of the Forgotten Depths comes to a close with full stats and descriptions for all of its monsters and creatures and details of the magical items that can be found in the adventure.

However, one option not discussed in Temple of the Forgotten Depths in detail is what happens if a Warlock Player Character is forced into a Pact of the Deep through prolonged contact or another Player Character is affected by a Pact of the Deep. It is suggested that there is the possibility of such a pact turning that Player Character—Warlock or not—against the other Player Characters. These are only suggestions though and it would have been useful to have been given advice and mechanics on what has the potential to be an exciting turn of events.

Physically, Temple of the Forgotten Depths is well presented. It is lightly illustrated, but the artwork is excellent, and the maps of the temple are clear and easy to use. If there is an issue with Temple of the Forgotten Depths, it is that the text is small, making it a challenge to read!

Temple of the Forgotten Depths delivers a solid, enjoyably thematic scenario for a good session’s worth of play. It is presented as a playtest adventure, but in truth, Temple of the Forgotten Depths is ready to play, whether that is as a one-shot for an evening or an encounter for a campaign, and ready to play with a minimum of effort.

When you are called into to investigate a violent assault at an address in Putney, Southwest London, it sounds like any other day on the job in Putney, let alone London. When it turns out that that the assailant is described by an eyewitness as looking like, “… [S]omething straight out of one of those pirate films.”, then you know this is no ordinary case. It is, instead, a case for The Folly. Or rather, the ‘Special Assessment Unit’ of London Metropolitan Police Service, which in particular deals with magic and the Demi-Monde, and under the command of Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, registered practitioner of Newtonian magic, is increasing the number of its operational staff as crimes involving magic also rise. Which includes the Player Characters, who are then assigned to investigate the affray at the house in Kingsmere Close. Whilst the victims of the assault are not saying much, it quickly becomes clear that they are up to no good, as they have turned the house into a cannabis farm and are not the actual owners of the house. Further, once an Initial Vestigium Assessment has been conducted, it confirms that magic was used in the assault, and that very definitely means that this is a case for the Folly. So where is the owner of the house? Who is the man dressed like a pirate, quite likely an unlicensed practitioner of magic, and why did he attack the operators of a cannabis farm in a quiet corner of Southwest London? All pressing questions in Jimmy’s Last Dance: A Swashbuckling Case File of Family Intrigue.

Jimmy’s Last Dance: A Swashbuckling Case File of Family Intrigue is an investigation and case file for Rivers of London: the Roleplaying Game, based on the Rivers of London novels by Ben Aaronovitch. Published by Chaosium, Inc., this is a lengthier case file than previous releases for the roleplaying game, one that will probably take two or so sessions to play through. Or it can be added to campaign, perhaps run after ‘The Bookshop’ from the core rulebook or the case files, Going Underground – A Case File for Rivers of London: the Roleplaying Game and The Font of All Evil: Murder and Mayhem Besides the Thames. One issue perhaps with the scenario is that it set in a specific year and that it involves a political scandal that was at its height at the time. The year is 2016 and the scandal is The Windrush Scandal. Of course, the authors advise the Game Master to handle the issue with care and it is certainly not a problem that The Windrush Scandal is part of the scenario—in fact, it is actually woven into the plot of the case file—but rather that the timeframe is quite specific and thus difficult to shift the case file to another year.

There are multiple plot strands to the investigation, ones that will lead the Player Characters to a criminal gang, a solicitor with less than ethical standards, a rotten son-in-law and a bare-suspecting daughter, and an old lady with interesting secrets of her own. Then ultimately to the ‘pirate’ who attacked the cannabis farm and who has his own agenda throughout the scenario. Sometimes that and his movements will intersect with those of the Player Characters and their investigation. Although they can return to the Folly to conduct research, most of the investigation is confined to the borough of Putney itself and involves lots of Police dogwork—interviews, surveillance, and so on. Over the course of the investigation, the Player Characters will be conducting multiple interviews, all of which nicely presented to help the Game Master answer their questions and portray the various NPCs. In addition, there are some decent handouts that the Player Characters will be able to find through various research avenues.

There is good advice for the Game Master throughout the scenario. This starts with suggested Player Character types and roles, how to portray a pirate without sounding like Robert Newton, and continues with notes from both Peter Grant and Ben Aaronovitch. It is recommended that at least one Player Character be a police officer or detective and that one be a Newtonian apprentice or hedge wizard. Suggestions are given too, if the players want to roleplay pre-generated characters from the core rulebook. The oddest advice is on various pieces of British vernacular, such as the meaning of the term ‘old bag’ when used as a pejorative to describe a woman, old or not. Whilst a British audience will find this amusing, for a non-British Game Master, it explains the vernacular and gives alternatives where necessary. This gives her the choice of enforcing the verisimilitude with the given terms or using less pejorative ones. The structure of the scenario is nicely supported with both a relationship map and a plot progression chart, to help the Game Master keep track of the investigation and more importantly, the location of the ‘pirate’.

Physically, Jimmy’s Last Dance: A Swashbuckling Case File of Family Intrigue is clean, tidy, and easy to use. The maps and plot progression diagram are easy to use, the advice is good throughout, and the portraits of the various NPCs are excellent.

Jimmy’s Last Dance: A Swashbuckling Case File of Family Intrigue is a richly detailed investigation that combines parochially British charm and menace, backed up with good advice for the Game Master—and if things go right, a cozy ending.

—oOo—

Chaosium, Inc. will be at UK Games Expo which takes place on Friday, May 30th to Sunday June 1st, 2025.

Escape the Dark Sector: The Game of Deep Space Adventure is about survival. About making a break from the cell of the detention block of a vast space station where they have found themselves incarcerated. They have an opportunity to escape their imprisonment, but the route they must take, between the detention block and their spaceship, is fraught with danger. The escapees must find their way out of the Detention Level, through the Heart of the Station, and then the Forgotten Zones to their impounded spaceship—and escape! Published by Themeborne Ltd., Escape the Dark Sector is the Science Fiction sequel to Escape the Dark Castle: The Game of Atmospheric Adventure, which was inspired by the Fighting Fantasy series of solo adventure books and also the dark fantasy artwork of those books. As with its fantasy predecessor, Escape the Dark Sector can be played solo or collectively and offered plenty of replay value and variability with six Character Cards, fifty-three Chapter Cards—fifteen of which form the encounter deck, and five Boss Cards. Then of course, there are game’s three expansions: Escape the Dark Sector – Mission Pack 1: Twisted Tech, Escape the Dark Sector – Mission Pack 2: Mutant Syndrome, and Escape the Dark Sector – Mission Pack 3: Quantum Rift. Each of these provided players with new characters to play, a new mechanic—which meant a new challenge to overcome, new equipment, and of course, a new Boss standing in the way of the players’ escape. However, when it came to death—and there is no denying that Escape the Dark Sector is definitely about death, as well as escaping, if not more so—what neither Escape the Dark Sector, nor any of its expansions, or even Escape the Dark Castle, could offer was much mote than a mechanical outcome whenever a player’s character dies in the game.

The solution is Death in Deep Space, the Science Fiction equivalent of The Death Book for Escape the Dark Castle. This is a book of over one hundred death scenes, each corresponding to a particular Chapter or Boss. It is very easy to use. Whenever a character dies as a result of the events in a Chapter or the showdown with a Boss, he checks the relevant entry in the pages of The Death Book. This is made possible because every card in Escape the Dark Castle as well as in all three of its expansions is marked with a unique code. Cross reference the code with corresponding entry in the book, whether for a Chapter or a Boss card, read out the description provided, and so provide an unfitting, but final end for your character, followed by that of everyone else.

For example, the details on the Boss card, ‘The Alien Queen’ reads as follows:

“Die, humansss!”

The Alien Queen was lying wait! Jets of venom fly towards you as she pounces—YOU must roll two HIT DICE now.

If a player should die in the course of this final confrontation before he and his companions, always a strong possibility in Escape the Dark Sector, he picks up Death in Deep Space and after finding the entry for ‘The Alien Queen’, he reads aloud the following:

The Alien Queen

Once it enters your bloodstream, the paralysing venom of the Alien Queen works quickly – a spreading rigidity coursing through your entire body, locking your joints one by one until you are all but paralysed. Even your eyelids cannot close, and you are forced to watch in horror as the terrible creature captures your fellow crew with equal ease.

With a series of hissed commands to her countless, scurrying servitor spawn, you are all dragged back her vast, deck-spanning nest. There, a slick, black, fleshy membrane covers the walls and beneath the vaguely humanoid shapes of her decomposing victims are still recognisable. Their shallow breaths rise and fall in eerie synchronicity, an indication that their suffering is yet to be ended. Soon, you and your crew join them.

Once in place, your spines are sliced open. The shimmering spools of nerve fibre that spill out are intertwined with those of the other captives suspended around – the connection sealed with a sticky, mucus coating. In this way, you become part of the fabric of the hive, a sensory node in a living web, lining the walls as far as the eye can see, warning the hive of approaching threats and passing the news back through the biotic chain in an instant.

For the rest of your days, your pain is theirs and theirs is yours; you see what they see and hear what they hear, your collective existence painfully prolonged in service to your bestial captor.

Your adventure ends here.

Physically, Death in Deep Space is a neat and tidy, if plain affair. A page of introduction explains how to use the book and contains the book’s single illustration which shows where the unique code for the Chapter or Boss card is located. Then each entry has a page of its own. There is a degree of repetition to the entries, but only a little, and it really only becomes apparent when reading the book from end to end, which is not its intended use. A small and relatively slim book, Death in Deep Space fits easily into Escape the Dark Sector: The Collector’s Box Set.

Death in Deep Space is book of endings, but one that provides a final narrative and some context to that death. Escape the Dark Sector is an enjoyable game, but character deaths can feel little, “Is that it?”. With Death in Deep Space, it is no longer the fact that you died, but very much how you died. Grim and ghoulish, The Death Book brings the death of every character, and with it, the game of Escape the Dark Sector to a nasty and unfortunate, but fitting end.

—oOo—

Themeborne Ltd. will be at UK Games Expo which takes place on Friday, May 30th to Sunday June 1st, 2025.

It could be the seventies. It could be the eighties. It could be nineties. It could be now. Whatever the decade, the world is in danger and refuses to believe it. Creatures of the night stalk the darkness and only you have the knowledge and bravery to face their danger head on. So ready your UV torch, sharpen your stakes, bless your holy water, and load up the mystery wagon, because tonight you are going monster hunting! Are you ready to save the world and have nobody notice? Then that makes you a vampire hunter—fearless or otherwise! This is the simple set-up to Bite Me!, a scenario and mini-supplement for ACE!—or the Awfully Cheerful Engine!—the roleplaying game of fast, cinematic, action comedy, published by EN Publishing, best known for the W.O.I.N. or What’s Old is New roleplaying System, as used in Judge Dredd and the Worlds of 2000 AD and Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition. Some of the entries in the series have been expansive, such as Orcs & Oubliettes and Strange Science, providing a detailed setting and an scenario, whilst others in the series have tended to be one-shot, film night specials. Bite Me! falls into the latter category.

As with other supplements for ACE!, both the genre and inspiration for Bite Me! are obvious. However, there is a twist. The genre involves vampires and vampire-hunting, so the obvious inspiration is Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It is not though, the only inspiration for Bite Me! and the other adds very tongue (or is that fang?)-in-cheek tone to the whole affair. That inspiration is the Hanna-Barbera cartoon series, Scooby-Doo. So, this injects an extra dose of cheesiness into the play of the Awfully Cheerful Engine!. The bulk of Bite Me! is dedicated to a single adventure, ‘Darkness, BITES!’ and to that end, it provides four pre-generated Player Characters. However, it also gives the means for the players to create their own characters. These include suggested Roles such as talking Animals, Clerics, Druids, Slayers, Vampires, and Werewolves. To these are added the new Roles of Fortune Teller and Paranormal Investigator. The Fortune Teller gains the Power stat and can cast magic, but to begin with, does not know any spells. The Role also grants a bonus when using a tarot deck and knows if spirits are harmful. The Paranormal Investigator begins play never having encountered the supernatural, but has unveiled a lot of hoaxes. The Role gains a bonus when looking for clues and interacting with the authorities, and starts play with the Mystery Wagon, a mid-sized van.
In addition, various items of equipment are listed as being of use. These include garlic, holy symbol, tarot deck, EMF meter, pure salt, and more. In addition, there are stats for various things that the Player Characters might encounter, such as devil, mummy, poltergeist, and wolfman. The most amusing of these are the Crooked Property Developer (all together now, “And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you meddling kids!”) and the Pirate Ghost.
The four pre-generated Player Characters consist of Fluffy Winters, reluctant vampire slayer; Lilo Thornberg, witty fortune teller; Rooby Roo, faithful dog; and Ted Bones, cheery paranormal investigator. All of whom are very knowingly tongue-in-cheek in being drawn from their sources.
The adventure, ‘Darkness, BITES!’ begins with news reports of strange occurrences at a rundown amusement park. It could be ghosts or it could be something else! In fact, it is both, because the adventure really leans into both of its inspirations. So, if the players are expecting there to be a Crooked Property Developer, they will not be disappointed, and if they are expecting ghosts, they will not be disappointed either. That though, is not the end of the scenario. The Crooked Property Developer is hiding something and that tips the Player Characters into a much darker storyline, which will see them race around town to find signs of occult and even vampiric activity—helped by a local psychic and chased by another classic monster—before finally tracking the evil down and confronting it in its lair. Not so much Transylvania, as Transylvania USA! The scenario is nicely detailed and plotted out and easy to run. It is not set in a specific city, so can be set anywhere the Game Master decides. It just needs to be big enough to have an abandoned amusement park. The play of it should take two sessions or so to play through.

Physically, Bite Me! is well presented with reasonable artwork. It needs a slight edit in places.
Bite Me! is very light in terms of its treatment of its inspirations—but then it has to be. The aim is to make those inspirations easy to grasp by Game Master and player alike and enable the players to engage with them as little or as much as they would like. Which is all part of making the main focus of Bite Me!, the adventure ‘Darkness, BITES!’, just as easy and as quick to prepare. Bite Me! should provide the Game Master and her players with a session or two’s worth fang-tastic and snacka-licious fun. All they have to is provide the snacks.

—oOo—
EN Publishing will be at UK Games Expo which takes place on Friday, May 30th to Sunday June 1st, 2025.

The last two weeks you have spent in the city of Venice have been amazing. You have visited the Doge’s Palace, St. Mark's Basilica, and the Bridge of Sighs, as well as taken a gondola ride on the Grand Canal, explored the Rialto Market, and taken a day trip to the island of Murano to discover its unique glassblowing tradition. The food and wine have been good too, but now your holiday is nearly over. Your flight home leaves tomorrow, but you have one left one last thing you have to do to the last minute—gifts to take home for your friends and family. In fact, you are not really sure that you have enough time to search the shops for right gifts and get to Marco Polo International Airport for your flight home. It is not helped by the fact that the three friends you are buying for, hate it when they are not treated equally, but you have hired a gondola and you are going to search high and low for the right gifts for the right people—or miss your flight trying!

This is the set-up for Souvenirs from Venice, another game from Oink Games, the Japanese publisher best known for Scout. It is a set-collecting game designed for two to five players, aged eight and up, that can be played in thirty minutes, and it is from the same designers who did Deep Sea Adventure. The aim of the game is three sets of matching souvenirs and get to the airport. At the end of the game, each matching set of souvenirs will score points, whilst souvenirs that do not match will lose a player points. The players have to find the right souvenirs, make sure they do not have wrong souvenirs in their hands, and get to the airport. Only a player who gets to the airport in time will have a chance of being the winner.

Besides the rules in French, German, and Spanish as well as English, Souvenirs from Venice consists of forty-eight Souvenir Tiles, thirty Money Tokens, five Summary Cards, an Airport Card, a single die, and five Gondolas. The Souvenir Tiles range in value from five to ten and in turn depict Venetian Glass, Venetian Masks, Leather Goods, Gondolier Shirts, Squid Ink Pasta, and Fridge Magnets. Each Souvenir Tile is actually a shop and items are the goods they sell. Two depict the ‘Pigeon’ and ‘The Pigeon Feed Seller’. The die is marked one, two, and three, rather than one to six, and the gondolas are done in brightly coloured wood. The Summary Cards are reference cards for the play of the game.

Game set-up is simple. Each player receives a gondola, six Money Tokens, and a Sun. The Souvenir Tiles are laid out in a seven-by-seven grid, or five-by-five if two players, all face down, whilst the Airport Card is placed in one corner instead of a Souvenir Tile. The grid is open as the spaces in between represent the canals of Venice where players’ gondolas will travel, moving from intersection to intersection. All of the gondolas are placed on the Airport Card where they start play.

On his turn, each player must do three things in strict order. These are ‘Research’, ‘Move’, and ‘Buying or Selling’. In the ‘Research’ step, the player flips over any tile face down so that everyone can see it. In the ‘Move’, the player rolls the die and moves his gondola that exact number of spaces, hopping over any other player’s gondola in the way. ‘Buying or Selling’ gives a player two options. If he buys, it can be done in secret, looking at a Souvenir Tile adjacent to his gondola, but keeping it hidden from the other players, or he can buy any face up tile. Either way, he replaces it with Money Token. If he sells, he places a Souvenir Tile in his hand on the table face down, replacing a Money Token which he takes.

If the ‘Pigeon’ and ‘The Pigeon Feed Seller’ are both revealed—and they have to be revealed face up when discovered, they force each player to pass a Souvenir Tiles (or a Money Token if they have no Souvenir Tile) to the player on his left. This can mix things up, forcing a player to scramble to find matching Souvenir Tiles with the ones he has in his hand. However, this really comes into play later in the game rather than earlier, as the earlier it happens, the lower the chance it has of mucking up a player’s hand.

Souvenirs from Venice is a primarily a push-your-luck game, although it does have a memory element in that a player may need to remember the Souvenir Tiles he has looked at and where they are. However, what a player is mostly doing is pushing his luck to three sets of Souvenir Tiles, ideally of a higher rather than lower value. Of course, there are more of the latter than the former. Thankfully, a player can choose to sell to get rid of a poor value Souvenir Tile if he knows where one with a better value is or if he simply wants it out of his hand. The latter may be necessary because the other push-your-luck element of game is the timer element. Once all of the Souvenir Tiles have been bought or flipped over and face up, the flight leaves the airport. Anyone not at the airport by then, cannot score any points for the Souvenir Tile sets they have collected and automatically lose. Any player with sets of Souvenir Tiles at the airport gets to score, and the player with highest score wins.

Souvenirs from Venice is decently presented, if as with every Oink Games title, packed tightly into its little box. The quality of the components is good and the rules are clearly written.

Souvenirs from Venice is a solid, satisfying little game. It is a light game, better suited to family audiences and has a surprisingly decent theme that matches that lightness.

—oOo—
Oink Games will be at UK Games Expo which takes place on Friday, May 30th to Sunday June 1st, 2025.

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

Since 2008 with the publication of Fight On #1, the Old School Renaissance has had its own fanzines. The advantage of the Old School Renaissance is that the various Retroclones draw from the same source and thus one Dungeons & Dragons-style RPG is compatible with another. This means that the contents of one fanzine will be compatible with the Retroclone that you already run and play even if not specifically written for it. Labyrinth Lord and Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay have proved to be popular choices to base fanzines around, as has Swords & Wizardry. However, not all fanzines written with the Old School Renaissance in mind need to be written for a specific retroclone. Although not the case now, the popularity of Traveller would spawn several fanzines, of which The Travellers’ Digest, published by Digest Group Publications, was the most well known and would eventually transform from a fanzine into a magazine.

The publication of The Travellers’ Digest #1 in December, 1985 marked the entry of Digest Group Publications into the hobby and from this small, but ambitious beginnings would stem a complete campaign and numerous highly-regarded supplements for Game Designers Workshop’s Traveller and MegaTraveller, as well as a magazine that all together would run for twenty-one issues between 1985 and 1990. The conceit was that The Travellers’ Digest was a magazine within the setting of the Third Imperium, its offices based on Deneb in the Deneb Sector, and that it awarded the Travellers’ Digest Touring Award. This award would be won by one of the Player Characters and thus the stage is set for ‘The Grand Tour’, the long-running campaign in the pages of The Travellers’ Digest. In classic fashion, as with Europe of the eighteenth century, this would take the Player Characters on a tour of the major capitals of known space. These include Vland, Capitol, Terra, the Aslan Hierate, and even across the Great Rift. The meat of this first issue, as well as subsequent issues, would be dedicated to an adventure, each a stop-off on the ‘The Grand Tour’, along with support for it. The date for the first issue of The Travellers’ Digest and thus when the campaign begins is 152-1101, the 152nd day of the 1101st year of the Imperium.

To best run ‘The Grand Tour’, the Referee will need access to The Atlas of the Imperium, Supplement 8: Library Data (A-M), Supplement 11: Library Data (N-Z), Supplement 7: Traders and Gunboats (or alternatively, Supplement 5: Azhanti High Lightning), as well as the core rules. In addition, other supplements would be required depending on the adventure. Of course, that was in 1985, and much, if not all, of the rules or background necessary have been updated since. The campaign is also specifically written for use with four pre-generated Player Characters. They consist of Akidda Laagiir, the journalist who won the Travellers’ Digest Touring Award; Dur Telemon, a scout and his nephew; Doctor Theodor Krenstein, a gifted-scientist and roboticist; and Doctor Krenstein’s valet, ‘Aybee’, or rather, ‘AB-101’. The fact is, AB-101 is a pseudo-biological robot, both protégé and prototype. Consequently, the mix of Player Characters are surprisingly non-traditional and not all of them are easily created used the means offered in Traveller or MegaTraveller. This is addressed within various issues of the fanzine.
The Travellers’ Digest #6 was published in 1986 with the success of the Origins Convention, which took place from July 3rd to 6th in Los Angeles, very much still on the minds of the editors. The event cemented the relationship between Digest Group Publications and Game Designers Workshop and laid the groundwork for a number of forthcoming products, including 101 Robots. The editorial also gave an overview of future issues of the fanzine and where they would take the heroes of ‘The Grand Tour’.

The sixth part of ‘The Grand Tour’ in The Travellers’ Digest #6 is ‘Feature Adventure 6: The Most Valuable Prey’, written by Nancy and Robert Parker. The starting date for the adventure is 212-1102, or the two-hundredth-and-twelfth day of the year 1102 and surprisingly, the adventure does not need anything other than the standard books required by the campaign. The adventure itself is set on the world of Kaiid in the Shuna Subsector of the Lishun Sector. It is hot, wet world, described as a paradise, and is the seat of Count LeMorc, who permits parts of the world to be used as a hunting reserve. The primary target for the hunters is the Minlad, a bipedal creature that is easy to hunt and valued for its fur. However, its numbers are falling, a bone of contention between hunters who want to continue hunting it unabated, the hunters who want to limit the numbers that can be hunted, and environmentalists who want it stopped all together. Add into that is the fact that there are ongoing rumours and supposed sightings of giants out in the jungle.
The aim of the scenario is for Player Characters is to discover and prove to others that the Minlad are not just some simple species to be hunted, but a sentient species. Of course, hunting a sentient species is illegal in the Third Imperium—if it can be proved! This includes not only the hunters, but also an on-world Scout team already conducting a survey and Count LeMorc. The Minlad are a primitive species, but they are capable of communication and part of the adventure involves interacting with the Minlad and learning to understand their speech. This is a fascinating scenario that really will challenge the Player Characters as they try to save and understand the Minlad without the hunters reacting badly to the loss of income and potentially, to the realisation as to what they have done.
The world of Kaiid is described in some detail. This includes silhouettes and descriptions other fauna found on the planet, a map of the single large settlement near the Starport, and full information about the Minlad and their language. The adventure also includes a list of ‘Rumours, News, and Other Activities’ which can be used to drive the scenario and as well as a specialised crowd-swaying task for use with the Universal Task Profile.
This is a challenging scenario to roleplay because the Player Characters will need to a do a lot of persuasion and learn another language. It is also challenging to run, and that is due to its organisation. The scenario is presented as a series of ‘Nuggets’, a format which would be developed in later issues and in scenarios for Mega-Traveller. This compartmentalises the scenario’s information and/or scenes into separate sections to make it both non-linear and easier to run, but it is not as effective as it should be. Ultimately, what it is missing is a good reason for the Player Characters to want to visit Kaiid and a better overview of the nuggets. Otherwise, a genuinely fresh and interesting scenario.
The ’Playing the Characters’ series continues its deeper look at and guide to roleplaying the four pre-generated Player Characters for ‘The Grand Tour’. This time, it should be no surprise given the first contact nature of ‘Feature Adventure 6: The Most Valuable Prey’, it is the turn of the ex-scout, Dur Telemon. With these, it is almost worth holding starting a playthrough of ‘The Grand Tour’ so that every player has one for their character. The scout/scout service strand to the issue continues with Nancy Parker’s ‘Persons and Unpersons’, which looks at what signifies Intelligence and how the Imperial Interstellar Scout Service defines it. The article first looks at the primary indicators—language and tool use—and then how the scout service reacts to it. This is an interesting read that nicely supports the adventure in the issue.
The Travellers’ Digest #6 details the Shuna Subsector, Subsector I of the Lishun Sector and part of the Domain of Antares and develops the Lishun Sector with ‘Library Data of the Lishun Sector’. All decent background, whilst Joe Fugate continues the fanzine’s examination and development of the UTP or Universal Task Profile in ‘The Gaming Digest: Tasks’ with a look at uncertain tasks. At the time, this would have been an interesting herald of what was to come, foreshadowing the upcoming adoption of the UTP for MegaTraveller. Today, it is less interesting unless the reader has a specific interest in the mechanical and rules development of Traveller. Lastly, the Traveller Tech Brief in this issue is ‘Grav Belts’. This fully details and describes the appearance, function, and operation of the grav belt. It includes a section on the use of grav belts in military operations which will certainly have application in some Game Masters’ campaigns.
Physically, The Travellers’ Digest #6 is, as with all of the issues so far, very obviously created using early layout software. The artwork is not great, but it does its job and it is far from dreadful.

—oOo—The Travellers’ Digest #6 was the first issue of the fanzine to be reviewed. This was by Herb Petro in The Imperium Staple Issue #8 (October, 1986). Of the Feature Adventure in the issue, he wrote, “The feature adventure, The Most Valuable Prey, uncovers the truth about the mysterious “Giants” on the world of Kalid in the Lishun sector. I don’t want to give away anything to those who might be potential players, but it is very good. In my opinion better that the feature adventure in issue #5.” He praised several of the other articles in the issue, of which he said overall, “TRAVELERS’ Digest has been growing. This issue is better than the last and the next promises to be even better.”—oOo—

Where The Traveller’s Digest #6 is at its weakest is making the connection in ‘The Grand Tour’ with the events of the previous issue and making clear why the Player Characters are on a minor hunting world. However, once they are, ‘Feature Adventure 6: The Most Valuable Prey’ is a very good scenario once the Game Master has it set up and worked her way around its Nuggets. The rest of the issue is good, but it is the scenario that really stands out for its depth and detail, as well as the demands it is going to place on the players (and their characters).