Heart of Atom Isa: A Short System Neutral Adventure in a Science Fantasy Future of Old is a scenario for Hypertellurians: Fantastic Thrills Through the Ultracosm, the roleplaying game of retro-Science Fantasy inspired by the artwork of Frank Frazetta and Roger Dean, the adventures of John Carter of Mars, Buck Rogers, and Barbarella published by Mottokrosh Machinations. Unlike the previous A Bride for a Vampire, which was a blend of the Gothic horror with the Science Fantasy, Heart of Atom Isa is very much grounded in classic Science Fantasy. It mixes Planetary Romance with a B-Movie supervillainess worthy of the Pulps of the twenties and thirties.

Although Heart of Atom Isa is written with Hypertellurians: Fantastic Thrills Through the Ultracosm in mind, it is all but systemless, and so like A Bride for a Vampire, it can be adapted to almost any set of mechanics. This extends to the four given pre-generated Hypertellurians, who come with strengths and weaknesses, plus a drive, all ready for the Game Master to adapt to the roleplaying of her choice. Hypertellurians: Fantastic Thrills Through the Ultracosm is of course, an Old School Renaissance Science Fantasy retroclone, so there are plenty of other retroclones which Heart of Atom Isa could be adapted to, but then again, it would equally work as well with Evil Hat Productions’ FATE Core. The given pre-generated player characters include a Victorian-era Ultranaut adventuress, a fez-wearing formless alien green blob fascinated by magic, a greedy ex-Pharoah, and a beetle-man general cut off from his Hive. The playing group is free to adapt these or use the the versions provided by the publisher.

As written, Heart of Atom Isa is designed to be played by four players in just one or two sessions. The scenario is thus relatively short, consisting of three scenes, but with plenty of scope for player input. The player characters are ultracosmic explorers, discovering the wonders of the multiverse aboard their silver bullet rocket, the Atom Isa. Unfortunately, when visiting the desert world of Sonnos, the ‘heart’ of the Atom Isa is stolen. It can still travel through space, but not with any sense of finesse, but it can no longer traverse across or through the Ultracosm. The culprit is Argencia, the feared Silver Sorceress known to crush men. As the scenario begins, they have discovered where the archvillainess lives—or hides depending upon your point of view—and that is amongst the nomadic tribe of Zelteens, who live and travel on gargantuan hermit crab-like beings, known as Tremendostaceans.

In the first part of the scenario get to visit the Zeldeens amongst their walking village of connected Tremendostaceans with their tremendous conical shells upon which stand the Zeldeens’ houses and connecting bridges, and visit one of their famous markets where traders from all over the Ultracomos come to deal. This can be in anything from strange paints (Dulux is not going to be offering these paints any time soon) offered by Magnus the Paint Seller and explorer’s gear from Taque’s Emporium for Explorers & Fortune Hunters such as a breathing bowl helmet to Lomarc’s Fashionistas of Tomorrow at which can be found figure hugging, shrink-to-fit Helix second skin onesies and Extra Teeth and Nanny Nontyvia’s Reclaimed Relics where you can find Relic-shards of the A.I. saints. Add in a table of random events, whatever the player characters want to do, and the opportunity to do some shopping, should provide plenty of opportunity for some fun gaming and roleplaying.

The second part sees the crew of the Atom Isa chase Argencia off Sonnos to her secret lair on a distant, icy moon. (Of course it has to be an icy moon, the player characters have been on a desert planet!) Naturally—or rather unnaturally (which is perfectly natural when you are dealing with a feared archvillainess like Argencia)—Argencia’s lair is just a little bit weird and a whole lot creepy, including keeping a harem of physically fit and attractive men and women for pleasure and decoration because, well because… In addition, Argencia has actual minions at her command, so if the player characters want a fight, then they will give it to them. Conversely, Argencia herself is intended to be sexy and slinky, preferring to use her charisma, bargains, and seduction to get what she wants. Or get away with what she wants. Ideally, she should give the Game Master plenty to get into in terms of roleplaying, but the sex appeal of the character may not be to be the taste of every playing group. Now Argencia is designed as a B-Movie, Pulp villain, and so this does fit the archetype, but the Game Master needs to be aware of this prior to play and may want to take her players’ sensibilities into account. Of course, like any good Pulp villain, there is a means for her to make her escape and be ready to make a comeback in a future scenario.

Physically, Heart of Atom Isa is a slim,digest-sized book. Done in full colour throughout, the artwork has a pleasing cartoonishly pulp look to it. In particular, the thumbnail portraits of the pre-generated player characters are really good. The adventure is mostly presented in an almost bullet point style, making it easy to pick up off the page.

Heart of Atom Isa is really easy to pick up and run and easy to adapt to the roleplaying game mechanics of the Game Master’s choice. A minimum of preparation is required and the Game Master could easily run Heart of Atom Isa as a completely systemless adventure with even less preparation. Whether running as a one-shot or as part of an Ultracosmic Saturday morning style serial, Heart of Atom Isa: A Short System Neutral Adventure in a Science Fantasy Future of Old is a tongue-in-cheek, pulpy, fun scenario.

Like any roleplaying game with its own set of monsters, familiarity breeds contempt. One exposure to them too many and they become less impressive, less of a threat, and so they lose their impact. So it is with Dungeons & Dragons and the contents of the Monster Manual and so it is with Call of Cthulhu and Trail of Cthulhu and other roleplaying games of Lovecraftian investigative horror. Now for Dungeons & Dragons the common solution is to provide an ecology guide to a particular monster or a whole new bestiary, but for roleplaying games of Lovecraftian investigative horror there is less obvious scope for creating and adding more monsters to the canon of the Cthulhu Mythos. There is though, plenty of scope for variation, reinterpretation, and making connections, which is exactly what Hideous Creatures: A Bestiary of the Cthulhu Mythos does.

Published by Pelgrane Press, it should be made very clear from the start that whilst the mechanics of Hideous Creatures are designed for use with the Gumshoe System of Trail of Cthulhu, the rest of the supplement’s content will work with just about any roleplaying game of Lovecraftian investigative horror. And even then, adapting the mechanics of Hideous Creatures to any other roleplaying game of Lovecraftian investigative horror should not present too much of challenge given that for the most part the creatures and monsters it presents and re-presents are already present in those other roleplaying games of Lovecraftian investigative horror. So whether for Call of Cthulhu or Cthulhu Hack, Delta Green or FATE of Cthulhu, this is a supplement which should prove useful to the Keeper or Game Master of those games, not just Trail of Cthulhu.

As the title suggests, Hideous Creatures: A Bestiary of the Cthulhu Mythos examines the creatures of the Mythos—not the gods and deities, but the various races, beasts, things, and horrors. It builds around some fifteen or so such examinations previously available as single write-ups, all written by Kenneth Hite, to which Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, Becky Annison, Helen Gould, and Ruth Tillman have added another sixteen. So some thirty-one of them, from Bat-Things, Bholes, and Black Winged Ones to Wendigo, Worm-Cultist, and Y’m-Bhi. Many of them will be familiar, such as Byakhee, Deep Ones, Ghoulds, or Shoggoths, but others are new. Yet whether old or new, all draw inspiration from and are described to some degree in some of the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, August Derleth, Robert Bloch, and others. Each entry comes with an overview of the hideous creature, accompanied by its stats in the game. After that, each and every entry in the book gets a whole not more interesting, for overview and the stats mere serve as the chassis upon which is mounted various ideas, developments, and suggestions. They include possible alternative abilities; variations upon the explanation and interpretation of what each hideous creature is; Mythic Echoes draw parallels between the hideous creature and monsters and creatures of various myths around the world; the ‘Investigation’ second provides clues for each and every one of Trail of Cthulhu’s investigative abilities; ‘Scenario Seeds’ are adventure ideas; and lastly, the Bibliography provides a thumbnail description of the hideous creature’s source in the Mythos fiction as well as other works of note in which it—or an alternative version—has appeared over the last century. 

So, what Hideous Creatures provides is not just thirty-one horrible monsters and alien races, but over three hundred possible extra abilities across the thirty-one entries, over three hundred variations, over one-hundred-and-fifty parallels and connections with the Mythic Echoes, over nine hundred clues tied into Trail of Cthulhu’s Investigative Abilities, ninety or so scenario seeds, and thirty-one bibliographies and sample clues. It should be noted that the variations are designed to be ‘intentionally self-contradictory’, whilst the scenario seeds are based upon the classic or baseline versions of the Mythos creatures and monsters. It seems churlish to reduce the supplement to just numbers, but what it showcases is the scope of the supplement’s imagination and just the sheer number of ideas on show. 

So for example, Night-gaunts, the winged creatures with barbed tails, prehensile paws, and inward horns upon their heads, traditionally known for their blankness of their faces and their predilection for tickling their victims are suggested as having a face like a roiling storm, a shifting plasticity, or a void which opens onto a Great Abyss. They might not be slender, but as their name suggests—gaunt, with wings like a moth or a flying squirrel or… Instead of simply tickling to make a victim laugh, a Night-gaunt’s barbed tail renders him agonizingly breathless or recoiling in helplessness as spiders scuttle over the skin. New possible abilities include Chest Crunch as a Night-gaunt lands upon a victim’s chest and crushes his lungs, or Tracking, enabling a Nigh-Gaunt to track a victim it has already touched via its sense of smell, whether on the Earth, the Moon, or in Dream. Variations include Night-gaunts capable of assuming the faces of those it has killed or of anyone currently dreaming, actual investigation of or curiosity about Night-gaunts enables them to filter into the dreams of the foolish and so attract their attention, and Night-gaunts themselves are immune to the most harrowing of Mythos manifestations or locations. Mythic echoes draw parallels between the Night-gaunt and the legend of the Night Hag, amongst others… Amongst the Clues, Anthropology links cultures around the world with traditions of dark shapes crushing or tickling their victims, whilst Cop Talk reports many people hearing the missing girl laughing ‘from upstairs’, but can she have been upstairs from everyone on the whole block? Of the three scenario seeds, ‘Precious’ looks to be highly entertaining, as the 1928-1929 archaeological dig at Lydney Park by Tessa Wheeler and Mortimer Wheeler unleashes something which haunts and hunts those associated with the dig, including one J.R.R. Tolkien! The bibliography starts with H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath’ before suggesting authors as diverse as W.H. Pugmire, Brian Lumley, Gene Wolfe, and more. Lastly, the handout takes the form of a flyer put out by a husband whose wife disappeared upon Silverstrand Beach, warning others and calling for the attention of the authorities.

As well as examining many of the familiar, Hideous Creatures examines nine new creatures—Bat-Things, Black Winged Ones, Gaseous Wraiths, Medusas, Raktajihva, Ultraviolet Devourer, Vampirish Vapour, Worm-Cultist, and Y’m-bhi. Of these, Raktajihva actually comes from a letter written by H.P. Lovecraft and is interpreted as an avatar of the Bloody Tongue, whilst for Call of Cthulhu purists, whilst the Worm-Cultist may not necessarily be new. Something similar, named the Crawling Chaos, does appear in Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, the very first campaign for Call of Cthulhu.

Physically, Hideous Creatures is as well laid out and as well written as you would expect for a book from Pelgrane Press. If there is a downside in terms of the presentation, it is that the artwork is not quite as good as in other supplements for Trail of Cthulhu. That said, the handouts for each and every one of the entries in the supplement are excellent.

Ultimately, Hidden Creatures takes its inspiration from H.P. Lovecraft’s own assertion that stories of vampires, werewolves, and even ghosts had become too familiar and too formulaic to evoke true horror—“Horrors, I believe, should be original – the use of common myths and legends being a weakening influence.” Unfortunately, with the proliferation of the Mythos in fiction, games, and other media, the authors of Hideous Creatures suggest that, “Almost a century after he wrote, his own monstrous races have likewise begun to seem like comfortable story furniture rather than unnerving signals that the world is horrible and wrong.” Hideous Creatures: A Bestiary of the Cthulhu Mythos is a counter or solution to this problem, presenting a plethora of ideas and variations which successfully makes the familiar unfamiliar, and providing inspiration upon inspiration for the Keeper or Game Master—whatever the roleplaying game of Lovecraftian investigative horror.

Hearts and Minds: Saving a World on the Brink of War! A Mindjammer Adventure is a sourcebook and scenario for Mindjammer – The Roleplaying Game: Transhuman Adventure in the Second Age of Space, the Space Opera setting with a harder, more contemporary Science Fiction edge published by Mindjammer Press. Set some fifteen thousand years into the future during the Second Age of Space, it takes place on the world of Olkennedy whose society stands on the brink of civil war. Originally settled eight thousand years ago during the First Age of Space, like so many planets settled then, the original colonists were forced to survive with no contact from Old Earth, a local astronomical event forcing some into stasis, the others to survive as best they can. When the surviving original colonists awoke, their reappearance led to tensions between them and the society which had survived, regressed, and was building anew. These tensions have been exacerbated in the last two decades when long spread rumours of aliens were confirmed with the arrival of the Commonality.

In the Second Age of Space, the New Commonality of Humankind presides over an expanding sphere of influence and control, seeking to maintain and protect its culture as it maintains and protects those of other worlds through the offices and agents of the Security and Cultural Integrity (SCI) Instrumentality. Yet not every world wants or is ready to accept the influence of or integration into the Commonality. So it is with Olkennedy. There are many on the world who do not believe that the Commonality when it says it protects the rights and cultures of those worlds it adopts and in particular, they fear the loss of individuality should they accept implants which grant them access and membership of the Mindscape, the virtual world which connects the Commonality. There are a great many who would take up arms to protect the loss of such rights and culture, and there even more who could be persuaded to join them. Opposing views clashes, tensions rise, and civil war  looms. It is into this febrile situation that the player characters step.

The first half of Hearts and Minds is devoted to detailing and describing the world of Olkennedy, its people, history, and culture. Or rather it focuses on the area which can support life, a crater deep enough to hold an oxygen-rich atmosphere and which has a subtropical climate, including a sea, with snow layers to the north. The planet has a high gravity, is subject to high winds and storms, and has a short day. The generally self-reliant inhabitants have had millennia in which to adapt to this. The planet is home to five distinct nations. Columbiana is youngest, but the most advanced and most dominant, its citizens mostly descended from the colonists—known as the Awoken—who emerged from stasis a millennia ago, whilst Van Kuvrai is home to the descendant of the colonists who did not enter stasis. Nwasha and Omianto are home to the Nwasha pithecines who were originally developed as labour by the original colony. Nwasha is primarily an arboreal culture whilst Omianto is more industrialised. Lastly, Akantack hominids, similarly developed as a labour force by the original colonists are nomads who live in the Snow-Layer which runs around the rim of the Crater or the Akantack Sanctuary. Although the five nations of Olkennedy have existed peacefully for a century, now their planet’s membership of the New Commonality of Humankind threatens to bring them into conflict once again.

As well as the inhabitants and cultures of Olkennedy, Hearts and Minds details the colony’s ecology, flora and fauna, major cities such as Craterport Down, technology, and more. Scenario hooks and random events are provided for both wilderness and urban settings, such that there is more than enough information here for the Game Master to run her own adventures. Together with the Genotype for the Akantack hominids, there is also information enough to create characters native to Olkennedy and perhaps explore some of its history, for example, why the Awoken emerged from stasis when they did or what were conspiracy theories surrounding the Commonality’s presence prior to the Disclosure, the traumatic event which revealed the existence of the New Commonality of Humankind to the Olkennedians. 

Of course, Hearts and Minds is designed to explore a clash of cultures, that is between the Commonality culture and a relatively newly found culture, that of Olkennedy. Whilst some Olkennedians accept the presence of the Commonality, many do not and they have coalesced around the Fiver separatist movement, named for the five nation on Olkennedy. In the years prior to the arrival of the player characters, its activists have been actively attacking the Commonality presence on planet, fomenting riots, causing unrest and engaging in acts of ‘terrorism’ or ‘freedom fighting’—depending on your point of view. This is not helped by factionalism within the Commonality itself. Two factions are detailed. The Integrator faction want to bring newly discovered planets into the Commonality, whilst the Dialogic faction wants to maintain a conversation with each newly discovered world rather than simply bring into the Commonality.

The second half of Hearts and Minds is the adventure itself. The most obvious role for the player characters will be SCI Force agents, sent to Olkennedy because of the deteriorating political situation, but they might also be diplomats, soldiers of the Armed Forces Instrumentality, merchants, scientists, or a mix of all six. Their roles of course will colour their approach to handling the situation on Olkennedy. For example, soldiers of the Armed Forces Instrumentality are more likely to commit to a military solution, whilst diplomats will seek a more conciliatory solution. Whatever their roles, throughout the scenario the Game Master will be tracking the effects that their actions have using Mindjammer’s Plot Stress mechanics. Essentially, through their actions, it is entirely possible for the player characters to sway the opinion of the Olkennedians towards or away from accepting the presence or membership of the Commonality—or somewhere in between.

The adventure is played out over four episodes and an epilogue, the latter being when the Game Master will assess the actions of the player characters and determine the ultimate outcome of events on Olkennedy based on them. There are plenty of opportunities for both roleplaying and conflict, but Mindjammer being a Transhuman Space Opera roleplaying game, there are lots and lots of opportunities for action. Now much of the action may well look a little like a cliché in places, but the action scenes are well handled and once the player characters get involved, with their wide array of Aspects being brought into play, the action will be anything but. If there is an issue with Hearts and Minds, it is that running it is a challenge. This is because it explores numerous options and their consequences as the scenario proceeds, and it is all too easy for the Game Master to get lost in them. The likelihood is that the Game Master will need to work harder to keep track of everything, especially of the consequences of the player characters’ actions and decisions, and when combined with having to present the scenario and roleplay its many NPCs, she may well find she has a heavier workload than is the norm.

Physically, Hearts and Minds is well presented behind its Eugène Delacroix’s ‘Liberty Leading the People’ inspired cover. The book is mainly done in black and white, but touches of colour are used to bring out its maps. The artwork is excellent, although a little dark. The writing and editing are well done, but if there is one thing that the book lacks, it is an index. Although less than a hundred pages in length, there is a lot of information in Hearts and Minds and having a better means of finding things would make it easier for the Game Master to run.

Originally published in 2015, the politics present in Hearts and Minds, although set on a Science Fiction world in the far future do feel relevant today. The adventure and situation explores deeply polarised political views, threats to cultural identity, loss of status, and so on, which escalate into civil unrest, acts of violence, and even terrorism. Of course, Hearts and Minds is a fiction, but undeniably there are parallels with contemporary politics, whether in the United Kingdom, Europe, the USA, and elsewhere. How much a gaming group wants to read into the scenario is another matter. It can be played with or without the group drawing the parallels.

Hearts and Minds can be played as one-shot or a convention scenario, and there are guidelines given to that end. Yet to do so, would be to miss a lot of the depth and nuance to the scenario’s set-up, to all too easily and quickly side with one polarised faction or another. Played as a full scenario, and what Hearts and Minds does is present an exploration of Mindjammer’s core themes—cultural conflict, the rediscovery of strange new worlds, and the personal conflicts which arise from them, all played out against an advanced Space Opera background. Simply, Hearts and Minds: Saving a World on the Brink of War! A Mindjammer Adventure is the ideal first scenario to showcase what the roleplaying game is all about.

Published by Hydra Cooperative, LLC, Lorn Song of the Bachelor is an Old School Renaissance fantasy scenario for the roleplaying game of your choice. If choosing a retroclone, it works with any that use ascending Armour Class, and in terms of setting, it would work with any which involve elements of colonialism, imperialism, and mercantile adventuring companies, such as the East India Company or the Dutch East India Company. So it would work with Arion Games’ Maelstrom as much as it would Triple Ace Games’ Leagues of Adventure: A Rip-Roaring Setting of Exploration and Derring Do in the Late Victorian Age! or the same setting as Hot Springs Island or that of Crypts of Indormancy. It would also work as far off location in Empire of the Petal Throne: The World of Tékumel. The scenario does also mention the use of firearms, but they are not integral to its play and the Game Master can easily ignore their inclusion.

Obviously, the scenario’s themes of colonialism, imperialism, and mercantile adventuring companies are contentious issues, even difficult ones for some, but the author of Lorn Song of the Bachelor makes clear that they are unavoidable given the legends and history of the region that the scenario is based upon, and that they are open for the players and their characters to explore and make choices about. To that end, no obvious incentive is provided to involve the characters in the situation detailed in Lorn Song of the Bachelor.

Although is a sandcrawl of sorts, Lorn Song of the Bachelor is quite different to the previous sandcrawls published by Hydra Cooperative, LLC, such as Slumbering Ursine Dunes and Misty Isles of the Eld. It is as far away from the Hill Cantons as can be imagined, being a riverine and dungeon crawl inspired by a story from the island of Borneo. It shares much with the lovely fanzine, MR-KR-GR The Death-Rolled Kingdom—crocodilian gods, forgotten monkey-empires, dangerous waters, and exotic fantasy—and indeed, they share the same author, Zedeck Siew. And just like R-KR-GR The Death-Rolled Kingdom, Lorn Song of the Bachelor feels humid, sweaty, and sun-drenched, strange, and exotic.

In essence, Lorn Song of the Bachelor is all set-up. At the far reaches of a river, in the lands of the tribe known as the Gleaming Fins, grow great trees from whose heartwood can be extracted a valuable incense, Dreaming Agaru, which aids divination of all sorts with flashes of true inspiration. So the Company sends trade factors and loyal mercenaries—all bad teeth and bad breath—up river to trade and harvest the heartwood of these trees. Yet that trade is threatened by the Bachelor, a giant albino crocodile, which has been the scourge of the river for centuries, having killed all of the other crocodiles. Long has it preyed upon the boats of the Gleaming Fins tribe, upending them and tipping the men into the water to be snapped up. Many times the tribe has hunted the great riverine beast, even killing it, but always it returns. Is the Bachelor a god? Is he immortal? Now it takes the Company’s boats too and so threatens its investments and revenues.

The most obvious way into this for the player characters is to be hired by the Company—akin to Conrad’s Heart of Darkness—but what they will discover is faction upon faction within the lands of the Gleaming Fins. The one-armed, silver painted Vartu Si Sartu, Gleaming Fins chief wants the Company gone; the untattooed, jade finger-nailed and abacus-wielding Company merchant, Machivir Sanna Krau, wants the Bachelor dead; and the wrinkled, incense-infused, firefly surrounded witch and midwife, Sati Wu Sati, wants the curse of the Bachelor on the river lifted and the breaking up of the crocodile cult dedicated to him. These are not the only factions and not the only motivations threading their way through Lorn Song of the Bachelor. The player characters will need to weave their way through these to learn the secrets that lie at the literal heart of the Gleaming Fins territory.

Lorn Song of the Bachelor is presented in a sparse fashion. Descriptions are kept to a minimum, often supported with a table or two of further elements waiting to be found and interacted at each location. There is often a bullet-point or list-like quality to the writing, making it accessible and easy to work with. In terms of scale the adventure really only consists of eight locations, each roughly a half day apart, and a small dungeon of just seven locations, a ruin left over from the Monkey Empire. Here the descriptions are richer and weirder, perhaps even more wondrous.

Of course, the presence of the Bachelor, the albino god-crocodile, lurks throughout the scenario and will become an active threat whenever the player characters are on or by the water. Unsurprisingly, this is very likely to occur given the location of various places in Gleaming Fins territory, and ideally it should, since the Bachelor is mystically linked to parts of this land and should he be hurt, there are repercussions for these locations. This perhaps one of the two weakest parts of the scenario in that it does not seem quite strong enough in effect and will need to be carefully worked in by the Game Master. The other is that the solutions to the scenario, there being several given the number of different factions present in the region, are not clear. Now part of this is intentional, as after all, they should not be obvious, but the players will need to work as hard to get at them as the Game Master will in presenting them.

Physically, Lorn Song of the Bachelor is a lovely little book. It is well written with its peoples and personalities, its places, and its strangeness being described with a very simple economy in terms of its words. Whilst the cartography is clear and strong, the minimum of description in the writing is paired with utterly delightful artwork, light, if not ethereal, ranging from the inhabitants of the Gleaming Fins lands and the weird objects found there to the strange vistas of the Monkey Empire ruin and the bestiary found at the back of the book.

The isolated and exoticism of Lorn Song of the Bachelor does mean that it may not be easy to add to an ongoing campaign, since it may well be far away from the campaign’s main locations. However, that does not stop it from being a lovely little adventure, a mini-sandbox into which the player characters can come and explore and perhaps aid one faction or another. It is simply presented with artwork which evokes so much of the strangeness and exoticism of the Gleaming Fins lands. Although the formatting means it looks simple, there is a lot of detail and flavour to Lorn Song of the Bachelor which together evoke visions of a very different world and of a very different fantasy to which a Western audience is used.

From Chaosium, Inc. with the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition and the Jonstown Compendium for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and HeroQuest Glorantha (Questworlds) to Wizards of the Coast with the DM’s Guild for Dungeons & Dragons, publishers are seeing the benefit of fan-based content. Free League Publishing, the Swedish publisher best known for roleplaying games as Mutant: Year Zero – Roleplaying at the End of Days, Coriolis: The Third Horizon, Tales from the Loop – Roleplaying in the '80s That Never Was, Forbidden Lands – Raiders & Rogues in a Cursed World, and Symbaroum, has its own platform for user-made content in the form of the Free League Workshop.
Slaves to Fate: An Adventure of Endless Winter is a short scenario for the near-Dark Ages fantasy roleplaying game, Symbaroum. Published by Earl of Fife Games, it is a focused affair actually intended as an introduction to a new campaign, Forever Winter. Consequently, it is linear in structure, it requires a particular set-up, and places a big responsibility with one player. The set-up is quite simple. The player characters are slaves. Mostly Ogres and Goblins, but also a mix of other races and occupations, so the player characters then. They should all be beginning characters and their players should decide how and why they ended up enslaved in the first place—captured by slavers, sold into slavery, to pay off a debt, and so on. One of the player characters should be a Changeling, and whilst Slaves to Fate provides enough in terms of motivation and background for this character, his player is free to create whatever character type he likes and there is still room for him to add elements to his backstory if he so desires. Alternatively, the Game Master can simply create this character as an NPC.

As the scenario opens, the player characters, as part of the slave coffle, have been taken north into the Davokar Forest where they are being worked all but to death felling trees and preparing lumber for shipment south. As the temperature drops and the player characters try and cope with exhaustion and not enough food and water, there is opportunity for them to escape. Several methods are discussed, but whatever the means, the player characters find themselves hounded from their camp by marauding beasts. Ultimately, they will find refuge, but all too quickly it becomes a prison and again they must escape to confront the forest itself…

The scenario does call for a degree of buy-in upon the part of the players, not least of which upon whoever will be playing the Changeling. Some players may object to being pushed from pillar to post, and may just simply refuse to the trust the Changeling, whether a player character or an NPC. To an extent the scenario includes advice on what happens if either the Changeling or the player characters die, but to get the fullest out of Slaves to Fate, the Game Master may want to talk to her players about the expectations of the scenario before play begins. Certainly she will need to do that with whomever is playing the Changeling.

Physically, Slaves to Fate is a 4.63 Mb, fourteen page, full colour PDF. The layout is clean and tidy and the illustrations are good, and generally well written even if it needs an edit in places.

In fact, Slaves to Fate is not a new adventure, it having been adapted to Symbaroum from previous versions for Zweihänder – Grim & Perilous, Shadow of the Demon Lord, Demon Gate, and the Genesys roleplaying game. The grim, near apocalyptic nature of the scenario though, fits the Dark Ages feel of Symbaroum as much as it does Zweihänder – Grim & Perilous and Shadow of the Demon. The scenario can only work as a prelude, the set-up for the campaign to come, Forever Winter, it otherwise being too linear and too bleak to really work as a one-shot. As the set-up to a campaign, Slaves to Fate works well enough and will hopefully lay the groundwork for the Forever Winter campaign.

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

The Miskatonic University Library Association brand is no more, alas, but what we have in its stead is the Miskatonic Repository, based on the same format as the DM’s Guild for Dungeons & Dragons. It is thus, “...a new way for creators to publish and distribute their own original Call of Cthulhu content including scenarios, settings, spells and more…” To support the endeavours of their creators, Chaosium has provided templates and art packs, both free to use, so that the resulting releases can look and feel as professional as possible. To support the efforts of these contributors, Miskatonic Monday is an occasional series of reviews which will in turn examine an item drawn from the depths of the Miskatonic Repository.

—oOo—
Name: A Fossil

Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Sean Monaghan

Setting: Modern Day

Product: Scenario
What You Get: 1.69 MB twelve-page, full colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: A lost auction is too heavy a price to pay. 
Plot Hook: A second chance to own the one book you really must have.
Plot Development: A dead rival, scales before the eyes, and a festering town...
Plot Support: Nine plain as they can be handouts and monster and creature stats.




Pros
# Open, flexible set-up
# Scope for player input
# Solid hook for the antiquarian investigator
# Potentially interesting setting
# Bullet point format eases Keeper’s job
# One-shot or one-session scenario
# Period neutral
# Creeping body horror

Cons# Needs editing
# Underdeveloped, murky setting
# Too much festering?
# Plot strands kept apart?
# No ACTUAL Sanity losses

Conclusion
# Underdeveloped 
# Needs editing
# Seaside body horror for one?

Latin for ‘from among (the) forgotten’ and sharing its name with a poem by H.P. Lovecraft, Ex Oblivione is a scenario for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game, the roleplaying game of conspiratorial and Lovecraftian investigative horror published by Arc Dream Publishing. It can be played using the roleplaying game’s full rules or those from Delta Green: Need to Know. Be warned though, this is a brutal, bloody affair involving mass violence and absolutely not for the faint of heart. In fact, Ex Oblivione is not a subtle affair in terms of its horror or its violence, but although the scenario will not mark the end of Delta Green as an organisation—after all, that has already happened with the original iteration of Delta Green, and it came back—but it very much mirrors the very first encounter with the Unnatural by the agency which would one day become Delta Green. A horror out of the agency’s deep past is about to take its very bloody revenge.

Agents of Delta Green—whether of the Program or the Outlaws—get involved when ‘HOME DAGON HOME HOME YHANTHLEI SEA TO THE SEA.’ is found graffitied on the wall at a gruesome crime scene. A family of five in Mustang, Arizona, a remote town originally founded to support the long since shutdown nearby U.S. Navy base have been ritually butchered and whilst the local police force suggest that ‘Dagon’ might have occult links, given that it is mentioned in the Bible as the name of a god worshipped by the Philistines, its investigators have no clues as to the motives or perpetrators of this heinous act. Delta Green knows otherwise and strongly suspects the involvement of the Unnatural in the crime. Consequently, a team is dispatched to Arizona to investigate, identify, and nullify the threat.

Unless complicated by setting up (or even breaking) cover identities, the initial investigation in Mustang is quite straightforward—the crime scene, local witnesses, and so on. Clues though, point towards the ruins of the old Naval base, little more than a hangout for the local teenagers, drifters, and the homeless, and from there to New England. This will likely confirm the suspicions of veteran players of Lovecraftian investigative roleplaying, but Ex Oblivione does not go in that direction. Certainly, it draws heavily from that direction—or source material—for inspiration… What Ex Oblivione does instead though…

What Ex Oblivione does instead though, is something unlike almost any other ending to a Call of Cthulhu or Delta Green scenario. First, there is the creeping realisation as to who the murderers are, and that is shocking enough, but then there is climax itself, which will require careful staging upon the part of the Handler. It is brutal, it is violent, and the horror of it is exactly that—horrifying. To say anything more would be to reveal too much about what is a monumental confrontation with the Unnatural.

Physically, Ex Oblivione is well presented, the illustrations and cartography as you would expect. Although decently written, the scenario does feel rushed in places and could have done with another edit.

It is almost traditional for scenarios of Lovecraftian investigative roleplaying to involve a threat to humanity or the world, a threat of immense scale. Here the threat is far, far smaller, but still of a staggering scale that Ex Oblivione is likely to remain a memorable scenario for the players and their Delta Green agent characters. Unlike the meaning of title, the final confrontation in Ex Oblivione is not going to be forgotten for anyone who plays it.

Mutant Crawl Classics #8: The Data Orb of Metakind is the eighth release for Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game – Triumph & Technology Won by Mutants & Magic, the spiritual successor to Gamma World published by Goodman Games. It is also radically different to all of the previous releases for Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game. The previous seven releases for the post-apocalyptic roleplaying game have all been scenarios. These have either been standard scenarios like Mutant Crawl Classics #6: The Apocalypse Ark or Mutant Crawl Classics #4: Warlords of ATOZ, or scenarios designed for use with player characters who are Zero Level. Such scenarios, like Mutant Crawl Classics #1: Hive of the Overmind and Mutant Crawl Classics #7: Reliquary of the Ancient Ones are known as Character Funnels, one of the features of both the Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game and the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game it is mechanically based upon—in which initially, a player is expected to roll up three or four Level Zero characters and have them play through a generally nasty, deadly adventure, which surviving will prove a challenge. Those that do survive receive enough Experience Points to advance to First Level and gain all of the advantages of their Class. In terms of the setting, known as Terra A.D., or ‘Terra After Disaster’, this is a ‘Rite of Passage’ and in Mutants, Manimals, and Plantients, the stress of it will trigger ‘Metagenesis’, their DNA expressing itself and their mutations blossoming forth. Mutant Crawl Classics #8: The Data Orb of Metakind is not a scenario, but a supplement—and a supplement dedicated to just the one artefact.

That artefact is the most holy of ancient relics, the Data Orb of Metakind, a device which has been handed down from shaman to shaman, from mystic mutant to mystic mutant for generations. Only Shamans, Mutants, Manimals, and Plantients can use the hand-sized golden orb—Purse Strain Humans cannot—and they need to be intelligent to do so. Once the user has understood and bonded with the device, what he gains access to accumulated knowledge of everyone who has ever handled and used it. So thousands of memories and experiences, knowledges, skills, and more. Though usually only a few times a day. Each time the character interfaces with the Data Orb, it is usually to extract a specific piece of information or answer to a particular question, but every time the character does so, his player has to make a roll to determine the character’s success. Now the likelihood of a player character extracting the information he is after is quite low, but it is possible.

Now the fun of the Data Orb and Mutant Crawl Classics #8: The Data Orb of Metakind is when the player fails the roll. Then the player character’s request might be misinterpreted, partially interpreted, or simply ignored, but if misinterpreted or partially interpreted , then the Game Master gets to roll on the indicated table. Most of the supplement is dedicated to the various tables representing the various categories of information contained within the data matrices of the Data Orb. Five of these deal with various types of technology to be found in Terra A.D.—including power sources, medical, arms and armour, and artificial intelligences. This grants a player character a bit of new information, generally helpful, for example, on the Weapons & Armour Technology Table, if the player rolls Dazer Pistol, the player character learns a new setting for the weapon.

The other tables send the player character off in another direction, all of them providing them a benefit in some way, either permanent or temporary. So from ‘Voices of the Past’, accessing Bulbar the Odd’s “When confronted by an unknown creature, it is far better that you assume that it is poisonous, blindingly fast and utterly ferocious. This attitude does not condone mindless extinction of the new and the novel, but it does lessen the chance of your corpse looking surprised.” will grant the user a temporary bonus to his attack rolls. Whereas accessing the Thought Records of the Ancients, “It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of Sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.” grants the character a permanent bonus to his Personality attribute. Mutant Crawl Classics #8: The Data Orb of Metakind includes lots of fun quotes like this and back them up with juicy benefits.

On the one hand, the Data Orb of Metakind essentially acts as a Patron AI, the means by which a Shaman gains his Patron AI Bond wetware programs—the nearest thing that the Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game has to spells. It does not though, actually grant wetware programs as having a Shaman praying to his Patron AI would. On the other hand, it grants access to knowledge, typically random knowledge (because the player character has failed to access the specified information he was looking for), and that is where the fun comes in. When that happens, the Data Orb becomes a source of random knowledge and benefits—tables and tables of them—much like the famed Deck of Many Things of Dungeons & Dragons. In comparison though, a Shaman can access the Data Orb again and again, several times a day.

Of course, none of this is without its dangers. Roll poorly and the user may simply get an electric shock from attempting to use the Data Orb. Roll really poorly and—well, why spoil it for the user? The Data Orb of Metakind is brimming over with secrets and dangers, all of which are best learned through play and discovery. If there is an issue with the supplement, it is that there is no scenario detailing where it might be found, but the Game Master will have to write one.

Physically, Mutant Crawl Classics #8: The Data Orb of Metakind is somewhat unprepossessing. It is fundamentally, one big set of tables, but they are all neatly laid out, well written, and easy to use. The supplement uses a range of artwork, including a fun one of the publisher himself on the back page.

The Data Orb of Metakind is the equivalent of a Magic Eight Ball in the post-apocalyptic world of Terra A.D. Think of a question, shake the Data Orb of Metakind, and see what answers, secrets, or dangers it gives. Mutant Crawl Classics #8: The Data Orb of Metakind provides a big artefact with plenty of potential for fun and failure, plus there is lots of gaming life to it, for once found, a Shaman is going to consult this again and again, making this a supplement for the whole of a Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game campaign.

So the heist went like clockwork. You got in, emptied the safe, grabbed the jewelry, and filled all of the holdalls with cash. Now all you need to do is get it back to the rendezvous point and divide the loot. Except… you know that the gang has been infiltrated by undercover cops, either because of an informant or because you are one of the undercover cops. Unfortunately, you only know what you are—a loyal Hardened Criminal or a sneaky Undercover Cop, or a villainous Hardened Criminal or an upright Undercover Cop enforcing the law. Anyone else could be either… And as questions are asked, protestations of loyalty and honesty are made, tempers flare, and the only way the matter is going to be settled is with a showdown shootout!

And if that sounds like the plot of almost any ‘Heist Gone Wrong’ film, from Rififi to Reservoir Dogs, you would not be wrong. It is also the set-up to Never Bring a Knife, a social deduction game from Atlas Games which can be best described as Reservoir Dogs meets The Resistance. Accusations and bullets will fly in this game until one of the gang goes down in a hail of lead and loyalties are revealed, betrayals are suffered, and either the Hardened Criminals are arrested by the Undercover Cops or make their escape from the police. Designed for four to eight players, it should be no surprise that the adult and violent inspiration and game play of Never Bring a Knife means that it carries a minimum playing age of seventeen years old and over. Now this does not mean that younger participants cannot play Never Bring a Knife, the rules being simple enough, but parental permission should be sought. That said, not every game needs to be designed with younger players in mind, and that is certainly the case with Never Bring a Knife.

Besides the short rulebook, Never Bring a Knife consists of sixty two cards. Eight are handy Reference cards, though all of the cards used in play have clear instructions on their use on them. Ten are Role Cards, divided between five Hardened Criminal and five Undercover Cop cards. Sixteen are Wound Cards, used to track each gang member’s Wounds as he suffers them. The first gang member to suffer three Wounds triggers the end of the game. The rest of the cards form the play deck.

The Gun cards inflict Wounds, a gang member suffering a Wound for every two Gun cards which end up in his stack at the end of a round. Armour cards cancel out Gun cards, but only the one each. If this reduces the number of Gun cards in a gang member’s stack at the end of a round, he suffers one less, or even no Wounds. Money cards in a player’s stack at the end of a round can be kept and banked and is expended to heal a Wound or to be able to look at another gang member’s Role card. Crime cards are used to force a gang member to discard Money cards, which will prevent him from paying for healing or to look at other gang members’ Role cards. A Hit can be purchased using Money cards and used to inflict a Wound on a gang member or banked for later in the game, so great for that last inevitable betrayal so in keeping with the game’s genre. An Intel card enables a gang member to examine, but not reveal, another gang member’s Role card. The Mole card forces a gang member to swap his Role card with that of the Boss, which may or not change the gang member’s allegiance.

Game set-up is simple. Each gang member receives a Role card and can look at it. One last Role card is placed in the middle of the table to represent the Boss. He will come into play when the Mole card ends up in a gang member’s stack. The Hit card and the Mole card go into the discard pile and so will come into play in later rounds, hopefully when dramatically appropriate! Each gang member not only gets to look at his own Role card, but also of that to gang member to his left. This is each player’s initial clue as to the true identities of his fellow gang members.

Never Bring a Knife is played over a series of rounds. At the start of each round, each gang member receives four cards. They then take it in turn to play one card at a time. The first card a gang member plays must be on another gang member and the first card played on a gang member must be face up. After that, a gang member is free to play his cards on anyone, including himself, but all cards are now played face down. Obviously, a gang member will want to play Gun cards on his rivals—especially if he knows them to be of an opposite Role, but keep the Armour and Money cards for himself. The former as protection, the latter because they can be used to purchase further actions. Once a gang member has had four cards played onto his stack, he cannot receive any more, but play continues until each gang member has had four cards played on him.

Once done, each gang member reveals the four cards in his stack and resolves them. This can be done in any order and may involve spending Money cards saved from earlier rounds. Wounds will be suffered, Money cards will be used heal Wounds or examine the Role cards of other gang members or the Boss (in the middle of the table, so this is useful if the Mole card is played at any time), Armour cards to stop Gun cards, Intel cards to examine the Role cards of other gang members or the Boss, and so on. Money cards and Hit cards can be kept to be used in subsequent rounds. At the end of the round, each gang member keeps any Wounds he suffered during the round which he could not heal by spending Money cards or stop with an Armour card. If at the end of a round, any gang member has three Wound cards in front of him, then he has fallen, and not only does the game end, but everyone on his team—either Hardened Criminals or Undercover Cops—loses and everyone on the other team wins.

Mechanically, play is quick, and the four-card hand combined with the four-card limit on each gang member’s stack keeps everything simple and elegant. A gang member might be killed in a couple of rounds, but a game will probably last a round or two longer than that. Physically, Never Bring a Knife is nicely presented. The rule book is easy to read, whilst the cards themselves are clear and easy to understand. A nice touch is that the artwork varies on each of the Role cards and different designs are used on the Gun cards. This gives the game a little more variety in its look. 

What is interesting in Never Bring a Knife as a social deduction game, is not just that each gang member will need to identify the Hardened Criminals and Undercover Cops in the gang, but will need to keep himself and his fellow team members alive. So the Money cards play as big a role in the game as the Gun cards. Initially each gang member will know about himself and the gang member to his left, whilst also wondering about the gang member to his right who knows whether he is a Hardened Criminal and a Undercover Cops. This is each gang member’s initial clue, the second being the first cards played on each gang member, which may or may not suggest their allegiance. After that, gang members will have to rely on Money and possibly Intel cards to discover who their friends and enemies are.

Throughout the game though, gang members are free to say whatever they want to each other, so they can agree to work together, issue threats, spread lies, debate about the Roles of their fellow gang members, share information, and even outright lie. A gang member’s role will only be revealed to everyone at the end of the game. It is here that gang members are free to roleplay too and given the genre which inspired it, Never Bring a Knife is ripe for film quotes and film-inspired roleplaying, which adds to the flavour of the game. Or, of course, a gang member might have enough of all the talking, cajoling, and threatening, lose his temper and just blaze away with his Gun (cards). Lastly, both the Hit and Mole cards have the capacity to add last minute twists to the outcome of the game if played at the right time, further emulating the genre that the game is inspired by. 

Never Bring a Knife is a fun stand-up, shootout showdown, which fans of heist films will enjoy roleplaying their way through. Its simple rules enable gang members to play out the story of heist gone wrong in hail of bullets, desperation, and recriminations. 

The Zhodani Candidate is the second scenario from the designer of the superlative freeform, Eve of Rebellion. Set in the Third Imperium of Mongoose Publishing’s Traveller and published by March Harrier Publishing via Mongoose Publishing, The Zhodani Candidate won the Zhodani Base Awards 2019 for Best Adventure. It is a one-shot scenario suitable for conventions or campaign breaks, designed to be played by five players, plus the Referee. In terms of mechanics, The Zhodani Candidate is written for the current rules for Traveller, but is so rules light, it can be run by almost every previous version of Traveller, or indeed, be adapted to almost any system of the gaming group’s choice. Indeed, the primary game content in The Zhodani Candidate in terms mechanics are the stats and skills of the five characters involved, although stats are also provided for the Cepheus Engine.

Inspired by the television series Homeland and the Cold War brainwashing thriller The Manchurian Candidate, plus the Trust and Betrayal mechanics of Contested Ground Studio’s Cold City roleplaying game, The Zhodani Candidate is a scenario about intrigue, deception, and conflicting agendas. It takes place in the year 1098 on the planet of Mora in the Spinward Marches. Lady Isolde Ling Muudashir, the heir to the Duchy of Mora, is planning to marry ex-Imperial Marine Sergeant Darius Cantu, a love match rather than the traditional marriage of securing dynasties and economic alliances. Cantu is a war hero who fought in the Fourth Frontier War against the invading forces of the Zhodani Consulate and after being captured, spent a decade in the Zhodani re-education camps before being returned to the Third Imperium as part of a prisoner exchange. Cantu would simply have remained an ex-war hero, content to do charity work for veterans of the Fourth Frontier War, were it not the fact that he met Lady Isolde and they fell in love.

Consequently, various Imperial agencies with an interest in the security and stability of the rich and technologically advanced Duchy of Mora given its role as the gateway to the Spinward Marches, have concerns about the intending nuptials. They are worried that Sergeant may have been brainwashed by the Zhodani during his decade-long captivity and may be a secret sleeper agent. As husband-consort to the Duchess of Mora, he would have access to a great deal of classified information and would represent a major security risk. Informing the current Duchess, Delphine Adorania Muudashir, of their suspicions, the agencies have come to a compromise with her. They will form an Inter-Agency Taskforce to perform a security vetting of Sergeant Darius Cantu and determine if he can be cleared to marry Lady Isolde, or whether he is the Zhodani Candidate—a sleeper agent programmed to betray the Imperium. They will then approve the wedding guest list, should the wedding go ahead.

The Inter-Agency Taskforce consists of five members. They include Undersecretary Eon Jaxon, Undersecretary to the Ministry of State, Spinward Bureau, who formed and heads the Inter-Agency Emergency Vetting Taskforce; Senior Ducal Bodyguard Sir Jans Hillier, the head of Her Grace’s Security Service; Perrin Davos Senior Security Vetting Agent, Ministry of Justice, a specialist in security vetting; Lieutenant Samanthe Rosen, Imperial Naval Intelligence, a junior member of Naval Intelligence recommended by the Admiralty as an investigator and interrogator; and Senior Scout Evelyn Tremayne, a representative of the Intelligence Branch of the Interstellar Imperial Scout Service with information to present to the Inter-Agency Emergency Vetting Taskforce. All five player characters are presented in some detail and come with full stats, skills, background, and equipment, as well as a Departmental Agenda, a Personal Agenda, and more. What this means is that there is quite a lot of information for the players to absorb in terms of their characters—and then there is the addition of Traveller’s Library Data pertinent to the scenario.

The scenario itself is divided into two parts. The first is the investigation of Sergeant Darius Cantu, the second is the vetting of the wedding guests and the wedding itself. Now although there is a central objective in the scenario, that of ensuring that Lady Isolde Ling Muudashir is married to a safe husband, achieving it is only half of the scenario’s playthrough. The other half is the interplay of the player characters and their sometimes conflicting objectives. Here, as with the earlier Eve of Rebellion, is where the author’s experience with playing and creating freeforms come to the fore. That said, the objectives in Eve of Rebellion are tightly supported by the links between the player characters, but in The Zhodani Candidate, these are not present, at least not initially. At the start of the scenario, the player characters do not know each other, so the players will need to work harder to involve their characters in the scenario. Now the investigation serves to pull them into the scenario, but after that, the players will need to work hard to work bring their objectives into play without exposing them.

The actual adventure in The Zhodani Candidate runs to less than a third of its length, but includes staging advice, the scenario’s events, and possible outcomes. Besides this, it comes with the five player characters, Library Data, timeline of events, and reference sheets for the Game Master. In comparison, The Zhodani Candidate is mechanically more complex than Eve of Rebellion, and the Game Master may want to have access to both Traveller, First Edition and Traveller, Second Edition from Mongoose Publishing to the fullest out of it. The complexity comes in the fact that unlike in Eve of Rebellion, the player characters in The Zhodani Candidate are going to be doing a lot more than just talking and deceiving. Stats and guidelines are given should the Game Master want to run the scenario using the Cepheus Engine.

One new mechanic which The Zhodani Candidate does add is for handling trust between the player characters. Adapted from Cold City, it measures the degrees of trust between the scenario’s cast, which can grant a bonus between two trusting characters. Conversely woe betide anyone who breaks their trust with another character, or rather expect trust to be lost and broken as the player characters’ differing objectives clash and conflict with each other.

Physically, The Zhodani Candidate is a 1.44 Mb, thirty-six page, colour PDF (though only the cover and some maps use any colour). It is well written, the characters are solidly designed, and the advice is excellent throughout. If there is anything missing, it is that the scenario could have done with a few more handouts, perhaps to give out as part of the briefing handouts and so establish a sense of verisimilitude right from the start. No doubt a Game Master could create these herself as part of her preparations to run the scenario—and even better if she did them as folders of briefing material, one for each player and his character, ready to be opened at the inaugural meeting of the Inter-Agency Emergency Vetting Taskforce.

What The Zhodani Candidate lacks in comparison to Eve of Rebellion is a sense of grandeur and elegance. Now this is due to differences in their subject matters, Eve of Rebellion with high politics and family matters, The Zhodani Candidate with subterfuge, espionage, and deception. So there is more machination to The Zhodani Candidate, more grit and more paranoia. Eventually though, The Zhodani Candidate will probably confirm everyone’s perceptions of the nasty, underhand, and perfidious Zhodani and their sneaky use of Psionics, and drive everyone on the taskforce into a showdown from which none are going to walk away unscathed.

It is the year 2050. Twenty years ago, an island rose in the Pacific Ocean and a horde of loathsome octopus-headed beasts swarmed over every ship sent to investigate, even withstanding multiple nuclear strikes. With a great being known as Cthulhu at their head, the creatures launched neurological attacks that warped and corrupted the survivors. Within a month, humanity survived only in a handful of enclaves. 

It is the year 2050. Twenty-two years ago, an island rose off the coast of Massachusetts and as the resulting tsunami floods the coast up and down the east coast of the USA there came reports of ships and towns being attacked by fish people. Then in the isolated town of Innsmouth, a search and rescue team saw survivors transforming into the fish people—quickly identified as Deep Ones. They were only the first, for what became known as the Innsmouth Plague spread around the world. Billions transform, millions die. What they have in common is that they were taking Palliagil, a cure to an MRSA plague from eight years before. Could it be linked?

It is the year 2050. On Hexenacht, April 30th, 2030, the top of Brocken, Germany’s highest mountain exploded to reveal a thousand foot tall, eight-legged and hoof-footed, tentacled monstrosity. Its appearance instigated a wave of cannibalism amongst the nearby Hexenacht celebrants that would leave thousands dead. But then from the corpses exploded miniature versions of the giant thing that had appeared earlier that night. They killed anyone who investigated, then more spawned from the new corpses. Within days, these tentacled horrors dominated the planet bar three, slowly contracting exclusion zones in New England, Nigeria, and Australia.

It is the year 2050. Twenty-two years ago, the unknown Nour Al Hasan walked out of the desert and won the Egyptian presidential election. He declared himself Nyarlathotep, the Dark Pharaoh, and that he would return Egypt to its former glory, whilst in Antarctica, over a hundred volcanoes exploded and revealed great cities and waves of star-headed, barrel-shaped and winged creatures which fly north to meet up with the armies of Faceless Ones that the Dark Pharaoh freed from below the pyramids. Within weeks, humanity is dead.

It is the year 2050. Twenty years ago a strange figure appeared in Covent Garden in London, all in yellow and masked, a strange mist spreading in its wake. Those touched by the mist exhibit symptoms of diseases in seconds that normally take days, either dying almost immediately or undergoing grisly transformations. Within hours this King in Yellow appears in cities around the world, spreading disease, and in weeks, there is nowhere in the world that remains untouched, most of humanity dead by then.

It is the year 2050. You are one of the few survivors of an unholy apocalypse that struck the world two decades ago. Scientists and researchers have developed the means to effect limited time travel and it has been decided that they will send one or more men or women—forewarned of knowledge of the future—back in time to meddle with one of these timelines and thwart the efforts of an Old Ones and its cultists. This is not without a cost though, for every time traveller must connect with another alien being known as Yog-Sothoth in order to come back to 2020, literally connect with the corruptive power of the Mythos, and that leaves a mark. It likely gives the time traveller a strange power, one beyond science, a power that itself will be of use in combating the Mythos and its influence, but even that will corrupt the user even further, however beneficial it may well be…

It seems that despite Call of Cthulhu having been in print for almost four decades and both initiating and dominating the Cosmic Horror subgenre, the long reach of Lovecraftian investigative roleplaying seems to touch upon roleplaying game upon roleplaying game. From Savage Worlds and Realms of Cthulhu and GURPS and Cthulhupunk, numerous roleplaying games have provided different takes upon the role of H.P. Lovecraft’s Mythos and approaches to it, so it is no surprise that it has finally reached FATE Core. The highly anticipated FATE of Cthulhu is radically different to the roleplaying games of Lovecraftian investigative horror that have come before it.

FATE of Cthulhu is a roleplaying game—a standalone roleplaying game which does not require FATE Core to play or run— of confronting the Mythos a la the James Cameron film, The Terminator. One or more of the investigators will have come back from 2050 to 2020 to stop the apocalyptic plans of an Old One and its cultists. They come back aware of the steps along the way which brought about the apocalypse and they come back ready to fight it. This though is not the Cthulhu Mythos in general, but rather a single Old One and its cultists, and each thwarting of an Old One is a self-contained campaign in its own right, in which no other element of the Mythos appears. So no cultist dedicated to another Old One or Nyarlathotep himself stepping in, even if only mockingly, to help the investigators thwart a common enemy. Unless the Game Master wants them to, that is… So what FATE of Cthulhu is not, is a roleplaying game of Lovecraftian investigative horror, but is instead, a roleplaying game of Lovecraftian action horror. Now this does not mean that the Game Master could not take the elements of the Lovecraft Mythos in FATE of Cthulhu and use them to run a scenario or campaign of Lovecraftian investigative horror as per other similar roleplaying games. That would take a little more effort upon the part of the Game Master, as FATE of Cthulhu is not written or organised to support that, in part because the Mythos is compartmentalised timeline by timeline.

Investigators in FATE of Cthulhu are defined by their Aspects, Skills, and Stunts. Aspects describe elements of a character and to work effectively, they need to be double-edged, that is, each should be both an advantage or a disadvantage. For example, the Aspect ‘An eye for the ladies’ could be used as an Advantage to spot a particular woman in a crowd or a bonus to seduction attempts, but as a Disadvantage, it would mean that the character would be easily distracted in female company. Each investigator has an Aspect each for his High Concept and his Trouble, plus two free Aspects. In play, an Aspect is Invoked by the player to gain an advantageous bonus or a reroll, but Compelled to trigger its disadvantageous elements. It costs a player a Fate point to Invoke an Aspect, but he will gain a Fate point if the Aspect is Compelled. (A Compel can be resisted by a player, but this costs him a Fate point). Stunts provide advantages or bonuses under certain circumstances, usually to skills, and they can be Corrupted by exposure to the Mythos. Skills simply provide a bonus to skill rolls, there being a limited number of broad skills in the game, one of which is Lore, expanded here to cover knowledge and its application of the Mythos.

Francine Hernandez
Personal Timeline: 2050
High Concept (Aspect): Desperate Housewife who knows too much
Trouble (Aspect): My husband was a cultist
Relationship: I trust John, but he doesn’t trust me
Aspects: Ex-Society Matron, Gets lost in the Future (Corrupted) 
Stunts: The Voice of Reason, Hound of Tinadalos’ Eye (Corrupted)
Skills: Deceive (Great +4); Contacts, Resources (Good +3); Fight, Rapport, Shoot (Fair +2); Drive, Lore, Notice, Will (Average +1)
Physical Stress (Physique): 1 2 3
Mental Stress (Will): 1 2 3
Corruption Clock: O O O O
Refresh Rate: 3 Fate Points: 3

Mechanically, whenever a player wants to undertake an action, he selects a skill and rolls four Fudge dice—FATE having originally been derived from the Fudge RPG mechanics—special six-sided dice, each of which has two faces marked with a ‘+’ symbol, two faces marked with a ‘–’ symbol, and two faces left blank. The ‘+’ and ‘–’ symbols cancel each out and the blank faces add nothing, so the results range simply between +4 and –4. The result is added to the player’s skill, aim being to beat a target set by the Game Master, an Average target being +1, a Fair target being +2, and so on, the targets matching the skill values in terms of progression. Should a player’s result match the target, then he succeeds at a cost; if the result is one or two points or shifts above the target, he simply succeeds; and if the result is three or more  shifts, he succeeds with style. In combat, shifts usually represent damage inflicted upon a target, but should a character succeed with style, then he can place a temporary Aspect in play, that can either be used once and then it is lost, or used once for free with subsequent uses requiring a Fate point to be expended.

Aspects like this can be set up on locations, objects, on NPCs, and on player characters, and then during play both the players and the Game Master can interact with them, Invoking and Compelling as necessary. Similarly, the Game Master can design and create places, people, and things all with the simple use of Aspects that get to the core of anything that he designs and creates, and again these can be Invoked or Compelled as part of FATE Core collaborative play between the players and between the Game Master and the players. Unlike FATE Core there is less of this collaborative effort involved during character creation, primarily because FATE of Cthulhu does not involve the worldbuilding that is part of the core rules.

One of the big differences between FATE of Cthulhu and other roleplaying games of Lovecraftian investigative horror is that where in those roleplaying games the corrosive effect of witnessing or employing the Mythos, whether that is seeing a Mythos entity or reading a Mythos tome, or casting a Mythos spell, is mental. In other words, investigators lose Sanity. Now in FATE of Cthulhu, the corrupting effect of the Mythos can work that way, but in the main, its effects are physical. Every time an investigator is exposed to the Mythos or uses it in the case of casting a spell or ritual, or using a Corrupted Aspect or Stunt, the investigator will face backlash as the universe tries to protect itself against the changes forced upon by the unnatural nature of the Mythos. If the investigator cannot withstand this backlash—the backlash being equal to the success of the use or power of the Mythos—he adds points to his Corruption Clock. Fill that in, the Corruption Clock is emptied, but the investigator is drawn further into the influence of the Old Ones and one of his Aspects is corrupted. Should an investigator have all of his Aspects corrupted, he is lost to the Mythos.
For example, Francine Hernandez is attempting to find where her husband, Hector,  is going to be as she knows that he will be participating in a great ritual to learn the location of a lost tomb. He has already managed to deceive her as to where he is going, but Francine and her compatriots need to know. Francine’s player decides to use her Gets lost in the Future Corrupted Aspect. Francine’s player pays the Fate point to Invoke the Aspect. This will give a bonus of +2 to Francine’s Notice of +1. The Game Master takes Hector’s Deceive of +4 and rolls blank, blank, ‘–’, and ‘–’, to give Hector a total of +2. Francine’s player rolls blank, ‘–’, ‘+’, and ‘+’, for a total of +5. This beats Hector’s attempt at Deception, and means that Francine learns where he has gone. Unfortunately Francine suffers backlash equal to the roll her player made or +5. Her player has to make a roll using her Will of +1  and rolls blank, ‘–’, ‘+’, and ‘+’, for a total of +2, which is not good enough as it leaves three mental shifts to absorb. Francine can absorb one of the shifts on her mental stress boxes, the other two having been filled earlier in the investigation. For the remaining two mental shifts, Francine can either take a point of Corruption and have part of her Corruption Clock filled in, or suffer a Consequence. Francine’s player decides on the latter and Francine gains ‘Visions of an alternate failed timeline’.Despite the physicality of the Corruption Clock versus the Sanity mechanics of other Lovecraftian investigative horror roleplaying games, there is still a downward spiral of being exposed to, and in this case, using the Mythos to fight the Mythos, over and over. Essentially, it may well be necessary to fight fire with fire, but the cost…? Once gained, Corruption is fairly difficult to lose, though it is possible if no Corruption has been gained during an investigation or through a supreme act of sacrifice upon the part of another investigator.

Instead of giving a greater sense of the Mythos, FATE of Cthulhu focuses on five distinct threats—five distinct threats powerful enough to bring about an apocalypse. Each threat is essentially a separate campaign or timeline in which someone from the future of 2050 has some knowledge of. Each of the five timelines—which in turn deal with Cthulhu, Dagon, Shub-Nigggurath, Nyarlathotep, and the King in Yellow—consists of five events, the last of which is always the rise of the Old One itself. The events represent the roadmap to that last apocalyptic confrontation, and can each be further broken down into four event catalysts which can be people, places, foes, and things. The significance of these events are represented by a die face, that is either a bank, a ‘–’, or a ‘+’. These starts out with two blanks and two ‘–’, the aim of the players and their investigators being to try prevent their being too many, if any ‘–’ symbols in play and ideally to flip them from ‘–’ to blank and from blank to ‘+’. Ultimately the more ‘+’ there are, the more positive the ripple will be back down the timeline and the more of chance the investigators have to defeat or prevent the rise of the Old One. Conversely, too many ‘–’ and the known timeline will play out as follows and the less likely the chance the investigators have in stopping the Old One.

Each of the five timelines comes with details of what a time traveller from 2050 would know about it, more detail for the Game Master with a breakdown of the events and their Aspects, Stunts, Mythos creatures, and NPCs. Most of these can serve as useful inspiration for the Game Master as well as the advice given on running FATE of Cthulhu and her creating her own timelines. In addition, FATE of Cthulhu highlights two issues with Lovecraftian investigative roleplaying. First it makes clear that in spite of his deplorable social views, H.P. Lovecraft’s writings and creations are worth examining as sources of inspiration, as are the writings of more modern writers who do not share Lovecraft’s views, race, or gender. Second, it makes clear that in FATE of Cthulhu, Corruption is not Sanity—or the loss of it—and that in Corruption, it not only has a far wider array of effects to apply to investigators, it wants to avoid any stereotypes or insensitivity that the portrayal of insanity or other mental illness might lead to. It goes on to give good advice about the portrayal of those affected by Corruption and how to avoid clichés. Both are fair, balanced, and mature approaches to their subject matters, being aware of the sensitivity and difficulty that some gamers may have with either subject.

Physically, FATE of Cthulhu is well produced, nicely illustrated, and well written, including numerous detailed examples. It is however more limited in scope than other roleplaying games of Lovecraftian investigative horror, being focused on a certain type of campaign, and if a Game Master wanted to do more with it than run those campaigns—although any of the five offers opportunities for roleplaying and action—she would have to make more of an effort. In terms of the five timelines and the concept behind FATE of Cthulhu, what is really missing is the point of departure for any time traveller (or time travellers if the Game Master was running a full on ‘Chrono-Commandos versus Cthulhu-style campaign), so no details of what the future is like. There is advice on how time travel works, how it is possible to meet your past self and even have them die in your past, but no background about what life is like in 2050. Also as written, it is very much focussed upon the timelines, so writing a solo adventure would also be challenging.

As befitting a FATE Core roleplaying game, FATE of Cthulhu is more action-orientated, more direct, and more upfront about its confrontation with the forces of the Mythos. It definitely veers to being Pulp in nature rather than Purist and can probably be best described as High Derlethian. Further, its ‘time commando comes back from the future to stop…’ may not be original, but FATE of Cthulhu does provide a fresh approach to confronting the Mythos with Lovercraftian action horror.

Published by Livres de l’Ours, what Rats in the Walls: A roleplaying game of cosmic horror offers is a mechanically light roleplaying game of Lovecraftian investigative horror with consequences. Set in the Jazz Age of the nineteen twenties and the Desperate Decade of the nineteen thirties, it is very much inspired by the writings and Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft, but does not actually use the writings and Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft. The consequences come with failure upon the part of an investigator, whether that is in combat, when he casts a spell, his will suffers from a sanity-draining incident or encounter. As well as facing Old Ones such as The Feeder, The Grinder, and The Void Mother, and their cultists, investigators in Rats in the Walls may discover wonders and dangers beyond the Walls of Sleep in worlds that reflect the dreams of the Old Ones. What drives the investigators is the knowledge that only they are in a position to defeat the terrifying machinations of the Old Ones and their cultists, that only they can prevent all of mankind being exposed to the horrifying truths of the universe.

An investigator in Rats in the Walls is defined by five attributes, which range in value between 0 and +3. These are Brawn, Dexterity, Violence, Wits, and Willpower. He also has a Profession, such as Artist, Boxer, or Magician, and a Reputation, like Anonymous, Old, or Shady. These provide a particular benefit. For example, the Lumberjack is used to living in harsh conditions and receives two extra Hit Points and the Occultist knows one spell and two dead languages, whilst a Feared Reputation means that most people will back down if they know who you are and Well-Travelled means that you never get lost above ground and learn languages easily. A Profession also allows an Investigator to succeed at the mundane aspects of his job and affords him several contacts in the field. An investigator also has a couple of pieces of equipment, perhaps a weapon as well, and some languages. To create an investigator, a player divides five points between the five attributes, and chooses a Profession, a Reputation, and some equipment and languages for him. With the rulebook in hand, the process takes mere minutes.

Our sample investigator is Henry Brinded, a Bostonian from a wealthy family who studied Classics at Yale before serving as an artillery officer with the American Expeditionary Force in Northern France during the Great War. As a consequence he is slightly deaf and abhors loud noises. He owns and runs a small antiquarian shop which specialises in ancient and medieval manuscripts.

Henry Brinded
Profession: Occultist
Reputation: Dilettante

Brawn 0, Dexterity 0, Violence +1, Wits +3, Willpower +1

Hit Points: 10
Sanity Points: 11

Languages: Latin, Ancient Greek, Hebrew
Spells:
Equipment: Notebook & Pen, Magnifying Glass

Mechanically, Rats in the Walls uses two six-sided dice. For an investigator to undertake an action, his player rolls the dice and attempts to get a high result. Bonuses are flat, either a +2 because the task is easy—due to the investigator’s Profession or he has the right tools or time, or -2 because the task is hard—due to a lack of time, tools, help, and so on. The target for the roll is typically an eight, but whilst that is always a success, it is a success with consequences. A player will need to roll ten or more for his investigator to succeed without consequences. Further, the Game Master does not roll, only the player does.

Before the roll is made though, player and Game Master discuss and set the terms of the task. Now a player can roll and the result be a failure, but it can instead be a partial success rather than an out and out failure. For example, in attempting to break into a house to view an occult tome which the owner is believed to possess, a player and the Game Master negotiate not an unsuccessful attempt if the player rolls a failure, but the fact that although the investigator manages to break in, find the occult tome, and get the information he needs, he leaves evidence of his intrusion that the house’s owner might find. 

Now, this act of negotiation is not carried out throughout the whole of Rats in the Walls. For tasks that take time, a player is simply rolling to determine how long the task takes, the better the skill check, the quicker it takes. Combat works in a similar fashion. At its most basic, with the average investigator having just ten Hit Points and a rifle inflicting 2d6 points of damage, combat in Rats in the Walls is deadly, and if an investigator is reduced to zero Hit Points and survives, then he suffers a scar, which might a limp, chronic pain, or a nasty scar. What a player is really doing in combat is rolling to see whether his investigator will inflict Consequences or suffer them. If a player rolls poorly, then his investigator will suffer one or two Consequences—decided upon by the Game Master, but roll well and his investigator can inflict them on his opponents. Potential Consequences include Harm, Ignore Armour, Stray Bullet, Vulnerable, and Stress, but the Game Master and the players are free to make them up.
For example, Henry Brinded confronts a cultist about to slice open the throat of a wouldbe sacrifice. His player states that he wants to disarm the cultist. He rushes forward and attempts to stop him by grabbing the knife. His player rolls two dice and adds Brinded’s Violence of +1. Unfortunately, he only manages to get a result of a nine and not the target number of ten he needs. This means that Game Master can inflict a Consequence on Brinded. Since Brinded was attempting to disarm the cultist, the Game Master rules that it be Harm as although he does not disarm the cultist, but he does in effect stop the cultist from cutting the victim’s throat when the cultist plunges the dagger into Brinded’s shoulder.Like most good roleplaying games of Lovecraftian investigative horror, Rats in the Walls has a Sanity mechanic. Whenever an investigator encounters a supernatural event or monster rather than any mundane horror, his player makes a Willpower roll. He can roll and succeed and lose nothing, but gain a bonus when encountering either again, or he can fail and lose Sanity Points. How many depends on how poorly the Willpower roll was failed by, either one to three or one to six points. Once an investigator suffers one shock too many and loses all of his Sanity Points, he may do something silly—run away in a random direction, shoot mindlessly, abandon his friends, and so on, faint, or even continue to act normally. The latter is not without its consequences, so the investigator might be shell-shocked and lose one Sanity Point permanently, gain a scar which aches in the presence of the unnatural or a third eye which detects the use of sorcery, a weak heart, or suffer from PTSD. Once a player has made his choice, the investigator gains a die’s worth of Sanity Points back, but it can also be gained between sessions by an investigator engaging in favourite activity.

Should an investigator permanently lose all of his Sanity Points, he becomes permanently insane and thus an NPC. There are two ways in which Sanity Points can be permanently lost. One is through being Shell-shocked, another is by learning a spell. Learning sorcery requires finding and deciphering an old tome. Casting a spell is a Willpower check and can lose the caster Sanity Points. Spells include Curse of the Mute which renders the target incapable of speech, Murmurs inflicts strange whispering voices on the target revealing dark secrets and a loss of Sanity Points, and Withering which gives the target the strength and vitality of a nonagenarian for a few hours. Now one of the things that Rats in the Walls does omit here are the tomes which contain these spells.

In terms of its mythos, Rats in the Walls does step over into the Cthulhu Mythos with the inclusion of the Ghoul and the Shoggoth, but in the main it offers its own Horrors Behind the WAlls of Sanity. Abyssals are creatures of living water which can teleport between any body of water in sight and manipulate water tendrils to attack; the Dying Light come from the centre of the universe in search of life to take back to the Void and can absorb life, but the sight of which is the same as seeing into the Void; and Memory Hounds target those humans who have killed other humans, possessing the face of the person who was killed. The Old Ones of Rats in the Walls’ mythos are unstoppable, almost unquantifiable entities who have found a home on Earth, Consequently, they have no statistics and cannot be killed, rather their plans can be delayed, the efforts of their cultists thwarted, and so Humanity saved for a while. They include the Feeder, the Grinder, the Howler, the Mad Dancer, the Stranger, and the Void Mother, each being conceptual in nature, and each comes with thumbnail descriptions of three cults, one from the Middle Ages, one from the Jazz Age, and one from the future, a Science Fiction setting.

The mythos of Rats in the Walls and the reach of the Old Ones stretches ‘Beyond the Walls of Sleep’. Here their inhuman dreams intermingle with Humanity’s imagination to create medieval cities lit by gaslight, lands reached by ships that sail the skies, souks populated by peoples and creatures out of myth, so realms of the fantastic, but also the disturbing and the weird, such as the Iron Plain, a wide plain covered in flowers of brass populated by the victims of the Great War, perhaps hunted by the first war machines or the City of a Hundred Summers where everything is bought and traded for in facts. Although it is possible to learn a ritual that will enable you to enter the Old Ones’ dreams, the greater likelihood is that an investigator will be drawn in after being embroiled in their machinations.

In terms of support for the Game Master, Rats in the Walls provides solid advice on running Cosmic Horror at the table, primarily that her task is not to scare the players, but the investigators. It advises using contrast to highlight the weird versus the mundane, making sure that the world is worth saving, and not to draw upon the Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft. It makes clear that although Rats in the Walls is inspired by his writings in its treatment of Cosmic Horror, it does not set out to emulate it. Further, on the Purist to Pulp scale, Rats on the Walls veers away from the former, being about stalwarts caring enough about the world to fight to save it from the alien beings which embody Cosmic Horror, even if that fight is daunting and there is the possibility that the investigators will die or go insane. Further advice guides the Game Master through creating investigations, whilst an appendix provides means to create investigators in The Past—the Victorian era and the Wild West, for example, and during the Crusades.

Physically, Rats in the Walls is available as an art free version or a version with full colour artwork. The latter consists of full page pieces, all fairly decent. The book is well written, although it needs an edit in places. If there is anything missing from Rats in the Walls it is a sample investigation or scenario.

What Rats in the Walls offers is rules-light cosmic horror roleplaying inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, but not emulating him. Its player-facing mechanics—a combination of Advanced Fighting Fantasy and Powered by the Apocalypse—make for faster, easier play and enable the Game Master to focus on guiding the narrative and portraying the NPCs. The lightly drawn mythos of Rats in the Walls: A roleplaying game of cosmic horror, means that there is plenty of scope also for the Game Master to create new content and develop new scenarios that may avoid some of the familiarity of similar horror roleplaying games.

There is no denying the continued and growing popularity of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, with it having appeared on the television series Stranger Things and the YouTube series, Critical Role, it no longer being seen as a hobby solely the preserve of typically male, nerdy teenagers and young adults. Yet as acceptable a hobby as roleplaying and in particular, playing Dungeons & Dragons has become, getting into the hobby is still a daunting prospect. Imagine if you will, being faced with making your first character for your first game of Dungeons & Dragons? Then what monsters will face? What adventures will you have? For nearly all of us, answering these questions are not all that far from being a challenge, for all started somewhere and we all had to make that first step—making our first character, entering our first dungeon, and encountering our first monster. As well written as both Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set and the Player’s Handbook are, both still present the prospective reader and player with a lot of choices, but without really answering these questions in an easy to read and reference fashion.

Step forward the ‘Dungeons & Dragons Young Adventurer’s Guides Series’ published by Ten Speed Press. This is a series of introductory guides to Dungeons & Dragons, designed as primers to various aspects of the world’s leading roleplaying game. Each in the series is profusely illustrated, no page consisting entirely of text. The artwork is all drawn from and matches the style of Dungeon & Dragons, Fifth Edition, so as much as it provides an introduction to the different aspects of the roleplaying game covered in each book in the series, it provides an introduction to the look of the roleplaying game, so providing continuity between the other books in the ‘Dungeons & Dragons Young Adventurer’s Guides Series’ and the Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set and the core rulebooks. This use of art and the digest size of the book means that from the start, every entry in the ‘Dungeons & Dragons Young Adventurer’s Guides Series’ is an attractive little package.

The first in the series, Warriors & Weapons provided an introduction to the various Races of Dungeons & Dragons, the martial character Classes, and the equipment they use. Second is not Wizards & Spells, the companion to Warriors & Weapons which covers Clerics, Sorcerers, and Wizards, or indeed any of the other spellcasting character types in Dungeons & Dragons. Instead the second book in the series is Monsters & Creatures. As the title suggests, this presents an introduction to the monsters, creatures, and animals that the prospective player may well have his character encounter on his adventures, many of them—like the Beholder, the Mind Flayer, the Owl Bear, and more—iconic to Dungeons & Dragons. Equally, the third in the series is not the eagerly anticipated Wizards & Spells, but Dungeons & Tombs, a guide to the dungeons, tombs, castles, crypts, cave networks, and other complexes which populate the many fantasy words of Dungeons & Dragons.

Dungeons & Tombs begins in promising fashion, warning of the dangers of dungeon delving, but highlighting also that they are places of mystery and adventure before discussing a little just some of the preparations necessary to venture into such places. Then the book leaps into the first of its three parts, ‘The Most Dangerous Dungeons’ which looks at six of the strange, sinister places ready to be explored by the adventurers. These are Ironslag from Storm King's Thunder, The Temple of Elemental Evil from Princes of the Apocalypse, The Sea Ghost from Ghosts of Saltmarsh, Ravenloft from Curse of Strahd, Chult from Tomb of Annihilation, and Undermountain from Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage. Each is given an overview, highlights its important places, shines a spotlight on a specific area, and outlines a key encounter in the dungeon where the adventurers will have to make a critical choice.

So for example, Ironslag is a former iron mine and fortress which has been reopened by the Fire Giant, Duke Zalto, who wants to construct a mighty warmachine. Besides Duke Zalto himself, other threats include the treacherous Yakfolk, salamanders, and other Fire Giants, as well getting into the dungeon itself—behind a high cliff face protected by the village of the Yakfolk. The latter is included listed in the dungeon’s important places, alongside the mines, the foundry, assembly hall, and at last, the Adamantite Forge. The spotlight is on The Foundry where Fire Giants are smelting iron and Duke Zalto’s son, Zaltember is about to toss a prisoner into the molten metal! Here is a chance for the adventurers to intervene, story prompts suggesting an idea for the Dungeon Master and an idea for the player characters. Lastly, the Encounter is presented in a short piece of fiction, here describing the final scenes in the dungeon and asking the reader what the character in the fiction should do next.

Now there is nothing wrong in Dungeons & Tombs showcasing the dungeons and campaigns available for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, and it has the benefit of all six ‘Most Dangerous Dungeons’ actually being in print—unlike the last time that Wizards of the Coast did something similar with the near useless, Dungeon Survival Guide. Yet Dungeons & Tombs only highlights six of the campaigns when at the time of publication there are ten available and it ignores the excellent Lost Mine of Phandelver from the excellent Dungeons & Dragons, Starter Set. Further, it exposes secrets (spoilers?) about each of these dungeons when perhaps the write-ups could have been more circumspect in what was revealed. Nevertheless, the six do showcase various types of dungeons—a ship, a mine, a castle, and so on.

The middle section returns to the territory of Monsters & Creatures, but specifically focusing on creatures found underground with the ‘Dungeon Bestiary’. Some fifteen monsters are detailed, each entry accorded a double page spread, the left hand page showing an illustration of the creature or monster, a listing of its special powers, a description of its size, and an indication of its Danger Level, from ‘0’ or harmless to ‘5’ for really nasty. On the right hand page there is a description of the monster or creature and its lair, accompanied by a list of things to do or not do when dealing with it. Many of the entries are Dungeons & Dragons classics, like the Basilisk, Mimic, Oozes like Black Puddings and Gelatinous Cubes, and Ropers. Others, like the Grung, the Sea Elf, and the Yikaria, are simply not, leaving the reader to wonder why such a random selection was included. The simple reason is that these monsters and creatures appear in the ‘Most Dangerous Dungeons’ rather than because they are classic Dungeons & Dragons creatures.

The last of the three parts in Dungeons & Tombs, is ‘Building Your Own Dungeon’, a relatively short guide for the potential Dungeon Master wanting to create her own dungeon. This looks at potential concepts—location, creator, and purpose; populating a dungeon with inhabitants and traps; mapmaking with examples and map symbols; quests and exploring dungeons; and using dungeons to tell stories. All of this is good advice, a solid introduction to designing dungeons and running them, but it is all for the Dungeon Master. The fundamental problem with Dungeons & Tombs is that it does not do the same for the potential player. There is no equivalent introduction to dungeoneering and its dangers for the player and his character, because instead, Dungeons & Tombs is focusing on specific dungeons and their dangers, which both player and character are likely to encounter just the once.

Now there is nothing wrong with a book for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition examining dungeons or adventures and their dangers for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. Yet in devoting over half of the book to specific dungeons, including the monsters and creatures which are specific to those dungeons, it forgoes the opportunity to give more general advice on dungeoneering for the prospective player and Dungeon Master. General advice which would enhance the utility of Dungeons & Tombs, potentially serving as general reference which could sit on the playing table or close at hand, ready to be checked for advice and hints. Much like the Monsters & Creatures book can work.

Physically, Dungeons & Tombs is an attractive little hardback. It is bright, it is breezy, and it shows a prospective player what his character might face, both in the art and the writing. Further, the art shows lots of adventuring scenes which can only spur the prospective player’s imagination.

The problem with Dungeons & Tombs is that it does not deliver on its tagline of ‘Explore the Magical Worlds of D&D’, but rather the bulk of it delivers ‘Explore SIX of the Magical Worlds of D&D’. Apart from the last section, the last fifth of Dungeons & Tombs, which is specifically written for the Dungeon Master, its approach to its subject matter is just not general enough to be useful in the long term. Dungeons & Tombs is disappointingly specific and the least useful, least interesting of the three Young Adventurer’s Guide’ titles to date.

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


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What is it?Rubble Runners - A collection of Pavis Characters is a collection of fifteen NPCs and almost eighty members of the supporting cast and scenario hooks.

It is a thirty-nine page, full colour, 5.97 MB PDF.

Rubble Runners - A collection of Pavis Characters is well presented and reasonably well written, but needs a thorough edit from start to finish. The illustrations are decent, being photographs reworked by the author.

Where is it set?
The content of Rubble Runners - A collection of Pavis Characters is set in Pavis and civilised Prax, specifically in the years 1625, 1626, and 1627 after Prince Argrath White Bull has defeated  Lunar forces at the Second Battle of Moonbroth and liberated the city and drove out it Lunar occupiers—mostly at the point of a sword.Who do you play?The supplement primarily consists of NPCs, though some NPCs can be used as player characters.

What do you need?
Rubble Runners - A collection of Pavis Characters requires RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and a whole lot more. Being set in New Pavis and its environs, to get the full benefit of this supplement, the Game Master will require access to various supplements including Cults of Prax, Pavis, Big Rubble, and Borderlands for RuneQuest II or River of Cradles, Sun County, and Shadows on the Borderlands for RuneQuest III.

Note that this is at the time of publication of Rubble Runners - A collection of Pavis Characters and will change when a new supplement dedicated to Pavis and the Big Rubble is published. 

What do you get?
Rubble Runners - A collection of Pavis Characters is a collection of fifteen NPCs, each of which is accompanied by five or six associates and contacts—their supporting cast and five or six encounter and plot hooks. Every NPC includes a half to full page description and background, full stats for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, an illustration, and the aforementioned supporting cast, encounters, and hooks.

Many of the characters in Rubble Runners - A collection of Pavis Characters are connected to each other, either directly as friends or family, or through the members of the supporting cast they have in common. Yet what really connects this diverse range of characters in the supplement is that they have all been affected by the bloody expulsion of the Lunar occupation. In this the supplement draws its inspiration from the Wild West following the American Civil War, as well as the cinema that it inspired. That said, the nastiness and antipathy expressed by and towards some of the NPCs in this supplement echoes that of occupied Europe following its liberation at the end of World War II.

One further limiting factor to the supplement is not the setting itself, but the nature of that setting. Rubble Runners - A collection of Pavis Characters is predominately a city supplement and there few cities in Glorantha which are large enough and urbanised enough to support this range of characters and their elements. Nevertheless, if the Game Master has such access to such a setting or is using New Pavis, this supplement is a ready-made cast into which the Game Master can draw her player characters, involve them in each other’s plans and objectives, and so help build towards an ongoing campaign.

Is it worth your time?
Yes. Rubble Runners - A collection of Pavis Characters is a solid set of inventive NPCs, a good mix of contacts, friends, foes, employers, and more. Particularly useful for the Game Master running a campaign set in New Pavis.
No. If the Game Master is not running a campaign set in New Pavis—or planning to take her campaign to New Pavis, Rubble Runners - A collection of Pavis Characters is not a useful supplement.
Maybe. Even if the Game Master is not running a campaign in New Pavis, the content of Rubble Runners - A collection of Pavis Characters may still be of interest. Some of the characters contained in its pages can be used as player characters, pulled out and used in other settings, or simply used as inspiration for NPCs of the Game Master’s own design.

Originally published in 1987, Terror Australis, for use with Call of Cthulhu, Third Edition, the supplement was always, much like its source material, something of an outlier in comparison with the venerable roleplaying game’s focus on North America and Europe. Indeed, Terror Australis was perhaps best known for the inclusion of the scenario, ‘City Beneath the Sands’, the Australian chapter of the highly regarded Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign. Of course the removal of ‘City Beneath the Sands’ for its inclusion in The Complete Masks of Nyarlathotep left scope for Chaosium, Inc. to revisit Terror Australis, but that opportunity did not come until the publication of the Masks of Nyarlathotep: Dark Schemes Herald the End of the World and the revised edition of Terror Australis, both of which have been written for use with Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition and updated, revised, and expanded in scope to make their respective contents more accessible and playable.

Notably Terror Australis: Call of Cthulhu in the Land Down Under is double the size of the original Terror Australis. In fact, it includes half as much again in terms of background and source material in comparison to the original Terror Australis—and that is in addition the supplement’s two scenarios, both new and both lengthy. From the start, Terror Australis takes a mature and respectful attitude towards its subject matter. It identifies the continent’s  indigenous peoples throughout as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, it acknowledges the racism prevalent against by those peoples by White Australia through much of its history, and it explores the presence of LGBTQI subculture to be found Australia’s big cities. Of course, not as prevalent as in Berlin as detailed in Berlin: The Wicked City – Unveiling the Mythos in Weimar Berlin in this period, but present nonetheless.

Terror Australis opens with an examination of Australian history, which of course begins with the arrival of the Europeans, there being no recorded history before that, looking at turn with the initial European exploration, the founding of the British penal colony—a period which has been looked at in greater detail in Convicts & Cthulhu: Call of Cthulhu Roleplaying in the Penal Colonies of 18th Century Australia, the Gold Rush of the 1850s, and so on, right up to the Commonwealth of Australia’s involvement in the Great War and its effects. It is followed by a guide to the continent’s geography which also touches a little upon its archaeology.

Where the history starts with the arrival of the Europeans, Terror Australis’ coverage of the Australians as a people starts with the indigenous peoples, identified throughout as the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It covers their history, culture, art, spiritual beliefs, and world-view, information enough for the Keeper to create interesting NPCs and the players create interesting investigators. White Australians receive similar treatment, the supplement noting that most will be British and that the Mother Country dominates Australian life and society, whilst highlighting the dominant male culture with its love of the working man, drinking, and gambling. It includes a guide to Australian slang and pronunciation, plus new Occupations and skills. For the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples there are the Hunter/Gather and Clever Man/Woman, whilst the broader Occupations are all support the working class nature of Australian society. They include the Boundary Rider who tours and repairs the boundaries of cattle stations, the Bushranger  or Outback outlaw, the Camel Driver who acts as guides and escorts in the Outback, the Digger or former miner or soldier, the Jackaroo/Jillaroo who are working cattle or sheep stations for the first time, the Stockman/woman who have more experience than the Jackaroo/Jillaroo, and the Swagman/woman or itinerant labourer. Of course, the many other Occupations from Call of Cthulhu are suitable for inclusion in a scenario or campaign set in Terror Australis, although it does discuss the nature of the Private Eye in Australia during this period, highlighting how they are unregulated, distrusted, and sometimes guilty of criminal acts themselves in pursuit the evidence or proof their clients want. The Relativists—mostly physicists and astronomers—is given as an investigator organisation with an interest in the unexplained, whilst The Theosophical Society is given later on.

As well as giving thumbnail portraits of some twenty or so Australians of note, ranging from artists, scientists, and journalists to politicians, activists, and aviators, the supplement details Australia’s police and legal system, healthcare, transport networks, and communications. Given the nature of Call of Cthulhu, it is likely that the investigators will find themselves ‘going Bush’ or mounting an expedition into the Outback, so there is advice on handling expeditions and ensuring their survival in the harsh environment beyond Australia’s settled coasts. Similarly, for players and their investigators, there is most obviously a guide to law as it related to firearms and the institutions, all museums, where research can be conducted. Australia’s five main cities are described—the two largest, Sydney and Melbourne in some detail, as well as Perth, Adelaide, and Brisbane. Each starts with a pair of handy references, one a guide to portraying the city, the other a guide to the city at a glance, plus places of note, criminal underworld, and more.

As well as detailed city maps, it is here that Terror Australis begins to explore the weirder side of the Land Down Under. Initially, this is via the ‘Strange Australia’ sidebars such as the river monster said to inhabit the Hawkesbury River and the fate of the Alert, the ferry which was used to ram great Cthulhu himself as described in Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu. The presence of various cults in each of the cities are also covered, the homegrown Cult of the Sandbat from Masks of Nyarlathotep being joined by the Cthulhu Cult and the acquisitive New World Incorporated from Day of the Beast. A good sixth of Terror Australis is specifically dedicated to the Mythos in Australia. Understandably, its initial focus is upon the Great Race of Yith, their place in Australia’s prehistory, their great city of Pnakotus, and their enemy, the Flying Polyps, exploring how both inhabit (or have inhabited) the very geography of Australia itself and this continues with the Great Hive of the Sand-dwellers. In addition various sites of Mythos interest, Terror Australis describes threats brought to the continent by Europeans. These include Ghouls, cultists from the darkest part of Gloucester, and a cult in the Barossa Valley sure to put off any oenophile. The Mythos bestiary adds a variety of different creatures and entities as well as discussing the presence of more traditional Mythos creatures and entities in Australia. So Ghouls and Hounds of Tindalos as well as Bunyips and Yowies, the latter akin to the North American Sasquatch or Himalayan Yeti, and Dark Spirits of Earth, which inhabit or haunt particular features of the land. No one Dark Spirit is the same as any other and the Keeper is given the means to create her own, for which she will need access to the Grand Grimoire of Cthulhu Mythos Magic.

The spiritual beliefs and existence of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are explored in some depth in ‘Alcheringa’, also known as ‘Dreamtime’. A spiritual space which surrounds everything, this is where the world can be explained, not as a creation myth, but as the world is, has been, and always will be. It is also a space which can be entered via ‘song-lines’, not just to learn how the world is, but also for learning knowledge, for revealing the secret nature of the world, and for bringing about supernatural changes to the world. This is done via specific rituals and requires the participants to follow each song-line fairly tightly if they are to gain the desired rewards, otherwise there is a chance that they may get kicked out of Alcheringa rather roughly. Following a song-line and entering Alcheringa is not without its dangers, which is even worse should an investigator actually enter physically. There is even the possibility that participants can alter and even twist a song-line, although this is not easy and is not without its consequences. 

Song-lines are in some ways a Mythos tome which an investigator can experience spiritually rather simply read and which a player can roleplay that experience. Further, there is a social roleplaying aspect to Alcheringa in that the investigators will need to find someone who will teach them the ritual or allow them to participate in the ritual. The rules for Alcheringa are supported with sample rewards—either internal and personal or changes to the world and external, artefacts which help in the Dreaming, and sample stories which can be used as song-lines, including an expanded one which shows how they work in play. Four examples of megafauna, long extinct, but of course still alive in Alcheringa where the investigators might encounter them… The rules for Alcheringa and song-lines are an impressive addition to Call of Cthulhu, helping to bring an aspect of Aboringal culture and spirituality to life and mark investigations in Australia as being different to those in other countries. They literally add another dimension to Lovecraftian investigative horror and as a side note, there are parallels between the song-lines of Alcheringa and the heroquests of RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha—also published by Chaosium, Inc. 

The two scenarios in Terror Australis are both new. The first is ‘Long Way From Home’ is radically different to almost every scenario before it. Taking a leaf out of the Old School Renaissance, it is a ‘sandbox’ scenario in which the player characters—or investigators—are free to wander as they please and engage with the elements of the scenario as is their wont. Now Call of Cthulhu being a roleplaying game of Lovecraftian investigative horror, ‘Long Way From Home’ provides multiple lines of investigation into the scenario. Set in the Northern Flinders Range to the north of Adelaide, these lines include a strange shower of meteors, a growing pattern of earthquakes, a spa deep in the outback providing miraculous cures, and a job offer to look after a copper mine which has been put into mothballs. Each of these strands are standalone, but all have links to Australia’s deep past and H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Out of Time’. There is a certain benign quality to the nature of the Mythos and a scientific feel to it at the heart of this scenario. The multiple strands means that there is also a flexibility to it also, because the investigators are free to follow whichever strand they want in whatever order they want. The strands include some pleasingly creepy scenes—one of which is archetypically Australian—and the final series of encounters have a surprising grandeur.

The second scenario, ‘Black Water, White Death’, feels more traditional in terms of Call of Cthulhu, possessing an onion skin layering of its mystery. Even its beginning is traditional, the investigators being asked to attend an auction on behalf of a client. He is a professor of anthropology with an interest in cannibalism in tribal society who wants the diary of a convict who escaped prison on the island of Tasmania in the 1830s and is reputed to have involved. Not everyone wants the diary to end up in his hands, but should the investigators get it to their employer, he further wants their aid in following up the information and that means they get to visit wintery Tasmania. Essentially a scenario of two halves, ‘Black Water, White Death’ is more confrontational than ‘Long Way From Home’, with a potentially bloodier ending which comes out of nowhere after strong investigative, almost academic, focus.

These are both good scenarios and worthy replacements for those which appeared in the original Terror Australis. Hopefully the two scenarios from that supplement—‘Pride of Yirrimburra’ and ‘Old Fellow That Bunyip’, the third, ‘City Beneath the Sands’ appearing in Masks of Nyarlathotep—will be revised and revisited in an Antipodean-themed anthology of further scenarios. Of the two, ‘Black Water, White Death’ is the easier to run, being more direct and straightforward than ‘Long Way From Home’, which will require greater preparation upon the part of the Keeper because there are more plots and they are separate plots. If there is a weakness to the pair of scenarios in the revised Terror Australis, it is that neither involves Alcheringa, although there is an option to include it in ‘Long Way From Home’. In addition to the two scenarios, it should be noted that the supplement is strewn with scenario hooks ready for the Keeper to develop, which would provide multiple sessions of play. Rounding out Terror Australis is a set of four appendices, containing in turn a list of equipment prices, a bestiary of Australia’s mundane, but often deadly wildlife, timelines mundane and fortean, and a good bibliography. All useful content.

Terror Australis being from Chaosium, Inc., this means that this is a good looking supplement. The layout is clean and tidy, done in full colour, illustrated with a wide range of artwork and period photographs. The cartography is also good and the writing excellent.

In 1987, Terror Australis was a decent supplement and thirty years on, it could simply have been a case of Chaosium, Inc. publishing a straight reprint, probably with the addition of a new scenario to replace ‘City Beneath the Sands’, but doing so would have been a missed opportunity. Thankfully, Chaosium has not missed that opportunity and has taken it to publish more than just a reprint, allowing the original authors to revisit, update, and greatly expand upon the original. The result of that effort is undeniably impressive and it almost goes without saying that this is another great supplement from Chaosium, Inc. Terror Australis: Call of Cthulhu in the Land Down Under fully fleshes out the continent, not just in mundane and Mythos terms as you would expect, but in magical terms with the extra dimension of Alcheringa. 

It is impossible to ignore the influence of Dungeons & Dragons and the effect that its imprint has had on the gaming hobby. It remains the most popular roleplaying game some forty or more years since it was first published, and it is a design and a set-up which for many was their first experience of roleplaying—and one to which they return again and again. This explains the popularity of the Old School Renaissance and the many retroclones—roleplaying games which seek to emulate the mechanics and play style of previous editions Dungeons & Dragons—which that movement has spawned in the last fifteen years. Just as with the Indie Game movement before it began as an amateur endeavour, so did the Old School Renaissance, and just as with the Indie Game movement before it, many of the aspects of the Old School Renaissance are being adopted by mainstream roleplaying publishers who go on to publish retroclones of their own. Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game, published by Goodman Games is a perfect example of this. Other publishers have been around long enough for them to publish new editions of their games which originally appeared in the first few years of the hobby, whilst still others are taking their new, more contemporary games and mapping them onto the retroclone.

Yet there are other roleplaying games which draw upon the roleplaying games of the 1970s, part of the Old School Renaissance, but which may not necessarily draw directly upon Dungeons & Dragons. Some are new, like Forbidden Lands – Raiders & Rogues in a Cursed World and Classic Fantasy: Dungeoneering Adventures, d100 Style!, but others are almost as old as Dungeons & Dragons. One of these is The Fantasy Trip, published by Metagaming Concepts in 1980. Designed by Steve Jackson, this was a fantasy roleplaying game built around two earlier microgames, also designed by Steve Jackson, MicroGame #3: Melee in 1977 and  MicroGame #6: Wizard in 1978. With the closure of Metagaming Concepts in 1983, The Fantasy Trip and its various titles went out of print. Steve Jackson would go on to found Steve Jackson Games and design further titles like Car Wars and Munchkin as well as the detailed, universal roleplaying game, GURPS. Then in December, 2017, Steve Jackson announced that he had got the rights back to The Fantasy Trip and then in April, 2019, following a successful Kickstarter campaign, Steve Jackson Games republished The Fantasy Trip. The mascot version of The Fantasy Trip is of course, The Fantasy Trip: Legacy Edition. 

The Fantasy Trip: Legacy Edition is a big box of things, including the original two microgames. So instead of reviewing the deep box as a whole, it is worth examining the constituent parts of The Fantasy Trip: Legacy Edition one by one, delving ever deeper into its depths bit by bit. The first of these is Melee, quick to set up, quick to play game of man-to-man combat. It was followed by Wizard, a companion to Melee which sends wizards into the arena to duel against each other. It is designed to be played by two or more players, aged ten and over, with a game lasting roughly between thirty and sixty minutes. Inside the box can be found a twenty-four page rules booklet, a 19” by 23” game map, a set of sixty-two counters, and three six-sided dice. It also includes an eight page Wizard Reference Pages, which summarises all of the spells in the game as well as character actions and monster and beast stats.

The presentation of the game is rather plain and simple. So the layout of the black and white rulebook is clean and tidy, as the is the game map, which is marked in two inch Hexes, each with a centre spot, every seven Hexes forming a Megahex three standard Hexes in width. The standard Hexes are used for movement and facing in melee combat, whilst the Megahexes are used to determine range in missile combat. The various counters provide a range of opponents, including animals and monsters, plus condition counters and area effects. These are done in a range of monochrome colours, but all are different and include a pair of giants whose triangular counters take up three Hexes and dragons who take four and seven Hexes! All of the counters have a skull and crossbones on the other side to indicate when they have been killed. Lastly, the set of three eggshell-blue six-sided dice add a spot of colour to the game.


Play of Wizard begins with the creation of well, a wizard. In Melee, each fighter had just the two attributes—Strength and Dexterity, whereas Wizard adds a third, IQ. All three it turns out are important to spellcasting magic-users. Just as in Melee, Strength covers how many hit points a wizard has, what weapons he can use, and how effective he is in hand-to-hand combat. Dexterity covers how easily a wizard can hit an opponent, disengage from the enemy, and how quickly he can attack. For a wizard though, Strength represents how many spells he can cast, each spell having a cost that is paid in Strength points, not only to cast the spell, but also maintain it if necessary. Dexterity also represents a wizard's ability to hit a target with a spell. Intelligence or IQ, the new attribute, governs the number of spells a wizard knows, the maximum level of spells he knows—each spell has an IQ rating between eight and sixteen which the wizard’s IQ must match for him to know, and his resistance to illusions and Control spells. 

All three attributes begin at a base value of eight each, to which a player distributes another eight points. Once done, a wizard receives a staff, though it can be a staff, a wand, a rod, or the like, through which he casts spells. It is not a physical weapon though, but Wizard does cover physical combat should a wizard resort to using a dagger or his fists. Once a player has selected his wizard’s spells, the character is ready to play.

For example, Sibbe Stigandidottir, a Seeress from the north who is studying at a secret academy in the warm south. Her rough manners have made her the target of other students and when she struck out at one of her tormentors, Alzono, he challenged her to a duel in the academy’s arena.

Sibbe Stigandidottir
Strength 09
Dexterity 10
Intelligence 13
MA 11
Wizard’s Staff
Spells: Blur, Clumsiness, Confusion, Control Animal, Dazzle, Destroy Creation, Freeze, Magic Fist, Mage Sight, Reverse Missiles, Sleep, Stone Flesh, Summon Wolf


Wizard lists some sixty or so spells. They are rated according to the minimum Intelligence or IQ a wizard must have to learn them. Each has a cost in terms of Strength points which need to be expended when a wizard casts the spell and many have an ongoing cost if the wizard wants to maintain them. They are catagorised into four types. These are Missile spells such as Magic Fist and Lightning,  which are direct damage spells; Thrown spells, like Blur and Slippery Floor, which can be cast on a target, whether that is a person or a location, but which do not inflict damage; Control spells such as Control Animal and Control Person; and Creation spells, being further divided between spells which create an actual object like  Summon Bear and spells which create illusions like  Illusion. 

Wizard is played out over a series of turns consisting of six phases—initiative, renew spells (or spell upkeep), movement, the opponent’s movement, actions (physical attacks, spell casting, attempts to disbelieve spells, and so on), and forced retreats, and dropped weapons. None of which happens simultaneously, but it takes place across a five-second round. Now in Melee, the primary objective in play is for the combatants to close with other and fight, essentially go from Disengaged to Engaged. This provides the fighter with a number of options. If Engaged, he can ‘Shift and Attack’, ‘Shift and Defend’, ‘Change Weapons’, ‘Disengage’, and so on. If Disengaged, he can ‘Move’. Charge’, Dodge’, ‘Drop’ (to prone), ‘Ready New Weapon’, make a ‘Missile Weapon Attack’, and so on. All of these options are available for the wizards in Wizard, but in the main, it will not be the wizards who will enraging with each other at such close range. Rather, it will be the things that they have summoned, whether that is wolves, bears, myrmidons, gargoyles, giants, and even dragons, or illusions—of them and other things—which can also inflict damage if the defending wizard fails to disbelieve them, which are likely to be engaging in close combat.

Which in main means that wizards will be dueling it out with each other at range. Mostly obviously this means casting missile spells at each other in order to do direct damage, but with four types and sixty spells to choose from, a wizard has more options available to him than a fighter has in Melee. Spells like Blur, Reverse Missiles, Spell Shield, and Iron Flesh all provide various forms of protection, whilst Slow Movement, Clumsiness, and Trip will hinder a target. These though are spells that target either the casting wizard or his opponent, but a wizard has access to spells which can the environment between himself and his opponent. So spells like Shadow fills a hex with black shadow, so hindering sight; Create Wall places a wall which blocks sight and movement; and Slippery Floor makes a megahex slippery, which forces anyone entering it to make a Dexterity check or loose their footing. It is also possible for a wizard to hide in the arena, either by casting Invisibility or slipping into a hex containing the effects of the Shadow spell. 

Being companion games, both Melee and Wizard share the same mechanics. This is essentially a Saving Throw, rolled on the three six-sided dice, made against an attribute. Typically, this will be a roll against the wizard’s Dexterity in order to hit an opponent or object with a spell, but roll against a wizard’s Intelligence to avoid a Control Person spell, disbelieve an illusion, and so on. Damage is dealt in six-sided dice, more damage being done by spells by a wizard expending more Strength on the spell when cast. Damage is deducted from a wizard’s Strength, a wizard being knocked unconscious when it is reduced to zero and killed when it goes below that. Wizard duels in the arena are either to the death, arena combat, or practice combat, each awarding fewer—fifty, thirty, or ten—Experience Points to any survivors. It takes one hundred Experience Points for a wizard to increase one of his three attributes.

Alonzo Bianchi
Strength 11
Dexterity 10
Intelligence 11
MA 11
Wizard’s Staff
Spells: Blur, Control Animal, Control Person, Freeze, Illusion, Magic Fist, Reveal Magic, Reverse Missiles, Rope, Shock Shield, Summon Myrmidon
For example, Sibbe Stigandidottir and her challenger, Alonzo Bianchi enter the arena and stand ten hexes apart from each other. Each player rolls a six-sided die for initiative, Alonzo’s player rolling a two, Sibbe’s player rolling a five, so she acts first. She knows that Alonzo wants this duel over and done with as quick as possible, so suspects that he will launch an attack as soon as possible. So she casts Reverse Missiles. This costs two Strength to cast and one to maintain. Her player tells Alonzo’s player that Sibbe has cast a spell, but not what, and notes it down. As she suspects, Alonzo casts a missile spell—in this case Magic Fist. This is a telekinetic blow which will do 1d6-2 for each point of Strength powered into it. In this case, two points. Alonzo’s player makes a roll against Alonzo’s Dexterity—there are no adjustments for range—and rolling three six-sided six, hits with a result of a seven. Unfortunately, because Sibbe has cast Reverse Missiles, her player reveals the the Magic Fist rebounds and hits Alonzo. His player rolls 1d6-2 for each missile, getting a result of a three and a one. Adjusted, this would be a one and a minus one, but since the damage can never be less than the Strength points put into the spell, the adjusted damage is two and two, for a total of four damage! At the start of Round Two, Alonzo has a Strength of five, having lost two for casting Magic Fist and four for the damage that spell would have inflicted. Sibbe has a Strength of seven from casting Reverse Missiles. Alonzo’s player rolls a six for initiative, whereas Sibbe’s player rolls a one. Alonzo, reeling from damage that should have struck his opponent, fires of a quick Freeze, which would hold Sibbe in place for several rounds. It costs him four Strength, leaving him with just one! Sibbe will need to make a Saving Throw to shrug off this effect to act, her player rolling fourteen, so not enough to hold her in place. She will be held immobile for seven Rounds. In Round Three, Alonzo’s player rolls a four for initiative, whereas Sibbe’s player rolls a six. She gets to act first and her player makes another Saving Throw, this time with a result of seven, which means she throws off the effects of Freeze and acts, casting Summon Wolf. This costs two Strength to cast and one to maintain. The creature appears and Sibbe directs it to hound Alonzo. Being left with just one Strength, he can only hope to hold off the wolf long enough for Sibbe to use up her Strength, but otherwise it looks like the end of the duel for Alonzo...This is just a simple duel, but with the range of spellcasting options available in Wizard, players have a lot of choice terms of what spells they cast and when. Duels can become tense, tactical affairs, especially when summoned creatures and illusions come into play because then the wizards will not be fighting against just each other, but multiple opponents. One type of spell missing from Wizard is the healing spell, though were there any such spell, a wizard would in effect be expending Strength to cast it in order to increase his Strength and so have more points to cast spells and withstand damage. Rounding out Wizard are rules combining Wizard with Melee, which will provide more options and tactics, and provide for a more involved game. Together, they also lay the groundwork for a proto-roleplaying game, but that will have to wait until The Fantasy Trip: In the Labyrinth.

Physically, Wizard is well presented. It has a ‘Old School’ monochrome feel, but the writing is excellent and the rules clearly explained, and the new artwork in the rulebook is very nice. The cover artwork for the box is also excellent. The game is also supported by short piece of fiction which is explained with a fully worked example of play.

Wizard, much like Melee is a little game, but offers quite a lot of tactical play and options in terms of its rules, much of which will be later seen in Steve Jackson’s GURPS. It is pleasingly self-contained—there is room inside the box for another set of dice and index cards to record the details of every wizard—and easy to set up and play. Unlike Melee, this game is not as easy to teach and certainly not as easy to master, for Wizard offers more options and more tactics, than simple armed combat. Learning them and mastering them will bring players back to Wizard as they try out different spell combinations and tactics, providing a magical counterpart to the brutality of Melee.

A Bride for Dracula: A System neutral, one-shot adventure of bridal contests with bite. is one-shot camp gothic scenario from Mottokrosh Machinations, a publisher best known for Hypertellurians: Fantastic Thrills Through the Ultracosm. Indeed, Hypertellurians: Fantastic Thrills Through the Ultracosm is one for the systems for which A Bride for Dracula is written, although technically, and as its subtitle suggests, the scenario is entirely systemless and its plot and set-up could be run using a panoply of roleplaying games and systems—and genres! For A Bride of Dracula takes place in a time when Dracula still resides at his castle in Transylvania, his greatest victim still loves him, the Nazis lost World War II, and ‘brain in a jar’ technology is available. So there is a technological seam to the scenario alongside its gothic theming, much in keeping with its genre.

A Bride for Dracula takes place on one night at an event hosted by Count Dracula who seeks—or rather lusts after—a new wife. Thus six prospective brides—and thus six players—have come to his castle at his invitation, their suitability to be his wife to be tested. They include Princess Naomi Andress of the Pale Hills—the prospective bride and her mother, Queen Ursula Andress of the Pale Hills; Brigitte, a humble milk maid; Elsa Van Elseling (definitely not Van Helsing Senior’s daughter. Nope.); and the crimson-skinned Yvonna Fackelot, who comes with minions and an almost endless wardrobe. They are joined by John the Carriage Driver, who is just along for the ride. All six characters come with secrets, goals, fears, and a list of the things they are good at and bad at. As written, these characters are detailed enough for players to roleplay should the Game Master want to run A Bride for Dracula as a very rules light, almost freeform scenario.

Alternatively, the players could roleplay members of the entourage for one of the contestants in Dracula’s  bridal competition. The Game Master and the players can easily adapt A Bride for Dracula to the mechanics of their choice. It would work with just about any retroclone for the Old School Renaissance, but especially with the tone of Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay, but also Troika, Into the Odd, or Numenera for example. Given that there are no stats given for any of the characters, it does mean that the Game Master will have some extra preparation to undertake prior to running the scenario. Plus, it is a pity that no stats are given for the characters written for the publisher’s own Hypertellurians: Fantastic Thrills Through the Ultracosm.

Plotwise, A Bride for Dracula is straightforward and linear. The characters start the game together and will experience the same encounters together before play opens up when the contest begins. The Game Master gets to throw in some complications too and much of the fun of the scenario will come as the players and their characters react to these complications and try to out-compete each other in Dracula’s contests. There is certainly enough to keep a playing group of six players occupied for the evening or session.

Physically, A Bride for Dracula is short book, neat and tidy. It is lightly illustrated, but the artwork is decent. The writing is clear and really, the Game Master could grab A Bride for Dracula as is and prepare it in ten minutes. So it really works as a pick-up game when not every player can make a regular session.

Unfortunately, there are couple of elements to A Bride for Dracula which may be problematic. One is the tone, which is camp and gothic, much in the style of the Carry on films—most obviously Carry on Screaming!—and the Hammer Horror series of films, and that tongue in cheek tone, even silliness, is not to everyone’s taste. The other issue is that one of the player characters is an ex-Nazi. Now the scenario does not dwell overly on this or go into further detail, but it does fit in with the campy, gothic tone of the scenario and the exploitation genre of films which inspired the scenario. As is, the character will need to be played with some care, but her very nature means that some players will find her inclusion offensive and not only will they not play her, they may not play the scenario because she is included. The Game Master will need to judge her players as to whether or not to include her, and if not, create a replacement. Arguably, it is a pity that the designer did not include an alternative.

A group need not even have a copy of A Bride for Dracula to play it, since the scenario is available online. Unless the Game Master and her group need to create characters, preparation for A Bride for Dracula is really, really quick, making it perfect to pull out and run at the last minute. There is scope for the Game Master to tinker with it at her heart’s content, but at the heart of A Bride for Dracula: A System neutral, one-shot adventure of bridal contests with bite. is a no fuss, straightforward, even linear scenario which can be run with the minimum of preparation.

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

The Miskatonic University Library Association brand is no more, alas, but what we have in its stead is the Miskatonic Repository, based on the same format as the DM’s Guild for Dungeons & Dragons. It is thus, “...a new way for creators to publish and distribute their own original Call of Cthulhu content including scenarios, settings, spells and more…” To support the endeavours of their creators, Chaosium has provided templates and art packs, both free to use, so that the resulting releases can look and feel as professional as possible. To support the efforts of these contributors, Miskatonic Monday is an occasional series of reviews which will in turn examine an item drawn from the depths of the Miskatonic Repository.

—oOo—
Name: Pickman’s Legacy

Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Keegan Sullivan

Setting: Modern Day

Product: Scenario
What You Get: 0.54 MB thirty eleven-page, full colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: A terrible legacy taken advantage of is still a terrible legacy. 
Plot Hook: A Cold Case in Lovecraft Country.
Plot Development: A missing daughter, a worried father, and a daughter drawn astray...
Plot Support: Four handouts, five monster and creature stats.

Pros
# Solid mystery
# Suitable introductory scenario
# Potential as a one-to-one scenario
# Adaptable to anytime after 1926
# Good use of a Lovecraftian bloodline
# Short, one or two session scenario
# Challenging epilogue

Cons# Needs editing
# Plot and clues poorly explained
# Not suitable for the new Keeper
# Underdeveloped
# Challenging epilogue
# No timeline
# Underwritten NPCs

Conclusion
# Underdeveloped 
# Keeper will need to make notes to understand the plot.
# Solid mystery and use of a Lovecraftian bloodline.

Ruins of the North is an anthology of scenarios for The One Ring: Adventures over the Edge of the Wild Roleplaying Game, the recently cancelled roleplaying game published by Cubicle Seven Entertainment which remains the most highly regarded, certainly most nuanced of the four roleplaying games to explore Tolkien’s Middle Earth. It is a companion to Rivendell, the supplement which shifted the roleplaying game’s focus from its starting point to the east of the Misty Mountains, upon Mirkwood and its surrounds with Tales from Wilderland and The Heart of the Wild to the west of the Misty Mountains. In particular, to present the Last Homely House of Master Elrond and then onwards through Eriador as far west as the town of Bree. Just as The Heart of the Wild has its companion volume in Tales from Wilderland, the Rivendell supplement has its anthology of scenarios in the form of Ruins of the North.

Unlike Tales from Wilderland, and especially unlike Bree, this anthology is not designed for beginning characters. In fact, two of the Heroic Culture character options presented in Rivendell—the Rangers of the North and the High Elves of Rivendell—are not designed to be equal to starting characters in The One Ring. There is a possibility that both can be introduced during the play through of Ruins of the North, which as written is designed to take the characters who have been part of a campaign set to the east of the Misty Mountains through the mountains and into Eriador. Then  once they have established Last Homely House as a sanctuary, they are free to go forth and adventure to the west. Sometimes at the direction of Elrond, sometimes not. To get the very best of the six scenarios in Ruins of the North, the Loremaster will definitely need access to a copy of Rivendell.

The sextet of scenarios presented in Ruins of the North take place between 2954 and 2977—so after the events depicted in Tales from Wilderland. They chart the growing influence of the Shadow as the once vanquished Witch-King of Angmar who in ages past, worked to bring down the Númenórean kingdom of Arnor, returns west of the Misty Mountains. They make use of the expanded rules given in Rivendell for treasure and Precious Objects and Wondrous Artefacts, as well as for The Eye Of Mordor, which reveals the presence of the player characters or company to the Shadow’s influence. In the case of the former, this means that the player characters are likely to uncover caches of treasure far greater than that found in previous titles for The One Ring, whilst in the case of the latter, they are in greater danger of accruing more points of Shadow and suffering other deleterious effects than before. Thus whilst the rewards are potentially greater, so are the dangers…

The anthology opens with ‘Nightmares of Angmar’. This begins in the Black Hills in the Vales of Gundabad where an isolated tribe of Hill-men has been raided by goblins and its children were kidnapped. As they suffer nightmares of desolate fortress, the player characters have to persuade that rescuing them is the best course of action and then chase the kidnappers west, over the mountains, and into Eridor. Dark alliances long past are revealed and there is an opportunity to make a new ally—or lose one in the rescue attempt. Whatever the outcome, the player characters, now west of the Misty Mountains, are given the opportunity to find rest in the House of Elrond. ‘Nightmares of Angmar’ is a gruelling affair, with long stretches of travel across blasted lands—something which will occur again and again through the anthology. It also provides some good roleplaying opportunities and exposes the characters to the reach of the Shadow down the long years.

The theme of the Shadow’s long reach continues in ‘Hard Than Stone’ as an ally appears from strange places to help the player characters in return for their help. Tasked with escorting a road maintenance crew, the company discovers evidence of a bandit attack and after managing to rescue some survivors, learn that the bandit party consists of both Men and Trolls! Learning what could bring such forces together lies at the heart of the scenario and brings into the open long term plans. Elements of the scenario are left for the Loremaster to develop and whilst some interesting options are given, it does leave the scenario with an underwritten ending.

‘Concerning Archers’ begins on a lighter note and a pleasing encounter with the protagonist at the heart of The Hobbit—one Mister Bilbo Baggins. Encountering characters from the books has always been well handled in The One Ring and this is no exception as Bilbo asks the company to help him settle a scholarly debate by visiting an ancient city where a legendary company of archers had its last stand. The company are free to tackle this whenever it wants, so once the request has been made, ‘Concerning Archers’ can either be run as is or added to a campaign as a side quest. This is an opportunity to delve a little into Hobbit history, especially for a Scholar character, and the Loremaster may want to have access to the Bree supplement as well for this and later scenarios.

The fourth scenario, ‘The Company of the Wain’, is a distinct change of pace and tone. The company encounters a caravan of travelling traders stopped off at a village. Initially, the player characters have an opportunity to spend a little money and interact with the traders, but when one of their number spots a possible kidnapping, it suggests that there is more to the caravan. The nature of the threat here is all but mundane, although is not to say that it is not evil. There is no quite right way to deal with the threat, potentially leaving the scenario open for further developments, some of which may lead south into the lands of The Horse-lords of Rohan and potentially, Oaths of the Riddermark.

The company comes to the aid of a Ranger in the fifth scenario, ‘What Lies Beneath’. He wishes to reclaim his family’s ancient mansion and establish a secure outpost for the Rangers near Weathertop. Unfortunately, it has been occupied by some bandits and he wants some help driving them out. This is very much a character piece, with the Loremaster having several NPCs—including the Ranger—to roleplay on one dark, murderous evening. The shortest of the scenarios in the anthology, the plot to ‘What Lies Beneath’ is well-worn, but hopefully good roleplaying upon the part of the Loremaster will divert the player characters enough for its events to play out.

In the sixth and last scenario in Ruins of the North, the player characters are asked by Gandalf himself to undertake a small quest. In ‘Shadows Over Tyrn Gorthad’, he asks that the company retraces its steps and return to the ruins of Angmar in order to determine why Barrow-wights from the Barrow-downs have been seen abroad far from their resting places. This is a much longer scenario than the previous five, and could be played out over several sessions, perhaps even running one of the earlier scenarios in the anthology between its events. Certainly there is room for the Loremaster to insert one of her scenarios here if suitable. Gandalf is not the only character from Middle Earth canon to appear here and the scenario gives another chance for the Scholar chance to shine, as well as be exposed to some dread dangers. The Bree supplement may also be of use here, but is not required. ‘Shadows Over Tyrn Gorthad’ brings Ruins of the North to rousing climax, standing alongside Gandalf attempting to stop a long slumbering threat rising again.

Physically, Ruins of the North is, like the other books for The One Ring, is a pretty book, done in earthy tones throughout that give it a homely feel that befits the setting of Middle Earth. The illustrations are excellent, the cartography decent, and the writing, although needing a slight edit here and there, is clear and easy to understand. The content is decently organised, making all six scenario easier to run.

Unfortunately, Ruins of the North is not quite as satisfying a set of scenarios as those given in the previous collection, Tales from Wilderland. They do not feel quite as cohesive, and certainly, they do not work as a campaign, since there are no strong threads running through the set, from ‘Nightmares of Angmar’ to ‘Shadows Over Tyrn Gorthad’. All together, they do delve into the region’s dark history and hint at the plans that Mordor has for the region, but this being a hint—admittedly a strong hint—Ruins of the North does very much feel as if it is laying the foundations for a bigger campaign, perhaps in the manner of The Darkening of Mirkwood. Of course, that is not be.

With six scenarios that are perhaps darker, nastier, and more challenging than previous anthologies, and definitely different in tone, Ruins of the North is a solid companion to Rivendell. Players and their characters will definitely want to find refuge in the Last Homely House after playing these six.

Conan the Barbarian is a supplement for Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of published by Modiphius Entertainment. It is the first in the ‘Conan the…’ series of supplements which focus on and take their inspiration from Conan himself at various stages of his life and what he was doing. Over this series, the supplements will track our titular character’s growth and progress as he gains in skills and abilities and talents. Thus this first supplement looks at Conan as a young man and his life among the people of his homeland, at the beginning of his career which will take him from barbarian to king, essentially the equivalent of a starting player character. Yet whilst the stats for Conan himself at this stage of his life do appear in the pages of Conan the Barbarian, they are more a side note than a feature, for the supplement is an examination of the countries of the north in the Hyperborean Age—Asgard, Cimmeria, Hyperborea, and Vanaheim. It includes new archetypes, talents, backgrounds, and equipment to help players create more varied barbarian characters and Game Masters more varied barbarian NPCs; a gazetteer and guide to the bleak lands of the north, either shrouded in fog or smothered in snow and; an array of detailed NPCs and monsters, including unique nemeses; and mechanics to help bring barbarian activities and attitudes to your game, including raids, contests, battle tactics, and more.

Conan the Barbarian opens with four new Barbarian castes and some changes to the castes given in the core rulebook for Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of. The latter are minor in nature, mostly name changes and slight adjustments in terms of Social Standing, whereas the five new castes are Barbaric, Law-speaker, Renegade, and Skald, each supported by new Talents, such as Savage Dignity and Uncivilised for the Barbaric caste, followed by Stories for each of the new castes enabling the creation of backstories for the characters of said castes. These are followed by four archetypes—Bard, Hunter, Raider, and Slaver, In addition, there are Barbarian Natures and Educations, and Talents, the latter the Skald and the Bard. Along with a small selection of equipment, including sun stones used as navigation aids and several sorcerous items, these options combine with those of the core rulebook to provide greater choice in creating characters from the barbaric north. This can be simply to create and play something different from the core rulebook, but it could also provide the diversity needed to create a party of barbarians from the north, whether for a campaign set there or looking to escape the frozen north…

Supporting these new character options is a gazetteer of the north. Beginning with the coming of the barbarians it looks in turn at the peoples, way of life, geography, and places of note in Cimmeria, Nordheim, and Hyperborea, with Nordheim being rent into two by great rivalry between Asgard and Vanaheim. Although other nations may look at the north as being wholly barbaric, the gazetteer begins to separate the four peoples and so emphasise their differences. So the Cimmerians live in clans belonging to four tribes and mainly live in independent villages dotted across the dreary Cimmerian Marches, their inhabitants only coming together when invaders, like the Aquilonnians, attempt to capture or colonise what the Cimmerians regard as their territory. The inhabitants of southern Nordheim recognise kings, queen, jarls, and more, whereas those of the north band together in nomadic tribes, constantly moving across the icy reaches of the north. Vanaheim also has a coast, enabling its inhabitants to build boats and fish and raid—their raiding ships with their carved figureheads being known as the ‘dragons of the sea’, whereas Asgard does not. To the East, the land of Hyperborea is known for its fortified cities and its participation in the slave trade. Again, there is a lot here to brought into a game, whether it is rolling on the Cimmerian village generator or nomad camp features table, or visiting the charm-bedecked Witch-Oak in Cimmeria said to be home to a witch, a crone to some, matronly to others, capable of lifting and bestowing curses.

If the gazetteer explores the cultures and places of the north, ‘Events’ describes the regular doings of the north. First and foremost is the ‘Thing’, a combined festival, council, and reunion, held by kings as much by lesser nobles. Here disputes and other matters are settled, to which the Game Master can add events from the accompanying table. Equally dramatic is the decision of a Nordheim tribe to migrate its camp across the snowy wastes or the members of Vanaheim village deciding to build a ship and conduct raids further along the coast. These are raids akin to those of the Vikings, rather than piracy, which will of course be covered in more detailed in Conan the Pirate, including ship-to-ship combat. There is a lot here to make all of these exciting and involving. 

The often dreary and unforgiving nature of life in the north is reflected in the discussion of its peoples’ gods and legends in ‘Myth & Magic’. None more so than the Cimmerian afterlife, which is even more dismal and dreary than their actual lives! Vahalla, the Hall of the Mighty is a more inviting prospect amongst the valorous of Nordheim. As well gods and legends, it presents rules for using geases and taboos, and Runes and inscribing them onto objects for one-off or even permanent benefits and the first Nemesis NPC in Conan the Barbarian. This is Atali, the Frost Giant’s Daughter, who plagues and plays with the lives of mortals. The following chapter, ‘Encounters’, includes even more Nemesis NPCs, from the generic Chieftain and Witch to the Lindorm, a two-legged serpent, a solitary hunter through the snow, and Bragi the Unloved, a seasoned chieftain who usurped his predecessor and who rules with an iron first, his ambition driving him to declare on his neighbours. This is in addition to the other thirty or so NPCs and creatures of varying capability. Not just Snow Apes, Boars, and Mammoths, but also Banshees, Draugrs, Were-Bears, and Wyrms. 

Rounding out Conan the Barbarian is ‘Hither Came Conan…’ which places our titular hero in the context of the supplement and provides a playable version of him early in his long career, rough equal to that of a beginning character. Running campaigns set in the north are explored in ‘The Barbarian Way’, discussing campaign set-ups—warbands and raiding parties in the main, whether the player characters part of or leading them, plus missionary and colonisation expeditions into the north; barbaric rites and traditions, and war and carousing, the latter including a lengthy table of carousing events. Lastly, Ali is a presented as a ‘Hero of the Age’, a female hero born to chattel slavery, a potential player character or an NPC, developed by a backer for the Kickstarter campaign for Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of.

Physically, Conan the Barbarian is a slim hardback, presented in full colour, illustrated with an excellent range of fully painted artwork. It is well written, although it needs to be edited in places. Otherwise, it is accessible and comes with a reasonable index.

As is, there is not really anything missing in Conan the Barbarian. There are plenty of ideas, places, NPCs, and monsters in its pages to spur a Game Master’s imagination, but perhaps for the neophyte Game Master, new to running Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of, some scenario hooks or adventure seeds would have been useful. Nevertheless, it is clear from Conan the Barbarian that its author has delved deep into Hyperborean lore and presented much of it in what is a multifaceted supplement. Although based on Conan’s early life, it goes beyond that to bring the world around him not just to life, but also to make it accessible and playable. Whether that is as Conan himself, using the provided write-up, or more obviously, as player characters. For the player who wants to create a barbarian character from the north, Conan the Barbarian offers welcome options, but for the Game Master wanting to run or take her Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of in or to the frozen, savage north, Conan the Barbarian is an excellent sourcebook.