Reviews from R'lyeh

Jonstown Jottings #92: Night at the Sunshine Inn

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

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What is it?Night at the Sunshine Inn is a scenario inspired by Night of the Living Dead for use with RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha in which the Player Characters are hired by an Issaries merchant to guard a shipment of ore being transported from Jonstown to Boldholme.

It is a possible sequel to the scenario, ‘A Rough Landing’, from the RuneQuest Starter Set.

It is a full colour, seventeen page, 3.66 MB PDF.

The layout is a bit tight and it is lightly illustrated.

The cartography is excellent.
It needs an edit.
Where is it set?Night at the Sunshine Inn begins in Jonstown, but will take the Player Characters east to the Old Tarsh Road and from there to a stop at the Sunshine Inn overnight, before (supposedly) travelling onto Boldholme.

It is set after Scared Time, 1625.
Who do you play?
Night at the Sunshine Inn does not require any specific character type, but Player Characters who are capable warriors are highly recommended.
What do you need?
Night at the Sunshine Inn requires RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, the RuneQuest Gamemaster Screen Pack, and the RuneQuest: Glorantha Bestiary.
What do you get?Night at the Sunshine Inn sets up a tale of revenge as the Player Characters find themselves at an inn which is suddenly attacked in the night. their initial challenge will be in properly arming themselves and donning their armour as the Chaos of the attack plays out around them. The Player Characters will need to hold off three waves of attacks from a band of Scorpionmen and their allies over the course of the night. Effectively, this is ‘tower defence’ style scenario, though much like the Zombies mode for the Call of Duty computer games, the Player Characters have access to timber, nails, and a hammer so that they can board up broken doors and windows between attacks. It echoes the classic ‘Gringle’s Pawnshop’ from Apple Lane.
By the time morning comes, the fact that their employer never turns up—he was supposed to join them at then Sunshine Inn—and the person he wanted them to meet at the inn is not there, should suggest to the players and their characters that something very odd is going on here. The likelihood is that the Player Characters are going to want to ask him some questions. He is a rather shifty-looking character, so that may tip the players and their characters off to the fact that he is up to no good.

Night at the Sunshine Inn is a simple scenario, primarily combat focused, though there is opportunity for roleplaying and interaction with the other customers at the Sunshine Inn. The Game Master may want to reduce the Reputation reward as it is a little high and since its climax is the defence of a single location, actually run it as a battle with miniatures to keep track of everything as there are a lot of combatants. One aspect not explored is what happens to the Sunshine Inn afterwards and what effect the attack has upon the fortunes of the Goodhaven clan that own it.
Is it worth your time?YesNight at the Sunshine Inn is a quick and dirty scenario that provides a single session of action and combat that can be easily inserted into a campaign or run as a side mission when a player or two cannot make it.NoNight at the Sunshine Inn is simplistic and combat-focused and the antagonist may be too shifty for the players to trust him, let alone their characters. Plus, the Game Master may not yet have run the scenarios from the RuneQuest Starter Set.MaybeNight at the Sunshine Inn is easy to run and add to a campaign, and may serve as a change of tone and pace between more interesting and sophisticated adventures.

Screams on Screen

They say that if you want to make it big in Hollywood, you are going to have to sell your soul. Not necessarily the devil, but to some studio executive for certain. Life is hard trying to make it big in Tinseltown, but that does not stop a whole lot of people trying—and when they get there, from working just as hard to stay on top, or as close as they can get. Fame and fortune, and your name up in lights on the marquee at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard beckon if you work hard enough, have got the talent, and get lucky. Right now, you got some of that and more—a contract. A contract with Starfall Studios, where, “The Brightest Stars are brought down to earth, just for you!”. In truth, you are a B-List actor, perhaps on the way up, perhaps on the way down, and also in truth, Starfall Studios has not had a hit in years. However, you know you can change that, because you know you are good and with the new management and the new funding, this could be your chance to get noticed. If not make a big hit, then big enough to maybe get an award nomination, get picked up by a bigger studio, and get put in bigger pictures.

This is the set-up for SHIVER Blockbuster: Legends of the Silver Scream, a cinema-themed campaign for Shiver – Role-playing Tales in the Strange & the Unknown, the horror roleplaying game published by Parable Games. In the campaign, the players take on the roles of actors working for a small film studio in Hollywood, trying to make some blockbusters and get noticed. It has five scripts, each bound to be a surefire hit in which the actors get to prove how good—or bad—they are and make Hollywood sit up and take notice! Effectively, each player is roleplaying an actor who is playing a role in five different films, so five times—and slightly more—the roleplaying as in any other campaign or roleplaying game, unless they always play the same role and play it to the camera. Then, the best thing of all, a roleplaying game like Shiver – Role-playing Tales in the Strange & the Unknown and thus SHIVER Blockbuster: Legends of the Silver Scream, has got a budget bigger than any Hollywood studio. So, it can make any film and it will never blow the budget!

Actor creation in SHIVER Blockbuster: Legends of the Silver Scream works like that in Shiver – Role-playing Tales in the Strange & the Unknown. First, a player selects an Archetype, a Background, and a Fear. Then for SHIVER Blockbuster: Legends of the Silver Scream, he selects a Starring Role. This can be ‘The Leading Hero’, ‘The Stunt Performer’, ‘The Thespian’, ‘The Heartthrob’, ‘The Love Interest’, ‘The Comic Relief’, ‘The Method’, and more. Each Starring Role has a Star Power and Audience Expectation. The Star Power is a unique ability that the Actor can perform once per quarter of the Doom Clock, whilst the Audience Expectation is something that if done on screen will gain the Actor the favour of both the audience and the Director, and so boost his career. So, for ‘The Love Interest’, the Star Power is a ‘A Healing Heart’ that enables the Actor to make a Heart Check and regain Hit Points if they perform a romantic scene, whilst the Audience Expectation ‘Break Heart/Bow Minds’ in which the Actor wants the audience’s favour to fall in love with them and so will make romantic confessions, and have moments of passion or tear-jerking moments to get the audience to love them.

Depending upon how well an Actor performed, he or she can receive an Accolade or a Review. Both are awarded by the Director. Engage in both Star Power and Audience Expectation and an Actor will earn an Accolade, but if not, he or she may be in line for a Bad Review. Accolades include the ‘Performance Award’, ‘Hall of Fame’, ‘Rabid Fanbase’, ‘Top Billing’, and so on, whilst Bad Reviews include ‘Hamming It Up’, ‘Worst Actor Ever’, and ‘Boring Performance’. Accolades provide a minor benefit, whilst Bad Reviews act as minor disadvantage. For example, ‘Performance Award’ gives the Actor a piece of armour to use in the next film, but once used, it is gone, whilst ‘Looking Fit’ grants Advantage on acts of athleticism. The Bad Review, ‘Diva Reputation’ means that if the Actor fails a Check that would advance the Doom Clock, if they also fail a Strange Check, they suffer Soul damage.

It is possible for a player to change his Actor’s Starring Role and the book suggests that if multiple players want their Actor to take a particular Starring Role, then they should audition! However, the awarding of Accolades and Bad Reviews is the purview of the Director and can be subjective. The problem is that they are effectively grading a player’s roleplaying skill and performance—good, bad, or indifferent—and that is not natural to roleplaying as a hobby. The advice on the matter is cursory, but nevertheless, this is a fun mechanic and enforces the film studio and life in pictures set-up of SHIVER Blockbuster: Legends of the Silver Scream. What the Director might want to do perhaps is encourage the input of the players in deciding the Accolades and Bad Reviews, possibly forming an association of Hollywood critics and roleplaying its members too to expand the roles that the players take?

Once set up, SHIVER Blockbuster: Legends of the Silver Scream presents five very different ‘scripts’ or scenarios. Each is very nicely formatted, including a set-up, a Classification Board, details of what the Director knows, enemies, weapons, and items, the epilogue, and the Doom Events. The Doom Events are the four events per scenario that can be triggered over the course of the script, whilst the Classification Board categorises the scenario. Actually the ‘SHIVER Board of Classification’, for each scenario it lists the length of play time, number of players required, Subgenre, Film Age Rating, Content Warning, Recommended Ability Level, and Watchlist. The latter includes the archetypal films that the script references and that the Director should watch for inspiration. Every film lists the roles required as well.

All five adventures in SHIVER Blockbuster: Legends of the Silver Scream can be played through in a single session, or two at the most. The first is ‘A Little Adventure’, which is inspired by Honey I Shrunk the Kids and The Incredible Shrinking Man and finds a family visiting Grandpa for the weekend only to find him missing and themselves suddenly shrunk into a big world where they must battle toys, pets, and insects from doll’s house across the garden to find a way to get back to the right scale. ‘Crossbones’ Treasure’ is inspired by Pirates of the Caribbean and The Goonies, and is a classic pirate tale that has the cast race across the Caribbean in search of pirate treasure and facing ghosts, undead, and a giant crab. The third scenario is ‘Intergalactic Planetary Temple of Terror’ is a Science Fiction film which is in parts Guardians of the Galaxy, Star Wars, and Flash Gordon. The Player Characters are galactic criminals who escape space prison and are chased by their robot masters known as the Authority all the way to an ice planet where they will be faced by a dilemma whose outcome will affect the universe! A combination of Lord of the Rings, Legend, and Clash of the Titans*, ‘Medieval Dead’ is a fantasy romp in which the Player Characters are would be heroes, apprentice members of the Adventurer’s Guild, who are forced to suddenly graduate to actual, proper heroes when at the annual Merry Heroism Festival, an army of skeletons and a skeletal dragon, led by the Necromancer kills them all. Plus, he also kidnaps the princess. So not only a revenge mission, but a rescue one too which pokes a little fun at Dungeons & Dragons too, all the way to Mount Gloom. The last scenario is ‘Deep Red Sea’ which is inspired by the Indiana Jones series of films, Jaws, and Atlantis: The Lost City. What starts as a shark hunt to improve the tourism of a Pacific coast town in 1941 turns into a confrontation with a big sea monster and an evil cult from under the sea!

* Hopefully the original and not the dire 2010 remake.

Now all five of the scenarios in SHIVER Blockbuster: Legends of the Silver Scream are linear. This is to be expected, as after all, they are meant to be films being shot by a film studio. They could also be extracted from the book and run as one-shots, but that would be to ignore the meta-level written into the campaign, that is, the fact that the Player Characters are Actors. Where the players get to roleplay Actors in five different films over the course of SHIVER Blockbuster: Legends of the Silver Scream, in between, they get to play the Actors themselves. Between each film there is an interlude. Starfall Studio is running a very busy schedule, so the Actors will have little time between wrapping up shooting on one picture and shooting the next, so will be confined to the Star Trailer Park. In the first interlude, between ‘A Little Adventure’ and ‘Crossbones’ Treasure’, the players get to introduce their Actors and what their Starring Role is and each is visited by their Agent for the dreaded Performance Review. This is when the Accolades and Bad Reviews are handed out. One odd issue perhaps is that the Actors all share the same Agent, but that does also suggest a certain creepiness to their situation and this is only enhanced by the ominous events which can occur to one or more of the Actors. These ominous events are inspired by the previous films which the Actors have just finished making and serve to add to the creepiness as more and more of them occur as more films are made. One option to offset the oddness of the single Agent, is to have the players roleplay the different Agents for their Actors, which will add another level of roleplay to the campaign and make it a little more like troupe play.

Over the course of the four interludes, life at the Starfall Studio lot gets more and more mysterious, like the scriptwriter on all five films going missing or a rabid fan running amok, until ‘The Last Reel’. Drawing inspiration from This is the End and Scream 2, in this campaign climax, the Actors are forced to step out of their heroic roles and become heroes themselves as they attend the Star Gala at Starfall Studios’ Ciné Star Megaplex and confront one big conspiracy and one big villain, who has been pulling the strings all along, proving, of course, just how evil Hollywood actually is!

Supporting the campaign in SHIVER Blockbuster: Legends of the Silver Scream is ‘The Compendium’. This lists all of the NPCs and monsters which appear in the various films, plus the Inventory for each.

SHIVER Blockbuster: Legends of the Silver Scream is not just a collection of film-themed and film inspired horror adventures. It is more than that and in part, that is where the campaign comes alive, in having the players not only roleplay the cast of characters onscreen in the campaign’s five films, but also step back from that to have them roleplay the Actors performing as the cast of characters. It calls for more roleplaying upon the part of the players, which can be as hammy as they like, because, after all, the Starring Roles are archetypes. And if they want to be inspired by particular actors who resemble those Starring Roles, then all the better.

SHIVER Blockbuster: Legends of the Silver Scream is a really entertaining campaign that in presenting five films to make, offers lots of variety, and having the players roleplay both the film casts and the Actors, gives them lots of roleplay to get their teeth into—a clever, well-executed combination.

The Other OSR: Bridgetown

In between the Infinite Sky above and the fog-bound depths of the Under below, the Bridge goes ever on. Towns sprawl upwards into dense conurbations of towers as if to touch the Infinite Sky, whilst the narrow sewers and undercities thread in and out of between the Bridge’s great stone piles. Were one to descend below, you might discover labyrinths and hidden facilities, and deeper still, horrors and strangeness beyond the understanding of any Bridger, each fascinated by the Bridgers brave—or foolish—enough to descend so far. Some Spans of the Bridge are busy towns. Some the gated estates of the aristocracy. Some are broken—by accident or by too much theft of the Bridge’s stone and metal, the only source of either, for the Bridgers. Some have buildings upon which there are rooftop gardens—the only source of food for the Bridgers. Some have gone to seed and overgrown into wildernesses, as much as the cobbles of the Bridge will allow. There is said to be a Span on the Bridge where it is perpetual night and another where the Span revolves slowly to connect with the rest of the Bridge once a day. It is also said that the Bridge is alive and some can hear its whispers if they listen carefully enough. In between every Span, stands a Gatehouse. Most are operated by the Turnpike Guild, taking travellers money in return for supposedly safe passage, though most regard the supposedly protective guild members as nothing more than extortionists. From the Awful Birds in the Infinite Sky and the Gargoyles lurking seemingly everywhere, everything is hungry and resources are far from plentiful, and occasionally, something strange will happen on the Bridge, though no one will say what. As the Bridge crumbles underfoot, there are those who look beyond their Span, ready to go in search of… something. The Bridgers are at peace now, thanks to the mythical pact between the Trolls and Gruffolk and Humans and Coblins, so now is as good a time as any for a Bridge-Punk to go look for it, somewhere along Bridgetown.

Bridgetown describes itself as a pastoral, liminal roleplaying game. Liminal certainly, as it is always set somewhere in between along the infinite length of the Bridge. Pastoral? Perhaps, but then only so far as the cobbles of the Bridge allows. Published by Technical Grimoire Games, best known for Bones Deep, it uses the TROIKA!, published by the Melsonian Arts Council, this is a roleplaying game of picaresque adventure and exploration along a weird and winding bridge that never seems to end. It is possible for the players to select backgrounds from the core rules for TROIKA!, but Bridgetown has a dozen of its own that all help enforce the feel of the sitting. These are Coblins, Gruffolk, Humans, and Trolls. The Humans include the Cobble Canter, charlatans who beg and spread the word of new gods and ideas like the Unrequited Moon and the Bleeding Stone; the Fallen Aristocrat who has literally fallen out of his tower and been scored by his fellows; the Pebble-Pincher, the homeless of the Bridgetown, who cheerfully avoids the authorities and might be connected to the mysterious Bindlestick Syndicate; the Stonewright, who can shepherd the spirits of the dead into protective keystones and talk to them; and the Turnpike Turncoat, a member who has been turfed out of the Turnpike Guild. Coblins are tiny folk, who typically travel in very large groups, forced out of their homes following the pact that ended their enslavement, finding homes where they can squeeze into. Coblin Cranny-Crawlers travel more openly, whilst Coblins in a Trench Coat disguise themselves in human-sized clothes. Gruffolk are nomadic goat-folk, travelling in braying groups called trips. The Gruffolk Hostler is on an endless quest to feed his Gruffolk travellers, whilst the Gruffolk Pilgrim searches for the perfect destination, the Fat Pastures, the Gruffolk afterlife, with a zeal, but enjoy a good fight along the way. The Troll Sewer Worker maintains and protects the sewers in the Underbridge, and as a member of the Sewer Union, seeks to unionise other works and stand up against the Turnpike Guild, whilst the Troll Shaman, or ‘Croaker’, who sacrifices part of his own stony hide to cast various spells and cures. Lastly, the Stone Keening is a Troll-sized agglomeration of human souls not syphoned into a keystone by a Stonewright, who have animated a pile of rubble and are mostly looking to avoid getting turned into a pile of gravel by a braying mob or for a quiet place to grow moss.

Bridger creation in Bridgetown follows the same process as TROIKA! begins with character creation. A Bridger is defined by his Skill, Stamina, and Luck. A player rolls for each of these, notes his possessions, and then rolls for his Background. Each Background provides several Advanced Skills, which can be actual skills or they can be spells. The process is quick and easy, and also includes an objective or three that each Background might pursue.

Name: Cumil
Background: Troll Sewer Worker
Skill 4
Stamina 18
Luck 6

ADVANCED SKILLS
Sanitation 7, Swim 3, Awareness 6, Tunnel Fighting 6

SPECIAL
See well in dark tunnels and cloudy water
Inoculated against waterborne diseases

POSSESSIONS
Knife, rucksack, lantern, flask of oil, a grimy shovel, miniature trollhole cover (Sewer Union Badge of Membership), slimeproof ratskin cap, snapstipe mushrooms (three provisions)

LOOK’N FOR
Workers to unionise
A place in need of infrastructure
A real breath of fresh air

Bridgetown is described in twelve locations, such as The Heights (and Depths); Craterton with its massive rock that fell from the Infinite Sky; the Squeeze, which is so densely populated that a single path runs through it; the Great Excavation where the inhabitants have dug down so deep into the Bridge, that Bridgers have to climb down deep into the excavated pylon and climb back out again; and Sourstone, which is not home to the Fabled Candy Cobbled Streets where every stone is a treat, but something much worse… If this does not sound that all that many, they are not necessarily one and done locations. All have tables of events and NPCs, so that the Bridgers can visit certain locations again and again, like The Heights (and Depths) and The Wyld Bridge, which are given over to lengths of wilderness.

Between the spans the Gatehouses, massive blocks of stone manned by the various Turnpike Guilds who always charge extra, or special, for ne’er do wells like the Player Characters. The description of each Gatehouse includes the toll that the Bridgers will have to pay to pass. So, The Armistice Gate has a powerful keystone that enforces a ban against the use of all weapons, so the Turnpike Guildsmen have become expert martial artists and brawlers with a penchant for delivering impromptu sermons! To pass through the Gate, the Toll the Bridgers will need to pay is not monetary, but the gruelling ‘Embrace of Peace’ initiation rite and give up their arms and armour. Locations within the Gate include The Hall of Arms where the confiscated arms and armour—some of them actually a rare source of metal on the Bridge—are displayed and stored and The Path of Peace, the temple-point of crossing where travellers cross from one span to the next.
Essentially, every Span and Gate is an encounter all of its own, each unique in their own way and rife with flavour and small details that bring them to life. They can be played in order as written—and Bridgetown includes a full-colour map that both depicts all of the Spans and Gates and allows the Game Master to do that or alternatively, randomise their order. Bridgetown comes with a way to push the Bridgers along in addition to their individual motivations. This is the campaign starter, ‘Stone Soup’, in which the Bridgers come into possession of the Cauldron, a big iron pot with a smiling face in which can be cooked magical stews! Known recipes are few and ingredients rare, but start with a handful of provisions. Possible stews can be boring, fancy, or tainted, and have odd effects such as a fertile stew that makes anything planted in it grow to fruition in a day, turns into a blade that shatters are dealing maximum damage, or makes anyone eating it grow hungrier and hungrier until he finds what he is looking for. The Fertile Stew requires fresh and magical ingredients, the Bladed Stew needs sharp and old ingredients, and the Curiosity Stew wants dull and secret ingredients. In possession of the Cauldron, the Bridgers might be searching for the cure to a horrible disease, for the Perfect Stew that might be the best means of exchange to pass through the many Gates, and so on. The more immediate driver will be the search for more ingredients and recipes, and Bridgetown has lots of information about ingredients and recipes.

Of course, in addition the Game Master can create her Spans and Gates—in fact, a book of reader submitted Gates and Spans would be an excellent companion volume—and she can add her own dungeons to the Under below the Bridge or even insert a ready-to-play one! In addition to the events and NPC tables to be found in most of the Span locations, Bridgetown includes spells linked to the Bridge which require the caster to be touching the Bridge directly and to possess a Spell-Stone. Every Spell-Stone has its own Stamina, which is expended when a spell is cast and crumbles to dust when all of the Stamina is expended. However, overuse of magic in an area causes a Span to weaken and also begin to crumble… Spells include Word on the Street when the caster literally asks the street underfoot what has happened there recently or Stonewall to create a physical wall to slow pursuers or a metaphysical wall to cause obtuse instructions in getting answers! There are further random tables for ‘Weird Weather’, more ‘Bridgetown NPCs or Creatures’, the effects of ‘Magical Spells Run Amok’, ‘Items and Loot’, ‘Awful Birds’, and more.

Physically, Bridgetown is cleanly laid out and accessible. It is clearly designed to be used at the table. The artwork is a mix of the twee and the odd and the doleful, a delightful combination.

As befitting a setting for TROIKA!, there is a weirdness and whimsiness to Bridgetown. In terms of scope, it is designed for short campaigns that would likely take the Bridgers across many of the Spans and through several of the Gates described in its pages, in addition to whatever the Game Master devised of her own. In terms of character, Bridgetown offers some wonderfully engaging choices, but the real character is the Bridge itself, a combination of the original London Bridge and Castle Gormenghast that looms over the Bridgers in their Dickensian flânerie as they in turn trudge and cavort from one Span to the next.

Quick-Start Saturday: Space: 1999

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

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

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What is it?
The Space: 1999 – Breakaway Quickstart Guide is the quick-start for Space: 1999 – The Roleplaying Game the post-disaster Science Fiction roleplaying game based on the British television series Space: 1999 which ran for two seasons between 1975 and 1977. Created by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson, famous for their Supermarionation television series such as Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet, Space: 1999 is a live action series which told the story of the men and women of Moonbase Alpha. Just as mankind was set to launch a manned probe to investigate a signal from deep space, disaster struck and the Moon was blasted out of Earth’s orbit and hurled into deep space. The series told of the encounters and challenges that the personnel of Moonbase Alpha would face as they were thrust into the cosmos. It includes a basic explanation of the setting, rules for action and combat, setting rules, the adventure, ‘Breakaway’, and six ready-to-play, Player Characters.

It is a fifty-one-page, 23.94 MB full colour PDF.

It needs a slight edit in places.

The quick-start is decently illustrated with a mix of stills from the television series and excellent artwork. (The reader should be warned that the colour palette matches that of the television series, and since it was made in the seventies, this involves a lot of orange and tan, though no avocado.)* The rules are clearly explained and are a less mechanically detailed version of the 2d20 System.

* No bathrooms appear in the Space: 1999 – Breakaway Quickstart Guide so there is no way to be certain.
How long will it take to play?
The Space: 1999 – Breakaway Quickstart Guide and its adventure, ‘Breakaway’, is designed to be played through in one session, two at most.

What else do you need to play?
The Space: 1999 – Breakaway Quickstart Guide requires at least two twenty-sided dice per player and two sets of different coloured tokens, one to represent Momentum, one to represent Threat.

Who do you play?
The six Player Characters in the Space: 1999 – Breakaway Quickstart Guide consist of a a Team Commander, an Operations Officer with a penchant for a ‘Nice Cup of Tea’, a Security Officer, a quiet and dedicated pilot, a hard-working Scientist, and a Doctor with experience of working on frontiers.
How is a Player Character defined?
A Player Character in the Space: 1999 – Breakaway Quickstart Guide—and thus the Space: 1999 – The Roleplaying Game—will look familiar to anyone who has played a 2d20 System roleplaying game. A Player Character has six Skills and six Attitudes. The six Skills are Command, Flight, Medicine, Science, security, and Technical. These also cover Charm, Athletics, Cool, Education, Strength and Perception, and Practical Intelligence and Dexterity. The six Attitudes are Bravery, Compassion, Dedication, Improvisation, Mystery, and Perseverance. Both skills and attitudes are rated between four and eight.
A Player Character will also have several focuses, plus Traits, Assets, and possibly, Complications. Focues, such as Charm, Observe, Stealth, Space Pilot, Dance, and Virology, grant grant an advantage in skill tests. Traits are describe aspects about the Player Character (and sometimes the environment); Assets are equipment or other items that can help a Player Character in a situation; and Complications are negative factors, such as the environment or an injury, that can hinder him. Lastly, a Player Character will have a Signature Asset, personal to him, that can be used once per session to gain Momentum.
How do the mechanics work?
Mechanically, the Space: 1999 – Breakaway Quickstart Guide—and thus Space: 1999 – The Roleplaying Game—uses the 2d20 System seen in many of the roleplaying games published by Modiphius Entertainment, such as Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20 or Dune – Adventures in the Imperium. To undertake an action in the 2d20 System in Space: 1999 – The Roleplaying Game, a character’s player rolls two twenty-sided dice, aiming to have both roll under the total of a Skill and an Attitude. Each roll under this total counts as a success, an average task requiring two successes, the aim being to generate a number of successes equal to, or greater, than the Difficulty Value. Rolls of one count as a critical success and create two successes, as does rolling under the value of the Skill when a Focus is involved. A roll of twenty adds a complication to the situation. Successes generated beyond the Difficulty value generate Momentum.
Momentum is a shared resource. It can be used to purchase extra twenty-sided dice to roll for an action, to create or remove a Trait, create an Asset, and to obtain information. The Player Characters have a maximum Momentum of six. If a Player Character has access to no Momentum, he can instead give the Game Master Threat to gain the same options as spending Momentum. Threat can also be generated in return for a Player Character ignoring a Complication, causing Escalation in a situation, being in Threatening Circumstances, and also for the Game Master rolling extra successes for an NPC. The Game Master can spend Threat to purchase extra twenty-sided dice for her to roll for an NPC, to increase the Difficulty of a skill test, to create or remove a Trait, create an Asset, to ignore a Complication affecting an NPC, and to trigger Environmental or Narrative Effects.
In addition to access to Momentum, a Player Character has his own resources to fall back on. One is Spirit, which is used to resist a defeat, to turn the result of one die into a ‘one’ or critical before the roll or reroll several dice after a roll. If a Player Character has no Spirit, he must rest, unable to do anything until he does and recovers some Spirit.
How does combat work?
Combat in the Space: 1999 – Breakaway Quickstart Guide is kept simple with a narrative outcome rather than than a mechanical one. A player declares what he wants his character to do, for example firing stun gun to stop a charging alien or persuading a crazed scientist not to open an airlock door and vent everyone into space. A typical Difficulty is two Successes. If the skill check generates enough Successes, the defendant has two choices. One is to accept defeat, the other is to expend Spirit in order to ignore the defeat.
What do you play?
‘Breakaway’ is set on the very day that the Moon is blown out of Earth’s orbit and into deep space. It enables the players and their characters to play out the events of the first episode of the television series and so set them up for the adventures to come made possible by the publication of Space: 1999 – The Roleplaying Game. When disaster strikes and the first explosions occur at the nuclear waste silos, the Player Characters are assigned to a survey Eagle and handle communications for the other Eagle crews assigned to move the canisters of nuclear waste before there is another exposition and the magnetic radiation grows too high. After their Eagle is forced to crash land, the Player Characters must make their way back to Moonbase Alpha where they find turmoil and uncertainty, panicking crewmen, and worse...
Is there anything missing?
No. The Space: 1999 – Breakaway Quickstart Guide includes everything that the Game Master and six players need to play through it.
Is it easy to prepare?
The core rules presented in the Space: 1999 – Breakaway Quickstart Guide are relatively easy to prepare. A Game Master who already run a 2d20 System roleplaying game will have no problem with this.
Is it worth it?
Yes, with minor caveats. The scenario, ‘Breakaway’, does follow the plot of the opening episode of the television series and will feel familiar t0 fans of Space: 1999. Also, Space: 1999 is not a well-known television series, being almost as old as Dungeons & Dragons! This has the benefit of the plot to ‘Breakaway’ not going to familiar to everyone, but the disadvantage of being seen as old and obscure by some. Nevertheless, the Space: 1999 – Breakaway Quickstart Guide showcases the setting and the rules in a solid session of Science Fiction survival
Where can you get it?
The Space: 1999 – Breakaway Quickstart Guide is available to download here (Coming Soon).

Friday Fantasy: The Rats of Ilthmar

Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #11: The Rats of Ilthmar is a scenario for Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game and the tenth scenario for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar Boxed Set. Scenarios for Dungeon Crawl Classics tend be darker, grimmer, and even pulpier than traditional Dungeons & Dragons scenarios, even veering close to the Swords & Sorcery subgenre. Scenarios for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar Boxed Set are set in and around the City of the Black Toga, Lankhmar, the home to the adventures of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, the creation of author Fritz Leiber. The city is described as an urban jungle, rife with cutpurses and corruption, guilds and graft, temples and trouble, whores and wonders, and more. Under the cover the frequent fogs and smogs, the streets of the city are home to thieves, pickpockets, burglars, cutpurses, muggers, and anyone else who would skulk in the night! Which includes the Player Characters. And it is these roles which the Player Characters get to be in Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #11: The Rats of Ilthmar, small time crooks trying to make a living and a name for themselves, but without attracting the attention of either the city constabulary or worse, the Thieves’ Guild!
Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #11: The Rats of Ilthmar is a scenario for Third Level Player Characters and is slightly shorter and slightly different scenario to others released for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar Boxed Set. Not in terms of what the Player Characters have do, which is perform a robbery, but in terms of who the robbery is being performed for and where it is being performed. The who is the Overlord, the ruler of the City of Sevenscore Thousand Smokes, and somehow, the Player Characters have fallen foul of the law, or at least the authorities, because either is very likely, or somehow come to his attention. Thus, the where, which is the city, the notoriously dirty, trash-ridden city of Ilthmar. This lies to the east of Lankhmar, on the coast of the Sea of the East. Then the why. Ilthmar is home to the cult of the Rat God, a cult barely tolerated in Lankhmar. The Overlord recently learned that the cult of the Rat God has recovered a holy relic, the Hand of St. Heveskin, and worse, instends to have it smuggled into Lankhmar where doubtless it will attract untold numbers of rats which will get into the city’s grain stores, leading to likely food shortages and possible famine and unrest. Fortunately, Lankhmar is home to some of the greatest cut-throats, sorcerers, and alley-fighters, not to save thieves, in all of Newhon. Of course, since neither Fafhrd or the Gray Mouser are available, the Player Characters will have to do. As the scenario opens, they find themselves in alley close to the Temple of the Rat on Ilthmar Harbour, observing a number of barefoot worshippers dressed in rat hair robes and carrying slender whips, followed by priests naked except for the rat masks they wear and the bigger whips they carry. This is definitely not a scenario for anyone who suffers from musophobia!
From this set-up, it is entirely up to the Player Characters how they proceed. They can climb over the walls, they can waylay some of the worshippers and attempt to mingle with them in what is an important ceremony, and so on. They only have tonight as today is the Day of the Rat and tomorrow the artefact is going to be shipped out to cultists in Lankhmar. Of course, because the priests and worshippers are attending the ceremony, the rest of the temple is going to be quiet—perfect for a bunch of ne’er-do-wells to sneak in, grab the reliquary, plus what treasure they can fill their pockets with, and sneak out again. And if they are successful, have the Overlord owe them a favour when they get home!

What follows from this great set-up, is a solid enough dungeon for the Player Characters to explore and plunder, although this time, they will be mostly sneaking their way through its various rooms and corridors. The various locations only number twenty, split between above and below ground, and are all nicely detailed. Never once does the reader and thus players when it is run, not get the feeling that the characters are in a grubby, rat-infested, and rat-themed temple. Signs of the Rat God are everywhere, including manipulation of some worshippers to be more rat-like. They include berserkers partially altered altered through ghastly surgery and worse to believe they are rats and a very nasty Catacomb Guardian, a ghost of what appears to be a tortured priest of the Rat God with the chittering heads of rats sown into his eyes and mouth, that still protects the catacombs. There is a random chance that he will appear, but if he does, he is a very difficult monster to defeat. There are several traps too, to catch the unwary, and the final encounter has a nice sense of energy to it, although a very agile Player Character may be able to get past it. Throughout, there are suggestions adjusting the threats and challenges for a smaller party of Player Characters.

The adventure is concluded with details of how the Player Characters might escape from the temple and what form their possible rewards might take if they return to Lankhmar with the Hand of St. Heveskin. Full details of the Hand of St. Heveskin are provided in the scenario’s first appendix. All together, Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #11: The Rats of Ilthmar is a short adventure that should take no longer than a session to complete and the criminal nature of the Player Characters means that it is easy to set-up and inset into a campaign using the Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar Boxed Set. Interestingly, Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #11: The Rats of Ilthmar began life as a special adventure for the winners of the Lankhmar Trivia Contest held in 2015 and then played at Gen Con 2015. Which means that it actually predates the release of Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar Boxed Set by two years! All ten questions from that trivia contest are included in the scenario’s second appendix, along with their answers.
Physically, Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #11: The Rats of Ilthmar is well presented. The artwork is good, having a suitably rattish, grubby feel to it. The cartography is rather plain, if workable.
Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #11: The Rats of Ilthmar is a scenario with a great set-up and potentially great rewards for the Player Characters. In between, it is solidly themed heist which the players can enjoy without having to win a trivia contest.

Screen Shot XIV

How do you like your GM Screen?

The GM Screen is a essentially a reference sheet, comprised of several card sheets that fold out and can be stood up to serve another purpose, that is, to hide the GM's notes and dice rolls. On the inside, the side facing the GM are listed all of the tables that the GM might want or need at a glance without the need to have to leaf quickly through the core rulebook. On the outside, facing the players, can be found either more tables for their benefit or representative artwork for the game itself. This is both the basic function and the basic format of the screen, neither of which has changed all that much over the years. Beyond the basic format, much has changed though.

To begin with the general format has split, between portrait and landscape formats. The result of the landscape format is a lower screen, and if not a sturdier screen, than at least one that is less prone to being knocked over. Another change has been in the weight of card used to construct the screen. Exile Studios pioneered a new sturdier and durable screen when its printers took two covers from the Hollow Earth Expedition core rule book and literally turned them into the game’s screen. This marked a change from the earlier and flimsier screens that had been done in too light a cardstock, and several publishers have followed suit.

Once you have decided upon your screen format, the next question is what you have put with it. Do you include a poster or poster map, such as Chaosium, Inc.’s last screen for Call of Cthulhu, Sixth Edition or Margaret Weis Productions’ Serenity and BattleStar Galactica Roleplaying Games? Or a reference work like that included with Chessex Games’ Sholari Reference Pack for SkyRealms of Jorune or the GM Resource Book for Pelgrane Press’ Trail of Cthulhu? Perhaps scenarios such as ‘Blackwater Creek’ and ‘Missed Dues’ from the Call of Cthulhu Keeper Screen for use with Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition? Or even better, a book of background and scenarios as well as the screen, maps, and forms, like that of the RuneQuest Gamemaster Screen Pack also published by Chaosium, Inc. In the past, the heavier and sturdier the screen, the more likely it is that the screen will be sold unaccompanied, such as those published by Cubicle Seven Entertainment for the Starblazer Adventures: The Rock & Roll Space Opera Adventure Game and Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space RPG. That though is no longer the case and stronger and sturdier GM Screens are the norm today.

So how do I like my GM Screen?

I like my Screen to come with something. Not a poster or poster map, but a scenario, which is one reason why I like ‘Descent into Darkness’ from the Game Master’s Screen and Adventure for Legends of the Five Rings Fourth Edition and ‘A Bann Too Many’, the scenario that comes in the Dragon Age Game Master's Kit for Green Ronin Publishing’s Dragon Age – Dark Fantasy Roleplaying Set 1: For Characters Level 1 to 5. I also like my screen to come with some reference material, something that adds to the game. Which is why I am fond of both the Sholari Reference Pack for SkyRealms of Jorune as well as the RuneQuest Gamemaster Screen Pack. It is also why I like the The Doctor Who: The Roleplaying Game Second Edition, Gamemaster’s Screen published by Cubicle 7 Entertainment for use with The Doctor Who: The Roleplaying Game Second Edition, the roleplaying game based on the world’s longest Science Fiction and adventure series made by the BBC.

The Doctor Who: The Roleplaying Game Second Edition, Gamemaster’s Screen comes with a three-panel screen and a ‘Gamemaster’s Guide’ for use with Doctor Who: The Roleplaying Game – Second Edition. The three-panel screen is in landscape format and boasts a handsome collage on the front, player-facing side of the screen, the eight—bar the most recent Doctor, the Fifteenth Doctor—most recent Doctors, including the last of Doctor of Classic Who, the Eighth Doctor, last to appear in The Night of the Doctor, and also the War Doctor and the Fugitive Doctor, all bookended by flying Daleks! On the back, or inside of the screen there are various tables taken for the rules to help the Game Master run her game. The left-hand panel covers journeys and adventures with ‘Adventures on the Fly!’ enabling the Game Master to create encounters on the go, whilst the ‘Random Journeys’, ‘Vortex Hazards’, and ‘System Damage’ tables all throw the Player Characters—the Time Lord and his Companions—into the dangers of travelling the Vortex through time. At the top of the middle panel is the ‘Chase Tracker’, for which the Game Master will need to provide some clips to keep track of where the chased the chasers are relatively to each other, plus the ‘Difficulty Levels’ and ‘Success Levels’ tables for handling skills. This is the right place to have them as they probably going to be the most used tables in the game. There are also tables for ‘Improving Your Character’ and ‘Technology Levels’. The right-hand panel is devoted to combat, including the ‘Weapon Damage Table’, ‘Where Does It Hurt?’, ‘Armour’, ‘Cover’, and also ‘Conditions’. Necessary, of course, but also to some extent not as important, as The Doctor Who: The Roleplaying Game Second Edition is very much a roleplaying game—as in the television series it is based upon—in which violence is always the last answer to any situation.

To be fair, Doctor Who: The Roleplaying Game – Second Edition is not a mechanically complex game and tends to be fast-playing and light in its play. So, in some ways, not all of the tables on The Doctor Who: The Roleplaying GameSecond Edition, Gamemaster’s Screen are going to be useful, or at least, constantly useful. Certainly, the ‘Improving Your Character’ is not going to be used very often, and similarly, the combat tables on the right-hand panel are not going to be used regularly. This does not mean that they are not useful tables, but rather that they useful to have when the Game master needs them, rather than needing them all of the time. However, one issue is that the none of the tables have page references to their relevant rules and use in the core rulebook. This is an annoying omission. Otherwise, a solid, sturdy screen with all of the tables that the Game Master is going to need.

The ‘Gamemaster’s Guide’ is a short three-guide to being a Gamemaster for Doctor Who: The Roleplaying Game – Second Edition. It opens with ‘What Makes a Doctor Who adventure?’. This is a guide to creating adventures and examining the elements typical to a Doctor Who adventure. This includes their episodic nature, the variety of genres from light-hearted romps to dark horror stories and much in between, iconic monsters, and so on. Some of the fundamentals of a Doctor Who episode includes a sense of wonder at the universe, confusion and understanding upon arrival in the TARDIS at any location, multiple factions, the looming threat, and more. It is a solid overview, though ripe for expansion on any one of its various pointers were Cubicle 7 Entertainment to publish a companion volume for the Game Master.

What ‘What Makes a Doctor Who adventure?’ does nicely complement is the ‘Random Adventure Generator’ that follows, which would also work well with the content and tables to be found in Doctor Who: Adventures in Space. Essentially, the set of tables here are designed to inspire the Game Master or help her create a setting, a threat and plot, and an adversary. Beginning with the ‘Setting Table’, the Game Master determines if the adventure is set on Earth, in Space, both, or somewhere special. Subsequent tables expand on each of these options, whilst the ‘Threat/Plot Table’ suggests themes such as Invasion, Societal Disaster, and Caper. The ‘Old Adversary Table’ lists lots of classics, such as Cybermen, Daleks, Sea Devils, Weeping Angels, and more, whilst the there is a set of tables for creating new aliens. It is all very useful and the Game Master can quickly create lots of adventure ideas and elements that she can thread together into something that she can run for her group.

‘Adventure Hooks’ includes four fun adventure hooks, the first of which, ‘Swine and the Rani’, is not only a great play on words, but also developed from the example worked through at the end of the ‘Random Adventure Generator’. The Rani is a fun villainess and here she is in the Classical Greek era up to no good. It opens with the Player Characters landing on a Greek ship in a storm and getting shipwrecked on an island guarded by pig-faced men who serve the Rani in her classical Greek temple which happens to be bigger on the inside. If ‘Swine and the Rani’ feels a little like H. G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau, then ‘Capture and Release’ feels a bit like The Time Machine with the Eloi and the Morlocks. However, it nicely subverts that relationship and the plot has a very pleasing twist to it. In ‘The Visitors’, the Player Characters get to runaround early sixties London, get caught up in pop mania, and chase down some nasty aliens—including a creepy man in a bowler hat and some popstars! Lastly, in ‘It Takes a Village’, the Player Characters arrive at a seventeenth century tavern to discover the locals discussing the very latest in galactic events! It is a great set-up and dies involve a witchfinder, but the epilogue does leave the Game Master without any suggestions as to how to resolve it, which is disappointing. All four scenario hooks are good and though some require a little more development than others, it is not difficult to imagine them being portrayed on screen.

Physically, The Doctor Who: The Roleplaying Game – Second Edition, Gamemaster’s Screen is well presented. The screen itself is sturdy and easy to use, whilst the ‘Gamemaster’s Guide’ is clean and tidy and easy to read. If there is an issue, it is that the Game Master will need a bag in which to store its various parts and not lose them!
The Doctor Who: The Roleplaying Game – Second Edition, Gamemaster’s Screen is useful, but not necessarily all of it and not necessarily all of the time. Primarily this is due to the fact that the roleplaying game demphasises combat, so those tables are not always going to be needed. This does not mean that they not useful, just useful when needed. The advice in the ‘Gamemaster’s Guide’ is broad, but nevertheless, also useful, whilst the ‘Random Adventure Generator’ is a very handy tool, and of course, adventure hooks are always useful, and the four adventures in the ‘Gamemaster’s Guide’ are fun. Overall, The Doctor Who: The Roleplaying Game – Second Edition, Gamemaster’s Screen is a useful access for Doctor Who: The Roleplaying Game – Second Edition.

Scares Under Scotland

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

Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Operation Falling Crystal takes place on the Home Front with the Player Characters, or Agents, suddenly rushed to the Scottish coast where a strange discovery has been made. With the Battle of France over and the Nazi war machine readying itself for Operation Sea Lion, Britain is frantically preparing defences against imminent invasion. In Scotland, this includes teams of coast watchers keeping an eye for roving U-boats, whilst just inland, near the sleepy village of St Abbs, an archaeological dig led by Professor Angus MacLeary, has made a discovery in an ancient cave system below a hill that sits behind a megalithic stone circle that stands looking over the sea. This is a highly valuable cache of the Blauer Kristall—or Blue Crystal—much coveted by Nachtwölfe, which uses it to fuel its increasingly weird weapons of war. Section M has been alerted to the discovery and quickly despatches a team of Agents, that is, the Player Characters, north to investigate and secure what could be a war-winning resource for analysis by the boffins at Clemens Park.

From the outset, Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Operation Falling Crystal sounds quite a bit like Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Under the Gun and in a great many ways, it is. Both scenarios are set on the Home Front and both take place in August—Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Under the Gun in August, 1940 and Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Operation Falling Crystal in late August/early September. Both scenarios are intended as sequels to Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Operation Vanguard, and thus both scenarios have the issue of the latter taking place in August, 1940. So there is a tight timeline involved. Both scenario involve a discovery being made underground which first attracts the attention of Section M, then the associated forces of the Mythos—in Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Under The Gun it is Deep Ones, whereas in Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Operation Falling Crystal, it is the Mi-Go—and both end in a three-way tussle between the Agents, the agents of the Mythos, and one of the Nazi factions in the secret war. Surprisingly, Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Operation Falling Crystal, it is Black Sun and not Nachtwölfe. Since it involves the Black Sun, it can be run after the events of ‘A Quick Trip to France’ found in the Achtung! Cthulhu Quickstart: A Quick Trip to France.

This is not to say that there are no differences. The Agents will have the opportunity to engage a little with the locals at the village pub at one in the scenario and there is an engagingly Hitchcockian feel to the train journey from London to Scotland. The Agents will also have their first encounter proper with the Mi-Go, one of the utterly alien factions in the Secret War, and may be able to parley with them in order to persuade them to work as allies, if only temporarily, against the Black Sun soldiery which has landed on the coast to take control of everything. There is more scope for roleplaying too, with the villagers, with the members of the coastal watch, with the members of the archaeological team, and even with the Mi-Go! What Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Operation Falling Crystal also does is introduce the Agents to both two more factions in the Secret War—Black Sun and the Mi-Go—and to the fact that the relationship between the Nazi factions, Black Sun and Nachtwölfe, is actually a rivalry.

Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Operation Falling Crystal is another short, sharp scenario which can be completed in a single session. There is a bit of clean-up in terms of what happens to the members of the archaeological dig and any captured Black Sun agents or troops, and the success of the Agents is measured in just how much and who they can get back to London. Success is not guaranteed through as the Agents face some tough Black Sun forces for a small group and they may make any potential successes less guaranteed by not making allies in the scenario. This a tough little scenario, high on combat and action over investigation.

Although Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Operation Falling Crystal is not a complex scenario, like the previous Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Under The Gun, its climax does involve a big battle with multiple opponents and factions, so it does feel a little like a mini-wargame rather than the climax of a roleplaying scenario. Certainly, the Game Master might want to have the factions involved in this tunnel and cave-based confrontation divided between herself and the Player Characters to make it easier to run and give her fewer dice to roll and NPCs to keep track of.

Physically, Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Operation Falling Crystal is cleanly and tidily laid out. It is not illustrated, but the maps of the various locations are decently done.

Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Operation Falling Crystal is a short and serviceable scenario, more action and combat than investigation. Its main problem is that it feels too much like Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Under The Gun, so the Game Master may want to run at least one scenario, if not more between the two if she is running the Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20 scenarios in chronological order. Otherwise, Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Operation Falling Crystal is an easy scenario to add to an early war campaign for Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20.

Horror House Hell

Have you wondered what would happen if a group of squatters looking for a place to stay or estate agents showing around prospective buyers got trapped in a haunted house? It is an intriguing idea, perhaps more interesting than the traditional trick or treating kids or new homeowners. After all, we already know how desperate either group is. The squatters desperate enough to break into an old house looking for somewhere to sleep and the estate agents desperate to make a sale and get the property off their books. If you are intrigued, then This House Is F*+#@%G HAUNTED is what you want. This House Is F*+#@%G HAUNTED is roleplaying game of ordinary folk being trapped in a haunted house, scared, petrified, and even dying from the frights that the spiritual trauma bound into the building are inflicting upon them. Initially uncertain, the protagonists—or victims—will over the course of three acts, suffer creepy events such as footsteps in another room or a music box playing by itself and then face obstacles like the lights going out and having to scrabble about in the dark or the faces in all of the portraits or photographs suddenly breaking into screams, before confronting the ghostly or ghoulish doings with a séance to appease a spirit’s woes or one of their number becomes possessed and begins to stalk everyone else in a murder spree!

This House Is F*+#@%G HAUNTED is a micro-game published by Parable Games, the British publisher best known for the horror roleplaying game, Shiver – Role-playing Tales in the Strange & the Unknown. It was funded as part of the publisher’s Parable Games ZineQuest RPG Buffet on Kickstarter. It pitches very ordinary—quite literally, each one is an everyman—into a terrifying situation, puts them through the ringer, and sees which ones survive. And survival is the prize. It is designed to be played in a single session, is very light in terms of mechanics, and comes packed with a bunch of prompts to use at every stage of the game. Some preparation is required in terms of the Housekeeper—as the Game Master is known in This House Is F*+#@%G HAUNTED—deciding upon the type of haunted house the Player Characters will be trapped in. Will it be a classic gothic mansion, a crumbling castle on the hill, or some irritating millionaire tech bro’s mansion? The choice will help the Game Master decide upon the nature of the haunting and how it will manifest over the course of the game. Beyond that though, This House Is F*+#@%G HAUNTED is a very low preparation roleplaying game, so good to have as a back-up or impromptu game.
In terms of the Player Characters, what the Game Master and her players need to decide is what the characters are. Several options are suggested, including the squatters and the estate agents, and beyond that, nothing. No Player Character has any skills to speak of, at least in a mechanical sense and the only stats are Harm and Will, like this:

Margorie Whittingham (Mrs.)
Estate Agent
Harm: 10
Will: 3

Mechanically, for a player to have his character overcome a challenge in This House Is F*+#@%G HAUNTED, he rolls two six-sided dice and attempts to get a result of seven or more. If he succeeds, fine. If not, he fails and bad things happen to him. The player is free to decide if his character is above average at this task or below average. In which case, he receives a bonus or penalty of one, respectively. The difficulty of the task can levy a penalty ranging from Difficult and -1 to Why Bother? and -4. Combat is primarily narrative driven, and since the Player Characters are ordinary folk, they rarely have the initiative or an advantage. If the threat is incorporeal, then the Player Characters will need to use the occult or some other means, to inflict harm upon them.

A Player Character suffers physical damage to his Harm and mental damage to his Will, including being scared. Both physical damage and frights can come from creepy events, obstacles, and confronting the danger itself, as well as from failing a roll on occasion. Reducing his Harm to zero will kill a Player Character, but when his Will is reduced to zero, he will become petrified. This imposes a further penalty on all rolls. However, if the player succeeds at a roll when his character is petrified, some Will is recovered and he is no longer petrified.

This is the extent of the rules to This House Is F*+#@%G HAUNTED, just two pages out of its twelve-page running length. The rest of the roleplaying game is dedicated to helping the Housekeeper create her haunted house and decide upon its nature. There is some advice, actually decent advice given the length of the game, and then lots of tables with lots of entries. These include reasons why the house is haunted and the ‘Minor Creepy Events’ for Act One, the ‘Haunting’ events for Act 2, and the nature of the final confrontation in the ‘Finale’ for Act 3. This is accompanied by a long list of ghostly enemies, from Poltergeist, Banshee, and Ghoul to Demon, Hellhound, and Legion. The Player Characters are supported by a list of possible weapons, from the mundane, like the rolling pin and the cleaver, and the magical, like the ritual dagger and Latin Dictionary (although the latter has a one-in-six chance of working, and a one-in-six chance of the Player Character failing in a Latin word salad).

Structurally, This House Is F*+#@%G HAUNTED is played out over three acts. In the first act, the Player Characters explore the house and suffer minor haunting effects. By the end of this, they will realise that they are all trapped inside and cannot escape—and of course, there is a table for this—and then in the second act, the serious haunting begins. This is when the Player Characters scramble for resources to survive and the means to overcome the threat they will confront in the third act, the finale.

Physically, This House Is F*+#@%G HAUNTED is simply, cleanly laid out and written. It is easy to read and the tables easy to use, since the Housekeeper is going to be referring to them on a regular basis. It is pitched as a fanzine, but really, that is only because the roleplaying game is short rather than the the format or inspiration.

This House Is F*+#@%G HAUNTED is a quick and dirty horror roleplaying game—low preparation, easy-to-play, and packed with prompts and ideas. Perfect for a gaming group in need of a fast game now and for the Housekeeper happy to improvise.

1984: Twilight: 2000

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

—oOo—
“Good luck. You’re on your own, now” It is perhaps one of the most famous opening lines of any scenario or campaign for any roleplaying game. It is an opening line—and its consequences—that all players of the roleplaying game have been faced with and have explored. It gave ultimate control to the players in deciding what their characters did next and where they went. Five years ago, the Cold War went hot. First in China, between the People’s Republic of China and the invading forces of the USSR, and later the Warsaw Pact. Continuing calls for support from Moscow a year later led to increasing dissatisfaction in East Germany and then an invasion by West Germany and an anti-Soviet coup in East Germany. West German forces were joined by U.S. forces and conflict quickly spread along the line of the Iron Curtain as NATO held off attacks by the Russians in Scandinavia and the North Atlantic. The war quickly spread as old rivalries ignited into armed conflict. First between Turkey and Greece, the latter with Italian support, then India and Pakistan, the latter being invaded. As NATO drove into Poland as far as Warsaw, the first nuclear weapons were used by the Soviets. In limited fashion at first with tactical nuclear weapons, on the Western Front, but on a huge scale on the Eastern Front, shattering Chinese forces and its industrial base. That was three years ago. In the west, the nuclear exchanges escalated, but did not yet tip over into full scale launches of intercontinental ballistic missiles. The destruction of industrial facilities and extensive disruption of trade was followed by famine and pandemic, and in the USA, a wave of refugees crossing the Rio Grande border. Unable to deal with the crisis, the now military-led government in Washington responded with arms and incensed, Mexico sent its army across the border to protect its citizens. By the end of the year, Mexico would occupy much of the U.S. southwest. Breakdowns in government and disputed elections in the USA ran right to the top, resulting in two governments, one civilian, one military. That was a year ago. The war in Europe bogged down into one of raids and attrition. A month ago, NATO forces in southern Poland launched a new offensive. It was met with unexpectedly fierce resistance by Warsaw Pact forces. Today, the last units from that offensive were destroyed or overrun. It is Tuesday, July 18th, 2000. The Third World War is over. Now you have to survive its consequences.

This is the set-up for Twilight: 2000, the military survival, post-apocalyptic roleplaying game published by Game Designers’ Workshop in 1984. The Player Characters are soldiers of the former United States 5th Infantry Division (Mechanised), left to fend for themselves and survive in southern Poland in an environment rife with danger—radiation, enemy forces, rival allied forces, bandits and marauders, limited supplies, desperate civilians—and limited intelligence. Of any roleplaying game released by a major publisher, it is arguably the most controversial. Most obviously due to its subject matter of nuclear war, and surviving that nuclear war and what it leaves behind, but also its militarism, its survivalism, and its Americanism. It would also win a major award, the H.G. Wells Award for ‘Best Roleplaying Rules of 1984’, in 1985, prove to be highly popular, be subject to over forty scenarios and supplements, a board game, a computer game, and three further editions, not always of the best quality or playability. This included the Twilight: 2000 2nd Edition Version 2.2 from Game Designers’ Workshop and the Twilight: 2013 Core Rules from 93 Games Studio. More recently, Free League Publishing would release its own version using the Year Zero Engine with Twilight: 2000 4th Edition. There is a lot to unpack and explore in Twilight: 2000—and not just in the game itself. However, that is the starting point.

The original Twilight: 2000 is a boxed set. Under its green ‘Contents of this Box’ sheet it contains a twenty-four-page Play Manual, a thirty-two-page Referee’s Manual, Players’ Charts, ten-page Referee’s Charts, twelve-page Equipment List, Price List, eight-page Beginning Adventure: Escape from Kalisz, Adventure Handout: Escape from Kalisz, Intelligence Briefing, A5-size Campaign Map depicting southern Poland, and three Record Sheets. The latter consists of the Character Generation Worksheet, Character Sheet, and Vehicle Record Sheet. There are also dice—four six-sided and one ten-sided—and an errata sheet. The latter is never a good sign… The Play Manual introduces the setting of Twilight: 2000 and details character creation, time and travel, upkeep, and the first part of combat. The Referee’s Manual examines skills and attributes, contains the second part of combat, looks at encounters, provides additional rules for radiation, disease, trade and commerce, repairs, electricity, and swimming, a chronological background, and a broad description of Poland. The latter is actually a breakdown of the military forces present in the remnants of the country rather than a description of it, and the advice for the Referee—just three quarters of a page long—suggests preparing a combat and a vehicle trek as training missions before play starts and identifies the need for the players and their characters to have a long term, but really only discusses one. Which is, of course, going home. The Players’ Charts lists the personal weapons for each nationality—including the West German Bundeswehr being armed with the Heckler & Koch G11 ‘submachine gun’, skill lists, languages, service branches and specialities, and languages by nationality. The Referee’s Charts contains tables for movement, terrain, encounters, vehicle damage locations, combat with a plethora of weapons, language lists, diseases to be found in encampments and settlements, armour values for cover, equipment availability, NPC motivation, radiation illness, and encounter stats. The Equipment List gives the ammunition type, weight, magazine size, and price of every weapon in the setting from the longbow through to the 120 mm mortar. It does similar things for all of the equipment and all of the vehicles that the Player Characters might also encounter too. It is an extensive list and most items are given at least a basic description. Vehicles are given a more detailed description, though no more than a paragraph, whilst weirdly, the Heckler & Koch G11 is given three whole paragraphs of its own.

The starting adventure in Twilight: 2000, Beginning Adventure: Escape from Kalisz describes the region fifty or so kilometres east of the city, the various Soviet forces present and their disposition. For the most part it details what units are where and the relationships between the Soviet forces and the civilians and where they are present, the civilians and marauders. There are some rumours and radio transmissions too, and some suggestions as to what the Player Characters might do as part of their efforts to escape the region, which primarily consist of ways to disrupt any attempts by the Soviet forces to follow them. The Adventure Handout: Escape from Kalisz provides a description for the players and their characters of the last month leading up to the radio transmission that leaves them on their own. The Intelligence Briefing is for the highest-ranking Player Character and gives an intelligence estimate of the forces still active in the region. Beginning Adventure: Escape from Kalisz is not a fully-fledged scenario in the sense that it has a plot with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Instead, it is a set-up that the Referee will need to develop during play, likely with the need to create some ready-to-encounter NPCs and enemy forces beforehand to make it easier to run all dependent upon what the players have decided what they want their characters to do. There are not really any hooks or adventure ideas in the traditional sense, and honestly, it feels more like a wargaming sandbox reduced to a personal scale which the Referee will need to develop a lot of further detail. Even then, beyond the limits of Beginning Adventure: Escape from Kalisz, like the Adventure Handout: Escape from Kalisz ends with, the Referee is on his own. (However, the official campaign, beginning with The Black Madonna, and continuing east with The Free City of Krakow, before turning north with Pirates of the Vistula, The Ruins of Warsaw, and lastly running west with Going Home.

A Player Character in Twilight: 2000 has six attributes—Fitness, Agility, Constitution, Stature, Intelligence, and Education. These range in value between one and twenty. An Education of nine or more indicates that the Player Character has graduated from high school, thirteen for a college, fifteen for a master’s degree, and eighteen or more for a PhD. Derived factors include Strength, Hit Capacity, weight, Load, and throw range. The Military Base Experience represents a Player Character’s basic military experience and will be lower for a Player Character with higher attributes, but higher for a Player Character with lower attributes as a balancing factor. From it is determined the number of dice rolled to find out how many months the Player Character has spent in combat. If this is higher than sixty, then the Player Character is a veteran, including of previous wars. Coolness Under Fire measures the Player Character’s reaction to stress and gun fire and is derived from the number of months spent in combat. Lower is better than higher. The Military Base Experience also determines how many Rads the Player Character has suffered. Rank is based on Education and Intelligence, plus a random roll, as are possible second languages.

Twilight: 2000 allows for a wide variety of nationalities, including those from the Soviet Bloc. The Service Branch and Specialities cover support services, infantry, engineer, medical, artillery, armour, and aviation, as well as special forces, rangers, and intelligence. Most have a straight roll requirement which must be equalled or bettered, but without any modifiers. The various specialities provide bonuses to certain skills or simply make one or two cheaper to buy. Every Player Character has some basic skills, but receives skill points to assign based on his Military Base Experience and Education, and then some Background skill points. Some skills are restricted to either being Military, Education, or Background skills, but all are purchased at a cost of one point per percentage point, and then two points per percentage points over fifty. Every Player Character gets his nationality’s basic equipment and then is free to buy any further equipment with the money earned based on his time in service. Vehicles are rolled for rather than purchased. Choice of equipment is limited depending on whether it is rare in the East or the West. However, this can lead to the Player Characters accruing a lot of equipment—and that much vaunted Heckler & Koch G11 is only $400!

Kevin Mongeau
Age: 27 Nationality: American
Service: US Army Branch: Engineer
Rank: Captain
Fitness 13 Agility 10 Constitution 18
Stature 17 Intelligence 13 Education 14
Strength: 15
Hit Capacity
Head: 18 Chest: 50 Abdomen: 35 Left Arm: 35 Right Arm: 35 Left Leg: 35 Right Leg: 35
Load: 50 Throw Range: 30
Military Base Experience: 5 Time in Combat: 24 Months
Coolness Under Fire: 5
Rads: 14
Skills
Body Combat 50, Chemistry 50, Civil Engineer 65, Combat Engineering 75, Combat Rifleman 50, Computer 50, Electronics 50, Farming 50, Foraging 50, Instruction 50, Mechanic 50, Melee Combat 20, Metallurgy 50, Motorcycle 50, Nuclear Warhead 20, Pistol 20, Scrounging 50, Swim 20, Thrown Weapon 20, Tracked Vehicle Driver 50, Wheeled Vehicle Driver 40
Base Hit Numbers
Combat Rifleman 30/15/10, Pistol 12/6/2
Body Combat Damage: 8
Equipment
M16 Assault Rifle, 9mm pistol

The character creation process is not particularly difficult, although it does involve a fair degree of arithmetic and it is far from quick. The Character Generation Worksheet is there to make it easier. The main issue is perhaps learning all of the three letter acronyms that the roleplaying game’s skills are reduced to.

Mechanically, Twilight: 2000 is a percentile system.* Attributes are multiplied by five when they need to be rolled against and tasks are either easy, average, or difficult. An easy task doubles the value, average keeps it the same, and difficult halves it. Combat uses the same core mechanic and plays out over six five-second rounds per combat turn. A Player Character can typically conduct one action per round, some of which can be combined with a move action. However, some of these have to be Hesitation actions when the Player Characters can do nothing. The number is dependent on the Player Character’s Coolness Under Fire. The lower the Coolness Under Fire, the fewer the number of Hesitation actions a Player Character is forced to do. Certain actions, such as repetitive ones and drivers under direction can avoid Hesitation actions under certain circumstances. Initiative order is determined by skill, higher skills being better. Combat is treated comprehensively, including rate of fire, aimed shots—all shots are assumed to be quick, but a round spent aiming doubles the base hit chance, firing from and at vehicles, and so on. The rules also cover indirect fire and antitank missiles. Damage can be slight, serious, or critical. Damage that does less than the Capacity in a location is counted as slight damage, serious if it exceeds it, and critical if it is twice the Capacity. Critical hits to the head are fatal.

* Which begs the question, why was only one ten-sided die included in the box?
The Play Manual also covers time, and more importantly, upkeep. This includes food requirements, foraging and fishing, hunting, fuel, and vehicle maintenance. All of this is important because the Player Characters no longer have access to regular supplies as they would normally. So, fuel includes consumption of different types and changing from one fuel type to another, also distilling alcohol, which typically takes three days to complete. Vehicle maintenance is also important; they are likely to break down especially since the road networks have been severely damaged and soldiers no longer have access to vehicle bays for checks and preventative maintenance. In many ways, Twilight: 2000 is a roleplaying game of technical survival, and as important as combat is in the play of the game because it is a military roleplaying game, so Player Characters who have technical, mechanical, and similar skills are as important as those who are crack shots.

The Referee’s Manual expands upon the use of skills, notably allowing for Outstanding Success and Catastrophic Failure. An Outstanding Success is equal to ten percent of the skill or attribute roll, whereas a roll of ninety or more, followed by a second failure, is counted as a Catastrophic Failure. What these are in game terms is left up to the Referee to decide. There are also some suggested skill rolls. As well as expanding on skill use, the Referee’s Manual expands on combat. It adds rules for explosions and explosives, chemical agents, mines, and vehicles. Vehicle combat is the most complex aspect of the roleplaying game, especially when it comes to component damage after a shot has penetrated a vehicle. The nature of Twilight: 2000 means that vehicle combat is a possibility, since the remnants of both sides are capable of fielding a mixture of light and heavy armour, and both the Player Characters and NPCs are likely to have access to anti-armour weapons. Encounters covers random encounters, settlements, and NPCs, though in the case of the latter, the drawing two cards from an ordinary deck of playing cards to determine their motivations. For example, clubs indicates violence, diamonds wealth, hearts fellowship, and spades power. The face cards indicate particularly strong motivations and drives, such as ‘heart Queen’ for love or ‘Club Jack’ for murderer. It is a very broad treatment, but works well enough should the Referee need an NPC quickly. The additional rules cover the extra dangers of the post-apocalyptic setting of Twilight: 2000, including radiation and disease, in particular a lot of diseases that are rare in highly advanced societies, such dysentery and typhoid fever. None of this is particularly pleasant as you would expect. The Referee’s Manual is rounded out with some notes on trade and commerce and on repairs, something that the Player Characters will need to do for reasons already explained, and the timeline and overview of Poland in the year 2000.

Physically, Twilight: 2000 is decently presented. There is some good writing in places. For example, character creation in the Play Manual is supported with some colour fiction that serve as the source for the examples of the process. Both the Play Manual and the Referee’s Manual are illustrated with a range of scenes and characters done in greyscale. When the artwork is not depicting an over-the-top combat scene, it is actually decent, depicting the difficulty of life and survival in this dangerous new world with some delicacy and also diversity. However, the rules would have certainly benefited from some more fully worked out examples of play and combat, especially vehicle combat.

Of course, as contemporary a roleplaying game as Twilight: 2000 was in 1984, even though it was set sixteen years into the future, events outpaced it. By 1986, with the appointment of Mikhail Gorbachev as General Secretary of the Communist Party, the de facto leader in the Soviet Union, and his adoption of greater transparency and openness, relations had begun to thaw between the USA and the USSR. Within five years of the publication of Twilight: 2000, the Berlin Wall had collapsed, the Warsaw Pact had begun to break up, and by 1991, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, had disintegrated and was no more. Game Designers’ Workshop would update Twilight: 2000 with a second edition first published in 1990 and then again in a new version in 1993, to take account of the rapidly changing geo-political situation. The belated version published by 93 Games Studio the history even further forward, Twilight: 2013 being set in 2013 within its even then, very short future history, deviating from 2007. The fourth edition, published by Free League Publishing as Twilight: 2000 – Roleplaying in the World War III That Never Was, returned the setting closer to its roots in the original version by Game Designers’ Workshop and made it an alternate timeline, which fortunately, we have lived past.

—oOo—Twilight: 2000 was reviewed not once, but twice in Space Gamer Number 74 (May/June 1985) in ‘During the Holocaust: Twilight: 2000’. First by Rick Swan, who lamented the lack of crossover between wargamers and roleplayers before saying, “Twilight: 2000 may change all that. Let’s say this up front: Twilight: 2000 is the most successful bridge between conventional wargames and roleplaying published to date. If it doesn’t bring the two camps closer together, it probably can’t be done.” However, he was critical of the Beginning Adventure: Escape from Kalisz, complaining that, “Unfortunately, Twilight: 2000 continues in the grand tradition of basic sets by including a substandard introductory adventure as part of the package. “Escape From Kalisz” is so sketchy (not a single NPC is described and the situation is directionless) that you may as well write your own. Let’s hope that GDW doesn’t waste any time in publishing some adventures worthy of the system.” Yet beyond this criticism, he said, “I’ve yet to come across a more engaging premise for a roleplaying campaign. And a war-based game that still retains such a strong sense of humanity is an accomplishment by any standards.” and his conclusion was more positive. “Whether or not Twilight: 2000 becomes a standard remains to be seen, but it certainly fills a niche and does so successfully. I hope it finds an audience with roleplayers and wargamers alike. As a design, it’s nothing spectacular, but as a concept, it’s an innovation. Bring on the adventures!”

Greg Porter offered a rebuttal in ‘Another View’. He praised the character creation system, the relatively realistic equipment list, and the simplicity of the core system. However, he criticised the use of acronyms for the skills and the need for errata in a new game, and called the combat system abysmal. He finished with, “All told, Twilight: 2000 is a tragic waste of 18 bucks. The nice concept and character generation system are completely overrun by innumerable flaws and hopeless violations of the laws of physics. If you insist on buying this game, read a friend’s copy first. I wish I had.”

Chris Felton reviewed Twilight: 2000 in ‘Notices’ in Imagine No. 27 (June 1985). He highlighted the difficulty of refereeing a game of Twilight: 2000 with, “This game system has its downfall built into its basic premise. A group of soldiers behind enemy lines in a disintegrating society is far more difficult to referee than any other game because of the fast-moving nature of the group. Radom is a big crater: will they go north to Bialobrzegi or south to Szydlowiec? Will they attack the supply dump or not? And so on. The players have endless choices in each evening’s play and the referee must be ready to cope with any decision they make. This is against the current trend in rpgs, especially in the States where parties tend to be steered for the referee’s own ease.” Although Felton had other criticisms, such as the acronyms, he said, “Overall, this is a good game, well worth clubbing together for if you belong to a group of experienced players who like free-running games and whose referee can run a scenario from minimal notes. If your referee has no experience of ‘winging it’ and needs all the details worked out in advance, this is not the game for you.”

Marcus L. Rowland reviewed Twilight: 2000 in ‘Open Box’ in White Dwarf Issue 68 (August 1985) in what perhaps is one of the most notorious and controversial reviews to appear in gaming magazines, let alone the pages of White Dwarf. He was highly critical, commenting that, “While the system is playable, the moral stance and attitudes it exemplifies are fairly loathsome. The rules favour the style of behaviour found in ‘fun’ war films…” and that, “The setting, two years after the last nuclear weapon was used, has evidently been designed to avoid showing the worst effects of the bomb; the random encounters don’t include civilians suffering from third degree radiation burns, blind children, and the hideously dead and dying victims of blast and heat. Starvation and plague are occasionally mentioned, with the implication that characters can always use their weapons to get food and medicines.” He finished by saying, “The suggested theme (which beautifully explains the attitude of this game) is to ‘return home’ to America: Europe evidently isn’t worth say anything about the possibility of rebuilding settlements, negotiating local peace treaties, or doing anything else to start civilisation working again. The box blurb says ‘They were sent to save Europe. . . Now they’re fighting to save themselves’, and it’s evident that this game has been written by and for Americans, with little or no understanding of European attitudes or desires.” and then awarding the roleplaying game a score of five out of ten.

Twilight: 2000 was placed at number thirty-five of ‘Arcane Presents the Top 50 Roleplaying Games 1996’ which appeared in Arcane #14 (December 1996). Editor Paul Pettengale said, “Pretty much all the previous ‘post-apocalyptic’ RPGs had been fairly fantastical, and had been set some time after the apocalypse. Twilight: 2000 is realistic and set in the middle of the breakdown of European society. Involving, but not exactly cheerful.”

One interesting remark by Allen Varney in ‘Roleplaying Reviews’ in Dragon Issue #175 (December 1991) would lead to a debate about the morality of Twilight: 2000. In his review of Dark Conspiracy, Game Designers’ Workshop’s near-future horror role-playing game, he wrote, “…[G]ood PCs fighting evil monsters is at least an improvement over the moral vacuum of the TWILIGHT: 2000 game…” This led to an early Internet debate the same year involving Varney and others, including an unnamed former GDW employee, about the morality or lack of to be found in Twilight: 2000, and by extension other games. The heated debate would result in ‘DO THE RIGHT THING: A Commentary’, which appeared in INTER*ACTION: The Journal of Role-Playing and Storytelling Systems Issue 1 (October, 1994) and is available to read here.—oOo—
Let us be fair about Twilight: 2000. It is very much a product of its time. It was released in 1984 at the height of the Cold War. The leader of the free world, President Ronald Reagan, faced off against a Soviet Union headed by Konstantin Chernenko, the last of the Communist old guard who still esteemed Stalin. The film Red Dawn depicted a Soviet invasion of the United States, which would be satirised by Greg Costikyan two years after the publication of Twilight: 2000 when relations between the USA and USSR had radically changed with The Price of Freedom from West End Games. Films such as The Day After in the USA and Threads in the United Kingdom, showed the public the horrors of nuclear war. As the bulwark against the forces of Communism, the American armed forces were held in high esteem, and of course, Communism itself was seen as a great evil, almost Satanic, anti-Christian, and definitely, anti-American. Thus, whatever the situation, even in a post-apocalypse as that set up—if not necessarily depicted—in Twilight: 2000, soldiers are seen as heroes. There can be no doubt that, along with its extensive list of guns, that the militarism and Americanism in the roleplaying game appealed to a certain audience, hence its popularity.

However, outside of the USA, as evidenced by Marcus L. Rowlands’ review in White Dwarf Issue 68, Twilight: 2000 found lesser favour. Again, because it was a product of its time and because of the Cold War. The United Kingdom might not have been on the doorstep of the Eastern Bloc, but it was closer and any conflict between NATO and the Warsaw Pact would take place only a few hundred miles away on the other side of the English Channel. There was a vocal anti-nuclear weapon, ‘ban the bomb’ movement in both the United Kingdom and in Europe, the Greenham Common RAF airbase being the site of an extremely long campaign of civil disobedience, including the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, protesting against the stationing of U.S. cruise missiles on the base. There was also a political divide to the anti-nuclear war movement too, as well as an anti-Americanism, which grew out of the feeling that whilst the U.S.A. would be protecting the United Kingdom and Europe against Russian invasion, it was not going to feel the consequences at home of such a war as the United Kingdom and Europe would suffer. Of course, were the Cold War to have gone hot and nuclear missiles been launched by both sides, everyone would have suffered.

As to the Americanism of Twilight: 2000, that is undeniable, since it is about American soldiers surviving on a wild frontier, a frontier to which they have themselves contributed to its wildness, wanting to get home to America. Indeed, the thrust of the first six releases for the roleplaying game, would be all about getting out of the hell of Europe and getting home. However, this is a roleplaying game written by American designers who had various degrees of military experience, and published by an American company, for an American audience, and the fact that anyone outside of the USA could buy Twilight: 2000 was extra income for the publisher. There were supplements set outside of the American experience for Twilight: 2000, such as Survivors’ Guide to the United Kingdom, but these were exceptions, not the rule.

Although not as immoral as perhaps the earlier military roleplaying game, Merc, published by Fantasy Games Unlimited in 1981, Twilight: 2000 is not in itself a moral game. In play, it may become a moral game, but the focus in the roleplaying game as written is on survival, combat, and escaping. That is what the Beginning Adventure: Escape from Kalisz is about, getting away from the chaos of a battle lost the day before, but then? It is not on the environment and the other survivors, who are relegated to aids and obstacles, nor is it on rebuilding and protecting what remains—at least until the Player Characters can get home to the shattered United States. Even then the rules do not support this concept of recovery or rebuilding, NPCs are not quite faceless, but they are very broadly drawn—quite literally from a deck of ordinary playing cards—and hardly at all in the starting scenario in the Twilight: 2000 boxed set. Further, there is no guide to creating civilian NPCs, no discussion of the civil or social aspects of Poland that have survived, and no advice on bringing them into play. That said, the artwork does in places depict the innocents of the conflict, the civilians and the children, acknowledging their presence and suffering that the roleplaying game’s text does not.
It is interesting to note that at the height of the Cold War, the roleplaying hobby produced two of the greatest roleplaying games about the fears of the consequences of a world on the brink of Nuclear War. One, Twilight: 2000, dealt with the immediacy of such a conflict and externalised it in a very strait-laced military treatment. The other is Paranoia, which like the previously mentioned The Price of Freedom, is designed by Greg Costikyan (along with Dan Gelber, Eric Goldberg, and Allen Varney) and published by West End Games. Where The Price of Freedom satirised the possible invasion of the USA by the USSR, Paranoia satirised and internalised those fears, most obviously that of McCarthyism.

Twilight: 2000 is the apogee of military roleplaying games and antithesis of the post-apocalyptic roleplaying game normally set centuries after anyone responsible for the disaster has died. The latter frees the players and their characters from having to think about the causes and the culprits, and instead focus on the consequences. In Twilight: 2000, the causes and the culprits are present in the setting and the Player Characters are likely to be concerned with them, if not aligned with them, whereas the consequences, beyond the technical, are ignored and the Player Characters are only expected to think about themselves. In a roleplaying game setting in which humanity has suffered so much and which places the Player Characters on the frontline of that suffering, it is a pity that as written, Twilight: 2000 ignores that humanity.

Stone & Storm

As one of the worst storms hits Boston, people gather along the harbour awaiting news of the arrival of the SS Champagne, late from the other side of the Atlantic and caught in the weather, seemingly adrift and in danger of running aground at the Massachusetts port. The harbour master has already acted and sent the FV Foggy Sea, a fishing trawler, out to where the SS Champagne was last sighted and there, have her crew board her, discover what has happened and ensure that the passenger liner is not lost with either hands or passengers. Once aboard, what the crew of the FV Foggy Sea discover is a charnel house. Signs of blood and death everywhere, corpses dismembered in ways unimaginable, with looks of terror upon the faces of the decapitated heads. There seems no reason to this bloody shock, this carnival of death which seems to have been played out up and down the length of the ship, from one deck to another. What or who caused this massacre of passengers and crew alike? Is it still present aboard the SS Champagne and are there any survivors? This is the big, opening dramatic scene for The Order of the Stone: A Horror Mystery in Three Parts.

The Order of the Stone: A Horror Mystery in Three Parts is a campaign for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition published by Chaosium, Inc.. It is a short campaign, intended to be played in a few sessions, but can be played via multiple means and it includes not one, but three different set-ups to help the Keeper get her players and their Investigators into the campaign. First, The Order of the Sone can be played using standard Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition rules; second it can be run using Pulp Cthulhu: Two-fisted Action and Adventure Against the Mythos and there are notes contained within its covers to do so; and third, it can be run using the rules given in the Call of Cthulhu Starter Set. The first set-up has the Investigators as members of the faculty and student body at Miskatonic University, specialising in history and archaeology, asked to go to Boston to check on the arrival of a fellow academic, Doctor Nicolus Sebastian, and his team, who are returning to the USA from a successful if troubled archaeological dig in Ireland aboard the SS Champagne. The second set-up is for existing Investigators simply awaiting the arrival of cousin aboard the SS Champagne. Experienced players, if not their Investigators, will quickly realise that none of this bodes well for the poor cousin. Well, this is Call of Cthulhu after all… The third set-up is the investigators as the crew of the FV Foggy Sea. If the second set-up reeks of familiarity, then this third set-up is genuinely interesting and novel, bringing a streak of bold muscularity to the roleplaying game as well as presenting the Investigators with the pre-packaged Investigator organisation. No matter which group the Investigators are drawn from—and to be honest, the Investigators as the crew of the FV Foggy Sea is original and startlingly different—they will all find themselves aboard the fishing trawler, headed to the SS Champagne. Also, The Order of the Stone: A Horror Mystery in Three Parts can be played in conjunction with Call of Cthulhu: Arkham, since although the campaign has its origins in Ireland, it plays out in New England. That said, the first and second set-ups, with either students and staff at Miskatonic University or pre-existing Investigators, works best with this last option.

The set-up of the campaign does make it difficult to adjust other periods, more so for a modern setting. The introduction provides a good overview of the campaign and its background, and also notes that throughout, at the end of key scenes, the leads that the Investigators need to find in order to progress are clearly marked. Then it is very quickly into the first scenario, ‘Terror on the SS Champagne’. There is a certain familiarity to the scenario. A ship adrift, seemingly abandoned—or in this case, its crew and passengers rent from limb to limb, and a dark and nasty threat stalking its passageways and rooms, and then, once it is aware of them, the members of the other crew who have come aboard to check for the living and/or salvage. Everywhere is a bloodbath and the Investigators will need to work hard not to join as they try and work out what has happened on the ship. The SS Champagne is given a detailed description to accompany its deck plans and there are several scenes and encounters that the Keeper can insert into the Investigators’ progress through the stricken vessel. These escalate the scenario’s growing sense of peril, enhanced by the worsening storm, until the Investigators find themselves stalked by the Mythos entity at the heart of the campaign. Should any Investigator suffer from a Bout of Madness, there is a useful list of possible phobias to suffer. ‘Terror on the SS Champagne’ is quite straightforward and will probably end with a bang—though other options are discussed too, but it does leave the players and their Investigators with a conundrum. What do they tell the authorities when they get back to Boston?

The second scenario, ‘Murder in Greyport’, opens with a strange revelation. Marco Torres, one of the passengers aboard the SS Champagne not only managed to get off the ailing passenger liner, but lived long enough to be murdered mere weeks later! Which begs the question, “If one person managed off the SS Champagne, did anyone else?” If ‘Terror on the SS Champagne’ was action driven and linear, ‘Murder in Greyport’ is more open and investigative in nature. Taking place in Greyport, a fishing town to the east of Arkham, the investigation will primarily consist of two lines of enquiry. First, who murdered Marco Torres, and secondly, how did he get off the SS Champagne? The investigation is very clearly organised and so easy for the Keeper to follow. As with the first part of the campaign, the description of the town and the various NPCs and what they know, all nicely interconnected, are accompanied by a series of events, driven by the Investigators’ presence in the town and their asking questions here and there over the course of a day or so. All of them are confrontational in nature, whether with the local townsfolk or with outsiders who have more than a vested interest in the Investigators’ activities. There are options here also, first to add a possible motivation for the Investigators, and second, to add other murder plots, but they do complicate the situation. By the end of ‘Murder in Greyport’ should have solved the murder, determined that the victim was not the only person to escape the SS Champagne, and worked out where they have gone. This middle scenario is surprisingly mundane, its horror one of small-mindedness and human emotions, though there are more than traces of the Mythos at the end.

The third and final scenario, ‘The Hunt’, narrows the story down to a confrontation with the forces and agents of the Mythos deep in the Massachusetts backwoods. The Investigators may gain some allies, and thus a potential source of replacement Investigators if their interactions with the other outsiders in Greyport went well, if not, the Investigators may find their efforts to stop the cultists’ plans somewhat hindered. The climax of the campaign takes place in the hills above a children’s summer camp, long closed down due to a canoeing accident, requiring a trek into the woods in the bloody wake of the cultists and their master. In the ruins of colonial era settlement, the Investigators have a chance to counter the activities of the cultists and so save the world. These scenes are fairly complex in comparison to the rest of the campaign, so does need a careful study upon the part of the Keeper.

Rounding The Order of the Stone are several appendices. These in turn detail all of the new tomes and spells in the campaign and then the crew of the FV Foggy Sea as pre-generated Investigators. This is a diverse mix of characters. Physically, The Order of the Stone is cleanly and tidily presented. The maps are serviceable, but the artwork is excellent. Oddly, two NPCs that appeared earlier in the book are given entirely different illustrations in different styles in the third scenario.

The Order of the Stone: A Horror Mystery in Three Parts is a small-scale campaign both in terms of its play length, its scope, and its factions. It offers a solid mix of both Mythos and mundane horror, interaction and investigation, in a tight story that works well as an easy to prepare first campaign.

Not Quite Quiddity

Quintessence is a generic, rules-light, dice pool-driven roleplaying game from Gribblie Games. Intended to do everything from hack ‘n’ slash fantasy, post-apocalyptic survival, and paranormal investigation to cartoon capers, space opera, and horror one-shots, it is written to allow a great deal of freedom in terms of character design and growth, some of which can be developed during play to create individual Player Characters with unique abilities. Once play begins, the mechanics to Quintessence are fast-paced, lean into cinematic action, and allow for player input in terms of describing the action and developing what their characters are capable of. The book itself is fairly short—barely a little over one hundred pages—which does not give a lot of space for it to cover everything. It can be roughly divided into three sections, covering in turn, the rules, character creation, and advice for the Guide, as the Game Master is known.

With a little time to explain what a roleplaying game is, Quintessence really starts with a glossary of its terms, necessary because it dives quickly into the mechanics. A Player Character has four Affinities—Air, Earth, Fire, and Water. Air represents grace, instinct, and spirit; Earth represents fortitude, reason, and resolve; Fire is confidence, passion, and spark; and Water is curiosity, expression, and subtlety. Within each, he will have one or more Approaches, ways in which deals with situations or problems. A Player Character’s attunement to each Affinity is represented by a die type, from a four-sided die to a twelve-sided die, whilst the Proficiency in each Approach indicates the number of dice rolled for it. Vigour is a combination of a Player Character’s energy, health, and motivation, and is either depleted when he suffers damage or when points are expended to undertake actions. Perks such as Soothing Voice, Lithe, and Confident will add dice to a pool, whilst Quirks like Inattentive, Fear of Snakes, and Illiterate deduct dice from a pool.

To have his character undertake an action, assembles a pool of dice equal to a pair of Approaches and their dice type and number of dice. If appropriate, Perks add dice to the pool, whilst Quirks deduct them. When rolled, results of four or more count as successes. Rolling the maximum value on any die counts as either two successes or go into the player’s pool of Destiny dice. A player can have a maximum of four Destiny dice and these can be kept and rolled on any later check. Any roll of one is treated as a fumble, in which case a success is deducted from the total rolled or a die can be added to the Guide’s Fate pool. The Fate pool works like a player’s Destiny dice in that it can have a maximum of four, which are used for NPC checks. Making the roll costs the Player Character a point of Vigour.

Action in the roleplaying game is kept track of on an Action Tracker. This is a track of boxes numbered from one to twenty and enables the Guide to determine when the actions of both the Player Characters and the NPCs take place. Some actions, such as talking to an ally or drawing a weapon take no actions. A snapshot with a rifle or a punch thrown in a brawl is a one-step action; a pointed attack with a rapier or an aimed shot with a pistol is a two-step action; and a smash attack with a mace or a targeted shot with a crossbow is a three-step action. Then the Guide counts up the number of steps on the Action Tracker and when enough have passed, the action will take place. Whilst one-step actions are faster and means that a Player Characters gets to do a lot, they do not inflict as much damage as the considered and longer two-step and three-step actions. Each action, no matter how many steps in involves, costs a single Vigour to carry out, so the player has to weigh up the cost of the faster, less damage-inflicting Actions that effectively cost more Vigour because a Player Character can do more of them versus slow, more complex, but potentially more damaging Actions that have the same Vigour cost.

Damage is determined by the number of successes rolled multiplied by modifier based on the weapon used and the number of steps that the action took. Armour reduces damage, but also takes damage itself, indicated by the number of times that the armour will successfully protect the character. The rules for combat also handle cover, which increases the number needed to count as successes; dodging and parry, which requires an opposed roll with the defender’s successes negating the attacker’s; and of course, death and healing.

Although the main purpose of the Action Tracker is to keep track of who acts when in combat, it can be used for other purposes. The most obvious is for chases and races, but another is long term projects, perhaps researching a spell or improving irrigation for a village. The latter is not really explored in the pages of Quintessence, but Endeavours, Notions, and Magic are. Magic requires a Perk as well as suitable setting theme, whilst a Notion is an idea or inspiration that is acquired through play, which can be banked at the cost of an Experience Point to be brought into play later on. The use of either Magic or Notion requires the use of an extended test, an Endeavour, that the player creates himself during play which can then be improved through multiple, successful use. The base difficulty for the Endeavour, like any action, is four, but this is increased by numerous factors, including whether the aim of the spell is to heal or harm—and then by how much, range, number of people affected, and so on. If the Endeavour is successful, then the player gets to record it. Once it is written down, the difficulty reduces by one and the next time the Player Character successfully casts the spells or performs the Endeavour, the difficulty lowers again until it reaches the default difficulty.

This Endeavour system is supported by some examples, primarily of magic use. It is a nice, simple, freeform system that allows for a lot of player input and scope for the player to develop his character as he wants. However, as good as it is, as written it feels limited to just magic and physical activities. Yet like the suggestion that the Action Tracker be used for more than combat and chases, the idea that the Endeavour mechanic be used for something else, including social situations and long-term projects, remains disappointingly unexplored.

One aspect of the rules that Quintessence does not cover is conditions. Beyond straightforward damage to Vigour, there is no advice on damage from other sources, where that is fire, falling, drowning, poison, and even fear. These are major omissions, especially more so given that they might be ones that the players might want to bring into play via their characters’ Endeavours.

To create a character, a player decides upon a concept that fits the Guide’s setting and then decides upon a Persona, Origins, Perks, and Quirks, before running him through a Lifepath. The Persona is divided between Nature, who the Player Character is in terms of personality or ideology, and Demeanour, how he appears to others. Origins can be lineage, species, community, and so on. For example, one could be Orc and the other Human, to become a Half-Orc, or one could be Italian American and the other the New York Police Department. Perks and Quirks are acquired from the Origins, and then the Lifepath consists of four life events for which the player must alter Approaches once, add Perks and Quirks once then, and choose any one of them again. The player also decides on gear, relationships, goals, and languages.

Henry Brinded
AFFINITIES
Air: d6; Etiquette 2, Intuition 2, Humour 2
Earth: d8; Grit 2, Knowledge 3, Willpower 2

Fire: d4; Optimistic 2, Obsession 2, Imagination 2
Water: d8; Inquisitive 3, Artistry 2, Shrewd 1
Vigour: 25

Origin #1: Classics Scholar
Origin #2: Quiet Antiquarian
Life Event #1: Grew up Boston Brahmin
Life Event #1: Yale
Life Event #1: The Great War
Life Event #1: My own business

Perks: Ear for Languages, A Love of the Past, Private Income
Quirks: Pacifist, Deafness

Goals: Prove to my family that my business can be successful (short term), return to college (long term), keep my friends safe (group)

The advice for the Guide covers setting and genre, running Session Zero and the questions to be asked, setting call to adventures for the Player Characters to give them motivation to go adventuring, and session planning. The latter covers its tone and pacing, types of encounters—including social, environmental, and action—and then threats to populate with them. There are optional rules for fumbles, accompanied by tables for both standard and magical fumbles, and notably, there is advice on the Guide working with her players. This focuses on ensuring that a player’s creation is not unnecessarily overpowered, but rather something that is useful and over time can be developed in an ability or spell or power that will be amazing. The advice is simply not to say no, but “Yes, but…” to ensure the vision that the player and the Guide do not clash and fit the setting. The advice for the Guide is good, but it is brief.

Physically, Quintessence is decently written and illustrated. The artwork ranges in quality, but none of it is bad and all together serves to give the book an enjoyably scrappy look.

Quintessence really sums up this roleplaying game. For there is a solid set of mechanics at its core and in the Endeavour mechanic gives players and the Guide the scope to bring powers and spells and abilities into play and develop them into signature moves. However, beyond that core, that ‘quintessence’, and the roleplaying game is undeveloped. There are hints and suggestions that the Action Tracker and Endeavour mechanic can be really flexible, but neither is as fully explored as it needed to be in order to really show how flexible the roleplaying game is clearly intended to be. Ultimately, there is a brevity to Quintessence and omissions from its rules which make it challenging to use. Perhaps a second edition—or at least a companion volume—that will fix these issues and make Quintessence the roleplaying game that the designers clearly intended it to be.

Friday Fantasy: Bloodwood

The Bloodwood Forest is a dense, semi-tropical forest that lies down the length of the Severed Valley, bisected by the river Sunder. The Bloodwood Forest is inhabited by Fey, who slip into the world from the Unseelie Court and prey on unwary travellers… There is a guaranteed safe path through the forest, the Fey Road, mostly unmarked and purported to be haunted by ghosts. The impenetrable forest is said to be full of riches, including rare woods and plants, seams of gemstones, and animals to trap for their pelts. Rarest of all are the Blood Trees, whose resin can be bled and collected for its magical value. Two towns stand at opposite sides of the forest, one of which is Redstone. Once a sleepy little village, in recent years it has been transformed into a bustling town following investment by Lord Julian Vasco. He even attempted to build a road through the Bloodwood Forest, but it was barely half built when its sponsor disappeared and it has fallen into disrepair since… Worse the Bloodwood Forest suddenly expanded rapidly and encroached on the town, the trees and plants piercing buildings and forcing people out. With what were once beautiful buildings in ruins, the inhabitants of Redstone were driven out or fled, and the boom town was reduced to a shadow of what it was before the arrival of Lord Julian Vasco.

This is the set-up for Bloodwood, a scenario for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition for a party of Sixth Level Player Characters. Published by Crow & Crown, best known for Herbarium: A Botanical 5th Edition Supplement, it is nominally set in the Forgotten Realms, between Lushpool and Sheirtalar, on the shore of the Shining Sea. Alternatives are suggested, but Bloodwood need not be set in Faerûn at all and can be easily slotted in a Dungeon Master’s campaign. Several reasons are suggested as to why the Player Characters might travel to Redstone, including a simple matter of being hired as caravan guards and a thief answering the call of his thief’s guild to aid a fellow thief in the former town. There are rumours abroad that suggest that Lord Vasco was orchestrating bandit attacks on the merchant caravans to sell the stolen goods and that he possessed a magical amulet which enabled him to ward off the forest fey. Both hooks are prosaic, and the situation does lend itself to others. Perhaps there are families wanting to find relatives gone missing in the Bloodwood Forest, Lord Vasco has creditors who want his disappearance confirmed, or even Lord Vasco’s family want to know where he is? Once the Player Characters get to Redstone, the options and motivations open up. NPCs will want the Player Characters to enter the Bloodwood Forest to obtain some resin from the Blood Train, locate the rare treasures that he was said to possess, and so on.

Investigating Lord Vasco begins at his estate, which apart from a single room, is as overgrown with the Bloodwood Forest as Redstone is. This is his office, which the Player Characters will have relatively access to and thus be able to search for possible clues as to his whereabouts. In a nice touch, these are easily found and point towards some of his activities and contacts made in the fey forest which has overtaken his home. The clues—consisting of pages from his journal—also point to his being a highly ambitious and manipulative man. Also here is the atrium, the centrepiece of Lord Vasco’s villa, once open to the sky to let the sun in, but now under a wild canopy of trees and plants. At its centre in the floor is a giant stone slab, said to hide the entrance to his treasure vault. Following the clues given in Lord Vasco’s journal, the Player Characters will make their way into Bloodwood Forest, following the Fey Road into depths, hoping that they do not get lost. The best time to do it is at night, when the Fey Road can be best seen by the ghosts that walk upon it, though the Player Character be careful lest fear drives them back out of the forest. With the treasures gathered, typically after facing some nasty denizens of the Unseelie Court, the Player Characters can return to Lord Vasco’s estate and potentially discover what secrets he was hiding.

On the surface, what the Player Characters have to do in Bloodwood is far from complex—discovering the clues at Lord Vasco’s estate, recovering the treasures he has hoarded in the Bloodwood Forest, and returning to discover his real secrets. There is more to the scenario than just this. The players and their characters do have choices to make in terms of which potential employer they decide to take up with since as they will quickly learn not all of them are moral, upstanding characters. Further, they are bound to discover hints that Lord Vasco was not quite as rich as he was supposed to be and that he was manipulating affairs deep into the forest. Unfortunately, the full extent of this manipulation is not revealed until after the climax of the scenario and the Player Characters have no chance to interact with the victims until then. At that point, the Player Characters do have some interesting choices to make and the Dungeon Master should prepare for what should be a good roleplaying scene.

Beyond its plot, Bloodwood is supported with an appendix that takes up a quarter of its length. This contains a wide range of new monsters and treasures. The treasures include the Cloak of Many Fashions, which can change its appearance to appear like any cloak; the Carrion Ring, which summons a swarm of beetles to aid the wearer’s attacks for one minute, though it leaves them smelling of rotting meat for an hour(!); and Dragon’s Blood Ink, made from the resin of the blood tree, which is used to enhance the effects of Glyph of Warding and other spells which need to be drawn for their effects. The new monsters include the Alraune, a homunculus grown from the roots of the mandrake plant which has a deafening scream and a taste for meat; the Gravebird, undead corvids possessed by wandering spirits that can mimic sounds and which likes to steal small shiny items from those it attacks; and the Tikbalang, an elongated, bony creature with a horse’s head that serves as a guardian for gates to the spirit world, that sometimes leads travellers astray or returns them to the path they were on, no matter how they have got. Several of the creatures given are taken from folklore. For example, the Alraune comes from German folklore, whilst the Tikbalang is taken from Philippine folklore.

Physically, Bloodwood is incredibly well presented. The writing is dense in places, even slightly overwritten, but the Dungeon Master is presented with a wealth of detail to bring the setting to life. The two maps are very nicely done, though more, including maps of the Severed Valley and Redstone would have been useful. The artwork consists of a mixture of the specially commissioned pieces and the creative commons, of which the latter is a problem. It is not that any of the creative commons selected artwork is bad. It is not. Rather that despite the text in Bloodwood describing the Severed Valley and the Bloodwood Forest as being semi-tropical, the artwork does not reflect that. Instead, it has a northern European feel, of a faded bucolic pastoralism that gives it an appropriate sense of fading decline that contrasts nicely with the sharpness of the Unseelie fey abroad in the region.

For the most part, the issues with Bloodwood—the density of the text and the partial lack of engagement with the actual backstory until the very—do not negate from what is actually an atmospheric and decently supported adventure. Bloodwood is a very likeable scenario that deserves a sequel to explore both the setting and the repercussions of its events further.

[Free RPG Day 2024] Garbage & Glory – Trashrun

Now in its seventeenth year, Free RPG Day for 2024 took place on Saturday, June 22nd. As per usual, Free RPG Day consisted of an array of new and interesting little releases, which are traditionally tasters for forthcoming games to be released at GenCon the following August, but others are support for existing RPGs or pieces of gaming ephemera or a quick-start. This included dice, miniatures, vouchers, and more. Thanks to the generosity of Waylands Forge in Birmingham, Reviews from R’lyeh was able to get hold of many of the titles released for Free RPG Day.

—oOo—
Garbage & Glory – Trashrun is a preview of, and a quick-start for Garbage & Glory, the roleplaying games of raccoons—known as ‘trash pandas’—going on adventures, typically to acquire the best kind of trash dumped by humans and turn it into something useful. They will have to compete—and sometimes even fight—for this trash with other trash-mongers like Rat Bandits and Killoyotes. Of course, there is rubbish, which is rubbish and trash, which is useful, and the best source of waste is always guarded giant Ogres in flashing yellow outfits. Who knows why? Actually, the ‘why’ really does not matter, because nothing is going to stop raccoons from getting the best trash. It is published by Wet Ink Games, which previously published Heckin’ Good Doggos – Someone’s Last Day at the Track for Free RPG Day 2023, but is probably best known for Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall, the horror roleplaying game set in a Chinese restaurant in the 1920s. Designed to be played by all ages, it includes the roleplaying game’s +One System, six ready-to-play pre-generated dog characters, and a full adventure, ‘Beyond the Sewer Gate’. In order to play, a group will need a pool of six-sided dice and two decks of ordinary playing cards, each of which should be different to tell them apart.
A raccoon in Garbage & Glory is defined by a Title, Calling, Attributes, and Training. The Title is descriptive, but a Calling grants a raccoon a unique ability and a unique skill. For example, ‘Argentus’, one of the pre-generated raccoons in Garbage & Glory – Trashrun has the Title of ‘The Crafty Blade’. He also has the Calling of ‘Rubbish Ruffian’. This grants him the Calling Ability of ‘The Body Remembers’ which doubles the effect when negating damage or receiving healing, as well as the Calling Skill of ‘Attack Back’, which allows him a riposte if an attack against him misses. The three Attributes are Brawn, Smarts, and Guts, which start at three each, but can be much higher. Each Attribute has four associated areas of Training. For example, Brawn has Break, Scrap, Sneak, and Wriggle. Besides equipment, a Raccoon has rating in Garbage and Glory, which indicate the number of cards for each that a Raccoon has.

Mechanically, Garbage & Glory – Trashrun and thus Garbage & Glory uses the +One System. This involves rolling a number of six-sided dice each to the skill being used. Each five or six rolled is a success. Harder tasks require more Successes. ‘+One Manipulations’ enable a player to change the outcome using points from the Attribute associated with the Skill. Prior to a roll, a manipulation can be made to add a die to a roll or even gain a skill rating in a previously untrained skill, if only temporarily. After the roll, to increase the value of a die roll by one—typically from a four to a five—and to reroll any number of dice. In addition to skill rolls, raccoons can face Challenges, which are attempted by the whole Mask—as a group of raccoons is known—as a group effort. They simply need to roll a number of Successes equal to the target number for the Challenge for the whole pack to succeed. The scenario, ‘Beyond the Sewer Gate’, uses ‘Countdown Challenges’, which if failed, add a cumulative penalty to all subsequent Countdown Challenges in the adventure.
There multiple uses for playing cards in the +One System in Garbage & Glory – Trashrun and thus Garbage & Glory. It depends upon which deck they are played from. Cards drawn from the Garbage deck have two uses—crafting and healing. For the former, the suits represent types of trash. Spades for sharp objects, Hearts for soft, Diamonds for shiny, and Clubs for hard, with higher value cards representing better trash and Jokers acting as wild cards. Notably, very Shiny trash means that it might be magical. For healing one card is discarded per potential point of damage. Cards from the Glory deck can be discarded for ‘+One Manipulations’, healing, and to gain Initiative scores. Whenever a card from the Glory deck is discarded, the player is expected to narrate exactly how glorious it is.

Combat is kept simple. Participants have the one action per turn, initiative is determined by the highest-ranking card of Glory—card suits matter in the full rules to Garbage & Glory, but not in Garbage & Glory – Trashrun—and once a player has acted, then he gets to choose who goes next. At the end of a round, the player of the last character—or the Game Master—to act chooses who acts first in the next round, though it cannot be themselves. Attacks are made against the Scrap, Hurl, or magic values of the defendant as the Target Number. Overall, both the mechanics and combat are nicely explained in Garbage & Glory – Trashrun, and supported with innumerable examples as well as tone and using the X-Card where necessary.

Garbage & Glory – Trashrun includes six pre-generated raccoons. They include a fighter, a skills generalist, a brawler, a healer and skilled dumpster diver, a sneaky raccoon with sticky fingers, and a tinkerer who can delivered a barbed quip. Each has a full sheet, with spaces for each raccoon’s Attributes marked with bottlecaps!

The scenario, ‘Beyond the Sewer Gate’ opens with the raccoons outside the legendary Munci Wastedisp, ready to sneak in and search for its long sought after trove of trashy treasure. The Mask plans to explore its dark and twisty depths in search of good trash, all the whilst avoiding patrolling Ogres in their shiny yellow armour. There is a constant flow of water and rubbish—and perhaps some trash—into Munci Wastedisp, but there is also the chance that too much flows in and it has to go somewhere! Mechanically, if the players fail three Countdown Challenges, they are washed out of Munci Wastedisp. Inside, the Mask will find Rat Bandits, rooms full of all too shiny rubbish, and eventually way into ‘The Depths’ of Munci Wastedisp where they will find the best trash they have ever dreamed of. There they need to avoid the Ogres—and worse—search for the best trash, and get out again, likely chased out… ‘Beyond the Sewer Gate’ is a solid scenario, which hides much of what is going on to the players in the dark of the municipal waste dump, giving it an atmosphere that they unlikely to have thought much about, let considered a location to set a roleplaying scenario in!
Physically, Garbage & Glory – Trashrun is brightly, cheerfully presented. The writing is clear and the illustrated of the various raccoons and the threats they face are excellent. At the front there are illustrations of the weapons that the raccoons use, including a ‘Car Key Shank’, a Stainless Steel based on a steel ruler, and a ‘Pretty Gear Chain Sword’, which is essentially a bicycle chain turned rapidly using the pedals as handles! These are a lot of fun. It is a pity that none of the character sheets for the raccoons have illustrations, and it would have been useful if there had been explanations on what each of the pre-generated raccoons do.
Garbage & Glory – Trashrun is a good quick-start and a good introduction to Garbage & Glory. Its setting and its mechanics make it suitable for younger teenagers and older players and an experienced Narrator, especially one who has run some storytelling style games, will be able to grasp the +One System and explain how it works with ease. Overall, Garbage & Glory – Trashrun is cheerfully, cheeky fun and should give a session’s worth of raccoonish rambunctiousness.

Danger Under Dover

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

Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Under the Gun takes place on the Home Front with the Player Characters, or Agents, suddenly rushed to the Kent coast where a frightening discovery has been made. With the Battle of France over and the Nazi war machine readying itself for Operation Sea Lion, Britain is frantically preparing defences against imminent invasion. This includes the fortification of the Kent coast, specifically in and around Dover and its famous, chalk cliffs which stand at the closet point between England and France. There are news reports that excavations have unearthed an ancient British fort, but this only a cover story. What an archaeologist and several British army engineers have discovered is a strange stone pillar which seems to make everyone feel at least queasy, if not leave them suffering nightmares, seeing things out of the corners of their eye, and if that is not odd enough, suffering bouts of ichthyophobia! Those that have been suffering the worst have been hospitalised. As agents of Section M, the Player Characters are ordered to investigate the site at St. Andrew’s Cliff.

With a little care, the Agents have the opportunity to learn what happened to the men digging at St. Andrew’s Cliff and perhaps conduct a little research locally. Very quickly, the Agents are rushed to the site, now a combination of fortification in the making and archaeological dig site, both semi-abandoned. The Agents have the afternoon to investigate the site before events take a sudden and highly confrontational turn. The site, including the Agents and the few members of the British Army left to guard the site are attacked—not once, but twice! First by locals from the nearby village and then by Nazis. The Agents may already have discovered the legends about the nearby village of St. Andrews, but what they find out in the confrontation is that the legends are true, that, “Them St. Andrew’s folk aren’t right — flat-faced, goggle-eyed devils!” In other words, Deep One Hybrids. The Nazis are members of Black Sun, though only a small team that has landed by glider on the cliffs nearby. This is a big fight—though small in the scheme of things—over who has access to the strange stone pillar in the case of the Black Sun unit and who should be punished for defiling the strange stone pillar in the case of the villagers.

Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Under The Gun is a short, sharp scenario which can be completed in a single session. It does leave the question of what to do with a village of Deep One Hybrids on the English coast up to the Game Master. Either raid the village and intern everyone as per the U.S. Navy and U.S. Marine Corps raid on Innsmouth in 1928 or actually recruit them as allies in the Secret War against the Nazi occult? Both options are valid and both would make for interesting developments, especially the latter. More so if the Game Master is planning to run Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Operation Vanguard. The events of Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Under The Gun take place in June, 1940, whereas the events of Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Operation Vanguard take place in August, 1940. Both involve Deep Ones, so they are thematically linked and thus Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Operation Vanguard can be run as a possible sequel to Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Under The Gun. Since it involves the Black Sun, it can be run after the events of ‘A Quick Trip to France’ found in the Achtung! Cthulhu Quickstart: A Quick Trip to France.

Although Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Under The Gun is not a complex scenario, its climax does involve a big battle with multiple opponents and factions, so it does feel a little like a mini-wargame rather than the climax of a roleplaying scenario. Certainly, the Game Master might want to have the factions involved in this fog-bound confrontation divided between herself and the Player Characters to make it easier to run and give her fewer dice to roll and NPCs to keep track of.

Physically, Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Under The Gun is cleanly and tidily laid out. It is not illustrated, but the maps of the various locations are decently done.

Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20: Under The Gun is a short, sharp encounter with the multiple forces of the Mythos that also manages to pack in a little investigation as well. It can be played in a single session and this makes it easy to drop into a campaign, especially taking early in the war.

The Other OSR: .GIF

The Shattered Dominion stands broken by war and the passing of the Last Gods. Only the Warriors of the Grand Guild are now touched by the dwindling spark of their fleeing divinity, imbuing a rage that sees them smash and savage their way through the underground complexes of ancient races or the up towers of overly ambitious wizards, wiping out all before them and looting great relics, but always missing much and leaving a rather big mess in their wake. Thus, they are always followed by members of the Lesser Orders. Chaplains, cut off from their gods and in search of new purpose. Rogues, avoiding a life of crime that might be deadlier than disarming traps and uncovering secrets in a dungeon. Scholars, bereft of magic also, whose sage-like knowledge and ability to keep records might be useful. Their job, perhaps with the addition of the hired help, is to follow the Warrior into the dungeon and there clean up in his wake, map everywhere, record every detail, pick up on anything that the Warrior might have missed, and report back. Their duty is not to fight, especially since the Warrior should technically have dealt with everything, and more importantly, sending a fighting man to clean up after a great Warrior would be exceptionally rude. That though does not mean that they will not have to fight, since the Warrior likes to be direct and straightforward—quite literally in some cases—when dealing with a dungeon.

This is the set-up for With Guile, Incantation and Faith, a ‘Genre Set-Up’ for Sanction: A Tabletop Roleplaying Game of Challenges & Hacks. Published by Just Crunch Games, this is in fact, an expansion to a Genre Set-Up, also called ‘With Guile, Incantation and Faith’, one of the two given in Sanction. Of the two, it was most familiar and consequently, not quite as interesting, whereas the other was far more intriguing. That said, With Guile, Incantation and Faith—or .GIF as it is annoyingly abbreviated—does do something interesting with Dungeons & Dragons-style play. This is to make any dungeon replayable again. Not by simply restarting afresh, but by starting after a party of Player Characters—or in this case, a mighty Warrior—has worked their way through the dungeon, leaving a trail of broken bodies, traps, puzzles, and treasures behind him as well as a myriad number of rooms and locations unattended. It can be a dungeon that the players might even have played through previously or it can be one that the Game Master creates or adapts herself. Whatever the source of the dungeon, when the members of the Lesser Orders work their way through it, it is in the aftermath.

The expansion in With Guile, Incantation and Faith sees the setting developed further—if only a relatively little—and more details given to the Lesser Orders. That is, the Rogue, the Scholar, the Chaplain, and the Hireling. To this are added extra Abilities, the means of the Lesser Orders members’ survival. These include Boating, Disguise, Excavation, Anatomy, Brewing, Passage & Pathway (the dungeoneering equivalent of traffic analysis), Astrology, Gambling, Signs, and more. These are intended not necessarily as options available during character generation, but rather Abilities that can selected once a Player Character has some experience working as member of the Lesser Orders. Two suggestions—Dungeon Designer and Fate the Stars Foretold—are mentioned, but left undeveloped. The two new Specialities are more obvious and easier to use. The Druid worships the Force of Nature, which might be the only Old God that remains, and has access to Animal Lore, Animal Whispering, and Trapping, whilst the Ranger is a guide and trapper who has access to Hunting, Orienteering, and Passage & Pathway.

Cantrips are treated in a very basic fashion in Sanction: A Tabletop Roleplaying Game of Challenges & Hacks as just simple, single words that are left for the players and the Game Master to develop. In the world of Shattered Dominion, cantrips are remnants of spells that when have disappointing limited effects. With Guile, Incantation and Faith, each of the single words in the core rules are developed to set the boundaries of what each can do. The descriptions are not written in stone, a player allowed to develop his own interpretation or use of the cantrip, though what is written in stone is that any suggested use of a cantrip which feels or sounds like a fully fledged spell should not be allowed.

Although the set-up and running of With Guile, Incantation and Faith and what the Player Characters do is predicated on the actions of the Warrior, the Warrior remains a nebulous, offscreen presence, but one that is nevertheless constantly felt by the Player Characters. In mechanical terms he becomes a timing mechanism marked by alternating periods of progress and sleep, the latter also marked by a sudden silence after all of the crashing, banging, and wails cut off mid-scream. Then with a yawn and stretch, the Warrior is off again, either to leave the dungeon all together—good for a single session or a convention game—or ready to continue smashing his way through the dungeon.

Random tables are given to track the Warrior’s way through a dungeon with the Player Characters following on behind, and these can be used in a couple of ways, depending on the degree of preparation that the Game Master wants to do. The tables can be used to direct the movement of the Warrior with relatively little regard for the consequences upon the wider environment in a low preparation game, whereas in a high preparation game, the Game Master can use them in combination with asking what effect the Warrior has on the wider dungeon. This will include the obvious scattering of corpses, but to that can be added rescuers, reinforcements, looters, wanderers, vermin, and more. The Warrior’s progress can also cause instability in a dungeon, either break traps or ignore them, likely ignore puzzles, and so on. A handful of monsters are be added, but together with those given in Sanction: A Tabletop Roleplaying Game of Challenges & Hacks still does not feel enough. Perhaps there is scope for a bestiary of broken and unbroken dungeon monsters, both scarred and unscarred, for With Guile, Incantation and Faith?

With Guile, Incantation and Faith ends with a ‘Sample Dungeon’. It feels more like a manor house than a dungeon, one which the Warrior has run straight through rather entering rooms to the left or right. However, the path can be altered with a few rolls on the random tables to provide some deviation and add more chaos and destruction. Overall, it is short, but detailed and should provide single session’s worth of clear up and accounting in the Warrior’s wake.

Physically, With Guile, Incantation and Faith is a slim, little book, cleanly laid out and easy to read. It is lightly illustrated, but the artwork is good. The cartography is plain.

With Guile, Incantation and Faith is a clever, even witty twist upon classic Dungeons & Dragons-style play, and this supplement nicely expands upon the information first given in Sanction: A Tabletop Roleplaying Game of Challenges & Hacks. However, it does feel as if there could be more—more monsters, more background, and more adventure sites—but nevertheless, With Guile, Incantation and Faith is a decent further exploration of a world of lost gods, missing magics, and damaged dungeons.

The Alternative

The Pathfinder Roleplaying Game has a relatively short history that really runs parallel to that of Dungeons & Dragons. Originally published by Paizo, Inc. in 2009, it was an extension and development of Dungeons & Dragons, 3.5, published by Wizards of the Coast, a reaction to the development and direction of Dungeons & Dragons, Fourth Edition, which was radically different to the previous editions of the roleplaying game. That reaction to Dungeons & Dragons, Fourth Edition would result in three separate developments. One is that that the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game would acquire the nickname of ‘Dungeons & Dragons 3.75’; the second is, of course, the publication in 2014 of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition; and the third is that the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game sold very, very well, though never enough to actually outsell Dungeons & Dragons, Fourth Edition. In the years since, the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game has continued to sell very well, receiving a second edition in 2019. Then, in 2023, it was revealed that Wizards of the Coast was planning to make updates that would revoke the previously authorised use of the Open Gaming Licence upon which many roleplaying games, including the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, relied. Although Wizards of the Coast never followed through on its planned changes, by the time it decided not to, Paizo Publishing, along with several other publishers, had developed and was using the Open RPG Creative Licence in its stead. For Paizo, the result would be the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, Second Edition Remaster. Its four core rulebooks—Player Core, GM Core, Monster Core, and Player Core 2—replacing the previous books—Core Rulebook, Bestiary, Gamemastery Guide, and Advanced Player’s Guide.

The Player Core contains everything that a player needs to play the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, Second Edition Remaster. Well, almost, but this review will come to that. It is a handsome sturdy volume that provides a player with an introduction to the game, an explanation of what it is, and then the means to create a variety of different characters and begin play. The explanations are clear and simple, noting that the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game is for everyone, defining what a character is and what it looks like, and describing how the game is played. This is supported by a clearly presented two-page spread of the roleplaying game’s key terms and more importantly, by an example of play that mixes in exploration, interaction, and combat. It is decently done. An experienced player will read through these pages and very quickly pick up the basics of the game, whereas a less experienced player will find himself eased into the game.

The point of the Player Core is the creation of Player Characters. Each Player Character is first defined by six attributes—Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. He also has an Ancestry, Background, Class, and then extra details. Ancestry represents the broad family of people that the Player Character belongs to; Background is what the Player Character before he became an adventurer; and Class is his profession as an adventurer. The Ancestry sets the Player Character’s beginning Hit Points, languages, senses, and Speed, as well as Ancestry Feats; Background gives a feat and training in one or more skills; and Class grants the Player Character his extra Hit Points at each new Level, the majority of his proficiencies, and Class Feats. Eight Ancestries and eight Classes are given in the Player Core. The eight Ancestries are Dwarf, Elf, Gnome, Goblin, Halfling, Human, Leshy, and Orc. Of these Leshy is an immortal nature spirit granted physical form, and all of the Ancestries have Heritages which define them further. For example, the Orc Ancestry offers the Badlands Orc, Battle-Ready Orc, Deep Orc, Grave Orc, Hold-Scarred Orc, Rainfall Orc, and Winter Orc. Each grant quite different abilities. For example, the Battle-Ready Orc is the descendant of very scary battle leaders and is trained in Intimidation and has the Intimidating Glare skill Feat, whilst the Winter Orc is trained in Survival and can cope with more extreme cold environments.

In addition, there are three versatile Ancestries, the Changeling, the Nephilim, and the Mixed Ancestry. These build off a base Ancestry, but offer alternative Heritages to those normally associated with the base Ancestry. The Changeling was stolen as a child and taken elsewhere; the Nephilim is a character who has had dealings with immortal beings; and the Mixed Ancestries offered are the Aiuvarin and the Dromaar. The Aiuvarin has one parent who was an Elf, whilst the Dromaar has one parent who was an Orc. An Aiuvarin Player Character can choose from both Aiuvarin and Elf Ancestry Feats and the Dromaar Player Character can choose from both Dromaar and Orc Ancestry Feats.

The eight Classes in the Player Core are the Bard, Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Ranger, Rogue, Witch, and Wizard. Notably, the Cleric, the Fighter, the Rogue, and the Wizard Classes are illustrated with signature pieces of artwork for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game which actually predate the roleplaying game when they appeared as example Player Characters in the Rise of the Runelords Adventure Path back in 2007. Also notable is the absence of certain Classes that one would expect to see in the core rulebook for a roleplaying game such as Pathfinder. The Barbarian, Monk, and Sorcerer Classes are absent, and so the Player Core does not feel complete. However, they do appear in the Player Core 2, along with a host of other Ancestries and Classes.

Character creation in the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, Second Edition Remaster is a matter of making a number of choices rather than rolling any dice. The lack of the latter is because once a player has selected both an Ancestry and a Class, attributes are not rolled to determine the bonuses they grant as in similar other roleplaying games. In fact, the classic three to eighteen spread for attributes is done away with entirely and instead the bonuses that the attributes might have generated in those other roleplaying games, actually become the attributes. It is not a new idea, having previously been seen in roleplaying games such as True20 Adventure Roleplaying and Fantasy AGE, both published by Green Ronin Publishing. Instead of rolling dice, a player applies Attribute Boosts to the attributes, which will come from the character’s Ancestry, Background, Class, plus some free ones. An Ancestry may also apply an Attribute Flaw, but these are rare. At First Level, no attribute can be boosted above +4 and when it can, it takes two Attribute Boosts to raise an Attribute by another full point.

Name: Eglund
Ancestry: Human
Heritage: Versatile Human
Background: Farmhand
Languages: Common

Class: Fighter
Class DC: Fighter (Trained) 16
ATTRIBUTES
Strength +4 Dexterity +2 Constitution +2 Intelligence +0 Wisdom +1 Charisma +0
Hit Points: 18
Hero Point: 1
Armour Class: 16 (18)
Melee Strike: +5 Ranged Strike: +3
Saving Throws: Fortitude (Expert) +7, Reflex (Expert) +7, Will (Trained) +4
Attacks: Simple Weapons (Expert) +5, Martial Weapons (Expert) +5, Advanced Weapons (Trained) +3, Unarmed Attacks (Expert) +5
Defences: All Armour (Trained) +3, Unarmoured Defence (Trained) +3
Class Features: Reactive Strike
Class Feats: Reactive Shield
Ancestry Feats: Co-Operative Nature
General Feats: Ride, Shield Block
Skill Feats: Assurance (Athletics)
Skills: Acrobatics (Trained) +3, Athletics (Trained) +3, Farming Lore (Trained) +3, Intimidation (Trained) +3, Nature (Trained) +4, Perception (Expert) +6, Survival (Trained) +4
Equipment: Scale mail, dagger, adventurer’s backpack, grappling hook, longsword, steel shield, 6 gp, 2 sp

One major change in the Player Core and thus the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, Second Edition Remaster is the replacement of Alignment, an aspect of game design which has been with us from the start of the hobby, with Edicts and Anathema. Edicts suggest acts and behaviour driven by a personal code or philosophy, whilst Anathema are acts and behaviour which run counter to that personal code or philosophy. The various Ancestries suggest commonly held Edicts and Anathema amongst that particular species, whilst certain Classes more or less mandate them. The most notable of those are the Cleric Class, which will have Edicts and Anathema according to the deity worshipped by the Cleric. Violating the Edicts and Anathema can lead the Cleric to lose some Class abilities. The Player Core includes details of the gods commonly worshipped on Golarion, the setting for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. Of course, a Player Character need not be a Cleric to worship any of these gods.

This change from Alignment to Edicts and Anathema has a profound effect upon the player of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. No longer is the world around the Player Character sharply categorised according to a moral compass. Nor is there any need for the Player Character to adhere to its diktats. The player and his character is freed to make choices according to the latter’s Edicts and Anathema, which can be those shared with an Ancestry, a deity, nation, or other organisation, or they can be more individual than that. It also means that the morality of the play or the roleplayed actions of the Player Character come out through play rather than necessarily being rigidly defined. Also gone are spells like Detect Evil since they are based on Alignment, whilst Protection from Evil is simply changed to Protect which provides a bonus to Armour Class and Saving Throws.

In addition to the mechanical aspects, the Heritages and Feats for the Ancestries, the Features, Skills, and Feats for the Classes, every Ancestry and Class is accompanied with suggestions as why a player might choose it and what they might do in play. Each Ancestry also covers physical descriptions and typical society and beliefs, whilst a Class also suggests what a Player Character might during combat and social encounters, when exploring, and during downtime. It offers some possible motivations and broad ideas about what others might think of the Class. Every Class description includes some sample concepts too, which suggests Attributes, Skills, beginning Feat, and higher-Level Feats to take to recreate the concept. There are notes too on creating Multiclass Player Characters, to create archetypes, though this is a more complex option.

In terms of progression, every Class goes up to Twentieth Level—and at every Level, a Player Character will receive something. The Ancestry will provide Ancestry Feats, whilst the Class will provide its own Feats, plus options to choose Skill Feats and General Feats. Plus, Attribute Boosts as well. Since a Player Character gains a new Level every thousand Experience Points, progression is consistent between the Classes and every player will feel like he and his character is being rewarded at regular intervals. The range of Feats available across all of the categories gives a player a wealth of choice and options when designing the type of character he wants to play.
The four spell-casting Classes in the Player Core are the Bard, Cleric, Druid, Witch, and Wizard. All have access to a range of cantrips and spell defined by magical tradition. This is another change like that of Alignment. Instead of Abjuration, Alteration, Conjuration, Divination, Enchantment, Illusion, Invocation, and Necromancy, what the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, Second Edition Remaster has is four magical traditions. These are Arcane, Divine, Occult, and Primal. The Bard can also infuse his performances to create Compositions and will be inspired by a Muse such as Enigma or Maestro; the Cleric gains extra spells from his Divine Font that can either harm or heal, as well as those from his deity; the Druid belongs to a Druidic Order such as Animal, Leaf, or Storm which grants further spells; Witches are granted hexes and taught lessons by a patron such as ‘Faith’s Flamekeeper’ or ‘Silence in Snow’; and Wizards study a thesis, such as ‘Improved Familiar Attunement’ or ‘Staff Nexus’ which changes the way in which they cast spells and attend an arcane school which grants further spells. In addition, some spellcasters, like the Witch and the Wizard, have a familiar through which they can cast their spells. Any Player Character can have an animal companion if they have the right feat, and whether the animal is a companion or familiar, it will grow and improve as the Player Character gains experience and Levels.

Name: Thulee
Ancestry: Goblin
Heritage: Unbreakable Goblin
Background: Cultist
Languages: Common, Draconic, Dwarvish, Kholo, Goblin, Orcish
Class: Witch
Class DC: Witch (Trained) 17 Spell DC: Witch (Trained) +7
ATTRIBUTES
Strength +0 Dexterity +4 Constitution +0 Intelligence +4 Wisdom -1 Charisma +2
Hit Points: 16
Hero Point: 1
Armour Class: 16
Melee Strike: +0 Ranged Strike: +5 Spell Attack (Trained): +7
Saving Throws: Fortitude (Trained) +3, Reflex (Trained) +7, Will (Expert) +4
Attacks: Simple Weapons (Trained) +3, Unarmed Attacks (Trained) +3
Defences: All Armour (Untrained) +0, Unarmoured Defence (Trained) +3
Class Features: Patron (Spinner of Threads), Witch Spellcasting
Class Feats: Cauldron
Ancestry Feats: Goblin Song
General Feats: Pet (Familiar) – Badger
Skill Feats: Schooled in Secrets
Skills: Arcana (Trained) +7, Craft (Trained) +7, Deception (Trained) +5, Lore (Spinner of Threads) (Trained) +7, Medicine (Trained) +7, Occultism (Trained) +7, Perception (Trained) +2, Performance (Trained) +5, Stealth (Trained) +7, Thievery (Trained) +7Lessons: Lesson of Fate’s Vicissitudes, Familiar of Balanced LuckSPELLS
Cantrips: Daze, Detect Magic, Know the Way, Shield, Telekinetic Hand
First Level: Grim Tendrils, Summon Undead
Equipment: Explorer’s clothing, staff, sickle, sling and 20 bullets, staff, adventurer’s backpack, cookware, healer’s toolkit, 7 gp, 1 sp, 8 cp

The Player Core includes an introduction to Golarion and the Inner Sea, the default setting for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, describing the various regions and their themes, and possible ideas for example characters. There is a list too of the various deities worshipped on Golarion. Besides a description, each god write-up includes areas of concern, Edicts and Anathema, and associated divine attribute. For the devotee, it gives spells for the Cleric, its Divine Font, skill, domains, and even a divine weapon. Together, this provides background details for the Player Character who wants a faith to follow and fundamental aspects of a Cleric’s worship. There are not just gods listed, but faiths and philosophies too, such as Atheism and the Green Faith. The latter two are in keeping with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game giving a player more choice, and avoiding the diktats of Alignment.

Much of the Player Core is devoted to the numerous feats and spells within pages, so it is almost four hundred pages into the book when it looks at how to play the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and its core mechanics. There is some guidance on the Pathfinder baseline in terms of content and tone, more detail being provided in the GM Core, but the focus here is on the core rules. It covers the three modes of play—Exploration, Encounter, and Downtime, rolling checks, attacks, damage, spellcasting, and so on. Checks are made against a Difficulty Class, the roll modified by the Attribute modifier, Proficiency bonus from skills, and circumstance modifiers. If the result is ten more than the Difficulty Class, it counts as a critical success, whilst if it is ten less than the Difficulty Class, it is a critical failure. A roll of natural twenty counts as a critical success, whilst a roll of one is a critical failure. Attacks, of course, are rolled against a target’s Armour Class, and that includes spell attack rolls. Damage and its effects work as you would expect, although Hit Points cannot be reduced below zero. If they reduced to zero, the Player Character will be dying if the damage is lethal or knocked out if the damage is nonlethal. If his character is dying, his player must make Recovery Checks, each failure increasing the character’s Dying Value, which if it reaches a value of four, the character dies.
The actual play of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game includes two notable additions. The first is Actions. Each round, a Player Character has three Actions. Activities can either take one, two, or three Actions. (The number is indicated by an icon in the rules, so initially it is not obvious.) The basic activities are One-Action, such as Leap, Raise a Shield, Sense Motive, Stride, and Strike. Notable of these is the Raise a Shield Action, which when taken means that a Player Character raises his shield to protect himself against a possible attack against him. The default position is thus: a shield is carried, but not raised, the protection it provides is not automatic and the player has to choose to raise it. The three Actions per round gives some flexibility to what a Player Character does over the course of a round. So, a Fighter might use the Stride Action to move to attack the enemy, attack with the Strike Action, and then do the Raise a Shield Action to provide himself with further protection. Or, a Cleric might cast his Bane spell, which takes two Actions and then do the Raise a Shield Action or the Take Cover Action. The rest of the Player Core covers movement, area effects, conditions, and more.

Physically, the Player Core is a thick heavy book. But it designed for use. It eases the new player in and there is an indication where the reader is in the book on each righthand page, whilst at the back the glossary and index are combined, which is very helpful. The book is also a good-looking affair. The layout is clean and tidy, and the artwork is excellent.

Of course, the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, Second Edition Remaster offers play that is like Dungeon & Dragons—after all, that is what it is derived from, but that play is different and, in many places, more nuanced. These include the three Action economy of the combat round, the Edicts and Anathema, and so on. Their combined effect is to give a player more choice in game and support that choice mechanically, beginning with the range of Ancestries and Classes that just that bit different and then in the long term, reward the character and his player at every Level. The Player Core is a everything that a player needs to get started with the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, Second Edition Remaster and makes that getting started, accessible and easy.

The Other OSR: Book of Beasts

With Forbidden Lands – Book of Beasts, the name of creatures and threats with which to menace the Player Characters doubles! Published by Free League Publishing, Forbidden Lands – Book of Beasts provides twenty-eight descriptions of monsters fierce and fearsome adding to the twenty-three given in the core rulebook for the ‘Retro Open-World Survival Fantasy RPG’, Forbidden Lands – Raiders & Rogues in a Cursed World. Every entry comes with a short piece of colour fiction, full stats and abilities, and a table of Monster Attacks. That though is not all. For there is also a table for the player to roll his character’s Lore skill and so determine what Insights he might have into the creature. Then there is not one but two random encounters, each with some flavoursome description and an indication of the terrain types where the monster might be found. Lastly, there is a description of the ‘Resources’ that might be harvested from a monster if the Player Characters manage to kill one. Last, but least, there is a superb illustration. Beautiful, rich, and detailed, every image of a creature in Forbidden Lands – Book of Beasts is captivating. Any time that the Game Master shows one of these to her players, she really is going to amaze them.
So the Mummy is depicted as a dried husk of a warrior, grinning as it holds a victim by the throat in one hand, whilst readying a sword in the other. It is described as being in life a great lord who lusted after power, a lust that was not dimmed by the cold death of the crypt. In its unlife, it reigns over the steel and gold it was buried with and now jealously guards. Its body is hollowed out and empty and it hungers for the salts and juices that flow through the bodies of the living, having become a predatory cannibal in death. Some of this will be revealed in a Lore roll, but there is more that the Player Characters can learn. One of the random encounters is just a simple tomb description, whilst the other is a bit more exciting—a Mummy’s tomb that is already open and would have been plundered by some graverobbers were it not for the fact that they are being attacked by a Mummy and its servants!

In terms of stats, the Mummy is incredibly strong, but otherwise slow. It is unnaturally drawn to human entrails, but bound to its tombs. Its attacks include ‘Lordly Strike!’, which inflicts such a heavy blow that the defender is knocked prone, whilst with ‘Heart Constriction’, the Mummy makes a crushing genre with his fingers at an opponent who suffers a sudden and terrible pain in his chest and is potentially overcome with mortal terror! This is of course, in addition to the other four attacks listed for the Mummy, whilst the last entry in the monster description suggests the only Resource that can be harvested from a Mummy is the powder ground from its bones that when swallowed grants a bonus to the imbiber’s Strength.

So every monster and every creature in Forbidden Lands – Book of Beasts is given this treatment to great effect. The entries are all easy to read and easy to use, and include things such as a Dread Raptor, Giant Spider—which has descriptions of hatchlings, adults, and elders, the Iron Dragon, the Nature Spirit, Rat King, Twisted Ent, and more. There are some great monsters here and they provide the Game Master with some fantastic new options in terms of presenting challengers to her players. However, that is not all that there is in the pages of Forbidden Lands – Book of Beasts, although they do take up nearly two thirds of the book.

The content beyond the monsters in Forbidden Lands – Book of Beasts begins with a random encounter table for the thirty-six encounters that follow. All of these again, have a single paragraph of colour fiction, suitable to read out to the players, and typically a half page of detail, though some have more. Stats are included where necessary, but there is always a list of the terrain where the encounter can take place. They range from finding a man locked in a hanging iron cage pleading to be let free and coming across an old battlefield that could be salvaged to going to the aid of a legendary brewer and being employed to track down the bandits that attacked him and having to placate the spirit of an orc lord after sitting on his somewhat bedraggled stone throne. Some are as simple as coming across a piece of statuary and the opportunity to learn some lore about the history of the region, whilst others are more complex like discovering a length of a Dwarven wall and with the aid of an expert on its history finding a way to the tomb of an ancient chieftain. Not all of them are quite ready to run though, so there are several which require more development than others, such as the meaning behind a coded message that is found on a dead pigeon. This is though, a good selection of encounters and scenario hooks.

Oddly, Forbidden Lands – Book of Beasts has its own section of ‘Game Master Tools’ as if none of the previous content was for the Game Master and this section is for her eyes only. Of course, the whole book is for the Game Master. The section contains a list of traps, from nets, poison darts, and crusting boulders to domination, magical traps, and teleportation, which can be rolled for or selected, whilst ‘Books, Ballads, and Grimoires’ expands upon the ‘Carried Valuable Finds’ and ‘Carried Precious Finds’ from the Game-master’s Guide. These can all be studied and in return, a Player Character can gain a bonus, which can be a Talent or a skill increase. For example, ‘Easy Little Dwarfling’, a lullaby by Yendra grants the Lightning Fast Talent, whilst ‘Sweet, Courage, and Leverage’ by Nilia Trollvälte is a manual that increases the Might of anyone who studies it. Between the various categories, there are over seventy entries here and even just having the names of either the manuals and ballads, and their authors, adds to the immersive nature of the Forbidden Lands setting. A similar set of tables adds new artefacts to the roleplaying game, though they lack the description and detail given to those in the core rules.

‘Journeys’ adds further tables, but this time for nature of different locations or terrain types, ranging from plains, forests, and dark forests to quagmires, marshlands, and ruins, and then it does the same for camps, plus there is trio of quick and dirty weather tables. In general, the ‘Journeys’ only adds a little extra detail and the tables are limited in their number of entries. Strongholds form a major part of play in Forbidden Lands – Raiders & Rogues in a Cursed World, whether that is the Player Characters needing to investigate one, either to take and hold it as a base of operations or explore and scavenge its contents, or as a base of operations, work to make the surrounding area safer. ‘Rules for Strongholds’ adds to the rules found in the Player’s Handbook with a short table of events and a long table of potential servants, their personalities, and secrets. The table of events could have been much, much longer, whereas in a campaign, the Game Master will get much more out of the table of servants.

‘Potions & Poisons’ opens up a new aspect of play, especially for the Player Character with the Herbalist Talent. It allows a Player Character with this Talent to forage for herbs and with the addition of the new Alchemist Talent, him to brew and concoct various potions, tinctures, and more. There are rules here for a new function that can be added to the Player Characters’ stronghold, a Laboratory, which adds a bonus to brewing potions and poisons. In addition to the list of various alchemical potions, there is a list of poisons too, which is useful for the Poisoner Talent. There is a new rule what happens if too many potions are consumed in too short a time.

Lastly, Forbidden Lands – Book of Beasts includes ‘Solo Rules’. This addition to various roleplaying games has become popular since the advent of COVID-19 and the extended periods of lockdown, enabling players to play face-to-face gaming at the table proved impossible. The rules here give the player, which of course, can be the Game Master, the means to explore the Forbidden Lands alone. The Player Character needs to be a little more powerful than a standard Player Character, and suggests that Lucky be taken as an extra General Talent. There are rules here for including a companion character, potentially a replacement Player Characters, and tables for the creating encounters and providing answers that the Player Character might have about the world around him. An ordinary deck of playing cards is required to generate the answers from what the rules call ‘Oracles’, covering simple ‘Yes/No’ questions, ‘Helpful/Hazardous’ situations, and more. As with other solo rules, the ones presented here make play more procedural than standard play and of course, they lack the capacity for roleplaying. Nevertheless, they are a useful option.

Physically, Forbidden Lands – Book of Beasts is a black and white book, but an absolutely fantastic-looking one. The artwork is exquisite. Otherwise, the book is very well written and easy to read.

Forbidden Lands – Book of Beasts is great addition to Forbidden Lands – Raiders & Rogues in a Cursed World and so much more than a simple bestiary. In fact, as a bestiary, it is not even simple. The monsters and creatures described are things out of nightmare and folklore, memorably menacing and dangerous. There is more to them than just encountering a gaggle of Goblins as in other roleplaying games, aided by the uncertainty of their different and random attacks, their lore, and of course, the encounter descriptions which accompany each entry. Then, there is the rest of the content in Forbidden Lands – Book of Beasts—encounters, traps, alchemy and potions, and quite a lot more. Forbidden Lands – Book of Beasts is not just a great bestiary for Forbidden Lands – Raiders & Rogues in a Cursed World, but a good companion to its rules as well.

The Little Book of Death

Escape the Dark Castle: The Game of Atmospheric Adventure is about survival. About making a break from the deep dank dungeon cell you have been thrown into and working your way through the rooms and corridors of the dark castle until you can get to the main gate and escape. Of course, in between there is lots of uncertainty and plenty of death—the latter your own included, and that is all before you encounter the big Boss who will definitely try to kill you and prevent your escape. Published by Themeborne Ltd., inspired by the Fighting Fantasy series of solo adventure books and also the dark fantasy artwork of those books, Escape the Dark Castle offered plenty of replay value and variability with six Character Cards, fifty-three Chapter Cards—fifteen of which form the encounter deck, and five Boss Cards. Then of course, there are game’s three expansions: Escape the Dark Castle: Adventure Pack 1 – Cult of the Death Knight, Adventure Pack 2 – Scourge of the Undead Queen, and Adventure Pack 3 – Blight of the Plague Lord. Each of these provided players with new characters to play, a new mechanic—which meant a new challenge to overcome, new equipment, and of course, a new Boss standing in the way of the players’ escape. However, when it came to death—and there is no denying that Escape the Dark Castle is definitely about death, as well as escaping, if not more so—what neither Escape the Dark Castle, nor any of its expansions could offer was much mote than a mechanical outcome whenever a player’s character dies in the game.

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

For example, the details on the Boss card, ‘The Dark One’ reads as follows:

“Your pitiful trinkets are no match for my dark magic!”

As YOU enter the Dark One’s presence, any items YOU are carrying vaporise (other players keep theirs). Discard them now.

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

The Dark One

From the strange, clawed fingertips of The Dark One a terrible torrent of dark magic pours, crackling through the air and striking you down. The unrelenting stream intensifies, coiling around you and holding you in place like spectral chains. You roll and twist on the chamber floor, wracked with agony, foaming at the mouth. With a single motion of it staff, The Dark One sends you hurtling through the air. Your body slams into each of fellow prisoners, the impact knocking them from consciousness one by one. By an upward motion of the staff, you are now sent soaring high into the air, only to be released as The Dark One turns his back and glides out of the chamber. As quickly as rose you tumble helplessly downward, slamming to the cold stones and exploding in a shower of gore.

Your adventure ends here.

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

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

Friday Fantasy: The Emerald Enchanter

The green-skinned wizard known as the Emerald Enchanter has been a presence in the region for as long as anyone can remember. In recent times a number of inhabitants from nearby villages have gone missing and the clues point to him being responsible. It is feared that the Emerald Enchanter will use them as subjects in the experiments he is said to conduct. Hopefully, someone will be brave enough to make a rescue attempt. Thus, a number of brave adventurers have assembled outside the gates to his citadel, which sits atop a windy cliff, a foreboding presence over the whole of the region. This is as much set-up as there is for Dungeon Crawl Classics #69: The Emerald Enchanter, the third scenario to be published by Goodman Games for use with the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game. Designed for a group of eight to ten Second Level Player Characters, it is an important scenario for three reasons. One is that it is written by the publisher, Joseph Goodman, the second is that it is the third scenario to be written for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game and the second to be written for Player Characters who are not Zero level, and the third is that it is the first scenario for Second Level Player Characters.

Dungeon Crawl Classics #69: The Emerald Enchanter is as grim and weird and as challenging as you would expect for a scenario for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game. The scenario feels in part inspired by B1 In Search of the Unknown and ‘The Halls of Tizun Thane’ from White Dwarf Issue No. 18 reprinted in The Best of White Dwarf Scenarios) as well as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus in that it involves the home of a wizard—though not a dead one—and the creation of new constructs. The latter are not composed of the flesh of the dead, but of blocks of emerald, green gemstone. The Player Characters will quickly discover that there are two types, one rough as if an unfinished sculpture, the other exquisitely detailed it had been a living person transformed into a block of moving emerald, green gemstone. Which of course, is what it is, and what some poor victim has been transformed into after having dunked into the Transmogrification Vats in the Emerald Enchanter’s workshop. Pairs, consisting of one unfinished and one finished, can be found throughout the manse of the Emerald Enchanter. Worse, the Player Characters will discover that upon killing a finished one, it reverts back to the person they were before the Emerald Enchanter experimented upon them. Sadly, they still die, but if they can revert back, does this mean that a way can be found to reverse the process and keep them alive?
The scenario beings with the Player Characters outside the doors to the Emerald Enchanter’s citadel faced with the first of the various pairs of emerald constructs. Once inside, the path from the front door to the Emerald Enchanter’s laboratory and the final confrontation with his evil ways is quite straightforward and linear. There are some entertaining encounters on the way, such as the ‘Hall of Mosaics’ and the ‘Hall of Anguish’. The first is with a Tile Golem, which pulls itself off mosaics on the walls and can draw more tiles from the wall to heal itself, blast the Player Characters with a stream of tile shards, and even create tile beasts that can harass the party! The second is of grey rock into which the Emerald Enchanter has imprisoned his enemies as ebon spirits. Now they haunt the hall, able to reach out from the walls, floor, and ceiling to attack the Player Characters. The encounter description references the fate of Han Solo in The Empire Strikes Back as to how they look, but of course, they are much, much more menacing! There is even an initial encounter with the Emerald Enchanter who comes to check on the intruders, weirdly appearing up through an emerald gemstone table. This is only a fleeting encounter, though it does offer a way to circumvent the whole of the rest of the adventure and cut straight to the final confrontation—if the Player Characters are adventurous enough to take it. If they do not, though, they are stalked by a number of bewinged, flying emerald skulls that appear and disappear out of the walls.

Before the Player Characters get to the confrontation with the Emerald Enchanter in his laboratory—fantastically illustrated with a player handout on the inside front cover—there is an encounter with the source of his power. This is a demon, long held captive in a pentagram. This is primarily a roleplaying encounter, one that can grant the Player Characters a major bonus, but oddly what it does not do, is actually help them in defeating the Emerald Enchanter. In fact, nothing does except their abilities, spells, and luck. Narratively, this is underwhelming, especially if, as given in an earlier encounter, the Player Characters could have leaped straight into the final encounter with little in way of penalties. There are elements which can be discovered to help solve aspects of the scenario, but none them of help the Player Characters defeat the Emerald Enchanter and none of them are time sensitive. The confrontation though, is fun and full of action. Roiling vats of boiling green liquid, flying emerald skulls that fire beams of deadly energy from their eyes, an automatic pulley system ferrying cages with villagers screaming in terror on their way to immersion in the nearest vat, and the Emerald Enchanter himself! If the Player Characters can defeat the Emerald Enchanter, they will be praised for their courage, and if they manage to save the villagers, they will be feted as true heroes! For the Elf or Wizard there is some decent loot too.
The scenario does have some requirements. One is the large number of players which may be difficult for some groups to get together. Alternative options are either to have a number of replacements in the event of Player Character death or increase the Player Characters from Second to Third Level. Neither are quite satisfactory. The other requirement is perhaps more important and that is the need for a spellcaster, whether a Wizard or an Elf. Since the adventure takes place in a wizard’s manse, there are numerous encounters in which items or parts of the encounter are activated by spell checks. Whilst it is possible for non-spellcasting Player Characters to attempt such checks, the probability of their succeeding each time is so low that in combination with high number that occur in the adventure means that the without an actual spellcaster, the play of the scenario is going to be much slower than the author intended.
Dungeon Crawl Classics #69: The Emerald Enchanter also includes a second scenario—‘The Emerald Enchanter Strikes Back’. This a sequel, also written for eight to ten Player Characters of Second Level, in which it revealed that they failed to kill the Emerald Enchanter, and now he roams area, enraged and bent on revenge. Only he is not on foot, but now in command of the Emerald Titan, a towering arcane colossus, in which strides the land, targeting the surrounding towns and villages in his revenge. This is a much more open scenario, primarily a mini-wilderness adventure—although the Judge might want to consult Dungeon Crawl Classics #66.5: Doom of the Savage King about one of the locations—in which the Player Characters must track down the Emerald Titan (although how difficult is to hide a thirty-foot tall emerald green robot?), gain access and deal with the Emerald Enchanter once and for all. This is a fun addition which requires a little more careful handling by the Judge as it is a wilderness adventure and bit more open.
Also, as much fun as this adventure is, and as fun as some of the things that the Emerald Titan can do to dislodge or kill the Player Characters once they are inside it, like stepping into a river to fill its legs with water and drown them, poke at them between its armour plates with splintered trees, or even pushing a bee hive through a crack, the inside of the Emerald Titan is barely described, if at all, making it feel very sparse and not really helping to emphasise the odd nature of the Player Characters’ situation. ‘The Emerald Enchanter Strikes Back’ is a great addition to Dungeon Crawl Classics #69: The Emerald Enchanter, but it just needed that bit more fleshing out.
Physically, Dungeon Crawl Classics #69: The Emerald Enchanter is as solidly produced as you would expect for a scenario for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game. The maps are decent for both scenarios and the artwork is nicely done too.
Dungeon Crawl Classics #69: The Emerald Enchanter is a grim scenario that feels like a Hammer Horror scenario as much as it does a scenario for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game. It is playable as is, but at the same time, the Judge is left wanting more information about the Emerald Enchanter and might want to give a temporary bonus that will weaken the Emerald Enchanter if the Player Characters defeat his source of power. Other than that, Dungeon Crawl Classics #69: The Emerald Enchanter is an  entertainingly engaging and grim scenario that should really challenge the Player Characters.

Magazine Madness 31: Senet Issue 11

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

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

Senet Issue 11 was published in the summerof 2023. It opens with the editorial noting the death of Klaus Teuber, the designer of one of the world’s most successful board games, Settlers of Catan, and that he had hoped to interview him in the future. Of course, that is not to be, but perhaps a tribute may appear in a future issue? After that, the issue gets down to business with ‘Behold’. This is the regular preview of some of the then-forthcoming board game titles. As ever, there are some interesting titles previewed here, including Crumbs!, a mini-card game about making sandwiches and Empire’s End, a board game in which the players’ empires are beset by plagues, floods, barbarian hordes, and more. Players bid to win the least worst of the disasters, their empires suffering the effects, but also learning and growing hardier from the experience. This sounds like a fascinatingly different game from the usual treatment of empires in board games.

‘Points’, the regular column of readers’ letters, contains a mix of praise for the magazine and a discussion of gaming culture, including representation in the hobby and the appeal of co-operative games. Just four letters, so it does not seem enough. As with the previous issue, Senet Issue 10, there is scope here for expansion of this letters page to give space to more voices and readers of Senet. One way of doing that is perhaps to expand it when ‘For Love of the Game’ comes to end. This regular column continues the journey of the designer Tristian Hall towards the completion and publication of his Gloom of Kilforth. In this entry in the series, he wanders off on a tangent about game designs which could have been, including one which appeared to the designer in a dream! Just how much this is useful to anyone interested in the design process is really up for debate.

Definitely more interesting is ‘Bez in Show’ by Alexandra Sonechkina. This is the first of the two interviews in the issue and with the designer and publisher Bez Shahriari, best known for the games Yogi and the ELL deck. This gives a little of her history and goes into more detail about her design process. The process for each designer differs, more obvious perhaps if you have read the interviews with other designers in previous issues and so can compare, but as an independent designer, hers differs perhaps more than most, focusing as it does on titles and subjects that are not necessarily as commercial, but still interesting and playable. Senet always includes two interviews, one with with a designer and one with an artist. Dan Jolin’s interview with the artist in this issue is with Adrian Smith. He has created art for publishers such as CMON and Games Workshop, specialising in Science Fiction and Horror. ‘Gods and Monsters’ showcases Smith’s artwork for Zombicide, Cthulhu: Death May Die, Rising Sun, and many more. Each piece is accompanied by a commentary from the artist to enjoyable effect.

In addition to the interview with an artist and a designer, each issue of Senet also includes one article examining a theme and a mechanic. Senet Issue 11 is no exception. ‘Sowing the Seeds’ is both an examination of a mechanic and an exploration of the proliferation and spread of a particular. The mechanic is ‘count and capture’ or ‘sow and harvest’ in which a player picks up seeds from one of his pits and sows them one at a time in the adjacent pits, aiming for certain objectives. The objectives will vary according to the different game variations, but they are all based upon Mancala. This is said to have originated in either Africa or Southeast Asia, but has subsequently spread around the world via various trade routes. It is perhaps one of the oldest of games and one of the oldest mechanics, but has been revisited by designers in more recent years. Most well known is Five Tribes, in which players manipulate the placement of the members of five different Arabian tribes and Trajan, an area control and set collection game set in Rome which uses a rondel (a mechanic previously examined in Senet Issue 5). More recent designs have used the mechanic for gunslinging duels as in A Fistful of Meeples and even improving links to attract supplicants to English abbeys in Pilgrim. This is a fascinating article which puts Mancala under the spotlight and engagingly explores its more modern applications.

Equally as interesting is ‘Power Play’. Written by Matt Thrower, this is the theme article in the issue, which is politics. It begins with The Landlord Game, which has today been transmogrified into Monopoly and its many variants, before coming up to date with SHASN, an Indian design which explores ideology in general elections and even Brexit: The Board Game of Second Chances, which examines the absurdities of that vote. In between, looks at political games with focuses big and small, the latter including games around the Suffragette movement, including the more recent Votes for Women, whilst the former includes Twilight Struggle, a game which covers the whole of the Cold War. Parodies and polemics are also covered, such as the less than serious Kremlin and the more then serious designs from Brenda Romero, such as Train, though it is as much an art piece and thought exercise rather than actual game. Both ‘Power Play’ and ‘Sowing the Seeds’ explore fascinating aspects of the gaming hobby, but in both cases do feel as if there is much more to be said about both. Especially political games. One sub-genre of the political game is only touched upon briefly here with 1960: The Making of the President and that is games about the U.S. election. The repetitive nature of the American election cycle means that designers often return to the subject. Not necessarily every election, but certainly often enough to warrant a whole article of its own.

‘Unboxed’, Senet’s reviews section covers a wide range of games. This incudes Verdant, a drafting and placement game about houseplants; Till The Last Gasp, a two-player skirmish game which involves elements of roleplaying; and even a reissue with Cranium 25th Anniversary Edition. ‘Senet’s top choice’ is Frosthaven, a sequel to Gloomhaven, which offers even more game play. Of course, Senet cannot cover every board game being released, but this is a good selection.

As is traditional, Senet Issue 11 comes to a close with the regular end columns, ‘How to Play’ and ‘Shelf of Shame’. For ‘Confessions of a bad board gamer’, James Lewis explains why it does not matter that he is not a good player when it comes to board games. What he means is that he is not a good player at winning games, rather than being a poor player in social terms. He even points out that games need losers as well as winners. At the same time, he makes clear that when not winning, he is actually learning about the game and how it can be won. All very obvious, but it is still an entertaining enough piece. Danielle Standring, takes Mechs vs Minions off her ‘Shelf of Shame’ and discovers that she enjoys it enough to want to play again, and so brings the issue to a close.

Physically, Senet Issue 11 is very professionally presented. However, it does need an edit in places, but otherwise looks and feels as good as previous issues of the magazine. Oddly, the cover with Lady Liberty rolling dice does suggest that issue include some roleplaying content, since the dice are polyhedral dice more associated with that hobby rather than board games. There is no roleplaying content in the issue though.

Senet Issue 11 is an enjoyable read, made all the better for two excellent articles. These are ‘Sowing the Seeds’ on the influence of Mancala and ‘Power Play’ on politics in games. The latter though, does feel as if it barely scratches the surface and could have been much, much longer. Together they are worth the price of picking up Senet Issue 11, whilst everything else in the issue is a bonus.

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