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

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

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Name: The Oracle of YuggothPublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Quico Vicens-Picatto

Setting: 23rd Century PlutoProduct: One-shot
What You Get: Twenty page, 9.13 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Memory, mazes, and madness on Pluto
Plot Hook: “UNKNOWN”Plot Support: Six pre-generated Investigators, one map, and one Mythos monster.Production Values: Colourful
Pros# Fantastic cover# Highly detailed Investigators# Interesting new Occupations# Athazagoraphobia# Mazeophobia# Mnemophobia
Cons# Needs a good edit# Unpleasant Investigators# Weird Sanity losses# The Sanity losses never let up# Highly detailed Investigators# No plot or investigation
Conclusion# Uncompelling Sanity-scouring slog# No objectives or agency except to suffer for what they are and what they did

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.

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Published in April, 1994, the Planescape Campaign Setting was as a radical a setting for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Second Edition as could be imagined in the 1990s. Perhaps even more imaginative than the Spelljammer setting published five years before that Planescape would ultimately replace in terms of both tone and scope. Based on the earlier Manual of the Planes for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition, it introduced a multiverse that was in part familiar to an audience from that supplement, but in way that was totally unfamiliar. Where perhaps the Manual of the Planes had been a means for the Player Characters—typically of a high Level—to traverse from one plane of existence to another, what Planescape provided was a base of operations, a city, rife with politics and factionalism, from which the Player Characters could leave to visit and come back from realms that before they could have only dreamed of visiting. Whether it is the Astral Plane or the Ethereal plane, the Inner or Elemental Planes of Air or Water or the Quasielemental Planes in between, for example, Paraelemental Plane of Smoke or Paraelemental Plane of Ooze, the Outer Planes divided between the Upper Planes of Good such as Arcadia or Mount Celestia, the Lower Planes of Evil, like the Abyss and Acheron, and the Boundary Planes of Neutrality, such as Bytopia and Elysium, or even whole other worlds on the Prime Material Plane, for example, Krynn of Dragonlance or Athas of Dark Sun, the Player Characters could come and go as they pleased. For the most part, that is. For they needed to know how, they need access to a portal or door, a gate key to pass through, and sometimes, they needed permission. For all of that, they needed to be in Sigil: The City of Doors.
Sigil: The City of Doors literally floats at the centre of the multiverse, spread around the inside of a torus turning atop a towering mountain spire with the surrounding Outlands radiating out below, a cramped city of spires, bureaucracy, and industry under greasy clouds that spit rain upon its streets. It is a neutral point in which all manner of creatures are likely to be seen living, working, visiting, and abiding on its streets. Angels, Avatars, Modrons, Baatezu, Tanar’ri, and Yugoloths—Baatezu, Tanar’ri, and Yugoloths because the Planescape Campaign Setting was published at the tail end of the Satanic panic of the eighties in which references to devils and demons were removed from Dungeons & Dragons to avoid ill-founded allegations that Dungeons & Dragons promoted Satanic worship—could all be found in Sigil. Normally adversarial, they were bound to keep the peace in Sigil because the city’s mistress, the Lady of Pain, caring of the city, callous of its citizens, wreathed in glittering, keen-edged blades, can simply deny them access to the doors to elsewhere in the multiverse. This does not mean that many do not covet possession of Sigil itself, but to move against the city and the Lady of Pain would be to raise her ire and perhaps even spark a war across the planes as the other factions try to prevent such a takeover. There is also the need for a neutral meeting place, especially with the ongoing Blood War between the denizens of the Nine Hells and the Abyss, which to date the Lady of Pain has prevented from spilling onto the streets of the city.
Below the city—far below the city—lies the Outlands, or the Plane of Concordant Opposition. Although the Plane of Neutrality, it is marked by a number of realms close to the Great Ring. These include Tir Na Og, ‘The Land of Youth’; the Palace of Judgement, ruled by Yen-Wang-Yeh, Judge of the Ten Law Courts and King of the Eighteen Hells; the Caverns of Thought, fizzing with the energy of brain waves and thought, whose cold and heartless tunnels always lead back to the court of the god-brain, Ilsenine, god of the Mind Flayers; and the Dwarven Mountain, a realm of merrymaking, belching smoke, and labour. Beyond lie the Inner Planes of the elements and quasielements, and the Outer Planes of morality or alignment. Also connected to Sigil and the Outlands via doors and portals and other means of planar transport are the worlds of the Prime Material Plane, and both Astral and Ethereal Space. From the start, the setting of Planescape is epic in scale.
As befitting a boxed setting for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Second Edition from the nineties, the Planescape Campaign Setting is richly appointed It includes four books, four posters, and a DM Screen. The books consist of ‘A Player’s Guide to the Planes’, designed to introduce the Planescape setting for player and Dungeon Master alike; ‘A DM’s Guide to the Planes’, containing detailed information about the setting for the Dungeon Master’s eyes only; ‘Sigil and Beyond’, a guide and more to the city that formed the heart of the setting; and the ‘Monstrous Supplement’, which provides the additions particular to the Monstrous Compendium—the equivalent of the Monster Manual for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Second Edition. The four posters in turn depict the heraldic-like icons for the setting’s sixteen factions, and maps of the Outlands surrounding the city of Sigil, the Outer Planes, and Sigil itself.
The starting point is the thirty-two page ‘A Player’s Guide to the Planes’ and right from the opening paragraph, it is clear that this is no ordinary boxed set and no ordinary setting. The reader is assailed by liberal doses of Cant, served up by berks, bashers, and barmies—fools, thugs, and crazies—who engage in chants, garnishes, and dark—gossip, bribes, and secrets. Drawn from a mixture of Elizabethan and Dickensian slang, it is jarringly in-game and jarringly informal, but it accentuates the differences between this and any other campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons, before and since. It introduces the key concepts to Planescape, both in terms of play and design, and these are the idea of the ‘Centre of the Multiverse’ is both subjective and nonsensical; that the Multiverse consists of rings, such as the Outer and Inner Planes, and even the Outer Rings are ringed by a Great Road which lead on to the next infinite plane; the ‘Rule of Three’, that everything—good or bad—comes in threes, thus the Prime Material Plane, the Inner Planes, and the Outer Planes; Law, Chaos, and Neutrality; and so on. The denizens of the Planes also come in three types. These Primes, who were born on the Prime Material Plane, Planars, born on a plane, and Petitioners, the departed spirits of Primes and Planars, who seek to cement a union with the powers of their plane. Petitioners and other beings can be a Proxy, an agent of a Power bestowed with gifts in return for loyalty, whilst a Power is a deity who rules over a plane.
In terms of what the Planescape Campaign Setting offers the player, ‘A Player’s Guide to the Planes’ gives one broad choice, a number of new Races, and more importantly, Factions. A Player Character can either be a Prime, from the Prime Material Plane, which means that they are not subject to the effects of Monster Summoning spells or general planar magic, or a Planar, who can be subject to those effects and more—like Protection from Evil, but inherently has the power to see the gates between the Planes. The new Races are the Bariaurs, goat-like centaurs, whose males have a headbutt attack with their horns and females have stronger senses; the Githzerai, humourless ascetics with a loathing of the Githyanki and the Mindflayers; and Tielflings, halfbreed-orphans often reviled for their supposed ties to the darker powers. The Planescape Campaign Setting marked the introduction of the Tielfling.
The Planescape Campaign Setting does not include any new Classes, but does instead give cultural notes on all of the standard Classes. Instead, what it does introduce are factions. There are sixteen of these, complete with official faction title, faction philosophy, primary plane of influence, allies and enemies, eligibility for membership, and both benefits and restrictions. In general, there are no restrictions in terms of Race and Class for any one faction, though there are exceptions. For example, the Athar do not believe that there are such things as gods, so have a dislike of priests, but gain protection from certain divine spells; the Bleak Cabal believe that the multiverse does not make any sense and so are immune to any spell that causes madness; the Dustmen believe that everyone is dead, but some are dead than others, and benefit from a pact with the undead who will ignore any Dustmen member; the Free League cannot decide upon the exact nature of the Multiverse, so openly debate it and have an immunity to charm effects, since they each of their own mind; and the Mercykillers want to bring about the perfect world through justice, so allow only Lawful members and have the ability to detect a single lie per day. In general, these are relatively minor abilities, but alongside them, what each provides is an idea and a belief, which of course, roughly aligns with those of other factions, whilst bouncing off those of others. Plus, of course, they are a great set-up for scenarios, plots, and storytelling.
The second of the four books in the Planescape Campaign Setting is the sixty-four page ‘A DM’s Guide to the Planes’. In addition to describing the numerous planes of the Inner Planes and Outer Planes, and their cosmology, this book explains how magic and magic items work across that cosmology. Naturally, everyone has a view on why magic and magic items work differently from one plane to the next, but again, unsurprising, the ‘Rule of Three’ applies. The caster needs to be aware of the effect of the spell on the target’s home plane, the position of other planes involved in the spell, and the availability of extradimensional space, but beyond that it does a bit complicated as which spell or magical item works where, and knowing that becomes a bit of hassle for the prospective arcane spellcaster. In fact, mechanically, this is the most complex part of the Planescape Campaign Setting. However, the setting provides an easy way around it—Spell Keys. Which are like the Door Keys that enable the Player Characters to access portals and thus other planes, but they allow a Wizard to cast spells freely on a particular plane, whilst a Power key does the same thing, but for a Priest’s spells. Magical items tend to be less effective the further they are taken from the plane where they were crafted. The combination of keys—Door Keys, Power Keys, and Spell Keys—are a toolkit for the Dungeon Master who can use them to craft and push the direction of her game by choosing when they become available and how they become available.
The ninety-six page ‘Sigil and Beyond’ is the third and longest book in the Planescape Campaign Setting. It begins with advice for the Dungeon Master on how and why she should run a Planescape campaign. ‘A Player’s Guide to the Planes’ suggests campaigns involving all Prime or all Planar Player Characters, or a mixed group, whilst the ‘A DM’s Guide to the Planes’ emphasised the fact that the tone of a Planescape campaign is about ideas and philosophies, and that those can lead to terror and treachery as well as mercy and goodness, most obviously through the factions, but also across the planes, tied as they are, to Alignment. In fact, it could be argued that Alignment plays a role in the Planescape Campaign Setting like no other setting for Dungeons & Dragons ever before. The differences continued to be highlighted throughout the advice, that Planescape is not about straight dungeoneering and plunder, but quests and objectives, exploration and experiencing a sense of wonder, interesting with and against the factions, not about being bullies and beating everything in sight including gods and taking their powers. The advice also covers possible adventures written for low, medium, and high-Level Player Characters.
The bulk of ‘Sigil and Beyond’ is devoted to describing both the various Realms and Towns of the Outland and the City of Doors itself. There are some extra notes on the factions too, but the main focus is on Sigil, which is given enough detail for the Dungeon Master to use and bring to life. Rounding out ‘Sigil and Beyond’ are a pair of campaign quick-starts. ‘For the Price of a Rose’ is designed for low Level Player Characters and is intended to get them from the Prime Material Plane to Sigil, chasing a gang which has been stealing from the world and thus annoying the gang enough to want revenge, whilst ‘Misplaced Spirit’ can be used as a follow on to ‘For the Price of a Rose’ or used to start a campaign with all Planar Player Characters. This has the Player Characters chasing after a petitioner who has escaped the Palace of Judgement, so it gives them the opportunity to run round the city. There are also a pair of new spells and a list of the Cant, which the Dungeon Master can annoy her players and their characters with by learning and using!
The fourth and last book in the Planescape Campaign Setting is the thirty-two page ‘Monstrous Supplement’ presents twelve new monsters for the setting. Some of the entries are tough, like the Aleax, the physical manifestation of the vengeance enacted by a Power, or the Spirit of the Air, a winged monkey-minion of a Power of air and wind, so not necessarily immediately useful. Whereas, the Cranium Rat, vermin whose intelligence is boosted the greater its numbers, including spellcasting, and the Dabus, odd, berobed humanoids who speak in speech bubbles and iconography and are tasked with repairing the City of Doors, are likely to be encountered in Sigil. The longest entry is dedicated to the Modron, the polyhedral creatures of absolute order from the plane of Mechanus. It is more an interesting mix than a useful mix, and is the core set’s biggest omission and disappointment.
The extras in the Planescape Campaign Setting are not perhaps as useful as they could have been. The four-panel ‘DM Screen’ is serviceable, containing a mix of standard tables from the Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Second Edition, along with the few tables from the Planescape Campaign Setting, so more of the former than the latter. This consists of the ‘Faction Reactions’, ‘Wizard School Alterations by Plane’, and ‘Magical Items in the Planes’. So not necessarily all that useful over the standard screen for the roleplaying game. Similarly, the poster showing the heraldic icons of the factions is nice, but not useful, whereas the poster maps of The Outlands, the Outer Planes, and Sigil, are much better and more useful, including extra content on their reverse side.
Of course, the other major difference between Planescape and other campaign settings for Dungeons & Dragons is the physical design. The palette of green, Verdigris, and brown, the use of Exocet typeface which replaced the letter ‘t’ with ‘+’, and the stunning artwork of Tony DiTerlizzi which wraps sinuously around the text and echoes the administrativia and grotesquery of Mervyn Peake’s Gormanghast novels. This is in addition to the iconography of Dana Knutson, who created the symbols for the factions and most notably, that of the Lady of Pain, which adorns the front of the box and each book.
—oOo—The Planescape Campaign Setting would win the 1994 Origins Award for Best Graphic Presentation of a Roleplaying Game, Adventure, or Supplement, but the reviews were limited in number. The Planescape Campaign Setting was reviewed by Rick Swan in ‘Role-playing Reviews’ in Dragon Magazine Issue #207 (July, 1994), giving it a rating of six out of six, or ‘The Best’ as well as describing it as “…[A] spectacular boxed set and TSR’s most ambitious campaign world to date.” and “…[D]esigner Zeb Cook’s finest effort since 1985’s Oriental Adventures and may be his masterwork.” He praised the boxed throughout, before ultimately concluding with a warning: “By covering so much ground and hinting at so many possibilities, the PLANESCAPE set raises expectations that may be tough to meet. Despite five books of material, there’s only enough room to give a taste of what’s in store, hence the tantalizing asides about dungeons made of giant skulls, a link between Toril and Krynn, and cities that change planes when their populations change alignments. This set is a box of promises, and if subsequent supplements fail to deliver, there’s going to be an awful lot of disappointed berks.”
Scott Haring, reviewing the Planescape Campaign Setting in ‘Pyramid Picks!’ in Pyramid Vol. 1 #8 (July/August, 1994) opened with, “I’ll cut to the chase — Planescape is the finest game world ever produced for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Period.” He described it as being, “…[E]verything us cool, jaded, disaffected gamers always complained that AD&D was not — sophisticated, almost adult roleplaying.” Praising the Planescape Campaign Setting throughout—best especially the artwork of Tony DiTerlizzi—Haring concluded with, “Planescape is a revolutionary product, a breakthrough for TSR. If you think you’ve “graduated” from AD&D, that you’ve evolved past it, go back and take a look at Planescape. This is the game world that will get you playing AD&D again.”—oOo—
The Planescape Campaign Setting could have been written by White Wolf in the nineties. After all, its emphasis on the presence and role of factions in the setting do make it feel like a World of Darkness roleplaying game, enabling the telling of stories around politics and beliefs as well as the exploration of the planes and more. The Planescape Campaign Setting includes a wealth of material to support such a campaign, but it is a wealth that does not feel quite enough, especially when it comes to the factions and the planes. The Dungeon Master is definitely going to want to know more to help her bring Sigil: The City of Doors and the Outlands to life. Of course, TSR, Inc. would follow up the Planescape Campaign Setting core box set with numerable supplements, including multiple boxed sets that would add depth and detail to the Multiverse of Planescape. Of these, the Dungeon Master is going to want In the Cage: A Guide to Sigil for a better guide to Sigil: The City of Doors, The Factol’s Manifesto for more detailed descriptions of the factions, and the MC8 Monstrous Compendium Outer Planes Appendix for more foes. The Planescape Campaign Setting is a superb start though, an amazing introduction to the setting and means of getting berks and bashers to Sigil: The City of Doors.
The Planescape Campaign Setting is the most interesting, the most innovative, and the most individual of all the worlds created for any iteration of Dungeons & Dragons. It is a fantasy utterly non-traditional, taking the Player Characters from the Dickensian grubbiness of the alleys of Sigil: The City of Doors all the way out to the infinite splendour of the Outer Planes and back again in time for bub and kip, a setting and a game line whose look and feel, let alone that setting, is genuinely unique and can truly be described as iconic.

Ten years ago, the Abisko Mine was forcibly shut down following an explosion which killed many of the mine workers. Located in the far north of Sweden above the village of Abisko, all that remained of the mine was a crater. There were few if any survivors and no investigation, the cause of the disaster becoming first the subject of conjecture, and then rumour, as the incident was forgotten about. Recently, the mine and its surrounding area was bought by the Svea Mining Corp, owned by Karl Magnusson and his wife Sigrid. They have attracted the interest of scientists, the attention of the military, and the money of investors with rumours of the discovery of a new type of gemstone that could change the fate of Sweden and the course of the world, speeding up the pace of industrialisation which is already sweeping the country. Yet there are those who have not forgotten the explosion that closed down the original Abisko Mine, and worse, they believe that the gemstone is not something that should be exploited, but instead studied and kept careful control of, lest it fall into the wrong hands. One of these is Franzibald Hansen, Danish author and expert on Norse mythology. Although wealthy and knowledgeable, he lacks the means to investigate himself, let alone deal with the problem as he sees it beyond being a lone voice. Thus, he turns to one of his old contacts and through her, the Society, the body of scholars and adventurers based in Castle Gyllencreutz in Upsala, whose gift of second sight enabled them to see the Vaesen, the supernatural creatures who have for centuries lived alongside the folk of Scandinavia. With their help, Franzibald Hansen is sure that he can prevent the Magnussons from bringing their plan to fruition and the gemstones from falling into the wrong hands.
This is the set-up for The Lost Mountain Saga, the first campaign for use with Vaesen – Nordic Horror Roleplaying, the Roleplaying Game of investigative folklore horror set in nineteenth century Scandinavia published by Free League Publishing. As well as being the first campaign for Vaesen, what is also notable about The Lost Mountain Saga is that it is based on a podcast of the same name that the author has adapted for use with Vaesen. This continues the phenomenon of roleplaying podcast adaptations previously seen with Critical Role and Tal’Dorei Campaign Setting Reborn from Darrington Press and Old Gods of Appalachia from Monte Cook Games. In the case of The Lost Mountain Saga, the result  is a relatively short campaign, consisting of five parts that take place over the course of a year, from September to August. The only requirement for it is the core rules and the fact that the Player Characters are members of the society and have conducted a handful of investigations, and thus be able to improve the facilities at Castle Gyllencreutz. Optional are other scenarios for Vaesen. There are gaps of several months between the third and fourth parts and between the fourth and fifth parts where the Game Master could run another scenario or two. That said, if the Game Master decides not to run other scenarios between the five parts of The Lost Mountain Saga, then the campaign can be played through quite quickly at a rate of two or three sessions per scenario—at the very most.
All five chapters of the campaign follow the same structure as other scenarios for Vaesen. The ‘Background’ and ‘Conflicts’ explains the situation for each scenario, whilst the ‘Invitation’ tells the Game Master how to get the Player Characters involved. In The Lost Mountain Saga, this includes letters, invitations, and the personal request of Franzibald Hansen, which will lead to the town or village where the mystery is taking place, the getting there detailed in the ‘Journey’, typically a mix of railway and coach journeys. It should be noted that every mystery has a moment or two when the Player Characters can prepare and goes into some detail about the journey. There is an opportunity for roleplaying here, perhaps resulting in longer travel scenes than the core rulebook necessarily recommends. The ‘Countdown and Catastrophe’ presents the Game Master with one or two sets of events which take place as the Player Characters’ investigation proceeds, sometimes triggered by the Player Characters, sometimes triggered by the NPCs, whilst ‘Locations’ cover NPCs, Challenges, and Clues, all leading to a ‘Confrontation’ and its eventual ‘Aftermath’. The mysteries are well organised, a mix of the sandbox and events which the Game Master will need to carefully orchestrate around the actions of her Player Characters. Only the most pertinent of the locations in each town or village is described and the Game Master is advised to create others as needed, though she will very likely need a ready list of Swedish names to hand for whenever the Player Characters run into an NPC or two. That said, the campaign is fairly linear and self-contained, meaning that relatively little preparation is required outside of the campaign itself and it can serve as an introductory or starter campaign the first time Game Master could run after she has run a few scenarios.
The campaign opens with ‘Duty and Despair’,  with news of the reopening of the Great Copper Mountain mine of Falun. This brings the portly bon viveur, Franzibald Hansen, to Castle Gyllencreutz. He has received a letter from the local priest about an outbreak of witchcraft and requests their help in investigating it. Almost everyone in the town seems charmed by the exceptionally stern Reverend Bruselius, who quickly settles on the culprit and prepares to hold a trial. Is she guilty, or is there someone else responsible and can the Player Characters identify them in time? However, in discovering this, the Player Characters will encounter another vaesan, one which will already have taken its first victim—Franzibald Hansen! It seems that he had an interest in Falun more than the outbreak of witchcraft, but quite will be revealed in the next few chapters.
‘The Beginning of the Fall’ shifts the mystery back to Upsala where the university is hosting an exclusive ball which will be attended by members of the nobility, the military, and the science community. This is because Karl and Sigrid Magnusson are going to announce the nature of the gemstones their operation has unearthed at the Abisko Mine. At the same time, there are reports of overcrowding at the city’s asylum, including a journalist who wrote an article critical of the Svea Mining Corp. Is this a coincidence? The ball is a chance for the Player Characters to mix with members of high society—military, noble, and scientific—so the Game Master may want to have some NPCs ready here, as well as a chance to get a good look at the strange gemstones. In addition, some of Franzibald Hansen’s secrets will be revealed!
The middle part of The Lost Mountain Saga is ‘Where the Sun Dies’, and it sends the Player Characters off in an entirely different direction—Norway! Norwegian Police Commissioner Olof Dahl comes to the Castle Gyllencreutz asking for their help. Contact has been lost with the island of Værøya above the arctic circle as it appears have suffered a radical fall in temperature weeks before it is normally due and to date, none of the rescue missions have returned. Having travelled to Bergen, the Player Characters set sail aboard an icebreaker commanded by one Captain Harrock—“Billions of bilious blue blistering barnacles!!”—and so investigate the island. From having to ski across the ace to reach Værøya to confronting the frosty foe responsible, this is an entertaining scenario that is quite creepy and unsettling in places.
‘The Prince and the Witch’ returns the action to Upsala and to the great Valborg bonfire next to the Royal Mounds of Upsala for the ancient spring festival. There a young woman asks for the Society’s help. She is a member of the Vanadisir, an organisation whose members claim to be the descendants of the Norse goddess Freja, and she wants help in rescuing her leader from an evil man in this forest. It turns out that ‘he’ is not a prince, but a snake, and not the only one in this linear encounter which draws the Player Characters back into the past. The confrontation is particularly nicely handled here.
The campaign comes to a close with ‘The Lost Mountain Saga’. A plea from an unexpected quarter sends the Player Characters back to where the campaign begins to reveal the secrets of the Abisko Mine and the true dangers that it represents to all of Sweden. The scenario literally ticks down to the climax in a race to prevent the Svea Mining Corp’s plans coming to fruition and a final confrontation.
Physically, The Lost Mountain Saga is everything that you would expect a book for Vaesen – Nordic Horror Roleplaying to be. It is well written and presented, but the artwork and the cartography are both excellent, evoking a mixture of nineteenth century charm and folkloric horror. The book itself is actually a lovely artefact in its own right.
The Lost Mountain Saga is a short campaign as well as being an uncomplicated campaign. This and its year-long, but handful of chapters, structure give it space and a flexibility into which the Game Master can add or develop her own content. This may well be necessary to offset its quite linear nature and the fact that the campaign veers away from its storyline in its middle chapters. If the campaign is instead played through at pace, this may not be an issue though. Overall, The Lost Mountain Saga is a good starter campaign for Vaesen – Nordic Horror Roleplaying, suitable for the Game Master looking for a first campaign and the veteran Game Master looking for something lighter.

Just after you review one roleplaying game about running a coffee shop with difficult customers designed to be run on its own or as corollary on top of just about any roleplaying game imaginable, along comes another roleplaying game about running a coffee shop with difficult customers designed to be run on its own or as corollary on top of just about any roleplaying game imaginable.* Coffee & Chaos – Comedy Café Roleplaying Game from Cobblepath Games was the first, a standalone game which used ordinary playing cards, cutlery mattered, and a slice of life was served up with smile and a heart in the foam in the face of difficult customers and dwindling resources (as essentially, there was never anyone to do the washing up!). The Eternal Grind Café is the second. It is published by Mottokrosh Machinations, best known for Hypertellurians: Fantastic Thrills Through the Ultracosm, the Old School Renaissance adjacent roleplaying game of retro science fantasy inspired by the artwork of Frank Frazetta and Roger Dean, the adventures of John Carter of Mars, Buck Rogers, and Barbarella. Certainly, any of those ‘Hypertellurians’ could end up in the Eternal Grind Café, but then again so could any character from any roleplaying game. Definitely though, The Eternal Grind Café does not share the same inspirations as Hypertellurians: Fantastic Thrills Through the Ultracosm.

* If I have to review a third, something weird is going on.

What has happened is that in their hubris, the Player Characters have angered the gods. To teach them a lesson, the gods have cast the Player Characters into Hell. Instead of hellfire and brimstone and eternal torment, it turns out that Hell is actually a minimum wage job in the only growing industry in the world. In other words, work as a barista. So now, where they were once mighty heroes and heroines who braved the odds to defeat dragons and save the princess, long-bearded wizards who commanded cosmic forces of magic, an accountant driven to investigate the unknown, and in the process save humanity unacknowledged, a necromancer who raised an army of the dead, and so on, they now clock on, tie an apron on, smile, take orders for coffee, brew that coffee, and smile again, until it is time to clock off. Unfortunately, the Eternal Grind Café gets at best, the most interesting customers, at worst, the worst customers in the known universe, and all the Player Characters have to do is suck it up until the end of their shift, or if they are really lucky, the gods change their minds. Which is unlucky. So technically, the Eternal Grind Café could actually be called the Infernal Grind Café...

The Eternal Grind Café is a storytelling style roleplaying game for between three and five players, which can be played in a single session. Mechanically, it is very simple, but it provides scope for lots of roleplaying and scope for improvisation. Designed for three to five players, as written, it is intended to be run by a Game Master, who portrays all of the customers who come to the Eternal Grind Café. However, it can easily be run without a Game Master, with the players taking it in turn to portray the bad or difficult customers. A barista in The Eternal Grind Café has two stats or skills. Barista covers anything to do with coffee and running the coffee shop, whilst Character covers everything else—and that includes everything that the barista could do as a Player Character in his home game. The hero’s wielding of a sword, the wizard opening up a portal to the netherworld, the accountant budgeting or casting Elder Sign when he really needs it, or the necromancer commanding the undead… Both skills start at three and are rolled on a six-sided die, the aim being to roll under. If good customer service is given, then both skills move to the right, but if bad customer service is given, they both move to the left. If the stats move to the right, the Barista skill goes up, but the Character skill goes down. If the stats move to the left, the Barista skill goes down, but the Character skill goes up. If either skill is raised to six in this fashion, the Barista loses his and the player loses control of his Barista, but in different ways depending on the stat. A Barista skill at six means that the barista has become a mindless drone, but a Character skill at six means that the barista goes on a murderous rage! Which is truly terrible customer service.

To prevent either from happening, the barista has an outlet—social media. If the player describes a social media post in which his barista complains about his job, he can reduce his Barista skill by one. If he describes a social media post in which he tells of a flashback about his Player Character’s epic deeds in his former life, he can reduce his Character skill by one. In this way, the Barista and Character skills go out of sync.

The aim of the baristas is to gain tips. Each tip is represented by a die type, from four-sided to twenty-sided dice. The bigger the die type, the bigger the tip.* Each die goes into the tip jar. At the end of the shift or whenever the health inspector turns up, all of the dice are rolled and totalled. For each full twenty points rolled, the gods relent, and let a barista return to his former life. If there are not enough points for every barista, then it is every barista for himself and since this hell, betrayal or doing the dirty is just going to be seen as part of the décor.

* The use of Dungeon Crawl Classics dice would be particularly diabolic!

To support play, the Game Master has tables for determining the belligerent nature of the coffee machine—it could be haunted or it could woof and wag its tail like a dog, for random events, and for twenty customers. They include Three Sloths in a Trench coat, Belon Trusk X, a barista’s Mother, Mango Maga Man, and more. Each one comes with roleplaying tips and what the baristas need to do for each to give a good tip. There is a sly sense of humour to the various customers. The Game Master is advised not to say who the customer is, but just describe what they look like and let the players work it out…

Physically, The Eternal Grind Café is lightly and cleanly presented. The artwork is light and suitably humorous. Elements of the presentation will change for the full edition rather than this the Preview Edition. Things that can be added to the game include coffee options, more complications, and more customers.

The Eternal Grind Café is a light and silly roleplaying game that is ever so easy to prepare and equally as easy to run. Perfect to run in between longer games or as a pick-up game, whether at a coffee shop or at home, The Eternal Grind Café is relaxing fun until everyone has the chance to get out of hell and never have to work another shift again!

It is difficult to describe what Asterion is without being as direct as its author is. So not to beat about the bush, Asterion is a sex dungeon. Asterion is a sex dungeon for Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess. What it does is take the Ancient Greek myth of the creation of the Minotaur and turn it into a sex dungeon and combine it with a bloody meatgrinder. In the myth, Minos, King of Crete, prayed to the sea god Poseidon to send him a snow-white bull as a sign of the god’s favour and promised to sacrifice the bull to the god. When he did not, Poseidon punished Minos by making his wife fall in love with the bull and eventually she bore a child, a half-bull, half-man. Called Asterius, this is Minotaur. So inhuman and so ferocious was Asterius, that he would only eat human meat. After taking advice from the Oracle at Delphi, Minos had the craftsman, Daedalus, construct a mighty labyrinth to house the Minotaur. Into this, King Minos would cast his enemies. Asterion takes this myth and removes any references to Greece, enabling the Game Master to drop the adventure into her campaign, if, that is, she actually wanted to. Because remember, Asterion is a sex dungeon, as the Minotaur is not only wandering the labyrinth eating anyone he finds in there, he is also living out a priapic fantasy with anyone he finds in the labyrinth—whether they want to or not.

It should be noted that Asterion is written by the author of Beware the Mindfuck. That scenario carried an ‘18+ Explicit Content’ label on the front cover—and it deserved to. As does Asterion. Be warned. The language and the tone of Asterion is strong and of an adult nature and it deserves that exact same warning label. Unfortunately, it does not have one. In the meantime, some of the language and content in Asterion is repeated as part of the review where necessary.

After some immature posturing by the author about how he is not going to tell the Game Master how to run the adventure, how the adventure is not “…[F]or those that get easily butt hurt about touchy subjects”, and that the Game Master should run it if she has a “cool group”, he actually settles down and begins telling the reader what the adventure is about. The set-up is simple. The Player Characters are thrown into the Labyrinth, perhaps with a sword or a spear and some torches and then left to it. Accompanying them is a number of Zero Level tributes to Asterion, the Minotaur. The Labyrinth is described as a series of tight corridors crossed by many intersections, at which Bull Calves, the offspring of Asterion, will be grabbing them and attempting to eat them, have sex them—that is, rape them, take them back to their father, or a combination of all three. The Zero Level tributes are replacement Player Characters. So far, so bad. Fear not though, for it gets worse.

Instead of there being a map of the Labyrinth—the Game Master is expected to make it up—there is simply a table of twenty, increasingly detailed and unpleasant encounters. Screams, statues, mushrooms growing in cow dung, corpses, and so on, seem perfectly normal. Elsewhere an incredibly attractive, incredibly large woman demands sex in return for oracular divinations and will get extremely frustrated if the Player Characters refuse; a male dominant, dressed all in leather, invites the Player Characters to participate in his sex dungeon and attacks them with his handcrafted sex toys when they refuse; and a scene of bestiality. Plus, there are the scenes with the Bull Calves having sex with and/or eating the women imprisoned in the Labyrinth.

Running Asterion involves the Game Master describing the Labyrinth to her players, occasionally rolling for an encounter on the table, and when all of those are crossed off, she can run the scenario’s final scene in Asterion’s throne room. There are promises of freedom, but as the author makes clear in his ‘Wrapping Shit up’, “Everyone will die! Seriously. It’s a fuckin [sic] meatgrinder!” There are stats for the various monsters in Asterion, but that is about it.

Physically, Asterion is thankfully short. It is unpleasantly written and surprisingly, is illustrated with numerous images of statues and vases from Ancient Greece given that this aspect of the background to the scenario is ignored.

So, what you have in Asterion is a meatgrinder—in all senses of the word—one-shot in which the Player Characters are exposed to a lot of sex and semi-cannibalism, not expected to survive, and that is it, really. In fact, there really is very little for the Player Characters to do except wander around and fight. That is the extent of the agency they have. For the players, there is equally as little for them to do, little that is going to engage them or their capacity to roleplay, and ultimately, all Asterion does is expose them to the sexual fantasies of the author.

Asterion is repulsive, immature, and pointless. It does not deserve so much as an ‘18+ Explicit Content’ label, but an ‘Immature Players Only’ label.

—oOo—

DISCLAIMER: The author of this review is an editor who has edited titles for Lamentations of the Flame Princess on a freelance basis. He was not involved in the production of this book and his connection to both publisher has no bearing on the resulting review.

The Nature of the Beast is a scenario set in an England rent by division and strife during the reign of Charles I. This division is between the Protestantism of the country and the Catholicism of Rome, Paganism and Protestantism, King and Parliament, King and country, weakening the Anima Gentum, the bloodline and the Crown, which ensured that the Crown looked to both the spiritual needs and the physical needs of the country. The Anima Gentum is yet to be broken with the execution of the king in 1649, but the Veil has been weakened by this division, giving access to the beyond, the Shadowlands, and the Demonic Realms, and so allowing mankind to entreat with things beyond our understanding. The Anima Gentum will be broken, England will be upturned, and the land will have no king. In the north of England, as the Scots fume and bridle at the King Charles’ attempt to reform the Presbyterian Church and there is mutterings of civil unrest in the south as the king may actually recall Parliament for the first time in a decade, the weakening of the veil has enabled a terrible revenge to be wrought from beyond the grave. Monsters stalk the land, and though they do not know it, they threaten the reputation of a noble family even as their presence brings about terrible tragedy.

The Nature of the Beast is the first scenario to be published for The End of Kings: Core Rules for 17th Century Adventure, the roleplaying game of magic, monarchy, and division set in the early modern period prior to the English Civil War. Published by MontiDots Creations, best known for publishing horror scenarios such as The Fenworthy Inheritance and scenarios for the Old School Renaissance such as Limbus Infernum. It is a roleplaying game in which weaselly Vagabonds, stout Commoners and Yeomanry, and gracious members of the Nobility, as Cunning Folk or Woodkernes, Clubmen or Soldiers, Priests or Witch Hunters, Warlocks or Outlaws seek adventure and perhaps work to protect the realm from creatures from beyond the Veil and machinations of those men and women who would take advantage of the weakening of the Veil. Notably, it uses the GORE Generic Old-School Role-playing Engine published by Goblinoid Games. This is a percentile system which means that anyone familiar with the Basic Roleplay mechanics will have no difficulty adapting The End of Kings and thus The Nature of the Beast.
The scenario opens with the ‘Adventurists’—as it terms the Player Chaarcters—being hired by Reverend Richard Hinde, the corpulent priest of the village of Cranfold in the north of England. The flocks of sheep kept round the village have been subject to a spate of vicious attacks, the corpses left mutilated and half-eaten. The village is divided as to the nature of the culprit. Although no wolf has been seen in the country for a century, some say that is what it is, but others think it to be something much, much fouler. The priest, though, will confide that he thinks it a thing summoned through the Great Veil, though by whom or to what end, he can only conjecture. He had thought to hire the local hunter, but he has not been seen for days, but there is worse news for the reverend’s employer, the local squire. Lord Perfleet’s eldest daughter has also gone missing. The Adventurists are thus to travel to Cranfold and investigate the activities of the creature before hunting it down and killing it.

These events are of course, all connected, as the Adventurists will discover in the course of their investigations. Initially, it is suggested that this take the form of divination. The scenario gives crystallomancy as being the most effective and suggests that one of the Adventurists be capable of this, whilst another should be a priest with a sanctified silver cross capable of holding twenty Magic Points. The divination will grant them some initial hints, and can be used to gain further insights once the Adventurists arrive in Cranfold and want to examine the surrounding valley. Beyond this, their efforts are hampered by the arrival of the county Intelligencers—members of the inquisition who search for witches and signs of the devil—who have come to Cranfold in order to uncover what they think to be the activities of a witch. Bullies, man and woman, they will be quick to discover the ‘culprit’, denounce her, and condemn her to her fate, all in the name of god and coin in the pocket! The witchfinders are a reprehensible bunch, and are likely to arouse the ire of the Adventurists. This may lead to confrontation, if not between the Adventurists and Intelligencers, then between the Intelligencers and the returned hunter. The issue for the Adventurists is that the Intelligencers have the law on their side and any confrontation will get them into trouble. If he can be found, he knows much more about what has been happening and will point the Adventurists in the right direction, including approaching a caravan of Roma who are due to pass through the village as they regularly do at this time of the year. They will be able to help with advice and more before the Adventurists home in on the source and centre of the horror going on in Cranfold.
The Nature of the Beast is well supported with excellent maps and stats of the various NPCs and monsters. However, it could have been better organised, such as giving the description of the village towards the start of the book rather than in the middle of the adventure. Otherwise, physically, The Nature of the Beast is well presented, decently illustrated, and does come with great maps.
Where The Nature of the Beast is at its weakest is in the overreliance upon crystallomancy and divination as a means for the players and their Adventurists to gain hints and clues. It does not allow for other options and this, combined with the poor organisation means that The Nature of the Beast is not as easy to run as it should be. Here is where it could be better developed to be more flexible and less reliant on magic.
The Nature of the Beast is a solid adventure that combines some familiar elements—attacks on animals, revenge from beyond the grave, fear of witches, folk horror, and so on—with a pervading sense of horror and the unknown, the result feeling very much like a Hammer Horror film. The climax of the scenario does lend itself to cinematic action, so enforcing that feel. Even if the Game Master does not want to run the scenario using The End of Kings: Core Rules for 17th Century Adventure, the plot and set-up of The Nature of the Beast is relatively easy to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Fourth Edition or Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay, as both are set during a similar period.

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

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

—oOo—
Name: The Viscount Who Left MePublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Z.V. Cretney

Setting: Regency-era BathProduct: Scenario for Regency Cthulhu: Dark Designs in Jane Austen’s England
What You Get: Fifty-two page, 52.14 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: ‘Gone Groom’ (not by Gillian Flynn) Plot Hook: The groom has gone, can the bridesmaids save the day?Plot Support: Staging advice, six pre-generated Bridesmaids, ten NPCs, thirteen handouts, one Occult tome, one occult spell, and one occult monster.Production Values: Excellent
Pros# You get to play Regency bridesmaids!# Regency folkloric horror one-shot# Highly detailed scenario# Detailed Investigators# Nicely done handouts# Great title# The bridesmaids need to return# Ornithophobia# Hemophobia# Anthropophobia
Cons# Bridesmaids may need a pointer or two get the investigation started
Conclusion# Connection between set-up and first investigative steps undeveloped, but otherwise another good one-shot for Regency Cthulhu: Dark Designs in Jane Austen’s England# Richly detailed post-wedding Regency weirdness whose bridesmaids deserve a sequel

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

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

—oOo—
Name: Hail To The KingPublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Marco Carrer

Setting: New York State, 1989
Product: One-on-One Scenario
What You Get: Nine page, 448.60 KB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: “Modern music is as dangerous as narcotics.” – Pietro MascagniPlot Hook: This is one rare record you won’t want to rave aboutPlot Support: Staging advice, one pre-generated Investigator, and four NPCs.Production Values: Untidy.
Pros# One Investigator, one session scenario# Easy to adapt to other modern time periods with recorded sound# Straightforward investigation# Melophobia# Hemophobia# Pharmacophobia
Cons# Needs a good edit# Linear# Needs an opposition to mix up its noir nods and make it a MacGuffin hunt
Conclusion# Seedy, direct investigation that feels just a bit too easy# Tell, me have you heard the Yellow Sign?

Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition is a Science Fiction roleplaying game with a long history. If Dungeons & Dragons has its own Systems Reference Document containing guidelines for publishing content under the Open-Gaming Licence, then so does Traveller, the classic Science Fiction roleplaying game inspired by Imperial Science Fiction, published by Game Designer’s Workshop in 1977. This is the Cepheus Engine System Reference Document, which contains the ‘Classic Era Science Fiction 2D6-Based Open Gaming System’, which provides a common framework for Referees to create and run, and players roleplay, whether for their own table or for actual publication. This is a roleplaying game which enables the Player Characters to travel the stars, explore new worlds, engage in speculative trade, conduct small scale military missions, fight off pirates preying on interstellar trade, investigate strange alien ruins, and more.

Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition is published by Stellagama Publishing, best known for the campaign setting, These Stars Are Ours!. It is an update and expansion of earlier versions of the rules. The changes include the inclusion of the hexadecimal notation system beloved of Traveller being optional; combining skill and characteristic modifiers—which means that the target thresholds for actions are higher; Player Character is less random and a Player Character cannot die during the process, although he can be injured; damage suffered by Player Characters and NPCs is not deducted from characteristics, but from Stamina and Lifeblood, instead; Player Characters have Traits, heroic abilities which makes them stand out; spaceships can be larger—ten thousand, rather five thousand tons—and can be equipped with main guns, like Particle Guns and Gravitic Disruptors; technology is shifted up and down slightly, so that Cybertechnology can be available at Tech Level 9 and Force Shields at Tech Level 16; Player Characters can suffer mortal wounds instead of dying and can even undergo Cyborg Conversion or Bio-Reconstruction; and a section for the Referee has been added. There are innumerable changes and additions throughout Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition, but they are compatible with previous editions of the Cepheus roleplaying game. Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition is upfront about these changes, but in addition, throughout the rulebook, the Referee is given options that she can include in her campaign.

A Player Character in the Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition has six characteristics—Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Intelligence, Education, and Social Standing. These typically range between two and twelve, but can go much higher. Then a Player Character has skills. These range from Admin, Airman, and Athletics to Tactics, Watercraft, and Zero-G. Notable omissions are the Mechanics and Electronics skill, replaced by repair, Admin includes the Advocate skill, and Gambling is part of Carousing. Skills range in value from zero to five, and are gained from a Player Character’s Homeworld and his Career. He also gains one or more Traits, depending on the length of that Career. These are tied to particular skills, so for example, ‘Jump Tuition’ requires Piloting 1 as a skill and allows the Player Character to roll with Advantage when making a Jump throw and travel faster-than-light, whilst ‘Explorer’s Society’ grants a high passage ticket once every two months and free stay at the society’s hotels.

To create a Player Character, a player assigns an array of values to the Player Character’ characteristics. He chooses one skill for his character’s Homeworld and then puts him through a Career. There are twelve of these, and include Agent, Belter, Colonist, Elite, Navy, Pirate, Rogue, Scholar, and more. A career lasts a number of terms, each four years in length—though an option allows for their length to be random—and a player picks skills as he takes his character from one term to the next, learning fewer skills as he ages. Once per turn, the player can also choose to give up a skill option and instead increase a characteristic. There is also the chance of suffering from the effects of age, but the main thing that the player will be rolling for is an event each term. This creates an incident which the Player Character can gain from or suffer because of it, and it can be career-related or it can be life-related. At the end of the Career , a Player Character will gain mustering out benefits in terms of money, items, ship’s shares, and characteristic bonuses. In extreme situations, a Player Character will find himself being trained in psionics or being sent to prison!

Using the Event Tables allows a player to create a bit of background about his character. For example, this belter grew up on an inhospitable colony before signing on with a mining concern to strike it rich. He never did, but he was sponsored for university and trained in the sciences and technical subjects. After nearly getting injured during an attack on the company facilities, he decided to retire, believing he had sufficient skills to go it alone and look for his own strike.

Karol Stounten
Strength 4 Dexterity 6 Endurance 7 Intelligence 11 Education 11 Social Standing 8
Career: Belter, 4 Terms Rank: Crew Boss
Stamina: 7 Lifeblood: 7
Age: 34 Homeworld: Inhospitable Outpost
Events: Pirate Protection Racket (Resisted), Study, Specialist Training, Cyberterrorism!
Skills: Athletics-0, Computer-2, Demolitions-1, Engineering-1, Melee Combat-1, Piloting-2, Repair-1, Science-3, Streetwise-1, Zero-G-1
Traits: Sensor Ace, Scientist (Physical Sciences)
Equipment: Spacesuit, CR 10,000 Prospector

Mechanically, Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition is simple. For a Player Character to undertake an action, his player rolls two six-sided dice and aims to beat a target number, typically eight or more, for an average difficulty task. The player will add modifiers for the characteristic and the skill being used, a skill rating of two indicating that the Player Character is a trained professional and an experienced professional if three or more. A roll of twelve always succeeds, and sometimes, a situation will give the Player Character Advantage, enabling his player to roll three six-sided dice and use the best two. This is usually due to a Player Character trait. The amount by which the roll exceeds or misses the Target Number is called the Effect. Effect itself is not clearly explained, although there are numerous uses for it throughout the book, such as increasing the damage by a successful attack or the captain aboard a starship in combat using Leadership to ‘Lead Crew’ and create bonuses that his player can assign to the other crew members.

As a Science Fiction roleplaying game, Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition provides a wide range of equipment. This includes armour, exploration and survival gear, arms, armour, and cybernetics. The latter is classified into four grades, which start with A-Grade, superficial or common implants, such as cosmetics or an Internal OmniComp, all the way up to R-Grade cybernetics, invasive, experimental, and irreversible implants like a Berserker Module or a Hercules Frame Replacement. Every cybernetic implant has a point cost. If a Player Character has more than six points worth of Cybernetic Points, he suffers from cyber-disassociation, which will affect his ability to socialise. The weapons include vibroblades, gyrojet guns, tanglers, blasters and laser guns, and even a grav launcher that fires a floating plasma bomb that the user can guide to the intended target. A solid selection of vehicles is included too, as well as a quick and dirty robot design sequence, which allows them to be created in a few minutes, alongside a few examples, ready to be used in play.
The rules for combat allow for cover, aiming, automatic weapons, suppressive fire, grappling, morale, and more. If a combatant suffers more damage than his Dexterity characteristic, he is knocked prone. Damage is deducted from Stamina first, and then Lifeblood, the latter indicating that he has been wounded. If it is less than half his Lifeblood, he is seriously wounded. He is mortally wounded if it is reduced to zero. There are rules for trauma surgery and recovery. The rules for chases cover both foot chases and vehicle chases. Psionics are handled in a straightforward fashion, possible talents consisting of Awareness, Clairvoyance, Telekinesis, Telepathy, and Teleportation. What talents a Player Character might have are determined randomly, but at the very least, he will have Telepathy. His Psionic Strength, essentially an extra characteristic, determines the number of PSI points he has and the abilities he has within a talent. In order to use a psionic ability, he simply spends the PSI points.

Understandably, the longest section in the longest section in Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition is devoted to starships. Spacecraft below one hundred tons are smallcraft and do not have a Jump Drive. Interstellar travel is achieved by the aforementioned Jump Drive, rated between one and six, indicating how many parsecs a starship can travel in a single jump. Speed within a system is measured in gees, again from one to six. The rules begin by explaining how starships are operated and the costs of doing so, including speculative trade in terms of cargo and passengers. The procedure for the latter is explained and there are suggestions too, on how to make the ferrying of cargoes more interesting. There is a similar procedure for designing spaceships and starships, all the way up to hulls displacing ten thousand tons. The latter enables the creation of large vessels and arming at that scale with large weapons that fit in triple turrets and bay weapons that displace fifty tons, and even main gun weapons that displace one thousand tons. In general, these are outside of the scope of most campaigns that a Referee might run, but their inclusion allows the possibility of a big, naval-based campaign. The procedure is the most complex in Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition, involving as it does quite a lot of decisions and arithmetic. The process does take a bit of practice to get right and get the numbers to balance. Numerous common spacecraft designs are included too, from a ten-ton fighter and ten-ton gig, all the way up a thousand-ton cruiser. Most of the vessels that will be within the purview of the Player Characters include the two-hundred-ton trader, one-hundred-ton scout vessel, and so on.

Spaceship combat is similarly complex. It is conducted in six-minute rounds which allow for weapon recharge cycles, the distances that missiles have to travel to reach their targets, the time needed for repairs, and so on. In that period, each crew member has time to take a single action. For the captain, that will be to ‘Lead Crew’ to orders, and more importantly, possible bonuses, or to ‘Outmanoeuvre’ the enemy and gain a better Position in relation to them; the Pilot has a choice of Attack Vector, Disengage, Evasive Manoeuvres, Plot Jump, and more; the Sensor Operator can Spoof Missiles, Jam Sensors, Target Systems, gain a Sensor Lock, or Break a Sensor Lock; the Gunner can Fire Energy Weapons, Launch Missiles, Launch Sand (which screens against attacks), or fire Point Defence weaponry; and the Engineer can Overcharge weapon or Redline Engines, or conduct jury-rigged repairs. It starts with attempting to gain Position over the enemy, this replacing what would be Initiative or Range in ground or air combat, as there is neither in space in Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition. Combatants can target specific locations on a spaceship, and if an attack does get through and hit an enemy vessel, it can inflict surface, internal, or critical damage. Internal and critical hits can damage or destroy specific components or locations aboard a vessel. The rules also allow for radiation damage too. Overall, the rules are busy and detailed—but not overly so, and they do work to keep every Player Character aboard a ship busy and useful in a fight.

The rules for world creation remain unchanged. The procedure enables the Referee to roll for the various factors which make up a world—size, atmosphere, water percentage, world government, law level, starport, and tech levels. All these will together indicate trade codes and the presence of bases, whilst the Referee determines what travel zone the world lies and what allegiances it has, if any, plus communication and trade routes. The procedure is straightforward and much less complex than the rules for either starship combat or design. In addition, there are rules and tables for social encounters, detailing NPCs, plus some sample generic stats, plus a guide to creating and running animals or xenofauna. This is perhaps the shortest section in the rulebook.

One new section specifically for the Referee provides her with a range of advice. This is broad in its coverage, its primary suggestion being for the Referee to start small with a handful of worlds and build as her players and their characters begin to explore the setting. There is advice on using contacts, enemies, and so on, as to what to allow or terms of technology since Cepheus Deluxe has a high number of baked-in features. These start with no Faster-Than-Light communication, slow interplanetary and interstellar travel, physical rather than virtual activity, and so on. The Referee is further supported with six detailed adventure seeds and then several appendices. These include a bibliography, options for using the ‘UWP’ or ‘Universal World Profile’, cyborg conversion or bio reconstruction to avoid death, and options for aliens. In general, Cepheus Deluxe is a humanocentric setting, but it is also a Science Fiction rules set, so rules for creating NPCs or Player Characters from alien species are almost obligatory. There are three given here, the Greys, the Reptiloids, and the Insectoids.

Lastly, Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition does include what every player and Referee wants for their Science Fiction roleplaying game—starship floor plans. Presented in ‘Appendix F: Schematics’—and not Appendix ‘F’ for ‘Floor Plans’, these accompany the full stats given for various spaceships earlier in the book, including an Assault Ship, Explorer, Prospector, Research vessel, Scout, and System Defence Boat. Many have a rocket-like quality to them, landing on their ends and having multiple small decks rather than fewer, but larger decks. However, they separated from their stats, and worse, they produced far too small to use with any ease.

Throughout Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition the Referee is constantly given two things. The first is options. For example, the ability to increase characteristic value once play starts; Hero Points to allow rerolls by both the players and the Referee; letting Player Characters switch Careers; allowing dodging and parrying in combat; armour as a penalty to hit rather than absorbing damage; heroes and grunts in combat for more cinematic play; and more. They lessen in number towards the end of the book, but they provide the Referee with numerous choices if she wants to tweak her Cepheus Deluxe game.

The second thing that Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition provides the Referee with, is examples. Examples of Player Character creation, combat, chases, starship combat, and so on. In some cases, more than one example, there being three examples of Player Character creation and two of combat, plus the examples of starship combat is lengthy and detailed, enabling the Referee to understand how the procedure works. In each and every case, they help to bring the rules to life.

What the Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition does is shift the ‘Classic Era Science Fiction 2D6-Based Open Gaming System’ away from its Traveller origins, and through that, any association with Imperial Science Fiction and specifically the Third Imperium, the setting for Traveller. However, the problem with that, is where it leaves Cepheus Deluxe, because it is not quite truly a generic Science Fiction roleplaying because its underlying architecture is still that of Traveller. This is not to say that Cepheus Deluxe could not do other types of Science Fiction. It could—and that includes many of the sources of inspiration listed in the roleplaying game’s Appendix A, such as The Expanse, Babylon 5, Dark Skies, and Outland. However, advice on adapting or adjusting Cepheus Deluxe to the possible subgenres of Science Fiction it could encompass, for example, Biopunk, Cyberpunk, Dieselpunk, Military Science Fiction, Space Opera, Space Western, would have been both very welcome and expanded its utility.

In some ways, this is not helped by the underwhelming treatment of alien races, either as NPCs or Player Characters. The inclusion of the three in the Appendix D feels like an afterthought. Here perhaps rules for the Referee to create her own would not have gone amiss, again, expanding the utility of Cepheus Deluxe. The inclusion of this and a more detailed examination of other genres would have made the Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition a better toolkit. Perhaps there is scope here for a Cepheus Deluxe Companion with tools, options, and essays to expand on this?

Physically, Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition is disappointing. For the most part, the layout is clean and tidy, but it does need an edit in places. Worse, the artwork is often garish and simplistic, really failing to depict the tone of the roleplaying game’s Science Fiction. Conversely, the spaceship illustrations are excellent, though small.

Cepheus Deluxe: Enhanced Edition is ultimately a passport to the Classic Era Science Fiction ‘Classic Era Science Fiction 2D6-Based Open Gaming System’. It presents and supports the Cepheus engine in a thoroughly accessible and—for the most part—supported fashion, especially with the engaging examples of play, providing the Referee with the tools to create her own content and use content available from other publishers.

When thirteen people vanish along Highway 70 in the Arizona desert in a matter of weeks, a stretch of road that the press calls it the ‘Devil’s Highway’, local enforcement is at a loss to explain the disappearances. This includes both tribal police—because Highway 70 runs through the San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation—and state police, and so the FBI is called in. Despite the wariness of the local police and the distrust of the local populace, what the agents discover is trail of bloody terror that stretches along the highway and then back across America. Investigating murder site after murder site reveals a determined monstrousness, seemingly inexplicable by normal standards, and weirdness and one implausibility after another. Do the FBI agents have one of America’s worst serial killers on their hands or is there something else going on?
This is the set-up for Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays, a scenario published by Arc Dream Publishing for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game. This is the modern roleplaying game of conspiratorial and Lovecraftian investigative horror with its conspiratorial agencies within the United States government investigating, confronting, and covering up the Unnatural—the forces and influences of Cosmic Horror—and long-time fans of Delta Green will recognise Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays. This is because it originally appeared in the Delta Green sourcebook for Call of Cthulhu, published in 1997, and was thus for many, their introduction to the world of Delta Green. Then it served as an introduction to the setting of Delta Green and the conspiracy of Delta Green, as well as a recruitment to the latter, and Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays does all three of these once again with this new version. More specifically, this version of Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays serves as an introduction to the setting of Delta Green and the conspiracy of Delta Green, as well as a recruitment to the latter, but as it was in the late nineties, when Delta Green was an off the books, unofficial, and cowboy conspiracy outside of the government, and its enemy, MAJESTIC, was very much inside. This then is an introductory scenario for Delta Green ‘Classic’, one updated to accompany Delta Green: The Conspiracy, the nineties sourcebook for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game.

The scenario is designed for a small group, as most Delta Green scenarios are. Here, the Player Characters are specifically FBI agents, almost the default Agent background for Delta Green and certainly the most familiar to players. That is really due to familiarity with a big television series of the period, The X-Files, an influence certainly on how the player and the Handler then approached the setting of Delta Green, though notably, not an influence on the designers, since the creation and appearance of Delta Green as an organisation pre-date that of the broadcasting of the series. Another parallel perhaps is with the film The Hidden, but that is lesser known and if there are parallels, then Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays goes in a very different direction to that film, most obviously in the conspiracy of Delta Green and the Unnatural of Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game.

The investigation is relatively straightforward, but rich in details, and the Agents are soon faced by a wealth of clues, often strangely pointed out to by scavengers. What the Agents initially find is a series of both bloody and bloodless deaths along the highway and nearby, but the investigation then telescopes in and out, as first the Agents discover that the trail of death leads back across the USA, and second, outside agencies—what is actually Delta Green and its enemy—take an interest in the case, the latter a very direct interest in the case, and then the identification of the prime suspect sets up a manhunt across the Arizona desert. The investigation is hampered by the distrust locally—both at large and in law enforcement—and the need to be aware of Indigenous American cultural attitudes, and not just because of native attitudes towards to the Federal authorities. Essentially, if the Agents run roughshod over them, they will find that the local Apache tribe will no longer co-operate with them. This takes some careful roleplaying upon the part of the players.

In terms of the antagonists, the alien threat and the seemingly unstoppable killer of the original Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays from 1997 remains the same in the 2024 version. What is different in the new version is the naming of the horror at the heart of the scenario and the development of the presence of the Unnatural in the scenario. This includes tying the scavenger to a particular Unnatural deity and then to a particular figure in the Delta Green Mythos, one whom only veteran players of Delta Green will recognise. Of course, if the scenario serves as the introduction to a Delta Green campaign, then that figure can appear and serve as a callback to Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays.

Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays is designed to introduce the classic period of Delta Green for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game to the players, and introduce new Agents to the conspiracy of Delta Green. To that end, the Agents are both hounded by NRO DELTA Agents of MAJESTIC and recruited by Delta Green. That said, Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays can be played as a one-shot. For campaigns set in the contemporary period of the core rules for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game, then it could possibly be run as a flashback, especially if one of the Agents is a veteran of Delta Green. There are notes on running the scenario if the Agents are already members of Delta Green, although sadly, not for adapting it to the modern period of Delta Green.

Physically, Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays is well done. Now in full colour rather than black and white as in the original Delta Green sourcebook, all of the scenario’s illustrations, handouts, and maps have been redone.

Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays has aways been regarded as a classic scenario for the Delta Green setting and after twenty-five years since it was originally published, it still stands up as a great scenario. It has fantastic cinematic pacing to it, especially in the often-desperate action scenes against its antagonist, but it gets up close and personal—especially in the autopsy scenes—where it becomes really creepy and unsettlingly, before leading to desperate action scenes once again. In many ways, Puppet Shows and Shadow Plays set Delta Green up, and it is good have it doing that job once again for the nineties for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game.

In life, you were one of society’s reprobates or worse. You were evil, villainous, even. You committed murder. You committed acts of fraud. You stole. You dealt drugs. Your actions hurt people. In life you did one, more, or even all of them. You were a vile bastard and did not care. You got rich. You got high. It did not matter. In death, it is another matter. Ultimately, deep down, you knew what you were doing was wrong. Immoral. Evil. In death, the consequences are worse than might even have imagined, that is, if you thought about it. What matters now is that you are dead and you are in pain, lying bound under a blood red, burning sky, your lips sewn up. You hear many words, but understand only one, “Rectify.” Spoken by an oily, black thing that can only be a demon, it points towards an opening in the rocks of a giant black skeleton, an archway that could be a mouth, but is more like a drain or sewer… As you drag your desiccated body over jagged rocks that tear at your skin, you enter and work your deeper and deeper, almost as if lowering yourself down a throat, and ultimately, into the bowels… of Hell. Perhaps as the begins somewhere else anew, you will have the chance to ask yourself, “What did I do wrong?” and in answering that question, find a way to answer another, “What can I do to make amends?” In other words, is there a way for you to ‘Rectify’?
Rectify is published by Hansor Publishing, best known for The Gaia Complex – A Game of Flesh and Wires. Rectify though, is a journalling game in which the Player Character is a faced with the five trials of hell, undergoing excruciating punishments for past sins, and constantly being asked to atone for the transgressions. It differs from other journalling games in a number of ways. It is systemless. In fact, it uses no mechanics whatsoever. This is both in terms of character creation and action resolution. Most journalling games provide a means of creating a character, but in Rectify, a player really only needs to know what his character’s crimes were and to able to understand why he committed them. Similarly, most roleplaying games employ a range of prompts and ideas, randomly selected through either roll of the dice or drawing of a card. Rectify does neither. Instead, it asks only a handful of questions from start to finish, the most at the end of each trial—of which there are five—The Mouth, The Throat, The Gut, The River of Blood, and The Pit. Each is a well-done vignette that asks the player to contemplate the actions of the character, preferably in a cool dark place. This though is not whole of the Reflection which Rectify asks the player to undertake, and it is here that Rectify is the most radical.

Rectify is designed as an immersive solo roleplaying game. In Rectify, the immersion comes about because the player and the character are inexplicably connected. Not because the second is the creation of the first, though that is undeniably true, but because at each of the five stages of the character’s journey to atonement, the act, or Pledge, that the player must undertake for the character to ‘rectify’, is a physical one. This comes after a moment—or even longer—of ‘Reflection’, but it is an act that as written, is carried out in the real world rather than the fantasy of Rectify. The player is recording his experiences both at the start of a period of reflection and after, and this includes the experience of carrying out the Pledge and the experience of its consequences. It those consequences that radically shift Rectify away from a fantasy, because the consequences can be life changing.

For example, the first scene takes place in The Mouth, where the theme is one of accepting your fate and being silenced. In the period of Reflection, the player calms his mind, sets aside his fear, embracing what Hell is tormenting him with, and then swallowing his (character’s) guilt, ignites his senses. This is combined with the Pledge, of which there are three options. One is eat a handful of chilli peppers, including seeds and without drinking any water; another is to fill your mouth with as many ice cubes as possible, and keeping the mouth shut until they have completely melted; and third, have the tongue pierced (by a professional). Pledges at the end of later scenes include the player confessing to something that he has kept hidden for a long time; have sex with someone (consensually) or masturbate, but always be in the moment; go and get some dental work that you have been putting off; face your biggest fear head on; and so on. Some these can have cathartic, even beneficial effects, such as such as volunteering for a helpline or support group, like the Samaritans or a food bank, or watch a film that makes you cry and enables you to express your emotions, but most are not. The problem is that although these are often thematic, such as numbing the throat through chillis or ice cubes after the character has swallowed his guilt, the physicality of these actions is going to be uncomfortable at the very least, painful at the very most.

Effectively, the immersion at the heart of Rectify is too immersive. It negates the power of the imagination and it punishes the player for his imagination. Of course, the player has not committed murder or defrauded anyone or stolen anything, and so is not being punished with a fine or a prison sentence by the authorities. He is, however, being punished for thinking about having done those things. Rectify does carry a warning about it being for mature players. That though, may not be enough.

Physically, Rectify is well presented. Done in stark black and white throughout, with pages borders that seem to squirm. The look of the journalling game is constrictive and oppressive, though the art is decent.

Rectify feels more like therapy then roleplaying game, more like a punishment than a pleasure. It blurs the line between reality and fantasy, possibly dangerously so. There is scope to explore the atonement of the guilty and the wicked in roleplaying games, but that is best left to the fantasy and a line drawn between it and the reality. Something that Rectify fails to do.

Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #9: Grave Matters is a scenario for Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game and the ninth 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 #9: Grave Matters, 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 #9: Grave Matters is a short, one or two session scenario which takes place over the course of a single evening. Designed for two or three Player Characters of Second Level, it opens with them being approached by Faukel, an elderly, though still tough warrior and ex-member of the Slayer’s Guild. He has a job for them which requires both their skills and their discretion. Something belonging to his employer—a respected figure in the more shadowy parts of the city—has been stolen and he wants the Player Characters to recover it. Which for experienced burglars like the Player Characters sounds easy enough, but unsurprisingly, there are complications. First, there is a deadline. The stolen item is due to be smuggled out of the city in the next two days and is currently in the possession of the smugglers. Second, Faukel’s employer wants it done without resorting to killing anyone and offers to pay the Player Characters a bonus if they manage that. Third, there is the nature of the item that Faukel’s employer wants recovered—it is a sarcophagus. So quite a hefty item, and yes, it does have a body still in it! Fourth, the smugglers, the ‘Grave Men’, who were the ones to hire the thieves who stole the sarcophagus, are connected to the Thieves’ Guild. The latter is possibly the most dangerous aspect of accepting the task. The Thieves’ Guild does not take kindly to freelance thieves, those who do not operate according to its rules or pay their dues, more so if the freelance thieves either steal from or kill actual members of the Thieves’ Guild.

There is also a fifth difficulty. The ‘Grave Men’ are not fools and so they have set up precautions and alarms to prevent their base of operations being broken into by thieves. The Player Characters, as experienced thieves and second storey men, should be used to that, and act and plan accordingly. The base of operations is actually an embalming business, a useful façade that also provides the means to smuggle items out of the city—embalmed bodies have plenty of cavities. ‘Brevak’s Embalming and Funeral Arts’ is still a going concern and is a mapped out and described in no little detail across its several floors. In order to not attract attention, the Player Characters will primarily relying on stealth, but there are opportunities for a fight or two, as well as traps to disarm and locks to be picked as you would expect. The cover of the scenario actually depicts the embalming room, which is an entertainingly weird location to have a fight and it should definitely involve or more of the NPCs or Player Characters being pitched off the walkways in the room and into the stinking embalming vats. Then, when it comes to the getting the sarcophagus out of the embalmer’s building, the easiest method would be to use one of the business’ hearses—and perhaps, if that sets up a chase, with one hearse careering after another through the streets of Lankhmar, it would be a fitting way to end the scenario!
However, ‘Grave Matters’ is not the only scenario in Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #9: Grave Matters. There is a second scenario, ‘The Madhouse Meet’. Originally appearing in Dungeon Crawl Classics: Lankhmar – The Madhouse Meet/Mutant Crawl Classics: The Museum at the End of the Time, Goodman Games’ release for Free RPG Day in 2016, it is an introductory scenario for Dungeon Crawl Classics: Lankhmar, intended as a ‘Meet’ for First Level Player Characters. A Meet’ adventure begins with a situation in which the Player Characters find themselves all together despite never having met before, and forces them to work together to get out of the situation they find themselves in. ‘The Madhouse Meet’ does that with a classic story situation. In this case, it is in the same cell somewhere in the city of Lankhmar, manacled to the wall. The challenge for the Player Characters is to both get out of their predicament and discover is responsible, which the scenario lets them do. The first issue for the Player Characters once they are free is reequipping themselves, since all of their possessions have been taken. This includes weapons, so like the earlier ‘Grave Matters’, this is a scenario where the Player Characters to employ stealth rather than force of arms—mostly because they lack the arms to apply the force.
The dungeon beyond the cell where the Player Characters find themselves waking up is a relatively straightforward and quite small, but it is highly detailed and there is a lot here for the Player Characters to investigate and examine.  Where the scenario as presented originally in Dungeon Crawl Classics: Lankhmar – The Madhouse Meet/Mutant Crawl Classics: The Museum at the End of the Time, felt divorced from Lankhmar and could have been set anyway, here it feels more grounded and it gives the Player Characters, at the end of the scenario, the opportunity to go home to Lankhmar. It also provides the opportunity for the Player Characters to forge relationships and connections with each other, ready for the Judge to run more scenarios using the Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar Boxed Set. Part of that is the weirdness of the encounters in the asylum where they had just been held in captivity, which lean into the sorcery of the swords & sorcery genre. For the Judge, there is an alternate ending. This sets up the primary antagonist as a recurring villain, who is weird and creepy himself, rather being killed at the end of this scenario.
‘The Madhouse Meet’ is a solid ‘Meet’ scenario, one which pushes the Player Characters to rely on their skills and abilities rather than their gear. So, this is testing affair, one which will probably take a session or two to play through. In comparison, ‘Grave Matters’ lets the Player Characters use their skills and abilities to the fullest, aided by their equipment, and get them to plan and execute a burglary just as they are expected to in Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar Boxed Set.
Physically, Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #9: Grave Matters is well presented. Both artwork and cartography are good, although ‘Grave Matters’ looks very much more like a scenario for Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar than ‘The Madhouse Meet’.
Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #9: Grave Matters provides an alternative means to get the players and characters involved both with each other and in Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar with ‘The Madhouse Meet’ and a nicely done adventure which the Judge can run after the Player Characters have had an adventure or two. Overall, Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar #9: Grave Matters is a sold pair of scenarios for use with the Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar Boxed Set.

First broadcast six decades ago, Thunderbirds is a classic of British children’s television, combining the advanced puppetry of ‘Supermarionation’ with superb scale models and special effects. The result still stands up today as exciting television with great music and amazing opening credits. The series told of the daring missions to save life and limb conducted by International Rescue, a secret non-government organisation dedicated to rescuing those that governments cannot. It is equipped with a fleet of advanced vehicles, each with Thunderbird call sign, enabling its operatives to conduct air, land, sea, and space missions from its secret base on an island in the Pacific Ocean. Ex-astronaut Jeff Tracy leads International Rescue, but it is his sons that conduct the missions, supported by Brains, who develops and builds new vehicles, and Lady Penelope, the organisation’s London ‘secret’ agent. Opposing International Rescue is the criminal and terrorist, The Hood, who uses disguises and constantly plots to steal International Rescue’s technological secrets and make a fortune by selling them to the criminal underworld.

The Gerry Anderson television series has been the subject of previous board games, most notably, Thunderbirds, designed by Matt Leacock and published by Modiphius Entertainment in 2015. The latest game based on the series is the card game, Thunderbirds Danger Zone: The Game, published by YAY Games. Designed to be played by two to six players, aged ten and up, it is a co-operative game in which the players attempt to complete seven missions. Each of the seven is based on a classic episode—‘End of the Road’, ‘Pit of Peril’, ‘30 Minutes After Noon’, ‘Trapped in the Sky’’, Vault of Death’, ‘Terror in New York City’, and ‘The Impostors’—and the game can be played through in between twenty and forty minutes, depending upon the difficulty and length of a mission. In the game, each player takes turns playing the role of Jeff Tracy, leader of International Resource, who will marshal four types of resource—‘Team Spirit’, ‘Fuel’, Tech’, and ‘Knowledge’—that will get the members of International Rescue on a Journey to the Danger Zone where they can conduct the rescue. If the players get both the right members of International Rescue and the right resources to the right places, they can complete a mission and win the game!

Thunderbirds Danger Zone: The Game consists of several sets of cards. The first are the Danger Zone cards. There are three of these per mission and each shows which resources and character is needed to complete that part of the mission. The Journey cards represents the steps needed to get to the mission, represented by the Danger Zone cards and have their own requirements in terms of resources. The Resource cards show a mix of Resource types, either three or all four, and their number. The Tracy Island cards have countdowns on them of various lengths, from ten to four turns, and are used to set the game’s difficulty, ten being the easiest, , four being the hardest. There are also reference cards for the various Actions that the characters can take, Tokens to represent each character, Journey Tokens to increase the difficulty a bit more, a Countdown Marker to use on the Tracy Island cards, and Tokens used to indicate that a resource has been successfully supplied.

To set up a mission, its three Mission cards are placed in a row and three Journey cards, either those for the mission or three random, are laid out in a row below the Mission cards. A Journey Token is placed on each Journey card, either a resource or The Hood. The Journey Token increases the number of Resources needed to complete the Journey card, whilst the presence of The Hood reduces the number of Resources the players can play. Each of the three Mission cards has an associated character on it, and the Token for each is placed below the corresponding Mission card and Journey card, along with another Journey Token.

Each round, the players each has a hand of three Resource cards. One player is designated to take the role of Jeff Tracy and he will ask the other players to supply him with resources to fulfil one of the Resource requirements, first on the Journey cards, and then on the Mission cards. Each player selects a card from his hand and places it face down. The Jeff Tracy player selects two of these face down Resource cards. If the total number of the resources on the Resource cards selected match the number on the designated Journey card or Mission card—adjusted for the Journey Token or The Hood on the Journey card—then the action succeeds and the Jeff Tracy player can place a Success Token on that Resource. If the players have been unable to supply enough Resources, the Jeff Tracy player can swap one of the Resource cards he choose, with a Resource card of his own. If the Jeff Tracy player cannot match the number of Resources indicated on the Journey card or Resource card, the action fails, the Countdown Marker is moved down one space on the Tracy Island card.

The round ends and all cards played are discarded. Players draw back up to three Resource cards, except the Jeff Tracy player if he swapped one of his Resource cards. In this case, he starts the next round with two Resource cards. The Jeff Tracy token is passed to the next player and the new round begins.

The aim is move all three Character Tokens for a mission through the Journey card and onto the Mission Card. This is done by fulfilling all of the Resource requirements for the Journey card. Once all three Character Tokens have been moved from their respective Journey cards to the Mission cards, play continues in the same fashion until either all of the Resource requirements for each Mission card has been fulfilled and the Mission completed with a successful rescue, or the Countdown Marker runs out of space on the Tracy Island card, in which case, International Rescue has failed to complete the mission and the players have lost the game.

Initially, the Jeff Tracy player will have no real idea as to what Resources to ask for, so the players do not know which of the Resource cards in their hands to play with any certainty. However, once a particular Resource on a Journey card or a Mission card, the choices will begin to tighten and a player can husband his Resource cards and perhaps save particular cards for later rounds. Should the Jeff Tracy player swap a card to fulfil a Resource requirement, then the Jeff Tracy player on the next round will know one of the cards that player has a holdover from the previous round. In general, though, because Resource cards are kept hidden in each player’s hand, there is an element of uncertainty to play, which will of course, grow and grow as the players get closer to completing a Mission and the Countdown Marker slides down Tracy Island. On side effect of keeping the Resource cards hidden, is that there is no ‘Alpha’ player, no one player ‘suggesting’ the best course of action for everyone. The revolving role of Jeff Tracy enforces that too because it puts a different person in charge from round to round.

Beyond the core game, Thunderbirds Danger Zone: The Game adds options that increase both theme and complexity. These primarily give more options for the Jeff Tracy player. If the players manage to supply sufficient Resources on a turn, he has an extra pair of options. One is to ‘Prepare Pod and Equipment’, the other is to provide ‘Mission Support’. The ‘Prepare Pod and Equipment’ action is necessary because all of the six missions beyond the beginning mission, ‘End of the Road’, have Pods and Equipment. The Pods hold the special vehicles built by Brains and are transported by Thunderbird 2 piloted by Virgil Tracy. For example, the ‘Pit of Peril’ mission requires ‘The Mole’ and ‘Recovery Vehicles’, and the Equipment includes ‘Explosives’. What it means is the players have layers of cards each with their own Resource requirements, adding to demands of play and lengthening game play, but at the same time adding theme too.

‘Mission Support’ is carried out by bringing another character and his token into play, which is done by playing Resource card showing that character. These cannot be the characters actually on the mission, and provide the players with an advantageous action. For example, Lady Penelope has ‘Inside Information’ that lets the Jeff Tracy player reveal a third Resource card in play and use that instead of the one he has already selected, whilst Scott Tracy, as ‘Team Leader’, can use the Team Spirit Resource on one Resource card as the Knowledge Resource on another, and vice versa. The ‘Mission Support’ from any one character can only be used twice before he needs to be reactivated again. The Jeff Tracy player can conduct multiple ‘Mission Support’ actions.
Physically, Thunderbirds Danger Zone: The Game is well presented. The cards are of good stock and the tokens of sturdy cardboard. The rules leaflet is clearly laid out and easy to read. All three—especially the cards—are illustrated with photographs from the television series, and the particular episodes depicted in the seven Mission cards.
Thunderbirds Danger Zone: The Game is a serviceable card game that as a co-operative game interestingly introduces mechanics that avoid the ‘alpha player’ problem found in many co-operative games. As a game itself, it is perfectly playable, but ultimately, Thunderbirds Danger Zone: The Game really is a game for Thunderbirds fans and they are really going to get the most out of it.

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

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

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Name: Pass The Giggle WaterPublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Christopher DiFoggio

Setting: Arkham, 1929
Product: Scenario for Call of Cthulhu: Arkham
What You Get: Thirty page, 5.30 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: A race against the rage...Plot Hook: When rage comes to Arkham, can the source be found?Plot Support: Staging advice, eight NPCs, ten handouts, one map, and two Mythos monsters.Production Values: Untidy.
Pros# Scenario for Call of Cthulhu: Arkham & Lovecraft Country# Introduces NESI or ‘New England Shadow Investigations’ as an Investigator organisation# Can be played with one Investigator
# Angrophobia# Toxicophobia# Methyphobia
Cons# Needs a good edit# Linear# More floorplans and maps a necessity# Includes a deathtrap which might kill everyone# Another poisoned alcohol scenario for Call of Cthulhu# If the safest route into the mansion is via the basement, how do the Investigators get to the basement?
Conclusion# Underdeveloped and under presented# Potentially serviceable scenario that almost works, but ultimately is something for the Keeper to fix

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

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

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Name: The Schoolmarm’s GhostPublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Andy Miller

Setting: Oregon, 1877
Product: One-on-one scenario for Down Darker Trails: Terrors of the Mythos
What You Get: Fifty-eight page, 23.36 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Ghost, but in the Beaver StatePlot Hook: An inheritance and a haunting points to...?
Plot Support: Staging advice, one pre-generated Investigator, eight NPCs, sixteen handouts and images, seven maps and floorplans, three Mythos tomes, and two Mythos monsters.Production Values: Decent.
Pros# Scenario for Down Darker Trails: Terrors of the Mythos# Scenario for one player and her Keeper# Good introduction to both Call of Cthulhu and Down Darker Trails
# Probably the best conversion notes in the world
# Richly detailed investigation# Extensive notes included# Phasmophobia# Osmophobia# Androphobia
Cons# Needs a slight edit# Scenario hook is a Call of Cthulhu cliché
Conclusion# Excellent, easily adapted introduction for one player and her Keeper# Takes a hoary old cliché and turns it into a richly detailed and thoroughly enjoyable investigation in the Old West

In the far future of the 41st Millenium, the Gilead System has been isolated from the Imperium of Man by the Cicatrix Maledictum, the Great Rift that unleashed waves of supernatural darkness and malignant power from the Realm of Chaos. The system, rent by internal strife and disagreement from within as to how to survive and threatened by the Ruinous Powers and its allies from without, teetered on the edge of collapse, but hope arrived in the form of the Varonius Flotilla, a Rogue Trader fleet under the command of Jakel Varonius, bringing ships and forces which could ensure the system’s survival. The only vessels to have made contact since the opening of the Great Rift, the Varonius Flotilla is seen across the Gilead System as its saviour, but the fleet alone can only so much. There are wars across the system, the chances of starvation grow daily, and alliances have to be made, even with xenos. This is a time for heroes, for ordinary men as well the Imperium’s genetically enhanced super soldiers, the Space Marines, Psykers, scribes, and others to work together to withstand the Chaos and protect all those it would suborn and destroy. Under the command of Jakel Varonius himself, such agents will become the most distant, but worthy arm and blade of the Emperor himself! Can the agents save the Gilead System? Will ‘wrath and glory’ be theirs?

This is the set-up for the Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory – Starter Set. Published by Cubicle 7 Entertainment, this is the second attempt at a starter set for the Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory, previously published by Ulisses Spiele in 2019. It follows the same format as the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Starter Set in providing everything needed to play and get started in action, horror, and intrigue of the 41st Millenium. This includes ‘Traitor’s Hymn’, an adventure set aboard the Varonius Flotilla; ‘The Varonius Flotilla’, a guide to the fleet; six character sheets; three reference sheets; Wrath, Glory, and Ruin; and a set of eight six-sided dice, including a Wrath Die. ‘Traitor’s Hymn’ is a detailed adventure designed to introduce both the setting and the mechanics of Wrath & Glory, but ‘The Varonius Flotilla’ is designed to not only detail that setting, but also support further play with both background and further play with extra scenarios that will extend the usefulness of the Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory – Starter Set.

Open the Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory – Starter Set and the first thing that you see is a gatefold sheet with the words ‘READ THIS FIRST’ on it. This introduces the basics of everything about Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory, essentially preparing each player for his first choice—what will he roleplay? Underneath is a sheaf of six gatefold character sheets, each of which details a Player Character or Agent. A lot of thought has gone in terms of the design of these gatefold character sheets. On the front of each, there is a summary of who and what the Agent is, as well as warning not to open the character sheet up unless the player is definitely planning to roleplay that character. Inside, the character sheet presents the stats and details in easy-to-read fashion, plus a background, and possible connections with the other Agents, secrets, and objectives. It includes notes on each Agent’s talents, abilities, and equipment too. There is a full-page illustration of the character on the back. None of the secrets are heretical, but they are often dark and may make life difficult for the Agent. The Agents consist of a Sanctioned Psyker, a Sister of Battle, a Rogue Trader, a Skitarius, an Aeldari Ranger, and a Space Marine Scout. The inclusion of an Aeldari Ranger, a Xenos, indicates the desperation which is driving the surviving factions and forces in the Gilead System to work together.

‘Traitor’s Hymn’ is the beginning scenario. It is designed to introduce the setting, the Agents, and the concepts behind the roleplaying game in a step-by-step process. As play begins the Agents are aboard The Herald Varonius, a voidship transporting notables to the Varonius Flotilla. They are attending a grand banquet for the guests aboard when everything goes awry. Before that, each Agent receives a flashback which allows his player to make a choice, roll some dice for the first time, and have some time in the spotlight. The events of all six flashbacks tie into the adventure. There is the chance to learn a few more clues before the action begins and the voidship is inexplicably thrown into the Void. However, the Geller Field which would normally protect the crew and passengers of The Herald Varonius is fluctuating, which means her Geller Field Generator is malfunctioning. Which means the Agents are going to make their way into the bowels of the ship in order to find the cause and if they can, fix it. Between them lie Chaos infestations and manifestations, cultists, and worse, via an entrail-strewn library, a combat turned execution arena, twisted hydroponics gardens, and more before they reach the bowels of the vessel and discover the real culprits behind the situation The Herald Varonius finds itself in.

Mechanically, the Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory – Starter Set, and thus Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory, is a dice pool system using six-sided dice. Rolls of four and five are counted as ‘Icons’, and a roll of six as ‘Exalted Icons’. Tests are typically rolled as combinations of an attribute and a skill, or just the attribute, the latter being fairly broad, with a Difficulty Number of three being ‘Standard’ difficulty and a Difficulty Number of five being ‘Challenging’ difficulty. If a player rolls a number of Icons equal to the Difficulty Number, the task is successful. Any ‘Exalted Icons’ rolls are worth two Icons rather than one. However, if enough Icons are rolled on a test and there are any ‘Exalted Icons’ left over, they can be ‘Shifted’, or removed from the dice pool. A ‘Shifted Exalted Icon’ can be sued to gain more information, make the Test exceptional and give an extra beneficial outcome, add an extra Effect Die in combat, or add a point of Glory to the party’s pool.

Included with any roll, is the Wrath Die. This is of a different colour. It works like a standard die, except when one or six is rolled. On a one, it adds a complication to the task, whereas a roll of six is counted as an ’Exalted Icon’, but also adds a point of Glory to the party pool. In combat, it indicates that a Critical Hit has been scored. A player also has access to Wrath Points. These can be spent to reroll all dice that rolled a one, two, or three on the dice in a Test, add a minor element to the narrative, or to take an Action to recover Shock which has either been lost through combat or misadventure. The party as a whole, has access to the Glory Pool. Glory Points can be spent to add dice to a test, to add more damage to a successful attack, to improve the effect of a Critical Hit, or to seize the initiative.

Combat uses the same rules, with an Agent able to take a Combat Action, a Simple Action, a Reflexive Action, a Movement Action, and a Free Action on his Turn. Initiative simply passes back and forth between the players and the Game Master until everyone has acted. Both Armour and an Agent’s Resilience stop damage, any left over being suffered as Wounds. The Wounded Condition means that the Difficulty Number for Tests increases, but a player can roll his character’s Determination. Any Icons from this roll convert Wounds to Shock, but suffer too much Shock and an Agent may end up exhausted.

Fear Tests are based on an Agent’s Resolve, failure giving the Agent the Fear Condition. Corruption Tests are based on the severity of the source of Corruption, a player rolling his Agent’s Conviction to withstand its effects. Corruption will increase the Difficulty Number for future Corruption and Mutation Tests. The latter will occur when the number of Corruption Points exceeds an Agent’s Conviction. The Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory – Starter Set only provides a few options for Mutations, there being a more extensive list and advanced rules in the core rulebook for Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory.

Whilst the Players have access to Wrath and Glory, the Game Master has Ruin. Points of Ruin are gained when an Agent fails a Corruption Test or a Fear Test, or the Game Master rolls a six on the Wrath Die. She can expend it to reroll failures on Test, to Seize the Initiative or have NPC act in an ambush, to restore an NPC’s Shock, and to make a Determination roll. Ruin is also spent to activate certain abilities on NPCs and creatures of Chaos.

‘The Varonius Flotilla’, the second book in the Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory – Starter Set, details both the Varonius Flotilla and the Gilead System. This includes the major NPCs with their goals and agendas and their quirks and secrets, and the various ships of the fleet, the last being The Herald of Varonius. The latter is where ‘Traitor’s Hymn’ is set and it is also the reward which the Agents are assigned at the end of the scenario. What that does, is give them the means to travel back and forth across the Gilead System, undertake further missions, and do both with some agency. ‘The Varonius Flotilla’ notes that of Jakel Varonius, the rogue trader and commander of the fleet, has brought the shuttles across the whole fleet under his command to lessen individual ship control, tie the fleet together, and to give him an information network in the form of the shuttle pilots. Besides bringing support and relief to the Gilead System, the Varonius Flotilla is also searching for resources in the system to exploit, despite it having been settled and worked for millennia.

The ’Ports of Call’ section details the eight worlds of the Gilead System, including the major locations, NPCs, threats faced by the world, and important features. Notably, there is one of each major type of world found within the system, thus, Gilead Primus is a Hive World, Ostia an Agri World, Enoch a Shrine World, and so on. Each world is given a couple of adventure hooks as well. Lastly, there is a discussion of the Warrant of Trade that Jakel Varonius holds as a Rogue Trader, before ‘The Varonius Flotilla’ presents six further adventures that will take the Agents back and forth across the Gilead System. In terms of play, these are relatively, offering a single session each unless the Game Master wants to flesh them out further. In comparison, ‘Traitor’s Hymn’ will probably take tow to three sessions to play through.

One issue in terms of play between ‘Traitor’s Hymn’ and six extra scenarios is that the Agents are not going to improve or learn from their experience. To do that, the Game Master will need access to the core rulebook for Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory. That said, a starter set is typically not designed to facilitate that aspect of play, the Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory – Starter Set being no different here, and of course, the Game Master can adjudicate the rewards as necessary if her players want to continue playing beyond the confines of the Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory – Starter Set.

Another issue is the player count required for the Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory – Starter Set. There are six Player Characters or Agents, but ‘Traitor’s Hymn’ requires a minimum of five players. It can be played with four players, but one of the other Agents becomes a communal NPC. It is a high demand, and perhaps it could have been written with the lower player count in mind and allowed for an adjustment in terms of more rather than fewer players.

In terms of setting, the Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory – Starter Set draws the Game Master, her players, and their Agents in a couple of steps. First, ‘Traitor’s Hymn’ gives an immediate experience of the milieu and sets them to explore the setting of the Gilead System detailed in ‘The Varonius Flotilla’. Together, the two books do the same for the wider setting of the Gilead System detailed in Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory. However, there is a third thing that it should do as well, and that is follow in the footsteps of the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Starter Set which is supported by its own series of scenario anthologies, beginning with Ubersreik Adventures: Six Grim and Perilous Scenarios in the Duchy of Ubersreik. That enables the Game Master and her players to continue playing with the same Player Characters and in the same setting.

Much like the earlier Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Starter Set, the Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory – Starter Set is not a good introduction to roleplaying and nor is it designed to be. It just does not start from the first principles to do that, but that is fine, because as an introduction to Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory, it does a very good job and does so in an attractive package. Similarly, the rules presented have been stripped down from the core rulebook, but there is more than enough to play through the contents in the Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory – Starter Set. If the Game Master and her players have access to the Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory core rules, it would be possible for the players to create their own Agents and play through the scenarios included here, but unless they adhere to the archetypes given in the Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory – Starter Set, some of the nuances of the pre-generated Agents and their ties to the Gilead System and the events of the scenario in ‘Traitor’s Hymn’ may be lost.
Physically, the Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory – Starter Set is a handsome boxed set. Everything inside is of good quality—the gatefold character sheets are particularly well done—and vibrantly illustrated. It does, unfortunately, need an edit in places.

Overall, the Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory – Starter Set is an impressive introduction to the setting of the Gilead System and Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory, its playthrough preparing the Game Master and her players for wider adventures. For anyone wanting to roleplay the action, horror, and intrigue of the 41st Millenium, the Warhammer 40,000: Wrath & Glory – Starter Set is the perfect place to make that stand against corruption, chaos, and Chaos!

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?Rubble Redux: Insula of the Waning Moon is a supplement for use with RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha which details an insula or city block with the ruins of the Big Rubble in Prax. It includes a complete description of an atypical city block in the Old City and an example city block, the eponymous ‘Insula of the Waning Moon’, plus four scenarios.

It is a ninety-four page, full colour hardback.

The layout is tidy and it is decently illustrated and comes with extensive floorplans. The Greek style illustrations are nice touch.
The PDF includes floorplans which can be used with miniatures.
It needs an edit.
Where is it set?Rubble Redux: Insula of the Waning Moon is set in the ruins of Big Rubble in Prax. It is set after the liberation of Pavis by Argrath.
Who do you play?
Rubble Redux: Insula of the Waning Moon does not require any specific character type.
What do you need?
Rubble Redux: Insula of the Waning Moon requires RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and the RuneQuest: Glorantha Bestiary.

The Big Rubble: The Deadly City will also be useful.
It is a suitable addition to New Pavis: City on the Edge of Forever and the rest of The Pavis & Big Rubble Companion series with some adjustment.

What do you get?Rubble Redux: Insula of the Waning Moon draws upon archaeological plans to present a type of building block found across the old city of Pavis and the Big Rubble, which can be found in various states of repair across the ruin. This is a large, square city block complete with businesses and residences. In the case of the Insula of the Waning Moon, these consist of food sellers, an oil seller, stables and a carter, and an inn, plus residences and a sunken garden. These are mapped out in some detail with a series of large, easy-to-read floor plans measured in one Mostal (or metre) squares.
The insulae were standard designs across the whole of Lord Pavis’ city and details the history and general features of the design, the history of their ownership and how that changed from being municipal to hereditary, and how the design changed as the city’s fortunes declined. Thus, they can be in various states of repair, from simple walls to fortified strongholds in various locations throughout the Big Rubble. This is a possible subject for expansion and a table of ideas as to what might be found in insulae across the various building phases their design would have been useful.
The supplement also address the change in attitudes to adventuring in the Big Rubble with the liberation of Pavis. Where the Lunar administration encouraged adventuring, now it is seen as looting the city’s cultural identity. There is also the push to clear and resettle parts of the Big Rubble. This presents other opportunities for work, though, and building materials from the insulae are still worth salvaging. In addition, a group of Player Characters could actually settle in the Big Rubble, finding an insula that they can occupy and fortify. This is not without its risks as their presence will attract the attention of predators—both human and non-human—from the surrounding area.
There are four adventures in Rubble Redux: Insula of the Waning Moon. The first two short, one-session affairs and both involve vermin and both involve the Player Characters simply walking past the insula. In ‘Thirsty Work, the Player Characters come to the aid of a family living the ruins which is using the well in the Insula of the Waning Moon as its source of water, but it has dried up. There is not much to reward the Player Characters if they help, except the gratitude of the family and the knowledge that they have rid the Big Rubble of one more Chaos beast. The second scenario, ‘Lucky Snake Ball’, begins when the Player Characters see snakes slithering across their path and into the insula. Inside they discover a ball of writhing, fighting snakes. Dealing with the odd phenomenon reveals a second problem, one very common to the Big Rubble. It should also expose the cause of the ‘snake ball’, which a rather neat little magical item.
The third scenario, ‘No Good Deed’, is the longest and most heavily plotted of the four, as well as the most traditional. The head of one of the Pavis Survivors clans employs the Player Characters to find his daughter who he thinks has run off to become a Lunar convert after she saw the good work that their missionaries were doing in the Big Rubble. Which is made all the more difficult because the Lunars have fled Pavis. The Player Characters will need to deal with some of the poorer inhabitants of Pavis that live in the ruins and who are very wary of strangers. Eventually, they can track her down to the Insula of the Waning Moon, where she is not living with Lunar missionaries, but has been captured by a gang looking to hold her to ransom. The gang is on the make, so seasoned adventurers will not find its members to be two much of threat, although they could get lucky, plus they have the benefit of being holed up in the insula. How the Player Characters deal with the problem is left up to them, obvious solutions such as paying the ransom or mounting a rescue are described in detail.
The fourth scenario is more of a set-up than an adventure. In ‘First Rule of Fight Club’, the Player Characters are hired to escort a party overnight out into the Big Rubble to a ruined insula. As the title suggests, a fight club is being run. Not though, with the Player Characters, but with slaves. How the Player Characters deal with this is left up to them, although a rescue attempt would be very dangerous. They could take the money or they could devise a solution, it all depends on how they feel about the moral dilemma presented to them.
All four scenarios take place in then Insula of the Waning Moon. This, though, is not all at the same time and the only factor linking the four scenarios is the city block itself. So, they do not form a campaign. Instead, the insula is somewhere that the Player Characters might pass again and again and nothing happen, but very occasionally it does or they have reason to go there. This makes Rubble Redux: Insula of the Waning Moon easy to drop into an ongoing campaign set in Pavis and the Big Rubble.
Where the scenarios could have been improved is in the presentation of the set-up and possible consequences. The set-up for each is written for the player’s benefit rather than the Game Master’s, so it does take a while for the Game Master to actually find out what is going on, and the consequences of the scenarios are also always fully explored, especially, in some cases, the consequences of the Player Characters doing nothing.
Is it worth your time?Yes—Rubble Redux: Insula of the Waning Moon is a solid addition to any campaign set in Pavis and the Big Rubble, with a building type that can be easily customised and four scenarios to slot in between the major plots of the campaign.No—Rubble Redux: Insula of the Waning Moon is ideally suitable for campaigns with extensive urban and ruined areas, such as Pavis and the Big Rubble, and that is not where my campaign is set.Maybe—Rubble Redux: Insula of the Waning Moon because the Lunars and the war against inflicted a lot of damage, so the insula could be relocated to any formerly Lunar-occupied town or city that has city blocks and its scenarios adapted to the new locations.

A line of cars, black, with the Stars & Stripes fluttering from the bonnet. The scene jumps. A cheering crowd, flags in their hands, waving. A band strikes up with anthem that always announces his arrival. Men in black, sunglasses hiding their eyes, but you know they are looking. Are they looking for you? You look up. The man in the suit. Striding. Waving. Grinning to the crowd, but not to you. The scene jumps again. Looking at the man. Looking at where you are, but from far away. It jumps again. Hands move quickly. They know what they are doing. There is something in those hands. Is it a device? A trigger? A rifle? There is bang. Close to you. The scene jumps. There are screams. People are running. You cannot see the man… Oh my god! Is it real? Will it be real? Will you be there? Fortunately, this is a vision, a premonition, it has not happened. Yet. But it might. Someone really wants to assassinate the President of the United States and the someone is the USSR. Nobody is going to believe you though, nobody except your fellow psychics in the program. Certainly not since the head of the program was killed in a car crash—why did nobody see that coming?—and funding from the US government got cut… Now it is just you, armed with your premonitions, which stands between you and the death of the leader of the free world and the consequences that would have.
This is the set-up for Project Cassandra: Psychics of the Cold War, a roleplaying of secret government projects and conspiracies in which the psychically gifted, trained as part of a program to spy on the Soviets, are the only ones who know that the President of the United States’ life is in danger. Except, of course, for those involved in the conspiracy to assassinate him. Published by LunarShadow Designs as part of ZineQuest #3 following a successful Kickstarter campaign, it is designed to be played as a one-shot, of the Player Characters responding to the premonition and attempting to prevent it from happening, but it can be played as a longer campaign and it need not be about the assassination of the President. There are plenty of pinch points throughout the Cold War, from the Hungarian Uprising and the Bay of Pigs to the Moon landings and the stationing of Pershing missiles in Germany, which serve as inspiration for Project Cassandra: Psychics of the Cold War.

However, given its subject matter, what inspires Project Cassandra: Psychics of the Cold War is not the obvious cinema and television of the period. So instead of dark psychological thrillers or the constant dread of all too many of those who lived through the era, it takes its inspirations from lighter fare. The question is, what exactly is that inspiration? If not The Manchurian Candidate or The Parallax View, or similar films and television series, the most obvious inspirations, what then? These after all, are not only great cinema, but also great inspiration in terms of tone and atmosphere. Unfortunately, Project Cassandra: Psychics of the Cold War does not include a bibliography and that is a serious failing. So why not dark psychological thrillers or the constant dread? The simple answer is Safety Tools. This is not a criticism of Safety Tools in general. They deserve a place in the roleplaying hobby and they deserve a place in Project Cassandra: Psychics of the Cold War since it is set in the past when negative social attitudes were rife. Yet to ignore the inspirations for its inspiration means that Project Cassandra: Psychics of the Cold War is really doing a disservice to its audience. It should not only have included them, it should have included them as an option and allowed the Game Master and her players to make that choice given the genre of Project Cassandra: Psychics of the Cold War.

A Player Character in Project Cassandra has an Identity, a Background, ten Skills, several Knowledges or areas in which he is an expert, and a single, unique psychic power. The Skills are divided between three categories: Mental, Physical, and Specialist. The Skills can be anything that a player likes, but the Mental and Physical, skills are broad, whereas the Specialist skills are fairly narrow. To create a character, a player assigns a Rank value of one to one of the three categories, and a Rank value of two to the remaining pair. The player assigns four Skills to one category and three skills to each of the other two. The Player Character starts with a single Knowledge. It has no numerical value, but is used once per session to introduce a fact or truth related to the Knowledge into the game.

Identity: Maureen Herslag
Background: Housewife
Premonitions: 14
Mental – 2: Intimidation, Haggle, Chutzpah, Being Nosy
Physical – 2: Cleaning, Look Anonymous, Dodge, Athletics
Specialist – 1: Pistols, Self Defence,
Knowledge: Cookery
Power: Yesterday

Project Cassandra uses what it calls the Precognition Engine. To undertake an action, a player must roll six six-sided dice and obtain as many successes as he can. Each roll equal to or under the value of the skill counts as a success. The difficulty and the number of successes that a player has to roll varies between one and seven, the latter being almost impossible. Successes can also be spent to overcome a challenge, such as picking a lock or punching out a senator’s aide/Communist sympathiser, representing both the amount of effort it takes and the amount of time it takes. It might be done in a single action, or it might take several. A failed roll will result in a Player Character suffering a consequence, typically a narrative consequence, but it can also be a condition, such Paranoid or Bloodied. A player can choose to suffer a Condition in order to gain an extra success, meaning that it has come at some cost. A Condition can increase the difficulty or it can make a Player Character’s Premonitions more difficult to use.

A Player Character starts play with fourteen Premonitions. These represent his ability to see the immediate future and can be used to reroll any dice that did not roll successes. They recover slowly, at a rate of one Premonition per night of rest. A Player Character’s tenth and fifth Premonition is special. It grants the Player Character a more detailed vision of the future, specifically about the next scene. A Premonition is also used to activate a Player Character’s power. Most people will be unaware of psychic powers, but some are Nulls, who have no psychic footprint and who can negate a Player Character’s power if it is used directly on them. The conspiracy does employ Null agents as well as psychic agents.

The set-up to Project Cassandra is intended to be fairly freeform. It begins with the players and the Game Master building a conspiracy. Together they create an Opening Vision and answer some Conspiracy Questions. This should set the era, the nature of the conspiracy, and so on. Typically, this will involve the assassination of the President. For example, ‘How will the President be killed?’, ‘Where will the attack take place?’, and ‘Why will the world believe you are responsible?’. Project Cassandra incudes some sample questions, an example of play, and good advice for the Game Master on running the game and what Safety Tools to use. There are notes too on running longer term conspiracies—longer than four sessions—but they are fairly brief.

Besides five ready-to-play Player Characters, Project Cassandra includes two Mission Profiles, also ready to play. The Opening Vision of ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ sees President Kennedy assassinated in Berlin in June 1963, and starts with a bang for the Player Characters, whilst ‘The Dark of the Moon’ is pulpier in tone, asking the Player Characters to confront what hidden secrets Apollo 12 brought back from the Moon. Both come complete with questions to set the stakes and details of the conspiracy.

Physically, Project Cassandra: Psychics of the Cold War is generally well presented and nicely illustrated. However, it could have been much better organised and it takes a while to work out quite what is going on. Once done, the roleplaying game is easy to grasp. The other aspect of the roleplaying game which could have been made clear on the cover is the fact that it is a storytelling game.

Project Cassandra: Psychics of the Cold War is in need of a bibliography and really some general background about the period, because not everyone is going to be familiar with it. However, for those that are, Project Cassandra: Psychics of the Cold War does have an enticing set-up. That though is far as it goes, for Project Cassandra: Psychics of the Cold War is storytelling game, and the uncovering of the conspiracy and the prevention of it coming to fruition as well as the set-up depends on both players and Game Master working together. For the most part, Project Cassandra: Psychics of the Cold War is best suited for a group which has some experience with storytelling roleplaying games and some understanding of the period.

The land of Norway is one of mountain ranges and fjords, and according to legend, one of the mountain ranges is not at a mountain range at all! Instead, it is the body of a Jötunn, Hrungnir, who has been lying sleeping ever since he was killed and thrown out of Ásgard for being a very bad guest and threatening his hosts, whereupon his body turned to stone and formed the mountains! In the many centuries since, Norway has since changed, not least of which was the widespread adoption of Christianity and abandonment of the Old Ways. Not every Norwegian has abandoned the Old Ways though, and there is a cult whose members believe that they can be restored. The cult believes that when Hrungnir was killed by Thor, his mighty hammer, Mjonir, knocked a piece of the giant’s heart free that also fell to Earth. If the Heart of Hrungnir is restored to the mountains where the Jötunn is said to have fallen, the cult believes that a great gift will be bestowed upon the people of Norway. Only recently has the cult found the Heart of Hrungnir once again, in the possession of John Ostergaard, a London merchant, as part of his Cabinet of Curiosities. However, as the cult begins to make threats against him, John Ostergaard discovers that the object of the cult’s attention has been stolen!

This is the set-up for A Gift for all of Norway, a scenario for use with Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess. The Player Characters are hired by John Ostergaard—perhaps at the recommendation of The Magnificent Joop van Ooms—to recover the Heart of Hrungnir. He is a hard, but fair bargainer, and will tell the Player Characters that he believes a recent acquaintance, Francois Arquette, stole it and is taking it to Norway. The Player Characters, of course, will follow in its stead.

A Gift for all of Norway really begins with the Player Characters standing before a cavern entrance on Hrungnir’s Peak. Once they enter, what they discover is a series of caverns, initially connected by a single, often convoluted tunnel. In places, the tunnel walls want to open and digest the Player Characters, oozes float around waiting for the opportunity to attach themselves to intruders, and there are signs too, of others already having passed through the caverns. The long tunnel connects to a bat-infested cave and another lined with sticky vines. The dungeon is actually quite long, but consists of a very few locations. In fact, bar confrontations the strange creatures to found within the caverns and the tunnel connecting, and perhaps cultists dedicated to restoring the Heart of Hrungnir to its rightful place, proceeding through the dungeon is very quick and the Player Characters could be in and out within an hour or two’s worth of actual game play with the Heart of Hrungnir in hand… Except…

Well, there is an ‘except’ here, and it is very much a big ‘except’ and a very small ‘except’. It also hinges on the fact that the legends are true, that Hrungnir’s body really did fall to the Earth and form a mountain, and that part of his heart is missing. What this means is that the tunnel and caverns the Player Characters are travelling through is his partly ossified alimentary canal. Now adventures in which Player Characters penetrate and explore the body of some gigantic beast or even a god, are a known design choice such that they have become almost a cliché in their own right. In general, the Player Characters find a way in via the mouth or nose or ears, but not through the anus. A Gift for all of Norway is, of course, written for use with Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying, so using the rear entrance was a given.

Anyway, the Player Characters will find the Heart of Hrungnir very quickly. Then they have a choice. Go home, return the Heart of Hrungnir to its ‘rightful’ owner, and take the money, or give it to the cultists or perhaps explore further and see if there is any truth to the cultists’ belief that a great gift will be bestowed upon the people of Norway if the Heart of Hrungnir is also restored to its ‘rightful’ owner. What that gift is, is left up to the Game Master to decide, but the inference is that whatever it is, might have been good for Norway during the age of the gods, but in modern day, Christian, Norway? Not a chance… Thus, taking the money is the good choice, whilst being overly curious is the wrong one. Which all begs the question, is that it?

Yes.

Physically, A Gift for all of Norway is well done. It is well written, the descriptions are good, the artwork fine, and the maps excellent.

A Gift for all of Norway combines a number of elements common to Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying. One is the consequences for the Player Characters if they are too curious. The other is a big, stompy threat that will probably unleash hell upon the surrounding countryside, and in most cases those scenarios have been a combination of entertaining, clever, and amusing. Unfortunately, A Gift for all of Norway is none of those. It is not that the scenario is bad per se, and it is certainly not a case of the scenario being presented badly, but rather that A Gift for all of Norway is not really sufficiently interesting or atmospheric to entice the Game Master to want to run it. At best A Gift for all of Norway is a sidequest that could have severe consequences for Norway and the Game Master’s campaign, but if it does not, the effect is underwhelming.
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DISCLAIMER: The author of this review is an editor who has edited titles for Lamentations of the Flame Princess on a freelance basis. He was not involved in the production of this book and his connection to both publisher and thus the author has no bearing on the resulting review.

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.

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

Senet Issue 9 was published in the winter of 2022. As an issue, it does something different. This is to spread its wings away from its usual subject, that is, board games, into roleplaying—though only a little! This is in the issue’s interviews with designers and publishers who have both had a big influence on the games hobby and industry, one more recently, one over the course of decades. Never fear though, for outside of these articles, Senet Issue 9 is very much a board games magazine. This does not stop the editor highlighting one of the issue’s interviews in his editorial, which is perfectly reasonable, since it is with a designer and publisher who is a very big name in both the board game and the roleplaying hobbies—and other hobbies—here in the United Kingdom.

‘Behold’ is the regular preview of some of the then-forthcoming board game titles. As expected, ‘Behold’ showcases its previewed titles to intriguing effect, a combination of simple write-ups with artwork and depictions of the board games. Notable titles previewed include Pandasaurus Games’ The Fox Experiment, co-designed by Elizabeth Hargrave of Wingspan fame, which is a ‘roll-and-write’ design about the Belyaev-Trut experiment into fox domestication, in which the players attempt to draft friendly foxes and use them to breed even friendlier foxes, whilst Moon, the third and final part in a trilogy of card-drafting games from Sinister Fish Games which began with Villagers, takes the series off planet to colonise the Moon as well as increase the player interaction with this style of game.

‘Points’, the regular column of readers’ letters is only as thematic as to be all from readers praising the magazine, so is a whole lot less interesting than in previous issues. ‘For Love of the Game’, 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 addresses the issue of  acknowledging your inspirations when it comes to your game, both in terms of other game designs and other sources. He cites Donald X. Vaccarino being inspired by the deck-building aspect of Magic: The Gathering for his Spiel des Jahres award-winning Dominion, but actually lists other sources for his inspiration for his own Gloom of Kilforth, such as the Fighting Fantasy books, Dungeons & Dragons, and J.R.R. Tolkien, so although this represents another nod to roleplaying in the issue, it does feel one-sided.

Senet follows a standard format of articles and article types and Senet Issue 9 is no exception. One explores a theme found in board games, its history, and the games that showcase it to best effect, whilst another looks at a particular mechanic. In addition, there are two interviews, one with a designer, the other with an artist. The particular mechanic in the issue is the engine-building game. In ‘Rise of the Machine’, Alexandra Sonechkina examines the history and state of the mechanic, starting by making an interesting suggestion that Monopoly, a fairly poorly regarded game, is actually an engine-building game—although not one in the modern sense. That, though, is really as far as the history goes in the article, as it looks what makes a good engine-building game. The article is an interesting look at what the mechanic can do, but it could have benefited from boxed sections highlighting particular designs and used them to track some of the mechanic’s development to give more context. Although interesting, the article does not feel complete.

The theme article in the issue is pirates! Matt Thrower’s ‘Pirates on Board’ is a far thorough look at the history of its subject, whose more recent surge in popularity as a theme can be traced back to 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean, and before that with Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Along the way, it notes the historical nature of the subject means that it has long been a popular subject for wargames, such as Wooden Ships & Iron Men and Blackbeard, both from Avalon Hill, but the fantasy element of pirates means that it is seen as a suitable subject for lighter board game designs too. Examples include Cartagena and Pirate’s Cove, yet as the hobby has matured, there has been an acknowledgement the fantasy of pirates does not always equate to the actual history, since they are both villainous and violent, though less so with other board game themes and history. Thus pirate-themed board games tend to romanticise the history and make it palatable for a wider audience. It does, though, come up to date with a look at the issue of actual piracy and counterfeiting in the board gaming industry, but does not come to any more conclusion than that it is an ongoing issue. ‘Pirates on Board’ is an entertaining piece that nicely continues the magazine’s thread of examining the themes common to modern and not so modern board games.

The much-heralded highlight of the issue is ‘The Games Master’. This is the first of the two interviews in the issue, and is with Sir Ian Livingstone, co-founder of Games Workshop and co-creator of the Fighting Fantasy series, as well as designer of board games like Judge Dredd: The Game of Crime-Fighting in Mega-City One. The lengthy interview, which starts with Livingstone’s first experiences with board games and takes the reader through the founding of Games Workshop, the games he designed, the creation of the Fighting Fantasy series—the primary roleplaying focus in the interview, and beyond to what he plays today. It is a good, solid interview, interesting and informative, liberally illustrated, though more so if you have not read other interviews with Livingstone. The interview is, of course, timed ahead of the release of Dice Men: The Origin Story of Games Workshop, which expands upon the various subjects explored in the piece and more.

The second interview in Senet Issue 9 is with Johan Nohr, the co-creator and illustrator of Mörk Borg, the Swedish pre-apocalypse Old School Renaissance retroclone, and its Cyberpunk counterpart, CY_BORG. As with previous issues of the magazine, this does a very nice job of showcasing his artwork, although it is not necessarily a style that would be seen in board game design.

‘Unboxed’, Senet’s reviews section actually includes a review of Apothecaria: Solo Potion Making RPG, so continuing the issue’s flirtation with roleplaying games, although solo journalling games are typically the magazine’s only flirtation with roleplaying games. Otherwise, a wide range of games is reviewed, from family titles such as Dodo and its egg-rolling down a mountain mechanic to big, brutal storytelling designs such as Oathsworn: Into the Deepwood. The latter is the issue’s game of choice, but there are a surprising number of disappointments reviewed too, like Rear Window and Cellulose: A Plant Cell Biology Game. In between, there is a good mix of interesting games reviewed that should drove the reader to go and find out more.

Rounding out Senet Issue 9 are the regular end columns, ‘How to Play’ and ‘Shelf of Shame’. For ‘How to Play’, Mx Tiffany Leigh addresses the issue of ‘Playing with Alphas’, and how the over abundance of advice from an Alpha Player can negate player agency, involvement, and fun, before giving straightforward advice. In fact, the advice might be called too straightforward, even obvious, but this does not make it bad advice. Tom Brewster of Shut Up & Shutdown takes Pax Pamir, a wargame of nineteenth century politics in Afghanistan, off his and ‘Shelf of Shame’ and explains why it is not getting to his table to play more often. Unlike a lot of entries in this series, it is not because it got forgotten or bypassed in favour of other titles, but because it is actually not a game that others want to play because of its complexity and capacity. This highlights an issue with a lot of board games, that of finding the right audience.

Physically, Senet Issue 9 is very professionally presented. It looks and feels as good as previous issues of the magazine.

It has almost become a cliché to state that as with previous issues, Senet Issue 9 offers a good mix of articles, interviews, and reviews, but it does. Yet where the interviews both look great and are very accessible, the articles on the issue’s theme and mechanic are not. This is not to say that they are unreadable, as they are, but they are no longer highlighting particular games appropriate to either theme or mechanic, so unlike in previous issues with these articles, there are no examples to stand out effectively and catch the reader’s attention. The issue also has an odd feel to it because of its emphasis on roleplaying in its two big articles, but this change is refreshing, widening the scope of the magazine, if only a little. It also highlights how a magazine of similar quality devoted to roleplaying could be just as good. Overall, Senet Issue 9 is still good, but just a little bit different—and that is not a bad thing.