The Mythos of H.P. Lovecraft and the swashbuckling tales of Alexandre Dumas are closer than you think. Or at least, they can be moved closer than you think. After all, both involve conspiracies and secrets and assignations in the night and shocking revelations and dark organisations plotting to end the current regime–whether that is a total end to mankind or a change in who controls the fate of France. However, when it comes to roleplaying, it has not been a close fit, bar the very occasional scenario. In fact, the easiest way to do it has been to combine Leagues of Cthulhu, an expansion to Leagues of Gothic Horror for Leagues of Adventure: A Rip-Roaring Setting of Exploration and Derring Do in the Late Victorian Age! with All For One: Régime Diabolique, because both are written for use with the Ubiquity System. Step forward–or swing through a window on a rope and land on its feet, rapier drawn–Nightfall Games, because the Scottish publisher has a much easier solution for you.
Musketeers vs. Cthulhu: A Simple NightfallRPG Book is a campaign and sourcebook for use with Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, published by Chaosium, Inc. It is based on ‘The Tablet’, a short story by Claudia Christian–yes, that Claudia Christian–and Chris McAuley from the anthology, Musketeers vs. Cthulhu in the Court of King Louis, from Black Ink. It is also based on The Three Musketeers and others in the series, includes some basic background, guidelines to creating Musketeers and other period Investigators, genre rules, and over twenty new manoeuvres, because after all, what would a game involving Musketeers be without the means to swash a buckle or two! As you would expect, it includes stats for all four Musketeers and those of the villains and villainesses they face in the course of Dumas’ classic novels. Of course, in Musketeers vs. Cthulhu, the Musketeers will face things that are much, much worse, and much more of a threat to France–and the world in general!

Musketeers vs. Cthulhu very quickly opens with the first part of its four-part campaign. It is set in 1626. King Louis XIII holds the throne with Cardinal Richelieu as his adviser, opposed to the influence of the Queen Mother, Marie de Medici, who was once regent for her son. ‘L’Affaire du Possion Rouge’ opens with the musketeers at a ‘dive’ bar on the Seine, meeting Damian De Salazar, a friend on behalf of Monsieur le Colonel de Tréville and then getting him away from the attentions of the Cardinal’s Guards and back to Musketeer headquarters. With barely enough time to take in the less than salubrious ambiance, disaster, or rather the Cardinal’s Guards strike! The clientele of the bar take strong exception to their presence and the first of the campaign’s many brawls breaks out. With the Cardinal’s Guards outside and a brawl inside, this is the perfect cover to make an escape, but in the process, the musketeers discover that the bar flies were hiding secrets of their own. Dark secrets.

At the end of the first scenario, the musketeers should have Damian De Salazar in tow, but where he ends up is down the musketeers. If they successfully get away from the bar, they should get him back to the care of Monsieur le Colonel de Tréville, but if they get captured, they find themselves before Cardinal Richelieu. If this happens, the rest of the scenario will play out as described in the book, but with the musketeers secretly beholden to the manipulative Cardinal.

The affair in the Possion Rouge sets the events of the campaign in motion as factions working beyond the shadows begin to plot against the King–and in the process against the King’s Musketeers and Cardinal Richelieu. De Salazar himself, is a scholar of the occult, and has recently decrypted and translated a document known as the Third Key of Solomon. Unfortunately, a faction of cultists known as the Court of Chaos has kidnapped De Salazar’s daughter and is demanding that he hand over the manuscript in return for her life.

In the second scenario, ‘The House of Hasteur’, the musketeers undertake a second task, the delivery of the manuscript in exchange for the life of De Salazar’s kidnapped daughter. Although they may have gained some slight awareness of the strangeness that these doings entail, it does not prepare them for the strange encounters in the house. This is not so much a ‘madhouse dungeon’ as a ‘Mythos madhouse’ in which their experiences verge into the hallucinogenic. If they succeed though, no matter who exactly they are working for–Monsieur le Colonel de Tréville or Cardinal Richelieu–the actions of the musketeers bring them to the attention of the King. He has another task for them, one that takes them to ‘The Courtyard of Miracles’ and into the Paris catacombs via a newly opened up entrance.

The fourth and final scenario, ‘Nuit d’Apocalypse!’, begins almost immediately after ‘The Courtyard of Miracles’ comes to a bloody close. The streets of Paris are rife with fear and fighting as it appears that the city is subject to a riotous assembly as Protestant Huguenots run amok, citizens either blockade the streets to prevent anyone from passing or hide behind locked doors, and dark forces take advantage of the chaos. A series of running street battles, including a standing battle with a Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath, build to a climactic showdown with the forces of the Court of Chaos and hopefully the opportunity to save Paris and thus all of France.

Musketeers vs. Cthulhu: A Simple Nightfall RPG Book is a short campaign. Some of the individual scenarios might only take a session to play through, though most will probably take two or three. They are also not investigative scenarios in the more traditional sense of Call of Cthulhu, so no consulting of ancient documents or perusing the shelves at libraries. Instead, the scenarios involve more interaction, and definitely more action and combat. In fact, a lot more of the latter, and although Musketeers vs. Cthulhu is written for use with Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, it might actually be better to run it using the rules in Pulp Cthulhu, especially as there is a lot of combat and there are a lot of Mythos monsters.

The campaign can be played in one of two ways. First, the players can take the roles of the Musketeers from Dumas’ novels—Aramis, Athos, Porthos, and d’Artagnan—and Musketeers vs. Cthulhu provides full stats and background for all four. Second, they can create their own Investigators and play through the campaign. Thus, there is a guide to creating Investigators suitable for the period, beginning with Musketeer, but also including members of the Clergy, Spy, Courtier, and Occult Scholar. Along with a list of weapons appropriate to the period, there is guidance on playing with just one or two players. The given options allow for increased starting Luck, narrative style combat when fighting members of the supporting cast, and almost immediate adaptation to seeing the Mythos. The latter minimises the amount of Sanity lost for seeing a Mythos monster a second time—after all, once you have seen one Ghoul, you have seen them all!

To fit the other genre of Musketeers vs. Cthulhu, there is also a list of new Manoeuvres. These include ‘Charge’, ‘Counting Coup’, ‘Creative Flamboyance’, ‘Flipping a Table’, ‘Leaping onto a Horse’, and ‘Using a Cape’ or ‘Throwing a Drink to Blind an Opponent’. All enable the Investigators to engage in the type of swashbuckling action that their players will have seen on screen.

Lastly, there are full stats for both the other characters from the novels, such as Milady de Winter and Cardinal Richelieu—though no backgrounds as are given to the Musketeers, and all of the Mythos monsters that appear in Musketeers vs. Cthulhu. Add in the table of phrases and events and the Keeper has a few prompts with which to add colour to her depiction of seventeenth century France.

Physically, Musketeers vs. Cthulhu: A Simple Nightfall RPG Book is a short, buff, and unillustrated affair. It is well written and easy to read. It needs a slight edit in places and there are fun flourishes here and there. The cover though, is particularly eye-catching and feels not dissimilar in style to a certain series of very long running children’s story and reference books.

Musketeers vs. Cthulhu: A Simple Nightfall RPG Book leans into two things. First, the ‘Simple’ aspect of its title, the campaign being a straightforward confrontation with the forces of the Mythos rather than a convoluted investigation, and second, the swashbuckling action of The Three Musketeers. As a result, this is an action-orientated, often combat focused, Pulp-style campaign rather than a Purist scare fest. Musketeers vs. Cthulhu: A Simple Nightfall RPG Book is not just “All for one, and one for all”, but “All for one, and one for all—and all against the Mythos”, and the musketeer-mythos movie you never knew you wanted.

The world of Praelar dying. It was driven to the point of collapse by climate change and then exacerbated by colossal poisonous tornados called ‘spore storms’. It was then that dragons appeared. They came from a world parallel to us to save us. They drew Dragon Essence extracted from their unhatched eggs and used it to power machines long-buried under the spore fields that cleared the poisons from the air and the water, and even began to abate the spores storms. Yet humanity took advantage of them. The Mecharch leaders took the power of the dragon yolk and reprogrammed the machines as devices of war before sending them out to slay dragons and take their eggs. As one dragon after dragon died, the Mecharch leaders gained power and many eggs were lost or abandoned, or broken. There are those who see this as an injustice and have rallied around to rescue the remaining eggs and not only save them, but raise the hatchlings. Their hope is that the newborn dragons would heal Praelar and restore the communities to what they once were.
This is the background for Dragon Dowser: A Journalling Game for One Player, in which the player will use his dowsing crystal to overcome the elements, uncover ancient secrets, battle long-buried machinery, and in the process, save the last of the dragon eggs. It is published by Hatchlings Games, best known for Inspirisles, the Deaf-aware, sign-language as magic, Arthurian roleplaying game. In comparison, Dragon Dowser is more anime-inspired, though not heavily so and leaves much of its setting to be interpreted, created, and written down by the player. It is a solo journalling game in which the aim is to locate abandoned dragon eggs and return to a Sanctuary. However, this requires the expenditure of resources. If the Dowser succeeds before all of his resources are expended, the hatchling can be reared to adulthood and together change the world. It requires a standard deck of playing cards, a six-sided die, a set of tokens, and a journal for the Dowser to record his story. As an alternative to the deck of playing cards, the game has its own deck of cards. These have their art and text, so that the player does not have to refer to the book for the card descriptions.
The game requires some set-up before play begins. The first is choose one of four Dowsings. These correspond to the Ace cards of the four card suits and determine the story’s element, season, and theme, which all together suggests where the dragon egg might be. For example, the Hearts dowsing is associated with water, spring, and community, and the egg is lost to the currents of a river and washed away downstream from the chasing soldiers. The player chooses one of the four and draws twenty-three cards from the deck. Together with the selected Dowsing, these are placed face down in a six by four grid. Two Sanctuary cards are placed either side. The player’s die is put on one of these Sanctuary. Together, this forms the play area.
On a turn, the player moves from one card in the play area to another. A card can give the dowser more Resources or force him to expend them. Cards also have a Description and a Prompt. For example, the ‘3 of Hearts’ has the Card details, “I should trust my instincts… and my crystal more!”; the Description, “A stranger you meet at a crossroads says there are a clutch of dragon eggs to the north. You follow the path to straight into an ambush.”; and the Prompt of, “Describe the fight. How do you survive the ambush?”. Lastly, its Effect of -4 deducts Resources from the dowser’s pool. It is possible for the dowser to move in any direction, including returning to a card that has already been flipped over. Doing so will trigger the effect upon the Dowser’s Resources, but not the Description and the Prompt. The likelihood is that this will cost the Dowser in times of Resources, so it is better to keep moving forward and continue the search. At each stage the player describes what happens to his Dowser, taking inspiration from the Description and the Prompt. Both are written to be open-ended rather than proscriptive, allowing the player to engage his imagination.
If the Dowser finds the Dowsing he drew at the start of the game, he has found the egg. It is then his objective to return the egg to one of the Sanctuary cards. In doing so, he has succeeded and the game is over. There are still years of nurturing and training of the hatchling to come, but those are outside the scope of Dragon Dowser: A Journalling Game for One Player (though there is potential in a sequel to the game here). If the Dowser runs out of Resources before then, the play comes to an end, the Dowser has not succeeded, but he has not died. This does not mean that the Dowser cannot try again, whether from a rearrangement of the current spread of cards or from a completely fresh spread. It is also possible to discover other Dowsing cards or Aces in the grid of cards. This a definite moment of sadness for the Dowser as he has discovered the site of broken eggs. At this moment, he has the opportunity to offer a eulogy or a ritual to the lost hatchling.
The rules to Dragon Dowser are simple and easy to learn and play. This makes it suitable for younger players and this is helped by an extended example of a Dowsing that shows how the game is played in just a quick read through. The fact that the Dowser cannot die—just try again—also makes it suitable for younger players.
Physically, Dragon Dowser is well presented. It is a small, landscape format book with some excellent artwork, much of it replicated from the game’s cards. The writing is clean and simple, making the game easy to pick up and play. With only half of the deck being used at any one time, there is plenty of replay value in the game.
Dragon Dowser: A Journalling Game for One Player is both a solo journalling game and a map game, both of which require some Resource management. Proper handling of the latter will keep Dowser exploring, but the random nature of turning over cards and exploring means that the Dowser and his player is going to be constantly challenged, constantly weighing which up card to move to next. There is a high degree of luck in that the Dowser’s objective card—the Ace or Dowsing card—might be flipped over early in the game or much later. (One way to offset that might be to place it in the lower half of the cards drawn to form the grid.) Overall, Dragon Dowser: A Journalling Game for One Player is a charming journalling game that leaves a lot of room in how the player interprets the game’s prompts and how he tells his Dowser’s story.

As well as contributing to Free RPG Day every year Goodman Games also has its own ‘Dungeon Crawl Classics Day’, which sadly, is a very North American event. The day is notable not only for the events and the range of adventures being played for Goodman Games’ roleplaying games, but also for the scenarios it releases specifically to be played on the day. For ‘Dungeon Crawl Classics Day 2023’, which takes place today on Saturday, July 20th, 2024, the publisher is releasing not one, not two, but three scenarios, plus a limited edition printing of Dungeon Crawl Classics #104: Return to the Starless Sea. Two of the scenarios, ‘The Grinding Keep’ and ‘Tuscon Death Storm’, appear in the duology, the DCC Day 2024 Adventure Pack. The third is DCC Day #5: Gods of the Earth. Both DCC Day #5: Gods of the Earth and ‘The Grinding Keep’ are written for use with Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game, whilst ‘Tuscon Death Storm!’ is the first scenario for use with the Xcrawl Classics Role-Playing Game, the ‘Dungeon Crawl Classics’ adaptation and upgrade of the earlier Xcrawl Core Rulebook for use with Dungeons & Dragons 3.5, which turns the concept of dungeoneering into an arena spot and monetises it!

The DCC Day 2024 Adventure Pack contains two scenarios. The first scenario is ‘The Grinding Keep’, a scenario by Marc Bruner written for four to six First Level Player Characters for use with the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game. Drawing from the Appendix N of the Dungeon Master’s Guide for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition, it is inspired by the works of Michael Moorcock and John Bellairs. The scenario is a locked room—or manor house—puzzle box, where the Player Characters have been sent to locate the Enduring Light, a lantern whose light is said to bless those it falls upon. The butler seems welcoming as silent staff serve them drinks and later diner as they await an audience with the lord of the manor. It is of course, designed to lull them into a false sense of security as the following morning, the Player Characters find themselves trapped in a house that seems to change around them in random fashion as they move from location to location. The home definitely feels bigger on the inside and if the Player Characters are not careful, they will get lost and separated from each other. There is something strangely organic about the house and this becomes increasingly apparent as the Player Characters explore further and it literally comes alive. Surprisingly, the Enduring Light is easy to find, but getting out of the house is another matter. To do this, they will need to work through several puzzles, some of which are quite challenging and some of which do rely on player knowledge.

Although the scenario is short, it is not straightforward and it does require more preparation than its length suggests. This is primarily due to the random nature of the movement throughout the scenario’s second half and the puzzle elements that need to be solved before the Player Characters can progress. Consequently, the scenario may be slightly too complex for anyone playing the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game for the first time. It is possible for the Player Characters to hack their way out, but the puzzle solving method is much more satisfying. Overall, ‘The Grinding Keep’ serves up a solid dollop of Dungeon Crawl Classics weirdness.

‘Tuscon Death Storm!’ is the first scenario to be released for the Xcrawl Classics Role-Playing Game, prior to its actual release. Written by the game’s designer, Brendan Lasalle, it is a bit of an odd choice—at least as a first release. First, it is designed for Second Level Player Characters, and second, it takes place outside of an Xcrawl arena where most of the action in the roleplaying game takes place. So, it is of no use to a Judge beginning her Xcrawl Classics Role-Playing Game campaign and it requires the Player Characters to have acquired at least a Level before attempting it. As a demonstration game it also does not showcase what the game is about either. In fact, it is closer to a straightforward dungeon for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game than it is a Xcrawl Classics Role-Playing Game scenario. However, this does not mean that it is actually a bad scenario, but rather that its set-up and release are untimely. Plus, if the Judge can hold on and run this scenario once the Player Characters in her campaign have reached Second Level, then ‘Tuscon Death Storm!’ comes into its own.

In ‘Tuscon Death Storm!’, the Player Characters are Xcrawlers on the up, having taken their first footsteps in the area. This brings them to the attention of DJ Creature Feature, an industry veteran notorious for the popular Necromerica event. She has lost contact with a colleague, producer Margaret Cauldwell, who was working on converting a recently discovered temple just outside of Tuscon, Arizona, into an Xcrawl dungeon arena. Having already sent people to check up on her and her team, DJ Creature Feature asks the Player Characters to go and investigate. If they, then she promises access to a Division II event and sponsors for the event, which would be a big step up in terms of the Player Characters’ careers. This—and the fact that the scenario showcases how playing in the Xcrawl Classics Role-Playing Game—is where ‘Tuscon Death Storm!’, adding depth and detail to the Xcrawl world beyond the walls of the arena.

The scenario is short, running to just nine locations and seven pages. It is also linear, but it is nicely detailed, the descriptions neatly contrasting the ancient feel of the temple with the equipment and plans of a modern work crew along with health and safety concerns. The monsters that the Player Characters will face are modern twists on old creatures—though at the end of it, they are likely to be sick of a certain breed of dog. They will have to face on the sponsored beverage monsters that the Xcrawl Classics Role-Playing Game is fond of. A great touch is that the Player Characters’ efforts to investigate the old temple are being filmed so that the footage can be turned into a documentary to promote the new area. The recording process also means that the Player Characters are still performing and still do grandstanding moves to gain bonuses.
Ultimately, ‘Tuscon Death Storm!’ gives the Player Characters opportunities to be heroes outside of the arena, make some contacts, and hopefully give their careers a lift. It is a decent ‘in-between’ scenario that slips into an ongoing campaign with ease and pushes it along a bit.

Physically, the DCC Day 2024 Adventure Pack is as well done as you would expect for a release from Goodman Games. The artwork is decent and the cartography well done. The cover is very nicely done, showing the Xcrawlers at a bar watching the activities of the Player Characters in ‘The Grinding Keep’ scenario, whilst the inside artwork depicts the reverse. That is, the Player Characters of ‘The Grinding Keep’ scenario looking at a group portrait of the Xcrawlers in a victory pose. It is a nice touch.

The DCC Day 2024 Adventure Pack is a solid release for Goodman Games’ own celebratory day. Both scenarios are good, but not immediately useful, either due to the extra preparation required or the relative awkwardness of fitting it into a campaign.

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

—oOo—

Treasures of Deep Grotto is a scenario for Sink!, the piratical setting for use with Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. Published by Crimson Herald via Hitpoint Press, it is designed to be played by four Third Level Player Characters in a single session. Notably, it employs the unique mechanic called the ‘Soul Link’. It represents a Player Character’s connection to his soul, mechanically represented by his Hit Dice. During play, a Player Character’s Hit Dice can be affected and drained by various effects, such as traps and magical attacks, but it can also be used as a source of power to fuel magical items. However, the downside is that if a Player Character suffers the ‘Sunken’ condition—potentially common in a nautical and piratical setting like Sink!—he can die if he is reduced to zero Hit Points when he also has his Hit Dice reduced to zero! Thus, Hit Dice are an important new resource in the Sink! setting. In addition, Sink! also adds tattoos as magical items. These are treated as wondrous items and are created using a magical needle. Four are detailed. They are the Assassin’s Tattoo, the Flicker Tattoo, the Ironbound Tattoo, and the Skyward Tattoo. Each grants a special effect, such as ‘Feather’s Grace’ for the Skyward Tattoo, which grants limiting flying speed.
The scenario begins en media res with the Player Characters already having been shipwrecked and suffering the ‘Sunken’ condition. The Player Characters are part of the crew of the Misty Mermaid, which has been attacked and sunk by the Hades Hound, a pirate ship commanded by Captain Grimscar, a warlock in the service of the powerful sea-bound fiend, Y’agthul. The Dread Admiral Y’agthul commands the Black Armada, and as one of his lieutenants, Captain Grimscar has been ordered to sail the seas around the chain of islands known as ‘The Blots’ and seize ships for plunder and the souls of their crews and passengers. These he must return to the Isle of Journey’s End where the Deep Grotto, home to one of the crossroads of life and death, and give them to his master. After the prologue which explains how they got there, the Player Characters, washed ashore, they are approached by the Misty Mermaid’s lucky—lucky were it not for the attack by Captain Grimscar and the Hades Hound—Sea Gnome* who tells them where they are and what they need to do. Which of course is to defeat Captain Grimscar and his master!
* Somewhat tweely dressed in tweed flat cap and cream-coloured cable knit sweater.
Although other adventure hooks are listed, they are all to get the Player Characters to the Isle of Journey’s End. There are three of them, whereas perhaps four would have been better to each give the four Player Characters the adventure is designed for to each have their own motivation. The Deep Grotto is a small dungeon, with just four locations. These are decently detailed, with links to monster stats and other details in the book clearly marked. The plotting is quite simple. The Player Characters must overcome or solve two puzzles located in two parallel watery chambers. Doing so enables them to unlock access the main room, the Sanctuary, where they confront Captain Grimscar before his master, the fiend, Y’agthul. This is a challenging combat, as not only do the Player Characters have to fight the pirate captain, but they also have to defeat Lubber and Swabbie, his eel fiend familiars, and all under the baleful influence of Y’agthul!
Four pre-generated Player Characters are available to download via the publisher’s website. They consist of a Half Orc Mist Born Ranger who can tether others with magical, ethereal harpoons and then zap them with lightning; a Human Buccaneer Fighter; a High Elf Spellskin Wizard whose spells are tattooed onto his skin some which can be shared with his allies; and a Half-Elf College of Tidesong Bard who can entreat allies to join in a Sea Shanty and gain Advantage on a single attack, ability check, or saving throw each turn for a minute. Of the four, the Fighter feels underwritten, but otherwise they showcase some of the Player Character options in the Sink! setting.
In addition to the four tattoos in the book—which the Dungeon Master is encouraged to let the players choose one each for their characters, Treasures of Deep Grotto describes three magical items. All of these work with the ‘Soul Link’ mechanic introduced in the scenario. For example, Dead Man’s Promise is a ring of coral found on the fingers of drowned sailors which grants the wearer an extra Hit Die to use with the ‘Soul Link’ mechanic and which can be used once to expend that Hit Die to recover Hit Points.
Physically, Treasures of Deep Grotto is a small, slim book. It needs a slight edit in places, but artwork stands out. Done in the style of traditional nautical tattoos, they really are very good and for the Dungeon Master impart an engaging sense of the Sink! setting. The writing could have been clearer in places. In particular, it is not quite clear if Captain Grimscar has the Player Characters’ souls or not.
Treasures of Deep Grotto is a short, action-packed scenario, with an emphasis on combat and puzzles. In fact, there is very little interaction and roleplaying involved in the scenario. For a one-shot, that is less of an issue than for a longer scenario where the plot would be longer and more involved. That said, Treasures of Deep Grotto can easily be added to a campaign in the Sink! setting and with some adjustment shifted to another setting with a strong nautical or piratical theme. Overall, Treasures of Deep Grotto is solid introduction to the Sink! setting and some of its ideas, with much of the flavour being imparted by the traditional tattoo artwork.

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

In addition to any number of scenarios for Achtung! Cthulhu, Modiphius Entertainment also publishes what it calls ‘Section M: Priority Missions’. These are smaller missions and scenarios intended to help a Game Master is hard-pressed for time or needs an alternate scenario when there are fewer players. Alternatively, they can be used as one-shots or woven into ongoing campaigns. Each though, provides a single mission that can be played in a single session as well as adventure hooks should the Game Master want to expand the scenario.

Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20 – Priority Mission 1: Resurrection Men is the first entry in the series. As the frontlines shift between the Allied and Axis forces, Allied intelligence has learned of a network of Great War-era tunnels near an impending advance, whilst Section M suspects that it might actually be the site of Ghoul colony. The Section M agents are assigned to investigate the tunnel network, confirm its suspicions, and if necessary, wipe out the colony. The obvious location for the scenario is along the trench lines left over from the Great War, either in France or Belgium. It could also be shifted to the Italian/Austrian frontline from the Great War. Chronologically, if set in Northern France, Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20 – Priority Mission 1: Resurrection Men could be run during the operations of the British Expeditionary Force in Northern France in 1939 and 1940 or at any time after D-Day. One alternative to this, would be for the Player Characters to be all members of the French Resistance, which would make for a different scenario and mean that it would work better as a one-shot.

The scenario requires some preparation upon the part of the Game Master. There are no stats provided, so the Game Master will need to provide stats for the ghouls and a German patrol that the Agents might have to try and avoid, but that is all. What the scenario provides is a good map of the remains of the World War I tunnel network and some advice and suggestions. This covers how the ghouls will react to the presence of the Agents, what else the Agents might encounter, and a total of ten adventure hooks. This includes Allied forces being concerned about corpses vanishing, a former French officer-now ghoul with no love of the Nazis claiming to have intelligence to share, looking for an agent believed dead, but was supposed to have been carrying important information and now her corpse is missing. The ten adventure seeds are all decent ideas and all will need fleshing out by the Game Master. One alternative could be that Section M needs the information learned by a recently dead agent and the only way to learn that information is have some ghouls pick his brains! The variety also suggests the ways in which the Agents might go about fulfilling the mission—full out assault, a claustrophobic and tense series of close quarters bug-hunt style battles in the tunnels, or even approaching with an open hand.

Physically, Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20 – Priority Mission 1: Resurrection Men is cleanly and tidily laid out. It is not illustrated, but the map of the tunnels that make up the ghoul nest is very nice.

Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20 – Priority Mission 1: Resurrection Men is not quite ready to run, but it really only requires minimal preparation. Nor is it quite a full mission, but as a small location with lots of ideas as to how to use it, there can be no doubting its utility. For the Game Master wanting something quick to prepare and run, Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20 – Priority Mission 1: Resurrection Men is just the ticket, but if the Game Master has a bit more time, it can be made to be much more.

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

—oOo—
Bar the dice, the smallest and very probably the weirdest release for Free RPG Day 2024 is the Lost Tome of Monsters: Free RPG Day Edition. Unlike the majority of the other releases, it is not a booklet, but what at first appears to be a pin (or badge) with a backing card. And this is more or less what it is, except that it is also something more. Published by Foam Brain Games, it is actually a ‘Pinature’ and an encounter. Except that description does not help given the fact that right now you are asking yourself, “What the hell is a ‘Pinature’?” It is a portmanteau word that combines ‘pin’ and ‘miniature’, and like that portmanteau word, what you get with is the Lost Tome of Monsters: Free RPG Day Edition is both a ‘pin’ and a ‘miniature’! The pin-part depicts a zombie in all of its ‘purple decayed flesh, knock-kneed, brain exposed, ragged cloth wearing, and blood dripping from the mouth’ glory. It is cartoonishly lurid as it looms over an open book, its pages marked with a ribbon. The book sits slightly forward of the zombie-figure, obscuring its twisted feet. This looks a bit odd, but the reason becomes apparent once you turn the pin over. On the back are two ‘Rubber Clutches’* and they look and are perfectly normal. However, at the bottom of the ‘pin’ there appears to be a hinge, right where the zombie’s feet are. The hinge enables the book on the front of the ‘pin’ to twist through ninety degrees and in doing so, provides a base for the zombie, which now stands vertically like a miniature much like the two-dimensional miniatures sold by W!ZK!DS. Thus, with the twist of the book base, the zombie goes from ‘pin’ to ‘miniature’ and back again. Hence, ‘pinature’.
* This I did know was a thing or what Pin Backs and Pin Attachments were called until I read ‘Custom Pins 101: Types of Pin Backs and Attachments’.
The encounter is described on the card that comes with the ‘pinature’. It is a ‘Challenge Rating 6’ encounter that begins with the adventurers playing dice and having a nice time at ‘Ye Olde Local Game Store’. This is interrupted by a storm and an unnatural darkness which surrounds the establishment and as thunder and lighting flash outside the store’s windows, the doorbell chimes. The shopkeeper screams in fear as it is not another customer that has entered the shop, but a zombie—the zombie of the ‘pinature’. As it lurches towards the adventurers, it utters one word: “Gammeeeesssss……” Do the Player Characters cower in fear or do they let the zombie join in? Also, where did the zombie come from, are there more? How can the zombie understand the rules of the game? And lastly, does the zombie have anything to do with the unnatural dark and the storm? The first question is the crux of the encounter, whilst the others are hooks that the Game Master can expand as possible further hooks.
There is no clear suggestion as to what roleplaying game exactly the encounter is written for, but the ‘Challenge Rating 6’ of the encounter suggests either Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition or the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game. That said, with the ‘Challenge Rating 6’ being the only mechanical element to the Lost Tome of Monsters: Free RPG Day Edition, the encounter can be very easily adapted to the roleplaying game of the Game Master’s choice.
Physically, the Lost Tome of Monsters: Free RPG Day Edition is decently done. The zombie ‘pinature’ is small, but nicely detailed and really quite cute. The card captures the zombie ‘pinature’ in all of its lurid detail on the back, whilst the encounter is given on the back. The text for that is small though, and not easy to read.
The Lost Tome of Monsters: Free RPG Day Edition is both cute and silly. The zombie ‘pinature’ is the cute, in addition to being gory, whilst the adventure is the silly, what with adventurers playing in ‘Ye Olde Local Game Store’ and a zombie wanting to play games. Overall, tongue in cheek and not without its charms, but definitely the weirdest release for Free RPG Day 2024.

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

—oOo—
The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game was published in 1984 by TSR, Inc.it was an attempt to create an introductory roleplaying game based on the highly successful films, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Although supported by six adventures and an accessory pack, it was poorly received and would prove to be a failure. The licence lapsed the following year. In the years since, it has gained a poor reputation for not only being a flop, but also for being a badly designed game. Even in some cases, one of the worst roleplaying games ever published. Its problems can be attributed to just two design decisions. The first decision limited what you could play. The options were Indiana Jones and then Sallah, Marion Ravenwood, Short Round, Willie Scott, Wu Han, and Jock Lindsey. They were the only options because The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game does not have rules for character creation. Even then, the choice of characters for a young teenage audience was extremely limited. Did anyone really want to roleplay Willie Scott, let alone Wu Han or Jock Lindsey? Plus, this is not a roleplaying game for more than a few players, one of whom gets to roleplay Indiana Jones, whilst the others play his sidekicks, who are going to change from one story to the next. The second decision is more mechanical, but effectively, none of the heroes can die in The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game. This models the films—except for poor Wu Han, of course—but no matter how bruised or battered he gets, how far he falls, Indiana Jones cannot die. He can suffer a lot of damage, but he cannot die. Then, when he does suffer damage, he takes weeks to heal, which does not model what we see on screen. Forty years since it was published, is The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game as bad as its reputation claims it to be?

The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game comes as a boxed set. Inside is the sixty-four-page Games Rules Booklet, an eight-page Evidence File, a World of Indiana Jones Map, a Referee’s Screen, and three-dimensional cardboard figures to cut out and use in play. The Games Rules Booklet contains all of the rules to play, as well as a solo scenario, ‘The Ikons of Ikammanen’, which leads in a scenario that can be played by multiple players. The Evidence File gives stats for Indiana Jones and his six companions, plus maps and clues for the ‘The Ikons of Ikammanen’ scenario. The World of Indiana Jones Map depicts the world as it was in the nineteen thirties and is marked with the common travel routes, sadly not in thick red lines though. The Referee’s Screen has many of the tables on it needed to play, but not all. The Referee will need to refer to the Games Rules Booklet for the ‘Chase Flow Chart’ as well as the back of the Games Rules Booklet for the ‘Modified Check Table’ and the ‘Check Results Table’ as both require full colour and only the front of the Referee’s Screen is in colour. The three-dimensional cardboard figures include all of the heroes, NPCs that appear in ‘The Ikons of Ikammanen’ adventure, and generic Goons and Villains. They also include a few rough buildings.

With a little colour fiction, the Games Rules Booklet pulls the reader into an explanation of what a roleplaying game is and the basics of the mechanics and what a Player Character looks like. Following this is ‘The Ikons of Ikammanen’ scenario, at this stage a solo adventure, although not a ‘choose your own’ style of solo adventure. Rather, it provides a few options, but keeps them all to the same page. In each case, what it is doing is getting the reader to make a few dice rolls and show how the previously explained rules work in practice, going from one page to two, and then more as the rules have to handle more complex situations. It does this in turn for combat, chases, and more, until it gets to part four and dealing with ‘Cronies & Contacts’ where Indiana Jones has to interact with some NPCs. This requires an actual player and a Referee. Up until that point it has been the reader playing through this, so what this means is that to get to this point, the Referee has to play through the first three parts and the player has to play through the first three parts, and then they have to come together for part four and beyond… This is annoyingly clumsy in its execution when the simplest solution would have been to have had player and Referee involved from the start. From this point on though, the remaining five chapters of the adventure do require the Referee and then  another player to take the role of Indiana Jones. That said, the format of the author explaining or telling the reader rules and then showing the reader the rules and getting him to use them in play is a good idea. It is just that its execution is poor.

Instead of character generation, The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game simply gives the stats for Indiana Jones and his sidekicks from the films Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. A character has seven attributes—Strength, Movement, Prowess, Backbone, Instinct, and Appeal. Prowess is his fighting ability; Backbone is his determination and his guts, as well as his ability to overcome irrational fears; and Instinct is his perception. There is no Intelligence type ability, but there are Knowledges, areas of expertise that let a character do certain things or simply know about them. Notably Indiana Jones is not that much better than his sidekicks. Both Indiana Jones and Willie Scott have irrational fears that require a Backbone Check to overcome lest they be frozen in fear and ultimately, their players to roleplay their way past them. Some of the Player Characters have notes such as Wu Han knowing a little archaeology and being a master of disguise.

Indiana Jones
Attributes
Strength 68
Movement 80
Prowess 76
Backbone 72
Instinct 80
Appeal 88

Movement Rate (running); 25 squares (5 areas)/turn
Weapons: bullwhip, pistol, knife
Money: $500
Knowledges: Archaeology, Driving, Parachuting, Surveying
Irrational Fears: fear of snakes
Notes: Indy wears glasses to correct an astigmatism

Mechanically, The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game is a percentile system, similar, but very simplified in comparison to, the mechanics used in Marvel Super Heroes, also published in 1984. To have a character undertake an action, his player makes an Attribute Check. The Attribute Check is easily modified by either doubling the value if the task is easier, or halving or even quartering it if the task is difficult. Modifiers cancel each other out, so that a Prowess Check to shoot an NPC would be doubled because the weapon is resting on a solid object, but halved because the target is in cover. If the result on percentile dice is equal to, or less than, the attribute value, the character succeeds, but if how well the character succeeds, the Referee can consult the ‘Modified Check Table’ on the back of the rulebook. This compares the result of dice roll to the modified Attribute Check. The result is a colour coding and when that colour is checked on the ‘Check Results Table’ it will give a more nuanced outcome, depending upon whether a character is attempting to inflict damage in combat, discover something using Instinct, or persuade someone using Appeal.
For example, Indiana Jones wants to find the next clue to the location of a tomb. He is in a library, but a gang of goons is after him, so the Referee rules that this increases the difficulty and halves Doctor Jones’ Instinct of 80. So, his player will be making an Instinct Check of 40. He rolls ‘07’. This is between ‘06’ and a quarter of his current Instinct Rating and indicates a yellow box. Checking the corresponding yellow box under Instinct ‘Check Results Table’ and the Referee can tell Indiana’s player that he has a ‘What or Where’ result, meaning that he has found the information he was looking for.If the result is five or less, then the character gets a ‘Lucky Break’, but suffers a ‘Bad Break’ if the player rolls ninety-six or more. A Lucky Break on a Movement Check might be that the enemy falls and trips up his companions or a trap fails to work on an Instinct Check. A Bad Break might be that an NPC finds the character repulsive on an Appeal Check or the character’s knife or sword breaks on a Prowess Check. However, the important line here is, “No one ever dies as a result of a Lucky Break or a Bad Break. Such events just make things just a little more interesting—one way or another.”

Combat is more complex and stats slightly oddly in that rolling for initiative is optional. The players and the Referee only roll if they want to act before anyone else. A Movement Check is used for initiative and also if a character’s action is to move, whilst a Prowess Check is used for all attacks. Specific actions, such as Indiana Jones using his bullwhip to snatch a gun from a goon’s hand or attempt to knock a goon off his feet rather than inflicting straight damage are handled as modifiers to the attacker’s Prowess. The level of damage inflicted is determined by the quality of the roll and checking on both the ‘Modified Check Table’ and the ‘Check Results Table’. The outcome can either be light, medium, or serious damage. Brawling inflicts injuries, whilst Shooting inflicts wounds. Some weapons increase the severity of damage inflicted, for example, from light to medium. This tends to be weapons that inflict injuries, such as a blackjack or the buttstock of a rifle when used as a club, whilst piercing or cutting weapons inflict wounds. Both injuries and wounds can lead to Attribute Ratings being reduced and unconsciousness, whilst wounds can result in death—although how that is handled is not addressed and in fact, this is the only mention of death in the roleplaying game. Goons—such as Nazi guards or Nepalese thugs—always act after the heroes and are knocked out if they suffer serious damage, whereas villains, like rival archaeologist René Belloq, act and take damage like a Player Character. The fact that Goons can be knocked out by serious damage does model the films, for example, Indiana Jones shooting the swordsman in the marketplace scene or the fistfight against the German Luftwaffe mechanic. The roll also determines where the damage is inflicted. This is done by reversing the numbers on the roll and consulting the ‘Action Results Table’ on the Referee’s Screen.
For example, Indiana Jones is fighting his way out of the library and wants to punch one of the Nazis in front of him. This is a Prowess Check. Indiana has a Prowess of 76. His player rolls ‘25’ and the Referee compares it to the ‘Modified Check Table’ and the ‘Check Results Table’. This is between a quarter and a half of Indiana’s Prowess and indicates medium damage. The result of ‘25’ is reversed to ‘52’ and the ‘Action Results Table’ consulted—Indiana has landed a good blow in the Nazi goon’s gut! This forces a Strength Check on the goon. The check is successful and so all of the Nazi’s Attribute Ratings are halved for this and the next round. (If the roll failed, then the Nazi would have been knocked unconscious.)As this is a roleplaying game based on Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, there are rules for vehicles, chases, and combat whilst in a chase. This is the most complex part of the rules in the roleplaying game, but is decently explained, there is an example of it in play, and then the reader gets to try it out. The rules also make use of the ‘Chase Flow Chart’, which model routes and intersections and possible hazards that the Player Characters might encounter. (A similar chart would later appear in Top Secret/S.I., published by TSR, Inc. in 1987.) Other rules cover money, travel, equipment, and dangerous events. Of these, the rules for money are arguably superfluous since money never plays a factor in the films. The rules for dangerous events, whether falling, hanging on to a failing rope bridge, riding a runaway cart in a mine, drowning, and more are simply given a Danger Rating which works like an Attribute in play, using the same ‘Modified Check Table’ and ‘Check Results Table’.

There is good advice for the player as well as the Referee. For the player, this is about having fun, getting into the adventure spirit, and playing the good guys. In fact, there is a rule for enforcing the latter, the Referee having the right to demand a Backbone Check if she thinks that Indiana Jones, or a sidekick, is about to do something out of character. Since there is no means of creating Player Characters in The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game, there is no way of improving them either. There is, though, an optional rule for Player Points. These are earned by achieving the objectives in an adventure overall and in some episodes as well, such as rescuing an NPC or obtaining the artefact that Indiana Jones is searching for, whilst the Referee can earn them by having the NPCs capture the Player Characters or retain the artefact that the Player Characters are after. The players and the Referee can also reward each other with Player Points at the end of an adventure or episode for making the play fun, good roleplaying, and coming up with good ideas. A player cannot earn more than five Player Points per adventure or episode and cannot have more than fifteen in total. Player Points can only be spent to reduce the severity of a Player Character’s wounds or injuries, for example, from serious to medium, at a cost of five Player Points each time. This also applies to the Referee and her NPCs.

Another way to earn Player Points is a special bonus if a Player Character sacrifices himself to save another Player Character or NPC. If a Player Character is killed, the Player Points are carried over to the player’s new one. Given the lack of discussion of character death in The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game, this seems at odds with the nature of its play, and whilst the expenditure of Player Points counters the sometimes severity of the combat system, in hindsight it feels so limiting that they cannot be spent to undertake heroic or cinematic action. That said, this is a roleplaying game published in 1984 and the idea of Hero Points or Luck Points, of which Player Points are a sort, had yet to be adopted by the wider gaming hobby. Yet this is despite the pioneer of their broader use, James Bond 007: Role-Playing In Her Majesty’s Secret Service, being published by Victory Games the year before.

In terms of background, The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game provides a timeline and a very short history of the 1930s, plus descriptions of various archaeological locations around the world, none of which are marked on the World Map. The advice for the Referee is decent enough. The scenario though, ‘The Ikons of Ikammanen’, is in parts exciting, but as a whole never more than serviceable. It opens with the death of a former student of Doctor Jones, which puts him on the trail of a set of legendary artefacts from West Africa. Here he will be captured along with the student’s sister—who also took classes under Indiana Jones—by a greedy local, and together they will be forced to explore a mysterious and deadly volcanic island. The scenario stretches credulity in places, such as when a Nazi submarine torpedoes the ship they are on, rescues them, and actually transports them across the Atlantic to New York! It is a direct adaptation of the first story of Marvel Comics’ The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones series and highlights how ultimately, The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game is a very direct adaptation of the source material rather than a setting to be explored. It is disappointing that an original story could not have been included, perhaps one that could actually have involved more than one player. That said, it does get comic artist and writer, John Byrne, who wrote ‘The Ikons of Ikammanen’ for The Further Adventures of Indiana Jones comic, a roleplaying game design credit!

Physically, The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game is underwhelming. The Games Rules Booklet is illustrated with images from the first two films, all in black and white, but the rulebook does feel cramped and busy. The most colourful items are the three-dimensional cardboard three-dimensional cardboard figures, but the artwork is far from great. It captures the look of Indiana Jones and his sidekicks in the clothing that they wear rather than their actual appearance.

—oOo—The first review of The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game appeared in Imagine No. 21 (December 1984), appropriately in an issue dedicated to superhero roleplaying games! In ‘Games Reviews’, Paul Mason said, “The main strength of the rules lies in the system used. The designers have come up with an ingenious way of combining chance with success, quality of result and (in the case of combat) hit locations with a single percentage role. The whole game depends on this simple system, making it easy to pick up.” In the main though, he was critical of the game, finishing with, “…[W]hile the game structure is spot on, the execution is poor, making me feel overall that the game is a missed opportunity.”

The most positive of its reviews would appear in the pages of Imagine magazine’s rival. In Adrian Knowles’ review of The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game in ‘Open Box’ in White Dwarf Issue 61 (January 1985) he highlighted how the rules are designed for someone with little roleplaying experience, commenting that, “It is very obvious that the game has been produced entirely with a young market in mind - players totally new to the idea of roleplaying will find it easy to play and pick up and good fun to boot.” and that, “Experienced gamers, I suspect, will regard the game with horror - a character who is unthinkable [sic], ridiculous!”. (Presumably, he meant ‘unkillable’ rather than ‘unthinkable’.) He concluded with, “Although I found the game to be quite enjoyable (but then I had spend [sic] the evening propping up a bar before tackling it) it only has appeal as a ‘one-off’ game - good for a break but unlikely to have lasting appeal. It is fun, however, and no matter what crazy stunt you attempt, Indy will survive.” before awarding it seven out of ten.

Steve Crow was less charitable in his review which appeared in the ‘Capsule Reviews’ section of Space Gamer Number 73 (March/April 1985). He was critical throughout and ended with, “Indiana Jones is so locked into the concept of the two movies that it is practically useless for anything outside of reenacting the movies or similar plots. FGU’s Daredevils and Hero Games’ Justice Inc. both take a broader look at the genre of 30s roleplaying, giving you a chance to take your life into your own hands with characters of your own creation. Indiana Jones does neither.”

The negative reviews continued with Different Worlds Issue 39 (May/June 19865). In ‘Game Reviews’, Russell Grant Collins reviewed The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game as well as the first two adventures, IJ1 – Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom Adventure Pack and IJ2 – Raiders of the Lost Ark Adventure Pack. He summed up both roleplaying game and scenarios with “In conclusion, avoid this game; if you play some other system that is set in this time period and are willing to do the conversions, the modules might be worth it, especially Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

Perhaps the oddest review would appear in the pages of Dragon No. 215 (March 1995). In ‘Role-Playing Reviews’, Rick Swan gave an overview of numerous roleplaying games and settings with ‘Something for everyone? West end Games’ MASTERBOOK game’. In examining The World Of Indiana Jones—which was published exactly ten years after The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game, he said of the first version that, “It wasn’t a big hit—I picked mine up at a GEN CON® Game Fair for fifty cents, still in the shrink wrap—possibly because of the elementary mechanics, more likely due to the exclusion of a character-creation system. Instead of dreaming up your own PC, you simply assumed the role of your favourite character from the films. Thus, the game ensured a flurry of fist-fights as players squabbled over who got to be Indy.”—oOo—
Although the licence for the roleplaying game would lapse in 1985, The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game would infamously and curiously have an afterlife that lives on today. According to legend, when the licence was lost, all copies of the roleplaying game had to be burned. Employees at TSR (UK) rescued the last, partially burned copy, and its remnants would end up encased in a Perspex pyramid, the only words legible being ‘diana Jones’. In the twenty-first century, this became the trophy for the Diana Jones Award For Excellence In Gaming, serving as an accolade for everything that The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game was not. The irony is not subtle.

The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game was, notoriously, the roleplaying game that applied the ‘™’ or trademark symbol to the word ‘Nazi’ as in ‘Nazi™’. Except this really is a roleplaying myth. Many of the three-dimensional figures do have both the Trademark and the Copyright symbols on their bases. These are all named characters from the films—Indiana Jones, Sallah, Marion Ravenwood, and so on. The others like the various Goons, the Ship Captain, and yes, the Nazi, do not.

What is surprising about The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game is that in some ways it is not as bad as its reputation suggests, but in every other way, its poor reputation is deserved. Mechanically, The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game is a good game and the way in which a single Attribute Check can determine its qualitative outcome and in combat, the hit location, with a single roll, is actually elegant and fast playing. Yet the way in which it handles the effects of damage, death, and effectively, script immunity for Indiana Jones, Sallah, Marion Ravenwood, and so on, underwhelms any sense of jeopardy. Of course, the sense of peril seen on screen is not real, because ultimately, we know that Indiana Jones will prevail, but The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game makes it explicit. Indiana Jones can take any amount of damage and come back from it, and though optional, the use of Player Points, enforces this. At the same time, you want the Player Points to allow you to do other things, just like Indiana Jones does on screen, but the rules are not there for that. The limitations of who and what you can play also limits choice and the number of participants. What The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game really is, is not so much a roleplaying game, with its freedom for the Game Master and her players to create their content in terms of characters and adventures, as an ‘adventure’ game designed to emulate very closely the films and stories upon which it is based.

By modern standards, it would not actually take much to adjust The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game into something more playable. The underlying mechanics are workable. It is the choices made to model the films too closely that undermine the rules and the roleplaying game as a whole. The result is that as both a roleplaying game and a roleplaying based on the world of Indiana Jones, The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game fails to satisfy.

Since 2013, Goodman Games, the publisher of the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game and Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game – Triumph & Technology Won by Mutants & Magic has released a book especially for Gen Con, the largest tabletop hobby gaming event in the world. That book is the Goodman Games Gen Con Program Book, a look back at the previous year, a preview of the year to come, staff biographies, community content, and a whole lot more, including adventures and lots tidbits and silliness. The first was the Goodman Games Gen Con 2013 Program Book, but not being able to pick up a copy from Goodman Games when they first attended UK Games Expo in 2019, the first to be reviewed was the Goodman Games Gen Con 2014 Program Book. Fortunately, a little patience and a copy of the Goodman Games Gen Con 2013 Program Book was located and reviewed, so since 2021, normal order has been resumed with the Goodman Games Gen Con 2016 Program Book, the Goodman Games Gen Con 2017 Program Book, and Goodman Games Gen Con 2018 Program Guide: The Black Heart of Thakulon the Undying, and Goodman Games 2019 Yearbook: Riders on the Phlogiston.

With both Goodman Games Gen Con 2018 Program Guide: The Black Heart of Thakulon the Undying, and Goodman Games 2019 Yearbook: Riders on the Phlogiston, the series had begun to chart a new direction. Each volume would contain a mix of support for the various RPGs published by Goodman Games and the content recognising the Goodman Games community, but the major feature of each volume would be a tournament scenario, staged the previous year at Gen Con. Unfortunately, events caught up with the eighth entry in the series, intending to highlight the presence of Goodman Games at Gen in 2020, which would cancel Gen Con and every other event as well as face-to-face gaming. It meant that Goodman games had to adapt and adapts its by now traditional Gen Con Program Guide. The result was Goodman Games Yearbook #8: The Year That Shall Not be Named.

Goodman Games Yearbook #8: The Year That Shall Not be Named also marked a name change as well, the traditional Gen Con Program Guide becoming a ‘Yearbook’ instead. It opens in tremendous fashion with a lengthy interview with the doyen of British fantasy gaming artwork, most well known for his work on The Warlock of Firetop Mountain and the Fiend Folio for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition. In ‘An Interview With Russ Nicholson’ by Thorin Thompson, the late illustrator takes the time to talk about his influences, how he got into drawing, and how he became involved with Games Workshop, all before coming up to date and providing covers for two covers he did for Goodman Games’ Dungeon Crawl Classics Dying Earth #2: The Sorcerer’s Tower of Sanguine Slant. Although not a gamer himself, it is clear that Nicholson is as much aware about games and the hobby as he is fantasy and that he also enjoys working in the medium. The interview is accompanied by a wide range of artwork, including the covers of several fanzines that he drew in the 1970s, that nicely showcases his style down the years. The only downside is that the interview is in the black and section of Goodman Games Yearbook #8: The Year That Shall Not be Named, and so we do not get to see any of his artwork in colour. That said, we do get see plenty of the line art that Nicholson is so famous for. It is a good interview and a great way to start the yearbook.
The mechanical content in Goodman Games Yearbook #8: The Year That Shall Not be Named begins with two articles by Marzio Muscedere. The first is ‘Monster Fumbles’. This provides a solution for what happens if the Judge rolls a one when rolling for an attack by one of his monsters. The exact die she has to roll depends on the Luck Modifier of the Player Character, so the higher the die type the Judge rolls, all the way up to a sixteen-sided die for a Player Character with a Luck Modifier of ‘+3’. This is accompanied by tables in turn for ‘Devils and Demons’, ‘Dragons’, ‘Giants’, ‘Humanoids with Weapons’—including orcs, kobolds, goblins, bugbears, lizardmen, cultists, and similar, ‘Monsters’, ‘Undead’, and ‘Elementals’. The latter category is the most complex, but only to the extent that the Judge has to adjust the results to fit the type of elemental who fumbled. The second is ‘Seven Mighty Deeds From The City Of Sevenscore Thousand Smokes’ which gives options for the Warrior Class’ Mighty Deed of Arms for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Lankhmar Boxed Set. Most of these are a ‘Tandem Deed’, that is, a Mighty Deed which requires two Player Characters to work rather than the traditional one. For example, ‘Bewilder and Backstab’ enables one Player Character to distract an NPC and so give a bonus to another Player Character about to perform a Backstab manoeuvre on the distracted NPC. Others include ‘Back-To-Back Badasses/Back-To-Back Fighting’, ‘I Got You Bro!/Draw Attacks Away From Allies’, and ‘Launch Ally’, all of them nicely capturing that idea of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser working together as well as giving play a little cinematic flourish. The rest, such as ‘ Increased Critical’ are more straightforward, whilst the last one, ‘Snowball Fighting’ is a bit of silliness, but can be easily adapted to include any improvised thrown weapon. All are accompanied by excerpts from Fritz Leiber’s novels to give them colour and background.
James A. Pozenel, Jr. provides yet more Mighty Deeds of Arms, but where ‘Seven Mighty Deeds From The City Of Sevenscore Thousand Smokes’ was specific to the Lankhmar setting, ‘Dwarven Rune Tracing – Mighty Deeds Of Rune-Powered Combat’, is specific to the Dwarf Class. A cross between a magical skill and a martial art, they are intended to add flavour to Dwarf combat. The Dwarf needs to have an Intelligence of thirteen or more to know even a single Rune. Once known, with a Mighty Deed of Arms, he can trace it in the air, on a shield, or his armour, and it will come into effect the following round. They include the ‘Rune of Strength’, the ‘Rune of Rage’, the ‘Rune of Speed’, and so on. The effect of each depends on the roll on the Deed Die and there are suggestions too for being able to raise the effect all the way up to nine on the Deed Die and making the learning or gaining of new Runes a mini-quest in itself. Again, this is optional, but in play it nicely makes the Dwarf Class just that little bit different to the Warrior Class.
Stephen Newton has already penned two horror-themed scenarios for Dungeon Crawl Classics—Dungeon Crawl Classics Horror #1: They Served Brandolyn Red and Dungeon Crawl Classics Horror: The Corpse That Love Built – 2018 Halloween Module—so it makes perfect sense for him to write ‘Stokerian Vampires: Bringing Bram Stoker’s Dracula To DCC RPG’. As the title suggests he adapts the archetypal vampires from the most famous vampire novel of all time, classifying them as ‘The Cursed’ like Mina Harker, ‘The Un-Dead’ like Lucy Westenra, and The King Vampire, who of course, is like Dracula himself. The article covers habits, lairs, hunting territory, traits, and more, much of which will be more than familiar. After all, Dracula is the basis for a very great deal of the vampire lore and the vampire in popular culture so the likelihood is that very little of the article is new. Nevertheless, this does not in any detract from the descriptions and details given for use with the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game, which all together give the perfect adaption if the Judge is looking for Bram Stoker-style, classic vampires.
‘The Dying Wish Of Daog The Blue: An Option For Arcane Healing In DCC RPG’ is a bit different and a bit controversial. Written by Jeff Goad, it suggests a way of bringing arcane rather than divine healing into the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game. It consists of two parts, the first fiction telling how Daog The Blue, having heard of arcane wizards casting healing magics on other worlds, from Middle-earth to Zothique, successfully brought it to Aereth. The other is the spell itself, Daog’s Dying Wish. This makes sense in a setting without the Cleric Class, but otherwise, it may be seen as poaching upon the territory of the Cleric Class.
The penultimate gaming content in Goodman Games Yearbook #8: The Year That Shall Not be Named is ‘Deadly Hands of DCC: Eight Epic NPCs For Your DCC Game’ by Michael Curtis, Brendan LaSalle, and Harley Stroh. This is an entertaining selection of villains and heroes inspired by martial arts films. ‘Baron Von Strangle’, a cursed set of armour that empowers its wearer, but also forces him to strange everyone he can and so the demonic strangler has become feared across the Steppe Kingdoms; ‘Flamehand, Jack’ is a wandering monk, ageless, who might be a charlatan or he might be a genuine saint, who strikes so fast the air appears to ignite around his kicks and punches; and ‘Qin Qian’ is a member of Spangled Court of the Endless Cycle, the clergy of Aleea, Goddess of Ordinary Days, whose radical interpretation of the need for ongoing peace and normality, has led her to launch a crusade against anything and everything that threatens that. Although this has greatly upset the rest of her fellow priests and her goddess cannot quite condone her activities—though is pleased about the peace they have brought many, ‘Qin Qian’ continues her work and may even direct adventurers such as the Player Characters to attack some local threat. If they take her hints, then the Player Characters may gain a small blessing in return. There are some fun NPCs included in the octet in this article and many of them can be used by the Judge to develop hooks and encounters.
Lastly, Michael Curtis complains about how his ‘Glaive Expectations’ were not met. His disappointment came about because the Player’s Handbook for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition did match the description of the glaive he was expecting. What he was expecting was the glaive from the film Krull. What he got was the ‘Glaive – Guisarme’, a polearm. So he instead provides a version of the Glaive from Krull, plus a magical one, for use with Dungeon Crawl Classics. Silly and self-indulgent.
Goodman Games has always been highly supportive of its community and showcases in every issue of the ‘program guide’ or ‘yearbook’. It begins in this volume with some images that capture the public spirit in terms of voting and preventing the spread of COVID-19 in 2019 and 2020 in ‘Goodman Games Tries To Change The World: Images Of 2020’. There are many, many convention photographs from Gen Con 2019 and Gama Expo 2020 before the world changes and play moves online, as showcased by photographs from Cyclops Con, DCC Days Online, and Bride of Cyclops Con. There are also the logo used for Goodman Games’ then new Twitch channel displayed in ‘Going Live On Twitch Goodman Games Evolves In 2020’. In 2020, it all felt like a radical change, one brought on by necessity, but now it feels much more like a normal state of affairs and everyone is far more used to playing online. There are also tongue-in-cheek ‘GG Joe Profiles’ of everyone involved at Goodman Games and the ‘2020 T-Shirt Designs’.
Goodman Games’ stand at Gen Con receives some attention with the hand drawn signs the publisher’s ‘Gen Con Book Shelves’, whilst Chuck Whelon draws the ‘Luck Award Winners’ of various winners on the Luck Token Redemption Table found at the back of the Goodman Games 2019 Yearbook: Riders on the Phlogiston, not once, but twice! There is, however, a wistfulness to ‘The Ziggurat That Never Was’ by Wayne Snyder. Having previously built the Doom Gong and then the Obelisks of Doom for the stand, for 2020, he was set to build a skull encrusted ziggurat, part-book stand, part storage space. Unfortunately, due to COVID-19 and the cancellation of Gen Con, the Ziggurat of Doom was not to be.
Lastly, Michael Curtis looks at the design of Original Adventures Reincarnated #3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks and Chris Doyle looks at the design of looks at the design of Original Adventures Reincarnated #4: The Lost City in a trio of articles each. ‘Barrier Peaks Designer’s Notes, Entry 1: Of Sleek, Futuristic Design’ examines some of the issues in extracting the back story to the original module and developing that further, whilst ‘Barrier Peaks Designer’s Notes, Entry 1: The Future Was Then’ details how Curtis went about presenting the look of the original module, famous for its illustrations, in the new edition. Similarly, in ‘The Lost City Designer’s Diary, Entry 1: Converting A Classic Adventure’, Doyle explains about the process of adapting a forty-year-old thirty-two-page module into a homage written for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, hundreds of pages long, whilst ‘The Lost City Designer’s Diary, Entry 3: Hunting For Easter Eggs’ lists and explains some of ‘Easter Eggs’ he slips into the updated edition. All three articles for both modules—for a total of six—are short, but fascinating reads, more so if the reader has access to Original Adventures Reincarnated #3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks and Original Adventures Reincarnated #4: The Lost City.
Physically, the Goodman Games Yearbook #8: The Year That Shall Not be Named returns to format of Goodman Games Gen Con 2018 Program Guide: The Black Heart of Thakulon the Undying, a book, rather than a collection of booklets. It is, as you would expect, well presented, easy to read, and a decent looking affair.
Ultimately, Goodman Games Yearbook #8: The Year That Shall Not be Named is almost, but not quite the ‘Goodman Games Year Book That should Be Forgot’, for as fun as some of the content is, it simply is not as good as in years past. That shows primarily in the lack of a scenario and then in the a medley of things and shorter articles that leave the reader with a feeling of brevity to the whole affair. Of course, the fault cannot be squarely laid at the feet of the Goodman Games, After all, circumstances dictated a very different book to the one that the publisher had likely intended.

The forest stands on the edge of the village fields or not far from the town walls, but it is somewhere to be feared. For under that canopy there is dappled light at best, darkness at worst, and something lurks there, ready to prey on the peasantry and add one more misery to their lives. And now, as if to justify those fears, something has been stolen. A child, or a coin purse, or a lover. In response the peasants have banded together and the bravest of them all will journey deep into the forest in order to retrieve the stolen item from the thieves that hide amongst the trees—the fae! This is the set-up for To Elfland and Back, a minimalist storytelling roleplaying game published by Planar Compass, best known for the fanzine of the same name, which takes Old School Essentials, the retroclone from Necrotic Gnome out onto the Astral Plane and beyond. To Elfland and Back is about as simple as it gets—a motivation for the players and their characters, character creation in four steps, fast mechanics, and a set of encounters that will develop through play. It can be played through in a single session, requires no more than a pair of six-sided dice, and offers a reasonable degree of replay value.

Player Character creation in To Elfland and Back is very light. All a player does is roll for a Job, chooses three or possessions, rolls for a Personality, and names the character. It should be noted that there just six Personalities, and it is a good thing that the game does not use a seven-sided dice or the Personality of ‘Doc’ would be added, because the six listed are all named after the Dwarves from Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves!

Matilde
Job: Tailor
Personality: Grumpy
Possessions: Needle, thread, thimble

Mechanically, To Elfland and Back is quick and easy. To have his character undertake an action, a player does a Challenge roll and rolls a six-sided die, consulting the Challenge Roll table for the outcome. One is a ‘Failure’, two to three is a ‘Success with negative consequences’, four and five indicate a ‘Success’, and six is a ‘Success with fantastic results’. Essentially, what you have here is the equivalent of ‘No’, ‘Yes, but…’, ‘Yes’, and ‘Yes and…’ results, and whatever the result the referee will describe the outcome. In addition, a Challenge roll can be made with Advantage or Disadvantage, the player rolling two six-sided dice and using the best result if at an Advantage or the worst if at a Disadvantage. The most obvious means of gaining Advantage will be from the Player Character’s Job, whilst the most obvious means of gaining Disadvantage is due to the Player Character’s Personality, though of course, other situations and causes will come up in play. Beyond that, the complexity of play—if any—comes from narrating the outcomes.
For the Referee there little in the way of advice, but rather a set of tables for generating various aspects of the story to be told, starting with what was stolen and where it was taken. After that, there are tables for encounters along the way, what fae can be encountered and what they might be riding, locations along the way, fae food and drink, and magic items that might be found in the fae lands. There is a table for what the fae might want in return for giving the purloined item back and lastly, because this is a fairy tale, the final table is a coda—how long have the Player Characters been gone?

Physically, To Elfland and Back is beautifully illustrated with a range of artwork, most notably medieval and Victorian pieces, as if it were an illuminated manuscript that was actually a Victorian collection of fairy tales. The writing is succinct.

Written for Fae Jam 2020, To Elfland and Back is at its most mechanical, a sparse set of tables with nothing in the way of advice or background. However, those tables are prompts that set the game up, enabling the Game Master to prepare a session quickly and easily beforehand or run a session straight from the rolls at the table. The latter makes To Elfland and Back a highly portable, low preparation game, making it great for a convention game or a pick-up game. In terms of background, this is a fairy tale roleplaying game and fairy tales are some of the earliest stories we are told as children, so most players are going to be familiar with the genre. In terms of play, To Elfland and Back is demanding in that it is relying on elements of storytelling more than mechanics, asking Game Master and player to create much of the world they go along, based upon the prompts taken form the game’s tables. Of which, there are enough to run To Elfland and Back more than a few times for the same group.

Overall, To Elfland and Back is a pleasing combination of simplicity and familiarity that is both easy to run and easy to play, and all with a genre and setting that needs no explanation.

Road to Haven is a campaign for Zombicide Chronicles: The Roleplaying Game, which is based upon the collaborative board game, Zombicide: 2nd Edition. Published by CoolMiniOrNot and Guillotine Games, this introduces a new mode of play for the roleplaying game—‘Campaign Mode’. This introduces the concept of missions connected by a one or more plots and by recurring NPS—‘Non-Player Survivors’. In the case of Road to Haven, the number of missions is short, just ten, and the plots are not complex. Ultimately, what Road to Haven does is provide a continuing motivation for the Survivors—as the Player Characters are called in Zombicide Chronicles—to do more than roam the city in search of food and supplies to scavenge. The main plot concerns the location of a secret military base called ‘Haven 3’, which might be located somewhere in the city. If the Survivors can deduce its location, they can hopefully find it, open it up, and once inside determine if is safe from the zombie hordes outside. That truly would be a haven! However, discovering this information will not be easy. A secret military base is secret for a reason and even before the apocalypse, very few people knew of its existence. Of course, since the apocalypse and the rise of the corpse cortège, even fewer people know! Can the Survivors get lucky and find the one person surviving who does know? This is not the only problem that the Survivor will have to deal with in their quest for answers. There is also something causing the zombies to mutate weirdly and if it spreads, it is going to make life for everyone still alive in the city—let alone anywhere else—a whole lot harder. Plus, there are other Survivors, and Survivors being Survivors, they often come with their issues, some of them left over from before the apocalypse.
The Road to Haven: Campaign Book actually does a bit more than just present a campaign. It introduces a total of eight new Survivor Archetypes. Of these, four are ready to play, meaning that the players can pick from these or those from the core rulebook and that they also serve as replacement Survivors or NPS. These four are the School Teacher, the Mortician, the Surfer, and the Firefighter. The other four are first encountered as NPS in the course of the campaign and once the scenarios where they first appear have been resolved, they are ‘unlocked’ and can be played as Survivors. These four are the Conspiracy Theorist, the Urban Climber Girl, the Social Worker, and the Exotic Dancer. The other thing aspect about the campaign that is ‘unlockable’ is knowledge about the Zombies. Early on in the campaign, the Survivors will discover a dossier of notes about the zombies called, ‘Anatomical Guide to Zombies’. This depicts the various types of zombies and their potential weak points. As a Shelter Action carried out between missions, a Survivor can attempt a new training action, ‘Compile the Anatomical Guide’. This requires a Survivor to consider the zombies fought by the group in the previous mission. His player then rolls an Education Check and for every success, the Survivor identifies a ‘weakness point’ in particular type of zombies. Once all of the weakness points have been identified, the Survivors can replace ordinary dice with Mastery dice they attack that type of zombie.

The campaign will also have the Survivors facing off against some nasty zombified monsters in addition to those found in Zombicide Chronicles: The Roleplaying Game. They include several twisted animals and a zombie centipede that splits apart! Many of the new zombie threats are connected to the campaign’s secondary plot about the mutant zombies. In addition, the campaign can also be modified by ‘Campaign Events’. These can be used by the Game Master to modify individual missions with seemingly random events. Some are helpful, such as an unexpected cargo drop by a military aeroplane, or weird, such as an eclipse, but others are also tied to the main plot of the campaign itself. All of them are optional, but a lot of them are fun—the idea of fighting zombie hordes in the middle of an eclipse is never going to be less than memorable.
The campaign opens with a standard Supply Run-style mission. When the Survivors rescue an NPS called ‘Tinfoil’, he tells them about a secret he has discovered—a radio broadcast! This, he thinks, is coming from a secret bunker and if it is still intact, it means it will have supplies and it will be safe. However, he does not know where it is, and since there is no Internet anymore, there is no easy way of finding out! Confirming the existence of the bunker and determining its location form the main strand of the campaign. It will take the Survivors to various locations across the city, including a library, the old city zoo, and an ‘exotic’ nightclub… In the process, the Survivors will also encounter some oddly mutated and much deadlier zombies. The question is, is there something affecting the zombies and twisting them into much nastier versions? Of course there is, and investigating this forms the basis of the second of the three plot strands in Road to Haven. Both this and the third strand are much, much shorter than the campaign’s main plot to find the hidden bunker. When the Survivors do find the hidden bunker, they will also discover secrets so dangerous that they could destroy the world and the campaign with it...
All ten missions in Road to Haven are presented in the same format. This begins with an introduction and a detailed description of the locations, a set of floorplans, details of the events that will be triggered during the mission, and descriptions of the adversaries and NPS who will be encountered during the mission. Objectives are also outlined and what happens next is discussed in the in the aftermath. The event descriptions can be quite detailed, but it does feel slightly out of order to have them after the location descriptions rather than before.

In terms of setting, the city in Road to Haven can be a generic city as in the core rulebook for Zombicide Chronicles: The Roleplaying Game or it can be set in the city of the Game Master’s choice. With its preponderance of guns, it is not as easy to adapt to anywhere outside of the USA.
Physically, Road to Haven is big, bold, and in your face. It is heavily illustrated with lots and lots of cartoon style artwork, decent maps and floorplans, and fully painted shots of the city. The book is well written and easy to read.

As a campaign, Road to Haven is short and uncomplicated, the latter meaning that it is relatively easy to run for the Game Master and the former that it can played through in as little as ten sessions (though it will probably take a few more). As the first campaign for Zombicide Chronicles: The Roleplaying Game, it completely suits the big, bold cartoon world of the roleplaying game and the board game it is based on.

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

—oOo—
BattleTech infamously began life as BattleDroids. Originally published by FASA Corporation in 1984, for the second edition it would be renamed BattleTech because George Lucas and Lucasfilm claimed the rights to the term ‘droid’. It was also infamously, the game of ‘big, stompy robots’, but as BattleTech, it would go on to be so much more. In the forty years since its publication, this has included numerous expansions to the core board game, numerous supplements adding rules and detailing the background to the game, several ranges of miniatures—both plastic and metal, over one hundred novels, a cartoon series, a collectible card game, and multiple computer games. These options have allowed fans to enjoy the setting in numerous ways, sometimes without even playing the core game, but the franchise has always been about the play of the boxed game that is BattleTech. This is a review of the second edition of BattleTech, published in 1985.


BattleTech is a turn-based multiplayer game, played on large maps marked with hexes and terrain with players fielding twelve-metre-tall humanoid armoured, fusion-powered combat units, weighting between ten and a hundred tons, called BattleMechs, or ’mechs. These are not robots, but are controlled by human pilots who will manoeuvre across the battlefield, exchanging fire from lasers, autocannons, missile-launchers, and the dreaded PPC or particle projection cannon. If close enough, they may even punch or kick each other, and if they have jump jets, launch a risky death from above attack. Over the course of a battle, a ’mech will build up heat due to movement and weapons fire, and if it cannot bleed off enough heat, the excess will impair its targeting systems, impede its movement, and potentially cause any ammunition it is carrying to explode or the ’mech to simply shutdown. Each unit is represented by one figure, an illustrated—front and back—cardboard piece that slots into a plastic base, and a record sheet. Each record sheet contains information about the amount of armour a ’mech has, how many weapons, and where the armour and weapons are located, as well as being used to track damage suffered and its location, ammunition used, and how much heat it builds up from one turn to the next.

BattleTech: A Game of Armoured Combat carries the description, “In the 30th century, life is cheap, but BattleMechs aren’t.” The box contains forty-eight playing pieces depicting the various BattleMechs, twenty-four plastic holders for them, one-hundred-and-twenty unit insignias for the game’s various armies and mercenary units, a forty-eight page rulebook, two full-colour card maps, and two six-sided dice. The forty-eight playing pieces are an inch high, whilst the maps measure twenty-two by seventeen inches, are marked in one-and-a-quarter inch-wide hexes, and are both identical. Each hex is roughly a hundred feet across. the game is designed to be played by two or more players, aged twelve and up. The basic unit in the game is a lance of four ’mechs, so with twenty-four plastic holders, it is possible for six players to field a lance each, two players to field three lances each, and so on. It is also possible for a player to control just a single battlemech depending upon the circumstances, such as a duel or a roleplaying situation.


The black and white rulebook covers everything that the players need to know about playing BattleTech. This includes its rules—going from basic training to advanced gunnery, expert and optional rules—as well details of fourteen different ’mechs. These range in size between 20 and 100 tons, and include the Marauder, Phoenix Hawk, Warhammer, Stinger, Locust, and BattleMaster. Many of these are regarded as classics even today, though lawsuits over who owned the rights to use their images, taken from various different Japanese anime, including Dougram, Crusher Joe, and Macross, would result in FASA Corporation withdrawing their original appearances and all art associated artwork from the game. These would be labelled as ‘the unseen’ by BattleTech fans, and were missing from the game for many years until a legal agreement was reached that allowed many of them to return.


The rulebook also contains the setting to BattleTech, which is explained in sidebars which run down each page. The setting is the Inner Sphere, a region of interstellar space surrounding Earth with a radius of roughly five hundred light years. It contains some two thousand settled worlds, reachable by both Faster-Than-Light travel and communication. Beyond the Inner Sphere lies the Periphery. In the thousand years that mankind has had Faster-Than-Light travel, no signs of sentient, alien life have ever been found. In the early thirty-first century, several hundred years after a civil war that saw the collapse of the Star League, the Inner Sphere is dominated by five Great Houses—the Capellan Confederation ruled by House Liao, the Draconis Combine ruled by House Kurita, the Federated Suns ruled by House Davion, the Free Worlds League ruled by House Marik, and the Lyran Commonwealth ruled by House Steiner. Each house claimed the right to be First Lord of the Star League, but none could agree as who was right, and in a series of Succession Wars, the houses have battled each other into technological decline. In that time, the battlemech has remained king of the battlefield, each house fiercely protecting the few battlemech manufacturing facilities each possesses and suffering from a decreasing capacity both to produce new ’mechs and repair them. A battlemech pilot is akin to a knight of old and many ’mechs are handed down through families. The last thing that any pilot wants to suffer is a loss of his mech and his becoming one of the Dispossessed. As well as presenting a history of the Inner Sphere and details of the five great Houses, the rule book also describes numerous mercenary units with their own histories and relationships to the Houses, plus the Bandit Kingdoms of the Periphery.


The background, essentially a ‘feudalist future’, provides reasons and rivalries in what is an age of continual war, that can explain the whys and wherefores of any battles that the players want to stage. If perhaps the rulebook is missing anything, it is some actual scenario ideas that the players can simply set up and play.


In terms of game, the players will roll for initiative and then alternate the movement of their battlemechs. A battlemech can walk, run, or jump—the latter requiring jump jets—which determines how many Movement Points it has to spend on crossing terrain. The terrain can be open or rough ground, cliffs and bluffs, light and heavy woods, and water. The heavier terrain costs more Movement Points to cross. Once movement has been completed, the players take it in turn to declare their attacks for their battlemechs and then roll for the attacks. Battlemechs are equipped with an array of different weapon types and sizes. Lasers can be small, medium, or large; short range missiles launchers fire volleys of two, four, or six missiles; and long-range missile launchers fire volleys of five, ten, or twenty missiles. Plus, there are an autocannon and the PPC. The different weapons have their own ranges, damage inflicted, and heat generated. Rolling to hit is based on the range and is modified by the gunnery skill of a battlemech’s pilot, the movement of both attacker and defender, terrain and cover, and lastly, any ongoing effects of heat for the attacker. The attacking player then rolls the dice, aiming to roll equal to or higher than the target number.


The location of successful hits is determined randomly as the targeting systems of the Inner Sphere are poor. This includes individual missiles for short range missiles, but groups of five for long range missiles. Damage is first deducted from armour in a location and when that is gone, from the internal structure. Critical hits on the hit location roll can bypass armour and automatically do damage to internal structure. Any damage to the internal structure has a chance to inflict damage to weapons or ammunition in a location, to the engine or gyro in the torso, to actuators in the arms and legs, and even the pilot himself on a headshot. Critical hits have severe consequences. Damage to a weapon will destroy it, ammunition will explode causing more damage, damaged actuators and gyro make the battlemech more difficult to operate, a damaged engine will increase its heat output and if it takes more damage cause it to explode and possibly kill the pilot, and head hits can also kill the pilot or knock out an important component. In the meantime, if damage exceeds the amount of internal structure, a leg or arm can fall off or be destroyed. Excess damage can also be transferred to other locations.


Lastly, as well as tracking ammunition use, a player must track the heat a battlemech generates from movement and weapons use as well as damage to the engine. Each battlemech comes with ten heat sinks which will bleed off a certain amount of heat, and more may be fitted, depending upon the design. Excess heat is retained until it is bled off via the heat sinks, meaning that a battlemech will probably need to firer fewer weapons and move a shorter distance to do this. One part of play is thus managing heat from turn to turn. Rushing into an engagement all guns blazing is likely to generate far too much heat, limiting tactical options in subsequent turns. Most battlemechs have an optimal range for its weapons so working within those parameters will also help in heat management. This is in addition to making the best use of the terrain to gain cover or if necessary, standing in the water to work off excess heat!


Rounding out the rulebook are expert rules that allow a battlemech to twist its torso as a reaction to change its firing arc, make physical attacks—including picking up a blown-off limb and using it as a club, charging, and setting fire to the wooded areas. There are also rules for battlemech design, enabling a player to create his own and then test them out on the field of battle. It is just four pages long, and even includes an example, but expands game play in a surprising direction, enabling a player to experiment beyond the fourteen official designs included in the game.


Physically, BattleTech: A Game of Armoured Combat is a good-looking game. It might only use cardboard standees, but they are attractive and they look decent on the very nice maps. The rulebook itself is in black and white and whilst packing a lot of detail into its forty-eight pages is easy to read and understand. This helped by examples of the rules throughout.

—oOo—Trever Mendham reviewed Battledroids in ‘Open Box’ in White Dwarf Issue 66 (June 1985). He said, “Overall, this is a well-written, easy-to-understand set of rules. Much of the design is clearly specific to robot combat and succeeds in capturing the flavour of this sort of battle. As it stands, Battledroids is a very good robot combat system, but very little in terms of ‘game’. The production value leads one to expect more.” before awarding it an overall score of seven out of ten.

In The Space Gamer Number 75 (July/August 1985), Aaron Allston reviewed the original game in ‘Featured Review: Battledroids’. His initial reaction was that the game was one of “…[G]iant
Japanese robot combat.” and was surprised to discover that it was not, feeling that its “…[F]uture-era “dark age”” was “…[F]leshed out far more than is necessary for a boardgame.” He then said, “But none of it feels like the Japanese cartoons. Rules such as beat buildup and weary campaign background are just wrong for the genre. It’s rather akin to designing a roleplaying game where the characters have superpowers and skintight costumes - and then run about performing political infighting and corporate takeovers a la Dallas or Dynasty. As the Japanese models and cartoons become more common over here, more and more buyers will be purchasing this game expecting something like the source materials, and they’ll be disappointed as I was. They’ll have a decent enough game on their hands – but they may not want to play it.” However, he was more positive in his conclusion: “My recommendation? Buy Battledroids if you'd like a giant-robots boardgame that has nothing to do with the Japanese cartoons. It’s a decent game. You won’t throw away any of your other games to play Battledroids fulltime, but you’ll be adequately entertained.”

BattleTech was reviewed in Adventurer: The Superior Fantasy & Science Fiction Games Magazine Issue #7 (February 1987), alongside the expansions, CityTech, which added urban terrain, infantry, and armour, and AeroTech, which added aerial and space combat. Ashley Watkins made some comparisons between BattleTech and some of the anime titles that were the source material for game and overall, had few reservations, concluding that, “Battletech has a real science fiction flavour, and it’s not often that the elements of playability and background come together in an SF game. So get Citytech for the combat rules, Battletech you want to design your own mechs, Aerotech only if you want the variable geometry mechs, or want to play the space game. This game could well become a cult classic and I highly recommend that you give it a look.”

Dale L. Kemper reviewed BattleTech and CityTech in ‘Game Reviews’ of Different Worlds Issue 45 (March/April 1987). He countered some of the criticism of the game not being Japanese enough by saying, “Battletech surpasses other “Japanese robot”-type games on the market for the simple reason that its universe makes sense. The Battlemech vehicles in the game (many which resemble those from such Japanimation shows as Macross and its Robotec U.S. variant) are piloted military units with strengths and weaknesses. They resemble walking tanks alot more than they resemble the shape-changing robots popularized in the latest cartoons. Certain tactics will aid Mechwarriors in various situations and others will not. Practice and skill outweigh luck in this game.” Before moving on to look at some of the expansions, he concluded that, “All in all Battletech is a good introduction to the universe of the Succession Wars. It should whet your appetite for more and FASA plans on giving it to you. With all the addon games and rules, Battletech will be around for some time to come.” and awarded it three-and-a-half stars.

Steve Wieck reviewed BattleTech in White Wolf Issue #7 (April 1987), continuing the trend of reviewing alongside the supplements Citytech, Aerotech, and MechWarrior. He awarded BattleTech a rating of eight out of ten and said that, “If the true test of any game is its playability, then Battletech is a good system. It is extremely easy to gamemaster and fun to play, at an hourly price that eventually beats the movies.”

Space Gamer/Fantasy Gamer Number 78 (April/May 1987) returned to BattleTech when Scott Tanner asked the question, “Feeling overwhelmed by the number of products for mechwarrior gaming? Here's
a survey of FASA Corps. BATTLETECH products.” in ‘Infotech on BATTLETECH’. He concluded his description of the core game with, “Battletech is a good game which stands on its own, but lacks
in two important areas which the next two supplements cover; warfare in an urban environment and air combat.” The article also contained descriptions of CityTech, AeroTech, and MechWarrior.

Battletech was reviewd in ‘Role-Playing Reviews: Tickets to the stars’ in Dragon Magazine Issue #131 (March 1988) by Jim Bambra alongside the MechWarrior roleplaying game. He said, “The BATTLETECH game is a brilliantly conceived and presented game of robotic combat set in the war-torn universe of the Successor States.” before concluding about the game, “The BATTLETECH game system requires tactical thinking and detailed combat resolution, without becoming too mechanically complicated. Add in the background which appears in sidebars throughout the book, and you have a very good game rich in depth and technical information.”—oOo—
From the basis of BattleTech: A Game of Armoured Combat has spawned a rich and detailed setting supported by numerous games and editions, as well as miniatures and more, but what has made the BattleTech franchise what it is today has to start somewhere. Returning to the original game and there is a pleasing elegance to BattleTech: A Game of Armoured Combat that is easy to grasp and play. What you might play is as another matter, for whilst the background is excellent, the issue with it is that not much is made it of in the rule book. There are no scenarios or suggested battles and had there been, that would have drawn the players into the game and setting. That said, there are hooks here and there in the background that can be developed in scenario set-ups, especially in the descriptions of the mercenary units and the bandit kingdoms. BattleTech: A Game of Armoured Combat is still a very playable and enjoyable game with flavoursome combat and a good background.

One of the biggest board games in recent years has been Gloomhaven, a fantasy-themed, campaign-based tactical skirmish game which combined narrative campaign, almost one hundred scenarios, and seventeen different playable Classes. The box itself is huge, the extent of the campaign vast, and the playing time months. Published by Cephalofair Games, it offered a roleplaying-board game hybrid and it has been a huge success. Now there is an option which is a tenth the size. Not only a tenth the size, but a tenth the playing size, a tenth the set-up time, and definitely a tenth the playing time. This is Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs. This is a game in which everything—including the protagonist and the game components and the play time—have been shrunk down. Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs is a solo board game set in the dark fantasy world of Gloomhaven, designed for ages ten and over, and to be played in just twenty minutes per session. It includes six different characters or mercenaries and over twenty individual scenarios, plus variable difficulty levels, means a combination which offers plenty of replay value. This does though come at a loss of some of the expansiveness of Gloomhaven, but then Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs is designed to offer more self-contained play.

The tight little Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs contains a small, thirty-six page rulebook, a set of plastic cubes to use as markers and monsters, six tiny miniatures representing each of the characters a player can choose from, five dials for tracking Hit Points—for both those of the monsters and the character, and a single die. The die is marked with an ‘O’, a ‘+’, or a ‘—’ symbol. This is used to determine if the movement, attack, and defence values for a hero are lower or better in round, and if the initiative, movement, attack, and defence values for the monsters are lower or better in round. There are also a lot of cards. These start with the Character Cards. There are six of these and include a brawler, a fighter, a spellcaster, a tinkerer, magical manipulator, and an assassin. Each give the character’s Hit Points, Ability Cards—at both the base level and the improved level, and also a complexity indication. There are three low complexity characters and two high, but only one medium complexity character. There is a set of Character Ability Cards for each character. As well as indicating the Initiative value for that round, each one provides two actions, at their most basic, a move action and an attack action. Other actions might provide an area attack, an elemental spell effect, or a piercing blow that ignores part of the defending monster’s defence value. On a turn, a player will choose two of these cards from his hand. He will use the best Initiative value of the two cards and when it is his turn to act, he will use two actions. These cannot come from the same Character Ability Card of the two, meaning that the player will choose the one from the top of one Character Ability Card and the one from the bottom of the other Character Ability Card. This gives a player some great choices when mixing and matching the actions on the Character Ability Cards.

Character Ability Cards are double-sided. The abilities on the ‘A’ are played first and then the Character Ability Cards are flipped over and the abilities on their ‘B’ side can be used on subsequent turns. When the latter have been used, the Character Ability Cards are discarded. Some Character Ability Cards have the ‘Lost’ Icon, which means that when it is used, it goes into Lost pile. Some have ‘Active’ abilities, which remain in effect. Should a player be in danger of running out of Character Ability Cards, he can perform rests to restore cards. Resting also forces the player to lose one card into the Lost pile.

The Monster Ability Stat Cards give values for their initiative, movement, attack, and defence in three different columns. The middle column gives the standard values, the lefthand column the lower values, and the righthand columns the better values. At the start of a round, the player will roll the die. If the ‘—’ is rolled, the lower, lefthand column values are used; for a ‘O’ symbol; there is no change and the middle column is used; and for the ‘+’ symbol, better, righthand values are used. The Monster Ability Stat Cards are double-sided and have a different monster on each side. The Monster Difficulty Modifier Cards are used to make the monsters more or less challenging to defeat and are used in conjunction with the Player Modifier Tray. There are some counters to track the effects of elemental icons and conditions during play and there is also an Icon Reference Card, which is definitely needed as there are a lot of Icons in the game.
Then there are the Scenario Cards. There is a deck of twenty of these, which together make up the whole campaign in Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs. They are double-sided. One side is split into three parts. The top part is the introduction to the scenario and how to set it up, whilst the second is the outcome if the hero is successful. In between, there is a list of the monsters required. At the very top and bottom of the card are the rewards that the hero will earn if successful. The hero can only use the one at the top or bottom of the Scenario Card—not both! On the reverse is the actual play area, a grid of hexes five by hexes, each hex being a centimetre across. The grid is also marked with the starting position both the hero and the monsters, obstacles, and possible traps. Some may also include effects and goals specific to the scenario. Whilst the hero has his own miniature, the monsters are represented by coloured cubes. These are not sophisticated maps, but to be fair, they do not have to be. Each scenario is intended to be completed in roughly twenty minutes.

There are several thick cardboard trays. There is a Player Modifier Tray and several Monster Modifier Trays. The Player Modifier Tray has a slot to track the adjustments made to the character action from one turn to the next. At best, the adjustments will add a bonus, at worst they will completely negate the effect of the decided action that turn. Different cards be slotted into the Player Modifier Tray to represent a character improving. A Monster Ability Stat Card slots into a Monster Modifier Tray, which has a slot to track the column used on the card.

Set-up of a Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs session is easy. Once set up, play is mechanically very easy, with relatively few components for the player to keep track off, a light skirmish game in which the player focuses on the Character Ability Cards and keeps track of the various conditions and icons. Then when play starts, Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs really is fun to play. And what is even better is that the game does not outstay its welcome because the play time for a single scenario is so short, and then set-up and put away time is so short.

The events of Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs are set after those of the main board game. A would-be adventurer approaches Hail, the mysterious Aesther who lives in the Crooked Bone, a derelict tavern, and who is said to be capable of turning anyone into a hero. This is what the character wants, but as soon as he steps over the threshold of the Crooked Bone, things go awry! He is shrunk and quickly finds himself attacked in the first scenario. It appears that Hail has set a trap to dissuade people from following up on the rumours, so the would-be hero must strike out across the ‘Button Realm’ and into the Crooked Bone where he will both prove himself worthy and find a way of being restored to normal size. So not only has Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs been shrunk from standard Gloomhaven, so has the effective play area—across a street and into a building—and the size of each scenario!

Physically, Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs is small, but impressive. The production values are good and the artwork excellent. If there is an issue with the game is that out of the box, some of the cards are slightly warped. If there is another issue, it is that the rulebook in the box is really an introduction to the game rather than a full set of the rules.

The scale and size of Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs does come at some cost. The story is linear and progression in terms of the characters is limited. Nor does it have the expansiveness or the ability to unlock elements of play like its big brother. The rulebook which comes in the box only really covers lay of the first scenario. The player will need to download the full rulebook. Yet these are minor issues in comparison to what Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs does offer. A self-contained game with twenty scenarios and six different characters to play, easy to learn rules, and then constant choices in play as to which combination of Character Ability Cards and their actions to use from one turn to the next. It is also easy to set-up and once you have played through all twenty scenarios, there is still the option of return to play another character. The replay value is very high—as is the portability. Plus, there is certainly scope for expansion as well.

Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs is incredibly pocket-friendly and packs a lot of game play and a surprising amount of depth into that game play. Gloomhaven: Buttons & Bugs is proof is that tiny can be great.

From the moment you see the words “Gleason’s Department Store. Arkham, Mass.” on the lid of the patterned box you know that you have something special in your hands. Open it on the inside of the lid it says “Arkham Leather” above the wallet itself, wrapped in red tissue paper. There is a ‘User Guide: Read Me First’, but honestly, you are not going to read that first. You might look at the ‘Automobile Bail Bond Certificate’ or the ‘Operator’s License’ as issued by the ‘State of New York—Bureau of Motor Vehicles’, with actual headshot photograph attached, but what you are really looking at is the wallet. The brown, real vintage-style leather wallet is also marked with the ‘Arkham Leather’ stamp and inside can be found an embarrassment of riches. There is a ‘Motor Vehicle Registration Card’ issued by The Commonwealth of Massachusetts Dept. of Public Works Registry of Motor Vehicles, a ticket to the ‘Miskatonic University Exhibit Museum’, membership cards for both the ‘Arkham Historical Society’ and ‘The Eye of Amara Society’, a card for the ‘Grafton Diner’, a ‘Locker Rental Assignment—Men’s Gymnasium’ for the local YMCA, a ticket for the ‘Northside Line’ of the ‘Arkham Transit Company’. There is matchbox* for a restaurant, amusingly called ‘The Red Herring’. There are coins and tokens, and even a genuine period key, as well as several dollar bills, and a ‘Prescription Blank National Prohibition Act’ so that the holder can legally drink!
* This is a prop set. Of course, there has to be a matchbox.

The attention to detail is genuinely verisimilitudinous. For example, the card for the ‘Grafton Diner’ has loyalty program punches around its edges, whilst the card for ‘Fennel’s Roadhouse’ has the name ‘Betty’ handwritten on it. The fact that it says, “For Good Time ’Phone 8031’ suggests that this is more than a simple roadside stop offering fuel and lodging.

This then is the Arkham Investigator’s Wallet. It is stunningly stuffed full of things, prop after prop. Things that you and perhaps your players—if you ever let them get their grubby hands on it—are going to be amazed by what they find. Lastly, when you do get to the ‘User Guide: Read Me First’, it explains its use and more. On the back of it is the ‘Arkham Investigator’s Wallet Prop Inventory’, which lists all forty-seven items. Many of them are marked in green, indicating that they can be downloaded and printed out again.

The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society is best known for servicing the great campaigns for Call of Cthulhu with amazing props and objets d’art, such as the Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set and Call of Cthulhu Classic Gamer Prop Set, but with the Arkham Investigator’s Wallet, it has done the reverse. It has provided the Arkham Investigator’s Wallet, not with a campaign, but a scenario which makes use of many of the items to be found within the pockets and folds of the wallet. This is The Dog Walker: A Scenario in 1920s Arkham, inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Out of Time’. As the title suggests, this takes place in Arkham, so you can make use of Chaosium, Inc.’s Call of Cthulhu: Arkham. It begins with Charlotte Foley, a precocious young dog walker and would-be detective, out walking one of her canine charges behind Christchurch Cemetery when she encounters a man acting strangely as if having some kind of a fit. Rushing to the nearest house—where the occupant, Madge Tomlinson and her friends are discussing plans for the neighbourhood’s annual Halloween party—for help, when she returns, the man has entirely disappeared. All that is left behind is a pair of spectacles and a wallet! What has happened to the man? Charlotte is determined to find out.

The Dog Walker is designed to be played with between two and six Investigators. Six pre-generated Investigators are provided in the book. They include a journalist, a history teacher, a retired cook, a retired professor of physics (with a drinking and gambling problem that may actually help the investigation in certain locations!), and a civil engineer, as well as young Charlotte. This is a nicely genteel selection of Investigators notable for the fact that all but one of them is unarmed, so the scenario is not one designed to be concluded through force of arms. That said, six Investigators does feel slightly too many for the scale of the scenario and perhaps some advice as to which of the six pre-generated Investigators to use with fewer players would have been helpful. The scenario is designed to be played solo, the player taking the role of Charlotte and using the ‘Solo Player PDF’ available to download. Alternatively, a Keeper can run The Dog Walker with the one player who can take the role of Charlotte. Lastly, the Arkham Investigator's Wallet Prop Set does require some customisation and set-up upon the part of the Keeper, removing certain props and adding details to others. The Dog Walker includes full advice for the Keeper as to what needs to be done as part of this set-up. An alternative option might be to combine the scenario with The Eldritch New England Holiday Collection and turn it into an all ‘kids-as-Investigators’ scenario.

The items in the wallet are all clues of course. Some, like the Bail Bond Certificate will hint at the missing man’s background, others such as the key enable easy entry to his nearby home, and still more grant access to otherwise closed locations, the Eye of Amara Society membership card granting the holder entry to the otherwise private members’ society. The clues will take the Investigators back and forth across Arkham, from dives such as Irish mobster Dan O’Bannion’s Lucky Clover Cartage Company to the Orne Library where they might meet Professor Henry Armitage. As the scenario progresses and the Investigators follow up clue after clue, location after location, The Dog Walker becomes a MacGuffin hunt as well. Ultimately though, everything leads back to the missing man and his home.

The Dog Walker is decently supported beyond the solidity of the props from the Arkham Investigator’s Wallet. There is a breakdown of all of the clues and how to prepare them for play—as well as a checklist for those that are pertinent to the scenario, the NPC stats, a timeline, and a map of the Lower Southside neighbourhood where the scenario begins. Physically, the scenario is cleanly laid out, very nicely illustrated (only one piece of artwork lets the look of the book down), and the props to be used in the scenario are also illustrated as well.

It is notable that Charlotte, the young girl and dog walker who makes the discovery of the lost wallet that triggers the mystery in The Dog Walker: A Scenario in 1920s Arkham is a fan of detective stories and Sherlock Holmes in particular. This is because the story itself is reminiscent of one of the best Sherlock Holmes stories, or rather one of the best pastiches. This is The Abergavenny Murder, the first episode in the second series of The Further Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, which continued the very fine BBC pairing of Clive Merrison and Andrew Sachs as Holmes and Watson—and Clive Merrison and Michael Williams before that—with stories based on cases mentioned by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but never expanded upon. In The Abergavenny Murder, the duo are at home at 221b Baker Street with nothing to do and lamenting the lack of crime to investigate, when a man rushes into their sitting room and drops down dead. Holmes and Watson then have forty-five minutes in which to solve the crime entirely based on the man’s corpse in front of them and what is on his body. It is a delightful ‘ship-in-a-bottle’ style episode and two-hander, displaying all of the personalities of the two men and the author’s inventiveness.

The Dog Walker feels much like this, though much more expansive than four walls of the sitting room at 221b Baker Street, and of course, having a wallet of clues to go on rather than a corpse and the contents of its pockets. Quite so too, since it would hardly be the done thing for young Charlotte to discover a corpse! That though highlights an issue with the scenario in that how does the adult world react to the inquisitiveness of a twelve-year-old? Apart from one NPC whose reaction to Charlotte may play an important role in the scenario, the issue is not addressed.

The Dog Walker: A Scenario in 1920s Arkham is a charmingly parochial mystery, its revelations hinting at the true nature of the universe, rather than fully blasting the minds of the Investigations with its actual uncaring majesty and the insignificance of humanity’s place within it. In fact, the scenario is almost gentle by other scenarios’ standards, there being only the one possible Sanity check in its telling. Which, of course, is how it should be given that Charlotte Foley is just twelve. All of which is supported by the Arkham Investigator’s Wallet and its marvellous props—of which, it should be noted, The Dog Walker: A Scenario in 1920s Arkham uses barely half, enabling the Keeper to return to the wallet to create his own mystery or the author to write a sequel. Above all, together The Dog Walker: A Scenario in 1920s Arkham and the Arkham Investigator’s Wallet are a wonderfully crafted combination that will provide a thoroughly enjoyable and engaging evening’s worth of detective work that will introduce one young lady to the mysteries of the cosmos.

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

—oOo—

2024 Free RPG Day Module: Across the Veil of Time is Goodman Games’ only contribution to Free RPG Day 2023. It is a scenario for use with the publisher’s highly popular Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game and written by the author of the very good Dungeon Crawl Classics #101: The Veiled Vaults of the Onyx Queen (though it should be noted that this is the second scenario by the author to use the word ‘veil’ in the title, so either he should stop now or use ‘veil’ in the title of every scenario from now on as his motif). Across the Veil of Time is designed for First Level Player Characters and can be played through in a single session or so. It is thus a slight affair, though one in which the entirety of time is in danger.

The scenario begins with the Player Characters on their travels reaching a village only to find it devoid of inhabitants. It appears that the village has been abandoned, except for a note on the door of a local haberdashery, “ENTER THE SHOP”, written in the hand of one the Player Characters and on a scrap of his cloak too! What is going on and how did the strange note appear on the door of a shop that the Player Characters have never seen before, in a place that the Player Characters have been to before? This is only the start of the strangeness in Across the Veil of Time. The Player Characters are thrown back in time again and again before they can gather enough clues to have any idea as to what is going on. The scenario ramps up the weirdness and will see the Player Characters racing along a bridge over the Sands of Time, trying not to fall in or be knocked off, and then up the ‘Clock Tower at the Centre of Time’, which of course, looks like a grandfather clock, though one with a cosmically horological mechanism at its heart rather than a simple clockwork. Here they will battle the ‘Time Lord’, the temporal demon, responsible for the situation, hopefully avoid blows from his nasty ‘grim’ Reaper, and save both the other person responsible and the universe!
Time [sic] constraints mean that Across the Veil of Time is a linear adventure. After all, it is designed to be played in a single session. However, it is really a series of puzzle-locked locations. Solve one puzzle and the Player Characters can move on to the next location. It is also very action and combat orientated, and there is very little scope for anything else. For a scenario with such tight playing time constraints, that really is the primary issue with Across the Veil of Time—no room for interaction or roleplaying. There is potential for expansion, especially early on in the scenario, if the Judge wanted to develop it, adding to its time and horological themes, and perhaps adding that the missing interaction and the NPCs necessary for that. Then, if the Player Characters are successful, then everything resets itself, the universe is safe, and all they will be left with is a slight sense of déjà vu… Appropriate, but paltry in terms of reward for having saved the universe.
Physically, Across the Veil of Time is very well presented. Both maps and artwork are decent and handouts, a surprising number for a scenario as short as this, are also good.
2024 Free RPG Day Module: Across the Veil of Time is easy to set up and run, being better as a convention or demonstration scenario. Its theme of facing time running backwards is intriguing, but the format constraints of the scenario being designed for a short, single-session playing time means that it is not explored enough. Without those constraints, the them could have been explored to greater effect and the scenario could have been much, much better. 2024 Free RPG Day Module: Across the Veil of Time is full of thematic potential, but it is just not allowed to fulfil that and so it is just all too slight.

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: A Sliver of StarlightPublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Daniel Chadborn

Setting: New York State, 1983Product: Weird Haunted House One-Shot
What You Get: Forty-five page, 7.19 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: “If you want to see an endangered species, get up and look in the mirror.” – John YoungPlot Hook: A haunted house (or inspiration) attracts the all too curious.Plot Support: Staging advice, two NPCs, four pre-generated Investigators, and twelve handouts.Production Values: Decent
Pros# Multiple set-up options# Decently done clues and events# Easily shifted to other locations# Staged, step-by-step plot# Easy to adjust to other eras and locations# Oikopobia# Eisoptrophobia# Trypophobia
Cons# Maps could have been better and clearer# Needs an edit# Staged, step-by-step plot
Conclusion# Clues and events engagingly unsettle the investigation# Staged, step-by-step haunted house plot that leads elsewhere (and back again)

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 AssignmentPublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Marco Carrer

Setting: Cthulhu InvictusProduct: One-on-One Scenario
What You Get: Ten page, 310.87 KB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Sometimes a femme fatale lives up to her namePlot Hook: A Finder doesn’t always want to find what he’s looking for
Plot Support: Staging advice, one pre-generated Investigator, four NPCs, one handout, floorplans, and one Mythos creature.Production Values: Plain
Pros# Scenario for The 7th Edition Guide to Cthulhu Invictus: Cosmic Horror Roleplaying in Ancient Rome# One Keeper, one Investigator one-shot# Short, one session noir-style investigation# Plot could be adapted to a Noir-style setting# Strigiformophobia# Necrophobia# Teraphobia
Cons# Needs a good edit# Familiar noir-style plot
Conclusion# Short and bloody noir-style investigation# Serviceable and easy to use

Numenera Destiny changes the way in which Numenera Discovery is played and the why it is played. Set billions of years into the future after multiple, highly technological and advanced civilisations have risen and fallen, Numenera is a Science Fantasy roleplaying game of exploration and adventure in the very far future of the Ninth World. In the course of this adventure and exploration, the Player Characters discover secrets, protect communities, and recover and make use of the technologies of the past—Artifacts, Cyphers, and Oddities—to continue to learn and explore. Numenera Destiny, the companion volume to Numenera Discovery, provides a core motivation for the Player Characters, the means to support that motivation with new Character Types and mechanics, new Foci and Descriptors, rules for creating, supporting, and developing Communities, breaking down Cyphers and rebuilding them to new purposes, plus new organisations and creatures, and lastly four scenarios. This motivation centres on the Community. Where in Numenera Discovery it might be a place that the Player Characters simply pass through or come to rescue of, with Numenera Destiny, the Player Characters become part of that community. They protect it. They lead it. They develop it. They build a better future for themselves and the other members of the community, and in the process, they create rather than just scavenge.

Numenera Destiny begins with the new character options. The three new Character Types are the Arkus, the Wright, and the Delve. The Arkus is a natural leader, potentially head of a community, an army, or even a faith, but ultimately a charismatic and social Character Type. The Wright builds and crafts, able to interpret plans and devices found in the ruins of the past, and using ‘Iotum’, scavenged components, design and create cyphers, artifacts, and installations. They are more than mere scholars—they are doers. The Delve is the ultimate explorer of the ruins, but also highly skilled in extracting the ‘Iotum’ that the Wright needs to build. The Arkus begins play with ‘Demeanour of Command’ which forces others to listen to him when not in combat and is naturally a ‘Community Leader’, which increases a community’s rank when he is present. He has precepts which grant him an advantage when dealing with others, such as telling an uplifting ‘Anecdote’ or having a ‘Connection With an Organisation’. Later on, an Arkus can gain followers. The Wright is Trained in Crafting Numenera, and when actively working as a ‘Community Builder’, it improves a community’s infrastructure, is ‘Always Tinkering’ and can create new random Cyphers. He has Inspired Techniques like ‘Right Tool for the Job’, crafting temporary tools from Iotum, gain ‘Extra use’ from an installation or artifact without triggering a depletion roll, and ‘Scramble Machine’ for devices nearby. The Delve spends less time in a community than the other Character Types, and is Trained in ‘Salvaging Numenera’ and as a ‘Community Explorer’, improves its capacity to find resources, open new trade routes, and so on. He has ‘Delve Lore’, which includes ‘Find the Way’ when he is lost and ‘Familiarise’ which enables him to study a region and gain temporary benefits whilst there. Of the three new Character Types, Delve is actually the least interesting, especially at Tier One. Fortunately, the Type gets more interesting at higher Tiers.

It is notable that all three new Character Types have core Community abilities that get better as they improve in Tier. However, Numenera Destiny goes further by providing Community abilities for the three core Character Types from Numenera Discovery. Thus, the Glaive has ‘Community Defender’, the Jack has ‘Community Fixer’ which improves a community’s health or infrastructure Ranks, and the Nano has ‘Community Scholar’, which also improves a community’s health or infrastructure Ranks. Together this balances the old Character Types with the new, though the additions are not as interesting as those for the new Character Types, especially as the Community abilities for the Jack and the Nano are identical.

Numenera Destiny adds thirty-five new Descriptors. The majority of these are designed to support the three new Character Types. Thus, the ‘Articulate’ aids the Arkus who emphasises speech, ‘Beneficent’ is for the Arkus who wants to help, and ‘Civic’ is about working with the community. ‘Curious’ is for the Delve who wants to know more and ‘Risk-Taking’ if he pushes his luck. ‘Imaginative’ and ‘Industrious’ both suit the Wright. Of them all, it does feel as more of them support the Arkus rather than the other Character Types. Similarly, there are over thirty new Foci, and again many support the community and leadership aspect of Numenera Destiny, like ‘Imparts Wisdom’, ‘Shepherds the Community’, and ‘Wields Words Like Weapons’. There are fewer which specifically support the roles of the Wright and the Delve, though ‘Builds Tomorrow’ is exception for the Wright, whilst others such as ‘Adjures The Leviathan’, giving a character control over one of the horrors to be found in the ruins, ‘Dances With Dark Matter’ which grants substance and control of shadows, and ‘Emerged From The Obelisk’ which changes the character’s body structure from flesh to crystalline all support the strangeness to be found beyond the walls of the community in the Ninth World.

Not all of these character options presented in Numenera Destiny are necessarily new. For example, the Arkus and the Delve are similar to the Glint and Seeker Character Types respectively from Character Options 2, whilst several of the Foci and Descriptors originally appeared in Gods of the Fall and Expanded Worlds and other supplements. However, they have been adjusted and redesigned to fit the new edition of Numenera Discovery and the companion volume, Numenera Destiny. It is still possible to play using the earlier iterations or concepts of these Character Types and Foci and Descriptors, but the updated and redesigned versions are more interesting and supportive of the emphasis in Numenera Destiny.

Specifically for the Wright, Numenera Destiny provides detailed, but surprisingly simple salvaging and crafting rules. Anyone can engage in salvaging as they explore the Ninth World, but in the main, the Wright will be at an advantage over other Character Types when he does so. In addition to gaining Cyphers and shin (the catch-all currency of the Ninth World), a successful Salvage Task check will yield ‘Iotum’. This is the catch-all term for scavenged parts, which might be, “silvery canisters filled with colourless goo, or bubbling fluid contained within etched stronglass canisters the size of small houses.” Iotum are then used to construct all manner of devices and installations. ‘Iotum’ can be random items—and there is a table for that accompanied by descriptions of each ‘Iotum’ type—or they might be something that the Wright is looking for. This is particularly likely if the Wright is attempting to construct something from a specific plan. Determining if the scavenger has found the ‘Iotum’ he wants requires a second Salvage Task check. That then is all there is to the salvage rules with more detail devoted to the salvage found than the mechanics of finding it.

The crafting rules are more complex, but not by much. Whether an object or structure is commonplace or numenera, the latter meaning it will have abilities like a cypher or an Artifact, it has as an Assessed Difficulty representing how difficult it is to construct and how long it will take to complete. However, if a numenera object or structure, the Assessed Difficulty is higher. To actually craft an object or structure requires multiple Crafting Task checks, that is, one subtask for each level of the Assessed Difficulty. So, for a Level 3 Cypher, the player has to roll a Crafting Task at difficulty one, then difficulty two, and so on. This can be reduced by a Wright’s Training and abilities, but not Effort as that has an immediate rather than a prolonged use. The same mechanics are used for repairing items, making modifications, and more. The rules are backed with numerous plans, from wooden walls and stone keeps to waterskimmer and windrider vehicles. (Rules for vehicle combat are included in the appendix.) The new Cyphers include several that will help a Wright when crafting, such as ‘Crafter’s Eyes’, thick lenses that when worn provide informative diagrams that help with a construction task or helps the community like the ‘Hiding Alarm Nodule’ that when attached to a building sends it out of phase if it is struck by sufficient force, such as that which might occur during a siege.

A community itself has a Rank and several statistics. These are Government, its leadership and organisational structure; Health, representing the number of able-bodied occupants; Infrastructure, its buildings, roads, and so on; Damage Inflicted, the damage it can do against another community or a horde—either NPCs or beasts; Armour, which protects attacks by other communities or hordes; Modifications are abilities particular to the community which might be a unique building, NPC, or skill; and Combat, which consists of abilities similar to Modifications, but combat-related. It is possible that the values for all will change over time due to circumstances internal and external, and once it is large enough, it can conduct Community Actions. This might be to open up trade with another community, send the militia to the walls to defend against a horde, dealing with disasters, and so on. Here again, Numenera Destiny keeps things simple. A community with a higher Rank wins, whether that is in negotiating a trade agreement, withstanding an attack by a horde, or surviving an earthquake. That though is if there are no Player Characters involved. If there are, the different Character Types enhance the various stats for a community, the Player Characters can undertake some of the community actions, and the Player Characters can invest themselves in the community’s future. The Arkus can lead and speak for it, the Wright can improve and repair it, the Glaive can protect it, whilst the Delve, the Jack, and the Nano can support everyone’s endeavours.

The advice for both Game Master and players is that a community—whether is one that the characters have adopted or founded—is not simply there for the characters’ benefit. (If it is, it more likely to be based occupied and run by the Player Characters.) Whilst the Player Characters do gain from living in a community, the other inhabitants will gain also, and the interaction with the inhabitants will not be all one way, even if the Player Characters’ fostering of community places them in positions where it can direct its future. There are suggestions too on the types of adventures that can be run based around the adoption or founding of a community, as well as how a community might be laid out, and a lengthy list of long-term tasks that the Player Characters can undertake. Some are general like building up food or water stores, enhancing a community’s happiness, or even raising a child, whilst many others are specific to a Character Type. An Arkus could ‘Demonstrate Grace Under Pressure’ or ‘Cultivate Followers’, whilst a Delve would ‘Prospect for Iotum’ or ‘Find Specific Iotum’. Add in the table of random events and Numenera Destiny provides the means to run a campaign grounded in a community which could last years, both in terms of play and in the setting itself. The advice to that end is excellent.

As well as rules for creating and running communities, Numenera Destiny describes several actual communities of varying sizes that the Player Characters might encounter in and around the Steadfast, the starting area for Numenera, and then in the Beyond. They include a nomadic community that rarely stays in one place for more than a few years as the inhabitants follow the shambling mountain-like Dream Titans; an arcology that migrates up and down the Sea of Secrets off the coast of Steadfast; and a mountain city over which floats an enormous artifact called the ‘Changing Moon’, the façade and interior of which constantly changes and is the subject of study by scholars. There are several descriptions of smaller communities too, less detailed and intended to be used as ‘Starter Communities’ that the Player Characters can adopt, protect, and develop. All come with their own stats and they can just as easily be used as locations to be added to the Game Master’s campaign. Added to this are details of various organisations, including notable members, facilities, and benefits of membership. They include the Amber Gleaners, a network of scholars, explorers, delves, and other travellers who share knowledge of the routes and locations they discover with each other; the Order of Healing, a relatively new offshoot of the Order of Truth, whose members travel the Steadfast and the Beyond, offering healing and medical aid; and the League, an organisation of envoys that foster communication between communities and the benefits of civilisation, though some wonder if it has an ulterior motive…

Besides providing an array of new Cyphers and beasts and NPCs, again all of which are designed to support stories and adventures around communities—whether as allies, enemies, or hordes, Numenera Destiny includes four scenarios. ‘The Door Beneath the Ocean’ is a community-starter scenario as the Player Characters come to the rescue of refugees fleeing both an active volcano and a cruel slave keeper, and then decide where to establish a new home for them. ‘Trefoil’ gives the Player Characters the opportunity to go and hunt for a particular type of iotum, but the situation where it can be found is more complex than the rumours say it is. In ‘Red Plague’, the player Characters come to the aid of the village of Glaww whose inhabitants are suffering from a deadly disease, but to save them, they will benefit from the skills of a Delve and then a Wright. Lastly, ‘Terminus’ scales up, being designed for higher Tier Player Characters with plenty of playing background behind them and the time to build up a stock of resources. These are necessary when they discover a dangerous threat that is first a problem for their community and then the world. This fourth scenario is the least immediately useful, as its requirements are much higher, but the others work as good set-up for a community-based campaign.

Physically, Numenera Destiny is very well presented and put together. Although it needs a slight edit in places, the book is well written, and everything is easy to grasp. Above all, the artwork is excellent and this is a great looking book.

Numenera Destiny is not absolutely necessary to play Numenera Discovery. Yet Numenera Destiny offers so many great options in terms of what you play and how you play, taking a campaign in a different, more involved direction, and giving scope for the players and their characters to become more invested in the Ninth World, that ultimately, it really does feel as if it is definitely going to be wanted.

If a licensed roleplaying game is based around a big story, the question is, how does its publisher address that story? Does it ignore it in favour focusing upon the setting instead? Does it incorporate it into the roleplaying game and make it a feature? The problem being that the events of the big story are inviolate and no matter what the players and their characters do, they cannot change them. Does this then undermine character agency? The One Ring: Roleplaying in the World of Lord of the Rings from Free League Publishing sets its stories between the two pillars of the intellectual property it is based upon, The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, giving it a sixty-year window in which a campaign can be set. Similarly, Green Ronin’s A Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying: A Game of Thrones Edition, based on George R.R. Martin’s epic fantasy series is set a century before the events of the books. Victory Games published multiple scenarios for James Bond 007: Role-Playing In Her Majesty’s Secret Service, most of them quite tightly based on a particular film, but written in such a way that if the players followed the actions of James Bond in the films, their characters would fail. Dune – Adventures in the Imperium: The Roleplaying Game, published by Modiphius Entertainment, does all of these—and more, for it has a more difficult path to tread.

Dune – Adventures in the Imperium: The Roleplaying Game enables the players to create characters who are members of a noble house and roleplay them as they work to improve the fortunes of their house. Those fortunes are bound up in Arrakis, the desert world that is the source of the Spice Melange that underpins the economy and structure of the Known Universe. Dune – Adventures in the Imperium: Agents of Dune began their story with a big ‘what-if?’. What if the Player Characters’ was appointed control of Arrakis instead of House Atreides and so supplanted House Harkonnen? The consequences and ongoing story were explored in Masters of Dune, but with the Fall of the Imperium Campaign Sourcebook, the players, their characters, and the campaign collide head on with the events of Dune—as depicted in the book and on screen—and ride that sandstorm all the way through to the unleashing of a great change. Their story will weave in and around the secret compact between the Emperor and House Harkonnen to unseat House Atreides, the rise of Muad’Dib, the fall of the Imperium, and the Jihad that followed. The Player Characters cannot change any of these events through their actions, but what they can do is explore some of the consequences to what happens on Arrakis that would otherwise take place in the background, participate in them, in the process tell their own story. That is their agency.

The Fall of the Imperium Campaign Sourcebook requires some set-up if run as a sequel to Dune – Adventures in the Imperium: Agents of Dune and Masters of Dune. The Herald of Change will come to the Player Character’s house and announce that the Emperor has awarded stewardship of Arrakis to House Atreides. This still sets up the events of Dune since House Harkonnen hates House Atreides and the Emperor can use that hatred to destroy a rival. The Player Characters will also maintain a presence on Arrakis, though no longer a major one, and will likely have formed a relationship with House Harkonnen—whether as allies or enemies—especially if their house replaced the Harkonnens in Dune – Adventures in the Imperium: Agents of Dune. The relationship between the Player Characters and House Harkonnen, and possibly with the Emperor himself, is important throughout the plot of the Fall of the Imperium Campaign Sourcebook. This is because it is one way in which the characters—and more importantly, the players—are forced to make choices that do not adhere to the plot of the novel as the characters are only aware of the obvious events rather than the secret events. So, what the Player Characters are aware of is that House Atreides has lost and House Harkonnen has won, and thus the question is—even though they as players know that Paul Atreides has survived—who does their house ally itself with? And then in the aftermath of the fall of House Corrino, how closely and openly do they ally with the new Emperor?

Fall of the Imperium consists of four parts which will take the Player Characters and their House from the Imperium through to the Ascension of Paul Muad’Dib. It opens with ‘The Gathering Storm’ with the replacement of House Harkonnen as the siridar governor of Arrakis by House Atreides and with the perceived weakening of the Harkonnens, House Ecaz seeks the Player Characters’ aid in taking its revenge for a past feud. Here, for the first time, there appears a theme that runs throughout the campaign—making alliances. There is always a choice of choosing between an alliance with or against House Harkonnen, but this like so many of the other choices throughout the campaign is never morally black or white. There are always advantages and disadvantages to any choice that the Player Characters have to make, which will extend from their dealings with House Harkonnen in the opening and middle parts of the campaign to their interaction with Emperor Shaddam IV in its climax and Emperor Paul Muad’Dib in the aftermath. Either way, the Player Characters will initially discover evidence of House Harkonnen’s stashing away Spice, but there is little that they can do with the information before events get out of control as the Player Characters trace a killer in the desert—with the unexpected help of the Spacing Guild—all the way to Kaitain. Yet before the Player Character can do anything with information they have gained, they return to Arrakis and get embroiled in the swirling mass of Harkonnen troops, backed up by the Emperor’s dread Sardaukar, as they assault House Atreides on Arrakis.

If ‘The Gathering Storm’ funnels the Player Characters down onto Arrakis in a maelstrom of death and destruction, ‘Muad’Dib’ opens up both the campaign and the Known Universe. As House Harkonnen takes control and then ever tighter control of Arrakis, the flow of Spice lessens and house after house is forced to look to other sources. In their hunt for a secure source, the Player Characters will find themselves visiting a variety of locations, such as a ski lodge, where when assassins strike, they will have to escape via ski bikes in James Bond style! The other way in which the campaign opens up is strategically, as play switches to Architect mode, the Player Characters directing house agents on a variety of missions. Although not discussed, these are easily expanded so that the players could roleplay these missions rather than handling them as straightforward dice rolls. After the Player Characters gain proof of how extensive House Harkonnen’s coverup of its Spice mining and reportage, they find themselves the subject of Imperial interest. This is nasty fraught situation and there is no option in terms of what to do with it, as the Player Characters find themselves entertaining the Emperor’s most dangerous representatives—Count Fenring and Lady Margot—and even negotiating with Baron Vladimir Harkonnen!

Events hurtle towards a climax as the flow of Spice from Arrakis dwindles and the Landsraad Council is divided over what to do about House Harkonnen’s growing mismanagement of Arrakis. The failure forces everyone to act, the Emperor coming directly to Arrakis and the Player Characters manoeuvred into intervening on their own. ‘Fall of the Imperium’ will culminate in the scenes in the Imperial throne room as Paul Maud’Dib confronts Emperor Shaddam IV and reveals himself as Duke Paul Atreides. The campaign takes an interesting change of tone as a regime change institutes a degree of uncertainty in how the Imperium works. Loyalties old and new are tested again and again as the old order faces a whirlwind of change, part of its fuelled by the new Emperor’s desire for revenge. In turn, the Player Characters are ordered to enact that revenge on an ally, scour the old Imperial capital in search of art, secrets, or people—or a combination of all three before the jihad falls upon it, even clear their names. If the Player Characters have more choice in this last part of the campaign, then their actions have more consequences, potentially leading to their own deaths or even the destruction of their house.

Rounding out Fall of the Imperium is ‘Adventures in the Era of Muad’Dib’. This is guidance on running and playing Dune – Adventures in the Imperium: The Roleplaying Game in the era of the new Emperor. This includes advice on portraying Paul in this period, on what the altered priorities are of the Bene Gesserit and the Spacing Guild, and the role of Paul’s new faith. This is represented mechanically by a faction template for the Qizarate and a number of associated Talents. The advice for the Game Master highlights the dangers of the Jihad, the autocracy of Paul’s reign as Emperor, and the possibilities of conspiracy and counter-revolution. The advice short, but solid, and doubtless, a whole supplement could be devoted to this. There are also some scenario hooks for the Game Master to develop.

The is very much a book of two halves, one half consisting of acts one and three—‘The Gathering Storm’ and ‘Fall of the Imperium’—and other half acts two and four—‘Muad’Dib’ and ‘War Across a Million Worlds’. In ‘The Gathering Storm’, the Player Characters are being pushed towards history and then in ‘Fall of the Imperium’, they are riding its waves, whereas in both —‘Muad’Dib’ and ‘War Across a Million Worlds’, they have far more freedom to act. The consequences are greater, especially in ‘War Across a Million Worlds’, but they do have more freedom to act. Similarly, in ‘War Across a Million Worlds’ the writers have greater freedom in their writing, no longer quite hemmed in by the plot of the novel. Whereas in ‘The Gathering Storm’ and ‘Fall of the Imperium’, the Player Characters are constantly coming up against that plot, encountering events portrayed in Dune, but at a distance or being involved in events that take place offscreen. The latter are more effective then the former, but in places it feels as if the Player Characters are there to witness what was not explicitly written down. The worst example of this is the attack on the sietch by the Sardaukar in which Paul’s first son, Leto, is killed, which the Player Characters are forced to accompany. There is almost nothing that the Player Characters can do to change the outcome, effectively meaning their agency is undone by plot immunity. Fans of Dune may well enjoy having their characters present at many of these scenes, but too often they feel like exposition that only serves to highlight the difficulties of writing a campaign set in and around the events of a great novel.

Physically, the Fall of the Imperium Campaign Sourcebook is very well presented. The layout is clean and tidy and the artwork is excellent.

The Fall of the Imperium Campaign Sourcebook is an ambitious attempt to do the impossible—write a roleplaying campaign based on the events of the seminal novel that the roleplaying game is based upon. Fortunately, that ambition is fulfilled and the result is a campaign, that at its best, is often morally difficult and full of challenging situations, which takes the Player Characters through the events of Dune and beyond. At its worst though, are the situations with a lack of agency which relegates the characters and their players to the role of spectators. Nevertheless, if the Player Characters and their House survive the events covered in the Fall of the Imperium Campaign Sourcebook, then they really will have awoken.

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

—oOo—

In 2017, Paizo, Inc. published Starfinder: First Contact, a preview of and teaser for its then forthcoming Starfinder, the Science Fantasy roleplaying game which takes the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game forward thousands and thousands of years and to the stars. So it is most appropriate that as a preview of and teaser for the forthcoming Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Second Edition, Paizo, Inc. has released Starfinder: Second Contact for Free RPG 2024. Where the task of Starfinder: First contact was to introduce the new roleplaying game and highlight some of the differences between it and the Starfinder Roleplaying Game, the task of Starfinder: Second Contact is to reintroduce us to the Starfinder Roleplaying Game and highlight some of the differences between it and the Starfinder Roleplaying Game, Second Edition as seen in the Starfinder Playtest Rulebook.

The introduction highlights how the Starfinder Roleplaying Game is going to evolve to be in line with Pathfinder, Second Edition, before jumping straight into ‘What’s New?’. These start with elements and skills that appear in the monster descriptions given in the booklet’s following pages. For example, the ‘Integrated Weapons’ appears in the entry for robots and new skills include Computers and Piloting used by both the Asteray and the Glitch Gremlin. Similarly, several of the spells are used by those creatures. They include Delete, a spell used to remove a limited amount of data, whilst the cantrip, Recharge Weapon, reloads a weapon with a round’s worth of ammunition upon a touch. The new weapons are a couple of laser guns, whilst the rest of the Starfinder: Second Contact is really all about the monsters. These start with the Asteray, Fey Tricksters born where the void and the First World overlap, they wander space looking for distractions and starship crews to consume, and end with the Cybernetic Zombie, which might have an arm cannon or a shriek module or repair nanites! In between, there are Security Robots, Glitch Gremlins—which of course, want to cause mayhem, Laser Wolves, and Ferrofluid Oozes, sentient puddles of ferromagnetic fluids that interfere with technological devices of all sorts. Every creature is given a full page description, stats, and an illustration.

Like the earlier Starfinder: First Contact, there is little to the background of the Starfinder Roleplaying Game to Starfinder: Second Contact. There is mention that Golarion, the setting for Pathfinder, is missing, that rumours arose during the Drift Crisis of super-size versions of Ferrofluid Ooze, capable of consuming whole ships, and that the AbadarCorp is responsible for the manufacture of most robots in the Pact Worlds, becoming a byword for guaranteed quality, but making their weakness commonly known so that criminals and spies can take advantage of them.
Being a release from Paizo, Inc., it should be no surprise that Starfinder: Second Contact is a slickly produced and well-presented booklet. Much like with Starfinder: First Contact for Free RPG Day 2017, Starfinder: Second Contact is very technical in nature in comparison to the other releases for Free RPG 2024. Nevertheless, Starfinder: Second Contact is a solid introduction to the technical elements of the roleplaying game, one aimed more at fans of the roleplaying game rather than the general roleplayer.

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

—oOo—

Death Out of the Stars is a scenario for Plague Bearer: Dark Fantasy Roleplaying. This is the fantasy version of Zombicide Chronicles: The Roleplaying Game. Published by CoolMiniOrNot and Guillotine Games, Plague Bearer: Dark Fantasy Roleplaying is the roleplaying adaptation of Zombicide: Black Plague, the medieval adaptation of the board game of Zombicide, 2nd Edition, which of course, is given its own roleplaying game with Zombicide Chronicles: The Roleplaying Game. The scenario is short, playable in a single session, and can be played using the Plague Bearer Quickstart Rules, which also has the six pre-generated adventurers needed to play. Death Out of the Stars can also be run as a sequel to ‘Blood and Wine’, the scenario in the Plague Bearer Quickstart Rules or simply be inserted into the Game Master’s campaign.
Death Out of the Stars begins en media res. The Player Characters—or Survivors—are on the run, being chased by a large horde of the undead, their only route forward being to cross a wooden bridge to Nahum Island. Fortunately, the wood of the bridge is rotten and collapses under the weight of the charging corpses, dashing them onto the rocks below. Unfortunately, the wood of the bridge is rotten and collapses under the weight of the charging corpses, trapping the Survivors on the island. The island is heavily wooded and with its steep cliffs and rocky shores, would be to be ideal holdout against the cadaver cavalcade which has arisen elsewhere in Wulfsburg. Unfortunately, the island too seems bereft of the living, although its undead strangely bloodless when compared to those of the mainland—grey of pallor as if drained of colour and wasting away to dust. Similarly, buildings are rapidly deteriorating and collapsing into piles of dust. Consequently, it looks like Nahum Island is not the refuge that the Player Characters might have hoped that it would be. They must face more zombies—even if they are different to the ones across the water—and discover what is happening on Nahum Island before making their escape, ideally after having dealt with the problem.
Horror fans may well recognise the reference in the scenario’s title and Death Out of the Stars certainly has a Lovecraftian feel to it. If one half of the scenario is the cosmic horror of H.P. Lovecraft, the other half is the corruptive influence of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, as if a lump of Warpstone had fallen from the sky. This gives the scenario an unsurprisingly grim tone, far less cartoonish than that of Zombicide Chronicles: The Roleplaying Game. Still, as befits a scenario set within a Zombicide setting, there is still scope for bloody—or in this case, dusty—action.
Physically, Death Out of the Stars is very well presented. The scenario is decently written and both the artwork and the maps are excellent.
Death Out of the Stars is a weird and creepy scenario in between the blasts of sword swinging, mace bashing action as the Survivors hold back the members of the cadaver cavalcade and try and work out what is going on on Nahum Island. It is a pleasing shift of tone from the often-cartoonish style of Zombicide Chronicles: The Roleplaying Game and is a solid addition to any Plague Bearer: Dark Fantasy Roleplaying campaign.