Now in its fifteenth year, Free RPG Day in 2022, was celebrated not once, but twice. First on Saturday, 25th June in the USA, and then on Saturday, 23rd July internationally. This was to prevent problem with past events when certain books did not arrive in time to be shipped internationally and so were not available outside of the USA. 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. Thanks to the generosity of David Salisbury of Fan Boy 3, Reviews from R’lyeh was get hold of many of the titles released for Free RPG Day, both in the USA and elsewhere.

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Iron Kingdoms: A Strange Light Breaks is a scenario fo Iron Kingdoms: Requiem, the version of the Steampunk and high fantasy setting best known for its miniatures combat game, Warmachine: Prime, for use with Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. Published by Privateer Press, Iron Kingdoms: Requiem and thus Iron Kingdoms: A Strange Light Breaks—and Iron Kingdoms: An Echo in the Darkness before it for Free RPG Day 2021 bring the setting and intellectual property full circle, both having been first seen in The Longest Night, Shadow of the Exile, and The Legion of the Lost, the trilogy of scenarios published for use with the d20 System in 2001. The three would later be collected as The Witchfire Trilogy.
The Iron Kingdoms is noted for three things. First, its interesting mix of races—Gobbers, Ogrun, and Trollkin alongside the traditional Humans, Elves, and Dwarves. There are no Halflings or Gnomes, and even the Elves are different to those of more traditional Dungeons & Dragons-style fantasy. Second, the prevalence of technology, in particular, the use of firearms and Steamjacks and Warjacks, steam-driven robots with magical brains, used in heavy industry and on the field of battle. Third, the tone of the setting is fairly grim, there being an island to the west, Cryx, where the sorcerers have long experimented with combing the undead with Steamjacks and Warjacks, and have long planned to invade the Iron Kingdoms.
Iron Kingdoms: A Strange Light Breaks is not a quick-start for Iron Kingdoms: Requiem, but a scenario, so the Game Master will need access to a copy of Iron Kingdoms: Requiem as well as Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, to run the scenario. It is designed to be played by between three and seven Player Characters of First to Fourth Level, but is optimised for five First Level Player Characters. As the scenario opens, a new branch of the Strangelight Workshop, the premier organisation in the Iron Kingdoms dedicated to investigating the supernatural, which has opened up a new branch in the city of Merin in the nation of Ord. It is looking for candidates and the Player Characters have decided to apply for whatever reason. Several motivations are provided to that end. A large sign above the door to the new branch reads ‘Post Delivery Outpost #113’ and the scenario feels reminiscent of Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal as well as possessing an enormous dollop of Ghostbusters.

The Ghostbusters feel starts with the equipment that the Player Characters are assigned. This includes antispectral ammunition for targeting ghosts, charged gauntlets to deal lightning damage to or grapple with ghosts, a Handheld Lumitype to take ‘spectragraphs’ of ghosts, and Strangelight Goggles and Strangelight Projectors, which gives the scenario a very technological feel.

The scenario is built around a job board on which are pinned three little jobs, each with a little commentary by the branch clerk, Emil Todmann, a constantly scowling if friendly ex-postman. These are quite colourful and should influence the order in which the Player Characters tackle them. They are free to do them in any order, but ideally should be run in the order that they are presented. In the first gig, ‘Branston Gunwerks’, the Player Characters, now newly-minted ‘spectral investigators’, are directed to a manufactory which is beset by gremlins doing all sorts of damage. They need to get into the building and in and amongst the machinery to ferret out the Gremlins who are having way too much fun in the Gunwerks. It is an action orientated opener which should be fun.

The second gig is ‘210 Aurora Street’ which takes place a few streets away from the branch office. There the occupants of a house have been beset by a spirit known as ‘Headless John’. The Player Characters have a chance to do a little research before he makes an appearance. When he does, they are free to approach however they want, so they can fight ‘Headless John’ or persuade him to move on. The latter is a less bruising option as ‘Headless John’ is quite a tough opponent, but again, this is another decent little encounter.

The third and final gig is ‘The Red Mare of Lime Gate’. A burning figure astride a red horse has been setting warehouses in the dock alight and Emil Todmann warns the Player Characters that this is an unknown entity and needs to be careful of what it might be. This is a slightly more complex scenario and there is plenty of opportunity for the Player Characters to conduct some investigation—interacting with the locals, examining some of the warehouses, and so on, before the spectre strikes! Ideally before then the player Characters will have picked up some clues that something is not right here and so it proves in a rousing finale to the scenario. Its secret is not the only one to be revealed in the scenario, as there is another in the scenario’s epilogue, which is entitled ‘End of Watch’ and has a double meaning. Both the finale and the epilogue can be played out in a few different ways, all of which are covered in the scenario.Physically, Iron Kingdoms: A Strange Light Breaks also comes with plain and simple, decent maps of each location for the scenario’s three gigs, as well as ‘Post Delivery Outpost #113’, full stats for all of its monsters and NPCs—from Gremlins to Emil Todmann, and full descriptions and stats for all of the equipment that the Player Characters are assigned as newly hired members of the Strangelight Workshop. Many of these are illustrated, as appropriate.
Iron Kingdoms: A Strange Light Breaks contains three very different ‘gigs’ or encounters and offers players a very different style of play to that of traditional Dungeons & Dragons in Iron Kingdoms. It involves a more investigative and technological mode of play and thus has a more modern feel. Iron Kingdoms: A Strange Light Breaks is an entertaining Ghostbusters-style scenario which is not fun to play, but definitely deserves a sequel.

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, 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 now in 2021, normal order is resumed with the Goodman Games Gen Con 2016 Program Book.
The Goodman Games Gen Con 2017 Program Book is a slimmer, more focused edition than in previous years, with a double combination of source material and scenarios, not once, but twice, another scenario, as well as the usual mix of Goodman Games community content. The first of the source material/scenario combinations is ‘Dinosaur Crawl Classics’ and ‘The Return of Scravis’ both by Marc Bruner, adapts an earlier setting published by Goodman Games to the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game. This is Dinosaur Planet: Broncosaurus Rex, the setting which Goodman Games published for the d20 System back in 2991. This is a Science Fiction setting in which mankind went to the stars in a timeline where the American Civil War ended in stalemate and two factions—the Federal Union of Planets and the Confederate States of America—are the leading powers. When dinosaurs are discovered on the Earth-like world of Cretasus, they rush to exploit it. Adventurers come for the wealth and glory; industrialists for the mineral wealth; colonists for the new world; and hunters for the biggest game of all—dinosaurs! Putting aside the fact that the setting draws from the American Civil War for some of its background, the obvious problem with ‘Dinosaur Crawl Classics’ is that it is a Science Fiction setting and Dungeon Crawl Classics is not. ‘Dinosaur Crawl Classics’ does not wholly address this as it is only a partial adaptation. What it suggests instead is using Cretasus and ‘Dinosaur Crawl Classics’ as a ‘Lost World’ a made mage’s experiment that perhaps the adventurers from a Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign end up on. However, that is not the default set-up in ‘Dinosaur Crawl Classics’.
In ‘Dinosaur Crawl Classics’, the players take the role of Velociraptor tribesmen! Options are given for playing at Zero Level, perhaps in Character Funnel, but the primary focus is on the five new Classes. These are Velociraptor Warrior, Velociraptor Tactician, Velociraptor Shaman, Velociraptor Exile, and the Wild One. These are mini Classes, just five Levels each. The Velociraptor Warrior is like the Warrior Class of the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game; the Velociraptor Tactician lays traps, uses stealth, and can co-ordinate others in battle with tactics; the Velociraptor Shaman knows alchemy, casts Clerical spells, and can often predict the actions of a creature with natural premonitions; the Velociraptor Exile live apart from any tribe and have a greater understanding of the wider world and human technology—both of which the Velociraptor Shaman does value them for; and the Wild One is a human who feels a tighter bond with nature than with technology, has a greater understanding of nature, and is uncomfortable around other humans. The Velociraptor Shaman also has ‘Ways’, reflecting how they bond with one particular type of dinosaur, like the ‘Way of the Tyrannosaur’, ‘Way of the Triceratops’, and ‘Way of the Pteranodon’, which grants them spells and other abilities. There are notes too on human technology and writeups of various dinosaurs.

‘The Return of Scravis’ is the accompanying scenario, written for use with Second Level Velociraptor Player Characters. The Player Characters are members of the L’dena tribe whose hunters have reported that their traditional hunting herds in the East Valley have been disrupted from their traditional hunting grounds. The scenario is quite short, a mini-sandbox, which shows off the potential of the ‘Dinosaur Crawl Classics’ setting. Hopefully Goodman Games will find the time to revisit this entertaining update of a title deep out of its back catalogue.
The second of the source material/scenario combinations in the Goodman Games Gen Con 2017 Program Book is ‘Lovecraftian Monsters for Dungeon Crawl Classics’ and the scenario ‘The Thing That Should Not Be’ both by Jon Hook. The author of course has history with Call of Cthulhu, in particular, the Age of Cthulhu line. With ‘Lovecraftian Monsters for Dungeon Crawl Classics’ provides stats and descriptions for twenty-two of the classic Lovecraftian creatures, from Byakhee and Colour Out of Space to Star Vampire and Yithian. In terms of fantasy, this is a good treatment of them, though of course it does lose some of the horror elements traditionally seen in their gaming versions. Nevertheless, this opens up options for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game and the Judge who wants to take her game into Cosmic Horror.
The scenario, ‘The Thing That Should Not Be’, is for Third Level Player Characters and sees them entering the Black Moss Woods and heading for a landmark known as the Screaming Ash to find out why local farmers were slaughtered and kidnapped. In the caverns below the Screaming Ash they discover the lair of a dread cult dedicated to the Great old One, Nyogtha. The cavern complex is relatively short and firmly steps into a territory that would normally be eschewed by roleplaying games of Lovecraftian investigative horror—the Cthuloid dungeon—because the result is invariably a Mythos mishmash. Here though, it works because of the format and the fact that the Player Characters are better equipped to handle monsters, whether of the Mythos variety or not. ‘The Thing That Should Not Be’ though, is a nasty and weird slice of pulp, fantasy horror.
The third and final scenario in the Goodman Games Gen Con 2017 Program Book is ‘Sisters of the Moon Furnace’ by Marc Bishop. This is a classic Character Funnel, one of the features of both the Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game and the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game—in which initially, a player is expected to roll up three or four Level Zero characters and have them play through a generally nasty, deadly adventure, which surviving will prove a challenge. Those that do survive receive enough Experience Points to advance to First Level and gain all of the advantages of their Class. Here the Player Characters awake to find themselves atop a strange complex amidst the clouds, from which they must descend to find out where they are and what they are doing there. There is the sense that they are being gently manipulated and then rewarded and penalised for their choices, suggesting perhaps that the Player Characters have a special destiny. The Player Characters need not fulfil the destiny in the scenario, and the likelihood is that it will be interesting if they do not, especially if the scenario is being used as a campaign starter. ‘Sisters of the Moon Furnace’ is an excellent example of the Character Funnel.
Also included in the Goodman Games Gen Con 2017 Program Book is more of ‘The Dungeon Alphabet’ by Michael Curtis, exploring particular aspects of dungeon delving and encounters and providing a table for each of ideas and encounter possibilities. Thus, we have ‘Q for Quests’ and ‘U for Underwater’ and simple tables for each that the Judge can pick and choose from. As expected, Goodman Games Gen Con 2017 Program Book very much focuses on the community aspect of being part of the Goodman Games family. ‘2016-2017 Mailing Labels’ by Stefan Poag and Brad McDevitt highlight the artwork which appeared on the mailing labels for anyone who ordered from Goodman Games; Doug Kovacs’ ‘A Visual History of the Band’ continues the history of the characters who continue to appear in Dungeon Crawl Classics scenarios, this time running from Dungeon Crawl Classics #68: People of the Pit to Dungeon Crawl Classics #93: Moon Slaves of the Cannibal Kingdom; and ‘Goodman Games Poster Contest’ by the Goodman Games Community collects all of the entries from the Road Crew Flyer Design Contest 2016.
Three entries in the Goodman Games Gen Con 2017 Program Book capture the energy Judges Crew and the Goodman Games community. ‘Real Life Adventures: The Alamo’ by Marc Bruner takes some inspiration from history and backs that up with several suggestions on using the Alamo—or situation like it—for the Judge, whilst Company owner Joseph Goodman recalls the ‘Real Life Adventures: The Goodman Games 2017 Creative Retreat’ and the ‘Con and Event Recap’ by the Goodman Games Community provide a fantastic range of photographs of both events. These bring the Goodman Games Gen Con 2017 Program Book to a colourful close, with the ‘Con and Event Recap’ giving a great feel for what just a little bit of Gen Con can be like.
Physically, the Goodman Games Gen Con 2017 Program Book is a slim softback book. It is decently laid out, easy to read, lavishly illustrated throughout, and a good-looking book both in black and white, and in colour.
On one level, the Goodman Games Gen Con 2017 Program Book, as with other entries in the annual series, is an anthology of magazine articles, but in this day and age of course—as well as 2016—there is no such thing as the roleplaying magazine. So what you have instead is the equivalent of a comic book’s Christmas annual—but published in the summer rather than in the winter—for fans of Goodman Games’ roleplaying games. The Goodman Games Gen Con 2017 Program Book differs from previous entries in the series, there being no gaming history or previews, instead focusing on solid gaming content, whether revisiting an old setting or taking fantasy in the direction of cosmic horror. The Goodman Games Gen Con 2017 Program Book is leaner and cleaner and all the better for it with some entertaining gaming content.

Now in its fifteenth year, Free RPG Day in 2022, was celebrated not once, but twice. First on Saturday, 25th June in the USA, and then on Saturday, 23rd July internationally. This was to prevent problem with past events when certain books did not arrive in time to be shipped internationally and so were not available outside of the USA. 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. Thanks to the generosity of David Salisbury of Fan Boy 3, Reviews from R’lyeh was get hold of many of the titles released for Free RPG Day, both in the USA and elsewhere.

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Homeworld: Revelations – A Tabletop Roleplaying Odyssey Quick-Start is the release from Modiphius Entertainment for Free RPG Day 2022. It is the quick-start for Homeworld: Revelations, the roleplaying based on the real-time strategy video game series Homeworld, which includes Homeworld, Homeworld: Cataclysm, Homeworld 2, and Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak, as well as the forthcoming Homeworld 3. The series tells the story of the  Kushan, a people lost in space after the destruction of their home planet, Kharak, and their attempt to find Hiigara, a new homeworld, journeying in fleet lead by a massive mothership. In Homeworld: Revelations – A Tabletop Roleplaying Odyssey Quick-Start, the players take the roles of members of The Dreamlands team, archaeologists brought together to gather historical records and artefacts from the wreckage of the great ship, the Khar-Toba, on the planet Kharak. Unfortunately, they are not the only ones interested the Khar-Toba. Others want to stop anyone from discovering the knowledge and technology which lies within the bowels of the great ship, and will do anything to prevent that from happening.
Homeworld: Revelations – A Tabletop Roleplaying Odyssey Quick-Start is designed for play by five players and come with five pre-generated Player Characters, printed separately. It contains all the rules necessary to play, including skills, action, combat, and interaction, all the way up to ship-to-ship combat. The five pre-generated characters include a security officer, a researcher, a medical officer, a technological operations manager, and pilot. All five are simply and clearly laid out and easy to read and use. Each also comes with a good illustration as well as a little background.

A Player Character in Homeworld: Revelations – A Tabletop Roleplaying Odyssey Quick-Start and thus Homeworld: Revelations is defined by Attributes, Disciplines, Focuses, Values, Traits, Talents, and Truths. The six Attributes—Agility, Brawn, Coordination, Insight, Reason, and Will—represent ways of or approaches to doing things as well as intrinsic capabilities. They are rated between seven and twelve. There are six skills—Combat, Command, Engineering, Exploration, Flight, and Medical—which are fairly broad and rated between one and five, whilst Focuses represent narrow areas of study or skill specialities, for example, Expert Pilot, Jury Rigging, Field Surgery, Unfamiliar Technology, and Chain of Command. Truths are single words or short phrases, which describe a significant fact or aspect about its subject, whether that is a scene, person, place, environment, or object. A Truth can make an action easier or more difficult, or even simply make it possible or impossible.To undertake an action in the 2d20 System in Homeworld: Revelations, a character’s player rolls two twenty-sided dice, aiming to have both roll under the total of an Attribute and a Skill. Each roll under this total counts as a success, an average task requiring two successes. Rolls of one count as two successes and if a Player Character has an appropriate Focus, rolls under the value of the Skill also count as two successes. In the main, because a typical difficulty will only be a Target Number of one, players will find themselves rolling excess Successes which becomes Momentum. This is a resource shared between all of the players which can be spent to create an Opportunity and so add more dice to a roll—typically needed because more than two successes are required to succeed, to create an advantage in a situation or remove a complication, create a problem for the opposition, and to obtain information. It is a finite ever-decreasing resource, so the players need to roll well and keep generating it, especially if they want to save some for the big scene or climatic battle in an adventure.
Now where the players generate Momentum to spend on their characters, the Game Master has Threat which can be spent on similar things for the NPCs as well as to trigger their special abilities. She begins each session with a pool of Threat, but can gain more through various circumstances. These include a player purchasing extra dice to roll on a test, a player rolling a natural twenty and so adding two Threat (instead of the usual Complication), the situation itself being threatening, or NPCs rolling well and generating Momentum and so adding that to Threat pool. In return, the Game Master can spend it on minor inconveniences, complications, and serious complications to inflict upon the player characters, as well as triggering NPC special abilities, having NPCs seize the initiative, and bringing the environment dramatically into play.
Combat uses the same mechanics, but offers more options in terms of what Momentum can be spent on. This includes doing extra damage, disarming an opponent, keeping the initiative—initiative works by alternating between the player characters and the NPCs and keeping it allows two player characters to act before an NPC does, avoid an injury, and so on. Damage in combat is rolled on the Challenge dice, the number of ‘Homeworld: Revelations’ symbols rolled determining how much damage is inflicted. A similar roll is made to resist the damage, and any leftover is deducted from a character’s Stress. If a character’s Stress is reduced to zero or five or more damage is inflicted, then a character is injured. Any ‘Homeworld: Revelations’ symbols rolled indicate an effect as well as the damage. In keeping with the tone of the various series, weapon damage can be deadly (and nearly every character—Player Character or NPC, is armed with a firearm of some kind), melee or hand-to-hand, less so.

Lastly, the Player Characters all begin play with several points of Fortune, which can be used to pull off extraordinary actions, perform exciting stunts, make one-in-a-million shots, or provide an edge during life-or-death situations. These can be spent to gain a Critical Success on any roll, reroll any dice, gain an additional action in a round, to avoid imminent defeat, and to add new element to the current scene. More can be earned through play, such as accepting a Complication, changing a Defining Aspect about a character, or good roleplaying.

The rules themselves in the Homeworld: Revelations – A Tabletop Roleplaying Odyssey Quick-Start take up almost two thirds of its pages. The rest is taken up by the scenario. This starts in the outer desert region known as The Dreamlands where the wreck of the Khar-Toba can be found. The Player Characters are part of a team lead buy by the archaeologist Mevath Sagald, sent to investigate the wreck and glean what historical records and artefacts they can from it. However, the wreck is guarded by the Gaalsien, a kiith or clan religiously opposed to all thoughts of discovery and exploration, fearing that the Kushan took part in a great evil long ago and were punished by being exiled. The Player Characters will need to find a way into the wreck and avoid detection, exploring the ships and recover archaeological artefacts, and then escape both the ship and any attempts by the Gaalsien to stop them. Divided into five scenes, the scenario primarily involves stealth and exploration, although there is scope for combat and interaction depending upon what the players decide to do. There are moments throughout for each Player Character to shine and the scenario builds to an exciting climax chased by Gaalsien spacecraft. Overall, it is good adventure, and it should provide a good two sessions’ worth of play or so.
Physically, Homeworld: Revelations – A Tabletop Roleplaying Odyssey Quick-Start is a good looking affair with excellent artwork and decent layout. Unfortunately, the whole affair does feel rushed and needs another good edit. On the plus side though, it is well written, and there are lots and lots of examples of play and sections of advice for the Game Master. There is no cartography and thus no deckplans of the Khar-Toba. The scenario is not difficult to run without them, but their inclusion would have helped.
Ultimately, Homeworld: Revelations – A Tabletop Roleplaying Odyssey Quick-Start is let down by one factor and one factor alone. It has rules, it has pre-generated Player Characters, and it has a scenario. What it entirely lacks is background. There is no explanation of what Homeworld is or what the setting of Homeworld: Revelations is like, so leaves the Game Master to do her own research and prepare it for her players. This is disappointing as a quick-start is designed to both introduce a setting and a roleplaying game to players unaware of the setting and introduce a roleplaying game to those who know the setting. Homeworld: Revelations – A Tabletop Roleplaying Odyssey Quick-Start does a better job of doing the latter than the former and so does not fully succeed as a quick-start.

Now in its fifteenth year, Free RPG Day in 2022, was celebrated not once, but twice. First on Saturday, 25th June in the USA, and then on Saturday, 23rd July internationally. This was to prevent problem with past events when certain books did not arrive in time to be shipped internationally and so were not available outside of the USA. 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. Thanks to the generosity of David Salisbury of Fan Boy 3, Reviews from R’lyeh was get hold of many of the titles released for Free RPG Day, both in the USA and elsewhere.

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Without a doubt, the slimmest of offerings for Free RPG Day 2022 is A Familiar Problem. There is good reason for that. It consists of a single sheet of light card, done in black and white on the one side and in full colour on the other. The full colour side consists of adverts for other releases from the publisher, Darrington Press, most notably, Tal’Dorei Campaign Setting Reborn, the supplement for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, based on the Critical Role YouTube campaign setting. Which is a bit strange. Strange because it is the adverts which get the colour and so take attention away from the roleplaying game on the other side. Strange because if Darrington Press had instead released a quick-start or a scenario for Tal’Dorei Campaign Setting Reborn for Free RPG Day 2022, then it might have got a whole lot more attention than A Familiar Problem is likely too. Putting that aside, what you get with A Familiar Problem is either a flyer with a mini-roleplaying game on the back or a mini-roleplaying game with a lot of advertising attached. Take your pick.
A Familiar Problem is a one-page roleplaying game in which the players take the roles of wizards’ familiars. Their masters and mistresses are away on an adventure and left them behind. Having been forgotten about them, they decide to have an adventure of their own and so prove to their owners that are useful and perhaps worth taking along on the next adventure. A Familiar might be a bat, a crab, an owl, a rat, a raven, and others. Each Familiar has four attributes—Clever, Fierce, Sly, and Quick, and a BREAK like Paranoia or Narcissism. The attributes range in value between zero and three, whilst the Break represents atypical behaviour if the Familiar acquires too much Stress. Each Familiar also knows three pieces of Pocket Magic, three spells such as Butterfingers, Door Magic, or Summon Horse. These are single use spells. To create a Familiar, a player rolls or chooses from the table of twelve and then does the same for his Familiar’s spells.
Lizzie the LizardClever +0, Fierce +1, Sly +2, Quick +2BREAK: CowardicePocket Magic: Limited Invisibility, Soak, Speak with Object
When a Familiar wants to undertake an action in A Familiar Problem, his player rolls a ten-sided die and adds the value of an appropriate Attribute to the result of the die roll. The aim is roll equal to or higher than a Difficulty Number, which ranges from five or Easy to Very Difficult or ten. If the roll is failed, the Familiar gains a point of Stress. Subsequently, each time a player rolls for a task and rolls under his Familiar’s Stress, his Familiar’s Break occurs. Then the player has to roleplay that behaviour until the other Familiars calm his Familiar down and rescue him from the situation which triggered it.
As to what the Familiars do, there is a set of three of tables, one for generating the mission and two the adventure location. For example, ‘Sabotage the villain’s scheme in the Opulent Castle’. And that is it… The rest of it is left up to the Game Master to make up, perhaps with some input from her players, for example, whatever the villain’s scheme might be, and then play out. Which should take no more than a single session—and probably a short session at that.
A Familiar Problem is plain and simple. Whether that is physically, conceptually, or playfully. One of the best features of the simplicity is that it is easy to teach, is suitable for some younger players (depending how far they can cope with the BREAK rules), and requires no preparation. The only thing that it really requires is the ten-sided die and a Game Master happy to make things up and help tell the story.

Now in its fifteenth year, Free RPG Day in 2022, was celebrated not once, but twice. First on Saturday, 25th June in the USA, and then on Saturday, 23rd July internationally. This was to prevent problem with past events when certain books did not arrive in time to be shipped internationally and so were not available outside of the USA. 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. Thanks to the generosity of David Salisbury of Fan Boy 3, Reviews from R’lyeh was get hold of many of the titles released for Free RPG Day, both in the USA and elsewhere.

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One of the perennial contributors to Free RPG Day is Paizo, Inc., a publisher whose titles for both the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and the Starfinder Roleplaying Game have proved popular and often in demand long after the event. For Free RPG Day 2022, the publisher again provides a title for each of these two roleplaying games, A Fistful of Flowers for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, Second Edition, the other being Skitter Warp for the Starfinder Roleplaying Game. In past years, the titles released for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game have typically involved adventures with diminutive Player Characters, first Kobolds, then Goblins, and this year, Leshys, humanoid sapient plants of various species and Classes, typivally crafted by a druid as a minion or companion. Four pre-generated Player Characters are included, each of Third Level, each independent of their creator, and the scenario requires the Game Master have access to the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, Second Edition, Pathfinder Bestiary, Pathfinder Advanced Player’s Guide, and the recently released Pathfinder Lost Omens Ancestry Guide. The scenario can be played in one good session or two and offers a good mix of skill challenges, stealth, interaction, and combat.

A Fistful of Flowers begins in Verduran Forest, a large woodland in Avistan. There is a Wildwood Treaty in place between the forest and the nearby settled lands, affording the forest certain legal protections. However, the Player Characters have become aware that some of their numbers are missing and as the more powerful Leshys in the woods, it is their duty to investigate. The trail begins down at a river crossing and leads across first to a campsite and then beyond the limits of the forest canopy to a nearby village. Here the Leshys will find themselves readily accepted by the villagers and able to gather clues as who might be responsible. This will lead to the first of the two main scenes in scenario which are fully detailed and mapped and serve as its two climaxes. This first takes place in the wax laboratory of Crystals and Candlewax, owned by the alchemist who has been stealing into the forest and kidnapping Leshys! He though is not the true villain of the piece, his ambitions having got the better of him and found him serving a snooty, venal aristocrat, Lady Constance Meliosa, who wants the Leshys as showpieces to display at parties to her friends. The climax of the scenario will see the Player Characters crashing her afternoon tea party.
A Fistful of Flowers packs a lot into its sixteen pages and gives plenty for the Player Characters to do. There are problems to overcome and NPCs to interact with, the scenario providing multiple means for approaching either, and whilst the confrontation with the brute of an alchemist is likely to end in combat, the confrontation at the tea party need not do so. The Player Characters can sneak in, crash the party, persuade the guests that Lady Constance’s misdemeanours break the Wildwood treaty, and so on. Whilst the encounter in the alchemist’s shop is a traditional sneak and combat affair, the aristocrat’s fancy tea party deserves to be played out as a riotous assembly of flying skirts, scattered cakes, and soured sensibilities.
To accompany the adventure, A Fistful of Flowers includes four pre-generated Player Characters. These consist of a Gourd Leshy Druid, Leaf Leshy Bard, a Vine Leshy Barbarian, and a Fungus Leshy Rogue. Each is neatly arranged on their own individual pages and complete with background and clear, easy to read stats. Of course, the players do not have to use these, but could instead substitute their own characters, created using the rules in Pathfinder Lost Omens Ancestry Guide. Otherwise though, these are a decently diverse range of characters. 
Physically, A Fistful of Flowers is as well presented as you would expect for a release from Paizo Inc. Everything is in full colour, the illustrations are excellent, and the maps attractive. The only issue is that the map of the alchemist’s laboratory is not numbered, though the locations are easy enough to work out. The Game Master might want to create stats for Lady Constance and her guests, but neither are absolutely necessary to run the adventure.
A Fistful of Flowers is an entertainingly likeable adventure. It provides a diverse range of Player Characters and has a pleasing different feel to its fantasy than that atypical of most roleplaying fantasy and packs a lot of adventure into what is just a handful of pages. Overall, A Fistful of Flowers is a fun showcase for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, Second Edition. 

Call of Cthulhu is a literary roleplaying game. Its play is predicated on the ability of the Player characters—or rather the Investigators—to be literate and so be able to read the array of clues to be found as part of the enquiries into the unknown. Newspaper reports, diary entries, letters, notes and marginalia, books and scrolls, and of course, the much-feared Mythos tomes such as the dread Necronomicon and Unaussprechlichen Kulten. Just as the Investigators—or at least some of them—are expected to be able to read them, then so are their players. Thus, we have clues and handouts, especially if the roleplaying game of our choice involves a mystery—mundane or Mythos related. There had been clues and handouts before, for example, U1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh, the 1981 scenario for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition from TSR (UK), included a clue showing the pattern of signals needed to contact a smuggling ship, but Call of Cthulhu took the role of the clue and the handout to new heights as they became more and more integral to game play. And since newspaper reports, diary entries, letters, notes and marginalia, books and scrolls, and more are all modern, the Keeper can create her own—such as soaking paper in tea and then drying it to age it—and easily copy those provided in particular scenarios or campaigns. Which is what the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society has done, and not just for its own campaigns, but your campaigns.
The Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set is a big box of handouts and clues designed to be used with Masks of Nyarlathotep, the classic campaign for Call of Cthulhu, often regarded as one of the greatest ever produced by the hobby. This no mere set of tea-soaked, faux-aged handouts and whatnot, for just as Call of Cthulhu took the role of the clue and the handout to new heights, the Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set takes the clues and handouts for Call of Cthulhu to new heights. There are over one hundred props in the box—telegrams, letters, a match box—just like in the original boxed set for Masks of Nyarlathotep, maps, charts, diary and ledger entries, business cards, photographs, memos, and newspaper clippings, oh so many newspaper clippings. Then there are bonus props. 
Open up the Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set and the first thing that you see is a scroll, from the Shanghai chapter. It is not simply presented as a scroll on heavy paper, but done on cloth with actual wooden rollers so that it can be unfurled with ease. Of course, few of the players are going to be able to read the Chinese script, though some of their Investigators might (so there is a translation), but putting that down on the table gives it an immediacy that no mere sheet of paper would. And once given to the players it is going sit there, a constant reminder of both just how brilliant the Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set is and the fact that their Investigators really, really want to get it translated.
Alongside the scroll is an ‘Ediphone Wax Cylinder Case’ containing not a wax cylinder—as after all, who owns a device capable of playing one of those these days outside of a museum?—but a USB drive with eight MP3 audio recordings which can be played at the appropriate points in the campaign. And these are not done by anyone, but professional actors, so instead of having the Keeper portray Jack Brady telling the players and their Investigators what is going on once they eventually find him, the Keeper can play the recording and so pull them both into his story. Below that are a set of six Nansen Passports, issued by the League of Nations and recognised around the globe plus a set of passport stamps. What this means is as a group begins the campaign, each player can record the details of his Investigator in the Nansen Passport and as he travels around the world as the part of the campaign, from Peru to New York to England to Cairo to Kenya to Australia to Shanghai and back again, the Keeper can affix the right stamps—which come on sheets designed to be peeled off and stuck in the passports—to indicate the Investigator’s entry and exit from each country. It is a fantastic physical record of an imagined travel and achievement, one that does not actually directly relate to the campaign itself, but it is a lovely bit of verisimilitude. As is the fact that the stamps include options for ‘Cancelled’, ‘Expelled’, ‘Deported’, ‘Return Forbidden’, ‘Code 1644 Psych. Hold’, and more is just a delight. Of course, six passports are not going to be enough unless the players and their Investigators are very lucky because Masks of Nyarlathotep is a notoriously deadly campaign and Investigator deaths, and retirements are highly likely. So, replacements are probably going to be needed.
Below that there is a double-sided sheet of paper detailing everything in the Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set. This lists everything folder by folder, according to which chapter each handout appears in. Now unlike the props included in the Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign itself, none of the props are numbered. Thus, they are more realistic and both Keeper and her players will need to keep track of which props their Investigators have discovered so far and which ones they have. Open up the first folder, for the new Peru chapter in the most recent edition of Masks of Nyarlathotep. A clipping has been torn from a newspaper, but it is no single article, there are others surrounding it as well as on the reverse. None of them have any bearing on the campaign, but they impart a sense of the wider world in 1925 and they are simply fun to read. The clipping is also on the right paper, so it has a flimsiness just as it should. Below that, there is a letter in Spanish, clearly torn from a notebook, then copies of period maps and of the scenario maps. The Peru chapter is quite short, but it sets up expectations for the rest of the campaign. The players will be wanting to see what is next and find out just how good each handout feels.
After Peru, the chapter of Masks of Nyarlathotep get progressively more complex and so each corresponding folder in the Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set is thicker, the New York one notoriously so. The original start of the campaign in previous versions of Masks of Nyarlathotep, the discovery of Jackson Elias’ body in his Chelsea Hotel room is combined with a welter of clues and a corresponding torrent of handouts. So what the Investigators know about Jackson Elias, almost all of the front of a newspaper—with articles front and back, numerous other clippings, a business card or two, several slightly crumpled letters (one of which includes the letter it came in), a telegram, one photograph of Jackson Elias dead on his bed and another of the Dark Mistress in Shanghai (infamously poorly portrayed in previous versions of the campaign), a submission from Jackson Elias to his publisher, Prospero House, an excerpt torn from Nigel Blackwell’s Africa’s Dark Sects—complete with book stamp, maps of New York and Harlem, and even the book cover to Jackson Elias’ own work, ‘The Hungry Dead’. It all culminates in a folder containing the patient records for Roger Carlyle and the folder is sealed. That is just the one folder. There are seven folders, one for each chapter in the campaign, and they are all like that.
Physically, Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set is a superlative presentation of the clues and handouts to the campaign. The right paper, a letter slightly crumpled as if pulled from an envelope (plus the envelope torn open itself), papers ripped from a diary, but held together by a paper clip. Perhaps the plainest of handouts are the ones that provide written copies of the audio files and details of things that the Investigators already know. They are the simplest and they do break the in-game feeling of the campaign, but they are all necessary. 
The Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set is definitely not needed to run the Masks of Nyarlathotep campaign. It is entirely optional. Yet the Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set is a physical reflection of the effort which Chaosium, Inc. put into upgrading the previous version of the campaign to Masks of Nyarlathotep, Fifth Edition. It would seem almost like an oversight for the Keeper to keep the campaign’s improvements in terms of its presentation and support to herself and not share them with her players through the Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set. Then there is the fact that Masks of Nyarlathotep is likely to provide somewhere between sixty and seventy hours of gameplay, so why not match that investment in terms of time with the physical investment of the Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set?

There is, of course, precedent for all of this. When Masks of Nyarlathotep was first published in 1984, it was a box set which famously included a matchbook from the Sleeping Tiger bar in Shanghai as amongst its first set of clues. It was an oddly physical thing to include, but it showed how clues and handouts could be presented and from that matchbook, H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society has taken the idea and run and run with it… The resulting Masks of Nyarlathotep Gamer Prop Set is a magnificent presentation of the clues and handouts Masks of Nyarlathotep, bringing the investigation in the greatest roleplaying campaign ever published into a physical reality barely even imagined when it was first published in 1984.

The Realm of Legendlore and of Azoth lies at an unstable nexus of reality, and where that instability touches other planes, including the Earth, Visitors can make the Crossing from one world to another. Sometimes intentionally, often unintentionally, perhaps because they inherited a keepsake which enables a Crossing, simply opened a door, or found a portal, perhaps a wardrobe or even a suitcase. Crossings have happened many times in the past—and not just by people. Both the Library of Alexandria and the Statue of Zeus at Olympia have both appeared in Azoth, Boudica and the Ninth Legion continued to fight each other for decades in Azoth, and even Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan landed there in 1937, and even though they were never able to replicate powered flight, but gliders launched from hot air balloons are common in certain parts of Azoth. The scientific knowledge brought from Earth continues to influence the world of Azoth where magic is common, leading to synergistic devices such as an Ensorcelled Typewriter and Food Wave Machine (microwave). Previous Visitors have left other Strange Things behind, more recently electronic devices which quickly run out of power. Whilst Visitors bring knowledge, certain attitudes, and perhaps a Strange Thing or two with them—typically no more than what they have in their pockets or a bag, what they find after the Crossing is even more amazing.

Visitors find that the Realm is a world of magic, of elves and dwarves, goblins and troll, minotaurs and dragons. They find themselves changed, because however when Visitors make the Crossing, what they find on the other side is a stronger You, a greater reflection of each of their inner selves, an Other You. They find themselves capable of casting magic, working with alchemy, fighting with swords and bows, or handling guns. They find themselves changed into different Peoples—Bryzine Trolls, Dwarves, Elves, Hairfoots (Hairfeet?), Orcs, and Pixies, as well as Humans. They find themselves as Clerics, Rogues, Wizards, Rangers, Bards, Alchemists, Sorcerers, Gunslingers, and more. They may also find themselves unchanged, so if wearing glasses is part of their identity, then they wear glasses in the Realm. Visitors are also greater than themselves—they have a Legend attached to them, a Destiny that they are only partially aware of. Thus, they might be an Avatar of Peace or a Regent of Dragons. They will have great adventures in the Realm, but ultimately, they have a choice—to stay or return home.

This is the setting for Legendlore, a roleplaying adaptation based on The Realm, the comic book series first published by Arrow Comics and then Caliber Comics. In the comic book, four ordinary, modern-day teenagers are thrown into an alternate realm where magic is real, dragons roam the skies, orcs and hobgoblins terrorise travellers, where unicorns prance through the forest, and kingdoms wage war for dominance. Although a fantasy world, it differs from the atypical Dungeons & Dragons world. Not just in the mix of magic and science, but in Legendlore the roleplaying setting, there is a sense of self-awareness. There are roleplayers on the Earth of Legendlore and they can be Visitors too, so they make the Crossing fully aware of fantasy roleplaying such as Dungeons & Dragons and all that entails. There is no equivalent of the Legendlore Roleplaying Game though, so they are not totally forearmed with knowledge. Published by Onyx Path Publishing, the adaptation is written for use with Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. It includes new Backgrounds and Classes and sub-Classes, as well as rules for being Legends, sample beginning Player Characters, a starting adventure, and setting material for the Realm.

From the outset, it is clear that Legendlore is designed to be as gender and identity inclusive as possible and that if a player wants to and is happy to do so at the table, that player can bring as much of themselves into the game as they want. What this means is their real self, their Earth-self can be exactly what they are in real life, but their Realm-self can be their best-self, their best You—or a reflection of it. Alternatively, each player can simply play a fantasy version of themselves, whether on Earth or the Realm, or on both. All of which should be discussed and agreed upon as necessary in Session Zero, which is discussed in the chapter on running the game.

Although it is possible to play Realmborn Player Characters in Legendlore, which would perhaps be the closest that Legendlore gets to a traditional Dungeons & Dragons-style set-up, the emphasis is very much on playing Visitors. Their creation begins with selecting a Visitor Background, for example, Academic Education, Activist, Born into Wealth, High School Student, Writer, Working Poor, and of course, Roleplaying Aficionado. Several Realmborn Backgrounds are given too, which are all nation-based. The Realm Races—Bryzine Trolls, Dwarves, Elves, Hairfoots, Orcs, and Pixies—all provide certain traits and bonuses as you would expect, but these are cultural rather than innate. So a player has the flexibility to match and change as he wants. There are two new Classes in Legendlore. One is the Alchemist, which blends chemistry and magic, crafting potions which have spell-like effects, whether thrown, imbibed, or applied. The other is the Gunslinger, which specialises in the use and maintenance of firearms, including the Culverin, an actual cannon! The other options are all sub-Classes of the standard Classes in the Player’s Handbook. These include the Ocean Raider and the Woad Painted for the Barbarian, the Eye of Otharis for the Cleric, primarily sages and oracles, Paladins have Oath of Fealty, which they take to a nation, and Sorcerers are Sourceborn, who draw directly from the Pool of Magic for more powerful magic.

A Player Character, certainly a Visitor, also has a Legend. Each has a Reputation and a means of acquiring Legend Points. For example, the Avatar of Peace grants when a Player Character refuses to commit acts of violence, persuades others to lay down their weapons, and lead negotiations for peace. When acquired, they can either go into a communal pool or a player can keep them, but when expended they can either gain Advantage for a Player Character on an attack, saving throw, or ability check, or they can be used to add a new narrative element to play. The Legend system replaces that of the Inspiration from Dungeons & Dragons, adding a little more flexibility. Just five are provided—Avatar of Peace, Bane of Ardonia (who oppose the isolationist and walled scientifically-advanced nation of Ardonia), Caln of Stone (uncompromising stability and construction), Regent of Dragons (dispensing wisdom and justice), and Suzerain of Blossoms (encouraging others to follow their own path and cultivating strengths and talents). Alternatively, a player can create his own for his character, but the advice for doing so does feel underwritten and the five given in Legendlore are not really enough—certainly not if there are more than five players or the Realm is being visited a second time with new Player Characters.

All magic in the Realm draws from the Pool of Magic, but its casters—apart from Sorcerers who are Sourceborn—can suffer from ‘Menthruac’ or mind-lock if they attempt to cast too much magic, too quickly. When a Player Character casts an arcane spell, he can opt to gain a level of Menthruac, up to four levels. Each level provides several extra effects to choose from, such as ‘Careful Spell’ or Twinned Cantrip’, but comes with a downside such as Disadvantage on attack rolls or ability checks, all the way up to Hit Points being reduced to zero or even death! Menthruac is removed after a long rest, but gives a spellcaster the option to power up his magic should want to. Legendlore also includes some seventy or so new spells, as well as twelve new rituals. Rather than draw fleetingly upon the Pool of Magic, like most arcane spells, rituals draw deeply from it and require a greater understanding of magic, period of study, and time to cast. For example, Open Crossing is a nine-hour ritual which opens a Crossing from the Realm to another destination. These should all take extensive game play to really learn and cast as they do have potentially very powerful effects.

Legendlore includes a decently comprehensive guide to the Realm and East Azoth, starting with its history from the arrival of the first humans and the wars that would result from their settlement, through to the peace following the end of the Forever War and then the Plague War that led to isolationism amongst many nations. The gazetteer is comprehensive too, detailing all of the nations of the region, even the Night Land, which even if it can be found, can only be entered during the hours of darkness. In addition, the gazetteer is littered with numerous adventure seeds. The bestiary, covering allies, adversaries, and creatures is likewise nicely detailed. Some of the races, such as the Dwarves and Goblins, adhere to their usual depictions, although others, notably the Orcs are different. Orcs have a porcine look and a poor reputation as raiders and pillagers, though that was long in the past when they found themselves being pushed out of their lands. These days they seek the return of their original homelands by diplomatic means and building trust. The bestiary also details demons, some of whom, such as Shinde Imas, the Elven Slayer, and Terrorek, the Plague Bringer, are the major villains of the Realms. Not included in Legendlore are writeups of any of the characters who made the Crossing in the comics—Alex, Dom, Majorie, or Sandra—and this is intentional. The starting point for Legendlore in terms of time frame is the first issue of the comic, and it is up to the Game Master to decide whether or not they made the Crossing or not.

The advice for the Game Master on running Legendlore is a mix of the general and the specific. There is good advice on handling Session Zero and on specific elements of the Realm as a setting. In particular, on handling good and evil since as a setting for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, there is no Alignment in the Realm, and also dealing with Player Character death. Resurrection is possible, but the resurrected often return changed in some way. The Game Master can make the process as simple or as complex as needed—but must be consistent. The other option is a new Player Character, but the Player Character need not be wholly new. It could be an earlier version of the player’s You before his lost character made the Crossing, or even a version from a slightly alternate Earth. The new version of the Player Character arrives bereft of knowledge of his predecessor’s adventures and could be of a wholly new Race or Class. There is advice too on getting home, and whether that is a Player Character objective, and also how much the campaign involves the Player Characters going back and forth between home and the Realm.

Rounding out Legendlore is ‘Voices from Afar’, an introductory adventure in the Realm for four to six First Level Player Characters. After they make the Crossing, they find themselves caught in a plot to use a strange artefact to spread the borders of the dread Night Lands. Accompanying the scenario which should take two or three sessions to complete, is not one, but two sets of pre-generated Player Characters. These are the same, but First Level and Third Level respectively, the latter for a group which wants to try out a more powerful set of characters. At the end of the scenario, the Player Characters have the option to stay in the Realm or go home.

Physically, Legendlore is well presented and laid out with a nice range of illustrations. What it does lack though is an index and that makes finding certain things challenging. A glossary would also have helped. The setting description is pleasingly balanced by some enjoyable pieces of colour fiction that follow the fortunes of several adventurers as they make the Crossing and discover the world of the Realm.

Legendlore is not a definitive guide to the Realm of Legendlore and of Azoth, and nor does it set out to be. It is a comprehensive and gameable guide, making the setting accessible and playable. If there is an issue with Legendlore, it is that it does not include much in the way of advice on handling the transition from Earth to the Realm, and in particular, from the ‘ordinary’ You of the Player Characters of Earth to the ‘best’ or ‘inner’ You of the Realm. After all, that change is going to be more significant to some players than others. Some advice and suggestions as to long term play and campaign objectives would also have been useful. Other than that, Legendlore is an engaging exploration of a familiar fantasy set-up, of ordinary folk transported to a fantastic world. Fans of The Realm who game will doubtless enjoy Legendlore, but for players wanting an identity positive and inclusive fantasy setting for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, then Legendlore not only supports that, but welcomes You to it.

Welcome to the Edge is an anthology of scenarios for Over the Edge Third Edition: The Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger published by Atlas Games. It presents four lengthy, often complex scenarios designed to do six things. First, to show what a scenario looks like in Over the Edge, Third Edition. Second, to act as a campaign starters or slot into an ongoing campaign. Third, it is designed to present multiple story hooks and thus means to get the Player Characters involved in each of its scenarios, whether as agents of one faction or another, newcomers to Al Amarja, members of one or more of the conspiracies on the island, as street level gangsters or criminals, or as paranormals or mystics. Fourth, it is designed to showcase the island of Al Amarja and its people in all of their conspiratorial, counterintuitive, and corresponding weirdness. Fifth, it is designed to shake everything up by throwing a grenade into the room and upsetting the status quo. In other words, once the Game Master has run and players roleplayed any one of the four scenarios in the anthology, the situation on Al Amarja will not be the same as before. For example, by the end of the second scenario, ‘A Conclave of Chikutorpls, or the Winds of Change Are Blowing (Up), or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Multidimensional Convergence.’ Frank Germaine, owner of Sad Mary’s, the hottest bar on Al Marja, may have lost control of it, whilst at the end of ‘Battle of the Bands’, the biggest band on the island may or not have been reformed and even one of the Player Characters might be a member of it! The result, whatever the outcome, is to enforce the sixth thing and that is, make Al Amarja and thus Over the Edge Third Edition: The Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger the Game Master’s own and thus different from that of any other Game Master with an Over the Edge campaign.

Right from the start though, Welcome to the Edge is a challenging set of scenarios. There is always homework for the Game Master to do as part of her preparation. Thankfully, each scenario references the very sections of the core rulebook that she needs to read, though there are multiples of them. There are usually a lot of NPCs to handle as well, often quite detailed in terms of their background and motivations, if not their stats. The authors of the anthology do go out of their way though to give advice and further explanation, including tips and playtest notes, with much of this supplementary information organised into sidebars and sections of boxed text. These are categorised by colour, so for example, advice and Game Master tips are always in red sections, NPCs in black, suggestions as where one scenario intersects with another in violet, and so on. Thus, Welcome to the Edge is laid out in great blocks of colour that are easy on the eye.

Welcome to the Edge begins in relatively gentle fashion with ‘Battle of the Bands’. The Glorious Lords of the Edge are hosting the biggest battle of the bands on Al Marja, an event which anyone can participate in, but one in which Oblivion Function, an electronica trio, is tipped to win and win big, and so get to perform a victory concert. However, this will be a big win too for the backers of the Oblivion Function, the Movers, and there are plenty of other factions on the island who do not want that to happen. So, another band needs to be found to defeat Oblivion Function and there is only one band capable of doing that, Betwixt, one of the biggest and most critically acclaimed groups on the island. Only Betwixt split up over a decade ago and nobody knows exactly why. If somebody—by which we mean the Player Characters—is to get Betwixt back together, they are going to have to track down the four members, find out why they split, and get them to make up and put aside their differences enough to perform together once again. Which means a road trip back and forth across the island as the Player Characters track down one band member after another.

The four members of Betwixt are nicely detailed, each with their own views and revelations as to why the band broke up and reasons for getting back together (or not). Part of the scenario involves getting the old band tour bus back on the road too (although alternatives are suggested) as well as finding out what has become of the band members. There are some fun encounters to had on the road too, such as a big burrito-eating competition and an attack by a hit squad consisting of a Capella band whose singing has dangerously telekinetic heft to it, and the scenario will climax with the actual battle of the bands.

‘Battle of the Bands’ is the least weird and the least complex of the four scenarios in the anthology, in some ways more of a multi-character piece than the weird conspiracy shenanigans that you would normally expect with a scenario for Over the Edge. This makes it both a good introduction and a poor introduction to Al Amarja. A good introduction because the level of weirdness is relatively low, plus because the road trip format provides a really good reason for touring the island, but a poor one because the weirdness is low and because the introduction, at least for ordinary visitors to the island, as members of the Betwixt fan club, is underwhelming. As a scenario, ‘Battle of the Bands’ has an enjoyably languid, summertime, dust and tarmac feel to it, and as an interlude from the weirdness of Al Amarja, it is just perfect.
The second scenario, ‘A Conclave of Chikutorpls, or the Winds of Change Are Blowing (Up), or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Multidimensional Convergence.’ both turns up the weirdness and has an easier means of introduction. It opens with the car they are in—either they are driving or being driven—knocking someone down in the street and a woman known as Chikutorpl appearing almost immediately out of nowhere. Then they begin finding flyers announcing the reappearance of the Winds of Change, the high-stakes pop-up casino owned by Chikutorpl where it is possible to bet your youth, your beauty, your talent, a memory, even your life… When they attend, Winds of Change lives up to its reputation as a raucous, racy event filled with strange games like hyperbolic billiards and immortal combat. Throughout the host is in a highly mercurial mood and seems to change almost every time the Player Characters see her. Whatever the outcome of their attendance, the Player Characters receive invitations to the next opening and that is when it gets even weirder. It turns out that the host both sent and did not send the invitations, because there are multiple Chikutorpls, each pursuing agendas of their own and seeming to threaten reality in the process. Successive events get more chaotic, and this begins to ripple out as multiple Chikutorpls’ plans have a greater effect upon attendee after attendee. Ultimately, it comes down to a showdown when all of the Chikutorpls on the island host their events to outdoor each other. Throughout the Player Characters can pursue their own agendas or get caught up with those of every other attendee, but the end result is likely to change them in ways they did not anticipate at the start of the scenario.

ParaCon is the most important cutting edge scientific and technological event on Al Amarja, if not in the world, and it is hosted by the leading paranormal figure on the island, Doctor Chris Seversen. In ‘Seversen’s Mysterious Estate’ the Player Characters get to attend the most exclusive high-tech event of the year, whether as bodyguards, as inventors, or simply at random! The scenario is one big party with a lot of guests and a lot going on, including the event being gatecrashed by an astral vampire (note this is not a spoiler, the author advises to tell the players at the start of the scenario about it attending the party in order to ramp up the tension) and a Presidentials wet works strike team. This is not so much a big sandbox as a highly populated sandbox with twenty-three NPCs to weave in and out of the event and several sequences of events for the Game Master to handle and run. It comes with good advice to that end, and it also provides a great set of NPCs which can be used beyond the party (that is, if they survive).

The last scenario in Welcome to the Edge is ‘Sympathy for the D’Aubainnnes’, which brings the Player Characters into contact with members of Al Amarja’s ruling family in a completely bonkers fashion. Everyone on the island receives a parcel containing a lifelike rubber mask of one of the D’Aubainnes, including the Player Characters. However, when anyone puts the mask on, they cannot take it off. Slowly the mask wearers begin to act like the D’Aubainnne family member they wear the mask off, so Jean-Christophe mask wearers starting teleporting short distances at random, Sir Constance mask wearers accrue wealth, and Sister Cheryl mask wearers become naturally disposed each other and feel stronger and better. The mask wearers also begin to hate the wearers of the other masks to the point that they will kill each other. As a rash of murders ripple back and forth across the island, it also becomes clear that someone is keeping a tally… ‘Sympathy for the D’Aubainnnes’ best works if one of the Player Characters dons one of the masks and the scenario includes multiple suggestions as to why one or more of them would do so. Once they do, then the scenario becomes one of survival and investigation, closer to a more traditional type of scenario found in other role-playing games. The result is a disturbingly surreal end to the quartet.

Physically, Welcome to the Edge is a bright, colourful book with excellent artwork. It is also well written, and the cartography is decent.

Welcome to the Edge provides four good scenarios that are all different and all easy to slot into an ongoing campaign. In fact, they work better as part of an ongoing campaign because all four will have long term effects upon a campaign, as the various factions and conspiracies work out their agendas. The is exactly what the Over the Edge Third Edition: The Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger needs, a showcase of just what the island of Al Amarja can deliver—stupendously surrealistic situations and wonderful weirdness backed up with good advice for the Game Master on how to handle all of that and run the scenarios too.

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

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The Witchfire Trilogy Book One: The Longest Night was published in 2001 by Privateer Press and introduced the Iron Kingdoms, the Steampunk and high fantasy setting best known for its miniatures combat game, Warmachine: Prime. In 2001 though, the Iron Kingdoms was very much a roleplaying setting, The Witchfire Trilogy being written for the d20 System and thus compatible with Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition. The trilogy would be completed by The Witchfire Trilogy Book Two: Shadow of the Exile and The Witchfire Trilogy Book Three: The Legion of the Lost, all before being collected as The Witchfire Trilogy in 2005. The Iron Kingdoms is notable for three things. First, its interesting mix of races—Gobbers, Ogrun, and Trollkin alongside the traditional Humans, Elves, and Dwarves. There are no Halflings or Gnomes, and even the Elves are different to those of more traditional Dungeons & Dragons-style fantasy. Second, the prevalence of technology, in particular, the use of firearms and Steamjacks and Warjacks, steam-driven robots with magical brains, used in heavy industry and on the field of battle. Third, the tone of the setting is fairly grim, there being an island to the west, Cryx, where the sorcerers have long experimented with combining the undead with Steamjacks and Warjacks, and have long planned to invade the Iron Kingdoms. Some, but all of this would be introduced in The Witchfire Trilogy Book One: The Longest Night.

What strikes you first about The Witchfire Trilogy Book One: The Longest Night is the cover. It is an incredible piece by Matt Wilson, depicting a young woman wielding a black two-handed sword crackling with energy whilst she is surrounded by the undead. The cover promised much, and whilst the scenario would deliver in terms of story and plot to match the cover, the cover also revealed the villainess of the piece. But then, so did the back cover blurb! What strikes you second about The Witchfire Trilogy Book One: The Longest Night are its internal illustrations, heavy pen and ink pieces by Matt Wilson and Brian Snoddy which brought the industrial gothic of the Iron Kingdoms to life. It gave The Witchfire Trilogy Book One: The Longest Night and the Iron Kingdoms a singularly recognisable look and that cover would win the ‘Best Cover Art Gold ENnie Award’ in 2001.

The Witchfire Trilogy Book One: The Longest Night though, has something of a split personality. This is because it has to do two things. One of which is to introduce the setting and the other is to give the first part of the scenario. Although it introduces the Iron Kingdoms, the bulk of the setting material is devoted to Corvis, the City of Ghosts, in and around where the scenario itself is set. Boxed sections cover elements of the setting as the scenario goes along, such as how firearms work and what skills are relevant to their use and manufacture in the d20 System; how steam power and steamjacks work, again with the appropriate skills; Human religion in the Iron Kingdoms; and more. Only a tenth or so of The Witchfire Trilogy Book One: The Longest Night is devoted to this setting’s background, and it is both enough and not enough. It is enough with which to run the scenario, but not enough to do more than that. Notably, there are no notes on what Player Characters are like in the Iron Kingdoms. In fact, that information would not be available until the Lock & Load: Iron Kingdoms Character Primer was published in 2002. This introduced all of the new Races and Classes particular to the setting, all of which were different to that of standard Dungeons & Dragons and contributed very much to the feel and flavour of playing in the Iron Kingdoms. Without them, The Witchfire Trilogy Book One: The Longest Night and the Iron Kingdoms feel like a very different setting for Dungeons & Dragons, but one still played using the standard Races and Classes of Dungeons & Dragons, even down to the Halfling, a Race actually mentioned in the scenario.

The Witchfire Trilogy Book One: The Longest Night is designed for Player Characters of First to third Level. As the scenario and the first act opens, the Player Characters are on their way to Corvis as guards on a merchant caravan, when the caravan is attacked by Swamp Gobbers raiders including one with a device capable of creating heavy mist! Unless the Swamp Gobbers manage to run off with one of the chests, the Player Characters will be able to progress into the city fairly quickly. There they will encounter Father Dumas, High Priest of Corvis, who will hire them to investigate a series of grave robberies that he has been unable to persuade the city Watch to look into. After visiting gravesites both in and out of the city, the Player Characters learn that the bodies stolen were all connected to a witchcraft trial which took place ten years ago. Further, one of the witches put on trial and executed was Father Dumas’ sister-in-law and he himself, is the guardian of her daughter and his niece, Alexia Ciannor. By this point, the Player Characters may also have suspicions that she is behind the grave robberies.

In the second act, Father Dumas suggests that the Player Characters investigate the site where the witches were interred after their execution. This is in a former army outpost, deep in Widower’s Wood, the first of the two mini-dungeons in the scenario. It consists of a mix of caves and worked rooms and passages, there are obvious signs that the complex has been broken into and that once the chain-bound coffins are found, that not all of the witches were entombed there… The tomb is also a chance to have the Player Characters encounter more of the Iron Kingdoms’ strange creatures. There is a chance too, for the Dungeon Master to roleplay one of these and there is good advice to that end. By this time, the Player Characters’ suspicions about Alexia Ciannor will have grown and grown, and nobody will believe them if they voice such concerns. Their best course of action is to keep tabs on her and that will lead the Player Characters via the sewers—in very Shadows of Bogenhafen fashion—into her lair where she captures them, explains her plans, and temporarily traps them before making her getaway. Getting out of her lair and its surrounding tunnels ends the second act.

The third act begins with the Player Characters climbing out of the sewers and into the arms of the law. Or rather, Captain Julian Helstrom of the Watch. He more or less press gangs the Player Characters into working for him, revealing his own concerns over Alexia Ciannor, and sends them out on her trail to an old, abandoned fortress beyond Widower’s Wood. It was here that a century ago the army slaughtered a bandit army and it is their hundred year old bones that will form the bulk of Alexia Ciannor’s undead army. With this news in hand, the Player Characters must race back to Corvis to inform Captain Helstrom of the attack, which is just in time for the ‘Longest Night’, the annual celebration which takes place during a lunar eclipse. This is the setting for the climax of the scenario, the celebrations disrupted by the attack of the undead army and a showdown between Alexia Ciannor and the actual villain of the piece. There are some fun moments to throw at the Player Characters and get them involved, including a runaway coach, costumed undead using the dead as a raft, a merchant ship under attack by undead, and more. Alexia Ciannor will appear and attempt to bring her plans to fruition, and ultimately although she will be thwarted, she will get away. Of course, she will return in The Witchfire Trilogy Book Two: Shadow of the Exile.

In addition to the setting content and the scenario, The Witchfire Trilogy Book One: The Longest Night provides stats for all of its monsters and NPCs. The monsters in particular are all interesting creatures with a different feel to those presented in the Monster Manual. These would also go on to appear in the bestiary for the Iron Kingdoms, the excellent Monsternomicon.

Physically, The Witchfire Trilogy Book One: The Longest Night is a great looking book with wonderfully atmospheric artwork. However, that artwork is not always best placed. For example, the illustration depicting an attack upon a boat by a swamp squid, is placed several pages away from where it is described. The map of Corvis could have been larger and had more locations marked on it, whilst the individual dungeon and fortress maps are just a little too dark to read with ease. The writing feels rushed in places, the rules are poorly utilised in others, and the combination of mini-sourcebook and scenario means that the author has a lot to pack into the scenario, making it feel cramped in places.

There is no denying that The Witchfire Trilogy Book One: The Longest Night has a great setting and a great story, but the way in which it implements that story is often heavy-handed. There are scenes where the Dungeon Master is advised to try and have her players and their characters avoid certain actions and then push them back onto the plot. There is a scene where the Player Characters are captured by Alexia Ciannor so that she can explain her plans to them and she uses multiple Hold Person spells to do it. Then at the climax of the scenario where she appears, Alexia Ciannor is confronted by another NPC rather than by the Player Characters, and although they do have some influence over the outcome of the scenario, they cannot stop her escaping. Now some of this is understandable, as the author wants to tell a good story and if the Player Characters capture her or even kill her, it derails the plot. Mechanically, this is unlikely though, as the Player Characters are going to be Third Level at most and Alexia Ciannor is a Tenth Level Sorcerer! The result is that there are moments where the players and their characters lack agency even as they are on the periphery of Alexia Ciannor’s story and plot. Doubtless, a Dungeon Master would be able to fix some of these issues, much as the author did in the later The Witchfire Trilogy Collected Edition.

Yet despite its flaws, The Witchfire Trilogy Book One: The Longest Night is still playable and far from being a bad scenario. It is though a scenario which comes its own with the addition of Lock & Load: Iron Kingdoms Character Primer or the Iron Kingdoms Character Guide: Full Metal Fantasy Volume 1 because it brings in Player Character options. Then of course, The Witchfire Trilogy Book Two: Shadow of the Exile and The Witchfire Trilogy Book Three: The Legion of the Lost build on it in epic fashion.

The Witchfire Trilogy Book One: The Longest Night is a hugely atmospheric scenario, full of flavour and detail that is worth experiencing even if the plot in places is heavy-handed. The full potential of The Witchfire Trilogy Book One: The Longest Night might not be realised until later books, but in 2001 it stood out as a well-received scenario offering something different from the growing array of d20 System third-party content which was then beginning to flood the market.

In Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons, Jon Peterson told three stories—one about a rise, one about a feud, and one about a fall and all of them about Dungeons & Dragons. The story of the rise was not one, but four, hand in hand with each other. The first rise would be of Dungeons & Dragons, the first roleplaying game. The second rise would be of roleplaying itself. The third rise would be of E. Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons and the founder of the hobby. The fourth rise would be of TSR, Inc., the company he co-founded to publish Dungeons & Dragons. The feud would be between E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, the other co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, which would colour so many of his decisions. The fall would be his ousting from the company he co-founded, at the infamous ‘The Ambush at Sheridan Springs’ in 1985, following a debt crisis which would result in the company’s takeover by Lorraine Williams. Game Wizards though only explored the first twelve years of TSR, Inc. Another twelve years would follow with Lorraine Williams at the helm before history repeated itself and TSR, Inc. would be bought out by Wizards of the Coast following another debt crisis. How this history was repeated and how the reputation of Lorraine Williams was cemented as a villain are told in Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons by Ben Riggs.

Like any other history of Dungeons & Dragons, laying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons begins with E. Gary Gygax. Its first fifth charts his rise and fall, mostly in familiar fashion before the Lorraine Williams era is ushered in with a sense of relief. This is important, because as Game Wizards highlighted, her intervention saved TSR, Inc. and with it Dungeons & Dragons. Yet again and again, her reputation is soured by poor management decisions combined with a dismissive attitude towards both the core product and the core market. This would see the company attempting to expand out of what management saw as the ghetto of the roleplaying hobby market into mass markets, whether that was the mass market for boardgames such as Monopoly or for books. This was despite being the biggest fish in the roleplaying hobby market and despite having number one bestsellers on the New York book list. Yet at the same time, the publisher put out introductory boxed set after introductory boxed throughout nineties, all in an attempt to widen the appeal of Dungeons & Dragons and attract new players. Then when the company did attempt to innovate, whether attempting to design a boardgame intended to introduce Dungeons & Dragons to a younger audience or developing a rival to Magic: The Gathering, it would always seem to be undone by management decisions.

Similarly, management’s treatment of its talent was poor. Time and again, the management would call upon the company’s creative talent to create brilliant product, and time and again it did. David ‘Zeb’ Cook created the Planescape setting, a combination of the earlier Manual of the Planes with factions inspired by Vampire: The Masquerade; Timothy B. Brown and Troy Denning designed Dark Sun, an anti-Dungeons & Dragons setting much of which was inspired by the artwork of then in-house artist, Brom; and Bruce Nesmith and Andria Hayday developed the Ravenloft: Realm of Terror boxed set, based on Tracy and Laura Hickman’s module, I6 Ravenloft. All of these were fantastic products with superb production values and gaming potential, but all at a cost that as the book reveals made the publisher nothing in the way of profit. Yet despite this, it never seemed as if TSR wanted to keep its creative talent, let alone keep them happy. Its management would change agreements that benefitted its employees and then ask them for more, driving the actual men and women who loved roleplaying and Dungeons & Dragons and what they did—being creative on a daily basis—away from the company, and often onto bigger and better things, whether as further fame as an author or artist, or in the computer games industry.

Much like the earlier Game Wizards, there are fascinating asides and missed opportunities throughout Slaying the Dragon. Notably, in Game Wizards it was the opportunity for TSR, Inc. to purchase Games Workshop. In Slaying the Dragon, the major missed opportunity was a failure to capitalise fully on its innovations, most notably in the development of comic books based on Dungeons & Dragons and TSR’s other properties, which would see the establishment of TSR West and the souring of the company’s relationship with DC Comics, and also the creation of Dragonstrike, a board game designed to introduce roleplaying and Dungeons & Dragons to eight-year-olds using a VHS recording, the company overinvested in and was unable to sell in the long term. Yet perhaps the most intriguing opportunity that TSR lost was designing and publishing a roleplaying game based on J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth. From being sued for the use of the term ‘Hobbit’ in Dungeons & Dragons in the seventies to being approached by the holder of the film rights to Tolkien’s works to being offered the chance to create a new Middle-earth roleplaying game in the early nineties is quite a turnaround. Unfortunately, when TSR was unable to obtain the rights to publish new fiction set in Middle-earth—because what the management of the company wanted to be was a legitimate publisher of fiction—Lorraine Williams passed on the opportunity. In hindsight it would have been fascinating to see a Middle-earth boxed set for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Second Edition and it would have been popular with the roleplaying game’s fans. It was not to be though, and it would not be until Cubicle Seven Entertainment published Adventures in Middle-earth in 2016 that the works of Tolkien and Dungeons & Dragons would be brought together.

Slaying the Dragon ends in 1997 with Peter Adkison manoeuvring to bring in the money that he and Wizards of the Coast had made with the huge success of Magic: The Gathering—as detailed in Generation Decks: The Unofficial History of Gaming Phenomenon Magic: The Gathering—and buy out TSR, Inc. and save Dungeons & Dragons. Which although necessary, was much to Lorraine Williams’ chagrin. By then, the terms of the company’s sales agreement with Random House, the inability to be profitable or innovate, or truly understand its market, had placed it deep in debt. The twenty-five years since are their own history, not yet written and probably not as tumultuous, but Slaying the Dragon ends on positive note, with the number one roleplaying game in safe hands awaiting the new millennium and a new edition.

Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons is a not a comprehensive history of the second twelve years of TSR, Inc. and Dungeons & Dragons and nor can it be. The author was unable to secure interviews with two of the leading figures at the company. One was Brian Thomsen, managing fiction editor at TSR, Inc., whose decisions would drive bestselling R.A. Salvatore, the creator of Drizzt Do’Urden, to stop writing for the company. The other was the president of the company, Lorraine Williams. Sadly, Thomsen died in 2008, but Williams declined to give Riggs an interview. Consequently, their roles in the company’s downfall and the defence of their reputations are told via anecdote, and there are more anecdotes charting the former than defending the latter. Thus, Brian Thomsen comes across as hardnosed and unnecessarily aggressive, whilst Williams remains a cold and remote figure, dismissive of gamers and the hobby, unable to escape her reputation as the true villain of the piece and the supposed inspiration for Planescape’s Lady of Pain. Yet there are moments when Williams does come across as being human, notably her sadness at losing TSR, Inc., but they are far and few between. Ultimately, until Lorraine Williams tells the history of the company whilst she was at its helm from her perspective, even though she saved the company and thus Dungeons & Dragons in 1985 and under her tenure there were some great products published, her reputation is always going to be that of the woman who destroyed TSR, Inc.

Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons is the counterpart that Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons needed. The two complement each other, one telling the rise of TSR, Inc., the other its fall, and it is impossible to read one without wanting to read the other. Slaying the Dragon is the lighter of the two histories, more anecdotal and less drawn from documentation—though they play an important role in Riggs’ telling of the story. Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons lifts the lid on the failures of TSR, Inc. and the consequences of poor decision after poor decision. Yet it is also a tale of brilliant creativity in the face of mismanagement, writers and artists like David ‘Zeb’ Cook and Bruce Nesmith and Jeff Easley and Brom putting out acclaimed content despite the input of upper management. Slaying the Dragon: A Secret History of Dungeons & Dragons is a compelling catalogue of catastrophes and a miasma of missteps, which tell the story of TSR’s failure and talented creativity in spite of itself.

Now it might seem inappropriate for a new version of Pandemic—the 2008 game of fighting and finding a cure to four outbreaks of different diseases—to be published in the midst of an actual pandemic. It might also seem inappropriate that its subject focuses entirely on North America given the high number of deaths from the Covid-19 virus in the USA. If you believe that to be so, then this review is not for you. However, you would be wrong in your thinking. To start with, the publication date of the new game is entirely coincidental. Second, the subject matter of the new game—just like the original—is about researching, teaching and finding a cure for multiple diseases, which is exactly what scientists are doing right now. So both Pandemic and the new game are about providing medical aid and saving people, undeniably positive rather than negative in both their subject matter and what the players are doing. If you still find the subject matter distasteful, then this review is not for you.

The original Pandemic was published in 2008 to much acclaim. In the game, between one and four players take the role of members of the Center for Disease Control working against four global epidemics—red, blue, yellow, and black—in a race to save humanity. The game was one of the first titles to really distill the concept of the co-operative game, a game in which the players played not against each other, but against the board and the game itself, into something that was simple, elegant, and ultimately, very popular. In Pandemic, the players race around the world, travelling from city to city in an effort to treat diseases and find a cure for them whilst staving off the effects of outbreaks that will spread these diseases from one city to every adjacent city. Too many outbreaks and the players will fail and humanity is doomed. Fail to find cures to all four diseases and the players will fail and humanity is doomed. Like all cooperative games, Pandemic is designed to be difficult to beat and can be made even more challenging through the various expansions.

The latest addition to the Pandemic family of boardgames is Pandemic Hot Zone: Europe, the second entry in the ‘Hotzone’ family of Pandemic games after Pandemic Hot Zone: North America. Published by Z-Man Games, this again is designed for between one and four players, has players cooperating to treat and find a cure to several diseases, and is played against the game rather than the players against each other. It is however, not the same game as Pandemic, for whilst there are many similarities, there are also several differences. The first of these is that there are only three diseases to find a cure for and the second is that it is set entirely in Europe, as opposed to the four diseases and the global scope of Pandemic. The third is the playing time. Pandemic Hot Zone: Europe can be played in thirty minutes as opposed to the sixty minutes of standard Pandemic. Further there are similarities between Pandemic Hot Zone: Europe and Pandemic Hot Zone: North America, such that their rules can be mixed and matched, although arguably if you have one, do you need the other as another shorter, fast-playing version of Pandenic?

So as with its American counterpart, Pandemic Hot Zone: Europe only needs four cards of the same colour to cure a disease instead of five, and there is only the one fixed Research Station instead of multiple Research Stations which can be placed on the board as in Pandemic. This is of course in Genève, the European headquarters of the United Nations and the World Health Organisation as well as the International Committee of the Red Cross. This negates the need for the ‘Operations Expert’ from Pandemic, who can establish Research Stations around the world and the ability of the players to shuttle back and forth between them. The four roles in Pandemic Hot Zone: Europe are the ‘Virologist’, ‘Containment Specialist’, ‘Pilot’, and ‘Quarantine Specialist’.

Pandemic Hot Zone: Europe only has three Epidemic cards. These accelerate and exacerbate the spread of the three diseases in the game, whereas standard Pandemic has three, four, and five, the number used to vary the difficulty of beating the game. Diseases cannot be eradicated in Pandemic Hot Zone: Europe, whereas in standard Pandemic, they can, preventing their appearance during the game. Lastly, rather than alter the number of Epidemic cards to vary the difficulty of beating the game, Pandemic Hot Zone: Europe—just like Pandemic Hot Zone: North America—provides a different means to alter the difficulty of play. In Pandemic Hot Zone: North America it was Crisis cards, but in Pandemic Hot Zone: Europe it is Mutation cards, which change how the various diseases in the game work.

Nevertheless, game play in Pandemic Hot Zone: Europe is similar to that of Pandemic. Each turn, a player will move round the map treating diseases to prevent there being too many on the board, visiting cities for which they have a card to give to another player, and when a player has the requisite four cards of one colour, rushing back to Genève to find cure for the disease of that colour. Designed for two to four players, aged eight and up, Pandemic Hot Zone: Europe is won by finding a cure for all three diseases. This is the only winning condition, whereas there are several losing conditions. Pandemic Hot Zone: Europe is lost if four Outbreaks occur, the players run out of disease cubes of any colour to add to the board, or when the Player Deck is depleted.

As its title suggests, Pandemic Hot Zone: Europe is played on a map of Europe. This depicts twenty-four cities across the continent, divided into three zones—the blue zone covering Western Europe, the red zone covering Eastern Europe, and the yellow zone Southern Europe. These cities are connected by various routes along which both the players will travel as they move around the continent and the game’s three diseases will travel whenever there is Outbreak in one city. This happens whenever a city with three disease cubes has more cubes of the same colour added to it. In which case the disease spreads to directly connected cities.

The game offers four different roles. The ‘Virologist’ can substitute one required card to ‘Discover a Cure’, so use three cards of one colour and two cards of another colour, and as an action remove a single cube from the board matching the colour of a card in his hand. When the ‘Containment Specialist’ enters a city with two or more cubes of one colour in a city, his player removes one of them. The ‘Pilot’ can Fly to any city within two connections of his current location, skipping the cities between them, and take another player with him. When the ‘Quarantine Specialist’ is in a city, if that city or the adjacent cities would be infected during the drawing of Infection cards, then no cubes are placed in those cities.

As well as the board, there are two decks of cards, both of which contain a card for each of the twenty-four cities on the board. The Infection deck is used to determine where incidences of the game’s three diseases will occur. Over the course of the game, Infection cards drawn will be reshuffled and added back to the top of the Infection deck to represent the populations of cities being constantly prone to the game’s three diseases. The cards in the Player deck are used in several ways. Each represents a single city and can be used to travel to or from a particular city, so to or from London. Once a player has four cards of a single colour—red, blue, or yellow—then he can travel to Genève and use them to find a cure. To acquire four cards of a single colour, a player can either draw them from the Player deck at the end of his turn or take them from or be given them by a fellow player.
In addition, the Player deck contains three other types of card—the Epidemic card, the Event card, and the Mutation card. When an Epidemic card is drawn it increases the rate of infection—the number of cards drawn from from the Infection deck at the end of a a player’s turn, determines the city where a new occurrence of a disease happens, and shuffles the Infection cards in the discard pile back onto the Infection deck to reinfect cities that have already suffered disease already. The Event cards each provide a one-time bonus, such as ‘Mobile Hospital’ which allows the current player to remove one cube from each of the cities he travels to on his turn and ‘Resource Planning’ which enables a player to look at the top four cards of the Player Deck, rearrange them and add them to the top of the deck. There are only four Event cards in the game.
There are nine Mutation cards in the game, with three different effects, one per disease. Thus, for ‘Resistant to Treatment’, if there are three or cubes of one colour on a city, a player must spend two actions to Treat Disease in that city. There is one of these for each disease. Once drawn, a Mutation card remains in play until a cure for its disease is found. Further, until that cure is found, more Mutation cards for that disease can be drawn and they stack, combining their effects, making the disease harder to treat and easier to spread. In addition, the game’s difficulty can be adjusted by adding more Mutation cards to Player deck. Each Mutation card affects a specific disease in a specific, permanent way. However, unlike the Crisis cards in Pandemic Hot Zone: North America, the Mutation cards in Pandemic Hot Zone: Europe do not feel like a wholly new mechanic, rules for mutating diseases having been previously seen in the Pandemic: On the Brink expansion for the main game. as to which Crisis cards the players will face.
Game set-up is simple enough. Each player is given a role and two randomly drawn Player cards whilst the remainder of the Player deck is seeded with the three Epidemic cards and three Mutation cards. Six cards are drawn from the Infection deck to determine where the three diseases first occur on the board and to form the discard pile. Then on his turn, a player will move round the map, treating diseases, taking or giving Player cards, and so on. At the end of his turn, he draws two more cards from the Player deck, adding them to his hand or immediately resolving them if they are Crisis cards or Epidemic cards. Lastly, he draws Infection cards from the Infection deck—starting at two and rising to four—and adds disease cubes to the cities indicated on the cards drawn. Play continues like this until the game is won by all three diseases being cured or lost by having four Outbreaks occur, running out of disease cubes, or depleting the Player deck.
Pandemic Hot Zone: Europe is easy to lose, but challenging to win. Plus winning does feel good. Like any Pandemic game, there is a real sense of achievement in working together, discovering curses to the diseases, and so winning the game.
Time is tight. With a four player game, the number of cards in the Player deck will range between twenty-three and twenty-nine, giving the players between eleven and fourteen turns between them before the game ends. So players need to plan and coordinate their actions from turn to turn, and this is not taking into account the effects of Epidemic and Mutation cards. So the players are constantly thinking, planning, and having to adjust to unexpected events (well, they are not unexpected, their being built into the game and its set-up, so think unexpected timing of events), so game play is both thoughtful and tense. However, since it is a cooperative game, there is the opportunity to discuss what your actions are going to be and that alleviates some of the tension—a little.
Physically, Pandemic Hot Zone: Europe is very nicely presented. Everything is in full colour, all of the cards are easy to read, and the rulebook quickly guides you through set-up and answers your questions. It even has a list of the differences between Pandemic Hot Zone: Europe and Pandemic. Lastly, the playing pieces are all done in solid plastic. Everything then, is of a high quality.
So is Pandemic Hot Zone: Europe a good game? To which the answer is, yes, yes it is a good game. However, it feels very close in play to Pandemic Hot Zone: North America, and having played one, it is debatable whether it is different enough to make it stand out. The lack of major differences mean that going from one to the other is easy enough and the compatibility means that the different roles and both Crisis and Mutation cards could be mixed into the one game. Yet another problem is that the Mutation cards only have three mutations between all nine cards (there being one of each type per disease) and that does not much in the way of variation.
Pandemic Hot Zone: Europe is an efficient, simpler version of the standard game of Pandemic, streamlined for faster play, size, and price. Yet Pandemic Hot Zone: North America already did that and if you already have that, do you really need another version? Had there been more variation in the Mutation cards to make it stand out a little more, then Pandemic Hot Zone: Europe would be worth trying and buying. Without that greater degree of variation, Pandemic Hot Zone: Europe is a serviceable, playable game that is perhaps of more interest to the dedicated devotee of the Pandemic line of games.

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

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What is it?
GLORANTHA: Rivers of Blood is a scenario for use with RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha.

It is a five page, full colour, 1.65 MB PDF.

The layout is clean and tidy. It is art free, but the cartography is decent.

Where is it set?
GLORANTHA: Rivers of Blood is set in the central hills of the Grazelands.

Who do you play?
Player Characters of all types could play this scenario, but any Chaos-hating character or character capable of fighting Chaos will be useful.

What do you need?
GLORANTHA: Rivers of Blood requires RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and the Glorantha Bestiary.

What do you get?GLORANTHA: Rivers of Blood details an ancient Mostali cave where a Quicksilver dwarf has his alchemical laboratory. Madness and failure to restore the World Machine have led him to incorporate Lunar Chaos magic in his research and he has begun the source of a river in his cave. The Player Character, either members of the clan who live along the river or connected to the clan which does, are sent up river to determine why it has turned blood red and begun to kill cattle belonging to the clan.

The Game Master is provided with a short encounter table and details of the cave, plus stats for the Quicksilver Mostali. The cave complex consists of five rooms or caves, worked or unworked. The description of the cave along with its map takes up one page. The map is based a free-to-use map by Dyson Logos. (The blog is worth visiting as Dyson Logos provides a more interesting description of the cave than the author of GLORANTHA: Rivers of Blood does.)

The biggest problem with GLORANTHA: Rivers of Blood—outside of the fact that it is neither interesting nor good—is how the Player Characters get across a three-foot deep pool of contact poison. No advice or suggestions are offered to that end.
GLORANTHA: Rivers of Blood is at best a quick, mini-fixer-upper that a Game Master might be able to develop into something else. Probably not purchasing now that the scenario’s decidedly limp plot has been given away. It could be used as a quick combat encounter if the Game Master has absolutely nothing else planned. Otherwise it is nothing more than an uninspiring dungeon bash.

It is supposedly set in the Grazelands, but the scenario could be set almost anywhere else here there is a river. The fact that GLORANTHA: Rivers of Blood is said to be set in the Grazelands is irrelevant.

Cows with Chaos features is an amusing notion and utterly worth stealing from this review rather than the scenario being reviewed.

Is it worth your time?Yes—GLORANTHA: Rivers of Blood is the perfect showcase of how to write an uninspiring combat scenario for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha.No—GLORANTHA: Rivers of Blood is a self-contained dungeon bash which the author kindly leaves all of the detail, stats, and flavour to the Game Master to develop herself. Cheap, cheerless, characterless, and charmless of which the author is highly skilled at churning out.Maybe—GLORANTHA: Rivers of Blood is a perfect showcase of how to write an uninteresting dungeon bash for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, so if the Game Master wanted to know how not to do it, she should start here.

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—

In 1981, Call of Cthulhu would revolutionise the roleplaying hobby, introducing the works of the Lovecraft, if not to the industry, then to the wider hobby; creating horror as a genre; making Player Characters or Investigators mortal and fragile; introducing the concept of Sanity and suffering mental damage; and more. The first supplement for Call of Cthulhu, published the following year, was just as revolutionary. Shadows of Yog-Sothoth: A Global Campaign to Save Mankind was the first campaign for Lovecraftian investigative roleplaying. It introduced the concept of the onionskin campaign. This has the investigators stripping away layers of information like the skin of an onion as the players progress through the campaign, revealing more of the evil cult’s plans and coming closer to the heart of the adventure. There had been campaigns before, such as G1 Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, G2 Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, G3 Hall of the Fire Giant King, D1 Descent into the Depths of the Earth, D3 Vault of the Drow, and Q1 Queen of the Demonweb Pits for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition, which were connected and could be run as a campaign. However, each part was available separately and could readily be run independent of the others, whereas each and every chapter of Shadows of Yog-Sothoth was integral to the plot and thus awkward to dismantle and run on their own. It was the first campaign to be set in a historical period and the first campaign to be set in a modern historical period and the first campaign to take its Player Characters around the world. In this way, Shadows of Yog-Sothoth set the blueprint for many the Call of Cthulhu campaigns we have had since, many of which would go on to improve upon the format, but Shadows of Yog-Sothoth was there first.

Shadows of Yog-Sothoth: A Global Campaign to Save Mankind also introduced the first cult to Call of Cthulhu, the Lords of the Silver Twilight, whose members range from centuries old wizards to the undead. It is their aim to force the rise of the sunken city of R’lyeh under the Pacific where Dread Cthulhu has slumbered for aeons and so unleash the Great Old One upon the world and bring about the end of mankind’s dominion over the Earth. The stars though, are not yet right to bring about such a calamitous event and there is a chance that the Lords of the Silver Twilight will fail. When they discover the plans of the Lords of the Silver Twilight have for humanity and the Earth, a group of stalwart Investigators set out to thwart them, an effort which takes them to Boston to New York, then Scotland, California, Maine, and finally Easter Island and the South Pacific. In the process, they will discover dread histories and the darkest of secrets, place both their minds and their bodies in harm’s way again and again, learn things that man was always best not knowing, and ultimately, confront an alien being beyond their comprehension.

Shadows of Yog-Sothoth opens in Boston in 1928. In ‘The Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight’, the Investigators are invited to join the eponymous and rich, well-to-do, misogynistic fraternity with a reputation for charitable works, not unlike the Freemasons. The order has several ranks though which the Investigators will quickly progress to the point when its reveals to them that in truth, its inner circle is dedicated to worshipping an unearthly god and is awaiting the time when the stars come right, and alien species can reclaim what once was theirs. The location and rituals for The Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight are all sketched out in some detail and once they are initiated into the upper ranks, there is the constant nagging question of, “When is knowing too much just too much?” Yet as the Investigators are promoted through the ranks and exposed to unspeakable things and expected to commit increasingly despicable acts, they have the chance to learn both what the order knows and what its aims are. This includes sneaking into some of the more secret areas where they will find horrors indeed.

‘The Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight’, the first chapter of the campaign, is detailed and rife with roleplaying possibilities combined with skulduggery and stealth. As written though it does not support that with any ease, there being no other members described other than the cultists and their acolytes, and similarly there is no real reason for the Investigators to join The Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight except as a means to begin the plot. This despite the fact that Shadows of Yog-Sothoth is intended for fairly experienced Investigators. Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, Second Edition, published in 2004, addressed some of these issues, but not all. It is easy to be underwhelmed by ‘The Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight’, but set-up and the plot definitely has possibilities. They just await the hand of a good Keeper to really fillet them out.

After the Investigators have learned all that they dare and fled the headquarters of The Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight, they receive the first of several letters which will alert them to strange events around the world. This is a device that the campaign will use again and again, typically letters which draw their attention to something which turns out to be connected to the main plot, but does not look like it first. This is one of the major complaints about the campaign, that the use of letters as a narrative device is clumsy and clichéd. In hindsight this is undeniably true, but at the time of publication this was not the case. 

The second scenario, ‘Look to the Future’, is a radical departure from the rest of the campaign, a piece of weird Science Fiction which takes the Investigators to New York where they will infiltrate an odd self-help and self-actualisation organisation. The Investigators are easily able to attend a meeting which is held in an oddly bare bunker-like building. In return for ready donations of money and unaware donations of Power—at this point in Call of Cthulhu’s rules, magic is fuelled by raw Power rather than Magic Points—at regular ceremonies, attendees are rewarded with small items of advanced technology, such as disposable lighters, digital watches, and non-stick frying pans. In addition, there is strange technology in the basement if the Investigators can gain access. Meddle too much and there is the possibility that one or more of their number will be killed, to the point that there is the possibility of all of them being killed. Even if they do not, they should find further links to the activities of the Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight and its masters, but the scenario leaves a lot for the Keeper to develop if the Investigators want to explore beyond the walls of Look to the Future’s bunker. Curiously, this scenario involves Nyarlathotep, here indicating for the first time the involvement of the Crawling Chaos in the numerous machinations of those involved in the Mythos and other scenarios and campaigns for Call of Cthulhu. This is despite the fact that the campaign is called Shadows of Yog-Sothoth and famously Yog-Sothoth appears nowhere in the campaign. 

More letters direct the Investigators to Scotland to check upon one Henry Hancock, renowned big game hunter and local amateur archaeologist. ‘The Coven of Cannich’ is a sprawling sandbox populated by numerous masters and mistresses of the Mythos as factions from the Lords of the Silver Twilight search for parts of an artefact believed to be buried in an ancient temple on the shores of Loch Mullardoch. These are not the only Mythos forces in the area, and there seems to be a medley of them, most far too powerful for the Investigators to face. The scenario is very much one of who the Investigators can trust from among the NPCs, and the difficulty is that because there are some twenty of them, the Keeper just has too many to handle and make them stand out from each other. There is potential to camp this up a bit a la Hammer Horror, what with the screeching ghost and the accents of the locals, but ‘The Coven of Cannich’ is a difficult scenario to run and prepare, and there is little in the way of advice for the Keeper.  

Back in the U.S.A., the Investigators are hired by a Hollywood movie mogul to investigate a supposedly ‘haunted’ film set out in the Mojave Desert after the film was shut down, the director committed suicide, and the lead actor, all but a vagrant. Again, as a scenario, ‘Devil’s Canyon’, feels unconnected to the campaign as a whole, but again the Investigators will find what also seem like coincidental links. Yet there is some fun investigation to conduct in Hollywood before the Investigators set out the eponymously named Devil’s Canyon. There they find the ruined set of what would have been an epic film. After the bucolic highlands of Scotland and the city streets of Boston and New York, there is a sense of space, sunlit and dry, in this scenario’s desert setting, but even with that feeling of openness the Investigators quickly find themselves trapped and stalked by invisible things. Their invisibility is balanced by their cowardice and if they can harness the technology available, the Investigators might be able to reveal what they are. Where the Mythos and the monsters are overdone in the other scenarios, here they are restrained and creepy, and the scenario really benefits from that. However, the scenario does not add much to the overall campaign, and it comes across as a diversion rather than essential to the plot.

The campaign then takes a turn for the worse for the Investigators in ‘The Worm that Walks’. They are offered further clues, even patronage and respite, by one Christopher Edwin, but in following them up, they face increasingly nasty dangers—a family of cannibalistic backwoodsmen, an attack by a shoggoth whilst they are aboard their new patron’s yacht, and then when one of them is poisoned, stalked by something in the hospital. By the time it gets to that point, the likelihood is that the Investigators do not trust him—even if they ever did given the typical player sense of paranoia—and they have every reason not to. Edwin is out to kill them as part of the Lords of the Silver Twilight’s revenge upon the Investigators, and whilst that is understandable, to come at a point so late in the campaign when there is the possibility again of all the Investigators being killed, in what is already a campaign a deadly campaign designed for experienced Investigators, is well, overkill. 

Penultimately, the campaign switches from reactive mode to proactive mode as it nears its climax. Up until now the Investigators have been reacting to letters received, but now they have the chance to begin moving against the cult, in ‘The Watchers of Easter Island’ and then in ‘Rise of R’lyeh’, the last two parts of the campaign. In the first, ‘The Watchers of Easter Island’, they travel to Easter Island, which during the period when Shadows of Yog-Sothoth is set, is a colony of Chile and under military rule. If the Investigators can make contact with the indigenous islanders and the survivors of an archaeological team, all of whom have suffered attacks and disappearances. There is something strange going on and the island is under martial law, the local commandant curious as to the reason for the Investigators’ visit and wanting to be kept aware of their activities. The indigenous islanders will guide the Investigators to a local, elderly priest who can advise and suggest the cause, and even equip them to fight the fearsome figure responsible for the disappearances. Getting to both priest and threat is physically gruelling and the end confrontation is challenging. ‘The Watchers of Easter Island’ does feel superfluous to the campaign itself. If they fail, the Investigators will be attacked on their voyage to R’lyeh at the beginning of the next chapter, but otherwise, the Investigators’ success or failure in preventing the final preparations being conducted by a Lord of the Silver Twilight have little effect on the campaign’s climax.

At last, in ‘The Rise of R’lyeh’, the efforts of the Lords of the Silver Twilight and their acolytes come to fruition and the island of R’lyeh rises out of the south Pacific, and they attempt to call Dread Cthulhu from his slumber. By this time, the Investigators should be armed with the artefacts they found during their investigations in the previous scenarios, and have the means to reverse the ritual that the Lords of the Silver Twilight want to perform, and so sink the island. It is a very short scenario, but a fitting one, as the Investigators race across the island to find a non-Euclidean vantage point from which to perform their reverse ritual. There is that moment of course, when they will have to witness Great Cthulhu easing himself out of his tomb and wading through the flotilla of boats carrying his worshippers, a moment worthy of legend that will tear at the Investigators’ sanity, after which the survivors must flee back across the island to their boat, and hopefully get away in safety. As momentous as this actually is, it does feel as if the Investigators are doing everything from the wings of the stage and so slightly anti-climactic. 

In addition, Shadows of Yog-Sothoth includes two extra scenarios. The first, ‘People of the Monolith’ is based on the short story, ‘The Black Stone’ by Robert E. Howard and reads more like a short story than a scenario. The Investigators are hired by a publisher to travel to Hungary to look into the circumstances behind a piece of poetry and the poet’s subsequent suicide. The scenario is short and very little actually happens, although it is not without its strangeness. Written as a beginning scenario, it is suited to less action-orientated Investigators, and it works with fewer Investigators rather than more. 

The second scenario is ‘The Warren’. This takes place in Boston and focuses upon the Boucher estate, long abandoned and now purchased for demolition and redevelopment. When the demolition expert goes missing the Investigators are hired to look into what has happened at the estate. What they discover inside the house is that the Boucher family never died out, but rather degenerated and became inbred, worshipping the Great Old Ones. Despite there being a decent bit of research to do beforehand, ‘The Warren’ all too soon descends into a location-based, dungeon style adventure. Nowhere near as bad as scenarios which would appear in the pages of the anthologies, The Asylum & Other Tales and Curse of the Chthonians: Four Odysseys Into Deadly Intrigue, but not something that would be done today or indeed since they were published. Despite the investigative efforts made before exploring the Boucher estate, the Investigators are unlikely to full prepared for the true threat at the heart of the scenario and the choice of the Great Old One feels ill-suited to the role here just as much as this type of scenario, whilst Lovecraftian, feels ill-suited to Lovecraftian investigative roleplaying. 

Physically, Shadows of Yog-Sothoth is well presented and actually decently written for a campaign published in 1982. The organisation of the material leaves a lot to be desired and a lot for the potential Keeper to work through and prepare. The cover is a glorious depiction of R’lyeh and the pen and ink illustrations, all by Tom Sullivan, are all suitably dark and oppressive, and the maps have a certain charm. By the modern standards, the handouts are plain, but they are serviceable. 

—oOo— 

Following its publication in 1982, Shadows of Yog-Sothoth was reviewed in Space Gamer Number 60 (February 1983) in the ‘Capsule Reviews’ section by William A. Barton, the designer of Cthulhu by Gaslight. He identified that several of the scenarios are “almost too deadly”, but concluded that, “Overall, though, SHADOWS OF YOG-SOTHOTH should provide some exciting CoC play for even the most experienced investigators (despite the odd fact that Yog-Sothoth never makes an appearance, title or not), and I recommend it to all Lovecraftians.” 

Shadows of Yog-Sothoth was reviewed not once, but twice in Dragon magazine. First, in Dragon #81 (Vol. VIII, No. 7, January 1984) in ‘Gaming without heroes: Horror role-playing gets its vigor from victims’ by Ken Rolston. From the start he highlighted issues with the campaign: “In design, each of the seven linked scenarios is a mystery, complete with clues, NPCs, and settings. However, for smooth presentation, considerable study and preparation by the GM will be necessary. The scenarios lack strict linear narratives. Though this avoids arbitrary limits on player freedom, it forces the GM to structure the adventures in response to the actions of the players — a difficult job even for experienced gamemasters. The-tactics of the antagonists are not adequately detailed, and will need to be improvised or planned ahead.” Ultimately, he was far more positive in his conclusion, saying that, “Yog-Sothoth requires much labor and study on the part of the GM; it is not usable after a single reading. The GM will have to provide most of the narrative structure for the campaign, since the players have much freedom to choose their own approach to solving problems. The writing and editing are generally superior. Player materials are provided in ample quantity and the text is adequately organized for GM reference. The adventures are unusual and the atmosphere exotic and terrifying. Yog-Sothoth is a classic example of role-playing horror, with awesome monsters, desperate victims, and an atmosphere of mystery and menace. Since it provides enough material for a campaign of several months’ duration, it is an excellent value for the $10 purchase.” 

The campaign was then reviewed six years later in Dragon #81 (Vol. XV, No. 1, June 1990) in ‘Role-playing Reviews: A losing war against the forces of darkness’ by Jim Bambra. This was as part of the Cthulhu Classics anthology, which reprinted Shadows of Yog-Sothoth along with ‘The Warren’, but not ‘People of the Monolith’, alongside ‘The Pits of Bendal-Dolum’ and ‘The Temple of the Moon’ from Terror from the Stars; ‘Dark Carnival’ from Curse of the Chthonians; and ‘The Secret of Castrenegro’ from Cthulhu Companion. Bambra was positive in his summation, stating, “The horror elements are well presented, and the adventures span a wide variety of locations and investigative approaches. Opportunities for role-playing, investigation, and combat abound with nameless horrors and the depraved cultists who worship the creatures of darkness.”

Ian Bailey reviewed Shadows of Yog-Sothoth in ‘Open Box’ in White Dwarf #44 (August, 1983). Before awarding it ten out of ten, he said, “All in all the Shadows of Yog-Sothoth is an excellent and masterly campaign that demands a high standard of play throughout. It is well presented (one feature is five pages of player-information which can be photocopied or pulled out to save the Keeper time) and carefully managed throughout, and it provides, I believe, the most exciting and satisfying adventure available on the market to date. It might seem expensive but it is worth every penny.” 

Anders Swenson reviewed the campaign in ‘Game Reviews’ in Different Worlds Issue 34 (May/June 1984). He highlighted the deadliness of the campaign saying that, “…[M]any  of the scenarios would seem to work better with relatively well-equipped adventurers who have gotten access to heavy military weapons…” as well its organisation, complaining that, “Then there is the organization. Each scenario does contain the material needed to run the adventure, but finding it and having it handy is another question. Many of the scenarios have a lot of nonplayer characters, situations, maps, etc., and the tendency of the layout people was to string them together without enough introductory, transitional, and connective next to make everything findable.” As with other reviewers, he ended on a positive note with, “Overall, though, this is an excellent collection of first-rate Call Of Cthulhu scenarios. All keepers (gamemasters) should get Shadows of Yog-Sothoth.” 

—oOo— 

When it was first published in 1982, Shadows of Yog-Sothoth was like nothing that had come before. It was a whole campaign, consisting of several linked parts, each integral to the whole and the flow of the campaign’s story. It was set in a modern age and it was a first horror campaign, and it pitted the Investigators against H.P. Lovecraft’s signature creature, the Great Old One, Cthulhu himself. That is one thing that no campaign has done since. It is this version that would be reprinted as part of the Call of Cthulhu Classic Kickstarter campaign to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of Call of Cthulhu. It is also this version which would be reprinted as part of Cthulhu Classics in 1989.

Yet for all its scope and grandeur, Shadows of Yog-Sothoth suffers, by modern standards, numerous flaws—and those flaws are well known. They include an underwhelming set-up which challenges the Keeper to involve her players and their Investigators in the campaign. The links between the chapters are flimsy, awkward, and repetitive, and the constant use of the letter as a plot device is wearisome. ‘The Worm that Walks’, the fifth scenario, has a well-deserved reputation as a killer, an intentional method of murdering one Investigator after another at a point in the campaign when their knowledge and experience are needed for the last two scenarios. The campaign also lacks advice for the Keeper and having been written by different hands, it has a rough, incohesive feel. 

It is possible that some or all of these issues could have been addressed by the planned development of a longer, more extensive, and greater world-spanning version of the campaign which would have been edited by Scott David Aniolowski. This would have included far more of locations visited in Lovecraft’s ‘The Call of Cthulhu’, the story which directly inspired Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, including Greenland, China, Germany, New Orleans, Kingsport, Saudi Arabia, Irem, San Francisco, and Xoth. Unfortunately, due to time constraints, this expanded version of the campaign was cancelled and Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, Second Edition was published instead. It should be noted that some of content of ‘The Call of Cthulhu’ has been presented for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition in Cults of Cthulhu.

Some of these problems were addressed in Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, Second Edition, published in 2004. They included reasons and motivations for the Investigators to join the Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight in ‘The Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight’, as well as NPCs beyond the Cultists which they could interact with. The links between the chapters were listed and made more obvious and some advice was provided for the Keeper, although all too often, not enough. Whether the version from 1982 or 2004, Shadows of Yog-Sothoth cannot fail to show its age and whilst as it should, it presents a huge challenge to the players and their Investigators, it also presents an enormous challenge to the Keeper who wants to run the campaign. There is so much to prepare in the campaign and Shadows of Yog-Sothoth never makes it easy. Certainly, within two years, there would be campaigns from Chaosium, Inc, beginning with The Fungi from Yuggoth and Masks of Nyarlathotep, the latter often regarded as the greatest roleplaying campaign ever published, which made incredible strides in campaign design and presentation. There is no denying that Shadows of Yog-Sothoth needs a rewrite and even a redesign and hopefully its third edition will be the rewrite and the redesign it needs and addresses its issues.

Shadows of Yog-Sothoth: A Global Campaign to Save Mankind broke new ground in so many ways, but it is no masterpiece. It is flawed and often incoherent, and it remains a daunting prospect for any Keeper who sets out to run it for her players. Yet it has many fine moments of horror and creepiness, and above all, it has ambition, and it has a grandeur and it does something no other campaign has done since, which is have the Investigators face Cthulhu himself.

In the Long Sixteenth Century all that stands between chaos and disorder is the Empire. The Empire is the bastion of law and order, but it is a law for those who can afford it and an order which keeps the citizenry in its place. Chaos comes in the form of all that would disrupt this law and order. Plague wends its way back and forth across the land. Feudalism has been displaced by the rise of the burghers and the wealthy middle class and the role of mercenaries on the battlefield, which have made the role of the knight irrelevant. Religion has become more than a matter of just faith with the schism the church. Adhering to one faith and not the other can get you butchered, letting getting caught up on the battlefield, whether as conscript or mercenary. The poor, the labouring classes, and the craftsmen all look to the Empire for stability and their safety, but yearn for something better knowing they are unlikely ever to truly gain it and so change their lot in life. The Empire wants them kept in their place, their labour making the rich even richer, their taxes filling the crown’s coffers, and their bodies, willing or unwilling, ready to be thrown into the quagmire of war against the enemy which threatens from without… Yet there is no great Chaos. Instead, there are the men and women who stand up and decide that theirs is not a life as dictated by the Empire. They seek lives of adventure and change, wanting to make difference in their lives first, but perhaps the lives of others too. As much as their agency can lead to their being employed by the wealthy, they can become a threat to the natural order. This is the setting for Kriegsmesser, a roleplaying game best described as Troika! meets Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.
Kriegsmesser is written and published by Gregor Vuga following a successful Kickstarter campaign as part of ZineQuest #3. It offers a range of character types with a light set of mechanics predicated on degrees of failure, solid advice on running the game, and a very much implied setting. That setting is one akin to Mittel Europe, roughly at the time of the Thirty Years War, so akin to that of the Empire and the Old World of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Although there is no specific setting, where Kriegsmesser differs from the original roleplaying game of ‘grim and perilous adventure’ is that it is humanocentric—there are no rules for playing anything other than Humans, there is no such thing as Corruption or supernatural Chaos, and so no bestiary of supernatural creatures. This is because the Player Characters are the chaos, though if the Game Master wants to include it, there are rules for Corruption which have a corrosive effect upon a Player Character, all too likely driving him into the clutches of Chaos.

A Player Character in Kriegsmesser is defined by a Career, four or five skills and some possessions. He also has ten points of Toughness and six points of Luck. To create a character, a player rolls ‘d66’ and notes the details of the character down. He then chooses a name. The options include the Street Rat, the Starving Artist, the Labourer, the Charlatan, the Revolting Peasant, the Vermin Snatcher, the Clueless Noble, and more. Each one of the Careers given in Kriegsmesser is accompanied by a short, but engaging piece of flavour text.

Helena Perun
Career: Slayer
Skills: Read Signs (Demonic) 3, Notice 3, Fight (Monsters) 2, Gossip 1, Track 1
Toughness: 10
Luck: 6
Possessions: Kickass Hat, Holy Water, Silver Knife

Mechanically, Kriegsmesser uses its own dice pool mechanics rather than those of Troika! Whenever a player wants his character to do something and the character has the relevant skill, he rolls a number of six-sided dice equal to the skill and looks for the highest result. If the highest result is a six, then the character succeeds without incurring any trouble. If the result is a five or four, then the character succeeds, but incurs some trouble. A roll of three or less is a failure. What form the trouble takes when a player rolls a four or five, can be anything from a weaker or partial result to bowing out gracefully or a complication. The Game Master is encouraged to present the player with a couple of options and essentially bargain with him as the possible trouble his character suffers. If a character does not have an appropriate skill, then his player can spend points of Luck to have dice to make the skill test. Luck can be recovered through rest, through prayer, or through some festive or merrymaking activities. Luck then forms an important resource and something that a player needs to expand with a care. Of course, every roll in Kriegsmesser should be important, but when or where, Luck is even more important.

Combat in Kriegsmesser is intended to be nasty and brutal, favouring characters—Player Characters and NPCs—who are combat trained. Otherwise, a Player Character has to rely upon his Luck and an NPC, a single die. Often, it is enough to draw a sword to persuade an NPC or possibly a Player Character to back down in the face of potential violence. Kriegsmesser does give more optional rules if the Game Master and her players want a less narrative influenced combat system. These cover initiative, armour (which reduces damage), various weapon types (from warhammer to pistol), mighty blows (bonuses to the base damage if sixes are rolled in an attack), and vantage (having a higher vantage grants a bonus die). Once a Player Character loses all of his Toughness, the next blow will probably kill him, but another option allows for Terrible Injuries, like losing multiple toes to one foot, a blow to the fleshy soft bits which forces the Player Character to double over in pain and vomit, or a strike which smashes the skull and damaging the brain, leaving him to collapse to the floor, dead. (No head flying off several feet in a random direction, sadly.)

For the Game Master, there is advice on the running the game, in particular, making the world real and the lives of the Player Characters exciting, being generous with information, and imagining and conveying a darkly humorously dark tone. There is advice too on how to interpret rolls, in particular, various forms of trouble if a Player Character does not roll a complete success. There are quick and dirty rules too to create and run NPCs, as well establishing relationships between them, as well as creating scenarios around towns. These tables are fairly short and are likely to be used up quickly. Six sample NPCs are included as potential encounters, which are nicely done. Rounding out Kriegsmesser is a discussion of the period in which it is set and ideas as to where it be set outside of a Holy Roman Empire-like setting. The latter is perhaps the least interesting or useful section in Kriegsmesser, but the inclusion of a decent bibliography makes up for it.

Physically, Kriegsmesser is decently presented, making good use of period woodcut artwork. The fanzine is general well written, but could have done with a slightly better organisation in places.

Kriegsmesser is Troika! meets Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, in terms of its simplicity and stripped-down style of play. Yet whilst it is by design set in a world similar to that of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, it shifts its window upon that world. Traditionally, the Player Characters are caught between being in society of the Empire and not, but by not having an ‘other’—typically Chaos in one form or another—Kriegsmesser pushes them into being that ‘other’ and as a consequence the roleplaying game echoes the politics of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, First Edition (if not its setting and history). If there is an issue with this, it is that without a setting of its own, Kriegsmesser never gets to show this off properly.

If the Game Master can provide a setting, then there is plenty of scope in Kriegsmesser to provide an engagingly light and simple option for grim and perilous adventure.

Eat the Rich takes place one hundred-and-fifty years from now in a horrible future in which the Earth has been overrun by flesh-eating humans who have fallen victim to ‘The Hunger’, an unknown apocalyptic-plague of unknown origins. Amongst the Ravenous, there are a few survivors who have proven to have an immunity to the virus and a few who have managed to get by without being bitten or infected. There are others who have managed to escape it all, the genetically and cybernetically-enhanced ruling class, who reside in a majestic cloud-piercing levitating spire from where they can look down upon the survivors grubbing away in the mud below. Many when they look up, they see the home of the Gods and wonder what life might be like above their squalid existence. Now a Cult wants someone to ascend to the Godspire and capture a God. The Assembly, the leader of the Cult, knows that survivors of ‘The Hunger’ assume the properties and memories of anyone they eat—dead or alive. If they can consume the flesh of a God, what glorious memories and abilities will they gain? Will they include the  knowledge they will help humanity restore the Ravaged Earth of this terrible future?

In Eat the Rich, the Player Characters will put aboard a lift-spacecraft which will take them to the Godspire. There they will explore its heights and its secrets, discover what has come of the Gods, and ultimately, find themselves threatened by something which will prove to be a danger to the whole of the world below. It is designed to be played by a small group of players. Four pre-generated Player Characters are provided, but there are guidelines too for generating them. This includes starting equipment, background, talents, and motivations. What will the Player Characters make of this strange, new, and vertical world? What will they discover and what secrets will they reveal? How will the Gods react to intruders from the Earth below?

As with other scenarios from Games Omnivorous, Eat the Rich is a system agnostic scenario, but it does not fit the genres of the previous entries in the line. Both The Feast on Titanhead, and The Seed are fantasy scenarios, but Cabin Risotto Fever and Mouth Brood are modern-set affairs, although they call all be easily adapted to other time periods. Mouth Brood though, can be shifted into the Science Fiction genre, whereas Eat the Rich sits firmly in that genre as well as the Post Apocalypse genre. Which means that it could be run using the rules for Metamorphosis Alpha: Fantastic Role-Playing Game of Science Fiction Adventures on a Lost Starship, Gamma World, or Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game – Triumph & Technology Won by Mutants & Magic, for example. Similarly, it is easy to adapt to any number of modern or Science Fiction roleplaying games. These include Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition or Chill, third Edition, as well as Alien: The Roleplaying Game, Traveller, and MOTHERSHIP Sci-Fi Horror Roleplaying Game. It would also really work well with Numenera. Of course, if Eat the Rich is run using any of the systems suggested, the scenario need not be set on Earth. Its set-up is simple, flexible, and easy for the Game Master to adjust as necessary. However, just like The Feast on Titanhead, The Seed, Cabin Risotto Fever, and Mouth Brood before it, Eat the Rich adheres to the ‘Manifestus Omnivorous’, the ten points of which are:

1. All books are adventures.
2. The adventures must be system agnostic.
3. The adventures must take place on Earth.
4. The adventures can only have one location.
5. The adventures can only have one monster.
6. The adventures must include saprophagy or osteophagy.
7. The adventures must include a voracious eater.
8. The adventures must have less than 6,666 words.
9. The adventures can only be in two colours.
10. The adventures cannot have good taste. (This is the lost rule.)

As we have come to expect for scenarios from Games Omnivorous, Eat the Rich adheres to all ten rules. It is an adventure, it is system agnostic, it takes place on Earth (although technically, it takes place above the Earth), it has one location, it has the one monster, it includes both Saprophagy—the obtaining of nutrients through the consumption of decomposing dead plant or animal biomass—and Osteophagy—the practice of animals, usually herbivores, consuming bones, it involves a voracious eater, the word count is not high—the scenario only runs to twenty-four pages, and it is presented in two colours—in this case, a dark red and silver on white. Lastly, where previous entries in the series have exhibited Rule #10, it is debatable whether or or not Eat the Rich fails to exhibit good taste—though perhaps that may ultimately be up to how the players and their characters react to it.

The scenario is self-contained, the location amounting to just eight locations and six out of the twenty-four pages that make up Eat the Rich. The Godspire is an odd mix of aesthetic and the technical, a luxury enclave beyond the comprehension of the Player Characters where the line between sufficiently advanced technology blends into magic. Some of the technology is described along with the handful of locations aboard the Godspire, as is the main threat aboard the floating spindle.

Eat the Rich is primarily a setting, a small environment awaiting the intrusion of the Player Characters, the inhabitants—the the ‘Gods’ of legend, the Technology Priests, and the scenario’s ‘monster’—reacting to their invasive presence. It requires a fair deal of preparation upon the part of the Game Master, primarily in terms of creating the stats for the various NPCs, monsters, and more. She is though supported by a pair of tables of random encounters and random inhabitants aboard the Godspire. She will also need to provide guidance for her players if they want to create characters of their own, or adapt the four pre-generated Player Characters to the system of her choice.

Physically, as with the other titles in the ‘Manifestus Omnivorous’ series, Eat the Rich is very nicely presented. The cover is of sturdy card, whilst the pages are of a thick paper stock, giving the book a lovely feel in the hand. The scenario is decently written and quite detailed in terms of its locations. The artwork has an odd feel to it, a strangeness which reflects the weirdness of the setting.

A combination of the television series, The Walking Dead and the films, Zardoz and Elysium, Eat the Rich is a strange mix of fragility and the unknown with the Player Characters being hunted up and down the Godspire. The setting and its strangeness do make Eat the Rich the most difficult of the ‘Manifestus Omnivorous’ series to add to a campaign, but easy to run as a one-shot.

For fans of Vaesen – Nordic Horror Roleplaying, the roleplaying game of investigative folklore horror set in nineteenth century Scandinavia, based on Vaesen: Spirits and Monsters of Scandinavian Folklore as collected and illustrated by Johan Egerkrans, there is just the one supplement supporting it—for the moment. However, for Vaesen and other titles from Free League Publishing, there is the Free League Workshop. Much like the DM’s Guild for Dungeons & Dragons, this is a platform for creators to publish and distribute their own original content, which means that they also have a space to showcase their creativity and their inventiveness, to do something different, but ultimately provide something which the Game Master can bring to the table and engage her players with. Such is the case with Midnight Hunt.

Midnight Hunt is written by one half of the hosts of the podcast, What Would Smart Party Do?—the other half designed King of Dungeons and presents an engaging and entertaining mystery with a dilemma or two. It could easily be played in a single session, perhaps two at most, and would make a good option for a convention scenario just as it would for the Game Master’s own campaign. It is the author’s second scenario for Vaesen after Unbearable.

In Vasen, the Player Characters are members of the Society, which is based in Castle Gyllencreutz in the city of Upsala and which is dedicated to the study and understanding of the vaesen. Thus its members look for opportunities to investigate signs of Vaesen activity, but in Midnight Hunt, that sign comes to the Player Characters in the form of a message delivered by carrier pigeon. It comes from Ingvar Kransvik, the village elder of Snorum, who is concerned that members of a local family as well as the village priest have gone missing, as the beasts in the nearby forest are acting oddly, and the other villagers are thinking turning back to the Old Ways, the faiths their ancestors followed before Christianity was adopted.

Midnight Hunt is—like Unbearable before it—a classic ‘village in peril’ scenario, one which again involves bears, but unlike Unbearable, there is less of the cliché to it. Snorum is a quiet place (which leaves you wonder if the name itself is meant to be a sleepy joke), its inhabitants mostly friendly, if a little wary, and for the most part, co-operative. The place appears to be mouldering, even rotting in places, and there is a sense of impending degeneration to this settlement in eastern Sweden. This is present not just in the buildings, but also in a number of NPCs, most notably Ingvar Kransvik. The Player Characters’ efforts are hampered by the presence of the also elderly Algot Lindberg, a renowned hunter determined to take as trophies from the supernatural creatures he believes to be the cause of the problems in the village. Since their enquiries are likely to cross over, Algot Lindberg will seem to be hunting the Investigators as much as he is the Vaesen. The Investigators must also contend with Birgitta Blomqvist, a recently arrived spiritualist who is holding ceremonies dedicated to the Old Ways and tempting many of the villagers to attend.

The scenario details just seven locations, complete with clues and challenges. The former are all open to interpretation and there is no one real solution. This is played out against not one, but three countdowns and potential catastrophes. These are nicely detailed, as are the three potential confrontations. There are several parts of a puzzle that the Game Master will need to seed the scenario with, which can be done as part of her preparation or placed as necessary through play.

Ultimately, the Player Characters will have a showdown with the supernatural cause of the problems and deaths in Snorum, hopefully with their having acquired clues and puzzle pieces sufficient to deal with the Vaesen, as well as the more human issues. Various solutions are offered and discussed with combat not necessarily being the obvious one. There is plenty of investigation to be done in the early part of the scenario, but there are opportunities to use other skills as well.

Physically, Midnight Hunt is decently presented. The artwork, which includes some nicely done thumbnail portraits of the NPCs, is decent and the maps clear and simple. It would have been useful though, if the map of the village had been included in the main body of the scenario along with the other maps. The scenario is not as well written as it could be, and a much stronger and much needed edit could have solved that issue.

Midnight Hunt is a nicely presented,  accessible, and self-contained scenario with a decent nature versus man plot and plenty of NPCs to interact with and clues to find. It is also easy to move to another location—though that location should have bears!—and easy to add to an ongoing campaign. The latter is probably easier than running it as a one-shot as it does feel busy in places. Overall, Midnight Hunt is a solid scenario for Vaesen which delivers some potentially savage horror in a moldering bucolic backwater.

Escape the Dark Sector: The Game of Deep Space Adventure brought the brutality of the Fighting Fantasy solo adventure books of the eighties to both Science Fiction and co-operative game play for up to four players in which their characters begin incarcerated in the detention block of a vast space station and must work together to ensure their escape. Published by Themeborne, with its multiple encounters, traps, aliens, robots, objects, and more as well as a different end of game Boss every time, Escape the Dark Sector offered a high replay value, especially as a game never lasted longer than thirty minutes. Now, like its predecessor, Escape the Dark Castle: The Game of Atmospheric Adventure, the game has not one, but three expansions! Funded via a Kickstarter campaign, each of the three expansions—Escape the Dark Sector – Mission Pack 1: Twisted Tech, Escape the Dark Sector – Mission Pack 2: Mutant Syndrome, and Escape the Dark Sector – Mission Pack 3: Quantum Rift—adds a new Boss, new Chapters, new Items, and more, taking the path of the escapees off in a new direction to face new encounters and new dangers. Each expansion can be played on its own with the base game, or mixed and matched to add one, two, or three mission packs that increase the replay value of the core game.
Escape the Dark Sector – Mission Pack 3: Quantum Rift differs from the previous two Mission Packs that it does not expose the escapees to the further secrets of the Dark Sector, but rather to secrets beyond its limits in terms of both time and space. The ‘quantum rift’ of the title is a strange anomaly which opens up a gateway in the fabric of time-space through which can pass inadvertent travellers caught in its field and malevolent forces taking advantage of the opening. As with Escape the Dark Sector – Mission Pack 1: Twisted Tech and Escape the Dark Sector – Mission Pack 2: Mutant Syndrome before it, Escape the Dark Sector – Mission Pack 3: Quantum Rift includes twelve new Chapter cards which represent the encounters the escapees will have as they flee. Some of the new Chapter cards have black backgrounds. These are Rift Chapters and indicate that the escapees have been caught up in the Rift and thrown into the past where they might run into a pair of Roman legionnaires barking commands at them in a language they do not understand, a drunken guard in a castle wondering who they are, a gunslinger at the end of a dusty street ready to draw and shoot you, a treasure chest on a sandy shore under the watchful gaze of the crew of a pirate ship. Surviving each Rift Chapters though, is not the only danger as every time the escapees find themselves cast into the Rift, the players must roll the Rift die. Although they might pass through the Rift safely, the other possibilities are they lose Hit Points, lose Hit Points and an item, or even suffer Rift Disruption! When this happens, all of the players must swap their items!
More than half of the new Chapter cards are Rift encounters and add a fun mix of time periods which the escapees must survive, including a pleasing crossover with Escape the Dark Castle. The other Chapter cards do not throw the escapes through the time and space, but they are no less weird. For example, they might run into an old woman who visits prisoners scheduled for execution, but might read the escapees’ last rites, or find themselves under the gaze of some incomprehensible being which casts it judgement upon them... Lastly, of course, there is the end-of-game Boss card, the ‘Araknochron’, the arachnid-like alien being whose ability to control time can temporarily prevent the escapees from acting, completely replace their weapons and gear, and of course, inflict deadly damage!

Other mission packs added new Items, but not Escape the Dark Sector – Mission Pack 3: Quantum Rift. Instead it gives Artefacts to be found. For example, it might be a Roman shield or javelin, a bundle of dynamite or bottle of grog, or a ration tin or a samurai sword. These enforce the sense of times and places that the escapees can visit with the various Rift chapters.

Escape the Dark Sector – Mission Pack 3: Quantum Rift also adds three new escapees. Lieutenants Gorn, Voki, and Taloch all have ‘split doubles’ as new symbols on their dice. These have two different symbols, and when rolled, generate doubles of both. However, a player can only use one set of these. Otherwise, the double symbol works as normal.
Physically, Escape the Dark Sector – Mission Pack 3: Quantum Rift is as well produced as the core game. The new Chapter card and Boss card are large and in general easy to read and understand. Each one is illustrated in Black and White, in a style which echoes that of the Fighting Fantasy series and Warhammer 40K last seen in the nineteen eighties. The Artefact cards are also easy to use and the dice are clear and simple. The rule book requires a careful read, if only to grasp how the different new mechanics work.

Escape the Dark Sector – Mission Pack 3: Quantum Rift does not so much add new subsystems, as add an even greater degree of randomness to fit the randomness of its theme. It is a fun theme and one that easily expandable with yet more Rift cards which will take the escapees across time and space. As with the other Mission Packs for Escape the Dark Sector, this third one easily mixes with the others, perhaps even more so given its random nature. Escape the Dark Sector – Mission Pack 3: Quantum Rift is an entertaining addition to Escape the Dark Sector: The Game of Deep Space Adventure, pushing its Sci-Fi theme to an even more random height.

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: OverduePublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Nathan Pidde

Setting: Modern Day MassachusettsProduct: Scenario
What You Get: Fifteen page, 1.29 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Hell hath no fury like a librarian scornedPlot Hook: A missing boy leads to a missing book leads to a...
Plot Support: Staging advice, five handouts, four pre-generated teenage Investigators, three NPCs, and one Mythos monster. Production Values: Decent.
Pros# One night one-shot# Enclosed space, focused scenario# Decently detailed handouts# Rats in the Library# Entertaining NPC for the Keeper to portray# Potential for an NPC to become an ‘Investigator’# Inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Dreams in the Witch House’
Cons# Needs a slight edit# NPC switch could have been better developed# Primary NPC has to be very persuasive# Artwork not always appropriate# Slightly clichéd pre-generated Investigators# No floorplans
Conclusion# Short, focused booked-based investigation inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Dreams in the Witch House’ which delivers an entertaining single session of horror.

Ever hear of Al Amarja? Yes, that Al Amarja. The island in the middle of the Mediterranean that everyone denies exists, ruled by president-for-life, Her Exaltedness Monique D’Aubainne, Historic Liberator and Current Shepherdess of Al Amarja? There is no way you would go there. After all, the state health care is mandatory, especially under Doctor Nusbaum’s experimental treatment programme, as is voting. Plus it is a brutal place with state control and overwatch, whether it is the seemingly ever-present members of Peace Force and their guard baboons (and if the baboons are not in Peace Force, they are everywhere), the nationalised state Total Taxis, and more. Sure, it is unrelentingly violent. There are fights on the streets and even organised in the middle of Roller Derby League matches, but nobody is allowed guns, and you really, really do not want to see what goes on in the ice skating—or maybe you do! (Since it is a full contact sport, baby, do I mean contact...) Then there are the public hangings as well as the Festival of Fate, the highlight of which is prisoners submitting themselves to Sister Cheryl’s Wheel of Fate at Temple of Divine Experience, the result of which possibly leads to the commuting of their sentence, but more likely death or torture and death. Of course, it is a commercial, trade, and scientific free-for-all, unfettered by all the regulation we have to suffer. So go to Broken Wings District for the best parties—whether to be seen amongst the elites or disrupt the event; Flowers District to party on the streets or experience that latest in Avant Garde artwork; spend time away from the island’s weirdness in the Sunken District with a fellow exile; and so much more… And there are supposed to be sorcerers and psychics on the island, Organ Grinders harvesting for their dead god, aliens, oh so many aliens, secret world bettering technologies which the corporations are hiding because they can and the same goes for cancer treatments, and more. Yes, that Al Amarja, which does not exist and never did because it is all some damned roleplaying game, Over the Edge: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger from back in the nineties, put out by some weirdly progressive little gaming company in Minnesota, Atlas Games. So, none of it is real.

Except it is.

Al Amarja is real. You can get there if you know how. Plus, if you are American, the state language is English and everyone takes dollars. They will take every other currency too, because it gets exchanged into the state currency, zlotys. So if it is real, where is it? Well, not where it was in the nineties. Now it is in the Mediterranean, but rather in the Atlantic. Freedom is still valued above all, but the government monitors everything—for your safety of course. Weapons are outlawed—especially firearms, but everyone carries something. Medical care is free at the point of delivery, but so is medical malpractice and there are no laws against that. Drugs are totally illegal, but the barista will add a shot of something to your coffee. In the teensies and the twenties, you will need look harder though, as Al Amarja slipped down a parallel time stream where Donald Trump got elected president and he let Nazis walk the streets of America again. Which means that it is different from back in the nineties, but the same, right? So if you have been before, you still need to get ready for the heady rush of unreality, because this is a whole other unreality even if bits still look familiar. And the reason for Over the Edge: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger? Call it the ultimate in disinformation sponsored by the government of the Ultimate Democratic Republic of Al Amarja. And if a piece of propaganda worked the first time, why not do it again? After all you are never going there, you were never going there, and you never will go there—and Al Amarja was and is fake, is it really there?

Over the Edge Third Edition: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger is real though. Funded via a Kickstarter campaignis no mere update. Instead, this is a re-envisioning of Over the Edge with everything old, but new. It is still a roleplaying game of counter-culture conspiracy, weird science, and urban danger combining conspiratorial factions, strange fringe abilities, cutting-edge technology, and cross-reality incursions all under the watchful eye of an all-powerful anarchic State. The revision also includes the rules and the mechanics, which forgoes the complexities of the original WaRP system, in favour of a more luck-based system designed to drive the story with extra twists—good and bad. There is nothing to stop a Game Master from running Over the Edge Third Edition: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger using the original WaRP system, but it is not designed with that in mind. It should be noted that Over the Edge has always been cited as one of the progenitors of the storytelling movement in roleplaying and this latest edition very much draws from that movement. The result makes demands of both the Game Master and her players. It uses simple character creation that calls for strong conceptualisation and scope for storytelling over the course of one or more story arcs. It asks the players to be ready for said characters to encounter and accept random twists—both for good or ill—to the outcomes of their actions, whilst the Game Master has to be on her toes ready to create and suggest those twists. Lastly, the players are required to commit their dice to Over the Edge and no other campaign roleplaying game. (Fortunately, Over the Edge only uses a pair of six-sided dice each.)

A Player Character in Over the Edge can almost be anything, which includes paranormal and magical gifts. This excludes plot wrecking powers such as invincibility, invisibility, flying, phasing, mind reading, shape-changing, and others. So an ex-MMA fighter turned vigilante, a doctor searching for the cure to cancer, a burned out ex-FSB agent, a conspiracy theory seeking the truth, an extreme tourist, a would-be sorcerer with an intelligent rat sidekick, and more. A Player Character though, is always human, adheres to ‘Hollywood’ reality and tenacity of the everyman, described in broad details, fits in and interacts with the setting, and is new to the island. He is described in four features—a Main Trait, a Side Trait, a Trouble, and a Question Mark. The Main Trait is what the Player Character is or does, whilst the Side Trait is something that he can do in addition to the Main Trait. The Trouble is whatever will draw or force the Player Character to act in ways that are probably unsafe, if not dangerous, to him, but will always be interesting. The Question Mark is an aspect of the Player Character about which he is uncertain or he will break or he will transgress. For example, ‘Hard-Hearted-?’, ‘Friendly-?’, or ‘Fearless-?’. He also has a name, but this is chosen last and the other players can suggest ideas for it too.

Cheyanne Lovecraft
An ex-stripper turned sorcerer’s apprentice [Main Trait] who is Intuitive-? [Question Mark] and has a talking rat mentor [Side Trait].
Trouble: Cannot resist a sob story

In addition, a Player Character has a Level. In fact, everything in Over the Edge Third Edition has a Level, ranging from first to seventh. So this is not just a Player Character’s capabilities, but also locations, backgrounds, opponents, and story arcs. What the Level does is set the degree of challenge that a Player Character will face in comparison to his own capabilities, and a Player character will typically match that. So a First Level Story Arc is about ordinary people in over their heads, a Third Level Story Arc is about notable experts in their fields, even powerful, who can get into trouble as much as they can out, whilst a Fifth Level Story Arc is about characters beyond human. Sixth and Seventh Levels are godlike and out of reach of a Player Character. Typically, the default in Over the Edge Third Edition lies at the lower end of the scale. Opponents, or Game Master Characters, are on a similar scale as Player Characters, whilst locations and backgrounds get progressively weirder the higher up they are on the scale. Where a Player Character sits on that scale with regard to the world of Al Amarja around him has an influence on the mechanics of Over the Edge Third Edition.

Mechanically, in Over the Edge Third Edition, a player does not so much roll dice as ‘cast lots’, and lots are cast only when the outcome matters and then really to encompass everything in what the Player Character is attempting to do. Thus, sneak into a warehouse to obtain a sample of Voo, the drug that makes temporarily forget everything or get away from the Charters, the independent band of pirates that predates the United States and only men can join (so technically women are men in the Charters), that is one roll. If the roll is a success, then fine. If a failure, then maybe other rolls are called for. What a player needs to do in either situation is cast his lots and aim to get seven or eight, or more. That is a success.

If a Player Character is of a higher Level than the Game Master Character, location, or background, his player gets rerolls and he rerolls one or more dice, but must keep the result. If a Player Character is of a lower Level than the Game Master Character, location, or background, the Game Master gets rerolls that the player must make and keep the result. If the Levels are equal, then there are no rerolls. Casting lots also generates twists. Each three rolled when casting lots, generates a bad twist, whilst each four generates a good twist. So it is possible to roll one good twist or one bad twist; a ‘Lightning Bolt’ or two threes, which can a two bad twists or a double-bad twist; a ‘Twist Tie’, meaning a good twist and a bad twist’; or a ‘Crazy Eight’ and two good twists or a double-good twist. It is also possible to fail a casting of the lots and still have a good twist or succeed and cast lost with a bad twist. Whatever the nature of the twist, the Game Master brings something new and interesting into play, this perhaps being the capacity that the Game Master can have when running Over the Edge Third Edition: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger. In addition, the players can have access to Karma which is shared between them and also allows a reroll. Together they can only share one use of Karama, but since it can be regained whenever doubles are rolled, it is always better to use it than not.

Combat uses the same casting lots mechanic. The primary outcome of a bad twist in combat is damage. Three strikes and a Player Character is possibly dying, and unless it comes from a strange, alien, or paranormal source, healing is slow. Depending upon their status and potency, Game Master characters can have one or more Saves, Game Master fiats which enables them to shrug off damage.

A good third of Over the Edge Third Edition: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger is dedicated to Al Amarja. This covers Al Amarja and the outside world, the presence and role of the state, culture media and media, and more. Every district is detailed, including why somebody might go there and what can be seen there, before the book details the gangs, groups, organisations, and more. Each one comes with an expanded explanation and advice for the Game Master as to how they can be used because ultimately, the Game Master is free to use them as she chooses, to pick and discard them as needed, and in the process, make Al Amarja hers and thus different to that of another Game Master. On the downside, this does mean that the island and its weirdness is densely presented, but on the plus side, the Game Master can in part tailor the island, its conspiracies, and its weirdness to the Player Characters and what is driving them.

For the Game Master there is further advice on running the new edition of Over the Edge, this in addition to the advice that appears throughout the book, as well as on engaging the Player Characters, creating Game Master Characters, to what degree she should be preparing her game, and advice in general. Like much of the rest of the book, it is accompanied by commentaries from both of the authors and there is also a full scenario, ‘The Sun Queen Must Die’. It is designed as an introductory one-shot, in which the players should create characters coming to Al Amarja in search of a reclusive guru. Their chance to meet him takes place at Sad Mary’s Bar & Grill, known for its girl fights and radical arts performances, at the height of an unsurprisingly adult Passover celebration. Events outpace them though and potentially take a darkly weird turn…

Physically, Over the Edge Third Edition: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger brightly and colourfully presented. The artwork is excellent, the layout a little busy in places, and the index is great. However, it takes a while for the roleplaying game as written to click. The issue is that the first fifth of the book is devoted to rules which feel out of context and difficult to quite grasp until you get to the selling point of Over the Edge Third Edition: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger and that is Al Amarja, its setting and its weirdness.

Over the Edge Third Edition: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger is weird and weird. It is weird because of what the setting is and what it is made up of, but it is weird because its resolution mechanic, which is designed as much to throw something else, a good twist or a bad twist, into the mix as much as can resolve any one situation. It forces players to fall back upon roleplaying and their character’s story and motivation rather than whatever stats or numbers a Player Character would normally have to rely upon. The lack of stats and numbers do make character creation incredibly simple, but incredibly challenging in making a player create a character with story potential. There are examples, all of them fully worked out, but a page or two of ready-to-play Player Characters would have been a useful inclusion. Further the designers push the weirdness further than might be found in another roleplaying game by having the Game Master reveal interior elements of that weirdness to the players which their characters would not be aware of. Thus, the play of the game takes on extra-narrative elements, an artifice that enforces the sense of unreality on Al Marja.

Over the Edge Third Edition: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger is a darker, faster-playing, even more improbable random return to the unreality of Al Amarja. Its even more storytelling-focus and ultra-light mechanics make demands of both the Game Master and her players and consequently the degree of buy-in, whether because of those rules or the unreality of the setting, is greater than might be expected. Still, what it comes down to is that just like Over the Edge: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger back in 1992, what stands out in Over the Edge Third Edition: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger is Al Amarja, and that is worth overcoming whatever reservations you might have about the mechanics.

If you want to get some idea of what Extraction From Demon-Fucked Cleveland 1996 is like, take the soundtracks to two John Carpenter films—Escape from New York and Prince of Darkness—and crush them together, and you pretty much have the whole thing in a nutshell. Since nineteen seventy-four, the Ohio-state city has been under quarantine. Inside the closed off walls, the city environs have been a literal hell hole which has been the personal fiefdom of a demon queen. There is even a ceasefire declared between the United States of America and what is now enemy occupied territory. That was twenty-two and three hours ago. Three hours ago, the plane carrying the President of the United States of America was shot down over Cleveland airspace. The President is implanted with a biometric scanner which shows his life signs as well as approximate location. The Player Characters’ team is to enter the Cleveland Demonic Zone via Lake Erie to the northwest, make its way to the Demon Queen’s Moon Citadel. There they are to secure the President and escort him to the extraction point on the eastern of edge of the zone. There is no possibility of failure. If the team cannot extract the President, it is not getting out either… There will be no extraction for the team without the President.

The set-up for Extraction From Demon-Fucked Cleveland 1996 is simple and obvious. Replace gangs with demons and what you have is the plot to John Carpenter’s Escape from New York in this adventure from MegaCorp Games, nominated for the 2022 Ennie Award for Best Adventure. The sense of urgency is built into its plot, each area within the zone taking thirty minutes to cross and each encounter, combat or otherwise, takes fifteen minutes to complete. The environment is literally on fire and the ambient temperature is incredibly hot. Plus there are demons, none of which are going to be happy with an incursion by humans. Fortunately, maximum firepower is authorised in order to execute the mission.
The Player Characters are free to explore the Cleveland Demonic Zone as they want and very much if they have the time. Although not immediately obvious, there are advantages to doing so. Perhaps there will be opportunities to find out more about the Demon Queen’s activities in the zone or finding an easier way out of the Cleveland Demonic Zone. The Game Master is given a countdown clock to track the progress of the Player Character across the zone, descriptions of the various areas in the zone, details of the hostiles that they will probably face, and a table of possible encounters. And that pretty much is it. There are some redacted details in the scenario and everything for Extraction From Demon-Fucked Cleveland 1996 fits on two sides of a single sheet of paper. That is because it is a pamphlet adventure. It is also systemless.

Extraction From Demon-Fucked Cleveland 1996 can be played with any ruleset which can do an alternate nineties in which demons roam the earth—or at least Cleveland—and have done so since nineteen seventy-four. Savage Worlds would work, as would Modern AGE or the Cypher System. Depending upon the choice of system and the tone that the Game Master is aiming for the scenario can run as a grim and gritty mission or it can be run in a more Pulp style. All the Game Master has to do is create the demons following the descriptions given and perhaps some pre-generated Player Characters. These can be as clichéd as the Game Master wants depending on the type of game she wants to run. Once done, the Game Master has everything necessary to run a horror-tinged action-packed thriller.

Physically, Extraction From Demon-Fucked Cleveland 1996 is tidily presented. It needs an edit in place for clarity as the format means the author is being a little too concise in his writing.
However, is it any good? Is it good value for money? Is it even original? The answers to all those questions is a yes and a no. Yes, it is original because it presents a fun twist upon a familiar plot, but definitely no because that plot is lifted wholesale from a film. Yes, it is good value for money because it supplies a set-up and plot to which all the Game Master has to do is provide the necessary stats, but no because of the lack of originality. Yes, it is good because its tone is fun and the players are likely to enjoy the action and stealth affair to which this lends itself, but no, because of the lack of originality. Ultimately, it comes down to whether or not the players can overcome the lack of originality in Extraction From Demon-Fucked Cleveland 1996. If they can put it aside and buy into the action and tone of Extraction From Demon-Fucked Cleveland 1996, then the players are going to have a blast with this popcorn-powered, cheese covered horror thriller cover of John Carpenter’s Escape from New York.