Monsters have arisen and the village is under attack! Dracula, The Mummy, Frankenstein’s Monster—and his Bride, the Invisible Man, the Wolf Man, and the Creature from the Black Lagoon are all on the rampage and it is up a dedicated team of heroic monster hunters to keep the villagers safe from their predations, find the means to thwart each and every one, and then put an end to their reign of terror! This is the set-up for Horrified, a co-operative board game from Ravensburger, designed for between one and five players, ages ten and up, in which they face the classic foes of the Universal monsters series of films from the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties. If you are a regular player of board games, then you will definitely spot the architecture and design elements of the first classic co-operative board game, Pandemic, but Horrified is far from a drily themed race to find the cure to four different diseases! It is a desperate race to defeat classic monsters, each of which is very different in terms of what they do and what the players need to do to defeat them, it oozes both theme and charm, and its horror is scary, but not terrifying, so it can be played by the family as well as the dedicated horror fan—and both will enjoy it.

Open up a copy of Horrified and the first thing you see is a warning about the potentially horrifying experiences to be found in the box. Of course it is a little tongue in cheek and so perfectly in keeping with the tone of the Universal Monsters, but what is clever is where this warning is placed. Not on a separate sheet of paper or the back of the rulebook, but on the back of the game’s board. It is a clever use of space and points to the degree of thought and detail which has gone into this game. The board itself depicts various locations within a village, a curious mix of the American small town and the European Gothic, so there is a precinct and a mansion as well as an abbey and a tower with an adjacent dungeon. A river runs through the village, connecting a lagoon and the waterfront. At the top of the board is the Terror Track.

The Heroes in Horrified—and there are seven of them—are each represented by a Hero Badge, essentially character cards detailing their abilities and their playing pieces. Each has good illustration, a number to indicate how many Actions he or she can take a turn, and a special action or ability. For example, the Mayor has five Actions per turn, but no special action or ability, whereas the Courier has four and can travel to any location where there is another Hero, and the Professor, also has four and can move any Hero or Villager one space.

The Universal Monsters in Horrified—and there are six of them—are each represented by plastic playing piece of a different colour and a Monster Mat. Each Monster Mat details what the Monster can do and how it is defeated, the latter requiring two steps. For example, Dracula can use his Dark Charm to pull a Hero to his space, and to advance to point where they can him, the Heroes need to visit each of the four locations where his coffins and destroy them, before confronting the vampire prince directly. At least six points of Red Item Tokens are required to destroy a coffin, and six points of Yellow Item Tokens to destroy him. The Mummy has a tablet on which Scarabs can be moved, the number of moves determined by the value of Yellow Item Token used. Move them into the right order and the curse is broken, and the Mummy can be entombed by confronting him and expending at least nine points of Red Item Tokens. However, the Mummy can fortify the curse by turning one of the Scarabs upside down! Perhaps the most interesting Monster to defeat, at least thematically, is that of Frankenstein and his Bride. Both have to taught to live peacefully together, Blue and Yellow Item Tokens being expended to increase their Humanity on a dial for each of them in their respective spaces. They constantly move towards each other, and can be ‘defeated’ if they have sufficient Humanity when they meet, if not, they flee back to their starting positions and the Terror Level goes up by one.

In addition, there are Monster tokens which are added to the game when particular Monsters are selected as the foes. For Dracula, this is his four coffins and for Frankenstein and his Bride, it is the dials to tack their Humanity, but the Creature from the Black Lagoon includes an overlay piece which replaces the Camp location and instructs a player what to do to direct the boat counter—which also comes with the Creature from the Black Lagoon—ever closer to its lair where it can be defeated. Essentially, the means of defeating each Monster is different and requires the Heroes to collect and expend the different coloured Item Tokens.

As well as the game pieces for the Heroes and the Monsters, Horrified comes with ten Villagers. When they appear on the board, they always want to reach their safe locations and the Heroes can guide them there. If they do, then they will be rewarded with a Perk Card. If a Monster reaches a Villager and defeats him, the Terror Level is increased. The Item Tokens come in three colours—red for physical items, blue for intellectual, and yellow for spiritual—and range in value between one and five. There are Markers for both Terror and Frenzy, the former used on the Terror Tracker, the latter to indicate when a Monster is Frenzied. Along with three dice, there five Reference Cards, one for each player; thirty Monster Cards to indicate Monster actions; and twenty Perk cards, awarded when a Hero gets a Villager home. Each Monster Card indicates how many Item Tokens are drawn from the game’s cloth bag and added to the board and gives an event such as ‘Thief’, in which case, the Invisible Man appears at the location where there are the most items and steals them, forcing them to be discarded. The Monster Card also reveals which of the Monsters move on a turn, including the Frenzied Monster—which can mean that a Monster can move and act twice in a turn, how many spaces, and how many dice it rolls to attack. Some Monster Cards can be beneficial, for example, the ‘Sunrise’ Monster Card will force Dracula to flee back to the Crypt, which might be away from a Hero or a Villager, and some might not have any effect, either because the Monster is not being played in the current game or because it has already been defeated. The Perk cards provide single benefits, like a ‘Taxi Ride’ which gets a Hero to any non-water location or ‘Late into the Night’, which grants the current player two further actions.

Horrified has one win condition and two loss conditions. The Heroes triumph and the players win the game if they defeat all of the Monsters. However, they lose if the Terror Level reaches its maximum level, forcing everyone in the village to flee in horror and allow the Monsters to take over. And they also lose if the Monster deck is emptied and one more Monster card needs to be drawn, the Heroes and thus the players having taken too long to save the village.

Game set-up is simple enough. The Terror Marker is set at zero and the selected Monsters set up as instructed. Then each player selects a random Hero, receives a Perk card, and the sixty Item Tokens placed in the cloth bag. Twelve of these are drawn at random and placed on the board. The rule quickly guides the players through the process, but goes not one, not two, but four steps further. It suggest that the players’ first game be against Dracula and the Creature from the Black Lagoon, any two Monsters for the Novice game, any three Monsters in the standard game, and any four in a challenging game. Thus it eases the players into the game and its play whilst showing them how to make the game more difficult.

A player’s turn has two phases. In the Hero phase, a player expends his Hero’s Action Points to move, guide a Villager to or from an adjacent location (a villager will accompany a Hero and move with him), take a Special Action, pick up Item Tokens or share them with a Hero on the same location, Advance a Monster’s task, or Defeat a Monster. The latter two task are different for each Monster and are given on their respective Monster mats, and require the Hero to be in specific places. In the Monster phase, a Monster Card is drawn from the Monster card deck, and the number of Item Tokens given on the Monster Card placed, its Event carried out, and then any movement and attacks conducted. The latter requires rolling dice, which have exclamation point and star symbols on them. Rolls of the exclamation point active a Monster’s power, such as Dracula’s Dark Charm, whilst rolls the star symbol force a Hero to discard Item Tokens, and if a Hero has none, defeats him, sending him to the Hospital and raising the Terror Level one step!

Physically, Horrified is a well-presented game. Everything is in colour, the board is painted in dark shades with pools of light to suggest that it might be midnight, the Item Tokens and cards are all easy to read, and the rules are well explained. In fact, the rules are very well written, with plenty of clarification and explanation of how each Monster works and can be defeated, along with several good examples of play. A player with some experience of playing board games could easily open up the box to Horrified, read the rules, and be playing within a relatively short time. Plus there is a little advice here and there on playing again, strategy, playing it solo—which is even more challenging, and so on. Another nice touch to the graphic design is the inclusion of an explanation of who the Monsters are on the outside of the inner box, also done in colour. However, the production values are not high as they could be. The plastic miniatures for the Monsters lack detail and the card stock for the game’s various cards is thin and will not stand up to too much handling.

In terms of game play, where in Pandemic, as members of the CDC, the players are travelling the world, visiting cities and treating diseases, and drawing and swapping city cards of the right to cure the game’s four diseases, in Horrified, the players as the Heroes, are moving round the village collecting as many Item Tokens as they can in order to have enough of the right colour to first advance the condition on each Monster Mat to the point where the Monster can be defeated. Hindering the players in Pandemic is the constant appearance of new cases the four diseases, and worse sudden outbreaks where a disease spreads to other cities, whereas in Horrified, the Heroes need to track where both the Monsters and the villagers are, because if the Monsters get to the Villagers, they kill them and so drive up the Terror Level. The Heroes also need to avoid the Monsters themselves until the time is right to confront them directly and defeat them. Of course, if a Hero can get a villager to his or her safe location, that earns him Perk card.

However, defeating two Monsters—the base difficulty in Horrified—is fairly easy. Defeating three, though—the standard difficulty—is challenging. Four is another matter altogether! The difficulty will also vary slightly depending upon the Monsters in play, plus the more players a game has, the more Monster cards are drawn and the more Villagers appear to be taken by the Monsters and so increase the Terror Level. The higher difficulty levels may not necessarily suit all players though, casual or family players potentially finding Horrified too difficult at three Monsters, and more so at four.

Horrified is a good game for a number of reasons. In terms of game play, it is relatively light, suitable for casual players and the family, but offering enough for the hobbyist player as a lighter option. Its theme is really well handled, from the different means of defeating the various Monsters and the inclusion of the villagers from the films those Monsters appeared in, to graphical design and the attention to detail which evoke a sense of nostalgia for the Universal Monsters. It offers a decent degree of replay value too, with seven Heroes and six Monsters to choose from, enabling players to mix and match both. However, it would be great to see an expansion with even more and different Monsters. In terms of value, Horrified is a game you can buy on the high street and specialised game shops, and as a mass market board game, it is not just a good game. In fact, it is fantastic game, because as a mass market board game, it is not only inexpensive, but it combines its theme and its mechanics really well. No longer do we have board games based on intellectual properties that are just throwaway ‘roll and move’ designs, but like the earlier Jaws: A Boardgame of Strategy and Suspense, we have mass market board games designed to fit their themes and make use of their themes, that are readily available and consequently, make you want to play again. Jaws does that, and so does Horrified. Lastly, it is also great to see a horror themed board game which involves neither zombies or Cthulhu, and so Horrified is not just nostalgic, it is also a refreshing change.

Thematically, Horrified is a great piece of design and it showcases just how modern game designers have been able reach beyond the hobby and bring thematically appropriate design and game play to the general audience. Horrified is a light co-operative game that horror fans will enjoy for the nostalgia and the family can play for the fun and the scares.

Now in its fourteenth year, Free RPG Day in 2021, after a little delay due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, took place on Saturday, 16th October. As per usual, it came with an array of new and interesting little releases, which traditionally would have been 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. Of course, in 2021, Free RPG Day took place after GenCon despite it also taking place later than its traditional start of August dates, but Reviews from R’lyeh was able to gain access to the titles released on the day due to a friendly local gaming shop and both Keith Mageau and David Salisbury of Fan Boy 3 in together sourcing and providing copies of the Free RPG Day 2020 titles. Reviews from R’lyeh would like to thank all three for their help.

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For Free RPG Day 2021, Modiphius Entertainment released not one, but three titles, two for existing roleplaying games, one for a forthcoming title. The first for the existing roleplaying game is the Star Trek: Adventures Quick-Start, an introduction to Star Trek Adventures, whilst the release for the forthcoming title is the Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20 Quick-start, which includes the scenario, ‘A Quick Trip to France’. This is an introduction to the 2d20 System version of Achtung! Cthulhu, the roleplaying game of pulp action fighting a Secret War during World War II against the Nazi organisations who have harnessed the forces and entities of the Cthulhu Mythos. Originally published in 2013 following a successful Kickstarter using Call of Cthulhu, Sixth Edition, Savage Worlds, and other rules systems, Achtung! Cthulhu was supported with numerous supplements, miniatures and miniatures rules, board games, and more, all presenting a more muscular and action-orientated take upon Lovecraftian investigative roleplaying. In 2021, Achtung! Cthulhu returns using the 2d20 System first seen in the publisher’s Mutant Chronicles: Techno Fantasy Roleplaying Game and Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of, and since developed into the publisher’s house system.

In Achtung! Cthulhu, players take the roles of soldiers and agents seconded to services more secret than SOE or the OSS—Section M in the United Kingdom and Majestic in the USA. They face the forces of two even more secret Nazi organisations. One is Black Sun, which through Hyperborean magic and dark pacts with the ancient gods of the Mythos, practices foul sorcery and summons evil creatures from other dimensions to rule the battlefields of men and delves into the Dreamlands. The other is Nachtwölfe, the Night Wolves, a splinter organisation which scours the world for the rare mineral Blauer Kristall and even rarer Atlantean technology, and employs it to develop science, technology, progress, biological enhancements, and wonder weapons powered by Blauer Kristall.
What this means is that Agents of both sides, Player Characters and NPCs, can use magic. This comes as two forms, one is ‘battlefield magic’, shorter-term enchantments, spells, curses, hexes, charms, and blessings, which are primarily used to aid forces involved in combat. The other is ritualistic magic, which is much more complicated and intricate, and thus more potent and powerful. It is used to contact and communicate with the forces and entities of the Mythos, to summon them, and even change the world! Either is learned through the traditional means of studying an occult path for years or researching forbidden tomes, occult lore, and fragments of precious knowledge, but dabblers might pick up fragments and spells that might be of use… Of the three, traditionalists and researchers are the more powerful, but all battlefield spells cast by the three types are stored in the sorcerer’s mantle, a token, fetish, icon, or wand, from which it is cast—and once cast, it must be stored again. In the midst of battle, a spell must be prepared—which in game terms, takes an action, and can inflict mental stress upon the caster when actually cast.

A Player Character in Achtung! Cthulhu 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 twelve skills—from Academia, Athlectis, and Engineering to Survival, Tactics, and Vehicles—which are fairly broad, whilst Focuses represent narrow areas of study or skill specialities, for example, History, Occultism, Handguns, Leadership, Instincts, and Battlefield Tactics. Truths are single words or short phrases, which describe a significant fact or aspect about its subject, such as ‘British’ or ‘Glimpsed What Mortals Should Not Know’. 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 Achtung! Cthulhu, 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 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 Gamemaster 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 Achtung! Cthulhu 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 Achtung! Cthulhu 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, and although how is not explained in Achtung! Cthulhu Quick-Start, there are numerous opportunities presented in the accompanying adventure, for the Game Master to award them to her players.

The rules themselves in the Achtung! Cthulhu Quick-Start take up a quarter of the quick-start. ‘Mission: A Quick Trip to France’ takes up more than a third, begins en media res, with the Player Characters about to parachute into France in the Rouen area. This is in response to a coded, but garbled message from a local resistance leader about a Black Sun Master, Jans Stöller, spotted in the village of Saint Sulac, leading a detachment of Black Sun troops. Essentially, the agents once on the ground, have to locate the resistance leader, investigate the Black Sun activities in the village whilst avoiding their attention, and ultimately thwart whatever dark plan Jans Stöller is concocting. Players expecting something akin to The Dirty Dozen or a host of war movies will probably be disappointed by ‘Mission: A Quick Trip to France’. A stand-up fight or going in all guns blazing will very likely get the Player Characters killed, and the adventure very much leans into the stealth and guile of secret missions in enemy territory, so the Player Characters will be sneaking around the village, trying to find out what is going on, before striking…! Overall, ‘Mission: A Quick Trip to France’ is a good adventure, does a decent job of showcasing the rules to Achtung! Cthulhu, and should provide a solid session or two’s worth of gaming.

To go with the adventure, the Achtung! Cthulhu Quick-Start provides a sextet of pre-generated Player Characters. The six are all members of Section M or Majestic, and include Agent Daphne Rogers, an Occultist Investigator; Sven Nilsen, Norwegian Dauntless Resistance Leader; Captain James Swann, a British Officer; Private Dan Gregg, a Genius Mechanic; and Corporal Sarah Walker, an Australian and Fearless Soldier. Two of these use magic—Daphne Rogers and Sven Nilsen, whilst Corporal Sarah Walker is accompanied by her loyal companion, a mutt called Crook. These are comparatively more complex than the other Agents—especially the two users of magic—and that means they receive double-page spreads each. Their players should be aware of their relative complexity ahead of time.

Physically, the Achtung! Cthulhu Quick-Start is well presented and easy to use. The artwork is excellent, and includes a number of illustrations which depict scenes from the scenario. That said, it is not as sturdy as it could be as it does not have a card cover. In comparison to other d20 System roleplaying games, Achtung! Cthulhu is more complex, crunchier even, but it has to handle the action of World War II, and more. Nevertheless, the Achtung! Cthulhu Quick-Start is a solid introduction to Achtung! Cthulhu, providing an excellent explanation of the core rules and showcasing them in an exciting and terrifying adventure.

Zoinks!! Someone has gone and turned Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! into an adventure for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. In fact, that someone has gone and turned it into two adventures for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition—of which A Night of Fright! is the first. However, this is not a straight adaptation of the long running cartoon, so not a modern-set adventure. Rather, it is a parody adventure, ‘A haunting adventure of meddling heroes and their talking gnoll’! And since you get a talking Gnoll, it can only be Dungeons & Dragons fantasy, but that is Dungeons & Dragons fantasy with the aforementioned talking Gnoll, The Clue Cruiser,* five pre-generated Player Characters, four Subclasses, ghosts, a mystery, and of course, an opportunity for the Dungeon Master to utter the classic line, “And I'd have gotten away with it, too, if it weren't for those meddling kids!!”

* Sorry, no Mystery Machine, this is a parody, remember?

A Night of Fright! casts the not-Scooby gang—or rather the S’koobi gang—as members as Mystery LLC, the area’s leading mystery solving meddlers. Together, many years ago, Sha-Gi, Sir Frederick, Dafni, S’koobi, and Vell’mah, helped a man named Uldryn Beauregard who believed his vineyard to be haunted, until the team that there were no ghosts, but rather a rival winemaker attempting to drive him from his property. Now they have received a mysterious invitation from Uldryn Beauregard—if they can spend a full night in a haunted house, they will receive one million gold pieces!

Thus we have a classic set-up—and of course, it only gets worse. For not only do the team have to spend the night in a haunted house, it also has to do it with some thoroughly unpleasant members of the Beauregard family! Then it only gets worse, for the team find itself trapped in the haunted house, of course, still with some thoroughly unpleasant members of the Beauregard family! With nothing else to do, the team begins do what it does best, and that is, investigate the greatly dilapidated house, dusty, grimy, strewn with cobwebs, and worse… All the classic elements of a haunted house are here—secret doors, paintings in which the eyes move, ghostly moans and arms reaching out of mirrors, faces in mirrors, books that float in the air, and more. Plus, there are traps and puzzles to discover and deal with, clues to find (because this is a mystery after all), and this being a S’koobi mystery, villains to run away from and ultimately unmask.

However, as much as A Night of Fright! is a parody of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, it is no straight parody of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! Being written for use with Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition means that the Player Characters are a lot more powerful than the members of the actual Scooby gang, but equally they are not up against ghoulies and ghosties as those that appear in A Night of Fright! In addition, the Dungeon Master gets to fling encounters at her players. These come in three flavours—Scary, Very Scary, and Important. These scale up, so that Scary encounters are simple parlour tricks intended to scare the members of Mystery LLC out of the Beauregard mansion; Very Scary encounters are actually real, definitely sinister, and potentially deadly; and Important events are story events, important plot points upon which the story turns.

In addition, the mansion is laced with traps, some of which are designed to separate the members of the Mystery LLC. Of course, this runs counter to the play of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition in which you never split the party, but it is perfectly in keeping with a Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! mystery. However, this means that the duties of the Dungeon Master are doubled up as she has to keep track of where each group of Player Characters is and which of the three flavours of encounters—Scary, Very Scary, and Important—apply to which group. It also means that the Dungeon Master will need to give the scenario a very careful read through so as to understand how they work and when they apply, especially as once the Player Characters are separated, the advice for the Dungeon Master is to switch back and forth between the various group so that neither focus nor tension is lost. Ideally, the Dungeon Master should prepare some floor plans of the Beauregard mansion and plot the movement of the Player Characters as they move about the house or suddenly shifted from one part of the house to another. Fortunately, A Night of Fright! comes with several maps of the mansion, including plain and squared, as well as a set of tokens for all the Player Characters and the NPCs in the scenario. Which means that with a little bit of effect, the scenario is ready to be set up and run online.

Included with the scenario are five, ready-to-play pregenerated Player Characters. These are the five members of Mystery LLC or S’koobi gang, all of Fifth Level. It is possible to play the scenario using other characters, in which case, they also should be Fifth Level. The provided Player Characters come as ready-to-play character sheets or in plain text, although the latter will need some adjustment in terms of their layout. All five use the standard character Classes from the Player’s Handbook, although S’koobi is designed as a talking Gnoll, and all have their own Subclasses. The four new Subclasses are ‘The Way of the Coward’ for the Monk, the ‘Oath of Traps’ for the Paladin, ‘The Damsel’ Otherworldly Patron for the Warlock, the ‘College of Snacks’ for the Bard, and the Bespectacled Sleuth for the Rogue. Which correspond to Shaggy Rogers, Fred Jones, Daphne Blake, Scooby, and Velma Dinkley, or rather in A Night of Fright! to Sha-Gi, Sir Frederick, Dafni, S’koobi, and Vell’mah. Thus, ‘The Way of the Coward’ is all about running away, including being able to run away so fast that you temporarily leave an Afterimage behind you; the ‘Oath of Traps’ favours nets and snares and spells such as alarm and ensnaring strike; ‘The Damsel’ Otherworldly Patron receives Distress Points whenever she activates a trap or is restrained or grappled, which can then be spent to increase damage from the spells she casts; the ‘College of Snacks’ specialises in magical cooking such as Courage Crunch treats that grant allies Advantage on the next attack or end particular Conditions they are suffering from; and the Bespectacled Sleuth has to wear glasses that there is chance of being knocked off, has a keen ear for catching lies, can use insight to gain a tactical advantage over an opponent and make a Sneak Attack from any angle, and of course, has Advantage on Investigation and Perception checks. Now because A Night of Fright! is designed for Player Characters of Fifth Level, none of the pregenerated characters—Sha-Gi, Sir Frederick, Dafni, S’koobi, or Vell’mah—have all of their Subclasses’ abilities, but in A Night of Fright! campaign?

Physically, A Night of Fright! is decently presented. The cover is very nicely done, but the rest of the scenario uses publicly available artwork, which though all appropriate to a haunted house is a little disappointing after the tone set by the cover. The floor plans are decent too, though the Dungeon Master will find herself flipping back to them a lot. The layout is busy and that does make finding things and quite grasping what is going on a little more challenging.

A Night of Fright! does have something of a split personality, that of Dungeons & Dragons versus the Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! Or in other words, the not really being scared of Dungeons & Dragons versus the ‘Zoinks!!’ and you are definitely going to be scared of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! The designers of A Night of Fright! push the latter rather than the former, with lots and lots of fear checks, the failed outcome being that the Player Characters will flee—if only for a little while. This may become a little tiresome in play, the advice is that the players should lean into them as much as they should be leaning into their characters and genre, and anyway, the scenario very quickly turns up the scares all the way up to the climax.

A Night of Fright! is a fun, silly parody of its source material that goes not just one step further in turning up the scares and the horror, but several. Doing so means that the Player Characters have to be lot tougher to face the blood and the monsters that the scenario also throws at them, and the nicely done members of Mystery LLC are exactly what is needed. Players and Dungeon Master alike should enjoy the knowing mix of horror and Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! coventions in A Night of Fright! before the Dungeon Master really turns up the genre!

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

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

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Name: La RecettePublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: G.A. Patrick

Setting: Jazz Age Louisiana Bayou Country
Product: Scenario
What You Get: Sixteen page, 5.29 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Voodoo treasure hunt hoedown with a corpse in the trunk.Plot Hook: When you need a dead man to talk, sometimes you got to do the voodoo that you do.Plot Support: Detailed plot, one good handout, five NPCs, one spell, and three pre-generated Investigators. Production Values: Good.
Pros
# Short, one-session, one to three Investigator scenario# Suitable as a one-shot or first part of a very dark campaign# Solid NPCs the Keeper can sink her roleplaying teeth into# Strong Pulpy plot confronts the Investigators with the Mythos# Entertainingly sweaty set-up and plot# Advice on using the plot with another backstory# Scope for the set-up to be played out# Set-up begging to be told in a flashback in a roadside interrogation# Whole scenario begging to be told in a flashback in a police interrogation
Cons
# Requires a strong edit# Requires access to the Malleus Monstrorum (alternatives suggested)# Does involve human sacrifice upon the part of the Investigators# Adult tone means it may not be suitable for all players# Begins en media res

Conclusion
# Requires a strong edit# Whole scenario begging to be told in a flashback# Entertainingly hot, sweaty, and desperate zombie noir set-up and plot

Now in its fourteenth year, Free RPG Day in 2021, after a little delay due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, took place on Saturday, 16th October. As per usual, it came with an array of new and interesting little releases, which traditionally would have been 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. Of course, in 2021, Free RPG Day took place after GenCon despite it also taking place later than its traditional start of August dates, but Reviews from R’lyeh was able to gain access to the titles released on the day due to a friendly local gaming shop and both Keith Mageau and David Salisbury of Fan Boy 3 in together sourcing and providing copies of the Free RPG Day 2020 titles. Reviews from R’lyeh would like to thank all three for their help.

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Into the Würmhole is a disgusting adventure set in the Vast Grimm universe, a standalone, art-filled, punk-fuelled Old School Renaissance role-playing game about the few humans remaining in a universe being consumed by growing parasitic würms. Some time in the future, the Earth has been shattered, carved up, and gnawed upon by würms such that all remains are vestiges. All that remains of humanity resides in habitats and spaceships, scavenging what it can, surviving the best that it can, everyone hoping that they will not fall prey to the infestation that will turn them into one of the würms, that they can find some kind of surviving civilisation, or perhaps they can find escape via the Gate of infinite Suns. In ‘Into the Würmhole’, the Player Characters are members of a Legion, investigating an urgent distress call from inside a dark and foreboding asteroid… Into the Würmhole includes every necessary to play—an explanation of the rules, the short four-page ‘Into the Würmhole’ scenario, and four ready-to-play pre-generated Player Characters.
Published by Infinite Black, Vast Grimm shares its mechanics and much of its tone with Mörk Borg, and indeed they are compatible, although not from the same publisher. Thus it is player-facing in that the players do almost all of the dice rolling, a test requiring a player to roll equal to, or greater than, a given Difficulty Rating, typically twelve, usually modified by the appropriate attribute—either Strength, Agility, Presence, or Toughness—which ranges from -3 to +3. Thus in combat, a player will roll for his character to avoid being attacked as well as his character making an attack. A Player Character also has a Tribute, for example, Grimm Reaper enables the character to command Grimm (Grimm those infected by parasites and würm things) for a number of rounds, whilst Strength of 1,000 Würms lets the character increase the strength of another character or creature. Tributes are the equivalent magic in Mörk Borg and cost Neuromancy Points to use, whereas Skillz, which represent skills and other abilities. For example, ‘Schwarze’s Stoogie’ is a mechanical cigar that always tastes like a fine Cuban and once per day its ash can be flicked at an enemy to blind him for a short while, whilst ‘Last to Die’ means that the character is weak and puny, never seen as a threat, and always the last to be attacked! Lastly, a Player Character has a number of Favours each day, which might grant maximum damage, allow a reroll of any dice, reduce damage taken, neutralise a critical strike or a fumble, or lower the Difficulty Rating of a test. 
The rules are explained in a single page of a small booklet, so there is a certain brevity to them. However, anyone with any roleplaying experience should have no difficulty picking one of the pre-generated Player Characters and beginning play, whilst the potential Game Master will need a little experience under her belt. Both will find Into the Würmhole easier to play or run if they have any experience with Mörk Borg—or any of the more minimalist retroclones. In fact, an experienced Game Master could easily pick up Into the Würmhole, read through it in five minutes, brief her players how everything works, and be running the scenario in ten.
The scenario, ‘Into the Würmhole’ sees the Player Characters descend into the carcass of a dead Würm which had burrowed deep into an asteroid. This is in answer to a distress call from another Legion, and inside the decaying corpse of they will encounter former members of the Legion turned Grimm, a variety of foul stenches and miasmas, and giant Leukocytes and Immunigoblins—humanoid defence mechanisms that attempt to immobilise any intruders, such as the Player Characters, so that the body of the Würm can digest and decompose them.
To play the ‘Into the Würmhole’ scenario, Into the Würmhole provides a quartet of pre-generated Player Characters. These include an Emo|Bot, a former communications ’bot which suffers from kleptomania, but which can access any computer; a Treacherous Merc; a Lost Technomaniac, who is accompanied by a Borg Bat, a cybernetic bewinged rat who acts as a scout; and a Soul Survivor. These are a mostly rotten bunch, intentionally so, desperate survivors, attempting to get by, make it to the next mission…
If there is an issue with Into the Würmhole, it is that it does on occasion refer back to Vast Grimm. So it suggests referring to the rules for further random monsters and it does not include any rules on what happens when a player fumbles a test for using a Tribute. Really it could have done with one less encounter table and a table of fumble results instead.
Physically, Into the Würmhole takes its design cues from Mörk Borg in its use of strong colours. Here they are done mostly as text boxes of psychedelic blue and pink, typically against a black background or swathes of bloody, meaty pink, suggesting something intestinal… The writing is generally clear, but given the short length of the booklet, does suffer from a certain brevity.
Except with a minor issue or two, Into the Würmhole and its scenario is incredibly easy to grasp and easy to bring to the table. Its scenario is short, probably offering no more than a couple of hours’ worth of play, but will nevertheless, provide a taster of the future that Vast Grimm has for us—an icky, festering, vile future with what is essentially a grim and perilous version of Fantastic Voyage.

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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I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City is important for several reasons—all of them firsts. It was the first scenario written by David ‘Zeb’ Cook for TSR, Inc. It was the first scenario in the ‘I’ series—I for Intermediate, designed for Player Characters of between Fourth and Seventh Level. It marked the first appearance of the monsters, the Aboleth, the Yuan-ti, the Mongrelmen, and the Tasloi in Dungeons & Dragons, whilst many of its other monsters would be drawn from the then recently published Fiend Folio. It was one of the first scenarios for TSR, Inc. to be heavily influenced by the Conan stories of Robert E. Howard. And if it was not the first sandbox scenario for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition, then it was one of the earliest. For many reasons, I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City is regarded as a classic and in 2004, was ranked the thirteenth greatest Dungeons & Dragons adventure of all time by Dungeon magazine for the thirtieth anniversary of the Dungeons & Dragons.

I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City began life as a tournament scenario for 1980 Origins Game Fair and when originally accepted, was intended to be part of the ‘C’ or Competition series of scenarios. This is very much evident in the design of the module and has profound consequences upon its play and its development. Similarly, its inspiration—the Conan short story, Red Nails, has profound consequences upon its play and its development, though nowhere near as much as its origins as a tournament scenario. (Notably, Cook would later design The Conan Role-Playing Game published by TSR, Inc. in 1985.) It is set in a deep rift valley in a faraway jungle, a lost city in the vein of the stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard, and of the story of archaeologist and explorer, Colonel Percy Harrison Fawcett, who would inspire Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Indiana Jones (and notably, Cook would also later design The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game for TSR, Inc. in 1984), and the character of Jackson Elias in Masks of Nyarlathotep, the genuinely classic campaign for Call of Cthulhu. It has pulpy undertones which are just a little bit at odds with the cod-medievalism of traditional Dungeons & Dragons—and certainly, of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition.

The adventure takes place in the far south amidst a mountainous jungle region. The Scarlet Brotherhood, a 1999 supplement for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Second Edition, would later set the module in the mountains south of the Pelisso Swamp in Hepmonaland in the World of Greyhawk. The supplement would also identify the Forbidden City as Xuxuleito and place it in Xaro mountains and previously ruled by Batmen and Olman before the Yuan-ti as detailed in I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City. From this region come reports of bandits waylaying and attacking caravans, the few survivors from the ambushed merchants and guards letting slip tales of strange flora and dangerous fauna, but having no idea as to who took the goods or where. Certainly the goods have not appeared in the markets since, so the question is, where have they been taken and by whom? Further, since the goods included singular pieces of treasure, including books, scrolls, and other items, all of them identifiable and valuable, somewhere to the south, someone is sitting on a hoard of treasure. This has been enough to spur multiple parties of adventurers to venture south into the jungles, though again, little has been heard of them since. The latest band of adventurers to travel south in search of these riches are the Player Characters, who after a long and perilous journey, have reached a village home to native people who are both friendly and happy to share information about the dangers of the surrounding jungle. The village chief tells them of creatures called the Yuan-ti and their servants, the Tasloi, lamenting that they recently kidnapped his son before retreating back into the jungle. The village shaman also warns them about a ‘forbidden city’ that lies deep in the jungle, which the village inhabitants believe houses the ghosts of their dead enemies. In return for their rescuing his son, the village chief will provide guides to the entrances to the ‘Land of the Demon-men’, but will go no further.

From here, there are two stages to I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City. The first is getting into the city. The second is exploring the city. Five entrances to the city are described. Some are mere paragraphs, simple descriptions of how the Player Characters might use vines or a tall tree to climb or lower themselves down into the valley below, but two are detailed entrances into the valley. Both are long tunnels, mostly linear in nature, consisting of ten or so locations. Both are notoriously challenging, but for different reasons. The Forgotten Entrance is guarded by the Yuan-ti and their minions, the bugbears, and features two grand set pieces. One makes sense, the other does not. The encounter which makes sense is a great swinging or rope bridge across a chasm, guarded by Tasloi on an upper platform who will fling rocks down onto the Player Characters as they make their way across. The bridge is sturdy enough, but if it takes enough damage, it will splinter and fall, dropping everyone on it to the bottom of the chasm. This will inflict the maximum amount of dice rolled for falling damage—probably enough to kill most of the Player Characters. Despite this potentially total party killing—and thus scenario ending—outcome, this is a grand, pulpy encounter, much like the end of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (though of course, that was not released until 1984).

The encounter which makes far less sense takes place in the Hall of Meditation. Here the Player Characters must get through a locked door in order to proceed on towards the city, but the key has been locked in a chest to prevent the Bugbear guards from simply deserting their post. In order to make even more difficult for the Bugbears to get hold of, the chest has been stuck upside down on the ceiling in an anti-gravity sphere, and is not only locked, but trapped with fear gas. Rungs on the ceiling enable the Bugbears, the Yuan-ti, or the Player Characters to swing out to the anti-gravity sphere and the chest. The intention is that if the trap is triggered and the saving throw failed against the fear gas, the Player Characters will run away, out of the anti-gravity sphere, and thus fall to the floor and take damage. Which is a clever trap, but it makes no sense in context as it simply blocks the Bugbears from attempting to warn their Yuan-ti masters against any intruders, such as the Player Characters. The whole encounter feels much more like an excerpt from a funhouse or death trap dungeon rather than a logical piece of design for this adventure. The encounter, and indeed, the whole tunnel entrance, is in fact, a holdover from the origins of I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City as a tournament module and can be better viewed as the next stage in a competitive event, presenting the Player Characters with a puzzle or thinking challenge rather than another combat encounter. The tournament origins are further emphasised by the fact that the chief’s son—whom the Player Characters have agreed to rescue—can be found outside the exit into the city at the far end of the forgotten entrance. In effect, the culmination of the tournament would be the Player Characters rescuing the chief’s son, thus marking their ultimate success.

The other tunnel entrance, the Main Entrance, does not lead to where the chief’s son is and is wilder in tone and in content, having fewer guards to encounter, but nevertheless still very dangerous. In fact, it is very dangerous from the start. The very first encounter in the Main Entrance tunnel will be with an Aboleth—the very first encounter with an Aboleth in Dungeons & Dragons!—and it is a tough encounter. Worshipped by the Mongrelmen of the Forbidden City as a god, the Aboleth has four attacks that can inflict a disease which turns the victim’s skin membranous, inflicting further damage if not kept wet, and which takes a Cure Disease spell to deal with. So the Player Characters need to have a Cleric or Druid who can cast Third Level spells amongst their number. Then, the Aboleth also has Psionics, which is a serious problem for the Player Characters if they do not have them. The other encounters in the Main Entrance tunnel are not necessarily as tough, but they are challenging, and when compared with the Forgotten Entrance, there is much more logic to them. One of the more entertaining encounters is with a Xorn who is not interested in attacking the Player Characters, but wants food—ideally precious metals—before it will let them pass. This presents a fun roleplaying challenge and a monster with much less of a lethal motivation.

Whatever route the Player Characters take into the city, what they discover is a set of vast ruins stretching across a steeply walled rift valley in the mountains, one part of it under a swamp. Just as the vista has opened up after the linear nature of the tunnels, so too, do the play options of I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City. Here is where the module’s inspiration of Red Nails comes into play, although Dashiell Hammett’s novel Red Harvest, Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, and Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, all have similar set-ups. The Forbidden City is home to several factions—Bullywugs and their god, a Pan Lung dragon, the Tasloi and their Bugbear minions, and the Mongrelmen. At the heart of it is Horan, an evil Magic-User, who resides in a compound in the city almost like a Bond villain, and who has been manipulating the factions in an attempt to control them all and take power. Ultimately, it is Horan who is responsible for directing the attacks by the Yuan-ti.

Although there is no great metaplot or story line to I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City, the broad idea is that the Player Characters will set up camp in the city and begin investigating, dealing with the factions in turn, and ideally, either leading one or more against the others, or driving them to attack the others. Typically, this will be during the day when the city is quiet, whilst the Player Characters rest and hold up in their hopefully defensible base of operations when the inhabitants of the city are active at night. How the characters go about this is up to their players, and they could easily ignore this in favour of taking out the factions one-by-one. To support whatever course of action the players and their characters decide to take, locations are described for each of the city’s factions—the Bullywugs, the Tasloi, the Bugbears, and the Mongrelmen. Some of these are more detailed than others in terms of story and plot. For example, if the Mongrelmen capture the Player Characters, they are expected to select a champion from amongst their number and wrestle the Mongrelmen chieftain to the death, or go willingly as sacrifices to the Mongrelmen god. If the champion wins, he becomes the new Mongrelmen chieftain, and is expected to lead them, for all intents and purposes, a hostage. Amongst the Bugbears is Shruzgrap, a rebellious and deceitful young warrior, who wants to be chief of his tribe and who offer to make a deal with the Player Characters if they help him. Of course, if they do, he will betray them.

In addition, I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City offers four backgrounds or reasons to use the Forbidden City in campaign play and four adventure ideas. The former include merchants hiring the Player Characters to investigate and put a stop to the raids as detailed in the background to the module, rescuing victims kidnapped from the surrounding lands, scouting and clearing the city ahead of an invasion, and recovering important papers stolen from a courier before other interested parties do. The adventure ideas include investigating the city’s sewer systems, home to jungle-ghouls, demonic leaders, and the fabulous, lost temple of Ranet; stopping a vile tentacular creature from another plane which the Yuan-ti have summoned and begun to worship from destroying the city; investigating and destroying a spy network which is organising the raids on the caravans—this idea will take the Player Characters out of the Forbidden City; and being thrown back in time to explore the city before its fall…

Rounding out I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City are the complete stats and writeups of the new monsters presented in its pages—the Aboleth, the Mongrelmen, the Tasloi, and the Yuan-ti. Also included are stats for the Pan Lung and the Yellow Musk Creeper from the Fiend Folio. Finally, there is a roster of ready-to-play Player Characters, the first six of these having been used in the original tournament of the module.

Physically, I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City is a mix of the good and the bad. Errol Otus’ front cover depicting a desperate fight between a Bullywug and Fighter with the Fighter in its clutches and drives his sword into its belly as a Gnome Wizard blasts another Bullywug in the background is superb. In fact, all of the artwork is excellent in the module. In general, the module is well written and presented, though some of the monster descriptions and stats are repeated in the main body of the text, and the individual maps of the locations in the city are nice and clear. However, the map of the city itself is difficult to read, despite it being a stunning piece.

I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City is a module with a huge number of problems. In terms of its most basic design, it has a split personality between the tournament play elements (with advice how to run the entrance tunnels as a tournament, but not the means, since the module is not part of the part of the ‘C’ or Competition series of scenarios) and the sandbox aspect once the Player Characters are in the Forbidden City. The former is highly detailed where the latter is not, the former has the players pushed in one direction, whereas the latter does not. Now whilst at least one of the encounters in the tunnels makes sense, the actual city is underwritten, with little description as to its current state or background as to its origins or who its original inhabitants were, with only the bases for each of the factions receiving any real attention or detail. And of those factions, the Yuan-ti suffer from the same issue. The module also treats its NPCs badly, few of them being named—even at the start the unnamed chieftain is not given the name of his son (when he is found, it is given as Zur), and few of the monstrous NPCs are named. So Shruzgrap the Bugbear is, as is the shaman who will secretly support him, but not the chieftain he wants to overthrow. Further, even the one named NPC in the scenario who will readily come to the Player Characters’ aid, an Elf Magic-User who is the only survivor from a previous expedition, has an unpleasant manner which will only serve to at least annoy the Player Characters, if not completely drive them off. Of course, none of her former companions are named.

Worse, I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City ignores the primary reason for the Player Characters to travel as far south as the Forbidden City—the treasure from the caravans. It is completely omitted from the scenario, leaving a motivation to be unfulfilled. And without that, once the chieftain’s son has been rescued, there remains little motivation for the Player Characters to stay in the city. Now, there are plenty of potential motivations and adventure ideas given at the end of the module, but these are not used in the module as written despite the fact that they are infinitely more interesting than the very basic ones of searching for treasure (which does not exist) and rescuing the chieftain’s son given at the beginning of the module. As a consequence of their not being written into the module, there are no sewer systems filled with jungle-ghouls, no lost temple of Ranet, no temple to tentacular thing from another plane, no spy network, no travel back to explore the city in its prime, and so on.

The fact is, I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City is begging for all of these—and more. The module is begging for development, for the input of the Dungeon Master, and then the players and their characters. The scope for development and thus for storytelling and adventure in I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City is huge, but like that potential, the tools to do so are all too often severely underwritten.

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I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City was extensively reviewed at the time of its release. Anders Swenson reviewed it in Different Worlds Issue 16 (November 1981) and was in the main positive about the module, concluding that, “Overall, the module is a good buy – there is a lot of interesting text crammed into the pages, and most of it is useful right off. The Forbidden City can be played as written, and if you want to jazz it up, so much the better.”

However, Gerry Klug, writing in ‘RP Gaming’ in Ares Magazine, Number 12 (January 1982) was not as positive. He described I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City as being, “…[I]llconceived, disorganized and, in some places, so ridiculous as to make me think TSR has lost editorial control over their product.” before lamenting, “TSR has set a standard in the FRP-ing community which the rest try to keep up with. If Dwellers of the Forbidden City is any indication of what is coming, they may not live up to their own standards. E. Gary Gygax, where are you?” (With thanks to Luca Alexander Volpino for access to Ares Magazine, Number 12.)

Writing in Open Box in White Dwarf #40 (April, 1983), Jim Bambra gave I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City average scores for playability, enjoyment, skill, and complexity, before giving it an overall score of five out of ten, and said, “To give the module its due it does offer a mini-campaign setting and many ideas of how to expand it. Any DMs using it, however, are going to have to put in a lot of work to make it more than a series of encounters and you’re prepared to this you may as well design your own from scratch!”. He concluded by saying that “… I1 is just not worth considering.” (With thanks to Emma Marlow for access to White Dwarf #40.)

More recently, I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City was included in ‘The 30 Greatest D&D Adventures of All Time’ in the ‘Dungeon Design Panel’ in Dungeon #116 (November 2004). It was ranked at number thirteen with Eric L. Boyd describing it as classic adventure in which Cook created a “[L]ost city jungle in the great tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs” and “The PCs can battle their way into the city through a labyrinth of traps and monsters or find their own way into the sprawling, jungle-cloaked ruins... Cook provides a host of backgrounds to motivate exploration of the city, but the map itself is inspiration enough.” Wolfgang Baur, editor of Dungeon magazine, added, “This adventure may be best remembered for its monsters—it was from Forbidden City that D&D gained the Aboleth, the mongrel-man, the tasloi, and the yuan-ti. The aboleth that guarded one of the entrances to the city was worshipped by the local mongrelmen as a god.”(With thanks to Paul Baldwin for access to Dungeon #113.)

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Wolfgang Baur is right to suggest that the module is best remembered for its monsters. Of course, it is memorable for introducing the Aboleth, the Yuan-ti, and other monsters, but I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City is neither a classic, nor does not deserve its revered status, and it certainly does not deserve to rate as high as thirteen on the list of greatest Dungeons & Dragons adventures of all time by Dungeon magazine for the thirtieth anniversary of the Dungeons & Dragons. As written, it simply is not that good, its tournament versus sandbox style of play giving it a split personality and its sandbox elements severely underwritten and underdeveloped in far too many places for the Dungeon Master to bring to the table and make playable without undertaking a great deal of development work. Yet if she can, there is a fantastic adventure to be got out of I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City, the setting has both Lovecraftian and Pulp sensibilities—the Yuan-ti essentially being Robert E. Howard’s Serpent Men, and the factions, the plots, and the setting are all ripe for development, such that it could form the basis of its own sandbox mini-campaign. There is room aplenty in the Forbidden City for this and more, including the Dungeon Master adding factions and locations of her own, whether that is in caves along the wall of the valley, in or underneath the ruined buildings of the city, and even outside of the city. This suggests then that I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City is ripe for another visitation and development, expanding upon what author David Cook began with, and notably, Wizards of the Coast would do this with Tomb of Annihilation for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, a campaign which would work in S1 Tomb of Horrors as part of the Forbidden City.

Ultimately, if I1 Dwellers of the Forbidden City is remembered as a classic for more than its monsters, it is not because of what is written on the page, but because of what the Dungeon Master did to make the adventure playable—and what she had to do to make it playable.

Now in its fourteenth year, Free RPG Day in 2021, after a little delay due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, took place on Saturday, 16th October. As per usual, it came with an array of new and interesting little releases, which traditionally would have been 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. Of course, in 2021, Free RPG Day took place after GenCon despite it also taking place later than its traditional start of August dates, but Reviews from R’lyeh was able to gain access to the titles released on the day due to a friendly local gaming shop and both Keith Mageau and David Salisbury of Fan Boy 3 in together sourcing and providing copies of the Free RPG Day 2020 titles. Reviews from R’lyeh would like to thank all three for their help.

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Paizo Inc. has always been supportive of Free RPG Day, typically donating scenarios for Pathfinder, typically involving goblins, and more recently, for its Science Fiction counterpart, Starfinder as well. The contribution for Free RPG Day 2021 for Pathfinder Second Edition is Threshold of Knowledge, a short adventure for First Level Player Characters. It comes with five pre-generated characters and can be played in a single session, but does feel a little long for a standard four hour session in comparison to a typical Paizo five hour session. To play through Threshold of Knowledge, the Game Master requires just copies of Pathfinder Second Edition and the Pathfinder Bestiary.

Threshold of Knowledge takes place at the prestigious Magaambya, the oldest school of magic in the Inner Sea region and in the nearby city of Nantambu. The Player Characters are prospective students at the Magaambya, undertaking training with Teacher Takulu Ot who is their sponsor. His initial task is for Player Characters to become part of the community and the first step in that is to help Alandri, a local fisherwoman, with whatever tasks she asks of them. This means going out into Nantambu and down to the canal where she wants them to fish for her. On the way, another student challenges them to a race to get to her stall. Presented as a series of challenges using a variety of skills and player ingenuity, this is not actually a good start to the scenario. Whilst there is no doubt that students might engage in such a race, there is no real benefit to it in terms of the story to Threshold of Knowledge, especially since when the Player Characters arrive at Alandri’s house, the first thing says is, “You’re late.”—and that is whether they win or lose the race. It feels artificial and forced, more a case of the adventure setting out to teach the players how to roll dice and use their characters’ skills than anything else. Certainly, if the Game Master wanted to shorten Threshold of Knowledge, then this section could easily be excised and the players be left none the wiser.

Fortunately, after that, Threshold of Knowledge settles down and gets on with its plot. Alandri has the Player Characters fish for her—and the intimation is that the Player Characters will be doing this daily for the first year or so of study at the Magaambya—but not with either net or rod, but by diving into the canal! This is much more fun and intriguing than the earlier race and it foreshadows events to come later in the scenario. The plot really triggers when the Player Characters return to the Magaambya. Teacher Ot’s office is awash with water and he himself is missing! The clues lead to a store room elsewhere in the Magaambya and from there back to the canal and back again to the Magaambya. There is a puzzle for the Player Characters to solve first, a series of tunnels and a grotto to explore, and some semi-aquatic combat encounters to overcome. Of these, the puzzle is the most difficult challenge to handle and will need careful study upon the part of the Game Master to really understand and then impart with her players. There are some fun encounters here, such as with a shark gliding across the floor of a partially flooded library!

To accompany the adventure, Threshold of Knowledge includes five pre-generated Player Characters. These consist of an Ekujae Elf Monk, a Human Fighter, a Grippli Rogue, a Human Cleric, and a Half-Orc Sorcerer. 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, especially if the Game Master is planning to run a campaign set at the Magaambya. Otherwise though, these are a decently diverse range of characters. In addition, there is a selection of magical items and spells, such Gritty Wheeze, an exhalation of abrasive sand and grit, which appear in the scenario.

Physically, Threshold of Knowledge 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.

Threshold of Knowledge is perhaps a little long and perhaps does not handle its single puzzle as well as it could have done, but it is a very 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. As written, Threshold of Knowledge is a good introduction for Pathfinder Second Edition or a good starting adventure for a campaign based at the Magaambya.

Now in its fourteenth year, Free RPG Day in 2021, after a little delay due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, took place on Saturday, 16th October. As per usual, it came with an array of new and interesting little releases, which traditionally would have been 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. Of course, in 2021, Free RPG Day took place after GenCon despite it also taking place later than its traditional start of August dates, but Reviews from R’lyeh was able to gain access to the titles released on the day due to a friendly local gaming shop and both Keith Mageau and David Salisbury of Fan Boy 3 in together sourcing and providing copies of the Free RPG Day 2020 titles. Reviews from R’lyeh would like to thank all three for their help.

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For Free RPG Day 2021, Modiphius Entertainment released not one, but three titles, two for existing roleplaying games, one for a forthcoming title. The first for the existing roleplaying game the Star Trek: Adventures Quick-Start, an introduction to Star Trek Adventures, the tenth roleplaying game to be licensed or at least derived from that Science Fiction intellectual property. As with other quick-starts, it provides an explanation of the rules, a complete adventure, and six ready-to-play Player Characters. All of which comes in a full colour—or is that full black?—thematically perfect LCARS pastel shades and layout on deep black, with the pre-generated Player Characters presented on a white background for easy printing. All the Game Master has to do is find some tokens, some twenty-sided dice, and some six-sided dice, and she has everything she needs to run the adventure in the Star Trek Adventures Quick-Start.

A Player Character in Star Trek Adventures is defined by Attributes, Disciplines, Focuses, Values, Traits, Talents, and Values. The six Attributes—Control, Daring, Fitness, Insight, Presence, and Reason—represent ways of or approaches to doing things as well as intrinsic capabilities. They are rated between seven and twelve. The six Disciplines—Command, Conn, Engineering, Security, Science, and Medicine—are skills, knowledges, and areas of training representing the wide roles aboard a starship. They are rated between one and five. Focuses represent narrow areas of study or skill specialities, for example, Astrophysics, Xenobiology, or Warp Field Dynamics. Traits and Talents represent anything from what a character believes, is motivated by, intrinsic abilities, ways of doing things, and so on. They come from a character’s species, upbringing, training, and life experience, for example, Trill (representing their ability withstand parasites and serve as a host to Symbionts), a character having undertaken the Kolinahr, his approach to Science (Cautious), and so on. A character’s attitudes, beliefs, and convictions are represented by their Values, such as Kirk’s ‘Doesn’t believe in a No-Win Situation’, which can be triggered to provide various benefits by spending a character’s Determination points.

Star Trek Adventures employs the 2d20 System first used in the publisher’s Mutant Chronicles: Techno Fantasy Roleplaying Game and Robert E. Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of, and since developed into the publisher’s house system. To undertake an action, a character’s player rolls two twenty-sided dice, aiming to have both roll under the total of an Attribute and a Discipline. 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 character has an appropriate Focus, rolls under the value of the Discipline 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 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 Gamemaster 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 star symbols and Starfleet insignia 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 Starfleet insignia symbols rolled indicate an effect as well as the damage. In keeping with the tone of the various series, weapon damage can be deadly, melee or hand-to-hand, less so. Rules cover stun settings and of course, diving for cover, whilst a lovely reinforcement of the genre is that killing attacks generate Threat to add to the Game Master’s pool.

The rules themselves in the Star Trek Adventures Quick-Start take up half of its pages, covering basics as well conflict resolution and suggestions as to Momentum expenditures. They do not cover starships or starship combat. Nor do they need to, since neither feature in the accompanying adventure. ‘Signals’ is an away mission set in the default setting for Star Trek Adventures, the Shackleton Expanse, and during the Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine time periods. (However, an experienced Game Master who has access to the core rules for Star Trek Adventures could easily adjust it to take place during the other two time periods for the roleplaying game, Star Trek: Enterprise and Star Trek: The Original Series, or even set it elsewhere.)

‘Signals’ is a mystery involving plenty of action. The Player Characters are an away team assigned to locate a missing runabout, the Susquehanna, which was investigating an alien signal deep in the Shackleton Expanse and has not been heard from. Her last known location was the planet of Seku VI and it is here that the adventure begins with the Player Characters beaming down to the surface. From there it quickly throws the away team into the action—the Romulans have got there first! Once the team has dealt with them, it can follow the signal and discover a colonist settlement and the source of the alien signal. The source is detailed, but not the how and the why, so the Game Master is free to develop what the purpose of the alien sign and also improvise the conclusion to the mission. If there is an issue, there really is only the one scene where players get to roll their character’s Science skills, and there is a strong emphasis in the scenario on combat (to the point where ‘Signals’ seems almost better suited to Star Trek: The Original Series than Star Trek: The Next Generation). Overall though, it is a decent scenario and does a good job of showcasing the rules to Star Trek Adventures.

To go with the adventure, the Star Trek Adventures Quick-Start provides a sextet of pre-generated Player Characters. All six are Star Fleet officers, and include a Bajoran First Officer, a Human Conn Officer, an Andorian Chief of Security, a Trill (with Symbiote) Chief Engineer, a Denobulan Science Officer, and a Vulcan Medical Officer. They are all well presented and easy to read, although three members of the away team have Talents which require them to be aboard ship to use, whilst the Conn Officer has three Talents related to piloting and ‘Signals’ does not involve either starships or shuttles. What this means is that the Conn Officer should not really be used as it will be difficult to bring her into play.

Physically, the Star Trek Adventures Quick-Start is well presented and easy to use. The artwork is excellent, and includes a number of illustrations which depict scenes from the scenario. That said, it is not as sturdy as it could be as it does not have a card cover. Nevertheless, the Star Trek Adventures Quick-Start is a solid introduction to Star Trek Adventures, providing an excellent explanation of the core rules and showcasing them in a reasonably good adventure.

For fans of Tales from the Loop – Roleplaying in the '80s That Never Was and Things from the Flood, the roleplaying games based on the paintings of Simon Stålenhag, as well as 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 Puppy Love.

Puppy Love 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 lots of Mats and puppies, plus 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.

The scenario begins at the start of the new school year, with the Player Characters all eager to return and catch up with friends at least, if not necessarily return to their lessons. However, on their way to school they spot two things. First, posters for a missing puppy belonging to a boy at school, Mats, and then further along and second, the missing puppy, Petra. Problem solved then. All the Player Characters have to do is take Petra back to Mats when they see him at school. Except, when they get there, Mats is nowhere to be found, and oddly, another pupil, the popular, but catty Doris, also has a puppy—a puppy which almost looks like Petra! What is going on? Is there more than one Petra or just more than one puppy? Where did Doris’ puppy come from? Where is Mats and is his puppy still missing?

The scenario takes an even odder turn—no surprise there, given that it is for Tales from the Loop—when the Player Characters attempt to find Mats. For when they get to his house, they find not Mats, but Mats and Mats. Two of them! Really what is going on?

Of course it has to do with the Facility for Research in High Energy Physics—or ‘The Loop’—the world’s largest particle accelerator, constructed and run by the government agency, Riksenergi, and since shut down. The question is how and then how do the Player Characters get in? Actually the latter is relatively easy, but the former will take a little more investigation. The actual difficulty comes in interacting and dealing with Mats—multiples of them, because all of them are slightly different and slightly wrong. The Game Master is accorded a pair of tables to randomly determine the appearance and personality of each Mats, though the scenario does come with a warning because the personality traits are potentially a little extreme for what is still a little boy.

Physically, Puppy Love is decently presented with the usual plot diagram for Tales from the Loop scenarios, nicely done artwork for each the scenario’s NPCs, and clear maps of the location for the scenario’s denouement. It is also well written and easy to read.

Although Puppy Love is set in Sweden on Mälaröarna, the islands of Lake Mälaren, which lies to the west of Stockholm, which is the site of the Facility for Research in High Energy Physics—or ‘The Loop’, it actually has an English sensibility to it. There is a mystery, and this being a scenario for Tales from the Loop, a countdown which escalates the situation, there is no real threat, and so it has the feel of Children’s Film Foundation television series or film. Certainly as weird as having multiple Mats and Petras is, having multiple Petras gives it a certain cosiness or cuteness.
Puppy Love presents a thoroughly charming, even cute mystery for Tales from the Loop. It is easy to add to a campaign and just as easy to use as a demonstration or convention scenario.

Magic plays a vital role in the world of Glorantha and thus RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. Characters—both Player Characters and NPCs—commonly have access to magic, typically Rune magic and Spirit magic. The manifestation of the former represents the connection between the mortal world and the realm of the gods, between Age of Time and God Time, and bringing of the power the gods into the mundane realm, whilst the manifestation of the latter is the result of communicating with the spirits found in world’s natural energies. Rune magic is the more powerful of the two and characters have only limited access to it, whereas Spirit magic can be more freely cast to limited effect. What that means in terms of gameplay is that every player needs to know what his character’s spells do and every Game Master what her NPCs’ spells do. This is where The Red Book of Magic comes to the fore.

The Red Book of Magic, however, is much more than just a big list of spells. Published by Chaosium, Inc., it is in fact two big lists of spells—one for Rune magic and Spirit magic—and then some more. Between the two lists it details some five hundred and more spells, almost four-hundred-and-fifty Rune spells and almost seventy Spirit magic, of which over one-hundred-and-fifty Rune magic spells and over thirty Spirit magic spells that are new to RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. Further, there is an explanation of spell terminology, explanations of how both types of magic are cast and work—and appear, sound, and feel to work when cast, discussion of rituals, and more. The coverage though is wholly upon Rune and Spirit magic rather than either Sorcery. Doubtless, it will receive its own supplement, as may Shamanism—which of course uses Spirit magic, but its greater effects are more than just simple Spirit magic, and of course, a book devoted to Rune magic and Spirit magic, like The Red Book of Magic, has greater utility in RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha.

Within Glorantha itself, The Red Book of Magic is an important magical text, consisting of fragments of the Red Revised Book, itself based on the much earlier Red Book, penned by Zzabur the Sorcerer Supreme. The Red Revised Book was the first work to separate Rune magic from Spirit magic, and to codify numerous different spells with near-identical effects, for example, Bladesharp or Heal, into a common spell with a simple and widely accepted descriptive name. It is supplemented by the Carmanian mystic Hepherones’ Statement of Magic, which serves to add colour before going into detail, but in effect, what this means that The Red Book of Magic is a resource in game and out, and thus any character–and thus his player or her Game Master—could consult its pages (barring technicalities such as literacy of course). Most of all though, with descriptions of hundreds of spells, The Red Book of Magic is a simple and accessible resource to have at the table, its size making it a lot easier to reference than the RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha rulebook.

In the pages of the RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha rulebook there is an emphasis upon the Rune spells known by the cults associated by the Lightbringers, which is understandable given their prominence in Sartar and its surrounds, the default setting for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. The Red Revised Book expands greatly upon that list of spells, with lots of new Rune spells associated with the Beast, Chaos, Fire, and Plant Runes. So for example, Butterflight is a Beast spell grants the caster the wings of the butterfly and the ability to fly, and Summon Insect Swarm enables the caster to summon swarms of insects of various sizes, depending upon the Rune points stacked into the spell; Bat Wings is a Moon and Chaos spell which grants bat’s wings to members of the cult of the Crimson Bat and Devour Book a Chaos spell which enables the caster to rip the knowledge from books, scrolls, and even carvings; Arrow of Light is a Fire spell which inflicts one six-sided die’s worth of damage direct to the target’s Hit Points ignoring armour if his POW is overcome and Destroy Clouds clears the immediate sky of clouds; and Chameleon is a Plant spell which increases the caster’s Hide skill and lets him use it when moving and Plant Spy turns any plant it is cast on into a remote spy, transmitting sound and touch to caster from its leaves. Similarly, there are numerous spells for the Darkness, Illusion, and Water Runes.

Spirit magic is given a similar treatment, again exploring how it is cast and works—and then appears, sounds, and feels to work when cast, and so on, before detailing its descriptions. Fun new spells given here include Hotfoot, which causes a burning sensation in the target’s strong enough that they cannot stand upon it, Sneeze which inflicts a nearly incapacitating sneezing fit on the target, and Solace, which relieves the mental distress in a target. In comparison with the Rune magic spells, the Spirit magic spells, certainly the new ones, feel less useful, because every Rune spell description includes its associated Runes, and therefore it is actually easier to link them to their casters and their cults, whether that is Plant Rune spells for Aldryami, the Chaos Rune for various vile Chaos worshippers as well as Lunar worshippers, and the Darkness Rune for Trolls.

The other reason why The Red Book of Magic is a useful resource is that in addition to presenting new spells adds a handful of new rules and other elements. This includes rules for creating new Rune spells, which when combined with the wide range of Rune spells in the supplement, could be used by the Game Master to create her own cults for her game; the addition of monsters like the War Tree (which requires the Plant Rune spells Animate War Tree and Create War Tree to create and control) and Manlings (Chaotic humanoids which bud from the caster of the spell, Spawn Manling); a guide to Rune metals and their properties; how illusions work with the various Illusion Rune spells such as Illusory Sight and Illusory Substance; and the collection and use of healing plants. In addition, many of the spells previously presented in other supplements and scenarios for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha have been revisited and revised—not such that they function differently, but rather to provide clarity. For example, the Heal Wound Rune spell is accorded supplementary information that not only clarifies its function, but explains how it works from cult to cult.

The Red Book of Magic is not without its issues. One is that there is no list of Rune magic spells, when there is a list of Spirit magic spells. In part, this is understandable. The list of Spirit magic spells is less than a page long whereas such a list of Rune magic spells runs to forty pages (the Rune Spell Reference Tables are available for free download as well as accompanying the PDF for the supplement), and that would increase the book’s page count by a third. Similarly, there is no list of spells by cult for either Rune magic or Spirit. Again, its inclusion would have greatly increased the page count. Yet its inclusion would have been undoubtedly useful, helping Game Master and player link the various spells to the cults and thus to Glorantha as a setting. Plus it would also have made it easier to cross reference with the forthcoming Gods of Glorantha supplement. Ultimately this is not to say that The Red Book of Magic is a bad or useless supplement because it lacks either of those lists, far from it. Rather, that their inclusion would have not only enhanced the utility of what is already a very useful supplement, but gone beyond that into making it indispensable.

Physically, The Red Book of Magic is on par with the standards set by previous releases for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. It is clearly written and easy to read, which after all, was the point, and it is decently illustrated.
At its most basic, The Red Book of Magic is a serviceable supplement to have at the gaming table during play, a book to refer to when the RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha core rulebook is in use, and away from the gaming table, for reference by the Game Master. It is very much a useful rather than a must-have supplement, that is, at its time of publication. The usefulness of The Red Book of Magic is going to grow and grow as more supplements are released for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. Not just the forthcoming Gods of Glorantha, but future supplements devoted to the Aldryami, to Trolls, and to the Lunar Empire, for example, with The Red Book of Magic serving as the corollary or magic companion to the new supplement. (And that does not include the many titles available on the Jonstown Compendium.) Right now, The Red Book of Magic is undoubtedly useful, but for the future of your Glorantha game, it is an investment.

The Darkness Over Eaglescar – A Modern Day Call of Cthulhu Scenario is the tenth scenario from publisher Stygian Fox. Although the title suggests that it is a modern-day scenario for use with Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, it is actually set in 1999. It is also set in England’s north-east, in the fictional coastal town of Eaglescar. What this means is that it has a certain English seaside town ambiance that certainly British Keepers and players will enjoy. Despite the specifics of the setting, The Darkness Over Eaglescar can easily be adapted to the setting and period of the Keeper’s choice, whether that is the Purple Decade of Cthulhu by Gaslight or the Jazz Age of Call of Cthulhu, or indeed, updated to a more contemporary period. With some adjustment the scenario could be adapted to run using Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game.
Designed for roughly four investigators and to provide two sessions or so’s worth of play, The Darkness Over Eaglescar begins with the Investigators being contacted by an old friend, Georgina Angler. She believes that her teenage daughter, Cassandra, is in trouble, having become involved with some shady characters, and she suspects, drugs, as well, and wants the Investigators’ help in finding her. Georgina will point to one of the business owners on the esplanade as someone who might know more, and he indicates two further leads, one a local drug dealer, the other a sea front fortune teller. Both will point towards the Voice of the Machine, a local New Age cult run by Eleanor X. Researching her reveals that her parents were members of a seventies hippie cult, The Children of the Vortex. This cult was notorious for its drug dealing, the exploitation of its members, and ultimately, the stabbing and murder of its founder. Background on the cult can be discovered by research at the local library and Eleanor X herself, will contact the Investigators to reassure them that Cassandra is fine. However, the cult leader will not let them see the missing girl.

Ultimately, the Investigators will need to investigate the cult’s properties and possible links between The Children of the Vortex and the Voice of the Machine. The latter will probably involve the Investigators having to commit a couple of acts of breaking and entering, which presents its own challenges in a small town, suburban environment. In doing so, they will likely be involved in one or more violent confrontations, and perhaps rescue Cassandra.

In terms of its horror, The Darkness Over Eaglescar is a scenario with a very human face. The Investigators will not be confronting any of the traditional elements of the Mythos, and to be fair, not really confronting the Mythos directly, more its effects upon the members of the cult. This will come primarily in a pair of intentionally surprisingly violent encounters, but depending upon what the Investigators discover, they may be able to get hold of another means to thwart the cult—a more magical means.

The Darkness Over Eaglescar is a relatively short adventure and although the players and their Investigators do not know it, they are up against a time limit. The players will need to use their Investigators’ time with some care, but unless they really waste it, they should be able to conduct their inquiries with alacrity. In fact, there are few plot strands to follow in the scenario, so the given timeline could be effectively collapsed into a couple of days or so and the scenario run in a single session as a convention scenario. However, that would be quite tight in its plotting. The alternative would be to reduce the number of Investigators—the scenario could be played with just two and still work.

The scenario is decently supported with a handful of handouts, some of which are really very good. Likewise, some of the artwork is also very good. Similarly, The Darkness Over Eaglescar is a very good-looking scenario, but unfortunately, looks can be deceiving. The cartography looks good, but feels a little odd in the design of its two houses. Plus, why is there no map of the Eaglescar itself? Then there are several element crashes between the scenario’s images and handouts and the text. This is not enough to make the text totally unreadable, but it is unnecessarily challenging. In addition, and although it is not as bad in previous releases from the publisher, The Darkness Over Eaglescar is further indication that Stygian Fox Publishing is still very much in need of a professional editor.

Let down by disappointing production values, The Darkness Over Eaglescar includes a decent mix of investigation and interaction, as well as some surprisingly violent scenes—ones that if played in the scenario’s British setting, the Investigators will probably be unprepared and ill-equipped to deal with. A more than serviceable scenario, The Darkness Over Eaglescar neatly captures the faded ambiance of the British seaside town, but is flexible enough to be set elsewhere and else when.

Mutant Crawl Classics #11: The Omnivary of Eden is the eleventh release for Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game – Triumph & Technology Won by Mutants & Magic, the spiritual successor to Gamma World published by Goodman Games. Designed for Second Level player characters, what this means is that Mutant Crawl Classics #11: The Omnivary of Eden is not a Character Funnel, one of the signature features of both the Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game and the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game it is mechanically based upon—in which initially, a player is expected to roll up three or four Level Zero characters and have them play through a generally nasty, deadly adventure, which surviving will prove a challenge. Those that do survive receive enough Experience Points to advance to First Level and gain all of the advantages of their Class. In terms of the setting, known as Terra A.D., or ‘Terra After Disaster’, this is a ‘Rite of Passage’ and in Mutants, Manimals, and Plantients, the stress of it will trigger ‘Metagenesis’, their DNA expressing itself and their mutations blossoming forth. By the time the Player Characters in Mutant Crawl Classics #11: The Omnivary of Eden have  reached Second Level, they will have had numerous adventures, should have understanding as to how their mutant powers and how at least some of the various weapons, devices, and artefacts of the Ancients they have found work and can use on their future adventures.
The set-up for Mutant Crawl Classics #11: The Omnivary of Eden casts the Player Characters as members of the tribe known as ‘The Ones Who Dig’. For centuries, the tribe has been digging deep into the ground and has finally broken into an underground complex built by the Ancient Ones. This is the long-buried entrance to the Garden of the Gods, which is said to be the repository of the Seeds of Creation, the seeds and biological records of all life of Terra A.D. from before the Great Disaster. It was foretold by the prophet, Boxx the Curious, that one day, a tribe would dig deep enough to locate the Earth Canoe which would take the faithful to the Garden of the Gods—and now that day has come. Unfortunately, the Player Characters are not among those deemed worthy to take the first journey in the Earth Canoe. They will be present though, when things go very wrong. Not everyone wants anything of the world before the Great Disaster restored to Terra A.D., and they would not only deny it to others, but destroy it too!.
Mutant Crawl Classics #11: The Omnivary of Eden begins with a bang and quickly throws the Player Characters into the action and then the quest. This takes them into a seed vault—a little like the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, but of course, updated for the twenty-ninth century and then turned upside down by the events of the Great Disaster. After the confrontation and the escape aboard the Earth Canoe, the majority of the scenario takes place in the seed bank, which is described in no little detail across its two levels. This detail combines weirdness of both the twenty-ninth century and Terra A.D., such as lickable walls and rabbits all with the same face of an old man, but everything is well explained. The latter is necessary because there is a lot of information to impart to the players as their characters explore the complex. This comes not just in the form of the purple text of the room descriptions, but also the secrets to be discovered by the Player Characters. Of which, there are a lot and most of which come in the form of audio-visual recordings, and as well as revealing what has been happening in the Garden of the Gods for the past three millennia do also hint about life before the Great Disaster.
Although there is some combat involved, the emphasis in Mutant Crawl Classics #11: The Omnivary of Eden is on exploration and examination of the strange place in which the Player Characters find themselves. Instead of artefacts and devices, the Player Characters will be mostly discovering secrets, and there really is very little ‘treasure’ to be found in the adventure. However, the adventure could have done with a little more combat, or at least, more threat. Mutant Crawl Classics #11: The Omnivary of Eden opens with an attack upon the ‘The Ones Who Dig’ tribe by the Gene Police, a faction of human fanatics, an attack which is problematic in terms of storytelling—not once, but three times. The first problem is that attackers successfully carry out at the beginning of the scenario and then do not appear again. Essentially, they serve as means to sabotage the expedition and get the Player Characters getting to go instead, which seems a wasted opportunity. Having set up a ‘Chekov’s Gun’ of the Gene Police attack, it seems a wasted opportunity to leave the possibility of their following the Player Characters to Garden of the Gods and attempting to destroy it, giving the adventure a greater sense of urgency in the process.
The second really stems from Mutant Crawl Classics #11: The Omnivary of Eden being written for Second Level Player Characters. It leaves both the Judge and her players to wonder what their characters were doing before the events of the scenario begin. In terms of Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game, what they were doing on their Zero Level Character Funnel, and subsequently, when they were First Level. With such questions, it leaves the scenario to be run as a one-shot, or worked with difficulty into the Judge’s own campaign, and just like Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game, there is no real advice on setting up or working the scenario into a campaign. There are no answers to the questions, “What if the Player Characters do not come from ‘The Ones Who Dig’ tribe?” and “What if there is no ‘The Ones Who Dig’ tribe?”. The third problem stems from the first two—just who are the Gene Police? The adventure describes them as having inveigled their way into the ‘The Ones Who Dig’ tribe, but does not say who they are or give them personalities. They are just treated as throwaway enemies and that seems like a wasted opportunity.
What happens after the scenario is much less of an issue, since the author includes notes for continuing Mutant Crawl Classics #11: The Omnivary of Eden. These are useful, since the discoveries to be found in the Garden of the Gods have potentially major ramifications for both the future of Terra A.D. and the Judge’s campaign. It would be nice to see these explored in a sequel to this scenario, if not multiple sequels.
Despite the issues with its set-up and follow through of that set-up, Mutant Crawl Classics #11: The Omnivary of Eden is an enjoyably detailed and entertaining adventure. It wears its inspirations openly on its sleeve—or at least in the colour gem in the palm of its right hand—and these are fun for the Judge and players alike to spot. This shows most obviously in the change in environment which the scenario undergoes as part of its story line, which is radically different to that for most scenarios for Mutant Crawl Classics #11: The Omnivary of Eden.
Physically, Mutant Crawl Classics #11: The Omnivary of Eden is nicely presented. It needs an edit in places, but is generally well written and the artwork is decent. The map is rather plain though.
Mutant Crawl Classics #11: The Omnivary of Eden is a thoroughly likeable scenario, designed to be played in two sessions or so, and full of detail and flavour. Whilst it should be fun to play as is, to get the most out of it, the Judge will need to develop more of the set-up and the consequences of the outcome of the scenario.

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: A Trek in the Marsh is a scenario for use with RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha.

It is a four page, full colour, 963.55 KB PDF.
The layout is clean and clean. It is art free, but the cartography is reasonable.
Where is it set?
GLORANTHA: The search for the Throne of Colymar is set in Sartar in the Upland Marsh. 

Who do you play?
Player Characters of all types could play this scenario, but is best suited to members of a nearby Colymar tribe or Ducks. Humakti will, of course, relish the opportunity to curb the influence of Delecti the Necromancer.

What do you need?
GLORANTHA: A Trek in the Marsh requires RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and the Glorantha Bestiary. The later is a necessity as no stats or creature or monster write-ups are included.
What do you get?GLORANTHA: A Trek in the Marsh is set on the northern edge of the Upland Marsh and presents an opportunity for a nearby tribe to reduce the great swamp’s boundaries and reclaim land lost centuries ago to the magics of Delecti the Necromancer. One of the magical rods which enforces his malign influence has been located and the local tribal chief thinks it can be removed or destroyed and so sends some trusted adventurers to deal with it.
Consisting of really only two pages, the adventure is linear, the Player Characters proceeding rom the edge of the map straight to the location of the magical rod, perhaps having an encounter or two on the way to the marsh—depending upon if they veer slightly left or slightly right. These encounters, as are the majority of the encounters in the scenario, all combat based. No NPCs are encountered or detailed in the course of the adventure. No encounter, even the encounter with the altered Dancer in the Darkness which protects the rod is accorded more than three sentences.
GLORANTHA: A Trek in the Marsh is not badly written, but very much like the earlier GLORANTHA: The search for the Throne of Colymar, it is underwritten and underdeveloped. As presented it is not a whole scenario, but rather the middle of a scenario. Despite the fact that the Player Characters are on a quest to destroy or remove a magical artefact, the artefact itself is not detailed or illustrated, and there is no information as to how the local tribal chief learned of the location of the artefact, how the artefact is removed, and what happens once the artefact is removed. In addition, the protector of is described as a combination of a Darknesselemental and a Dancer in Darkness, but stats or abilities are given, leaving the Game master to develop these herself without guidance. Omitting the stats for monsters and creatures which can be found in the Glorantha Bestiary is not wholly unreasonable, as the Game Master can easily provide these, but not providing the stats or write-up of a new combination of monster is simply nonsensical.
Similarly, the lack of set-up and consequences for the scenario, leaves the Game Master with more work than should have been necessary. The author need not have tied either to a specific tribe, but with sufficient background, the Game Master could easily have tied in both set-up and consequences to the tribe of her choice. Instead, the author leaves all of the development work to the Game Master rather than some of it.
Is it worth your time?Yes—GLORANTHA: A Trek in the Marsh contains the germ of an interesting scenario if the Game Master is willing to completely develop its set-up and consequences which its author failed to do.No—GLORANTHA: A Trek in the Marsh is a third of a scenario, no more than a series of combat encounters, in need of development in the beginning, middle, and end. Cheap, but avoidable.Maybe—GLORANTHA: A Trek in the Marsh contains the germ of an interesting scenario if the Game Master is a running a campaign in and around the Upland Marsh, and is willing to completely develop its set-up and consequences which its author failed to do.

A decade ago, on January 12th, a plague struck the world. A flu-like plague which seemed resistant to the then available treatments. Fortunately nobody died, but eleven days later, on January 23rd, all of the symptoms vanished and everyone recovered. Only later did people realise the significance of what became known as ‘Ghost Flu’ as months later, sufferers began exhibiting powers and abilities only found in mankind’s wildest imaginings and biggest cinema screen franchise. The ability to fly, phase through walls, read the minds of others, control gravity, flatten or enhance the emotions of others, and read or even enter dreams. Literally, people had superpowers. This manifestation becomes known as the ‘Sudden Mutation Event’ or ‘SME’, and in the next ten years approximately one percent of the population will manifest SME. In response, there was no rash of costumed heroes or villains, though a few tried. The most photogenic of SME suffers became celebrities, sportsmen, television and film stars, or politicians, others found jobs related to their newly gained powers, for example, a firefighter who control flames or oxygen, a transmuter who could literally turn lead into (industrial) gold, or a healer who work as a medic or doctor, and the most popular sports found ways of incorporating them into their play. Some though turned to crime, and of course, there were criminals who exhibited SME, and whilst the Heightened as they became known were mostly assimilated into society, they could still be victims of crime and they were also victims of a prejudice all their very own. For example, the Neutral Parity League campaigns against ‘Chromes’ (from ‘Chromosome’) as the Heightened are nicknamed, often violently, whilst organisations like the Heightened Information Alliance campaigns for the protection of their rights. In general, the Heightened have become one of society’s accepted minorities and most just get on with their lives.

When one of the Heightened is involved in crime—whether as victim or perpetrator—the police will investigate and handle the matter just as they would any other crime. However, most big city police forces have established a unit to specifically deal with such cases. This is the Heightened Crimes Investigation Unit (HCIU), staffed by Heightened members of the police force and tasked with investigating and solving SME related crimes, whether committed by or against SME sufferers. The HCIU also serves as a combination liaison/bulwark between the mutants and ordinary folk. The law has also adapted to take account of the prevalence of Heightened abilities. Thus investigative powers such as Observe Dreams and Read Minds require consent or a legal warrant, the use of X-Ray Vision ability must follow strict health and safety guidelines as its emits radiation and can cause cancer, the wrongful use of Impersonate is fraud, and several powers, including Radiation Projection, Invisibility, and Read Minds are deemed inherently dangerous. Such powers fall under Article 18 which regulates their use and may even see their users being monitored. The study of superpowers and SME expressives is known as Anamorphology, while members of the HCIU are trained in Forensic Anamorphology.

This is the set-up for Mutant City Blues, a super powered investigative roleplaying game, originally designed by Robin D. Laws and published by Pelgrane Press in 2009. It uses the author and publisher’s GUMSHOE System, designed to play investigative games which emphasise the interpretation of clues rather than their discovery, and which has been used with another genre in a number of roleplaying games from the publisher, including horror in The Esoterrorists, cosmic horror in Trail of Cthulhu, space opera in Ashen Stars, and time travel in Timewatch. In Mutant City Blues the other genre is the classic police procedural of Law & Order, Hill Street Blues, and NYPD Blue. The combination though is specific. The Player Characters are police officers with powers, not superheroes who are cops. So not DC Comics’ Gotham Central or the Special Crimes Unit from Superman’s hometown, Metropolis, or indeed, Wildstorm’s Top 10. This is very much not a ‘Four Colour’ superheroes setting. The action and the investigation of Mutant City Blues also takes place in a real city, whether New York or Toronto, or a city the Game Moderator is familiar with. Although Mutant City Blues has the feel of a setting that is North America, it would be easy to set a campaign elsewhere, and there are notes on adapting it to the United Kingdom.

To help the Game Moderator adapt Mutant City Blues to the city of her choice, the roleplaying game comes with a number of elements which mapped onto that city. This includes a future timeline which runs from the outbreak of Ghost Flu to the present day, a guide to the future city’s politics and leading figures, as well as its new institutes and businesses. First and foremost amongst them is The Quade Institute, the world’s foremost Anamorphological research centre, run by the renowned geneticist, Lucius Quade. The Quade Institute is also where members of the Heightened Crimes Investigation Unit are trained in Forensic Anamorphology. A complete Heightened Crimes Investigation Unit is described, ready for the Player Characters to be slotted into. Lastly, there is a ready-to-play scenario, ‘Food Chain’, which introduces the history of the Mutant City Blues setting as well as providing a case for the Heightened Crimes Investigation Unit to investigate.

In actuality that is the set-up for Mutant City Blues as published in 2009. In 2020, Pelgrane Press published a second edition, this time by Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan and Robin D. Laws. Mutant City Blues still retains the same set-up and flexibility in terms of where it can be set, but it also introduces a number of changes, not least of which is a new scenario, ‘Blue on Blue’. The majority of these changes have been implemented to make the game faster and easier to both set up and play.

As with other GUMSHOE System games, Player Characters in Mutant City Blues are defined by various abilities, either Investigative or General. Investigative Abilities are further divided into Academic, Interpersonal, and Technical. As a superhero roleplaying game, Player Characters in Mutant City Blues also have superpowers or Mutant Powers, which are again split between Investigative and General Powers. What defines the split between Investigative and General Abilities and Powers is how they are used. In the first edition of Mutant City Blues both Investigative and General abilities are represented by ratings or pool of points. For Investigative abilities, if the Player Character has the ability, he can always use it to gain core clues during an investigation, and his player could always spend more points from the Investigative ability pool to gain more information. For General abilities, such as Health, Infiltration, and Preparedness, a player expends points from the relevant pool and uses them as a modifier to a die roll to beat a particular difficulty. This is on a six-sided die and a typical difficulty is four, but can go as high as four. In the second edition of Mutant City Blues, a Player Character still has pools of points for his General abilities, including mutant powers, but not for Investigative abilities and powers. Instead of ratings, a Player Character either has the Investigative ability or power, or he does not. During an investigation, a Player Character will always pick up a clue related to an Investigative ability. If a Player Character wants more information, he can Push.

The Push is the major rule change in the second edition of Mutant City Blues. Replacing ratings for Investigative abilities, a Push is primarily used to gain more information or overcome obstacles preventing progress in an investigation. For example, it might be used to speed up the investigative process, such as getting the results back from the laboratory quicker than usual for Forensic Anthropology or Ballistics, to add an expert in the field as a friend using Art History or Occult Studies, or even use Cop Talk to impress the media or a Player Character’s superiors. A Push can also be used to sidestep or lower the difficulty of a General ability test. However a Push is used, a player only has two to expend per session, and they cannot be saved between sessions.

To create a member of the Heightened Crimes Investigation Unit, a player receives three pools of points to spend on his character. These are standard for both General abilities and Mutant Powers, but will vary for Investigative abilities, the value depending upon the number of players. To ease the creation process, the second edition of Mutant City Blues includes templates that model particular police departments, such as the Forensic Science Division, Gang and Narcotic, Robbery, and Special Weapons & Training. Each template has a cost in points, with any excess being used to purchase other Investigative abilities and purchase and increase General abilities.

Whilst choosing Investigative and General abilities is relatively straightforward, selecting Investigative and General Powers is more involved. In standard superhero roleplaying games, a player is free to choose what powers he likes, in any combination, often to model particular superheroes from the comic books and films. Now that option is possible in Mutant City Blues, but that diverges from Mutant City Blues as written. Mutant powers in Mutant City Blues are clustered together genetically, so that if a Heightened has the Transmutation power, he is also likely to have the Disintegration, Phase, Touch, Reduce Temperature, and Ice Blast powers. He may also have the Wind Control, Healing, Radiation Projection, and Self-Detonation powers, but not Pain Immunity or Gravity Control. All this is mapped out on the Quade Diagram—as devised by the renowned geneticist, Lucius Quade of The Quade Institute—and in addition to using it to select powers during the character creation, the Quade Diagram serves as a forensic tool in the game. HCIU officers can use it to determine the powers used at a crime scene, as many of them leave some form of residue. It can determine the involvement of one Mutant if the residue is clustered, more if there are several clusters. The point here is that mutant powers are known quantities and do not vary, and in addition, where in the comics, a superhero will often tweak or adjust his powers from one issue to the next, this is very difficult to do in Mutant City Blues.

Our sample member of the Heightened Crimes Investigation Unit is newly appointed Grace Bruckner who transferred across from Robbery where she specialised in art theft. She has become adept at identifying forgeries from merely touch alone. Her tendency towards Disassociation means she has few friends on the force, her colleagues seeing her as cold and unfriendly. This is despite the fact they know her genetics.

Detective Grace Bruckner, 1st Grade
General Abilities: Athletics 4, Composure 10, Driving 2, Filch 2, Health 10, Infiltration 4, Mechanics 2, Preparedness 5, Scuffling 5, Sense Trouble 5, Shooting 4, Surveillance 6
Investigative Abilities: Architecture, Art History, Bureaucracy, Bullshit Detector, Charm, Document Analysis, Evidence Collection, Fingerprinting, Forensic Accounting, Forensic Anthropology, Languages, Law, Negotiation, Photography, Research, Streetwise
Investigative Powers: Touch
General Powers: Disintegration 1, Healing 3, Phase 5, Transmutation 3
Defects: Disassociation

Certain powers and clusters, however, also have ‘Genetic Risk Factors’ associated with them. For example, Heightened with the Night Vision and Thermal Vision powers have tendency for Watcher Syndrome, whilst those with Telekinesis and Force Field, suffer from Sensory Overload. As she has both Phase and Disintegration, Detective Grace Bruckner can suffer from Disassociation, which means that she has a tendency to emotionally withdraw from people, and if the condition worsens, to see the world and her actions as unreal. Genetic Risk Factors need not come into play though, but it all depends upon the mode in which the gaming group has decided to play Mutant City Blues. The roleplaying game has two modes. In Safety Mode, Genetic Risk Factors are seen as potential risks to the Player Characters and may occasionally be topics of conversation, but in the main do not enter play except when they might affect Heightened criminals. In Gritty Mode, Genetic Risk Factors can express themselves in the members of the Heightened Crimes Investigation Unit, and in play, are one source of Subplots.

Subplots are plots extra to the main investigation, the ‘B’ plot to the ‘A’ plot, and are typically personal or tied to another case. The players are encouraged to suggest them and the Game Moderator can add them, but in Gritty Mode they can also take the form of a personal Crisis which will affect a particular Player Character, and they can be triggered by the expression of a Genetic Risk Factor or an event which occurs in the line of duty. The latter can affect all police officers, not just members of the Heightened Crimes Investigation Unit, but those triggered by a Genetic Risk Factor is specific to the Heightened. Mechanically, a Crisis requires a test and if failed, earns the Player Character a Stress Card. Similarly, if a Player Character exhausts the points from a power, but manages to refresh it by testing his Genetic Risk Factor (done against its resistance ability, which is different for each Genetic Risk Factor), he also gains a Stress Card due to the strain. Mutant City Blues lists over fifty, each with a tag like Addiction or Home Life, and Deactivation or Discard conditions, these being ways a Player Character effectively forestall the effects of a Stress Card or get rid of it completely. Should a Player Character acquire three or Stress Cards, then he is forced to quit or is fired from the force due to stress and his consequent actions.

Crises and Stress Cards are obviously storytelling and roleplaying tools, but they are also ways of enforcing the conventions of Mutant City Blues’ genre. In effect, Crises and Stress Cards are a way of handling a Player Character’s story arc over the course of a campaign. Just as in the television shows which inspire it, characters in Mutant City Blues leave, resign, take a new assignment, or are killed. Similarly, the use of the two modes—Safe and Gritty—model the two types of police procedural. Safe Mode represents a police procedural which focuses on the powers and the cases, and less on the personal and home lives of the Player Characters, whereas the grimmer Gritty Mode brings into play the personal and home lives of the Player Characters as well as the dangers of using their mutant powers. Of the two, the Gritty Mode more strongly enforces its genre than the Safe Mode. And this is in addition to the grind of dealing with the bureaucracy of the job, the Player Characters’ superiors, the media, and the criminals.

The two genres for Mutant City Blues—police procedural and superheroes—will be familiar to most, but not necessarily together. The roleplaying game’s authors provide plenty of advice to that end. The rules and advice cover collecting clues and using Pushes and their benefits, action at non-lethal, lethal, and superpowered levels, including combat, shootouts, chases, and more. There is a lengthy discussion of how the Heightened Crimes Investigation Unit operates, including an orientation manual (with annotations from a member giving an explanation and opinion on how things are actually done), handling interrogations and court scenes, how the presence of the Heightened has changed the law, and running cases of the week and big plots. Plus there is a guide to the future world of Mutant City Blues, its politics, cultures, sports, and notable figures that the Game Moderator can map onto the city of her choice. Plus that mapping need not be onto a city in the near future, but could be the here and now, and there is advice for doing that too. The players are not left out here with advice on selecting their characters’ watch commander, using subplots, and suggesting some interview techniques, since after all, few of the players are going to be trained police officers. Lastly, there is an adventure, ‘Blue on Blue’ which does a good job of introducing the setting of Mutant City Blues and its various elements as they are affected by the Heightened, and takes the story of SME all the way back to the beginning. That said, it very much has the feel of a North American city and the Game Moderator will need to make some adjustments to set it elsewhere.

Throughout the pages of Mutant City Blues, there is another option discussed. That is instead of the Player Characters as members of the Heightened Crimes Investigation Unit, they are Private Investigators. This gives the players and their characters greater flexibility in terms of how they approach investigations, as well as less responsibility and also less authority. However, they are still private citizens and they will need to be equally as careful, if not more so, in their use of their powers than members of the Heightened Crimes Investigation Unit. Rather than the set-up and organisation provided by the Heightened Crimes Investigation Unit, the players and their characters will need to work out the details of their agency ahead of time. The scenario, ‘Blue on Blue’ does have notes to enable it to be run using private investigators, but it is really written to be played using Heightened Crimes Investigation Unit officers.

Physically, for a book published in 2020,Mutant City Blues is surprisingly done in black and white. In some ways, that is thematic, and to be fair, it does not detract from the book in any way. In general, the artwork is excellent, the book is well written, and the layout clean and tidy, and best of all, easy to read.

If there are any issues with Mutant City Blues, it is in tone and setting. Some players may well find its strongly implied setting to be too North American, but the police procedural is very much a North American television staple, which for others it is that its superpowers are too low powered, to be not quite Four Colour enough. Yet even the roleplaying game’s Safe Mode is not Four Colour, although it is much closer than Gritty Mode, and after all, it is written to be a police procedural with superpowers, rather than it is a superpowered police procedural.

The GUMSHOE System was always designed to ease the process of playing investigative roleplaying games, but its iteration here in the second edition of Mutant City Blues has gone even further, switching from the previous edition’s pools of points to a simple binary yes/no for its Investigative abilities. Combined with the equally as simple Push mechanics and Mutant City Bluesmakes investigations even easier, shifting any prior complexity to the game’s action when General abilities—mundane and mutant come into play. And really, they are not that complex.

Inspired by two genres—police procedural and superheroes—Mutant City Blues still remains underpowered for handling either separately, but merged together, the result is an appealing combination of familiar genres that are consequently easy to roleplay. And that is made even easier by the streamlining of the GUMSHOE System and the cleaner presentation in this new edition. Mutant City Blues does what it says on the badge, present police procedural and investigative roleplaying in a near future that is almost like our own world, and make it accessible and engaging. The combination is very specific, but there can be no doubt that Mutant City Blues does it very well.

Warlock! Kingdom is a supplement for Warlock!, “A Game Inspired By The Early Days Of British Tabletop Gaming”, in particular, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and Maelstrom as well as the Fighting Fantasy solo adventure books which began with The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. It has Careers—Careers such as Agitator, Boatman, Grave Robber, and Rat Catcher; it has two attributes, one of which is Luck; and it has a Warlock! running around an unnamed, humancentric kingdom causing mayhem. Although mechanically much lighter than Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, it is nevertheless intended to be grim and gritty, a world of adventure and peril, but with mud aplenty—or worse—underfoot and a certain, sardonic sense of humour. However, beyond there being a marauding Warlock!, and gods, such as the beloved Thrice Blessed, the bloody Red King, and the reviled Dragon, there is unfortunately very little in terms of background in Warlock!. This is an omission that Warlock! Kingdom aims to rectify.

Warlock! Kingdom is published by Fire Ruby Designs and is very much a book of two halves. The first is a Gazetteer of the Evening Lands, which provides an overview and entails of the western part of the Kingdom, whilst the second is a guide to Grim Biskerstaf, a thriving port city on the mighty river Vessen. Both sections are for the most part systemless, so that a Game Master could easily take the descriptions and content found here and adapt to the roleplaying game of her choice, be it Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Zweihander: Grim and Perilous, or something else.

Warlock! Kingdom opens up with the ‘Kingdom Gazetteer’, which details the Kingdom, which feels fairly generic in its fantasy. It has great forests, mighty mountain ranges, rolling hills, broad meandering rivers, deep lakes, busy cities and towns with wide swathes of untamed wilderness in between, the settled areas populated by Humans, but also Dwarves, Elves, and Halflings. It stands on a peninsula, though this is not described. After this description, the book seems to go awry with a table of cultural events for the Player Characters to encounter and involve themselves in. It is a really good list, ranging from harvest festival to a funeral to dancing bear to Gerarix Stonecast with a mutated uman to exhibit, but feels too early in the book when you really want to know particular details of the country—languages, religion, and whatnot. Similarly, the discussion of the Royal Family and the Traitor, the latter the former chamberlain to the King whose worship of the demon Delock would lead to an unleashing of dark forces and precipitated a war that nearly shattered the kingdom. And also the fact that since the war against the Traitor, the King himself has not been seen, and that it appears that his wife the Queen and the King’s chief advisor are in charge given his absence. No suggestions are made as to why the King is missing or why, so there is plenty of room there to speculate—both in game and out.

Fortunately, Warlock! Kingdom settles down after that and guides the reader around the Evening Lands. This focuses on particular geographical locations like the Black Spine Mountains and the Golden Cave, the former riddled with caves and tunnels that are home to tribes of Goblins and clans of Dwarves, the latter a site of pilgrimage to the martyr, Saint Agarix, the current priest of which at the cave is probably living off the proceeds from the pilgrims’ donations. Many of these various location descriptions are accompanied by a table of random elements. Thus for the battlefield of Pomperburg, where the largest battle against the Traitor took place and which remains a place of horror to this day, there is a list of unusual items to be found on the site still. Not every location has such a table, but in each, they add a little bit of extra flavour and detail.

The bulk of Warlock! Kingdom—almost two thirds, in fact—is devoted to Grim Biskerstaf, a city on the kingdom’s south coast at the mouth of the Vessen River. In the wake of the war with the Traitor, though thriving, the city is in decline, its ruler, Lord Kelberond ineffectual and perpetually confused; the city guard forced to operate on a shoestring budget whilst the Peacock Guard, whose members protect Lord Kelberond, strut about the city as if they own it; the harbour the site of ongoing squabbles and fights between the Fish Speakers and the Dockers as to who controls trade on the river; and religious dissension growing as the Red King’s Men, worshippers of the Red King ejected from Fesselburg, the Kingdom’s capital, have taken up residence in the city—some actually devout, others little more than thugs. Then there is the Blight. This is a ghastly disease which turns the sufferer’s skin a sickly green and makes it break out into open sores. No one knows the source or cause of the Blight, but of late, the river has turned into sludge and it only affects the lower classes—so at the moment, the Blight is not all that important.

The description of Grim Biskerstaf follows the format used for the Kingdom in the first half of Warlock! Kingdom. Each of the descriptions of the city’s thirteen important locations is accompanied by two things. One is a snapshot from the main two-page illustration/map of the city, and the other is a table. Similarly, the descriptions of the city’s various organisations and notable figures are also accompanied by their own tables, which in each case adds further detail and flavour. Thus, outside the cathedral to the Thrice Blessed stands a tree and on that tree—in very Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay fashion—are nailed notices of employment described in a pair of tables, whilst along the city’s famous red stone walls, built by an Elven queen a millennium ago, stand a series of great towers, many of which have fallen into a state of disrepair and rumoured to have been occupied by persons other than the city guard. Who exactly occupies a particular tower can be determined by a roll of the die and reference to the accompanying table.

Grim Biskerstaf’s organisations include the Little Council, which supposedly governs the city and has table of its various plans; the College of Doors, its school of magic whose entrance changes regularly and is actually located in a hidden magical dimension, and its table suggests where the entrance door may be found that week or so. Its notable citizens include the wizard, Dolkepper, who when not studying the universe, is crabbily ruminating on which of the city’s citizens has slighted him and then tetchedly complaining about it. Who exactly, of course, is detailed on the accompanying table. In addition to the table, all of the descriptions are full of detail and flavour that the Game Master can bring to her game.
Rounding out Warlock! Kingdom is ‘So, You’re a Local?’, which gives a sextet of new Careers for Grim Biskerstaf. These are Docker, Fish Warden, Mudlark, Night Watchman, Publican, and Servant, but to be fair would work in almost any port city or town. Alternatively, they could serve as the basis for Player Characters in a campaign or scenario set entirely in Grim Biskerstaf! All of these have tables answering a couple of questions such as ‘What have you found?’ or ‘What have you seen?’, which further tie them into the city. As well as potential Player Characters they could also form the basis for NPCs too. Finally in Warlock! Kingdom, there is another pair of lengthy tables. One of hirelings, the other of adventure seeds. There are no stats with the hirelings, but the adventure seeds are nicely detailed and could keep a campaign in Grim Biskerstaf going for a while.

Physically, Warlock! Kingdom is a buff little book, starkly laid out and illustrated in a suitably rough style which feels suitably in keeping with the period inspiration. The cartography is nicely done, but the book does need a tighter edit in places.

Warlock! Kingdom begins in underwhelming fashion, the description of the kingdom at least feeling underwritten before it settles down and starts telling you interesting stuff. It really picks up with the description of Grim Biskerstaf, a city full of secrets and dirt which could be dropped into any campaign, which is made all the easier because like much of the book, it is systemless. Pick it up for overview of the kingdom, but definitely stay for the write-up of the Grim Biskerstaf in Warlock! Kingdom, which is perfect for any Grim & Perilous setting or roleplaying game, not just Warlock!

In ages past the greatest of all dungeons fell. Its great portals were penetrated by mighty heroes and level by level, its halls and corridors walked down, and its rooms and chambers, chapels and necropolises, lairs and dens, and reliquaries and treasuries entered, their denizens put to the sword and the spell, their coins, gems, and magics plundered. A millennium has passed since then and the doings of those great warriors and wizards have passed into legend and dungeons are things of the past, so perhaps it is time for a new network of tunnels and rooms, constructed and populated at the hands of a new Dungeon Keeper? Or at least the old Dungeon Keeper of old, woken after a thousand year slumber to build a dungeon anew?

This is the set-up for RISE: A Game of Spreading Evil. Published by Blackwell Games, it is a counterpart and opposite to DELVE: A Solo Map Drawing Game. Both are map-drawing games for one player and both involve the drawing and building, populating and defending, and exploring and exploiting of great underground networks. The difference is that in DELVE, the player takes the role of the Overseer of a Dwarven hold, digging down into the depths of the earth, whereas in RISE, the player takes of the role of the Keeper, tasked with building up to the surface—though is nothing to stop an enterprising Keeper from building down! In the course of this mighty construction, a Keeper will explore nearby caverns and tunnels, develop them into rooms such as chambers and hovels in which recruited troops can have their lair, forges which enable traps to be built elsewhere in the dungeon, a mason to allow the construction of secret passages and barricades, prisons in which to incarcerate captured adventurers, taverns and theatres to keep the dungeon’s denizens happy, and altars on which to sacrifice them in return for really good magic! Lastly, a Keeper might discover a portal to another realm and send forth explorers to learn its secrets and plunder its treasures.

RISE: A Game of Spreading Evil is a solo map-drawing game with tactical elements and some journaling aspects which can be played at leisure by the would be Keeper. Fairly easy to play, it can be started, put down, and picked up again because a Keeper’s dungeon never amounts to more than sheets of paper and perhaps a notebook. It requires a good pencil, a rubber, several sheets of gridded or graph paper, a notepad, some tokens, and a standard deck of playing cards. Each turn, beginning from the Dungeon Heart, as the Keeper the player will draw a card from the playing deck, and draw what it indicates on their map; resolve any combat; exchange Resources for Trade Goods or vice versa; build new features like rooms, traps, and barricades; and recruit new Units. Only one room can be built per turn. In addition, the Keeper must keep track of the dungeon’s Happiness, keeping it high enough to avoid its denizens from mutinying and turning on the Keeper!

The suit of the card drawn determines what the Keeper’s excavation teams have discovered. Clubs are Remnants, Diamonds are Trade Goods, Hearts are Resources, and Spades are Natural Formations. The depth or level of the discovery will determine the amount of Resources or Trade Goods found, whilst the number on Clubs or Spades card indicates the result on the Remnants or Natural Formations tables. In the case of the Hearts or Diamonds result, the Keeper can draw an empty cave on the map to represent the discovery, whilst with a Clubs or Spades card, the Keeper refers to the result from the relevant table and then draws that on the map. When building a Room, the Overseer pays the listed cost and either adds it to an empty space or builds it into an already discovered cavern. Each Room provides a particular benefit. For example, the Hovel serves as a basic lair and can house some ten units’ worth of troops, whereas a Puzzle Room is intentionally designed to slow any combatant—whether having descended from the surface or mutinied from amongst the Keeper’s own troops—down from one turn to the next. Others like the Theatre or the Casino enhance a dungeon’s Happiness, and some provide buffs, such as the Kitchen, which increases the fighting Strength of nearby troops with a ready supply of good unwholesome food, and Treasury, which increases the maximum amount of Trade Goods the Keeper can store.

If a Keeper builds an Altar, then sacrifices can be made to gain Good Magic. This might be to summon a spell which brings a room to life and turns it into a unit of its own or helpful whispers flit about the dungeon and cause any imprisoned Adventurers to switch sides and enlist in the service of the Keeper!* Another potential Good Magic is a portal. Once a portal has been discovered, the Keeper must construct a Portal Siege Camp if the aim is to launch raids through the portal and into other Realms. Successful raids will return further Resources and Trade Goods, as well as captured Units and even stolen items and artefacts. The latter is best stored in their dungeon’s Thieves’ Gallery.

* This quicker than the other option, which is sending the Adventurers to the Torture Chamber—should the Dungeon have one—and from there to the Hiring Office, and probably involves less paperwork. It is also probably less fun for one of the parties involved.

Combat occurs when a Keeper discovers the presence of the enemy, represented by a Remnant being drawn at the start of turn, such as an Adventuring party or a powerful champion who tests the Keeper’s forces. It can also occur when a Keeper’s own units become unhappy and mutiny, turning on their former master—or mistress, fighting their way to the Dungeon Heart. If the enemy or mutinied units cannot do this, then they will dig in and begin taking over a section of the dungeon. This will present a further challenge to the Keeper in addition to expanding the Dungeon from the depths to the surface. Combat is a matter of attrition, comparing the Strength values of the combatants and deducting the lower Strength value from the higher Strength value. A Unit whose Strength is reduced to zero is removed from the Dungeon. The rules allow for Ranged combat, such as from Archers and Warlocks, whilst Cultists can cast a protective shield and Trappers can reset or disarm traps.

In addition to launching raids into other Realms via Portals, RISE gives tables for Adventurers to be encountered, Information to be found, Legendary artefacts to be discovered—once the Joker cards have been added back to the deck with the Keeper’s expansion reaching the fifth level, gratuitously great Heroes who take it upon themselves to delve deeper and deeper into the depths of the Keeper’s Dungeon, and options such as World Layers. The latter are themed levels of the Dungeon, like a Primordial Layer populated by gigantic reptiles, lava flows, and ancient megaliths. These add flavour and serve as a feature in the Keeper’s Dungeon. Lastly, RISE comes with a set of challenges which can be attempted over the course of multiple playthroughs of the game.

What is not quite clear is what the end objective of playing RISE: A Game of Spreading Evil actually is. The aim is to explore and develop up from the depths, ultimately to reach the surface, and perhaps from there, become a true threat to the world beyond. Yet there is barely the need for such an objective, or even a sense of having won in playing RISE. This is a game whose point is twofold. There is, of course, the play, the intentionally procedural construction of the Dungeon and its development, but there is also the story of the Dungeon to be told in that constructive play. As with DELVE: A Solo Map Drawing Game, what develops out of the play of RISE: A Game of Spreading Evil is a map of the Dungeon, level by level in cross section; when combined with the notes kept in the journal, a story that tells of the Dungeon’s development, history, and notable features; and ultimately, a Dungeon complete with notes and map that the Keeper can take, and as Dungeon Master, could be run as a dungeon for a group of players. Perhaps for Dungeons & Dragons, perhaps for another roleplaying game.

Physically, RISE: A Game of Spreading Evil is a cleanly presented, digest-sized book. The writing is clear and simple such that the reader can become a Keeper and start digging and drawing with very little preparation.

One of the given inspirations for RISE’s sister game, DELVE: A Solo Map Drawing Game is the computer game, Dungeon Keeper, and the same can be said for RISE—if not more so. It is played at a much more sedate pace, with the player as the Keeper handling all of the procedural and resource management elements. Of the two, DELVE: A Solo Map Drawing Game is the more polished and deeper affair, RISE: A Game of Spreading Evil being a little rougher around the edges and not being quite as well explained as it could be. Nevertheless, RISE shares much in common with DELVE. It can be played in one sitting or put aside and returned to at a later date, but it does take time to play and the more time the Keeper invests in the play, the more rewarding the story which should develop and the more interesting the Dungeon created—and ultimately, RISE: A Game of Spreading Evil is about the story of Dungeon.

One of the pleasures of visiting the home of a friend or acquaintance, is the opportunity to peruse his shelf. Does he have the same titles as you, suggesting that you share interests and friendship in common? If so, does he possess titles you have never seen before, perhaps books you want to read or simply never heard of? Or do his shelves hold titles on subjects you have no interest at all, revealing a point of divergence? Perhaps he will allow you to browse their contents or even take them home with you to read them at your leisure? Author Edward Brooke-Hitching is highly unlikely to allow you to do either. He barely mentions the titles he has in his own collection, let alone on his shelves, but in the pages of The Madman’s Library: The Strangest Books, Manuscripts, and Other Literary Curiosities From History, he explores the weird world of books that are mad, bad, and dangerous to handle (and even eat!), and which he would like to have in his library.

Open up the pages of The Madman’s Library and within moments you will be astounded by the vibrancy of the colour illustrations from Louis Renard’s Fishes, Crayfishes, and Crabs, of Diverse Colours and Extraordinary Form, that are Found Around the Islands of the Moluccan and on the Coasts of the Southern Lands from 1719, if not intrigued by the scientific inaccuracies and wild imaginings, been offended by a nude depiction of the demon Asmodee from the Compendium of Demonology and Magic, and hopefully amused by He-Gassen, a Japanese scroll depicting men in flatulent competition with each other. You will also have learned that in 2010 Google estimated that there were approximately one hundred and thirty million titles in print—or at least available, and that Google planned to scan them all; the eponymous dictator commissioned the Blood Qur’an of Saddam Hussein, a copy of the holy book written using fifty pints of his own blood as ink; and that the art of binding books in human skin is known as ‘anthropodermic bibliopegy’. The practice is more common than you would have thought, and so deservedly receives its own chapter devoted to ‘anthropodermic bibliopegy’ in The Madman’s Library. It is also as fascinatingly ghoulish as you would expect.

Other chapters explore ‘books that are not books’, such as Chinese oracles bones, carved with predictions and forecasts, which were often mistaken for dragon bones and ground up to be used in medicines; ‘demon bowls’ containing spiralling protective incantations on the inside and buried in houses as supernatural protection; and hollow books which contain a secret cabinet of poisons; and 20 Slices, whose bright yellow binding contains exactly that number of Kraft American cheese slices. There are also the aforementioned ‘Books Made of Flesh and Blood’—thankfully not made from us, along with ‘Cryptic Books’, which takes the reader all the way from secret messages written on eggs and only revealed on the white of the egg is boiled to Kit Williams’ infamous Masquerade via the incomprehensibly mysterious Voynich Manuscript, followed by ‘Literary Hoaxes’, ‘Curious Collections’, Works of the Supernatural’, ‘Religious Oddities’; there are hoaxes, like the Fortsas Affair, which was announcement in 1840 of the sale of the magnificent library of the late Comte de Fortsas, which included fifty-two previously unknown works and which brought bibiophiles and collectors scurrying to the Belgian town of Binche, and which of course was an enormous joke; and a whole lot more.
Throughout, The Madman’s Library is delightfully luxurious in its presentation. No page goes without the image of a cover of, or of pages from a book, presented in exquisite detail and beautiful colour. These bring each and every book mentioned in the text to life—and short of having the titles in front of him, they are the next best thing.
As engaging and as entertaining as The Madman’s Library is in bringing its many books to life, the writing does sometimes feel as if it is skating over several of its subject matters. For every Grand Grimoire, a guide to summoning the Devil’s prime minister of Hell, Lucifuge Rofocalé or If We Can Keep a Severed Head Alive…, a patent of 1987 which discusses the technological, scientific, religious, historical, and ethical issues of decapitation and afterwards, there is a prayer-book pistol—owned by the Duke of Venice, Francesco Morosoni—which could be fired when the book was closed and the silk bookmark pulled as trigger, that only merits a mention. However, this still leaves several shelves’ worth of books to discover in reading The Madman’s Library.

Our fascination with books is also carried over into our gaming. Not just the fact that many of the games we play are actual books, but that the books play a role in our games. They are sources of knowledge, MacGuffins to be chased, secrets to be found, and more. Straight away, The Madman’s Library is excellent source material for almost any roleplaying game of Lovecraftian investigative horror. Both Call of Cthulhu and Trail of Cthulhu both share numerous Mythos tomes, but so many of the esoteric titles described in the pages of The Madman’s Library would sit alongside them or even make their way onto the shelves of the Orne Library’s Special Collection at the renowned Miskatonic University. Of course, the contents of The Madman’s Library are perfect for Bookhounds of London, Kenneth Hite’s campaign setting for Pelgrane Press’ Trail of Cthulhu, since it specifically casts the Investigators as bibliophiles. Many of the titles mentioned work in earlier periods too, whether that is the aforementioned Grand Grimoire or prayer-book pistol for The Dee Sanction or Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay, or even earlier for The Design Mechanism’s Mythic Babylon or Mythic Rome.

As good as a potential source of inspiration for your gaming as this book is, it is simply a good read. Engaging and eclectic, entertaining and enjoyable, with something interesting to discover on every page, The Madman’s Library: The Strangest Books, Manuscripts, and Other Literary Curiosities From History is a delight to read from end to end.

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

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

—oOo—
Name: HazePublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Héctor Gámiz

Setting: 2010s USA
Product: Scenario
What You Get: Twenty-eight page, 4.43 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Music to die for!Plot Hook: Could a strange teenage suicide be something more?Plot Support: Detailed plot, five handouts, four NPCs, one Mythos tome, one spell, and two pre-generated Investigators.Production Values: Solid.
Pros
# Potential introductory investigation# Solid investigation to conduct# Good mix of the interpersonal and the research   # Decently done NPCs# Can be adjusted to any time in the 21st century# Nicely done handouts# Easy to adapt to Delta Green: The Roleplaying Game
Cons
# Involves suicide# Can involve the suicide of an Investigator# Requires a good edit and localisation
# Is the title appropriate?
Conclusion
# Solidly written investigation# Does involve suicide# Potential Delta Green: The Roleplaying Game scenario

It is Friday, October 13th, 1307. For over two hundred years, the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, commonly known as the Knights Templar, has dedicated itself to protecting Christians making their pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Blessed by the Church and an official charity, the militant order of monks has become a power unto itself, a series of Papal bulls having placed the order above local laws, rendering them exempt from taxes, borders, travel restrictions, and legal oversight from any power short of the Papal Throne itself. In addition to protecting the Holy Land and participating in numerous Crusades against the infidel, the influence and power of the Templars has spread far beyond Outremer, primarily through the clever management of the vast tracts of lands given to the order as gifts, but also through the financial and banking network that it developed, ensuring the safe and transferred transit of credit. Yet in recent years, the reputation of the militant order of monks has suffered. Military defeats have forced it out of the Holy Lands and lost it access to the sites it was supposed to protect and there rumours of mysterious rituals and misdeeds, ranging from idol worship, sacrilege, and denying Christ to financial corruption, fraud, and secrecy. Then there are fears that the Knights Templar wanted to establish its own state in Europe, equal to any kingdom. Lastly, many of those kingdoms, including their monarchy and their nobility owed vast debts to the Knights Templar. It was for these reasons that the Templars fell from grace and from power.

On the morning of Friday, October 13th, 1307, French forces, on orders from King Philip IV of France with permission from Pope Clement V, moved in secret to arrest dozens of Knights Templar in the Templar’s Parisian stronghold, the Enclos du Temple, including their Grand Master Jacques de Molay, and their Commander of Normandy, Geoffroi de Charney. Both would ultimately be charged with heresy, excommunicated, and burnt at the stake. On the morning of Friday, October 13th, 1307, as the Enclos du Temple was assaulted by French troops, Grand Master Jacques de Molay would his last orders. Faced with betrayal and defeat, he commanded the last Templars to take the secrets of the order to safety. They would be the last thirty to escape the fallen stronghold and theirs would be a perilous journey across Europe in search of sanctuary, harried all the way first by forces loyal to King Philip, and then the Inquisition. Did they find sanctuary and do they ever discover the true secrets of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon?

This is the set-up for Heirs to Heresy, a roleplaying game published by Osprey Games in which the last thirty free members of the Knights Templar carry the order’s great treasure and secret to sanctuary—to Avallonis. Avallonis may be a mystical dimension that only the gnostic Templars know how to access; a demonic realm to which the all the souls of the Templars are bound to; a faerie city, shrouded in mist with gleaming silver towers; the city of Lisboa where its friendly King will shelter the Templars from the wrath of the King of France and his lackey, the Pope; a state of mind or even a second word that will grant them eternal reward; and ultimately, even a lie… As to the great treasure, it might be the Grail, the Lineage of Christ, the idol of Baphomet, the Library and Seal of Solomon, or something else. The exact nature of both destination and treasure are up to the Grand Master—as the Game Master is known—to decide, although the length of the flight from Paris will heavily influence the former. The further the destination from Paris, the longer the campaign. Thus, if the destination is London, then the campaign will be relatively short, whereas Malta, owned by the Knights Hospitaller, sister order to the Knights Templar, would be a longer journey and thus a longer campaign. Similarly, The Grand Master will also need to set the degree of Esoterica available in the campaign and thus potentially, the Player Characters. This can be mundane, infused, or mystical, and the higher the degree of Esoterica, the more likely that magick will play a role in the campaign, including the foes that the Player Characters encounter. Finally another limiting factor upon an Heirs to Heresy campaign is the number of Templars who escaped Paris—thirty. If they all die before any one of them reaches sanctuary with the treasure, then both the secrets and the last treasures of the Knights Templar will have been lost.

Of course, Heirs to Heresy is not the first roleplaying game to explore this legend, designer John Wick having done so with Thirty in 2005. Although they share similar themes, Thirty emphasises the esoteric, whereas Heirs to Heresy explores that aspect of the Templar legend as a range of options. The other difference, of course, is that what constitutes as safe and good roleplaying is today is openly discussed and stated. Thus, Heirs to Heresy is up front about what is. In the foreword, the author rejects the adoption of the iconography of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, the Knights Templar by hate groups which espouse white supremacy, religious intolerance, and persecution. It is also clearly stated that whilst Heirs to Heresy draws very much upon the history and religions of the fourteenth century, it is not written as a historically accurate roleplaying game. Rather it blends history, mystery, and legend to create the potential for exciting stories—much like a film or television series would. Ultimately, it is more historical fantasy, and that includes the types of characters that the players can roleplay. The Knights Templar recruited from France, Germany, England, the Iberian Peninsula, and Italy, as well as Scandinavia, the Middle East, North African, and other Mediterranean countries. As long as a Templar is a devout Catholic, there is no bar in terms of origin, or indeed, his or her gender.

A Knights Templar is defined by six Attributes—Might, Vitality, Quickness, Intellect, Courage, and Spirit as well as fifteen skills. The Attributes typically range between zero and four, and skills between zero and five. To first create a Knights Templar, a player decided whether his character is a Dedicated Knight or a Versatile Knight. This will determine the spread available for his attributes. A Dedicated Knight has a mix of higher and weaker Attributes, whilst a Versatile Knight has a more balanced range. Similarly, whether a Templar’s training, either Focused training or Well-Rounded training, determines whether he has mastered one skill if Focused training, or a wider range of skills if Well-Rounded. With Focused training, a Templar has fewer skill points to assign, but two skills can be high, whereas with Well-Rounded training, there are more points, none of them can be high. Notably, a Templar does not have any combat skills or a Horsemanship skill. Every Templar is supposed to be skilled in both, so they are covered by his Attributes rather than dedicated skills. This is in addition to determining what the character looks like, his nationality, whether or not he has seen combat, how far he has travelled, his degree of spirituality, when he became a Templar, and so on. A player can also roll for quirks for his Templar and lastly choose some relationships with his fellow Templars.

Our sample Templar is Gudbrand Signysdottir, originally from Scandinavia, who travelled to Constantinople with her merchant father. Although he was killed by bandits, she saw how fiercely the other members of the caravan were protected by a band of Templars. Scarred in the attack, she decided to join the Templars and dedicate her life to the White Christ rather than return home where her brothers would take their father’s business.


Name Gudbrand Signysdottir
Nationality Scandinavia
Languages: French, Latin, Old Norse
Quirks: Exceptionally long hair, scar over one eye

ATTRIBUTES
Might +1 Vitality +1 Quickness +3 Intellect +2 Courage +3 Faith +2

SKILLS
Athletics 3 Awareness 3 Battle 3 Craft – Courtesy 3 Explore 3 Healing – History – Hunting – Inspire 3 Insight 3 Persuade 3 Religion 3 Stealth – Travel 3

HEALTH
Maximum 15 Crippling Blow 5

COMBAT
Melee Attack +4 Melee Damage Bonus +2
Ranged Attack +5 Ranged Damage Bonus +5
Defence 18
Damage Reduction 7

WEAPONS
Longsword (1H) d12 (On a 1: ignore Damage Reduction)
Londsword (2H) 2d8 (On two 1s: ignore Damage Reduction)
Dagger d6 (On a 1: ignore Damage Reduction)
Mace 2d4 (On a 1: permanently reduce Damage Reduction by 1)
Axe d8 (On a 1: shatter shield, or reduce Damage Reduction by 1)
Crossbow d10 (On a 1 or 2: ignore Damage Reduction)

ARMOUR
Chainmail 5 Damage Reduction
Shield +2 Damage Reduction

Mechanically, Heirs to Heresy is straightforward. To perform a Test, a character’s player rolls two ten-sided dice and adds an Attribute and a Skill to beat a target. A task which requires effort has a target of fifteen, challenging is eighteen, and difficult is twenty-one. If the result beats the target and consists of doubles, it is a critical outcome. This means it is done with a flourish, perhaps faster, with a better effect, or similar. In combat, it means double damage. If the task is made with Advantage, three ten-sided dice are rolled and the best two selected. Conversely, if the task is made at a Disadvantage, three ten-sided dice are rolled and the worst two selected. Advantage can be gained from the situation or one Templar can grant by supporting another. Notably Heirs to Heresy does include fumbles in its rules, because the Templars are meant to be competent and because fumbles are boring.

In addition, as God’s chosen warriors, every Templar can bring his faith and commitment to bear on his situation. To reflect this, he has Faith points to spend on various effects, including adding his Faith Attribute to a single Test, damage total, or reducing incoming damage by the same, to reroll a single Test, and if they factor into a campaign, power esoterica, Gifts, and Relics. Faith points are recovered slowly, a point every Sunday morning or by spending an hour in deep prayer at a Church or Catholic Holy Site. The latter requires a Test. However, Faith points are lost if a Templar breaks his vow of chastity, steals from the less fortunate, fails to pray upon awakening, or leaves a fellow Templar behind who could not have been rescued.

Combat is slightly more complex, but throughout Templars intended to be highly competent and capable combatants. In the main, the opponents a Templar will face are Mobs and Fearsome Foes. Mobs are either particularly courageous or fanatical to want to attack Templars, who can easily outfight them. A Templar always goes first and kills or defeats one member of the Mob per point of damage inflicted, whilst a Mobs only acts when a Templar fails to deal damage. Thus the Templar will in general have the upper hand and only when he fails will be vulnerable.

A Fearsome Foe represents a challenging opponent who fights like a Templar and can attack first before a Templar can act. Initiative is handled by pulling tokens out of a bag—one colour for the Templars and one for the Fearsome Foes, and when one colour is drawn from the bag, one of its associated combatants can act. Combat covers manoeuvres such as furious blows, defending, parrying, and so on. One interesting element of combat occurs when damage is rolled. An attacker can hope to roll high and simply inflict a large amount of damage after Damage Reduction has been deducted, but if a one is rolled with several of the weapons the Templars commonly wield, the damage ignores Damage Reduction. What this means is that an attack can inflict damage if even the damage roll is low. Other weapons have different effects when a one is rolled. When a Templar suffers damage greater than his Crippling Rating, his player begins ticking off boxes on his Templar’s character sheet, which can be stunned, bleeding, broken limb, or worse.For example, Gudbrand Signysdottir and her companions have fled the chapterhouse in Paris and reached the outskirts of the city where they encounter a patrol consisting of two knights—both treated as Fearsome Foes and a Mob of foot soldiers. They are challenged and combat ensues, her companions engaging the Mob and one of the enemy knights, whilst Gudbrand Signysdottir faces off against the other. When the Grand Master draws the token for the NPCs and decides that the knight will charge and attack. She rolls the two ten-sided dice and adds the knight’s Attack bonus of +6. This roll is made at Disadvantage. She rolls two, five, and ten, and whilst the five and ten are enough with the Attack bonus, this at Disadvantage, so the Grand Master must choose the worst two rolls. The two and the five, plus the bonus are not enough to beat the Gudbrand Signysdottir’s Defence of eighteen. As his second action, the knight presses the attack. Her roll of seven, nine, and the bonus is enough to beat Gudbrand Signysdottir’s Defence. The knight’s damage roll is four plus six, for a total of ten, which when reduced by Gudbrand Signysdottir’s Damage Reduction of seven, means she suffers just three points of Health damage.

When one of the players’ tokens is drawn, her player decides that it is now Gudbrand Signysdottir’s turn to act and like the knight, she has two actions. The first is to attack, striking at the knight with her Longsword. Gudbrand’s player rolls eight and eight—which indicates a critical strike and doubles damage—and adds her Melee Attack of +4. The total is twenty, which means that the attack is a success. This definitely beats the knight’s Defence of sixteen and the damage roll is a twelve-sided die plus her damage bonus of +2, doubled of course for the critical result. The result is nine, plus the damage bonus, doubled for a result of twenty-two. The knight’s Armour rating of seven reduces this to fifteen, which is deducted from the knight’s Stamina of eighteen. As her second action, she pulls back and decides to Parry against the next attack. This means that any attack against her will be at Disadvantage.Beyond the core rules, Heirs to Heresy adds simple rules for combat, and in terms of the campaign, rules for travel and pursuit. Travel is handled via Travel Tests and becomes more difficult if the Templars have to leave the road, with failures leading to their becoming lost running out of supplies, enemies catching up with them, having an obstacle encounter, and so on. The Templars begin play with a pool of Pursuit points, one per Player Character, and they are accrued for being seen, engaging in combat, being pursued by an Inquisitor, and more. The Grand Master can spend these to have the Templars encounter a patrol of guards, penalise Downtime activities, and other activities. When they stop at places of safety on their journey, whether in the wilderness or civilisation, the Templars can attempt Downtime actions. For example, Conceal Trail might enable them to reduce their Pursuit points, find someone to aid them, spread rumours to throw off their pursuers and so reduce their Pursuit points, train to gain Advantage on a roll.

In terms of experience, a Templar can acquire Advancement Points and Gifts. A Templar can acquire a Gift once every four sessions or so, such as Armour of God, which increases his Damage Reduction by a Templar’s Faith Attribute, but the player cannot spend Faith Points to reduce damage; Nobility, which enables a Templar to request lodging from peasantry or royalty alike; and Spiritual Well, which gives a chance to recover the first Faith Point spent each day. Advancement Points are earned for making Critical rolls and can be spent during Downtime to increase Skills, to unlock Relics, and to learn Esoterica, the latter including Magicks, Blessings, and Martial Esoterica.

Learning Magicks means learning esoteric spells and the gnostic unlocking of the universe’s secrets through greater mystical understanding, and requires a Templar to study the Library of Solomon. This grants the Templar the Gnosis skill and access to an increasingly harder to cast circles of spells, such as Angelic Light or Obscured From Man’s Eyes. The Third Circle includes Bind Angel/Demon and Resurrect the Dead. Blessings are granted by the Saints, such as St. Adrian, who as the Patron Saint of Guards, grants Advantage on Awareness Tests made when keeping watch or trying to detect ambushes, or St. Christopher, who as the Patron Saint of Travelling, eases travel, enabling a Templar to spend a Faith Point to automatically find a safe place to shelter for the night. It is up to the Grand Master how a Templar comes to learn a Blessing, though he needs a high Piety to learn each one. The one suggested method is having access to the Holy Grail, but Templar might easily be granted through great acts of piety or a gift from a sympathetic member of the church. Lastly, Martial Esoterica such as Agile Climber, Hammering Blows, or Sword Savant are mundane abilities that can be learned or taught from training, meditation, and a host of other sources.

Of the three types, Martial Esoterica is the easiest to learn and include in an Heirs to Heresy campaign. Both Magicks and Blessings are more difficult, and not only require the Grand Master to decide whether her campaign is infused or mystical in nature, but also what the source for either is going to be. There are obvious choices here—the Library of Solomon for Magicks and the Holy Grail for Blessings, and if the Grand Master decides that either of these has a role in her campaign, especially as the treasure that which Grand Master Jacques de Molay has bid the Player Characters take to safety, that treasure becomes doubly important. It not only serves as their burden, but also a source of their mystical power, and ultimately, their faith made real.

Although Heirs to Heresy is simple in its core set-up and its mechanics, the Grand Master actually has a fair amount of work to do in bringing a ready to play to the table. She has to decide the length of the campaign and the destination that the Templar Player Characters have to travel to, who is pursuing them—the roleplaying game comes with a good list of enemies, what Avallonis is and what the treasure is that they are carrying, the nature of magic and presence of esoterica in the campaign, and ultimately, the truth about the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon. The suggestions cover most of the classic theories, that the Knights Templar were the Guardians of the Grail or the Lineage of Christ, Idol worshippers, or Gnostic knights, wanted to establish a Templar Nation-State, or had entered into an agreement, even an alliance, with the Order of Assassins. Of course, with a subject like the Knights Templar, there is a wealth of source material available to research and draw inspiration. And to some extent, research is really necessary for a roleplaying game like Heirs to Heresy, for as much as it is a work of historical fantasy, it still draws from and is set in that history. The Grand Master will want to research interesting locations and persons along the route that the Templar Player Characters decide to take to get to their Avallonis, and the longer the campaign, the more that the Grand Master will need to do this. This suggests, especially for those of a medium or long length, a possible structure for an Heirs to Heresy campaign, that of episodic television, in particular in the mode of the series The Incredible Hulk or The Fugitive. This may ease the amount of research the Grand Master has to do as well as helping her organise and develop her campaign.

The actual advice for the Grand Master is split into two strands. There is the advice for setting up a campaign and running adventures, and there is advice on being a Grand Master and on running a safe game, the latter being nice and clear in its presentation. All of which is welcome, but leads to a certain imbalance between whether Heirs to Heresy is designed as a roleplaying game for players new to the hobby or for long time players. The advice on running a safe game is welcome for either, but the effort needed to go into the set-up and the potential research needed for a campaign suggests that the roleplaying game is better suited to experienced players and potential Grand Masters.

Heirs to Heresy includes the beginning scenario, ‘The Flight from Paris’, which is intended to be played in a single session and lead into a campaign of the Grand Master’s own design. It specifically opens on the morning of Friday, October 13th, 1307 with the Player Characters awakened to find the Enclos du Temple already under assault and as they prepare to defend their order, they are pulled aside for an important mission. Which of course, is the flight from Paris, the exact details of which the Grand Master will have to define and her players roleplay. As a one-session scenario it throws the Player Characters into the action and teaches the players the rules, so has them ready for what is to come.

Rounding out the roleplaying game is an appendix of pre-generated Player Characters and a lengthy list of Angels and Demons. There are four pre-generated Player Characters and they are nicely balanced between Dedicated Knights and Versatile Knights, male and female knights, and diverse origins. The list of the Angels and Demons is lengthy and designed to work with the Angel and Demon Binding magick detailed earlier in the book. The list of demons is taken from the Key of Solomon, the Lesser Key of Solomon, and various other texts in the Library of Solomon.

Physically, Heirs to Heresy is presented in a clean, tidy, and fairly open fashion. It does need a slight edit and is decently illustrated in full colour. Except for when it comes to the tables, the Heirs to Heresy very much looks like anything other than a roleplaying game from Osprey Games. This is primarily due to Heirs to Heresy being a lighter game in terms of its background and mechanics, and ultimately, tighter in its focus, which results in a less compact presentation.

Heirs to Heresy is a toolkit to run a historical fantasy campaign, one which will need preparation and research. Almost a toolkit to run a single campaign for a single group of players, since it is designed to tell a particular story, and once played it is hard to retell that or a similar story with the same group. Within that story though—that of the exodus in the wake of their order’s downfall—Heirs to Heresy allows scope to tell of the Knights Templars’ last flight and of their fear, faith, bravery, and hopefully, their enlightenment.

Since 2018, the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG, beginning with the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG – Player’s Survival Guide has proved to be a popular choice when it comes to self-publishing. Numerous authors have written and published scenarios for the roleplaying game, many of them as part of Kickstarter’s ZineQuest, but the publisher of the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG, Tuesday Knight Games has also supported the roleplaying game with scenarios and support of its own. Dead Planet: A violent incursion into the land of the living for the MOTHERSHIP Sci-Fi Horror Roleplaying Game is one such scenario, but Tuesday Knight Games has also published a series of mini- or Pamphlet Modules. The first of these is The Haunting of Ypsilon 14. During a routine cargo job to a remote asteroid mining base, the Player Characters learn that one of the workers has disappeared. Then as they complete the delivery, one by one, the rest of the workers begin to disappear. What is happening to the mine workers on Ypsilon 14—and are the Player Characters next?

The first thing that strikes the reader about The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 is the format. It is done as a double-sided tri-fold brochure on bright yellow card. In fact, the card is stiff enough for the scenario to stand up right on its own, but open up the folder and the second thing that reader about The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 is the graphic design. At the top of the middle panel is a black box which reads ‘START HERE’ with an arrow pointing to the first location, Docking Bay 2, and then via the AIRLOCK to the second location, the WORKSHOP, and from there to the other locations in the scenario. Each location is given a box containing a description and an icon or two to indicate what might be found there, such vents and beds for the QUARTERS area. What the graphic designer has done here is combine the floorplans of the Ypsilon 14 mining facility with the description of the Ypsilon 14 mining facility. It is an incredibly economic piece of graphic design.

Whilst the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG is not the Alien or Aliens roleplaying game anew—there is after all, Alien: The Roleplaying Game for that—it very much shares the same Blue Collar Science Fiction Horror subgenre and inspirations. And so does The Haunting of Ypsilon 14. The scenario is, like Alien, a haunted house horror film in space, with first the NPCs and then the Player Characters, being stalked and taken by something unknowably alien. The crew aboard the mining facility even have cat, which can be used to add suspense and even herald the appearance of the scenario’s monster—much like Jones in Alien. When encountered the alien will be genuinely creepy, and definitely worthy of a scare or two in the low lighting of the mining facility. Whilst the main areas of the mining facility are detailed on the inside of the tri-fold brochure, the NPCs are listed and the monster fully detailed on the back, as is a set of three (well, two actually) clues—which come in the form of audio cassettes or logs—which can be found throughout Ypsilon 14. (Ideally, the Warden should record these ahead of time to play to her players when they find them, or even better, have someone else record them so that it is not just the Warden reading them out.)

The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 is designed as a one-shot, a horror film in which few—if any—of the cast is expected to survive. It is also designed to be easy to pick and run, with relatively little preparation required. The limited space of its format and economy of words facilitates both features, but creates its own problems at the same time. Advice for the Warden is light, primarily telling her to roll randomly to see which NPC disappears every ten minutes or so of game time and the various NPCs are very lightly sketched out. Now this does leave plenty of scope for the Warden to improvise, perhaps allowing a scene or two for each of the NPCs to shine before they are bumped off, but for a less experienced Warden, a little more preparation may be required.

However, there is a bigger issue with The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 and that is Player Character motivation. There are no ideas or suggestions as to why the Player Characters and their starship would actually stay at the mining facility once their cargo ‘job’ is complete. Is the crew dropping off or picking up—or both? Opting for the latter two options might be a way to keep the crew on-site as its starship is slowly loaded with ore, but the Warden will have to devise some motivations for the crew if not. Of course, since The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 is designed as a one-shot anyway, why not go ahead and create a set of ready-to-play Player Characters, complete with motivations?

Physically, The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 is definitely a scenario with physical presence, despite its relative slightness. It has just the one illustration and it needs a slight edit in places, but its graphical layout is excellent. The combination of its simple presentation and the familiarity of its plot, does mean though, that The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 is easy to adapt to other roleplaying games—even other roleplaying games within the Blue Collar Science Fiction Horror subgenre.

For the Warden ready to improvise and run a scenario on the fly, The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 is a low preparation, easy to pick up and play scenario, whilst for the less experienced Warden, The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 will require more preparation, but either way, the Warden may want to create some pregenerated characters and motivation to help pull the players and their characters into the events on The Haunting of Ypsilon 14. However, the Warden sets it up, The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 serves up a creepy even weird dose of body horror in a classic haunted house horror in space!