Since 2001, Reviews from R’lyeh have contributed to a series of Christmas lists at Ogrecave.com—and at RPGaction.com before that, suggesting not necessarily the best board and roleplaying games of the preceding year, but the titles from the last twelve months that you might like to receive and give. Continuing the break with tradition—in that the following is just the one list and in that for reasons beyond its control, OgreCave.com is not running its own lists—Reviews from R’lyeh would once again like present its own list. Further, as is also traditional, Reviews from R’lyeh has not devolved into the need to cast about ‘Baleful Blandishments’ to all concerned or otherwise based upon the arbitrary organisation of days. So as Reviews from R’lyeh presents its annual (Post-)Christmas Dozen, I can only hope that the following list includes one of your favourites, or even better still, includes a game that you did not have and someone was happy to hide in gaudy paper and place under that dead tree for you. If not, then this is a list of what would have been good under that tree and what you should purchase yourself to read and play in the months to come.

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Ancestry & Culture: An Alternative to Race in 5eArcanist Press ($24.95/£18.50)There can be no doubt that 2020 has been a fractious year and a year in which no subject matter has been more contentious than that of Race. So it was inevitable that questions about ‘Race’ and the stereotypes that the concept of ‘Race’ in roleplaying games such as Dungeons & Dragons enforces would be asked. Does a Gnome always live the forest and have an affinity for illusion magic? Does a Dwarf always have a beard, hate Goblins, and be trained as a smith, stonemason, or brewer? Why are there only Half-Orcs and Half-Elves? On the one hand, the answer is ‘yes’, because that is the way that it has always been—and in your Dungeons & Dragons campaign, there is nothing wrong in keeping it that way. On the other hand, the answer is a firm ‘no’. If you want your half-Orc to grow up amongst Halflings and have led a gentler life, or your character to have an Elf father and a Tielfling mother, than that is equally as acceptable. Ancestry & Culture: An Alternative to Race in 5e is a supplement which explores and addresses the issue of ‘Race’ in Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, providing options for you to create and play the types of characters that not only break the mold set by almost fifty years of Dungeons & Dragons history, but are the types of character you want to play.
Alien The Roleplaying Game – Starter SetFree League Publishing ($54.50/£39.99)Few starter sets for any roleplaying game come as packed as that for Alien The Roleplaying Game, the ‘Blue Collar’ Science Fiction-Horror roleplaying based on the films Alien, Aliens, and more. A rulebook, a complete scenario in ‘Chariot of the Gods’, a full-colour double-sided map showing charted space and starship plans, plus reference cards and counters, everything necessary to play a game of existential dread and horror in the isolation of deep space, all complicated by the personal agendas of the crew. Not only is the Alien The Roleplaying Game – Starter Set well appointed, it is superbly illustrated, in turns creepy and horrifying, and its mechanics—a variant of Free League Publishing’s Year Zero system—are designed to drive Player Character Stress up and up, first into hypercompetence, and then into panic and dread. Panic and dread that can spread and escalate… Lastly, the Alien The Roleplaying Game – Starter Set can be used to run Destroyer of Worlds, a scenario involving the Colonial Marines.
Six Seasons in Sartar: A Campaign for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in GloranthaChaoisum, Inc. ($39.95/£29.99)2020 was a great for the Jonstown Compendium, Chaosium, Inc.’s community content programme for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and other roleplaying games set in Glorantha. One of the best is Six Seasons in Sartar: A Campaign for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, a complete introductory campaign set in Glorantha designed to take characters from children through initiation and into their first few seasons as adults among an isolated clan in Sartar. It is also a complete description of this clan and the Player Characters’ place in it, an initiation for the Player Characters, their players, and the Game Master into the mysteries of Glorantha, and more. Fundamentally though, it is a campaign which takes the players and their characters step-by-step into the setting of Glorantha before forcing them into a confrontation with events from wider world beyond their vale. Six Seasons in Sartar: A Campaign for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha is a fantastic introduction to a fantastic world, one of the first titles a prospective Game Master of RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha should purchase from the Jonstown Compendium.
FATE of CthulhuEvil Hat Games ($39.99/£29.99)The influence of the Cthulhu mythos continues to ripple through the gaming hobby to spread and warp the options available when it comes to Lovecraftian investigative roleplaying. When it reached FATE Core, it did something completely different. It combined the Cthulhu Mythos with a ‘going back in time to save the world’ plot a la The Terminator not once, not twice, but five times! In FATE of Cthulhu, the End Times have come about and the survivors have made sacrifices to Yog-Sothoth to be able to go back before the disaster which befell humanity and perhaps foil its most twisted members in their attempt to welcome their inhuman masters back into the world. Whether it is Cthulhu, Dagon, Shub-Nigggurath, Nyarlathotep, or the King in Yellow, FATE of Cthulhu includes five timelines—or campaigns—which the investigators must go back to and disrupt the five events of which lead up to each of the Old One’s calamitous appearance, in the process facing not just the sanity-draining revelations of the true nature of the cosmos and mankind’s place in it, but also the potentially, physically corruptive effect of being exposed to it. FATE of Cthulhu is a more action-orientated, more direct, and more upfront about its confrontation with the forces of the Mythos and all the more refreshing for it.
Cyberpunk REDR. Talsorian Games Inc. ($60/£45)Forty years after the publication of Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0., the classic Cyberpunk roleplaying game returns in the form of Cyberpunk RED, set three decades before the computer roleplaying game, Cyberpunk 2077, also released this year. As well as improving and streamlining the mechanics—still familiar from the previous editions of the game—Cyberpunk RED pushes the timeline on two decades, into a post-mega-corp future where nation states are pushing back against rampant corporate influence, but the world, and the punk on the street, still has to deal with the fallout (sometimes literally)  from the Fourth Corporate War. Solos still provide jacked up, cybered muscle and cyber-eye targeting handguns to bring force and leverage to a situation, Media reports and now ‘makes’ the (fake) news, Execs represent cooperate interests, and Netrunners jack in and hack the post-NET world to steal data, sabotage, monitor, and more. Cyberpunk RED provides background, cyberware, streamlined and updated rules, solid advice on running the game and game types, and more to run a campaign on the edge, in a book which will look as good on the coffee table as on your shelf.
MÖRK BORG Artpunk RPGFree League Publishing ($39.99/£27.99)Stripped back to a stark brutalism, MÖRK BORG is a pitch-black pre-apocalyptic fantasy roleplaying game which brings a Nordic death metal sensibility to the Old School Renaissance. At the end of the world, there is one last dark age before all of the miseries come to pass as predicted by The Two-Headed Basilisks in which Fanged Deserters, Gutterborn Scum, Esoteric Hermits, Heretical Priests, Occult Herbmasters, and Wretched Royalty pick over the last remnants of civilisation on an island surrounded by an icy sea and as rotten as they are, make last grasps at heroism and their humanity, undertaking strange missions and tasks from the high and mighty, from The Two-Headed Basilisks’ gothic cathedral in Galgenbeck and Blood-countess Anthelia’s limestone palace, to the fields of death in Graven-Tosk and the barren wastes of Kergüs. From the doomed setting to the ultra-light mechanics, all of MÖRK BORG is wrapped up in vibrant washes of neon colour, splashes of sticky red blood, and stabs of polished silver, in what is an anguished scream of a game.
An Inner Darkness: Fighting for Justice Against Eldritch Horrors and Our Own Inhumanity is a Call of CthulhuGolden Goblin Press ($35/£25.99)Like the superlative Harlem Unbound: A Sourcebook for the Call of Cthulhu and Gumshoe Roleplaying Games—arguably the best supplement of 2017—before it, An Inner Darkness is a supplement for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition which explores the darker side human history during the Jazz Age. Thus, the anthology’s subject matters include child exploitation, sexual assault, mob violence, nativism, religious persecution, and racial discrimination, which is why it carries a Reader Advisory and that despite the fact that it also deals with cosmic horror which can drive the Investigators mad. This is an undeniably an adult, or at least a mature, gamer’s book and is unflinching in its treatment of its subject matters. Never more so that in ‘A Fresh Coat of White Paint’ which draws parallels between the treatment of immigrants now and then, ‘A Family Way’ which forces the investigators to confront the terrible consequences of sexual assault, and in ‘Fire Without Light’ that explores the aftermath of the Tulsa Race Riots of 1921. All six scenarios are uncomfortable to both run and play, forcing Keeper and player alike to confront the horror of our actual history as well as the horror of the Mythos. They should be no less memorable for either the history or the horror.
Mausritter*Games Omnivorous ($25/£20)Mausritter is a little game about little heroes in a big world. In this rules-light fantasy adventure role-playing game, each player character is a brave mouse adventurer, faced with a dangerous world in which there is threat to mouse-kind under every log and in every bush. Rush nose-first into every situation, and a mouse is sure to come to a short, but nasty end. By being clever and brave and lucky, a mouse can overcome the dangers the world presents to him, find a solution to the problem threatening his community, and perhaps become a hero in doing so. Mausritter is fast to set-up and fast to play—all too fast if a mouse is foolish, or just plain unlucky—and presents a world we recognise from above, which become a big challenge from below when faced at mouse scale. As well as simple mechanics, Mausritter employs an innovative inventory system which streamlines what and how many things a mouse is carrying and brings a clever mechanical effect into play when a mouse suffers from conditions such as Hungry or Injured. The Mausritter book also includes an adventure location to explore and a mouse kingdom base a campaign in. All wrapped up in a totally charming little book.
* (In the interests of transparency, I did edit the new edition of Mausritter.)
Valley of PlentyChaosium, Inc./Troupe Games ($35/£25.99)2020 was a great for the Jonstown Compendium, Chaosium, Inc.’s community content programme for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and other roleplaying games set in Glorantha. One of the best is Six Seasons in Sartar: A Campaign for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, a complete introductory campaign set in Glorantha designed to take characters from children through initiation and into their first few seasons as adults among an isolated clan in Sartar. However, the Jonstown Compendium was so good that it did it all over again with Valley of Plenty, a starter campaign not for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, but for QuestWorlds (previously known as  and compatible with HeroQuest: Glorantha), but very much still set in Sartar. The first part of The Jaldonkillers Saga, which will take the player characters from the idyll of their childhood through the sundering of their tribe and beyond to its reconstitution in exile and then the efforts made to retake both their tribe’s lands and glory. Use of the QuestWorlds mechanics enables the campaign to narratively scaled to the characters and the campaign is very well supported in terms of its background and setting. This is another great introduction to roleplaying in Glorantha, which takes both players and their characters step-by-step into the setting, its mythology, and drama.
Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the CorpsGale Fore Nine, LLC ($60/£44.99)Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps—or just another bug hunt—puts the players in command of Vasquez, Hicks, Ripley, and others, colonial marines or civilians as they land on and then investigate the strangely empty facility of Hadley’s Hope, looking for survivors, and answers… All too quickly they find out what happened as swarms of relentless monsters from hell which capture you for who knows what reason, have acid for blood, and if not capturing you, then ripping you apart, erupt from the walls and swarm towards you. The colonial marines are trained for anything, but not this and they had better keep their cool and stay frosty in this tense, co-operative, tactical standoff against an implacable, alien foe. The players work together against the board, whether on a bug hunt, or one of several missions which form a campaign. Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps is richly appointed with reversable maps, character cards for members of the Aliens cast, equipment, and more, including miniatures for Ripley, Newt, five of the colonial marines, and xenomorphs. Aliens: Another Glorious Day in the Corps brings the science fiction-horror of Aliens to the table and lets you play out the tense standoff and cat and mouse action horror of the film.
Vaesen – Nordic Horror RoleplayingFree League Publishing ($55/£39.99)Based on the work of Swedish illustrator and author Johan Egerkrans, Vaesen – Nordic Horror Roleplaying takes you into a dark Gothic setting of the nineteenth century, one steeped in Nordic folklore and old myths of Scandinavia. Long have the vaesen—familiars, nature spirits, shapeshifters, spirits of the dead, and other monsters lived quietly alongside mankind, for mankind knew their ways and the vaesen understood ours, but as the century wanes, the Mythic North is changing. The young are moving to the cities, the cities are industrialising, and the old ways are being forgotten, but not by the vaesen—and they are becoming unruly and dangerous. As members of the newly refounded The Society, the player characters have the gift of the Sight, able to see the vaesen and despite all possessing their own dark secrets have decided to band together and protect mankind against the threat posed by the vaesen. Whatever mystery presents itself to them, whatever horror or suspense they must suffer, the player characters must find a solution to the disruption caused by the vaesen, a solution that requires means other than brute force. Vaesen – Nordic Horror Roleplaying is a beautiful game, oozing atmosphere and hiding secrets for the player characters to discover, secrets forgotten in this very modern, industrial age.
Dissident WhispersThe Whisper Collective/Tuesday Night Games ($30/£25)Dissident Whispers is an anthology of fifty-eight two-page adventures for roleplaying games as diverse as Basic/Expert Dungeons & Dragons, The Black Hack, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, Electric Bastionland, Mausritter, MÖRK BORG, Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG, Trophy Gold, Troika!, The Ultraviolet Grasslands, and more, including many systems neutral adventures. It has been put together by an international and diverse range of authors, designers, editors, and illustrators. So it includes ‘Graktil – The Citadel that Crawls’,  a hallowed scorpion corpse turned mobile goblin fortress; ‘Snake Temple Abduction’, the partly flooded dungeon home to a medusa queen; and ‘Necropolis of Pashtep’, an Aztec-themed puzzle dungeon. For the Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG, ‘Hideo’s World’ turns the player characters virtual, whilst ‘Flails Akimbo’ for MÖRK BORG has the player character wake up with their weapons nailed to their hands, and… There is so much to dig into in Dissident Whispers, in truth not all of it necessarily the best quality. However, there are plenty of adventures here that are worth the price of admission and of the adventures that are not worth that, there are many here that are worth rescuing or plundering for ideas. Last and best of all, every purchase of Dissident Whispers goes towards the support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

On the tail of the Old School Renaissance has come another movement—the rise of the fanzine. Although the fanzine—a nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon, got its start in Science Fiction fandom, in the gaming hobby it first started with Chess and Diplomacy fanzines before finding fertile ground in the roleplaying hobby in the 1970s. Here these amateurish publications allowed the hobby a public space for two things. First, they were somewhere that the hobby could voice opinions and ideas that lay outside those of a game’s publisher. Second, in the Golden Age of roleplaying when the Dungeon Masters were expected to create their own settings and adventures, they also provided a rough and ready source of support for the game of your choice. Many also served as vehicles for the fanzine editor’s house campaign and thus they showed another DM and group played said game. This would often change over time if a fanzine accepted submissions. Initially, fanzines were primarily dedicated to the big three RPGs of the 1970s—Dungeons & Dragons, RuneQuest, and Traveller—but fanzines have appeared dedicated to other RPGs since, some of which helped keep a game popular in the face of no official support.

Since 2008 with the publication of Fight On #1, the Old School Renaissance has had its own fanzines. The advantage of the Old School Renaissance is that the various Retroclones draw from the same source and thus one Dungeons & Dragons-style RPG is compatible with another. This means that the contents of one fanzine will compatible with the Retroclone that you already run and play even if not specifically written for it. Labyrinth Lord and Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay have proved to be popular choices to base fanzines around, as has Swords & Wizardry. Another choice is the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game.

Published by Straycouches Press, Crawl! is one such fanzine dedicated to the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game. Since Crawl! No. 1 was published in March, 2012 has not only provided ongoing support for the roleplaying game, but also been kept in print by Goodman Games. Now because of online printing sources like Lulu.com, it is no longer as difficult to keep fanzines from going out of print, so it is not that much of a surprise that issues of Crawl! remain in print. It is though, pleasing to see a publisher like Goodman Games support fan efforts like this fanzine by keeping them in print and selling them directly.

Where Crawl! No. 1 was something of a mixed bag, Crawl! #2 was a surprisingly focused, exploring the role of loot in the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game and describing various pieces of treasure and items of equipment that the Player Characters might find and use. Similarly, Crawl! #3 was just as focused, but the subject of its focus was magic rather than treasure. Unfortunately, the fact that a later printing of Crawl! No. 1 reprinted content from Crawl! #3 somewhat undermined the content and usefulness of Crawl! #3. Fortunately, Crawl! Issue Number Four was devoted to Yves Larochelle’s ‘The Tainted Forest Thorum’, a scenario for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game for characters of Fifth Level. Crawl! Issue V continued the run of themed issues, focusing on monsters, but ultimately to not always impressive effect.
As the title suggests, Crawl! Issue No. 6: Classic Class Collection is all about Classes in the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game. One of the interesting aspects of the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game is that Goodman Games has supported it with scenarios and campaign settings, but not with expansions to the core rules. So no new volumes of monsters, character Classes, spells, and magical items, thus giving scope for the community to create this content, for example in fanzines such as Crawl! and the Gongfarmer’s Almanac. However, this does mean that in coming to Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game there are fewer Classes to choose from, certainly in comparison to classic Dungeons & Dragons. The choices include Cleric, Thief, Warrior, and Wizard, plus because Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game does ‘Race as Class’, then Dwarf, Elf, and Halfling each as a Class. Which means that there are some classic Dungeons & Dragons Classes omitted, and these omissions are what set Crawl! No. 6: Classic Class Collection sets out , if not to rectify, then at least, give the options if a playing group wants to rectify them. Crawl! No. 6: Classic Class Collection does not provide the playing group with all of the ‘missing’ character Classes, but just four of them, plus options for a standard Class in the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game.
The first Class in Crawl! No. 6: Classic Class Collection is the first of two by Jose Lira and is the ‘Bard’, possibly one of the most contentious Classes in Dungeons & Dragons. Like the Cleric, Thief, Warrior, and Wizard, it is a Human-only Class, this version of the Bard being a knowledgeable performer, able to cast limited magic spells, and has a number of Bardic Talents. How the Bard performs depends on his Alignment. So the Lawful Bard is typically found as a village or town entertainer or historian, perhaps even a heard for royalty; the Neutral Bard is common, a travelling entertainer, collecting tales and songs, sometimes in a troupe; and the Chaotic Bard puts on challenging performances, such as walking on a tightrope over a waterfall or dancing around swords, and they might even be spies or con-men. The Bard’s spells are randomly gained from a limited list which changes and grows smaller as the Bard gains Levels from a limited list. The Bardic Talents are Call to Arms, Challenge, and Calm, and can be used in and out of combat, but all require a roll on the Bardic Talent Checks Table with the Bard’s Talent Die plus Personality modifier to give results ranging from ‘Failure’ and ‘Boo, Hiss’ to ‘A Noble Performance’ and ‘A King’s Show’. Overall, it is nicely playable, but stripped back version of the Class which retains its major features.
Jose Lira follows the bard with a version of the ‘Paladin’, the classic, holy warrior. Key to the Class is his Alignment. So Lawful Paladins follow gods of good, harvest, light, and protection, Chaotic Paladins worship dark gods of war and destruction, and Neutral Paladins adhere to a balance between the two. A Paladin has access to divine magic, use Smite to add a bonus or Smite die to his attack and damage rolls made against his god’s enemies, and can do Holy Deeds, such as Lay on Hands, Instil Bravery, and Cause Fear. These require a roll on the Paladin Holy Deeds Table, with a chance of failure. When that happens, the Paladin gains his deity’s disapproval and his Disapproval rating is raised by one. The greater a Paladin’s Disapproval rating, the greater the likelihood of his Holy Deed failing and the greater the act of attrition necessary. Lira’s version of the Paladin follows that of the Bard not feeling overly complex, but retaining the Class’ notable features and their potential for roleplaying.
The only non-Human Class in Crawl! No. 6: Classic Class Collection is the ‘Gnome’ by Yves Larochelle. Consisting of just five Levels, the Gnome is generally a Neutral Class and although a spellcaster, has access to a limited number of spells. Most of the Class’ spells consist of illusion, deception, and trickery magic, such as Charm person, Colour Spray, ESP, Mirror Image, and the like. The Gnome also has the Trick die, added to the roll to determine the outcome of a spell check, instead of the Gnome’s Level. The Gnome is also resistant to magic and can detect gems and precious stones, but more importantly, a Gnome can create sturdy illusions that can cause damage or even instil fear. It is accompanied by a new spell, Scripted Illusion, which enables the caster to build a programmed response into the illusion. This enables the caster to be inventive in setting up traps and effects, adding another engaging element to the Gnome Class. 
The last Class in Crawl! No. 6: Classic Class Collection is the ‘Ranger’ by Raskal. Another Human-only Class, it is again flavoured by a Player Character’s Alignment. A Chaotic Rangers is a fearless raider, dedicated protector of nature, or obsessive trophy hunter and a Lawful Ranger is likely to be an army scout, frontiers patrolman, or bounty hunter tracking down criminals, but most Rangers are Neutral, lone wanderers in the wilderness. Mechanically, the Ranger receives a Deed die instead of a fixed bonus to attack, can either become an Archery or a Two-weapon Expert, and gains various wilderness skills. It is a decent adaptation of the Class to Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game, but does not feel as inventive or as interesting to roleplay as the other Classes in Crawl! No. 6: Classic Class Collection. 
Lastly, Colin Chapman offers ‘My Thief, My Way! Custom Thief Skills in the DCC RPG’. It decouples Thieves’ Skills from the core tables in the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game and thus Alignment. It instead offers the player with a Thief character more options in how his character’s skills progress. It is a small change, but gives reasons to look at the most skill-focused Class in the roleplaying game.
Physically, Crawl! No. 6: Classic Class Collection is neat and tidy. The few pieces of artwork are decent and the issue decently written. All four Classes basically do a good job taking traditional Classes from Dungeons & Dragons and mapping them onto the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game. In many cases, there is an element or two of inventiveness that will encourage interesting roleplaying, such that Classes such as the ‘Gnome’ and the ‘Bard’ look interesting and fun to play. In fact, the four ‘new’ Classes feel lonely, as if there should be more of them to round out those missing from the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game, as if Crawl! No. 6: Classic Class Collection should have been either longer or actually a supplement in its own right rather than just an issue of a fanzine. However, as an issue of a fanzine, Crawl! No. 6: Classic Class Collection is a solid edition, its contents easy enough to add to a Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game campaign and hopefully to be further explored in future issues.

When it comes to horror, you can have two things which are haunted—houses and lighthouses, obviously, but in the modern age, there is the third. This is the railway train, and when it comes to haunted trains—or trains best by horror in Call of Cthulhu, it seems like there is only one train which matters, and that is the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express, as in Horror on the Orient Express. Yet there is another train which deserves to be haunted—in fact, it deserves to be haunted or best by horror infinitely more than the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express. This is the London Necropolis Railway, which between 1854 and 1941, ran from Waterloo in the heart of London to the Brookwood Cemetery in Brookwood, Surrey, ferrying the capital’s dead for burial. Given the London Necropolis Railway’s obvious connection to the dead and to cemeteries, it seems surprising that in the thirty-five years since the publication of Cthulhu by Gaslight, there has been no scenario for the roleplaying game set aboard the London Necropolis Railway.

Nightmare on the Necropolis Express is a scenario for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition published by Stygian Fox Publishing. It is set during the last years of the nineteenth century, so is suitable for use in the Cthulhu by Gaslight setting, or the publisher’s own Hudson & Brand, Inquiry Agents of the Obscure campaign setting. It is short, playable in a single session—two at most, and could be played with a single Investigator and the Keeper, though it would probably work better with a few more. The scenario does not require any of the Investigators to possess a particular Occupation to complete, though perhaps a Priest might be of use.

Nightmare on the Necropolis Express begins with the Investigators being hired by a number of workers on the London Necropolis Railway to investigate a number of unholy apparitions and unsettling occurrences aboard night runnings of the train. The London Necropolis Railway does not normally run at night, but is currently ferrying bodies exhumed from the West Norwood Cemetery in Lambeth in south London to the more capacious Brookwood Cemetery. That is when the incidents began and the train crew, led by the lugubrious Tommy Thompson are worried about them continuing and spooking everyone.

The investigation process in Nightmare on the Necropolis Express is simple, a mere matter of finding out more about the London Necropolis Railway and potentially visiting the West Norwood Cemetery. Armed with a few clues then, the Investigators are expected to join Tommy Thompson and friends aboard the late running of the London Necropolis Railway. Very little happens until the return when quite literally an Abomination appears at the rear of the train—in one of the hearse carriages—and begins to rampage back up the train, moving towards the locomotive in what is a timed event. Can the Investigators stop it and can they discover what is really going on?

Nightmare on the Necropolis Express is a short scenario, ultimately built around an ‘unstoppable’ monster and involving quite slight investigation. The four handouts, detailing various newspaper reports about the London Necropolis Railway and the London Burial Crisis are interesting, but ultimately have little impact upon the events of the scenario. In fact, there is really only the one clue which is pertinent, but it does not really matter if the Investigators discover it or not, because the clue does not really help them or provide a means to deal with the final confrontation. Either way, the events of the scenario will play out and the Investigators will still face the problem on the train.

However, Nightmare on the Necropolis Express does present the Keeper with some fun NPCs to portray—including samples of dialogue which will help her portray them immensely. The floor plans of the London Necropolis Railway are decent and the unique nature of the setting very much stands out.

Physically, Nightmare on the Necropolis Express is a neat, nice little digest-size hardback done in full colour. The illustrations are decent and the inclusion of photographs of Brookwood Cemetery a nice touch. The handouts are disappointingly plain.

Ultimately, the shortness of the scenario and the relative lack of meaningful investigation makes it debatable as to whether or not Nightmare on the Necropolis Express was quite worth publishing as a standalone product. Further, the fact that the scenario and its primary solution comes down to a single skill check—although one that all of the Investigators can make—means that in terms of the story, Nightmare on the Necropolis Express does feel as if the Investigators are along for the ride.

Out beyond the reach of the Emperor is a world of martial arts practitioners, bandits, criminals, and gangs, prostitutes and brothels, secret sects and societies, inns and teahouses, tales of heroism and notoriety, and more. It is a place of corruption and lawlessness and unbridled consumption of alcohol despite the best efforts of the Emperor and his officials, but it is also a place of wandering ‘knights errant’, martial artists, court officials, pursuivant detectives, and the ‘greatest’ swordsmen of the age who right wrongs, feud with rivals and lovers, dedicate themselves to their arts and their crafts, engage in fierce, determined battles with their enemies, compete in tournaments for great prizes and reputation, enter into duels for reputation and face, and more… This is the Jianghu, not so much a place as a culture, and also the setting for Ruthless Blood, Ruthless Blades – Wuxia Roleplaying, published by Osprey Games—the imprint of Osprey Publishing best known for its highly illustrated military history books. It is the fourth roleplaying game from the publisher after Paleomythic, Romance of the Perilous Land, and Those Dark Places.

Ruthless Blood, Ruthless Blades – Wuxia Roleplaying is not designed as a sourcebook on historical China, but rather presents a romanticised, even ahistorical version ancient China, one drawn from the Wuxia novels of Gu Long and the darker films of the Shaw Brothers Studio of the 1970s and 1980s to create a grimmer, more brutal, and more dangerous take upon the Wuxia genre. It comes complete with rules for both martial arts and character creation, a discussion of the genre, a lengthy reading and watching list, notes aplenty on Chinese culture for the Game Master and player who is new to it, and an extensive sample Jianghu, a sandbox with tens of NPCs, organisations, locations, and potential plots, as well as a scenario. The focus is entirely upon Wuxia and martial artists. There is no magic—except for astrology and similar forms of divination and an option allowing the Magical Arts skill to launch attacks, which requires Game Master approval, and there are no supernatural creatures—so there is scope for the Game Master to create her own or for the authors to write a supplement. Instead, players take roles such as Brave Archer, Daoist priest, Master Swordsman, Palm Master, Unarmed Boxer, and others, who all study and practice some form of martial arts.

A character in Ruthless Blood, Ruthless Blades – Wuxia Roleplaying is defined by his Signature Abilities, Counters, Special Resources, skills, eccentricities, and an occupation. A Signature Ability represents martial arts styles or talents, for example, ‘Butterfly Sword Expert I’, which means that the martial artist fights with grace and skill to easily deflect blows and slide in strikes to improve his Evade ability, or ‘Breath of Fire’, with which the martial artist can channel the fire element to scorch all of enemies around him. A Counter is a means of defence against a particular type of attack, such as ‘Bending Reed Defence’, with which a martial artist can lean out of the way when his head is targeted, and then snap back to deliver a sharp blow, or ‘Water Torrent’ with which the martial artist splashes water onto the floor and uses it to slide behind an opponent to attack with a bonus on the next round. Special Resources can be wealth and property or social resources. So an illicit business, landed gentry, or a manor, or a loyal friend, devoted ex-lovers (who feud and bicker when they meet—brilliant for roleplaying potential and comedy there), or an official post and title—though sometimes this prevents the martial artist from leaving the post, so he can send a loyal servant instead, in which case, the servant transmits the Experience Points earned to his master in his reports! Skills fall into five categories. These are Defences, Martial Arts Skills, Specialist Skills—such as Medicine and Alchemy or a particular talent like painting or poetry, Unorthodox skills such as Disguise and Drinking, and Mental Skills such as Command and Reasoning. Eccentricities are quirks and flaws, from Absent-Minded and Beautiful to Persistent Smile and Scars. They can also include Deep Eccentricities, which represent recurring problems for the Martial Artist, such as Bad Breath, In Love, or Social Climber. 

A martial artist also has a Max Wounds value—typically three for a starting martial artist, representing the amount of damage a martial artist can take before rolls on the quite nasty ‘Death and maiming’ Table, a Resist Value—the ability to absorb wounds before taking damage, and Fire Deviation and Killing Aura. Fire Deviation represents an internal imbalance in the martial artist’s Qi energy and is gained by failed meditation rolls or can even be selected to gain an extra Signature Move. However, suffering from Fire Deviation also means gaining a Fire Deviation Eccentricity, such as suffering from delusions of grandeur or your hair or eye colour changing. Killing Aura is measure of how powerful or capable a martial artist is and is equal to his Level. It can easily be detected by other martial artists. In addition, for each NPC or Player Character a martial artist kills, he increases his Killing Aura Darkness, which hangs over the martial artist like a cloud and again, is an indication of how powerful he is and to an extent, his reputation.

To create a martial artist a player chooses a Signature Ability, a Counter, a Special Resource, assigns points skills—this is done by skill type and is standard for all martial artists, an eccentricity, and an occupation, before defining a backstory and filling out secondary details. If the martial artist qualifies for it, he can also select an occupation. This primarily determines his income. The process primarily involves making a fair number of choices and is simple enough, and notably, the deadliness of the setting and rules is foreshadowed in the suggestion that a player create a backup martial artist! However, the process is hindered by the wealth of choices and everything that a player needs being spread out over eight chapters—almost half of the book—and not necessarily in the order that the checklist gives.

Wang Yimu, the Widow of the Needle is the daughter of a wealthy merchant who was forced to marry beneath her status when her father’s business collapsed. Her husband was a tailor and his mother taught and scolded her over her lack of skill as an embroiderer and seamstress. She did not love her husband, but when he was killed by bandits, she first escaped their ambush and then set out to kill them one by one, tracking them down and enticing them in her company before sewing them up and leaving them behind her… When she returned, she told her mother-in-law that she was in charge now and would be taking over the business. Free of the scolding, she flourished and her skill grew and grew until she is one of most talented women in the Jianghu with a needle.

Wang Yimu, the Widow of the Needle
Signature Ability: Needle and Thread Expert
Counter: Steel-Shattering Finger
Eccentricity: Beautiful
Special Resource: Prosperous Business
Occupation: Artisan

Max Wounds: 3
Resist: 1
Fire Deviation: 0
Killing Aura: 1
Killing Aura Darkness: 0
Drinking Limit: 1

Skills
Defences: Evade 2 (7), Hardiness 1 (6), Wits 2 (7)
Martial Arts: External 0, Internal 3, Lightness 1
Specialist Skills: Medicine and Alchemy 1, Meditation, Survival, Talent (Seamstress) 3, Trade 2
Unorthodox Skills: Disguise, Drinking 2, Gambling 2, Magical Arts 2, Theft
Mental Skills: Command, Detect, Empathy 2, Persuade 2, Reasoning 2
Physical Skills: Athletics 2, Endurance, Muscle, Ride 1, Speed 3
Knowledge Skills: Institutions 2, Jianghu 2, Peoples and Places 2, Religion, Scholarly Arts

Ruthless Blood, Ruthless Blades – Wuxia Roleplaying is a Level and skills roleplaying game. A martial artist will start play with one Signature Ability and one Counter, but will gain more, plus increases to his skill as he goes up in Level. The rate at which he rises is determined by the length of the campaign—the shorter the campaign, the faster the improvement rate, up to maximum of Level Nine, whatever the campaign length.

Mechanically, Ruthless Blood, Ruthless Blades – Wuxia Roleplaying uses pools of ten-sided dice. Typically, this will be one, two, or three ten-sided dice, depending upon the level of the skill. Rolls are made again a target number—typically six—and the single highest die is counted. If it equals or succeeds the target number, the martial artist has been successful. A Roll of ten counts as total success and gives a more specular result. In opposed rolls, the single highest die rolled is compared to the opponent’s roll, the highest roll succeeding. Penalties and bonuses subtract or add dice respectively, as do many Signatures Moves, although there is a soft skill cap of a maximum of seven being rolled for any one action.

For example, Wang Yimu, the Widow of the Needle has tracked down one of the bandits who killed her husband and attempts to seduce him. Her player declares that she will not actually seduce him, but lull him into a false sense of security and to do that, Wang Yimu will use her Persuade  skill, which gives her two dice. The Game Master gives her a bonus die because the bandit is drunk. This gives her player three dice to roll and he rolls two, six, and seven. The latter is the highest result and is definitely higher than the bandit’s Wits of six. Wang Yimu, the Widow of the Needle has him where she wants him.

Combat revolves around six skills. The three Martial Arts—External, Internal, and Lightness, and the three Defences—Evade, Hardiness, and Wits. Evade is the ability to avoid being hit, Hardiness to withstand damage, and Wits a martial artist’s mental strength. They are not rolled, but provide the target numbers when a martial artist is attacked. External Martial Arts combines physical force and explosive damage, employing a martial artist’s bodily might with either weapons or unarmed; Internal Martial Arts is fighting with internal energy or inner force, to be able to emit energy blasts, fight with energy-based weapons-play or unarmed combat; and Lightness Martial Arts is about a martial artist’s control of his body weight and speed to be able to do all of the signature man oeuvres that the Wuxia genre is famous for—running up walls, hopping over rooftops, and balancing on treetops.

Combat involves three phases. In the ‘Talking and Analysis Phase’, opponents attempt to bluff or out talk their way out of the fight, psych them out to impose a penalty, assess them to gain bonus, or learn about a Signature Ability or Counter. In the ‘Roll Turn Order Phase’, the players roll their martial artist’s Speed to determine who goes first, and in the ‘Move and Perform Skill Action Phase’, the martial artists attack each other using a combination of Martial Arts skills, Signature Abilities, and possibly weapons. If appropriate, a Counter can be used in response to an attack. Notably though, the mechanics are deadly, so the Game Master will want to be careful as to what level of opposition she wants to pitch against the martial artists.

Continuing the example, Wang Yimu, the Widow of the Needle has tracked down one of the bandits who killed her husband and has him in her sights—she is ready to strike. . In the ‘Talking and Analysis Phase’, she definitely wants to analyse the bandit for the bonus. Her player two dice for her Empathy, getting a nine and five, the nine again being higher than the Bandit’s Wits of six. This grants her a bonus dice to the attack roll and bonus to the damage done if any wounds are inflicted on a Total Success or roll of ten. In the ‘Roll Turn Order Phase’, the player rolls three dice for Wang Yimu’s Speed, getting a one, three, and seven, the latter higher than the Bandit’s four and five. Wang Yimu, the Widow of the Needle will now use her Signature Ability of Needle and Thread Expert, making an Internal Martial Arts roll against the bandit’s Evade of six. Wang Yimu’s player has four dice to roll, three for the skill and one as a result of  the successful assessment. His roll of three, seven, eight, and eight indicates that the needles hit and Bandit is snapped out of his lascivious designs upon her by the sharp points imbedding themselves in his skin. Wang Yimu’s player rolls for damage, inflicting a single wound. The bandit responds by pulling out a knife and throwing it at her. The Game Master rolls two dice for the bandit’s External Martial Arts of two, attempting to beat Wang Yimu’s Evade of seven. He rolls ten and ten, which if successful is going to hurt her. Her player declares that Wang Yimu will Counter with Steel-Shattering Finger, which requires her player to roll a success and with a five, six, and seven, she gets her fingers in the way and stops the blade dead. At the end of the round, Wang Yimu has the bandit impaled on the needles and thread and the bandit needs to find another weapon.

In the second round, the bandit attempts to Psych Wang Yimu out, telling what he has planned for if he catches her. This is a Command roll, but with a score of one, the Game Master rolls the one die and on a five, does not best her Wits. Wang Yimu responds by telling the bandit what she did his comrades and with a roll of four and eight on her Persuade, it works—the bandit will be a penalty of one die to attack. However, the bandit first has to get a weapon, so the Game Master states that this will become a bonus die on the damage roll as he moves away from the pull of Wang Yimu’s needle and thread. This is automatic since the needles are embedded and the bandit is moving. Wang Yimu’s player rolls a seven and a ten. The latter inflicts two wounds, reducing the Bandit’s wounds to zero and necessitating a roll on the ‘Death and Maiming Table I: External Injuries’. A roll of ten indicates that the Game Master needs to roll on the ‘Death and Maiming II: Internal Injuries’ and the result of four is an intestinal injury which levies an Endurance penalty. The needles are free though and the bandit is armed, but is badly torn up by the said needles…

Beyond the rules, Ruthless Blood, Ruthless Blades – Wuxia Roleplaying provides the Game Master with swathes of information, ranging from overland travel, poisons and antidotes, rare and prized objects and weapons, rules for handling alcohol—it is possible play a drunken master with some effort, and more, even before she gets to the second half of the book, which is solely for the Game Master. This covers how to referee the Jianghu and run the roleplaying game, it includes an introduction to the Wuxia genre and a good bibliography, and a discussion of various scenarios and campaign types. There are also rules for handling fated destinies, calamities, secret histories and the like for martial artists in campaigns with bigger, bolder fates.

Aspects of Chinese culture in the Jianghu are also covered, including Face—earned, lost, given, or taken, various religions, philosophies, and beliefs, the drinking culture—inhabitants of the Jianghu, especially martial artists, are renowned for capacity to drink alcohol, the imperial bureaucracy, and more. As well as suggesting ways for Game Master to create her own Jianghu, Ruthless Blood, Ruthless Blades – Wuxia Roleplaying comes with its own. From the Top Ten Fighters and Top ten Weapons to the twenty locations and organisations and ninety-five NPCs—all nicely detailed and given stats and relationships with each other, this is a rich, Soap Opera Wuzia-style sandbox of a setting with a huge wealth of information for the Game Master to delve into and draw out ideas for scenarios and encounters from. This Jianghu could keep a campaign playing for a few months, there is so much information there. To help get a playing group started, ‘The Obsidian Bat’, a short scenario is also included, which has plenty of action and doublecrosses to keep the martial artists happy. Details of another scenario, free to download from the Osprey Games website, is also included.

Physically, Ruthless Blood, Ruthless Blades – Wuxia Roleplaying is a sturdy, glossy little hardback, done in the simple style seen in other titles from Osprey Games. It is well written and both illustrations and maps are excellent. However, Ruthless Blood, Ruthless Blades – Wuxia Roleplaying is simply not as well organised as it could be. Essentially chapters feel like they are out of order and they present the reader with such a deluge of information that it is at first difficult to take in and then it is difficult to work with. The index is decent, but finding things is not easy in the book and for example, creating a character takes a lot of flipping back and forth through its first half. 

Ruthless Blood, Ruthless Blades – Wuxia Roleplaying really is a simple, straightforward Wuxia roleplaying game, one that is easy to learn and easy to play. However, its organisation hampers both that and learning the game, there being nothing wrong with the organisation of individual chapters and their content, but rather the order in which the chapters are arranged. It also does not introduce the genre and what to watch or read for the player at all, let alone before leaping into the rules and the generation of martial artists. And for that, it presents the player with such a wealth of options, it is difficult to know where to start, such that it might have been useful if some ready-to-play archetypes had been included. There are pointers to that end, but they are just that.

Ultimately just hindered by its odd organisation, Ruthless Blood, Ruthless Blades – Wuxia Roleplaying is a gritty martial arts fantasy roleplaying game which plays fast and light, if not more than a little deadly, all backed up with plenty of well written background and advice for the Game Master and a fantastic Jianghu, or sandbox, of its very own. With a little bit effort to get past its organisational issues and Ruthless Blood, Ruthless Blades – Wuxia Roleplaying is a great introduction to roleplaying in the Wuxia genre.

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

—oOo—

Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game was published in 1980—and published by SPI or Simulations Publications, Inc., a publisher better known for its many, many wargames. Indeed, it was designed by James F. Dunnigan, the founder of SPI himself and a noted designer of wargames such as Jutland and PanzerBlitz, both for Avalon Hill. Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game is significant because not only was it the first licensed roleplaying game, it was the first licensed roleplaying based on an intellectual property that was not based on a genre such as fantasy, science fiction, or horror. It was also a flop, and infamously, would contribute to SPI’s financial woes and ultimate takeover in 1982 by TSR, Inc. Fellow designer at SPI, Redmond A. Simonsen, later explained in Why Did SPI Die?, “As to DALLAS: we didn’t print 250,000 of them. More like 80,000 (in two runs). That was about 79,999 more than anyone wanted. DALLAS didn’t kill SPI, but it didn’t save it either (as some had vainly hoped). Essentially, anyone who is wired on DALLAS (the TV show) is not also wired on games.” However, there are some interesting elements to Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game that would prefigure later roleplaying game designs.

Of course, Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game is based on the Soap Opera, Dallas, which ran from 1978 until 1991, and at the time of the roleplaying game’s publication was hugely popular around the world. It revolved around the affluent and feuding Texas family, the Ewings, who own the independent oil company Ewing Oil and the cattle-ranching land of Southfork. Its most notorious character is the Ewings’ oldest son, oil tycoon J.R. Ewing, who was renowned for schemes and dirty business practices in his effort to control the family business. In Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game, players take the roles of members of the cast from the television series, including J.R. Ewing, his wife Sue Ellen (Sheppard) Ewing, his younger brother Bobby Ewing and his wife, Pamela (Barnes) Ewing, J.R. and Bobby’s parents, Jock Ewing and Ellie (Southworth) Ewing, Jock Ewing and Ellie Ewing’s granddaughter, Lucy Ewing, Ray Krebbs, the foreman of the Southfork Ranch, and Pamela (Barnes) Ewing’s brother, Cliff Barnes. In each Episode, nine members—nine!—of the cast have their own objectives and over the course of five acts, they will negotiate with each other to achieve them, before persuading, coercing, or seducing their rivals to get what they want, or even investigating them to bring the law down upon them. At the end the five acts, the character who achieves his or her given aims, will have won the Episode, or alternatively the character with the most Victory Points wins, the latter coming into play if more than one character has achieved his or her given aims.

Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game comes a slim box containing three booklets, fifty-six cards, and two six-sided dice. The three books consist of the Rules of Play—just sixteen pages in length, barely five of which cover the rules, the rest being devoted to the three ready-to-play Original Episode scripts, ‘The Great Claim’, ‘Sweet Oil’, and ‘Down along the Coast’; the Scriptwriter’s Guide, also sixteen pages in length, with notes on running and teaching the game for the Director, writing scripts or Episodes, plus background on the cards and Texas, and a sample of play; and the Major Characters booklet. This consists of twenty perforated sheets, one a cheat sheet for the Director, and then a character sheet for each member of the cast. Each character sheet includes full stats for all of the cast, some background, and an explanation of how Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game is played. Each character includes some minor modifiers for affecting or resisting certain other members of the cast. The fifty-six cards consist of minor characters, organisations, and objects—the latter typically Plot Devices in the hands of members of the cast, such as Alexis Blancher, an employee of Ewing Oil, the Texas Railroad Commission, and a Saddlebag of Krugerrands. Many of these will come into play during an Episode and are essentially what the characters will be feuding for control over. The minor characters have the same stats as the members of the cast. 

Each character has four Abilities, and Power and Luck attributes. The four Abilities are Persuasion, Coercion, Seduction, and Investigation, and are divided into pairs, one to Affect another character, the other to Resist another character’s attempt to Affect them with that Ability. Power is a general measure of a character’s strength, whilst Luck is their good fortune—or lack of it—and is generally used as a last resort. The Abilities range in value between eleven and twenty-four, depending upon the cast member, and tend to be less for NPCs and organisations. Power ranges from one to nine for the cast members, or from Lucy Ewing to J.R. Ewing. Luck ranges between one and eight.

To play Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game, the Director—as the Game Master is known—selects or writes an Episode and the players select their characters. They also receive the Plot Devices they start with at the beginning of the Episode. An Episode consists of five Acts and each Act consists of three phases—the Director Phase, the Negotiation Phase, and the Conflict Phase. In the Director Phase, the Director provides the players with new information and plot devices, and then in the Negotiation Phase, the players trade cards, information, and promises to support each other in preparation for the Conflict Phase. The Conflict Phase is the meat of the mechanics.

The core mechanic involves the Affecting (attacking?) character using the active value for an Ability, modified by the Affecting character’s Power and any relevant factors for their relationship against the Resisting character’s defending value for the Attribute, plus modifiers. The Resisting value is subtracted from the Affecting value and if the result is twelve or more, the Affecting character succeeds. If the result, or spread, is between two and eleven, the player of the Affecting character rolls the two six-sided dice and if the result is less than the spread, the Affecting character succeeds. If the Affecting character has succeeded, then the Resisting character can make a Luck check and if his player rolls under the Resisting character’s Luck, he successfully resists the Affecting character’s attempt at Persuasion, Coercion, Seduction, or Investigation.

A successful attempt at Persuasion or Seduction will provide the Affecting character with information from the Resisting character, force the Resisting character to relinquish control of an NPC or Plot Device, control of an NPC if they are uncontrolled. Seduction attempts can only be made against members of the opposite gender who are not related to the Affecting character. Instead of providing the Affecting character with control of an NPC if they are uncontrolled, a successful attempt at Coercion can force another character to make his Affect attempt immediately. If against an NPC and unsuccessful, there is the possibility of Revenge, in which every other member of the cast can make a Persuasion attempt to control the NPC, with the players rolling to see who makes the attempt first. Lastly, a successful Investigation attempt forces the Affected character to reveal information, including the identity of NPCs and Plot Devices which are face down on the table. If a character has committed an Illegal act, another character who controls a legal authority, such as the FBI or Texas Rangers, can use Investigation to identify the suspect officially, and subsequently, use Persuasion combined with control of a legal authority to obtain an arrest, an indictment, and lastly, a conviction. Each of these steps scores a player an increasing number of Victory Points. A convicted character loses all of his Power, but is still in the game, as his conviction is, of course, being appealed.

Physically, Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game is cleanly and tidily presented. It is clearly written, but written in the style of a set of rules for a wargame with numbered and sub-numbered sections—just as SPI would do for its other roleplaying games, DragonQuest and Universe. Internally, none of the roleplaying game’s three booklets are illustrated. All of the illustrations appear on the cover of the box—in colour, and then in black and white on the front cover of the Rules of Play. So none of the character sheets are illustrated. Overall, the black and white production values—some spot colour is used on the cards—are underwhelming and lack the glossy sheen that a product or game based on a television series like Dallas really calls for.

The rules to Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game are decently explained and they do come with an example of play. The three pre-written episodes are also decent and the advice on creating scripts and other characters is workable. The advice on creating scripts is backed up by a list of Plot Devices and biographies of the various NPCs, all of which can be used by the Director to write her own scripts. There is also a lengthy, and quite detailed history of Texas. However, there is no background or information to the television series of Dallas itself, beyond that of the little information given on each of the character sheets. Essentially, to play a game of Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game, the designers expect the participants to rely upon their own knowledge of the series and its characters.

As a design, Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game is not a traditional roleplaying game and nor does it feel like one. There are no rules for creating new members of the cast, no rules for gaining experience, or improving a character as you would find in almost any other roleplaying game. And despite the fact that infamously, a big storyline revolved around the identity of who it was who shot J.R. Ewing, there are no rules for physical conflict or combat—the roleplaying game is all about verbal conflict. Then although it has a Game Master or a Director and everyone sits round the table just as in a traditional roleplaying game, the fact that a game can involve nine players and the Director, makes it feel more like a party or social game. Of course, party or social games were not a category of games as they are today, so the nearest equivalent at the time of Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game publication would be the ‘How to Host a Murder’ type games which were popular then.

As clearly and as simply as the rules are explained, anyone coming to them without a background in wargames or roleplaying—essentially the fan of Dallas picking up Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game on a whim or because it is clearly connected to the soap opera, is likely to feel intimidated by the procedural nature of its play and the stolid nature of the mechanics. Nor is this helped by the grey, even boring production values that might have made the roleplaying that much more enticing , something that another publisher of the time, Yaquinto Publications got right with its own TV’s Dallas: A Game of the Ewing Family board game, part of its Album series.

As much as it states that it is a roleplaying game—and a ‘family’ roleplaying game at that, Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game lacks an explanation of what roleplaying is and an explanation of how the Director narrates the beginning of each act. Nor is there a sense of the NPCs, the minor cast members, being characters in themselves, merely pawns for the main cast to control. There is also a sense of misogyny to the roleplaying game, one that admittedly it inherits from the television show, in that the male members of the cast are more powerful than the female ones. The character sheets though advise that the male characters should not necessarily throw their weight around and that they generally have more challenging victory conditions than the female characters who instead should be working together.

—oOo—

Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game was not well received at the time. The single notable review appeared in The Space Gamer Number 42 (August, 1981). Reviewer David Ladyman asked, “Is DALLAS a useful bridge between gaming and your “real world” friends? That might depend on how many DALLAS freaks you know that you would want to introduce to gaming. Hard core RPGers will probably want to add the game to their collection; characters' attributes and the conflict resolution system are novel enough, even if you have no interest in the television series. I wouldn’t suggest it, though, if you buy your games for long-term playability – DALLAS just doesn't have lasting entertainment value.”

—oOo—

However, as underwhelming as Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game is in terms of presentation, theme, and rules, it is in its own way innovative. As the first licensed roleplaying game, it showed the possibility of obtaining licences based on mainstream intellectual properties and the potential of drawing the fans of those properties into gaming. Within a matter of years, for example, FASA would produce The Doctor Who Role Playing Game and Star Trek: The Role Playing Game, both well received. Most licensed roleplaying games continue to be based on fantasy, horror, or science fiction properties rather than mainstream ones—Leverage: The Roleplaying Game being a rare and more recent example, as well as a good example of how to design a roleplaying game around a television show. Which of course, Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game was not, but it also prefigured adversarial roleplaying, that is a roleplaying game in which the Player Characters are against each other as often as not, and that there can be a clear winner in playing the game. This would really come to the fore in Phage Press’ 1991 Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game and would subsequently be seen in any number of indie roleplaying games.

Another aspect to Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game is that in hindsight, as perhaps as underwhelming as the design is, there is huge potential for roleplaying in the game. It is not the mechanics which entice, but the opportunity to dig into the members of Dallas’ cast, a great many of them signature characters that are familiar even decades on and roleplay them around the table. Although, whether you would roleplay all nine at the same time is is another matter. Of course, Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game does not support this, and it is only with hindsight and the experience of roleplaying that the potential can be seen. Anyone coming to Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game without that experience or that hindsight, will ultimately be daunted by what they find in the box. 

Forty years since the publication of Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game and the hobby is better served by roleplaying games which would emulate its genre. Dog Eared Designs’ Primetime Adventures: a game of television melodrama is an obvious choice, but Fiasco could also do it, as could Pasión de las Pasiones, the telenovela tabletop roleplaying game Powered by the Apocalypse published by Magpie Games. Further, all three of those roleplaying games would have the advice and guidance that Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game lacks.

Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game is significant as the first licensed roleplaying game, but not necessarily as a design. It can be seen as a venture or experiment, that in 1980, would have made commercial sense for SPI to pursue and publish because the crossover potential between fans of Dallas the television series and the roleplaying hobby could have been significant. Certainly, within a family it could have served as a means for a roleplayer to show his parents or other family members who were fans of Dallas, but likely mystified by his hobby, what roleplaying was like and how it could be fun.  Of course, it was not to be. Few in the roleplaying hobby would have been interested in a roleplaying game based on Dallas and anyone outside of the hobby would be daunted by the design of Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game, which is more of a card game than a roleplaying game.

Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game is an interesting, even important, curio from the dawn of the commercialisation of the roleplaying hobby. Its design though, is a hangover from the dusk of another hobby—wargaming, and that meant that Dallas: The Television Role-Playing Game was not the family-friendly—even if its cast of characters were anything but—introduction to roleplaying games it was intended to be. 

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

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Published by Margaret Weis Productions in 2010, Leverage: The Roleplaying Game is a licensed roleplaying game based upon the television series which ran from 2008 to 2012. In the series, a Crew of con artists—a mastermind, a grifter, a hacker, a thief, and a retrieval specialist—take on a series of heists in order to fight injustices inflicted upon ordinary citizens by corporations and the government. Each of the episodes follows a set story structure. A Client comes to the team with a problem that only its members can find a solution to. This involves researching the villain or Mark and finding a weakness which the Crew can use to undermine him, and then formulating a plan which will make use of both the weakness and the skills of individual team members. As the plan goes into action, the Mark and his henchmen will seem to gain the upper hand, but ultimately, the Crew will outwit them all. Flashbacks will reveal further clues and improvisations that helped them overcome certain complications, and so ultimately, bring justice for the Client. This is the exact format that Leverage: The Roleplaying Game follows to provide not only an excellent adaptation of its source material, but also arguably, the purest treatment of the heist genre in any roleplaying game. From the outset, Leverage: The Roleplaying Game is a simple sell. It is modern day, it is set in the real world, and the Player Characters, though highly skilled, are all easy to grasp and understand. They are all ‘crooks with a heart of gold’ or Robin Hood-types, rather than out and out criminals. The tone of the series and thus the roleplaying game is also family friendly—although there is action and there are fights, there is never gunplay, at least not on the part of the Crew. (The lack of gun play will also have an impact on game play, making carrying out a heist that much more challenging and thus more satisfying when pulled off because brute force or threat is not an option.) Plus, even if the players have never seen Leverage the television series, then they might have seen its BBC forebear, Hustle, or films such as Ocean’s 11 and the other entries in the series. Lastly, despite the fact that Leverage: The Roleplaying Game follows the formula of the television series, the formula and thus its set-up means that as a roleplaying game—especially a licensed roleplaying game—Leverage: The Roleplaying Game has not actually dated in the ten years since it was published. Leverage: The Roleplaying Game is one of five roleplaying games from Margaret Weis Productions to use Cortex Plus, the others being the Smallville Roleplaying Game, the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, the Dragon Brigade Roleplaying Game, and the Firefly Role-Playing Game. It is both a roleplaying game and a roleplaying game, a roleplaying game in that each player is roleplaying a character and each character is playing a Role. There are five Roles—a Mastermind, a Grifter, a Hacker, a Thief, and a Hitter—and Leverage: The Roleplaying Game works best when there are five players, each of whom takes one of the five Roles and so forms a Crew. The Mastermind specialises in plans and coordinating the Crew’s activities on the Job; the Grifter gains and use people’s trust through disguises and roles; the Hacker gains, supplies, and denies information, typically using technology; the Thief steals or plants things by stealth and foiling security systems; and the Hitter supplies force and a tactical edge. There is some crossover between Roles for the Crewmembers, so the roleplaying game can be played with fewer players, but its optimal number is nonetheless five. A Crewmember also has six Attributes—Agility, Alertness, Intelligence, Strength, Vitality, and Willpower; two Specialities, each one associated with a Role, such as Driving for Hitter and Piloting for Hacker; three Distinctions or personality quirks or traits, which can work to a Crewmember’s disadvantage as much as they do advantage; and Talents, essentially tricks which related to particular roles and when activated grant a Crewmember an advantage. Roles and Attributes are rated by die type, the larger the die type, the better the ability of the Role or Attribute, both being defined by ten-, eight-, six-, and four-sided dice. A Speciality is valued as a six-sided die, whilst a Distinction can be rated as an eight-sided or a four-sided die depending whether it is in the Crewmember’s favour or not.
To create a Crewmember, a player selects a Primary Role and a Secondary Role, assigning a ten-sided die to the former, an eight-sided die to the second, and decides on two Specialities, attaching each to a particular Role. A six-sided die is assigned to a third Role, and four-sided dice to the remaining two. The size of dice types assigned to the attributes will vary depending upon if the Crewmember is focused or versatile. Lastly, the player selects three Distinctions and two Talents. Winston MoranWinston Moran used to work in financial security, preventing banks and other institutions from being robbed. He was injured in a car crash which also left his wife in coma and due to the injury was forced to take early retirement. Unfortunately, his employers defaulted and left him without pension, forcing him to turn to ‘crime’ to pay for his wife’s medical bills. RolesGrifter d8, Hacker d6, Hitter d4, Mastermind d10, Thief d4 AttributesAgility d8, Alertness d8, Intelligence d10, Strength d6, Vitality d8, Willpower d8 SpecialitiesBank Fraud, Games DistinctionsVoice of Authority, Walks with a Cane, Industry Veteran TalentsSlip of the Tongue (Grifter)Sea of Calm (Mastermind) This though, is the quick and easy version—but not the fun version. The suggested version—the fun version—is ‘The Recruitment Job’. Each player partially defines his Crewmember and together the Crew play through a simple Job designed to showcase what each Crewmember can do and define and bring into play the other undefined aspects of each Crewmember. Essentially, this is the playing group’s pilot episode or ‘Zero Session’ for their Leverage series. There are one or two quirks about Crewmember generation. The first is that a Crewmember’s Secondary Role will define how he approaches his primary Role. For example, the Grifter whose Secondary Role is Hitter, is a ‘Swashbuckler’, aggressive and challenging  with a Mark, but uses lots of misdirection and quips in a fistfight, whilst the Hitter whose Secondary Role is Grifter is a ‘Duellist’, a quick, deceptive combatant who uses feints and distractions to bait his opponents. The second quirk is that there is no Charisma attribute and this is by design. Rather, the Attributes of Intelligence, Strength, Vitality, and Willpower all assume aspects of a Crewmember’s charisma and how he uses it on the Job. Essentially, every Crewmember is charismatic, but exactly how will vary from Crewmember to Crewmember—just like the cast of a television series. Mechanically, Leverage: The Roleplaying Game uses the Cortex Plus system—in 2020 revisited with new core rulebook, Cortex Prime. The basics revolve around two opposed dice rolls, one by the player, one by the Fixer—as the Game Master is known in Leverage: The Roleplaying Game. Each dice roll consists of two dice. For the Crewmember, the dice roll will consist of a die from one Attribute and a die from one Role, both of which will vary from situation. For example, when his Crewmember is chasing a potential Mark, the Fixer might call upon the player to roll his Crewmember’s Alertness plus Hitter, or if a Crewmember is being chased by security guards and he wants to hide, perhaps on the ceiling, the Fixer would ask his player to roll Agility plus Thief. The Fixer will in turn be rolling dice which might be for the environment, such as ‘Ten Stories Up d6 plus Vibration Sensors d8’ or an NPC, which for most NPCs, such as the Client, a simple Mark, Extras, and so on, will have no more than a handful of traits, such Wannabe Hacker d4 or The Best Golfer d6. Other NPCs, including Marks, Foils, and Agents—the latter typically out to capture or beat the Crew or a particular Crewmember, can be as complex as actual Player Character Crewmembers. Although just two dice form the core of the basic roll, other dice can be added to it. The use of Specialities, Distinctions, Assets, and Complications can all add dice to the roll. In most cases, these require the expenditure of Plot Points. Plot Points—of which a Crewmember starts with one—can also be used to activate Talents and create new Assets, which last for the scene (or the whole Job for two Plot Points). Ultimately, only the two highest dice are counted and added together. This sets the stakes for the Fixer to roll her dice and attempt to roll higher. If she does, she ‘Raises the Stakes’, and it is up to the player to reroll the dice, and if add in more dice, to gain a score higher than that rolled by the Fixer. Alternatively, whomever rolled lower can back down and decide not to roll to beat the other. In which case, the Crewmember or Mark has given in and taken down, the winner of deciding the outcome. If however, one side rolls five higher than the stakes are currently set at, then they have achieved an Extraordinary Success and an automatic takedown of their opposition. Where Cortex Plus gets interesting is in the generation of Plot Points. Whenever a one result is rolled on a die by a player, it is not counted towards the two dice he keeps as his Crewmember’s total, but it does generate or improve a Complication, which adds another die to the Fixer’s dice roll. When that happens, the player receives a Plot Point. When the Fixer rolls a one on any of her dice, it generates an Opportunity and the player can bring in one of his Crewmember’s Talents, if appropriate. The fact that rolls of one generate Plot Points and Plot Points can be used to create Assets, add dice to a roll, and so on, means that players will want to be rolling ones almost as much as they high results, and the best way to roll ones, is to roll lower value dice, such as six-sided- and four-sided dice. Both of course, have higher chances of rolling ones. A Crewmember starts play with a Role set at a four-sided die, but the other way to bring in a four-sided die is to add a Distinction to the roll. If the Distinction works in the Crewmember’s favour, then it is rolled as an eight-sided die, but if it is to his disadvantage, it only adds the desired, but also the reviled four-sided die. Either way, rolls of one represent the type of setbacks that might be seen in an episode of Leverage, but at same time generate the Plot Points that will ensure already expert Crewmembers complete the Job and take down the Mark. For example, the Crew managed to plant a bugging device in the Mark’s office. However, the Mark’s security ensured it was not able to broadcast what it downloaded from his computer, so the Crew needs to get it back. Winston Moran has already been into the Mark’s office, ostensibly to talk about a bank fraud, but that was to give the bug time to work. Now he needs to get it back. He tells the security guard that he dropped his wallet in the office, so the guard lets him go and get it. The guard is diligent and comes to check on Winston. To see if Winston grabs the bug before the guard becomes suspicious, the Fixer asks his player to roll Winston’s Alertness plus Thief. Unfortunately, this is a d8 for Alertness and a d4 for Thief—the latter is so low because Winston is not as young as he was. Winston’s player rolls an eight and a one! This sets the stakes at eight because the one is set apart and further, it generates a Complication. The Security Guard has Security Guard d6 and Really Doesn’t Want Any Trouble d6, but since Winston rolled a one and generated a Complication, it adds another die to the Fixer’s roll, in this case, Suspicions Aroused d6. She rolls a four, a five, and a two! This Raises the Stakes to eleven. Winston’s player states that he is going to roll d8 for Alertness and a d4 for Thief again, but spend a Plot Point to bring in a Distinction, in this case, Walks with a Cane. As this is being used to Winston’s benefit, it adds a d8 rather than a d4. His player rolls a three, a four, and a six to give a final result of thirteen. This beats the Fixer’s stakes and she backs down as Winston allays the security guard’s suspicions with, “Found it! Sorry for being so slow—old man with a cane, you know.”Beyond the simple mechanics, Leverage: The Roleplaying Game introduces numerous elements which model the television series. For example, all of the Crewmembers are Experts and as in classic episodic television, they do not really improve, or at least they, it is at a very slow rate. Instead of the classic Experience Points, a Crewmember records each of the Jobs he completes. During a future Job, a player can have his Crewmember make a ‘Callback’ to the previous events of another Job to gain a bonus eight-sided die. This provides the Crewmember with a ready pool of bonus dice, but alternatively, a player can improve an Attribute or Role die, or purchase further Specialities or Talents by permanently marking off the Job titles. Where the television series is really modelled is in the use of Flashbacks. In an episode of the television series, the focus of the Job is all on the Mark and how he is affected by the Crew’s efforts to scam him. They come in two forms. Establishment Flashbacks add an element to a Crewmember’s backstory to bring an Asset into play, whilst Wrap-Up Flashbacks establish Assets which can aid in turning the tables on the mark and go towards the finale and Mastermind’s final roll against him. They are both a narrative device to further showcase the various Crewmembers’ Roles and other traits and a means to overcome a Job’s final hurdles. For the Fixer, there is a deep discussion of the heist genre as seen in Leverage, taking her through the process of constructing a Job—from the Client and his Problem to the Mark, a discussion of a traditional three-act structure versus the five-act structure of a Leverage episode, twists to use and twists to avoid—the latter primarily to prevent the players and their Crewmembers getting to bogged down in planning, taking inspiration from news stories, and even a ‘Situation Generator’ for creating a random Job. The Fixer can also make use of the example Clients, Foils, Agents, Locations, and more, though Locations are relatively easy to come up with given that the Leverage: The Roleplaying Game is set in the modern day and the Fixer can draw inspiration from around her. The world around the Crew is explored in broad detail, whilst the criminal and the Crew’s place in it is given more detail. With advice on subjects such as ‘Thinking Like a Criminal’, ‘Violence’, and the nature of ‘Cons’, including long, short, and classic cons. This last part is a solid introduction to grifting and running con games, and much like the rest of the chapters intended for the Fixer can just as easily be read and perused by the players. Rounding out the Leverage: The Roleplaying Game is an episode guide for the first two seasons of the television series. This either works as inspiration for the Fixer or it feels a lot much like filler content, but either way, it would have been nice to have some ready-to play-Jobs alongside it.
One issue with Leverage: The Roleplaying Game is the same as the Leverage television series. It is fundamentally episodic in nature, such that there is relatively minimal character or on-going development from one episode to the next. This is partially reflected in the slow growth and improvement of the Crewmembers through the Jobs recorded and spent as Experience Points. What this means is that the Leverage: The Roleplaying Game is not necessarily a game to play on an ongoing or even a long term basis, but since every episode of the television series and every Job is more or less self-contained, it works well for one-shots, for short seasons, and even pickup games with minimal preparation time if the Fixer uses the tables provided in the book to create a situation.
In terms of play, Leverage: The Roleplaying Game is a game which encourages player input, whether that is in the expenditure of Plot Points to add Assets to a Job or be inventive in how each player brings his Attribute and Role combinations into play. The Fixer will probably suggest combinations most of the time, but there is scope for a player to suggest his own too. This though, is also open to abuse, but a good Fixer should be able to nix that in the bud and encourage her players to play in the spirit of the Leverage television series. Physically, Leverage: The Roleplaying Game is a really clean, bright looking book decently illustrated with stills from the television series. It is both engagingly and well written, and although it lacks an index, the table of content does a reasonable job of making up for it. Neither the mechanics nor the genre of Leverage: The Roleplaying Game have dated and both are as comfortable to run in the here and now of this year or any other year, as much as they were in 2010. The focus of the design on emulating its source genre however does date it to its publication era, that of the storytelling game/indie roleplaying game movement which dominated the late 2010s, but of course, designed to a far more commercial end. As much as it is designed to emulate the Leverage television series, its treatment of its genre means that it can do other heist or con game set-ups just as easily as it can Leverage the television series. Nominated for the 2011 Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Game, Leverage: The Roleplaying Game is an elegant, well-designed treatment of not just the Leverage television series it is based upon, but also of the heist and the con game genres in general.

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?
Remembering Caroman presents a scenario for use with RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha.

It is forty-nine page, full colour, 25.75 MB PDF.
The layout is clean and tidy, and many of the illustrations good. It needs an edit.

Where is it set?
Remembering Caroman is set in Sartar in the lands of the Orlmarth, Ernaldori, Enjossi, and Sambari clans.
Who do you play?Player Characters should be Sartarites or their in good standing. Members of the Orlmarth or Ernaldori clans will have strong ties to the plot and several of its locations. A shaman, or any character capable of talking to the spirits of the dead will be very useful. A Humakti will also be use.
What do you need?
Legion requires RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. The RuneQuest: Glorantha Bestiary may be useful for details of spirits, and both the RuneQuest Gamemaster Screen Pack and The Smoking Ruin & Other Stories will be useful for information about Clearwine. The Pegasus Plateau & Other Stories may also be useful for information about the Locaemtribe.
What do you get?
Remembering Caroman is a scenario set in and around the lands of the Colymar tribe after the events of the Dragonrise and the Lunars have been thrown out of Sartar. The Player Characters attend the funeral of a local homesteader and discover that not are only the ancestor spirits in attendance, they are also unhappy, primarily a holdover from the disruption caused by the occupation of much of Sartar by the Lunar Empire. Discussion with the other funeral attendees reveals that there may be spirits still to be laid to rest at nearby farm on Little Starfire Ridge.
Further investigation reveals that the farm has fallen into neglect following the death of its owner, that it is haunted by her spirit—she cannot rest or cross over until she sees her son who has been missing for almost a quarter of a century, and that it is a potential source of friction between the nearby clans as to which of them will inherit once the issue at hand is settled. Essentially, what the Player Characters have to do is locate her son and return him home. This requires no little investigation, the Player Characters needing to travel to first Clearwine, then to the shores of Kjartan’s Lake, and from there by one or two different routes into Sambari tribal lands. Their primary sources will be survivors of the first few battles during the Lunar invasion of 1602.
Remembering Caroman involves plenty of travel and besides one or two given encounters and situation, has scope for the Game Master to add details and events of her own. The initial setting on the Little Starfire Ridge makes the scenario easy to tie into a campaign in and around Apple Lane, such as that established in the RuneQuest Gamemaster Screen Pack, and then via both the RuneQuest Gamemaster Screen Pack and The Smoking Ruin & Other Stories to Clearwine. With some effort, the locations for the scenario could easily be adjusted to elsewhere. Along the way, there are some great scenes, such as coming to the help of workers at a collapsing salmon leap and running into a band of Trollkin who have got the wrong idea, 
The scenario will more challenging for a group whose number does not include a Shaman. The scenario is also quite linear, but then the Player Characters are following a trail of clues. This trail does diverge though, providing two routes to its dénouement, but that said, if the Player Characters take one route, they will avoid the interesting encounters on the other. Which is a pity, because the the likelihood is that the Player Characters will learn more form one path than the other. The scenario’s initial set-up may a require a bit of push to get the Player Characters involved, so the Game Master should ideally dig into their backgrounds to tie them into the set-up and thus get them involved. 
Is it worth your time?Yes—Remembering Caroman presents an enjoyable exploration of how the magical and the mundane worlds of Glorantha come together in a scenario that can easily be slotted into an ongoing campaign set in Sartar.  No—Remembering Caroman is probably best avoided if the campaign is not set in Sartar and the Player Characters do not include a Shaman.Maybe—Remembering Caroman is strongly location specific, but has some entertaining scenes which could be adapted elsewhere.

The careers of Delta Green agents tend not to go well—they dabble in the secrets of the Unnatural or they become so obsessed with a mystery or a case that they lose perspective, threaten their very sanity, and even the secrecy of the conspiracy itself. This is certainly the case in scenarios such as Delta Green: Need to Know and Delta Green: Kali Ghati, so it is with Delta Green: Music From a Darkened Room. Also available in the anthology, A Night at the Opera: Six Terrifying Operations for Delta Green: The Role-Playing, this is essentially a haunted house scenario, but done in the style of Delta Green rather than another horror roleplaying game, such as Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition.

Delta Green: Music From a Darkened Room, published by Arc Dream Publishing, takes place in the small town of Meadowbrook, New Jersey. The Agents are directed to investigate and determine the cause of the death of FBI Special Agent Arthur Donnelly who was found dead at 1206 Spooner Avenue, his throat and his blood sprayed around the room where he was found dead. Although his death has been ruled as a suicide, Delta Green suspects that there is more to it because the previous owner was also found dead under the exact same circumstances. Although the FBI considers the matter closed, Delta Green does not, and that will both drive and possibly hamper the Agent’s investigative efforts. The Agents are tasked with determining whether or not the house is tied to the deaths—and if so, how, and then if the house remains a threat to the public at large.

Effectively, what this means is that Delta Green: Music From a Darkened Room is divided into two halves—much like its precedent, ‘The Haunting’ for Call of Cthulhu. In the first half, the Agents investigate the history of the house, its occupants, the reasons for their selling up, and in all too many cases, the terrible things which happened whilst they were in 1206 Spooner Avenue. The Agents will have to work hard to dig into the history of the house, and even harder to avoid arousing the suspicions of the proper authorities, but there is a richness of clues for the Agents to uncover. Beginning with a couple of local contacts as well as a local Green Box—a repository of equipment, clues, records, and leftovers from previous other investigations, the trail of clues leads through the records of the ownership of the house, death certificates, surviving past occupants, and more. As well as warning the Agents not to alert the authorities, Delta Green also notably warns the Agents that they should take extreme care in investigating the house, suggesting that it may have had an influence upon the deaths which took place within its walls. Hopefully, this will be strong enough of a warning for the Agents to do their due diligence, rather than rushing off to physically examine the house (though there is nothing to stop them from doing so if they wish).

In the second half of the scenario, hopefully forewarned by discoveries made during their investigations in and around Meadowbrook, the Agents enter the house and explore its confines. The descriptions of individual rooms and what is in them feel quite lightly drawn—the Handler may well want to add a little more detail here, whereas the descriptions of what might happen in each of the house’s rooms and when, is highly detailed by comparison. The encounters and experiences to be had  from room to room in the house play are a major factor in the scenario’s second half, many involving flashbacks and pleasing in places, all five senses, and the investigation of the actual house, the majority of them varying according to the Agents’ Will Power stat. This enables the Handler to tailor the encounters and experiences to the players’ Agents, enabling her to start with a sense of unease during the first few scenes in the house and then build up through creepy to weird and then outright bloody confrontations. Although this needs to be handled with some care lest it be overplayed, there are some entertaining shocks to throw at the Agents and their players. The Handler may want to pick and choose which of these to use lest the horror becomes too sudden, too often.

Although there one or two nods in Delta Green: Music From a Darkened Room to its forebear, ‘The Haunting’ for Call of Cthulhu, most notably the two act structure of the investigation and the inclusion of a family from Quebec, Delta Green: Music From a Darkened Room is very different. Not just its modern milieu, but also because it is creepier, the whole house seemingly haunted and potentially a source of scares and threats to the Agents. The secrets of the house and its past occupants are also not as obviously found, and the Agents will have to work increasingly hard to discover a great many, if not all, of the scenario’s clues. If the scenario’s investigative process is also challenging—more so if the Agents are trying to conceal their interest in the house, let alone their investigations, then determining and potentially applying a possible solution that will solve the mystery is extremely difficult. In fact, so difficult that some players may even come to see Delta Green: Music From a Darkened Room as a no-win scenario.

Physically, Delta Green: Music From a Darkened Room is a well-presented scenario. It is well written, but the Handler will need to read it carefully as there is a lot of information that she will potentially have to impart to her players and their Agents. The single set of floorplans is clear, but perhaps a little plain and could have done with a few internal details added to help the Handler describe each room. The few handouts could also have been collected at the end of the book for easy use by the Handler. Given the wealth of clues to be found in the scenario, the players should be prepared to take a lot of notes for their Agents.

Delta Green: Music From a Darkened Room is a dark foreboding scenario, one with a strong sense of claustrophobia, both within of the walls of 1206 Spooner Avenue and in the town itself—especially if the Agents’ activities come to the notice of the townsfolk of Meadowbrook and they begin to gossip and take an interest in them. The Agents’ investigative efforts also have potentially disastrous consequences if they are not careful. Overall, Delta Green: Music From a Darkened Room is an enjoyable mix of challenging, but rich investigation and spine-chillingly unpleasant, often macabre atmosphere and encounters in a haunted house.

At first sight, Warlock! looks like just another Old School Renaissance Retroclone—and it is, but not the sort you might be thinking of. Published by Fire Ruby Designs—previously best known for Golgotha, the Science Fiction retroclone of far future dungeon scavenging in shattered battleships—Warlock! quickly makes its inspirations known with the strap line, “A Game Inspired By The Early Days Of British Tabletop Gaming”. As much as Warlock! is a fantasy roleplaying game replete with Dwarves, Elves, and Halflings, warriors and wizards, and so on, it only draws upon Dungeons & Dragons as far as that, and no more—just as inspirations for Warlock! did. Instead, Warlock! 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. The inspiration for Warlock! is thus Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and Maelstrom as well as the Fighting Fantasy solo adventure books which began with The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. However, Warlock! is very much lighter than Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, at least mechanically, though mechanically more complex than Fighting Fantasy. In tone though, Warlock! is 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.

Warlock! is a Career and Skills driven game rather than  a Class and Level game. A Player Character has two attributes—Stamina and Luck, as well as a Community. This can either be Human, Halfling, Elf, or Dwarf. These grant societal benefits rather than mechanical ones. He also has thirty-two base skills, ranging from Appraise, Athletics, and Bargain to Survival, Swimming, and Throw, and all of which range in value from one to twenty. To create a character, a player rolls dice for the two attributes, selects a Community, and sets ten skills at a base level of six and another ten at level five. The rest are set at a base level of four. The player then rolls four six-sided dice. These generate the four choices he will have in terms of Basic Career for his character. Once selected, a Career provides four things. First a quintet of skills which can be increased during play whilst the Player Character remains in that Career and a maximum level to which they can be improved, either ten or twelve. For example, the Pedlar receives Ostler 10, Streetwise 10, Appraise 12, Bargain 12, and Repair 12. The player divides ten points between these skills up to their maximum given values. Second, it provides a sixth skill, named after the Career itself, the level for this Career skill being the average of the other skills the Career grants. Third, it provides some standard equipment, and fourth it gives a pair of background elements specific to the Player Character’s time in that Career, both of which are generated randomly. For example, a Pedlar’s two die rolls would determine what he sold and where he has been. Lastly, a player picks three personality traits for character.

Name: Gottschalk Einstein
Community: Human
Career: Raconteur
Past Careers:

STAMINA: 17 LUCK: 13

ADVENTURING SKILLS
Appraise 07 (12), Athletics 05, Bargain 06, Blunt 05, Bow 04, Brawling 06, Command 04, Crossbow 04, Diplomacy 05, Disguise 04, Dodge 09 (10), Endurance 06, History 07 (10), Incantation 04, Intimidate 04, Language 06, Large Blade 04, Lie 08 (12), Medicine 04, Navigation 05, Ostler 05, Persuasion 06, Pole Arm 04, Repair 05, Sleight of Hand 04, Small Blade 05, Spot 06, Stealth 05, Streetwise 06 (12), Survival 05, Swimming 06, Thrown 04

Career SKILLS
Raconteur 7

POSSESSIONS
6 silver coins, backpack, three days’ foods, waterskin, eating knife, jaunty clothes, and boots.
A bottle or two of something strong and a few ‘relics’ of your past exploits, impressive but worthless.

WEAPONS
Arming sword

TRAITS
Charming, Enthusiastic, Lazy

SPELLS
None

NOTES
What tales do you tell? – The latest tales from the capital.
Where have you been? – Here and there. Buy me a drink?

Character generation is for the most part straightforward, as is character progression. A Player Character should receive one, two, or three advances per session. Each advance will increase one of a Player Character’s Career skill by one level, up to the maximum allowed by the Career. As a Player Character’s Career skills rise, so will his Stamina, representing him becoming tougher and more experienced. When a Player Character reaches the maximum skill level, he can change Careers—this will cost him a total of five advances. Whilst this grants him access to other skills, it will not increase the cap on the ones he already has. For that, he needs to enter an Advanced Career, such as Assassin, Bravo, Merchant, or Wizard. This raises the maximum skill levels to fourteen and sixteen rather than ten and twelve for Basic Careers. There are sixteen Advanced Careers in Warlock! and twenty-four Basic Careers. In general, a Player Character will be undertaking two or three Basic Careers before entering an Advanced Career—probably ten or fifteen sessions of play or so, before a Player Character is in a position to do that.

Mechanically, Warlock! is simple. To undertake an action, a player rolls a twenty-sided die, adds the value for appropriate skill or Career and aims to roll twenty or higher. More difficult tasks may levy a penalty of two or four upon the roll. Opposed rolls are a matter of rolling higher to beat an opponent. Luck is also treated as a skill for purposes of rolling, and rolled when a character finds himself in a dire or perilous situation where the circumstances go in his favour or against him. Combat is equally simple, consisting of opposed attack rolls—melee attacks versus melee attacks and ranged attacked versus the target’s Dodge skill. Damage is rolled on one or two six-sided dice depending upon the weapon, whilst mighty strikes, which inflict double damage, are possible if an attacker rolls three times higher than the defender. Armour reduces damage taken by a random amount.

Damage is deducted from a defendant’s Stamina. When this is reduced to zero, the defendant suffers a critical hit, necessitating a roll on a Critical Hit table. Warlock! has five, for slashing, piercing, crushing, and blast damage. Of course, roleplaying games like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay had more, and more entries on them, but for a stripped back game like Warlock!, they are enough—and they are brutal. Damage below a defendant’s Stamina acts as a modifier to the roll on the table, so once dice are rolled on the critical damage tables, combat takes a nasty turn.

For example, Gottschalk Einstein is heading to his lodgings after a night on the town when he is attacked by a couple of thugs—Wilmar and Bruna, thinking that the worse for wear gentleman will be an easy mark. Both have clubs, 14 Stamina, and a Blunt skill of 3. The Game Master states that in his inebriated state, Gottschalk will be surprised. This means that the thugs can act first and have a +5 bonus to their rolls. Gottschalk’s player will roll normally, but will be using his Dodge skill of 9. Against Wilmar’s roll of 10, Gottschalk’s player’s roll 13 is good enough—the raconteur sees the attack coming and just steps out of the way. Bruna is more successful though, as the Game Master rolls a total of twenty against Gottschalk’s 15. The Game Master rolls 1d6-1 for her club and inflicts four points of Stamina damage, which Gottschalk suffers because he is not wearing armour—a poor way to impress the ladies! On the next round, the Game Master has everyone roll for initiative, a simple roll of a six-sided die. Gottschalk’s four beats the thug’s two, and drawing his arming sword, he swings at the nearest thug, which is Bruna. Unfortunately, Gottschalk is slightly drunk and the Game Master levies a -2 penalty to his Large Blade skill—reducing it to two (who said Gottschalk was a fighter?). His player rolls a total of 12 versus Bruna’s 8, and so hits. Gottschalk slashes at his assailant and inflicts nine damage on her, reduced by one for her padded jerkin. Bruna now has six Stamina. Wilmar attempts a second attack, and whilst Gottschalk is at a penalty on his Dodge roll, his player rolls 16, three times Wilmar’s roll of 1 which means not only that he misses, the Game Master rules that he falls flat on his face!

On round two, Gottschalk continues slashing at Bruna, his player rolling a total of 21. The Game Master rolls 18, which is not good enough and his drunken swings are enough to inflict another eight points his blade slashes open her padded jerkin. This reduces Bruna’s Stamina to -2, necessitating a roll on the Slashing Critical table. Gottschalk rolls two six-sided dice and adds two to the result for an average result of seven—which means that he has sliced at least one of her fingers off! She drops her club and clutches her hand in pain. She thinks better of her action and dashes for the alley. Meanwhile, her cohort, Wilmar manages to get to his feet and hefting his club suddenly realises he is facing a drunk with a bloodied sword in hand and his cohort has scarpered! Wilmar has a moment to think about his current Career choice…

Magic in Warlock! can be cast by either priests or wizards, but both use Incantation skill to cast, have to be cast from scrolls, and require the expenditure of Stamina to power. Spells can thus be cast so long as the caster has Stamina. However, a caster will suffer ‘Wrath of the Otherworld’ should his player roll a one, followed by a second failed Incantation test. This results on a roll on the Miscast table, leading to results such as the caster’s skin being bleached white or their face frozen in a grimace for several days. It is even possible for non-priests or non-wizards to cast spells, that is, read them off the scrolls. However, the likelihood of such spells being successfully cast is relatively low given that every Player Character will have a four in his Incantation skill… Some thirty-six or so spells are listed, from Alarm and Banish to Swarm and Unseen. Magic items in Warlock! essentially model the effects of spells, either without the need for an Incantation check, or with the Incantation check, but without the Stamina cost.

Warlock!’s bestiary includes all of the usual suspects, from Chimera, Dire Wolves, and Demon to Wight, Wraith, and Wyvern. Advice for the Game Master highlights the deadliness of the combat, the low power of the magic and its potential accessibility by everyone, and whilst the monsters are not necessarily evil, they may act as such. It also states that the way to become powerful in terms of magic is to specialise, but there are no rules for that. The major piece of advice for the Game Master is that Warlock! is designed to be hackable, and given how light the mechanics are, that is certainly the case. There is advice too, on handling the expectations that the players have in coming to a scenario and building an adventure around those. However, there is no scenario included which would showcase what the designer expects to see, and this is not helped by the lack of background to Warlock!. What there is, is very lightly sketched out. There is a marauding Warlock! of course, and the gods, such as the beloved Thrice Blessed, the bloody Red King, and the reviled Dragon, but nothing beyond that... 

Warlock! is a buff little book, starkly laid out and illustrated in a suitably rough style which feels suitably in keeping with the period inspiration. It is very handy and especially combined with the lightness of its mechanics, makes it easy to reference and to run from the book.

The danger of being inspired by Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and Fighting Fantasy is that Warlock! could have been fairly complex, but in taking concepts and structures from both—the Careers in particular of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and the simplicity of Fighting Fantasy, the result is something that is leaner, faster, but still as brutal and as grim. Plus it is light enough for the Game Master to easily develop her own content. Overall, Warlock! is easy to pick up and play, presenting a quick and dirty fantasy roleplaying game that will tick many gamer’s sense of nostalgia.

At the Mountains of Madness is horror author H.P. Lovecraft’s longest and one of his most famous stories. It takes the form of a series of letters, written by Doctor William Dyer, a geologist from Miskatonic University, who in late 1930 led an expedition to the Antarctic which would end in disaster, madness, and death following the discovery of the remains of prehistoric lifeforms unknown to science, buried in the permafrost and the remains of a cyclopean city behind a mountain range the height of the Himalayas—previously never seen before, the city long abandoned for terrible reasons which are ultimately revealed at the denouement of the story. Specifically, Doctor Dyer’s letters have been written in an effort to prevent a second, and much more important and widely publicised expedition which is being mounted to the Antarctic from following in the same path. The story has a strong sense of atmosphere and environment—the ice and snow, and extreme low temperatures play a major role in the narrative, serving as a starkly frigid backdrop against which its events take place and its equally stark revelations as to the horrid and horrifying events in the past and their dark influences upon the origins of mankind.

Originally serialised in the February, March, and April 1936  issues of Astounding Stories, At the Mountains of Madness has been published many times since and in more recent years adapted into songs, musicals, graphic novels, radio serials, and more. The very latest adaptation is none of these, but an illustrated version of the novel. At the Mountains of Madness is published by Free League Publishing, a publisher best known for roleplaying games such as Mutant: Year Zero – Roleplaying at the End of Days and Forbidden Lands – Raiders & Rogues in a Cursed World, this is not the publisher’s first such title. That would be The Call of Cthulhu, the classic of American horror literature and the short story that is arguably H.P. Lovecraft’s most well-known. As with that classic, the Free League Publishing edition of At the Mountains of Madness is fully illustrated by French artist François Baranger and presented in a large 10½ by 14 inches folio format. 

However, this is only At the Mountains of Madness Volume I. Running to just sixty-four pages, the text of the story only takes the protagonists as far as the upper reaches of the Elder Thing city, it closing at the point where the protagonists are preparing to enter the city’s subterranean depths. Fortunately, the fact that  the reader will need to wait for the second part to see more of Baranger’s gorgeous artwork is the first volume’s only downside (all right, to be fair, the large format of the book makes it difficult to place on almost any book shelf). This though should not persuade the reader from perusing the gorgeous pages of At the Mountains of Madness Volume I, for Baranger illustrates every page, brilliantly realising many of the novella’s many scenes. These begin in the dusty halls of Miskatonic University, quiet and contemplative, Doctor Dyer putting pen to paper to warn the upcoming expedition, before leaping into the joy and hope of his own expedition as it sets sail from Boston for the South Pole. There, the large folio format grants space to capture the sense of scale to the expedition’s task, to the southernmost continent itself, and ultimately the city of the Elder Things itself, with wide, glorious vistas of the Antarctic and later the shattered, alien city—all bare, starkly white and icy. A later piece inverts this, depicting Dyer and his colleague, Danforth’s flight through the city with a dizzying sense of depth as it threads its way between colossal ruins.

Contrasting this is the closeness of the expedition, working and discussing the discoveries made, almost huddling together for warmth and to maintain a human connection. Here the colours are darker and use muddier tones as the expedition discovers the remains of the Elder Things in the caverns below the ice and later perform autopsies upon them. There is a nod to The Thing in these scenes, dripping menace and mystery as the weird corpses thaw and strange fluids fall to the floor, drop by drop. Baranger’s final illustration is subtly ominous, the stonework of the wall around the entrance to the tunnel below the Elder Thing city casting a skull…

At the Mountains of Madness Volume I is a stunning book. The likelihood is that the reader of this book will have read H.P. Lovecraft’s story before, probably more than once, but François Baranger brings the story to life in rich, gorgeous colour that captures both the grandeur and scale of the expedition’s discoveries as well as the dread claustrophobia of its mysteries and realisations. At the Mountains of Madness Volume I is a glorious way for new readers to discover H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and for veteran readers to revisit its mystery and madness anew. 

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: The Last Valley

Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Andy Miller

Setting: Down Darker TrailsProduct: Scenario
What You Get: forty-two page, 36.18 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Cowboys and dinosaurs, oh my!
Plot Hook: Lost in swirling fog in 1870s Utah whilst hunted by unknowable monsters from the past.Plot Support: Detailed Utah background and history, three monsters (dinosaurs), two NPCs, two maps, six handouts/pictures, and six pregenerated Investigators.Production Values: Decent enough, but could have been better organised.
Pros
# Cowboys and dinosaurs, oh my!
# Potential convention scenario
# Potential one-shot# Well done pregenerated Investigators
# Enjoyable introduction to the Lost Worlds genre# Solid background to Utah
# Creepy, fog-bound hunt# It can happen to Arkham, it can happen to Utah# Action driven scenario# Potential to divert a campaign in a weird direction

Cons
# Linear
# Utah background underused# Maps difficult to use# No Sanity losses for failure?# Potential to derail a campaign in a weird direction
Conclusion
# Cowboys and dinosaurs, oh my!
# Maps and Utah difficult to use# Potential to derail a campaign in a weird direction

Lyonesse is a lost land, a kingdom out of Celtic and Arthurian legend to the west of France and the British Isles said to have slipped under the waves late in the eleventh century in just a single night. Adherents of Christianity say that the drowning was divine wrath as punishment for the islanders’ unvirtuous living, but in truth, the inhabitants of the Elder Islands were always reluctant to accept the new faith’s spread from the lands to the East. None more so than the islands’ halflings—or fae—in their fairy shee (or grottoes) in the Great Forest of Tantravelles, their very power preventing Christianity from gaining a foothold, whilst the ordinary men and women of the Elder Isles embraced a great many other faiths. This was before the islands’ submergence, when its Ten Kingdoms and petty duchies and baronies feuded with each other, knights sought to embody the code of chivalry, wooing fair noble women, and competing in tournaments major and minor; wizards and witches explored the limits of their knowledge in the Elder Isles and otherworldly realms, whilst being bound by the Great Edict of Murgen—the most powerful of the surviving Elder Islands’ arch-mages—which forbade them from involving themselves in the petty politics of the Elder Isles, but not from meddling in the affairs of each other; and flimflammers and mountebanks slinked from village to village, enjoying the best that each has to offer for the least amount of effort—or the best scheme they can run. It is the events which took place in the Elder Isles during the Fifth Century that are perhaps the best known, when the ambitious King Casmir of Lyonesse sought to defeat and conquer the nine rival kingdoms, in particular, the island kingdom of Troicinet and its king, Aillas. These tales—and others—are chronicled in the fantasy novels, Lyonesse, The Green Pearl, and Madouc—better known as the Lyonesse Trilogy by author Jack Vance. They and their setting are also the subject of a roleplaying game from The Design Mechanism.

Lyonesse: Fantasy Roleplaying Based on the Novels by Jack Vance is a hefty tome which enables the Storyteller and her players and their characters to explore the Elder Isles and get involved in the intrigues, plots, rivalries, and conniving between the kingdoms and their lords, between those of rival magic users, court lords and ladies, adventure on quests great and small, get caught up in the taunts and clutches of the faery, or simply go in search of a really good cup of tea and slice of cake—if not pickled brawn and mashed bean sprouts in a robust nigella sauce, followed by fried grayling fish with sautéed pollock drizzled with a white wine nettle sauce. In addition to being able to randomly determine the landlord of the inn or eatery where the Player Characters are dining, as well as what they are eating—feasts are an important feature of life in the Elder Isles, Lyonesse introduces the Elder Isles and gives a synopsis of the three novels, explores the Ten Kingdoms via a lengthy gazetteer, examines their society and religion, presents rules for the magic of the Elder Isles, and more. The book is over five hundred pages long and whilst somewhat unwieldy, is undeniably comprehensive.

The comprehensiveness begins with a history of the Elder Isles followed by a guide to the Ten Kingdoms of the Elder Isles—Blaloc, Caduz, Dahaut, Dascinet, Godelia, Lyonesse, North Ulfland, South Ulfland, Pomperol, and Troicinet, as well as two others, Scola and Skaghane, the latter a separate island whose forces recently invaded North Ulfland and South Ulfland, an event which prefigures the events of the trilogy. It details the location, climate, and geography of each, history and background, government and economy, culture and people, notable places, and lastly, each kingdom’s role in the Lyonesse Saga and situation during each part of the trilogy. Each is accompanied by a map of the kingdom taken from the larger map of the isles. As well as all of this information, this gazetteer offers extra details, such as the Royal Honours of Lyonesse, the strange and isolationist Isle of Tark where women are never seen—this is because all of them are vampires and reside underground where their superior enables them to mine for precious metals, a discussion of political campaigns—Lyonesse being a hotbed of political intrigue—along with a table of villainous plots! Not every kingdom is accorded this extra information, but this, of course, is a reflection of the source material. Throughout though, there is a wealth of details here, from the weird and the wonderful to the mundane and the ordinary, even down to highlighting the inconsistencies in the Lyonesse Trilogy itself. Those aside,  there is plenty of information around which the Storyteller can build a story or scenario idea or a player could create his character.

The chapter on the society and religion of the Elder Isles makes clear that the inhabitants of the Ten Kingdoms are a melange, settled wave after wave of different peoples—Danaans, Galatians, Greeks, Lydians, Celts, and more. They were followed by Romans who only settled but did not conquer, Greek and Phoenician traders came, as did British and Irish settlers, the Celts having a strong influence in the Elder Isles. They are a welcoming people, with a strong sense of hospitality, their Roman blood making them cautious with money, their Greek blood granting them silver tongues and quick wits. As well as explaining everything from their social classes, morality, and law and justice to language, coinage, aesthetics, and education and science, the chapter details the numerous cults and religions to be found on the island, to be seen in the isles’ innumerable hidden temples, graven idols, standing stones carved with mysterious glyphs, and unknown tombs whose constructions methods have long been lost, plus songs, dances, place-names, and folk-tales that suggest a land of forgotten gods and dead priesthoods. The faiths include the Court of Dead Gods, Etruscan Rites, the Druid Faith, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Mithraism, all of which are described in detail and include a Faith bonus should any character—Player Character or NPC—be an adherent to one religion or another.

By default, all characters in Lyonesse are human—guidelines in the Bestiary provide the means to create Halfling Player Characters. The process of character generation begins by rolling dice to determine base attributes—Strength, Constitution, Size, Dexterity, Intelligence, Power, and Charisma. From these are derived several factors. These include the expected Damage and Experience Modifiers, Healing Rate, Height and Weight, Hit Points, Strike Rank, and so on, but to these are added Action Points, spent to act in combat, and Luck Points, used to give a character an edge, whether to reroll a dice roll, swap the tens and units of a percentile roll, to mitigate damage or unfavourable circumstances, or to gain a vital advantage in combat. Each character also receives the same set of standard skills, the base value for each one determined adding two attributes or doubling a single attribute.

Beyond the base character, a player takes his character through four steps. In the first, he rolls for or selects an Origin and a Culture—Celtic, Hybras, Ska, or Itinerant, which will provide one hundred skill points to assign to various standard skills, professional skills, and a Combat Style. The latter represents skill in fighting a number of weapons and  an associated trait, for example, the Dagger, Sling, and Bow weapons and the Skirmishing Trait for the Hunter Combat Style. Next, the player rolls for a Background Event—this providing a story element or motivation for the Player Character, determines his community ties—mostly derived from his social class, and in the third, he selects an actual Profession as well as assigning another one hundred skill points to its related skills. Some professional skills come from a character’s Culture; the others come from his choice of Profession. A character’s choice of culture also sets the careers available to him. For example, Crafter, Fisher, and Hunter are available to all four Cultures; Courtesan and Alchemist to Hybras only; and Wise Man/Woman to Celt, Ska, and Itinerant. Although the base values for both types of skills are determined by a character’s attributes, the granting of the same number of skill points throughout the process serves to balance character generation. Lastly, he assigns a further one-hundred-and-fifty skill points as bonus skill points.

In addition, a character has several Passions—loyalties, beliefs, and feelings towards someone or something, that are again measured as percentiles and which work in a similar fashion to the Personal Traits of the King Arthur Pendragon RPG. They also do something more though in that they can serve as a resisting value or to give a bonus to an action if said action is dramatically appropriate to the Passion. For example, a character who is subject to a seduction attempt could use the love of his wife to resist the attempt, whilst later he might use the same Passion to grant a bonus to a bow shot to strike a villain who has his wife in grasp and is threatening to kill her.

Ublaf the Unbelievable is a street poet and performer who ran away to Twissamy rather than work on the family farm, something that neither of his siblings have forgiven him for. Although he always had a fascination with stories—especially ones involving fairies, his family always saw it as a distraction from work, he learnt much from the travelling troupe of entertainers he joined. Not just performing skills, proving a reasonable poet and orator, but also how to seduce others—of any gender, and so make life easier for himself. He has had a string of lovers and received and pawned various fine gifts, but thoroughly enjoys such encounters that he wants more and more! One day, he might even seduce a fairy king or queen!

Ublaf the Unbelievable
Age 24
Profession: Entertainer

STR 12 CON 11 SIZ 11 DEX 08 INT 11 POW 12 CHA 15

Action Points: 2 Damage Modifier: -1d2 Experience Modifier: +1 Healing Rate: 2

Hit Points
Head 3 Chest 5 Abdomen 4 L. Arm 2 R. Arm 2 L. Leg 3 R. Leg 3

Initiative Bonus: +10
Luck Points: 2
Magic Points: 12
Movement Rate: 6

Standard Skills:
Athletics 30%, Boating 23%, Brawn 33%, Common Tongue 26%, Conceal 30%, Customs 62%, Dance 33%, Deceit 56%, Drive 20%, Eloquence 75%, Endurance 22%, Evade 16%, First Aid 19%, Folklore 32%, Influence 45%, Insight 48%, Perception 23%, Ride 20%, Sing 37%, Stealth 19%, Swim 23%, Unarmed 20%, Willpower 34%

Professional Skills:
Acting 60%, Art (Poetry) 57%, Courtesy 56%, Literacy 45%, Lore (Fairy) 52%, Oratory 57%, Seduction 56%, Streetwise 42%

Combat Skills:
Citizen Militia (Mace, Shield, Trait: Cautious Fighter) 20%

Passions
Loyalty to Town/City (Blaloc) 47%
Love (Himself) 67%
Hate (His brother and sister) 57%

Background
Origin: Blaloc
Culture: Hybras
Social Class: Freeman
Family: Parents dead, outright enmity to both brother and sister, both grandfathers still alive, no aunts or uncles, four cousins.
Reputation: A good family reputation
Connections: One Mover & Shaker contact, one reasonably connected rival
Family is Reasonably Connected; one ally
Weakness: Nymphomania 57%
Background Event: For some time now you’ve suspected that a powerful being has been watching out for you, and have come to believe it is one of the local gods of popular legend. You cannot say why they might be interested in your fate, but you've had several strokes of remarkable fortune that cannot be attributed to luck alone.
Affluence Rating: 52%

Lyonesse: Fantasy Roleplaying Based on the Novels by Jack Vance uses the Mythras system for its mechanics, a tried and tested percentile system in which a player rolls equal to, or less, than a skill or passion to succeed. Any roll of five or less always success, whilst ninety-six or above is a failure. A Critical success is one fifth of a skill, a Fumble, either ninety-nine or one hundred. The rules cover difficulty factors, contested rolls, group rolls, and so on, as you would expect, but also allow for an optional ‘Success, but…’ with consequences rule. It is also possible to augment one skill with another, although if successful, this only adds a tenth of the augmenting skill to the intended skill roll. For example, Ublaf the Unbelievable would add 15% to his Seduction skill when augmenting with his Eloquence. However, this would not increase the chance of his player rolling a Critical result.

Passions work in a similar fashion to skill augments, again adding a fifth of their value to the skill roll. They have other uses though, often being used to either drive or determine the actions of Player Character or NPC, to oppose other Passions, as a measure of a character’s commitment to that Passion, and even resist being manipulated. Depending upon events, Passions can deepen or wane, reflecting the outcome of a Game Master’s plot as much as they can be used to drive a plot and interactions between the Player Characters and with the NPCs within it. All of the NPCs drawn from the Lyonesse Trilogy in the roleplaying game have Passions, useful, of course, for the Game Master when determining their motivations and actions.

Since Lyonesse uses Mythras, combat in the Elder Isles tends towards being short and brutal. It uses an Action Point economy to determine how many things a Player Character or NPC has per round, actions including attacking, bracing against incoming attacks, changing range, casting magic, countering spells, and even dithering(!), and Combat Styles that each cover a number of weapons and Traits. For example, the Noble Combat Style includes Spear, Sword, and Shield, plus the Mounted Combat or Trained Beast Trait. The Trait in particular, covers special training or situations, for example, the Mounted Combat Trait enables the rider to ignore the skill cap placed upon combat rolls by the Ride skill, whilst Trained Beast covers fighting in close formation with an animal, the user able to use his Action Points to defend against attacks against the animal. As well as inflicting damage, the primary aim in combat in Mythras is to inflict Special Effects or disadvantages upon an opponent, such as doing a Bash to knock him off balance, Bypass Armour to inflict more damage, Compel Surrender, Scar Foe, and so on. This requires a differentially better roll than that of an opponent, so a Critical success versus a standard success, a success versus a failure, and similar results. Typically a roll will generate just the one Special Effect, but a Critical success versus a Fumble will generate a maximum of three! This makes for a much more action-packed fight, one with more story, and thus potentially as memorable as it is nasty. The Elder Isles being a land of chivalry means that the combat rules also cover jousting.

Also intrinsic to the Elder Isles and thus Lyonesse: Fantasy Roleplaying Based on the Novels by Jack Vance is magic. Woven into the lives of fairies, halflings, and various wizards, witches, and the like, magic is potentially powerful and deadly. In the Elder Isles it comes in three primary forms—fairy magic, sandestin magic, and enchanted items. Fairies and halflings have their own magic, whilst human magic users are capable of mastering the incantations necessary to command sandestins, the strange creatures who will actually perform the magical effect for the caster, and some of whom have effects of their own beyond merely casting magic. However, many so-called wizards are simply charlatans who were lucky enough to have come upon an enchanted device, either that, or stole or swindled it from its former owner. For fairy magic, it is a matter of learning or finding someone who can teach a Player Character one or more Fairy Cantraps, such as Agriva’s Telescopic Fornication—something that Ublaf the Unbelievable would probably want to learn, Egumasko's Mellow Scarf—sends a scarf to wrap around the head of the intended target and forces him to abay his passions or tempers, or Impspring Tinkle-toe—makes the recipient involuntarily leap high into the air whilst simultaneously twirling their feet!

Sandestin magic requires much more effort, practitioners studying the skills of Sandestin Invocation and Sandestin Coercion. The former actually needs to be studied multiple times, each time for a different Axiom, such as Geomancy or Verdomancy, each Axiom related to a different type of sandestin and thus different spell effects. The exact effects can be altered through the caster’s Sandestin Coercion skill, the higher the skill, the more effects possible. However, this requires more Magic Points and it is possible for a magic user to run out and overextend himself, leading to an unfortunate result, such as the caster suffering from a random poison or souls of every living creature within 10 metres being ripped from their bodies, their becoming haunts, and only able return to life if they first kill the magician! As with fairy magic, a wide list of interesting spells are given for sandestin magic. For example, Expurgation removes written text, illustration, and art from books and scrolls, Gyration lifts a victim into the air spins them at a speed chosen by the caster, which can range from making them ill or actually ripping limbs off, and Obturation, which will close one of the target’s orifices of the caster’s choice. The spell selection is diverse, inventively named, and some of them are useful, but many of them in their own way are quite nasty. However, learning spells is hard work, represented by their high costs in potential experience point rolls which a player will have to save and pay in order to learn a new spell. Lastly, there are rules for creating and using enchanted items which a swindler or mountebank might use to fool others into thinking that he has great magic ability.

Lyonesse: Fantasy Roleplaying Based on the Novels by Jack Vance also includes a bestiary, ranging ordinary creatures and giant versions to supernatural beasts like Bearded Gryphs, various types of Fairies and Halflings—including rules for creating Halfling Player Characters, Sandestins, Screamers, and individual creatures such as Dungle the Giant who is bothered by a jealous Harpy or Arbogast the Ogre, flesh-eating of the Forest of Tantrevalles. They are joined by full write-ups and stats for the heroes and villains of the Lyonesse Trilogy, such as young Prince Aillas, heir to the throne of Troicinet, who is thus the target of the ambitious, driven, amoral King Casmir of Lyonesse. Their inclusion of course, enables the Game Master to involve the Player Characters in the machinations and plots of the various NPCs and so pull them into the setting.

In addition, Lyonesse: Fantasy Roleplaying Based on the Novels by Jack Vance introduces other worlds and suggests what might be found there as well as reasons to visit, tables for generating towns and taverns and what might be found there, and a set of extensive notes for the Game Master on running the roleplaying game. These cover the types of adventures to be had in the Elder Isles, the nature of its magic, its themes—travelogues, food, tricks and tricksters, and getting captured, as well as general advice on various aspects of Lyonesse: Fantasy Roleplaying Based on the Novels by Jack Vance and its setting. If the roleplaying game is lacking, it is that there is no scenario, or indeed no scenario hooks, which might have been useful for a setting that is as rich as this is, but the notes for the Game Master nevertheless useful and will help her create her first adventure, or two.

Physically, Lyonesse: Fantasy Roleplaying Based on the Novels by Jack Vance is very well laid out, well written, and illustrated with some very nice black and white artwork. The rules are thoroughly illustrated throughout with the tale of primarily one character, though they expend a little with magic, which adds a sense of continuity from start to finish. However, it does need an edit in places and whilst the maps are in colour, some full colour illustrations would have perked up the book a little.

Lyonesse: Fantasy Roleplaying Based on the Novels by Jack Vance is fantastic and thorough, almost compendium-like adaptation of a classic fantastical setting, one that is likely to feel almost familiar to many gamers, because even if they have not read the novels, they will have encountered its influence on Dungeons & Dragons. This provides an opportunity for roleplayers old and new, unaware of them or not, to visit the Elder Isles, the setting of that influence, and explore it in all of its glory and grit, its whimsy and wonder, its manners and machinations, its delights and its dangers, in this well designed, well researched roleplaying game.

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?
The Dregs of Clearwine: A Sourcebook for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha presents the ten households, twenty-five fully written up inhabitants and more, plus maps and plot hooks of the Dregs, a ‘mini-slum’ in the corner of the tribal city of the Colymar for use with RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha.
It is a fifty- page, full colour, soft cover book.
The layout is clean and tidy, and many of the illustrations good. It needs a slight edit.

Where is it set?
The Dregs of Clearwine is specifically set north of the Ram’s Head Inn in the tribal city of the Colymar. With some adjustment it could be moved to another Sartarite city.
Who do you play?No specific character types are required when encountering the inhabitants of The Dregs of Clearwine. Ducks will find a ready home, but Trolls are unlikely to be welcomed.
What do you need?
The Dregs of Clearwine requires RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha as well as The RuneQuest Gamemaster Screen Pack for wider information about the city of Clearwine. The RuneQuest: Glorantha Bestiary may be useful for details on Ducks and The Smoking Ruin & Other Stories details NPCs who may be important to the inhabitants of Clearwine. To get the very fullest out of Dregs of Clearwine, both Cults of Glorantha and the Sartar Homeland Book will be useful.
What do you get?
The typical supplement for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha focuses naturally on adventurers and the great and the good and the bad, that is, Player Characters and NPCs who possess the agency and freedom to go anywhere or do anything. The Dregs of Clearwine: A Sourcebook for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha is radically different, focusing on the lives and loves of those further down the social ladder. It details the ten households of the ‘mini-slum’ and their inhabitants as well as the various itinerants and others who live and work in the ‘Dregs’, right down to the ‘down and outs’. The majority of these are fully statted up and nicely illustrated, and all include detailed descriptions of their hopes and relationships with others in their household and the wider community. For example, Onjeem Charcoal Carrier, is a Lunar Tarshite scribe who was a Seven Mothers missionary until the advent of the Dragonrise after which his hand was broken as punishment. Consequently, he was forced to live in the Dregs, trying what save what monies he can to pay to heal his hand by hauling in charcoal daily for Turi the Potter’s kilns, despite the fact that he is looked down upon by Turi’s sister-in-law, Adinna for his Lunar sympathies. This is because Adinna is from Dangerford and the Dolutha clan, which were known Lunar sympathisers, so she does not want to be reminded that she too, is an outsider in the Dregs. Onjeem occasionally receives a little help from Mamma Vorlena, the neighbourhood’s matriarch who mothers everyone in the Dregs and is in love with Minya, the older sister of Furli the Brawler, a pugnacious farm worker who overly protective of all three of his sisters and is prepared to use his fists to protect them and their honour. Every NPC is treated in this way so that there is a web of connections across the ten households of the Dregs.
The ten households include the potters, the kiln jars—where abandoned great apithios jars provide shelter for those where nowhere else to go, the Widow’s House—where lodgings may be found, the Flop Nest—a public nest of straw bed boxes popular for the Ducks that work the river that runs alongside the city and where merchants might be able to find out who attacked their boats and why, and more. Every household is accompanied by a big box of plot hooks—and that in addition to a selection of general plot hooks, a side elevation of the house, and the maps of the neighbourhood includes a rooftop map as well as a footprint map showing the floorplans of the mostly one-room households. Throughout, sections of boxed texts cover supplementary information, ranging from daily rituals, aspirational goods, and making pots to how the community handle justice, charcoal carrying, and family in the Dregs. Rounding out The Dregs of Clearwine is ‘Old Bones’, a murder mystery of a sort built around several of the NPCs in the community. It would work as a nice set piece alongside the supplement’s plethora of plot hooks.
At the heart of The Dregs of Clearwine is very nicely constructed web of relationships and sense of community that the supplement’s many plot hooks dig their barbs into. There is material here that could fuel session after session of roleplaying as the Player Characters come to involve themselves into the doings of the Dregs, but getting them involved may require just a little more effort given that the Player Characters are likely to be higher up on the social ladder than the community’s inhabitants. There are plot hooks included that will do that, but they are not immediately obvious and perhaps they could have been made more obvious or perhaps a box of plot hooks to pull the Player Characters into the Dregs and the lives of the inhabitants could have been included.
The set-up of The Dregs of Clearwine however, suggests another possibility. That is to run it as a mini-campaign location with the Player Characters are inhabitants of the Dregs, either having grown up there or forced to live there due to reduced circumstances. This would lead to a campaign of small lives, but strong emotions, essentially a soap opera amongst the dregs of Clearwine a la the BBC television series, EastEnders or the ITV series, Coronation Street. It is a pity to that the supplement does not include ready-to-play sample Player Characters or guidelines to create such characters, but perhaps that is scope for such supplementary support.
However the Game Master decides to use The Dregs of Clearwine: A Sourcebook for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, it is full of detail, flavour, and rife with roleplaying and adventure possibilities.
Is it worth your time?Yes—The Dregs of Clearwine presents a rich slice of almost soap opera life that will involve your Player Characters in the big stories of small lives, whether they are simply visiting or even residents themselves.No—The Dregs of Clearwine presents a rotten corner of Clearwine and your campaign may not even be set there, let alone want to pay a visit.Maybe—The Dregs of Clearwine presents an array of NPCs, relationships, and plot hooks which the Game Master can adapt to other locations if she does not want to use them as written.

Published in 1980, S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks has long been regarded as a classic adventure for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition, even so far as being ranked at number five in Dungeon magazine’s ‘The 30 Greatest D&D Adventures of All Time’, published to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of Dungeons & Dragons. Set in the World of Greyhawk, it did something that no other module did at that time, and that was to crash—quite literally—the Science Fiction genre into the Fantasy genre, when the Player Characters, hired by the Grand Duke of Geoff to investigate the origins of creatures spewing forth from a cave in the Barrier Peaks and attacking the surrounding regions, discover nothing no less and no more weird than a crashed space ship. Of course, the Player Characters are quite unlikely to view it as that, but their players will certainly realise it as their characters encounter strange creatures and artefacts that are beyond magic. Over the years, this memorable adventure has been reprinted more than once, first by TSR, Inc. in S1-4: Realm of Horrors in 1987 and then in S1-4: Dungeons of Dread in 2013 by Wizards of the Coast. More recently, in 2019, it has been reprinted and updated for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition by Goodman Games with Original Adventures Reincarnated #3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, part of the ‘Original Adventures Reprinted’ series which began with Original Adventures Reincarnated #1: Into the Borderlands.

Now, S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks has its own rock album. When it comes to roleplaying music has long been seen as something to add to the experience, to build the atmosphere, but rarely, the other way, the single by Sabbat, Blood For The Blood God, inspired by Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, which appeared in White Dwarf #95, the Traveller concept album by the band, The Lord Weird Slough Feg, and the work of the band, Gygax, being clearly inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, all being the odd exceptions. Doubtless, there are others. The Barrier Peaks Songbook is a ten-track concept album from Loot the Body. It describes itself as a psychedelic rock album, though it feels more Prog Rock than psychedelic rock, but to be fair, just as The Barrier Peaks Songbook is an exception in being a rock album inspired by roleplaying, Reviews from R’lyeh reviewing a rock album—or indeed, any music, is also an exception.

The album opens with ‘Expedition to the Barrier Peaks’, a crash of drums and guitar rhythms, and a sense of hope and inspiration as fifteen elves, halflings, dwarves, and men, “…brimming with the confidence that we’d soon be home again” cry of their quest, before plunging beyond the strange door in the mountain and cave and confronting the genuinely fantastical and for the Player Characters, utterly weird. The second track, ‘The Labyrinth of Evermore’ promises “Sights and sounds I’ve never known before”, something that in combination, module S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks and album The Barrier Peaks Songbook, undoubtedly do. None more so with encounters with the weird Vegepygmies, a variation upon the Mushroom Men so beloved of the Old School Renaissance, the song writer neatly playing with their concept with the lines, “And we’re legion, Because we’re made from, The same mold” in ‘We’re the Vegepygmies’, and the infamously benign ‘Wolf-In-Sheep’s-Clothing’ encounter or ‘The Cute Little Bunnyoid on the Stump’ that turns into a nasty surprise for the Player Characters. Its accompanying track, ‘Bunny on a Stump’, highlights this almost idyllic addition to the encounters in the crash-landed spaceship, one very much at odds with the dangerous nature of exploring the metal dungeon. This culminates in the harder-edged and batrachian-themed ‘Froghemoth’, which ties into one of the most dangerous encounters in S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. This adds a pleasing hint of cosmic horror and drowning despair to the encounter that was probably never envisioned by E. Gary Gygax when he wrote S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, but which forty years on, Loot the Body reinterprets and emphasises from an adventurer’s perspective.

Of course, S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks is renowned for its clash of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and if there is an issue with The Barrier Peaks Songbook, it is that it could have emphasised the  contrast between fantasy and technology further. There is a sense of Future Shock, of being faced with too much change, far too soon or far too quickly, in tracks such as ‘The Doctor’, but there no sense of the adventurers in this songbook picking up items of technology, experimenting with them, suffering mishaps, and so on until they work out how to operate them and what they do. Perhaps this is taking the confluence between module and album too literally, but it is, and always was, a significant aspect of S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. Perhaps the most direct confrontation between the two is in ‘Robot Police’, a more direct indication for the adventurers that they are interlopers in the spaceship. The song has contemporary resonances, the direct manner and horridly brutal methods of these law enforcement androids applying to the events of 2020 as much as it does a spaceship from another dimension in a roleplaying scenario from the past. The Barrier Peaks Songbook ends on a psychedelic, even psychic note, as the adventurers have one last weird encounter, although this one is of a benign, rather than malign nature, in ‘Shedu Liberation’.

The Barrier Peaks Songbook is not an album to be played whilst playing through S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, or indeed, Original Adventures Reincarnated #3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. Instead, its songs could work as chapter breaks, played between significant encounters, most obviously ‘Bunny on a Stump’ and ‘Froghemoth’ after their respective encounters. It also works as inspiration for the Dungeon Master in preparing to run S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks and as nostalgia for anyone who has either played or run it. However it is listened to, The Barrier Peaks Songbook is a thoroughly enjoyable album, adding voice and sound to the weirdness and the contrast of genres at the heart of S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. No doubt there are other Dungeons & Dragons campaigns or scenarios deserving of such concept albums, so perhaps we shall hear more of them from Loot the Body.

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: The Room with No Doors

Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: M. T. Black

Setting: Classic Jazz Age Arkham
Product: Scenario
What You Get: Twenty-eight page, 6.5 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: What would drive a housewife to a murderous mania?
Plot Hook: A landlord hires the Investigators to look into the truth of her new property being haunted.Plot Support: Detailed background, a decent floorplan, nine handouts, and a single monster.Production Values: Clean and tidy, well organised, clear map, and nicely done handouts.
Pros
# Classic Call of Cthulhu haunted house scenario
# Potential convention scenario
# Potential one-shot# Superb handouts
# Easily adapted to other periods# Investigation path clearly laid out
# Mythos light# Nice ties to Arkham# Possible first encounter with the Mythos?

Cons
# Classic Call of Cthulhu haunted house scenario
# Mythos light# Too obvious a title# Too close to ‘The Haunting’ from the Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition Quick-Start Rules
Conclusion
# Great production values
# Classic Call of Cthulhu haunted house scenario# Too obvious a title and set-up for experienced players

Forbidden Lands: Crypt of the Mellified Mage is an anthology of four adventure sites for use with Forbidden Lands – Raiders & Rogues in a Cursed World, the ‘Retro Open-World Survival Fantasy RPG’ published by Free League Publishing, following from the earlier The Spire of Quetzel. Like The Spire of Quetzel, it provides the Game Master with four more locales she can slot into her Forbidden Lands campaign—whether her own or Raven’s Purge, the roleplaying game’s epic eight-part campaign with an open structure built around eight locations and a finale at a ninth location—or possibly run as one-shots. They reflect the open play style of Forbidden Lands, in which the players and their characters are explorers, travelling across territories which have been cut off for centuries and of which they know little except legends. Such legends serve as hooks, pushing the characters to visit the setting’s adventure sites—villages, castles, and dungeons—and pulling them into the region’s history and secrets, often revealing the dark truths of lands that have been under a blood mist and demon-infested for centuries. Whether delving into the honeyed tomb of an undead apiarist-mage, making a rescue attempt for missing villagers in the caves of a blood-potter, taking advantage of internal politics to defeat the Monkey King and banish his pagoda temple complex which has drilled its way up into the Forbidden Lands, or exploring the weird mind cloud of a long dead wizard, just as with The Spire of Quetzel, what really marks these scenarios as being different is their authors.

All four scenarios in Crypt of the Mellified Mage are written by some of the leading writers in the Old School Renaissance. They include Fiona Maeve Geist, one of the designers of MOTHERSHIP Sci-Fi Horror RPG; David McGrogan, the creator of Yoon-Suin, the Purple Land; Zedeck Siew, author of Lorn Song of the Bachelor and A Thousand, Thousand Island setting; and Adam Kobel, the designer of Dungeon World. The quartet consists of three dungeon and one village adventure sites, and in each case will require a degree of preparation if the Game Master wants to include them in her campaign. Sometimes this is actually creating a location for a dungeon to be found under, but mostly they are foreshadowing during early parts of the campaign to be effective parts of the ongoing story of the adventurers’ explorations.

Crypt of the Mellified Mage opens with Fiona Maeve Geist’s eponymous ‘Crypt of the Mellified Mage’, a dungeon which lies beneath a village which the Game Master will need to create or develop. It is actually the tomb of the sorcerer Pagoag, whose cruel skill and hedonistic experimentation into medical matters is said to have led him down some dark paths including the mellifiying of flesh using honey into a candy which when consumed is said to prolong the consumer’s life. Pagoag, being a sorcerer, also sought life after death and the result of his experiments can be found throughout his tomb—apiaries built from bones, skeletons home to bee swarms, and undead bee swarms! If the legends are true, then perhaps the mollified flesh may be found and collected, perhaps to consume to heal a Player Character’s illness, that of their patron (if they have one), or simply sold to the highest bidder. There is a sense of sickly-sweet revulsion to the tomb and Pagoag himself is a vile monster. The crypt is, of course, not a pyramid, but it has the feel of an Egyptian tomb, although one infused with the musky scents of spices and honey and an apiarist theme running throughout. It is nicely designed, with a pervading sense of creepy unease and multiple entrances and approaches to the tomb itself so that unlike other crypts, there is no linear play to its exploration which funnels the Player Characters and limits their actions. However, one big problem with the scenario is that as attractive as the three-dimensional map is, its design does not always match the text and vice versa. So what this is means that the Game Master will need to put more effort into the scenario to ensure that she understands the layout of the tomb and certainly the connections between rooms.

David McGrogan’s ‘The Firing Pit of Llao-Yutuy’ is a smaller, more focused dungeon, a cavern complex where the eponymous Llao-Yutuy breaks his captured captives and infuses their blood into the bowls, pottery, and even golems he makes and fires. Despite being a much smaller adventure site and less complex than the others, it is no less creepy with its cruel atmosphere and unnerving automata which appear here and there. The potter’s servants and shockingly poorly treated apprentices are unlikely to present much of a threat to the Player Characters, whereas the aforementioned automata, Llao-Yutuy himself, and his vilely shrewish wife will do. There are some intriguing treasures to be found, which might be the reason for the Player Characters’ visit, or they might be employed to rescue some the captives currently held by Llao-Yutuy and his servants. In some ways this is the easiest of the four adventure sites in Crypt of the Mellified Mage for the Game Master to use—it is relatively easy to set up and prepare, and the site is small. However, it suffers from the same cartographic issues as ‘Crypt of the Mellified Mage’, and again will need careful preparation upon the part of the Game Master to ensure that there is no confusion between map and text.

Zedeck Siew’s ‘Temple of the Six-Limbed Lord’ literally invades the Forbidden Lands with monkey magic! Intended for more seasoned players and characters, technically, a village site, it is a temple complex consisting of several pagodas which have drilled their way up into the Forbidden Lands in an attempt to invade heaven. Of course, the Six-Limbed Lord wants to spread his worship, and that includes the Forbidden Lands, visiting nearby towns and occupying them, capturing friendly NPCs, even menacing strongholds held by the Player Characters. The Player Characters might encounter Monkey Soldiers on an impromptu pub-crawl, caravans beset by cloud riders sparking lightning, one of the Priests of the Six-Limbed Lord sat in a gilded throne borne by a Macaque Swarm, or even Nyanyetnya, Seventh Priest of the Six-Limbed Lord, who wants to serve them tea. Of course, she wants more than this, having been expelled from the temple—and she wants back in! To that end, she will engage the Player Characters who if they decide to help her will have to negotiate the petty politics of the other priests and their cohorts. This is the most sophisticated of the adventure sites, and the one to involve the most roleplaying as the Player Characters play the factions in the temple off against each other.

However, ‘Temple of the Six-Limbed Lord’ not only invades the Forbidden Lands literally, it invades the Western fantasy genre of Forbidden Lands – Raiders & Rogues in a Cursed World as well. What this means is that for some Game Masters, this adventure site might be at odds with their campaign and the genre. It is well done, despite suffering from the same cartographic issues as the earlier adventure sites and really adds something memorably different to a campaign, almost leaving Game Master and players alike to wonder quite what a Forbidden Lands-style campaign would be like in the setting beyond the walls of the Temple of the Six-Limbed Lord.

The last scenario in Crypt of the Mellified Mage is Adam Koebel’s ‘The Dream-Cloud of E’lok Thir’, and again is a very different dungeon—even radically different. What it does is turn the mind or dreams of a long dead wizard into a dungeon, one consisting of locations inspired by his fragmented doubts, elations, fears, and joys and as they explore each of these rooms, the Player Characters will encounter reflections of both E’lok Thir’s emotions and their own. There is no map to the dungeon, but rather the Game Master generates the life of the deceased mage and develops descriptions of rooms such as ‘Regret Made Manifest’ and ‘The Hidden Self’ based on what was rolled. The Game Master is free to connect these however she wants and without the need to adhere to the laws of physics, since this is, after all, a ‘Dream-Cloud’. Consequently, there is an otherworldly etherealness to ‘The Dream-Cloud of E’lok Thir’ and because the Game Master will need to know her player’s characters very well, there is an introspectiveness to it as well. Whilst it is the most open of the four scenarios in the anthology, it is also the most challenging to run. Further, it is not the easiest of scenarios to provide motivations for Player Character involvement. The Dream-Cloud can be reached via ritual, even as a consequence of a failed ritual, so the Player Characters might be forced to explore it following a magical mishap. The likelihood is that they will be wanting to enter the Dream-Cloud for a reason, either to obtain an object or treasure, or even information, and each of the location descriptions includes details of what treasures might be found there. Overall, ‘The Dream-Cloud of E’lok Thir’ is more a tool kit than a finalised adventure site ready to play, but its format does mean that it could be played through more than once, and each time it would be different enough.

Physically, Forbidden Lands: Crypt of the Mellified Mage is a lovely little book, that unfortunately let down by the disconnect between text and maps. Work around that though, and it is a pleasing hardback, nicely illustrated with maps done in the same style as other Forbidden Lands books. Each scenario follows the same format as those other books—Background, Legend, Getting Here, Locations, Monsters and NPCs, and Events. Despite the fact that the maps could have been better described, they are lovely to look at and the artwork throughout the book is exquisite. It would have been nice if some of the NPCs in the book had been illustrated, especially the various monkey priests in ‘Temple of the Six-Limbed Lord’ where they play such a pivotal role.

The disappointing side to the four adventure sites in Forbidden Lands: Crypt of the Mellified Mage is that each requires more preparation than they really should, especially to work them into a campaign, let alone coming to understand the map locations and their descriptions, and so none of the four are quite ready to play as they could be. If she is happy to make those preparations and develop them in readiness for inclusion in her campaign, Forbidden Lands: Crypt of the Mellified Mage provides the Game Master with some delightfully different adventure sites, each in their own way, creepy, weird, and wonderful. 

Strange Stars: Game Setting Book is a systemless Science Fiction setting book published by the Hydra Cooperative, a publisher best known for its point-crawl fantasy scenarios such as Slumbering Ursine Dunes and What Ho, Frog Demons! – Further Adventures in Greater Marlinko Canton. It is very much written to appeal to the Old School Renaissance, being inspired by the televisual Science Fiction of the seventies and eighties, the works of authors such as E.C. Tubb and Jack Vance, and TSR, Inc.’s first Science Fiction roleplaying game, Star Frontiers, in particular. So, it is generally fairly light in its treatment of the genre. However, it includes more modern elements of the genre, most notably Transhumanism, including authors such as Peter Hamilton and Alistair Reynolds. Being systemless, it would work with Stars Without Number—and there is a rules companion for the Strange Stars setting using Stars Without Number, Savage Worlds, or Fate Core, but this is not as such a complete setting. Instead it details—although not in too much detail—elements of the far future setting, such as peoples, places, and technologies. There is no grand overview and as such is designed as a compendium of ideas and elements that evoke the period feel of its genre. So, there is no grand overview by design, leaving the Game Master and her with the space to fill in the details as necessary. Which means that it is not going to appeal to some gamers, whereas it will others.

It quickly dives into a very short history of the future of humanity. The Radiant Polity has arisen to claim stewardship of paleo-humanity and hyperspace travel following a Dark Age into which the mysterious Zurr crept across planet after planet, and the research-sadists known as Faceless Ones appeared, each of whom would replace their face with a powerful sensory apparatus. The Dark Age is said to have lasted a millennium or more, and to have come about after The Great Collapse of the Archaic Oikumene, a technologically advanced empire which conducted planetary-scale engineering, built floating, crystalline cities, and constructed the hyperspace network. The Archaic Oikumene may or may not have arisen in the cradle of humanity, but true knowledge of the Archaic Oikumene and Old Earth have been lost.

It also introduces three categories of ‘sophonts’—Biologics, Moravecs, and Infosophonts. Biologics, from Paleo-Humanity to Star Folk bioships, include the descendants of organisms—either from Old Earth originally or another world, designed organisms, and bioroids, or biologic androids. Moravecs, named for an Old Earth scientist-prophet, like the warrior-poets of Eridanus or Telosian Moravec-supremacists are self-replicating, sapient robots, whilst the Wanderers, the Wise Minds of Interzone, and the like, are Infosophonts, digital minds independent of physical form.

Interstellar travel is achieved via hyperspace gates which connect star systems—and these routes and their various travel times/speeds are marked on the polity maps throughout the book. No routes are given between these polities, so the Game Master can connect them in any fashion that she wants. What is interesting is that none of the states newly arisen in the wake The Dark Age have knowledge of how to construct starships—certainly not their star drives, which need to be salvaged from ships of the past. 

Six of the polities are given tw0-page spreads each—The Outer Rim, The Alliance, The Instrumentality, the Coreward Reach, The Vokun Empire, and The Zuran Expanse. Each is given a brief description, details of a native inhabitant, and more detailed writeups of its planets or major sophonts. So the Outer Rim, located on the frontiers of space, is dominated by an isolated trio of worlds—Boreas, an ice-covered ocean moon whose native, intelligent coral life have weaponised microbiota that can reanimate the dead to fight back against an invading sophonts, the blue-skinned humanoids known as Uldra; the Fortuna system is a gambler’s paradise and is home to The Wheel, a roulette wheel-shaped space station and Solitaire, a diamond planet; and Gogmagog, where giant robots inexplicably fight each other, the defeated machines scavenged by bot breaker teams for the advanced technology they can sell off world, before von Neumann scuttle out to make repairs! The individual detailed is Yeran Gar, a Djägga—a vaguely feline humanoid—who makes his living as a bounty hunter.

Of the other polities, The Alliance was formed in response to the lawlessness of The Zuran Expanse and religious strife of Radiant Polity, and consists of seven member sophonts, such as the Gnomee, a small hive-like sophonts who mine asteroids, the winged, angel-like Deva dedicated to repairing the ten moon-sized worlds in their home system, and the Neshekk, banking and investment clans who are intensely private. The Instrumentality of Aom is a theocracy home to the Circus, a ring world which is the largest habitat in known space. The Coreward Reach, currently threatened by the Locusts, space borne alien von Neumann machines which devour habitats, was once a major centre of human civilisation, but now lies on the very frontier, and whose worlds include Gaea, a mystery copy of Old Earth and Rune, a medieval world whose sorcerers use magic (or psionic powers) to fight dragons. The Vokun Empire was once fiercely expansionist, but its increasingly corpulent leaders, once great conquerors have turned inward and become obsessed with petty politics, but are still able to field their feared Kuath shock soldiers, each sheathed in a two-and-a-half meter tall bio-suit and use Voidgliders, vacuum-adapted humanoids to sniff out lost hyperspace nodes. Lastly, The Zuran Expanse is a ramshackle, lawless collection of worlds, thought to be the site of Old Earth and is home to the Library of Atoz-Theln and Deshret, a desert world slipping back into what it once was before being terraformed and is worked over by Sandminers sifting for fragments of code and lost artefacts.

Other organisations or groups are not ignored either, whether that is Nomads like the Kosmoniks, traders and occasional pirates who live aboard rune-inscribed spaceships who communicate via sign-language or translators, or the S’ta Zoku, star folk who travel between worlds where they declare great festivals of music, sensory experiences, and more. Threats include pirates, criminals, and hostile sophonts. The pirates include the Zao Corsairs, who operate out of a rogue asteroid and are notorious for capturing and looting ships, holding their passengers to ransom or selling them into slavery—even selling the bodies of the captured passengers separate to their uploaded minds! The criminals include the Pharesmid Syndicate whose members are all bio-clones or mind copies of its founder, terrorist Ulm Pharesm, along with a list of most wanted, whilst the Ksaa and the Ssraad are sophonts inimical to galactic society at large. The Ssraad claim The Zuran Expanse and come in three colours—the Green who launch raids against other sophonts from their orbital stations and whose extending tongues can deliver a paralysing venom, the vicious Red employed as shock troops by the Green and mercenaries for the Blue, and the Blue, who steal ships and technology, and then force captives to remodel before killing them. Lastly, Strange Stars covers psionics—though only in a basic way, gives a pronunciation guide, and suggests some one-line adventure ideas.

Throughout, there is a wealth of tiny details which add to the Strange Stars setting and suggest adventure ideas. For example, the owner of Solitaire organises races run via remote operation and psionic control for the patrons of The Wheel, leases mining rights on the diamond planet, and is rumoured to harbour a data vault deep underground. Opportunities to gamble, race, and even hunt for and break into the data vault all lend themselves to adventure ideas. Similarly, under the description of starships and travel, that the holy grail of any salvager is one of the ancient battleships the size of a city and possessing a sophont mind. There were twelve of these, but some are known to have been destroyed, the others lost.

Where perhaps the Strange Stars: Game Setting Book is lacking is the corporate elements of the setting—there are no corporations in this future. A few scenario more developed hooks would have been nice too and as much as starship travel figures in the setting, you never get a feel for what the ships themselves look like.

Physically, the Strange Stars: Game Setting Book is stunning. The artwork evokes the sources that it draws from, whether that is Stella Starlight, starship captain of the Motherless Child, who all flairs, platform heels, and high collars, looks like she stepped out of a Blaxploitation Sci-Fi film, or Sianna Elizond, Special Operative for The Instrumentality, whose weapon echoes that of Princess Leia Organa from Star Wars, whilst her look is that of Jessica 6, from the film Logan’s Run. The Ssaad are reminiscent of the Slaad of Dungeons & Dragons, whilst the exceptional back cover artwork manages to give nods to the trading cards, electronic game cartridges, and the ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ books, all of the late seventies and early eighties. The book itself is well written and engaging, and with everything in full colour, it looks stunning.

At first, it is a little difficult to know quite what to make of Strange Stars: Game Setting Book, in the main because it is a book of parts that connect, but remain separate. So initially, it feels as if there should be a whole setting here, complete with histories and grand maps, but for which, thirty-two pages were not enough. That though, is not the point of it being that book of parts and because it is a book of parts,  Strange Stars: Game Setting Book works on two levels. First, as a whole setting, one in which the Game Master can freely inject content of her because there is so much space—figuratively and narratively—to work in. Second, as a source of ideas and elements that she can plunder or be inspired by to add to her own game, and this is made all the easier because the content is compartmentalised throughout—not just in the writing, but in the layout too. Overall, Strange Stars: Game Setting Book is a Space Opera setting rich with ideas ready for the Game Master to develop or source for a setting of her own design. All it needs is the rules set of the Game Master’s choice.

Published by SeaGriffin Games following a successful Kickstarter campaign, Pirates of Penryn – A game of Charm & Ferocity Upon Cornish Waters is a game of rum running on the Cornish coast in the eighteenth century. Designed for between two and five players—or Captains, aged nine and up, each takes command of two ships. One is a galleon, loaded down with rum, ready to smuggle up the Penryn River to the towns of Falmouth, Flushing, and Penryn, where a good price can be fetched for the illegal liquor. However, the waters of the Penryn River are too shallow for the galleon, so they must send their other vessel, the smaller RumRunner ashore with the illicit cargo. They must brave the dangerous waters with their whirlpools which bring as much good fortune as they do bad, avoid the piggish predations of dread sea serpent Morgawr, take advantage of the wind the best that they can, and avoid getting caught aground when the tide ebbs away to sea. Perhaps they will be able to sail all the way up the Penryn River to Penryn itself where they are bound to get a good price for their rum, but the waters are dread shallow the further up the river you go, and on the way back to their galleon, there is every likelihood that your RumRunner will be attacked by a rival crew, ready to steal the monies made! If a Captain can successfully empty all the rum aboard his galleon, sell as much as he can, and have his RumRunner return—hopefully with florins aplenty—then he can declare the end of the game. The winner will be the Captain with most florins aboard his galleon.

The very first thing that you notice about the Pirates of Penryn is the art. Its style echoes that of Oliver Postgate and Peter Firmin, of their series Ivor the Engine and Noggin the Nog. However, it is brasher in style, more cartoonish, and not as charming, and worse suggests that Pirates of Penryn is a game for children. Whilst there are rules for playing with younger Captains, the standard game of Pirates of Penryn is not for children. Combining hand management mechanics with a pickup and deliver mechanic, Pirates of Penryn can be a cutthroat race for gold, one in which the Captains can raid their rival RumRunners and engage in skirmishes and duels with them, sneak in Morgawr’s cave and steal from her hoard, all before racing back to their galleons. Play lasts about an hour or so, and is much more fun with more Captains than with fewer.

The very first thing you notice upon opening Pirates of Penryn is the board, or ‘sailcloth’ map of Penryn River. In fact, this is a neoprene cloth, done in full colour which depicts Penryn River marked in squares—thankfully movement is both orthogonal and diagonal rather than just orthogonal—in three shades of blue. The deeper the shade of blue, the deeper the water. Close into the shore and on several sandbanks, there are areas where a RumRunner may find itself run aground, forcing its Captain to miss a turn or two until the flow of the tide back up the river refloats the boat. Some of these low-lying areas will also deny a Captain access to Flushing and Penryn. Dotted up and down the river are a number of whirlpools—of varying size, and crossing one of these may bring a RumRunner a boon, but it may also place it in peril. The actual playing surface is actually quite small—or narrow, and the waters of the Penryn River become tighter and tighter the more Captains there are playing.

Along the coast are three towns—in ascending value of the florins they will pay for rum, of Falmouth, Flushing, and Penryn, as well as the smuggler’s haven of Ponsharden where new members of crew can be press ganged into service aboard a RumRunner. Also along the coast is Morgawr’s cave, the sea serpent who can be drawn out into Penryn River with a sacrifice of a crewmember and sent into the path of a rival RumRunner, and if a RumRunner does get too close, will snap pirates and florins from aboard the vessel and secret them away in her lair. Later on, and if Morgawr is away from her cave, then a Captain can sail his RumRunner into her cave and raid her treasure hoard! Around the edge of the board are spaces for the game’s cards—sold cargo, Morgawr’s hoard, whirlpools, crewmembers, and florins. One roundel tracks the direction of the wind, whilst another the ebb and flow of the tide. 

The other components include four decks of cards—sixty crew cards, sixty cargo cards, ninety florin cards, and forty-two whirlpool cards. All of the crew cards are individualised with illustrations and a bit of biographical trivia. The trivia can easily add some table talk and a little roleplaying if a Captain wants it, and the illustrations work better here in black and white. Each also has different levels of Charm and Ferocity, these being used when facing whirlpools and skirmishing with rival RumRunners, whilst a Pistol-Cutlass-Parrot symbol indicates their weapon of choice in duel with a rival pirate. Some also have a tattoo marked on their cards, indicating a special skill useful in dealing with Whirlpool cards. The Whirlpool cards typically grant a ‘Lucky Rascal!’ one-time bonus or some form of ‘Peril & Strife’ which must be overcome. For example, ‘Tame the TideMaid’ is a ‘Lucky Rascal!’ card which allows a Captain to adjust the TideMaid on the tide rounded in his favour, whilst the ‘Torrential Excrement’ explains how a rogue flock of seagulls has unloaded in a Captain’s RumRunner and loaded it down with guano! The problem can be overcome by either sufficient Charm or Ferocity or the tattoo needed to avoid the problem all together. In this instance, a total of eight Ferocity or the Animal Magick tattoo. If a Captain cannot overcome the problem, then his RumRunner must lose some Rum—in this case, two barrels of it. One issue with the Whirlpool cards is that they are text heavy, but there is both flavour and humour on each one.

Lastly there are cards for each Captain’s galleon and RumRunner. Cards under the galleon card are not in play, and therefore safe, but those under the RumRunner card are in play and are not safe—they can be lost in skirmishes and duels, dumped overboard because a Captain failed to overcome a ‘Peril & Strife!’ Whirlpool card, or snapped up by Morgawr! Each Captain has his own RumRunner piece, and there are also pieces for both Morgawr and the TideMaid, a Windicator used to show the direction of the wind, and the Skull & Crosswinds Coin flipped to determine the change in direction of the wind.

Set-up is fairly simple. Everything—both cards and playing pieces are placed on their correct positions one the map, and each Captain receives twelve Cargo cards, three Florin cards, and three Crew cards. All of these go under his galleon card. A Captain selects nine cards from these cards and loads them into his RumRunner. These can be of any combination, but the rules suggest a starting hand during a Captain’s first game. A Captain’s hand cannot be more than nine cards in total and a Captain will find himself balancing the three types of cards in hand throughout the game. He needs to carry rum to the shore, pirate crew to protect his RumRunner—and even attack a rival Captain, florins with which to hire crew, and of course, space to carry those florins back to the safety of his galleon.

On a turn, a Captain does two actions, but has scope to do a lot more. First he moves the TideMaid round the Tide roundel to determine the level of the tide, and then he flips the Skull & Crosswinds Coin to see which direction the wind blows that turn. He can then Set Sail, making up to nine moves. He can move two squares per move if this is a ‘Run’ in the direction of the wind, one square if a ‘Yaw’ and any direction not influenced by the wind, but cannot move in the direction opposite to the wind. If he moves adjacent to Morgawr, she will steal a card from the Captain, and if across a whirlpool, then he draws a Whirlpool card. A ‘Peril & Strife’ Whirlpool card must be dealt with at the end of his turn. A Captain can even sacrifice a crew member to Morgawr to move her anywhere on the map, or a florin card to her to gain extra moves. 

Other actions depend upon where a RumRummer is. If at a Port, a Captain can sell Rum, buy crew, and change florins—the latter useful to make space for other cards. If at Morgawr’s Cave, a Captain can peek at the riches she has in her hoard and then steal some—even some a Captain might have sacrificed earlier in the game! If alongside another RumRunner, a Captain can mount a raid. This can be a skirmish in which the raiding Captain attempts to beat the defending Captain using the total of either Charm or Ferocity icons on his crews’ cards, or a duel in which a single crew member from each RumRunner goes head-to-head, comparing their Pistol-Cutlass-Parrot symbols in rock-paper-scissors style—pistol beats cutlass, cutlass beats parrot, and parrots being parrots, parrot beats pistol. A successful skirmish garners the winner two random cards from the loser’s hand, a duel just the one. Lastly, when at his galleon, a Captain can stow florins—they are now safe, swap his crew, and load his RumRunner with rum if he still has some to take ashore.

There is a lot going on in Pirates of Penryn and a Captain has a lot of that he can do. The one thing that he will need to do is balance his hand between the choice of Crew, Florins, and Rum. All will be necessary to win the game, but focus on one to the detriment of the others and a Captain may not be able to make Rum sales quickly enough, be able to deal with raids or whirlpools, or defend against raids. A Captain can also use Morgawr to his advantage—move her to block, threaten, or attack another Captain, or to gain extra movement when it counts! Thematically though, it all feels suitably fitting and fun, emphasising the skill and ability of a Captain to deal with the random fortunes of the changing tide and wind, as well as making the best use of his crew. There is not a high degree of randomness or luck to the game, but there is just enough to make play challenging when it counts.

Physically, Pirates of Penryn is well presented and all of the components are of a reasonable quality—cardboard pieces rather than plastic or wood. If the artwork is perhaps a little twee, the game play will quickly disabuse any Captain that playing Pirates of Penryn is also twee. The rulebook—although it looks a bit too busy, takes the time to explain its rules and give examples of the rules in play. It also includes rules for playing the game with children, a two-Captain variant, and some optional rules to make it more of a challenge. These include the barrels of rum having different values and even being able to buy rum at one port town and sell it at another!

Pirates of Penryn – A game of Charm & Ferocity Upon Cornish Waters is a surprisingly challenging and fun game—the cover of the box simply does not suggest how fun it actually is. A Captain’s objective may be simple, and he really only has to do one thing, but there are plenty of things he can do to make it easier for himself and harder for his rivals, plus Pirates of Penryn makes great use of its theme, and there is nothing stop the Captains going all piratical themselves, such as speaking a West Country accent, bringing their crew members to life during play, and more. Doing so gives the Captains a chance to tell the story of their RumRunner’s daring exploits and smuggling runs and make Pirates of Penryn – A game of Charm & Ferocity Upon Cornish Waters an even better game.

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.

—oOo—

What is it?
Monster of the Month #11: Air Toads! presents a sort of inflatable batrachian bomb with which to confound your Player Characters for use with RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha.
It is an thirteen-page, full colour, 1.24 MB PDF.
The layout is clean and tidy, and the illustrations reasonable.

Where is it set?
Monster of the Month #11: Air Toads! can be set almost anywhere, but particularly where Cliff Toads may also be found.
Who do you play?No specific character types are required when encountering Monster of the Month #11: Air Toads!. Having a hunter amongst the party may be useful and the likelihood is that any Eurmali will enjoy the possibility of an encounter with these creatures going off with a bang!
What do you need?
Monster of the Month #11: Air Toads! requires RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. The RuneQuest: Glorantha Bestiary will also useful for details of Cliff Toads.
What do you get?
Monster of the Month #11: Air Toads! provides the Game Master with an utterly weird, almost confounding, certainly ridiculous monster. A toad, that like its Cliff Toad cousin, can look like a rock and squeeze its way through relatively narrow cracks and crevices, has a long tongue it uses to capture and then swallow its prey, but if punctured, can explode with a big whoosh of air and a bang! And not only that, but can inflate and float away into the sky!
The Air Toad is likely to be more nuisance than threat per se, but it is still dangerous and if being hunted or simply found in the area where the Player Characters are, then any attempt at stealth is likely to be thwarted should one or more of them explode. Besides being a nuisance though, Air Toads are valued for their body parts. Their eyes, for example, all three of them—which enable an adult Air Toad to see in every direction and thus make it very hard to sneak up on—are valued by sorcerers for their use in illusion spells, whilst alchemists use them to make floatwine, an intoxicating concoction that enables the imbiber to fly! However, recovery of such parts require that the Air Toad has not exploded and that needs bludgeoning weapons. Thus for many Player Characters, with their reliance on piercing and slashing weapons, going on an Air Toad hunt is a whole other challenge...
As well as its stats and biology, Monster of the Month #11: Air Toads! gives the Mythos & History for the Air Toad—unsurprisingly given the absurdity of the creature, Eurmal was involved—as well as adventure seeds (mostly as nuisance and prey for the hunt), a table of rumours, and a discussion of the different perspectives that other races have on the Air Toad. Notably, in Prax, this includes the Cult of the Storm Bull-Frog, a relatively temporary spirit cult, allied with Storm Bull, which dedicates it itself to the care and worship of a particular Air Toad. Along the way there is some scholarly discussion of the creature which adds another perspective or two and so should engage any Grey Beard amongst the Player Characters upon the subject.
Is it worth your time?Yes—Monster of the Month #11: Air Toads! presents toads which go bang, and who would deny that the levity of their game would not be improved with the addition of batrachian bombs?No—Monster of the Month #11: Air Toads! is a ridiculous idea. Honestly, who thought of such an idea?Maybe—Monster of the Month #11: Air Toads! is relatively easy to use, but the absurdity of it may change the tone of a campaign and even then, such batrachian bombs are not something that you can include too often in a campaign. It definitely falls under ‘Your Glorantha Will Vary’ and it may even fall under ‘Your Glorantha Will Really Vary’.

Fronti Nulla Fides—or ‘there is no trusting appearances’—is an anthology of six scenarios for The 7th Edition Guide to Cthulhu Invictus: Cosmic Horror Roleplaying in Ancient Rome using Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition. Published by Golden Goblin Press, this setting presents new challenges in investigating and confronting the Mythos in Lovecraftian investigative roleplaying, shorn of its reliance upon libraries, newspaper archives, and Mythos tomes, instead requiring the investigators to ask others lots and lots of questions, do an awful lot of watching, and sneak about a fair bit. In other words, more detective legwork rather than research. Similarly, the reliance upon firearms found in conducting investigations in the Jazz Age of the 1920s, makes such investigations and confrontations with the Mythos more fraught affairs. The sextet in Fronti Nulla Fides see the investigators conducting a raid on a house of tinkers, a rescue mission to a city of white apes, a terrible sea journey, and in turn, hunts for a slave, a dragon, and a barbarian.

The anthology opens with ‘The Clockwork Oracle’, the first of three contributions by  publisher Oscar Rios. This is set in Corinth in Greece—though it could easily be moved to another city—and has the Investigators hired by a trio of brothers and sisters whose father has become obsessed with mechanisms and clockwork devices, in particular, a mechanical jay known as The Clockwork Oracle, which he believes can tell the future. This obsession has grown to the point that he is spending much of his wealth upon them, has allowed a gifted tinker to move into his home, and when confronted by his children, threw them out of the house. Amongst other things, siblings want the tinker removed from the house, their father separated from The Clockwork Oracle, both him and the household slaves kept safe, their family’s financial records secured, and more. Of these other objectives, each of the siblings has his or own objective and the scenario divides them between the Investigators, so adding a slight divisive element when it comes to the scenario’s set piece. Oddly, the biggest challenge in the scenario for the Keeper is portraying the squabbling siblings as they talk across each other, but otherwise this a short and straightforward scenario that provides an opportunity for the Investigators to conduct some classic detective work before the scenario’s grand set piece—the raid on the house. Here the scenario is almost Dungeons & Dragons-like, with much more of an emphasis on stealth and combat in comparison to scenarios for Call of Cthulhu, but this should make for a fun change of pace. The scenario also has numerous different aspects to its outcome which will need to be worked through, depending upon how successful the Investigators have been. Overall, ‘The Clockwork Oracle’ has a two-fisted muscularity to it, but still packs in plenty of story.

Jeffrey Moeller’s ‘Goddess of the White Apes’ is a sequel to his ‘The Vetting of Marius Asina’ from De Horrore Cosmico. ‘The Vetting of Marius Asina’ is an interpretation of ‘Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn and his Family’ in which the Investigators look into the background of Marius Asina to determine if he is suitable for elevation beyond his current rank of senator. Of course, he was not, since neither Marius Asina nor his family turned out to human, let alone barely Roman citizens! ‘Goddess of the White Apes’ leans into the pulpiness of the ‘Swords & Sandals’ genre, but combines it with weird miscegenation and horror, as the Investigators are directed to rescue from the nephew of the emperor from a city to the far south beyond the furthest reaches of the empire. There they find a city which is rapidly coming to ape Rome itself as the leader of the White Apes attempts to make both their home and their society more ‘civilised’! Here the Investigators—after the travails of their long journey south (though a means of cutting the journey time is explored)—must deal with a leader more capricious than a Roman Emperor and effect an escape. The set-up of ‘Goddess of the White Apes’ allows it to be run as a standalone scenario, but it works better as a sequel to ‘The Vetting of Marius Asina’.

Whether as crew or passengers, the Investigators find themselves in peril at sea in Charles Gerard’s ‘Following Seas’. As they sail aboard the Minerva from Antioch in Syria Palestina to Ostia, the port which serves Rome, the ship’s captain veers between depression and irrationality, his mood and actions upsetting the crew as strange energies are seen to swirl about the ship’s rigging. Both investigation and action will take place aboard the Minerva in what is classic, ‘ship in a bottle’ scenario, one that quickly pushes its narrative to an action-packed dénouement. Along the way, there is room for unsettling flashbacks, either ones which have happened in earlier encounters with the Mythos or ones which each player can create for their Investigator on the spot. ‘Following Seas’ is a decent scenario, one which is easily run as the Investigators are travelling between locations—perhaps in a campaign, perhaps between other scenarios, and which can easily be transferred to times and locations which involve sailing ships and sea voyages.

Oscar Rios’ second scenario is ‘Manumission’, in which Rome’s practice of slavery is put to a vile purpose. A vigilis—the equivalent of the police in the Roman Empire, comes to the Investigators for their help. In fact, he comes to them for their help because they owe him a favour or two, so ‘Manumission’ works best later in a campaign when the Investigators who have had a run in with the authorities. The vigilis wants them to help a friend of his whose nephew has been sold into slavery by his drunkard father. Quick investigation reveals that the boy has already been sold and the buyer is not prepared to sell him back. In order to rescue the boy, the Investigators will have to follow the seller and perhaps steal him back. However, in the process, they will discover why the boy was sold and that adds a degree of urgency to the rescue attempt. This is a solid piece of nastiness, nicely set up and waiting for the Investigator to do the right thing.

‘The Dragon of Cambria’ by William Adcock takes the Investigators to the west of Britannia and into Wales where a rich lead mine has unleashed a dragon! This is a classic monster hunt in Dungeons & Dragons-style, but one scaled to Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, which means that the Investigators are likely to be snapped up in a straight fight between themselves and the creature. They will have to use their guile and planning to defeat the creature, though their efforts are likely to be hindered by rival hunters and locals interpreting the appearance of the dragon as heralding a rebellion against the Roman authorities.

Lastly, Oscar Rios’ third scenario takes the Investigators to the province of Germania Superior and beyond! In ‘The Blood Sword of Emeric’, a German tribal leader has risen in rebellion and is attacking locals and Romans alike, but is said to have a blood red sword capable of killing at a single cut and slicing through chainmail. Whether as agents employed by a merchant to recover a missing shipment, the head of a local fort beset by refugees wanting someone to bring him the head of Emeric, or even as agents of an occult society interested in rumours of the sword, the Investigators will need to get what information they can from the refugees, find a guide, and strike out beyond the frontier. The scenario is again quite straightforward and quite action orientated, but it does a nice bait and switch on the Investigators—not once, but twice!

Physically, Fronti Nulla Fides is well presented and edited. Each scenario begins with a full list of its NPCs and each scenario’s maps are generally good, and the illustrations, although having a slightly cartoonish feel to them, are excellent throughout.

Each of the six scenarios in Fronti Nulla Fides should take no longer than a session or two to play, each is different, and even despite their being quite short, time is taken to explore the possible outcomes and ramifications of each. Their length also makes them easy to fit into an ongoing campaign, either between longer, more involved scenarios or chapters of an actual campaign. They also provide a decent amount of physical and interpersonal investigation, showcasing just how rare it is that Lovecraftian investigating roleplaying at the height of the Roman Empire rarely involves visits to libraries or poring over Mythos tomes. Overall, Fronti Nulla Fides not only lives up to its title, but also provides the Keeper of a Cthulhu Invictus campaign with a set of six short, but enjoyably action-orientated and punchy scenarios.