Under a Winter’s Snow: Death & Disease in North Dakota is a scenario for use Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition. Published by Stygian Fox, it is set early in the Jazz Age in North Dakota in the wake of the Great War and the 1918 Pandemic. Amidst a flurry of snow and ice in January, 1921, the inhabitants of the town of Eisner have been struck by a strange disease which leaves them sweating, shivering, and penultimately delirious before they die. The local doctor has been overwhelmed by the rash of deaths, which he fears to be another outbreak of the Spanish Flu. However, in the victims’ delirium, they whisper of a shrouded man seen in both their dreams and on the streets of Eisner, and of superstitions long forgotten in this modern age…

It should be noted that Under a Winter’s Snow deals with an outbreak of a disease with flu-like symptoms. Published in 2020, but before the outbreak of the current pandemic, it means that it has strong parallels with contemporary events. The scenario’s themes of disease, infection, and contamination may mean it is not suitable for some players. The Keeper is advised to consider the ramifications of such themes before deciding to run Under a Winter’s Snow.

In the default set-up for Under a Winter’s Snow, the Investigators are county officials sent into help with the outbreak. Alternatively, they might be law enforcement tracking a strange individual who has been spreading chaos and madness since his return from the Great War or standard Call of Cthulhu Investigators who have been caught in Eisner during the dreadful weather. A fourth is given, that of the players taking the roles of members of the local youth, caught up in the winter and the dreadful situation with the disease. This though, is not the advised option as the Investigators are not meant to be residents of the town and is not supported by the scenario itself.

Under a Winter’s Snow is relatively short and it is very likely that the Investigators are going to be quickly mystified as to the cause of the disease and its source. This being a scenario for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, of course means that the disease has an unnatural cause, but getting to that source is going to be challenging for the players and their Investigators, whilst presenting the clues to that end, is going to be challenging for the Keeper. The scenario has a timed element, one that sees both more and more of the townsfolk infected and some of the Investigators infected. A nice touch is that being infected may actually open up some clues to the Investigators as well as drive them to investigate first the disease, and then perhaps beyond the disease itself… However, the scenario ultimately turns on the activities of a single NPC which the Keeper will have to very carefully roleplay—first portraying the NPC as innocuous, even helpful, but later as seeming to know more, until it is clear that the NPC is somehow involved. Here perhaps the Keeper can have some fun roleplaying an NPC who despite being insane might actually help the Investigators and in return, want their help, but not necessarily from the same motive.

Physically, Under a Winter’s Snow is tidily presented, but is lightly illustrated and needs another edit. The handouts are reasonable, but there is no map of the town. One of the handouts sort of doubles as a map, but only after the Investigators have done a particular action, and then it is a hand drawn piece, very rough, and very much at odds with the cartographic standards usually set by Stygian Fox.

Originally published as part of Stygian Fox’s Patreon, Under a Winter’s Snow feels rushed and not sufficiently developed to stand on its own as a scenario for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition. It leaves too much for the Keeper to detail herself, whether that is the town of Eisner, a map of the town of Eisner, the names of the victims of the disease, the names of various NPCs, and so on. It could have included pre-generated Investigators, especially if they have been sent by the county authorities to help the town’s doctor, and if not that, then at least given some suggested roles and Occupations. Either option would have worked if the scenario is being run as a one-shot. If not as a one-shot, as written the time period of the early nineteen twenties and remote location of North Dakota makes Under a Winter’s Snow difficult to bring into a campaign, but ultimately, the location is irrelevant because the scenario does nothing with it and so is easy to shift elsewhere, whether that is Lovecraft Country, the north of England, rural France, or even Germany.

Under a Winter’s Snow is not as fleshed out as it could be and feels much more of a magazine scenario than one that warranted a release on its own. It offers an interesting roleplaying challenge for the players and their Investigators in dealing with an NPC who has succumbed to the Mythos, but will require some effort upon the part of the Keeper to bring both setting and plot to the table.

Dead in the Water is a scenario for Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game – Triumph & Technology Won by Mutants & Magic, the spiritual successor to Gamma World published by Goodman Games. It is designed for Zero Level player characters, what this means is that Dead in the Water is a Character Funnel, one of the signature features of both the Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game and the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game it is mechanically based upon—in which initially, a player is expected to roll up three or four Level Zero characters and have them play through a generally nasty, deadly adventure, which surviving will prove a challenge. Those that do survive receive enough Experience Points to advance to First Level and gain all of the advantages of their Class. In terms of the setting, known as Terra A.D., or ‘Terra After Disaster’, this is a ‘Rite of Passage’ and in Mutants, Manimals, and Plantients, the stress of it will trigger ‘Metagenesis’, their DNA expressing itself and their mutations blossoming forth.

Dead in the Water is published by Savage AfterWorld and is a scenario for between twelve and sixteen Zero Level Player Characters—so three or four players, which takes place on and off the coast of The Rainbow Sea in the light of the ‘Horizon Star’ which causes the sea to glitter… The scenario begins in the fishing village of Narleen, with the Zero Level Player Characters either as residents or visitors. Either way, the Player Characters are present when screams are heard, and the village’s alarm bell is sounded. When they respond, they discover several waterlogged corpses dragging themselves out of the surf and into the village, where they claw at and grapple several of the inhabitants. The Player Characters have the opportunity to help here and in doing so come to the attention of Narleen’s village headman. Examination of the strange corpses discovers a strange thing—each corpse is host to a small squid-like creature residing in its mouth and also reeks of a powerful odour, the same as a flammable liquid to be found on The Island of Fire, a forbidden isle in The Rainbow Sea. This means that the source of the waterlogged, but animated corpses that have attacked Narleen and other villages, must be The Island of Fire, and so the village headman tasks the Player Characters with going to The Island of Fire and put an end to the attacks. This will be their Rite of Passage.

If the attack on Narleen is the first act of Dead in the Water, then the second is the sea journey to The Island of Fire and the third is exploring The Island of the Fire. The sea journey will be for the most part, quite straight forward, there is a chance for further attacks from the swimming corpses and other things, but perhaps the most fun (or frustration) will come when roleplaying and interacting with the captain of the boat they take to the island. The simple fact is that he cannot speak, so players and Judge will need to engage in a round or two of miming and hand signals!

The Island of Fire turns out to be a Site of the Ancients. There is an ecological feel to the initial exploration, but once inside the towering structure at the centre of the small island, it is revealed to be a technological site. There are some secrets to be discovered, as well as various artefacts, which are appropriate to the location rather than just random. Now despite The Island of Fire having a limited number of locations, there is a pleasing sense of scale to them and at least one of them should invoke a sense of wonder in both the players and their characters. However, this sense of wonder quickly turns to horror as the antagonist at the heart of scenario literally looms into view. The climax on—well, technically, under—The Island of Fire should be frantic, desperate, ad dangerous, whether it involves fight or flight! The Player Characters should ideally prepare themselves by grabbing whatever artefacts they can and by the end of the scenario, will hopefully have survived and gained enough Experience Points to become First Level.

Dead in the Water is just sixteen pages long and reasonably well illustrated and edited, and the maps decent. Some of the illustrations capture some of the adventure’s scale, but some are just a little silly. Just what are Beavis and Butthead doing in Terra A.D. and arguably, do you just not want the waterlogged corpses to grab them and pull them overboard? If there is anything missing in Dead in the Water, it is perhaps that it would have been nice to have seen more of the base presented—though there is nothing to stop the Judge from expanding it herself.

Whether played as a Character  Funnel, or even as a short encounter for First Level mutants, Dead in the Water is a likeable scenario which should offer a session or two’s worth of play. Dig into it and it has a combination of a zombie film meets Alien in its feel, which is nicely transposed to an interesting environment, making Dead in the Water a slightly creepy mix of Science Fiction and Horror.

 Waterdeep is a city of many faiths, yet there are many in the City of Splendours that lack wealth, influence, or congregation to build a temple of their own, let alone a cathedral. Each year though, on Plinth Day, the adherents of such faiths compete in displays of devotion in order to awarded one of the twenty shrines within the building known as the Plinth. This is a six-storey tower, slim, but with many balconies and home to the aforementioned shrines where those of the faiths that were successful on Plinth Day may come to worship without fear of condemnation or prosecution—whether be followers of Law or Chaos, or Good or Evil. Since the faiths with shrines in the Plinth must adhere to the rule of tolerance, civility, and respect, the multi-denominational, square tower is somewhere the agents of faiths and other organisations come to meet—though there is no knowing who might be watching, inside or out… The tallest building in Waterdeep, the Plinth is not only a well-known landmark, it is also home to a griffon cavalry guard station, a plum assignment for any member of the city’s griffon riders.

The Plinth: A Waterdeep Location is published by The Eldritch Press and as the title suggests, describes a location in the City of Splendours, perhaps the most important city in all of Faerûn. Thus it is a supplement for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, one that details the building itself, the occupants of the twenty shrines—from Auril, goddess of winter and Azuth, god of wizards to Talos, god of storms and Umberlee, goddess of the sea, descriptions of four NPCs and stats for a total of eleven, four quests, floorplans of all six levels of the Plinth, and a heresy. The NPC stats include generic characters and creatures such as the Flight Captain and Griffon Mount, but also entries tied to the quests, such as the Green Ghost which rises from the City of the Dead and everywhere it wanders, it withers the greenery and fresh flowers placed by the faithful of Eldath, goddess of peace, at the graves, and the Southern Assassins and Southern Rogues who will be instructed to deal with the Player Characters should they be taking too much of an interest in the fact that the masters of the Southern Assassins and Southern Rogues have been seen buying poison! Of course, The Emerald Enclave would like the Green Ghost laid to rest and The Lords’ Alliance would be very interested to learn about the purchase of certain poisons… The four quests range from Second Level up to Seventh Level, so the likelihood is that if the Dungeon Master uses all four, the Player Characters will be coming back to the Plinth more than once.

Perhaps the longest section in The Plinth: A Waterdeep Location—certainly the longest section of text—is dedicated to the Mother Source Heresy. Prior to its adoption as a multi-denominational establishment, the Plinth was a sacred monument to the goddess Selûne. Acolytes of the Seekers of Selûne are known to visit and wander the Plinth, communing with the building and chanting verses, sometimes even being struck by profound visions. Their activities are linked to holy fragments of a magical earthen vessel, known as the Mother Source Fragments, that suggest that there was an ultimate godhead and primeval Source-of-Realms to an unknown Goddess. Or it might be an aspect of an existing goddess, such as Selûne or Mystra and this interpretation has led to the rivals claiming that the interpretation is heretical.

The Plinth: A Waterdeep Location is very nicely presented. The artwork is excellent and the layout clean and tidy. Overall, this is a highly attractive supplement.

The obvious ties of The Plinth: A Waterdeep Location to Waterdeep make it difficult to use elsewhere and whilst it will be easy enough for the Dungeon Master to develop the four quests, it is pity that they do not tie into the Plinth as strongly as they should. Similarly, for all that the Mother Source Heresy is interesting, there are no quests actually using it or involving the Player Characters in it, so unlike the quests, it is not going to be all that easy to bring into a game or campaign. Perhaps in need of a little more development and support for the Dungeon Master, The Plinth: A Waterdeep Location does a decent job of presenting an interesting location and handful of NPCs—and presenting in a highly attractive fashion.

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?
Legion presents ninety-six pre-generated Broo, nine new deadly diseases, a Broo name generator, and a scenario for use with RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha.
It is ninety-two page, full colour, 28.82 MB PDF.
The layout is clean and tidy, and many of the illustrations good. It needs a strong edit.

Where is it set?
Legion can be set almost anywhere where Broo may be found (although there are references to Prax in the text). The included scenario, ‘Imperial Waystation 42’, can be set anywhere on the boundaries—or former boundaries—of the Lunar Empire.
Who do you play?No specific character types are required when encountering the creatures in Legion. The Broo are not that fussy (mostly). Of course, an initiate or priest of Chalana Arroy will probably be useful after any encounter with the Broo.
What do you need?
Legion requires RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. The RuneQuest: Glorantha Bestiary may be useful.
What do you get?
Echoing supplements such as RuneQuest Source Pack Alpha: Trolls and Trollkin, RuneQuest Source Pack Beta: Creatures of Chaos 1: Scorpion Men and Broos, and RuneQuest Source Pack Gamma: Militia & Mercenaries, as well as the Foes and Runemasters supplements, Legion is a supplement of deadly monsters and enemies that the Game Master can bring to her game. The monsters and foes in question are Broo—the horned, often goat-headed species befouled by Chaos and vile practices, widely known as carriers of horrid diseases and worshippers of dread Chaos gods. Legion presents some ninety-six pregenerated Chaos enemies, broken down into twenty Rune Lord, Priests, and Rune Lord Priests, twenty-six Initiates, and some forty-eight lay members, plus nine new deadly diseases, a Broo Name Generator, and ‘Imperial Waystation 42’, a location and short scenario. There is also a breakdown of the Broo according to their Cult, so along with the expected Malia and Thed worshippers there are worshippers of Cacodemon, Nysalor/Gbaji, Pocharngo, and even the Seven Mothers and a Sorcerer!
All of the Rune Lord, Priests, and Rune Lord Priests and the Initiates are full write-ups as well as their stats. For example, Gukgaz Khul is a Rune Priest of Primal Chaos, host to thousands of pin worms that constantly wriggle out of and across her body, and the ‘Bleak Hill Blindness’ and capable of controlling the unintelligent things which crawl from the chaos ooze, such as gorp and dragon snails, and including a small gorp which is home to her allied spirit, whilst Khul Gruc, a Rune Lord Priest and Shaman of Thed, one of three to be found in Dragon Pass, who is typically found in a discorporate state and guarded by other Rune Lords and Initiates of both Thed and Malia. His body is a riotous swathe of brightly coloured fungi and mushrooms that sprout from every available inch of his body. Initiates include Black Shuck, a Broo with the shaggy head of a fighting dog who constantly drools from both mouth and nose, and who worships Malia; Wild Face, an Initiate of Thed has the face and claw of a puma, who has issues loading his crossbow; and Khi Ghul, a sable-horned devotee of Seven Mothers with slick, black fur that has a dark red stripe running down it and who despite hating life, actually works as a translator for any human contact and idolises the Lunar Empire!
Legion being a supplement about Broo, it includes several new diseases—and they are deadly indeed. They are described as serious diseases, purportedly appearing and spreading in the wake of the withdrawal of Lunar forces from Prax. For example, Bleak Hill Blindness causes weeping and loss of vision; The Laughing Death, which causes the sufferer to collapse into fits of uncontrollable laughter and it is thought to have originated amongst Eurmal worshipers; and Dermal Glue, in which the sufferer exudes a fouling smelling glue which leads to everything sticking to him! All of these diseases are really vile.
‘Imperial Waystation 42’ is a ‘defend the flag’ one-shot, combat-orientated scenario. It describes a fortress at the edge of the Lunar Empire’s expansion, only partially completed before it was abandoned. The fortress is described such that it can be used elsewhere, but here it comes under attack by Broo. Several reasons are given for the Player Characters to visit the fortress and defend it, and the scenario comes suggestions as to which Broo to use from Legion, although the Game Master is free to pick and choose to match her players’ characters.
As well as the degree of invention on show in Legion, many of the Broo are accompanied by some fantastic artwork, much of it fully painted. The artwork and the map is decent throughout. In terms of the writing, one thing that should be made clear about Legion is that avoids the repellent nature of Broo procreational practices, although it alludes to it obliquely. Whether or not the Game Master wants to include this aspect of the Broo in her campaign is left up to her to decide.
Is it worth your time?Yes—Legion presents a vilely inventive array of foes and even NPCs (in some cases) that the players and their characters will remember not just for the confrontation, but also for the diseases that Broo will infect them with as a reminder.  No—Legion is probably best avoided if the Game Master does not want to bring Broo, their diseases, and their reputations into her game.Maybe—Legion presents foes which vary widely in power level, and many of them are likely to be too powerful for many groups of Player Characters, so the Game Master will need to use them with care.

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—
As the hobby in 2020 awaits the much-anticipated release of Cyberpunk Red, the fourth edition of Cyberpunk, the year also marks the thirtieth anniversary of both its highly regarded forebear, Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0., and another roleplaying game designed by Mike Pondsmith. That roleplaying game is Buck Rogers XXVC, or ‘Buck Rogers in the 25th Century’. Published by TSR, Inc. in 1990, as the title suggests Buck Rogers XXVC is based upon the character originally created by Philip Francis Nowlan in the novella Armageddon 2419 A.D., and subsequently popularised in newspaper comic strips, a film serial in the late nineteen thirties, and then a television series in the late nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties. In the original novella, Buck Rogers is frozen in a mine by radioactive gas and kept in a state of suspended animation for nearly five centuries, only to awake in 2419 to find a North America ruled by the Air Lords known as the Han and their allied gangs from fifteen great cities, Americans left to fend themselves beyond the confines of the cities, but putting up a resistance against the Han and their gang allies. The original novella, the film serial, the television series, and both roleplaying games—TSR, Inc. publishing Buck Rogers XXVC in 1990 and then the High Adventure Cliffhangers Buck Rogers Adventure Game in 1993—have expanded upon, to varying degrees, the scope of their Buck Rogers settings. For example, the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century television series takes the character and story into space and beyond the confines of the solar system, and its look is influenced by Star Wars, at the time being nearly everyone’s idea of what Science Fiction should be like; Buck Rogers XXVC takes the character into the space, but only the confines of the solar system, and its Science Fiction, is more Pulpy in its styling; and the High Adventure Cliffhangers Buck Rogers Adventure Game takes Buck Rogers back to his roots of the novella—a conflict set on Earth only, fought with the technology of the Great War and the nineteen twenties. What they share in common is the same cast of characters, and of course, Buck Rogers himself, a man out of the past, frozen in time for centuries, and awoken to help to fight an oppressive enemy.

Buck Rogers XXVC would be TSR, Inc.’s second attempt at a Science Fiction roleplaying game, following on from 1982’s well-regarded Star Frontiers, and preceding the High Adventure Cliffhangers Buck Rogers Adventure Game and the Amazing Engine and its subsequent line of supplements—both from 1993, and finally Alternity in 1998. It would come about because Lorraine Williams, the then president of TSR, Inc., was the granddaughter of John F. Dille, the publisher who had originally syndicated Philip Francis Nowlan’s Buck Rogers comic strip and as a property, Buck Rogers, is owned by the Dille Family Trust. Williams wanted to combine Buck Rogers with the popularity of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and this would lead to the development of a new background for Buck Rogers, by Williams’ brother, Flint Dille. This new background would be initially showcased in 1988 in the board game, Buck Rogers - Battle for the 25th Century, and then the roleplaying game, Buck Rogers XXVC, in 1990.

The setting for Buck Rogers XXVC is the year 2456. The twenty-fifth century is a future in which atomic powered rocket ships fly between the plants of the solar system, great power blocs work to terraform Mars and Venus, corporate warlords use genetically engineered workers and warriors to dominate whole worlds and enforce their will, and an Earth, a political and economic backwater still recovering from a war in the first half of the twenty-first century, bucking against off-world powers who see it as a source of clean water, historical art and objects and treasures, and other resources to be plundered. The solar system is dominated by three great power blocs, formed in response to the Last Gasp War fought between the United States of America and the Soviet Communist bloc which began with the successful destruction of Russia’s powerful new orbital offence system, Masterlink, by United States Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Anthony ‘Buck’ Rogers—who was assumed killed in the attempt and ended in a limited exchange of nuclear missiles. The three power blocs, the Russo-American Combine (RAM), the Euro-Bloc faction, and the Indo-Asian Consortium (IAC) quickly formed a world government and then, as the rest of the solar system was explored, settled, and terraformed, the System States Alliance. Each bloc claimed a different world, RAM took Mars, the Euro-Bloc Luna, and the IAC Venus, with both RAM and the IAC making great efforts to terraform their worlds. To date, both RAM and the IAC have made great strides such that parts of both worlds are habitable. Ultimately, RAM would rebel against the System States Alliance and by the end of the Ten Year War in 2285, break both Earth as a power and fearing the IAC as an economic rival, sabotage colonisation and terraforming efforts on Venus. As RAM tightened its grip and influence on the Solar System, refugees from Earth, Mars, and Venus would flee to Mercury where the most powerful colonists would establish a ‘Sun King’ monarchy made wealthy on the energy and minded ores it sold to the rest of the solar System. A later wave of refugees would flee into the asteroids, and to Jupiter and Saturn, these Outer Worlds eventually to become home to The Black Brotherhood, bands of pirates feared for their raids across the system. Earth, the majority of its population residing in Arcologies, with mutants confined to reservations or the polluted and scavenged Badlands, and its technology regressed to that of the twentieth century, is under the thumb of RAM, as part of its ‘Solar Alliance Protectorate’. More recently, an alliance of smugglers, traders, and rebels who have banded together to form the New Earth Organisation (NEO), an underground resistance group dedicated to freeing Earth from RAM’s yoke. (Notably, parallels are drawn between NEO and RAM, and the Continental Army and British forces during the American War of Independence, but of course, NEO’s enemy is corporate, rather than imperial, though no less autocratic.) Recently, NEO’s hopes and plans have been bolstered by the discovery and revival of Buck Rogers, the hero of The Last Gasp War.

Buck Rogers XXVC comes as a richly appointed box set, which start with three black and white books—‘Characters & Combat’, the ninety-six-page rulebook; the sixty-four-page ‘The World Book’, which covers the background and includes information and a scenario for the Referee’s eyes only; and the thirty-two-page ‘The Technology Book’, which covers the setting’s equipment and weaponry. The Referee is given a plain, but serviceable Reference Screen: Tables and Statistics, plus twenty-four reference cards. On the font of these is a full colour illustration, showing either a ship, an NPC—such as Ardala Valmar, Buck Rogers, or Killer Kane, or a map of one of the setting’s worlds, with the stats and background on the back. These reference cards feel reminiscent of Spelljammer, the space setting for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Second Edition. There are two double-sided poster maps. One poster has a map of Tycho Arcology Spaceport on one side and an outer-space hex grid for running space combat on the other, whilst the other poster has the deck plans for a small cruiser and a medium cruiser—both suitable for use with 25 mm figures—on one side, and a map of the orbits of the inner planets and various settlements in the Asteroid Belt on the other. Lastly, there is sheet of counters for use on the maps, a set of polyhedral dice, and a plastic overlay. This is used to determine travel and communication times between the planets as they orbit around the sun, the Referee having to move them along in their orbital paths once every thirty days in game to reflect the changing distances. Overall, the box set is nicely appointed.

Buck Rogers XXVC is a classic Race, Class—or Career, and Level system. It is based on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Second Edition, but with various tweaks to account for the genre. The Player Characters, traders, adventurers, spies, resistance fighters, and more, are assumed to be members of, or at least affiliated to NEO. A Player Character is defined by seven attributes—Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Constitution, Wisdom, Charisma, and Tech. These provide various bonuses, notably serving as a bonus to skill rolls, and range in value from one to twenty-two. A Character also has a Race, Buck Rogers XXVC offering thirteen options. They start with Terrans, unmodified Humans, and then add Martians, Lunarians, Venusians, and Mercurians, each type having been modified to survive on their respective home worlds. The other eight are ‘gennies’, or ‘genetic mutants’, modified with animal DNA to survive in certain conditions or perform various tasks. So Tinkers are crossed with lemurs and gibbons, and are short, have long fingers, a longer reach, and fine fur and are suited to engineering and technical tasks—especially in tunnels; the Martian Desert Runner has feline and canine DNA to give claws and the ability to run on all fours, and webbing between fingers and toes to run on the sands of Mars; and the dread Terrine have Shark DNA with tough skeletons, retractable talons on hands and feet, and sandpaper-like skin, and are bred by RAM as its shock troops. In terms of Class—or Career, Buck Rogers XXVC gives Rocketjocks, the pilots of the setting, Warriors—fighters and professional soldiers, Scouts—planetary explorers and loners, Engineers, Rogues—gamblers and information traders, and Medics. All six Careers have attribute requirements, and some cannot be selected by Gennies. Each Career provides a few abilities. The Rocketjock grants a bonus to Driving and Piloting skill checks and a Charisma bonus when interacting with a member of the opposite gender; the Warrior rolls a six-sided die for unarmed damage and gains a specialisation bonus every other Level to use a particular weapon, up to +3 for each weapon; a Scout a bonus to his Career skills at each Level; an Engineer receives a to hit and damage bonus when using a tool as a club in combat; the Rogue receives a bonus to his Career skills; and only the Medic can use a Drug Fabricator or Autosurgery. Each Career has its own set of skills. For example, the Rocketjock has Drive Jetcar, Drive Groundcar, Manoeuvre in Zero G, Notice, Pilot Fixed Wing, Pilot Rocket, Pilot Rotorwing Craft, and Use Rocket Belt, whilst the Rogue has Bypass Security, Climb, Fast Talk/Convince, Hide in Shadows, Move Silently, Notice, Open Lock and Pick Pockets.

To create a character, a player rolls three six-sided dice for each attribute, and selects a Race and Career. He divides forty points between his Career skills and another twenty between General skills. He also adds the value of the appropriate attribute to each skill the character has as well as any bonuses from the Career. Each time his character goes up a Level, he will receive another forty points to assign to his Career skills and another twenty to his General skills—that is, those skills not granted by his Career. He then receives between two hundred and two thousand credits to spend on equipment.

Name: Seldona Clarke
Race: Human
Career: Scout Level: 1

Strength 10 (Weight 40, Max. Lift 115, Strength Feat 2)
Dexterity 12
Constitution 09 (System Shock 65)
Intelligence 13
Wisdom 11
Charisma 13
Tech 10

Armour Class: 10
Hit Points: 8

Abilities
N/A

Career Skills
Animal Riding (Dex) 13, Befriend Animal (Chr) 01, Climb (Dex) 18, Move Silently (Dex) 17, Notice (Wis) 16, Planetary Survival (Wis) 16, Planetology (Int) 27, Tracking (Wis) 16

General Skills
Cook (Tech) 15, Geology (Int) 18, Navigation (Int) 18, Sensor Operation (Tech) 15

Equipment
Laser Pistol, Mono Knife, Utility Belt, Smart Clothes, Messkit, Backpack, Inertial Compass, Cr 75

Mechanically, Buck Rogers XXVC employs not one, but three different mechanics. The first a simple attribute test, a roll equal to, or less than an attribute on a twenty-sided die. The second is the skill check, a roll under—but not equal to, a skill rating. The difficulty of a skill check is directly modified, its skill rating doubled if the task is easy, halved if difficult, and quartered if impossible. The third is the combat roll, rolled on a twenty-sided die, rolled to beat an opponent’s Armour Class. However, Buck Rogers XXVC being designed in 1990 and not 1992 when Gamma World, Fourth Edition was published means that Buck Rogers XXVC uses descending, not ascending Armour Class. Further, Buck Rogers XXVC being based on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Second Edition, the value used to determine the number a player rolls to his is ‘To Hit Armour Class Zero’, or THAC0.

Armour Class itself runs from nothing and ten down to zero and Battle Armour. Battle Armour with Fields is even lower, and Armour Class is adjusted by cover, Dexterity, and illumination. It is also lowered if a Player Character does nothing but parry or dodge. Combat also covers melee and firearms combat, weapons like the Laser Pistol and Rocket Pistol doing one eight-sided die and one ten-sided die’s worth of damage respectively. At lower Levels, this can be enough to kill a Player Character, and a Player Character whose Hit Points is lowered to zero is dead, unless someone can get the would be corpse to a life suspension device, but these are expensive and bulky. So the likelihood of low Level Player Characters owning one is equally as low… Add in rules for heavy weapons, suffocation, radiation, extreme heat and cold, and until a Player Character has gained a few Levels, the world of Buck Rogers XXVC is grim and gritty rather than pulpy. That said, the Referee is advised that when possible to narrate ways of his Player Characters surviving near certain death—though not inescapable death!

Buck Rogers XXVC includes rules for both rocketship combat and construction for fighters, cruisers, battlers, transports, and freighters. Ships are expensive, running to hundreds of thousands of Credits. Space combat involves weapons like lasers, missiles, gyrocannons, and acceleration guns, played out at scale of fifty miles per hex. Essentially, a ship’s pilot—ideally a Rocketjock—maneuvers the ship whilst everyone else takes different stations aboard the ship. Weapons need to be manned in order to be fired, the Engineer needs to be able to conduct repairs, the Medic provide first aid, and so on. Each section of ship, whether that is sensors and communications, controls, life support, or hull, has its own individual Hit Points. Reducing any section to zero or fewer Hit Points has the same effect as a critical hit. Otherwise, the ship combat rules work as per personal combat, including the use of THCA0, and are serviceable enough.

Apart from the addition of Gennies, the other significant technology in Buck Rogers XXVC is that of Digital Personalities. Each is an artificial intelligence which can project a three-dimensional image of itself, which mechanically has mental, but not physical attributes. A Digital Personality cannot fight actual people, but can fight other Digital Personalities. A Digital Personality also has the ability to use computer programs such as Control Remote, Stealth, or Virus Attack. A Digital Personality is actually an NPC Career, as is the Scientist, someone who possesses skills and abilities, like gadgeteer, which Player Characters cannot. Notably, Doctor Huer is a Digital Personality, as is the head of RAM, Simund Holzerhein. This is not the only major change to the characters of the Buck Rogers in the 25th Century setting. For example, Ardala Valdemar is a freelance Martian RAM agent with high connections who serves as an information broker and espionage agent, whilst the infamous Rocketjock, Killer Kane, who defected to serve RAM, but only to save his then lover, Wilma Deering. In the meantime, Killer Kane has come to believe that RAM has the people of Earth’s best interests at heart.

In addition to covering each of the worlds of Buck Rogers XXVC in some detail—their economy and culture, their politics and government, ‘The World Book’ also includes rules for creating more Gennies, guidance for the Referee for running the game and its genre, and a scenario, ‘Ghost in the Machine’. This has a recently fired rocketship crew hired to get hold of a RAM yacht and its secrets before RAM can recover it. Intended for Player Characters of First and Second Level, it should provide sessions of play and enable the Player Characters to try out the various rules, including combat and space combat. ‘The Technology Book’ covers everything from terraforming and space elevators down to personal weapons and gear. Lastly, the Reference Cards present further information on aspects of the setting—major NPCs, the worlds, and ships. They are handy and accessible, providing illustrations and easily accessible content that the Referee can show to her players.

Physically, Buck Rogers XXVC is generally well presented. The artwork whether black and white in the books, or colour on the Reference Cards is good throughout. Equally, the maps are bright and colourful, though the counters are plain. In general, Buck Rogers XXVC is well written. Nice touches include the short, but involving ‘choose-your-own-path’ adventure which serves as an introduction to roleplaying in the ‘Characters & Combat’ book, the roleplaying and cultural notes on the various Races, and the Reference Cards, the maps, and the plastic overlay are all great.

Yet mechanically, Buck Rogers XXVC is underwhelming. In terms of the attributes, only Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution provide any bonuses; there are no special abilities assigned to each Race—at least not in terms of the mechanics; the various abilities Careers feel underpowered and unbalanced, some Careers, like the Rocketjock and the Warrior gaining an improvement every other Level, whilst others like the Engineer and the Medic, a single ability. And, in terms of the Medic, if a playing group wants to have a character who can operate a Drug Fabricator or Autosurgery, then one player has to select that Career, or an NPC be added. Also, there is no mechanical means for the Player Characters to be heroic, so no luck or hero points. It all comes down to the dice rolls, and whilst there is a means to determine the difficulty by adjusting the skill score, there is no corresponding way to handle degrees of success or failure.

Lastly, having three different sets of mechanics—one for attribute checks, one for combat, and one for skills, complicates rather than eases the play of the game. The use of THAC0—the use of THAC0!?—and skills as percentages feels more like a cultural and design clash rather than a decision, almost as if Buck Rogers XXVC is straining to get away from the constraints of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Second Edition, and be its own thing—rather than a hybrid. Of course, Buck Rogers XXVC was designed to ride on the back of the popularity of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Second Edition and so was designed to be familiar to the players of that game, but without those constraints, there is no denying that Buck Rogers XXVC could have been a better game. Indeed, the Referee could easily take the background of Buck Rogers XXVC and adapt it to the rules of her choice, especially if she wants more competent Player Characters and to reflect a pulpier, more action orientated style that reflects the Space Opera of the nineteen thirties and nineteen forties—the source material for Buck Rogers XXVC.

There is a great deal to like about Buck Rogers XXVC—the setting is well done and it is well presented, but ultimately, the mechanics and the low Level of the Player Characters do not feel suited to either the genre or the game. Buck Rogers XXVC is a great setting to delve into, but not necessarily play as written.

Delta Green: Kali Ghati is a scenario for use with Arc Dream Publishing’s Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game which can be played using the roleplaying game’s full rules or those from Delta Green: Need to Know. It is set in Afghanistan, so shares parallels with ‘Night Visions’ from Control Group: Horrifying Scenarios for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game and concerns the fate of a missing Agent, so shares parallels with the scenario  ‘Last Things Last’, from Delta Green: Need to Know. It comes with six ready-to-play Agents, so it can be run as a one-shot, as a convention scenario, as an introduction to the Unnatural—as the Mythos is called in Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game—and Delta Green a la Control Group, or simply added to an ongoing campaign.

Delta Green: Kali Ghati opens with the Agents in-country, having been sent to Forward Operating Base Turner in Patika province, in the eastern part of Afghanistan, close to the border with Pakistan. The base has been the process of shutting down and being handed over to the Afghan National Army, and only sixty U.S. Army soldiers posted still there. Unfortunately, a CIA clandestine services officer named Tim Ellis, also stationed there, has gone missing and the last thing that the U.S. Army wants is news breaking out of another American citizen having been captured by the Taliban. Worse, Tim Ellis is actually a Delta Green agent and the organisation does not want him—or the esoteric knowledge he has acquired over the years—falling into the hands of the Taliban either. The player character Delta Green Agents are sent in to locate him, retrieve him, and if unable to do that, make sure that he does not fall into the wrong hands.

Delta Green: Kali Ghati is essentially divided into three acts. In the first act, the Agents will investigate Ellis’ activities at F.O.B. Turner, dealing with the officers and soldiers who had dealings with him, as well as an interpreter and the members of the Afghan National Army. They are a mixture of helpful and reluctant, but with some careful roleplaying, the Agents will learn that Ellis was fascinated by the strange tales of a nearby village that go back to the nineteenth century, and more. They are likely to also be given warnings not to go to the village, but duty demands that they do. The second act consists of the drive to Kali Ghati—and here the action hots up as attempts are made to prevent them getting there. This is a big scene and will need careful staging from round to round, almost like a wargame.

The third act takes place at the village of Kali Ghati and sees the Agents learning the secrets that the villagers are hiding. They will very likely also discover the whereabouts of Tim Ellis. As plotted, once they discover the secrets of Kali Ghati, all hell breaks loose and the best they can probably do is get the hell out…

Delta Green: Kali Ghati is a problematic scenario. Its issue is that it is linear and does not allow a high degree of player agency. In the initial scenes where the Agents are investigating Ellis’ activities and interactions, they have plenty to do, but in later scenes, there is less and less that they can do. Should the players want their Agents to push harder and harder at the constraints of the plot, the more effort that the Handler will have to make to accommodate their actions. The scenario is also more combat focused in comparison to other scenarios for Delta Green: The Role-Playing Game, which will put Agents with fewer or limited combat skills at a disadvantage. Of course, replacement characters abound in the form of other U.S. Army soldiers, but the likelihood of having to replace the Agents—either early in the scenario or at the climax, undermines players’ roleplaying. Essentially, the combats are all but unavoidable, and the second combat is likely to become something of a grind, likely to be preceded by a grind of dice rolls to get to that second combat…

Physically, Delta Green: Kali Ghati is nicely produced. The maps are clear and the artwork excellent as is usual. The six pregenerated Agents, including a CIA Officer, an FBI Agent, CIA Consultant, a biohazard specialist, and two U.S. Army soldiers, are for the most part, decently done. They have a few details missing, but these are not pertinent to the scenario and can be easily made up by the Handler or the player. 

Delta Green: Kali Ghati is linear and is tightly constrained in terms of storytelling. In fact, to the point that it feels more like a film than a roleplaying game—indeed, the scenes in the village of Kali Ghati are reminiscent of the film, The Man Who Would Be King. The short length and the straightforward, narrow nature of its plot means that Delta Green: Kali Ghati is best suited as a one-shot or a convention scenario, especially for players looking for action rather than investigation.

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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Invented in 1965 by Doug Malewicki and published by Flying Buffalo, Inc. since 1972, the Nuclear War Card Game is a satirical game of Cold War brinkmanship, black propaganda, and mass destruction designed for between two and eight players. Designed for players with a sense of humour, aged thirteen and up, who each control a major nuclear power, it  can be played in roughly thirty to forty-five minutes. Whilst the aim of the Nuclear War Card Game is to win by defeating a player’s rivals—either by persuading their population to defect or bombing them back into the Stone Age, either way reducing their population to zero—a game can also end in a storm of retaliatory missile and bomber strikes that leaves everyone’s population dead and dying. In which case, everyone loses. If you think that this sounds M.AD., then that is Mutually Assured Destruction for you.

The Nuclear War Card Game consists of two decks of cards, eight player boards, a Nuclear Spinner Board, and a four-page rules leaflet. The two decks are the Population Deck and the much larger Nuclear War Deck. The Population contains cards representing between one and twenty-five million persons, whilst the Warhead Deck contains cards of various types. Warhead cards represent nuclear warheads ranging in size from ten to one hundred megatons, each indicating how many members of a population it will kill, ranging from two to twenty-five million. Delivery cards indicate the size of Warhead tonnage they can deliver to a target, raging from a single ten megaton warhead in a Polaris missile to a Saturn rocket capable of carrying a single one hundred megaton warhead, whilst a B-70 Bomber can carry multiple warheads up to a total of fifty megatons. Other cards include Anti-Missile cards which will bring down incoming missiles during an attack, whilst others are Top Secret or Propaganda cards. Top Secret cards can decrease an opponent’s or the current player’s population, force him or the current player to lose a turn. For example, ‘Your Cold War prestige soars due to being the first on the Moon’ causes five million of the enemy to join the current player’s country and ‘TEST BAN!’, which called by the President of the current player’s country forces him to miss a turn. Propaganda cards simply cause Population from a rival country to defect to the current player’s country.

Each of the Player Boards, illustrated with a photograph of a Titan missile launch station, is marked with six spaces—‘Face Up Card’, ‘1st Face Down Card’, ‘2nd Face Down Card’, two ‘Deterrent Force’ spaces, and ‘Population’. A player uses the ‘Face Up Card’ and ‘Face Down Card’ spaces to set up and bluff using his country’s nuclear arsenal; the ‘Deterrent Force’ space to establish a threat against anyone who might attack his country; and the ‘Population’ space to keep track of his Population cards. The infamous Nuclear Spinner Board is spun whenever a missile is launched or a bomb is dropped to give a random effect, such as ‘Explodes a Nuclear Stockpile! Triple the Yield’ to increase the number of Population killed or ‘Bomb Shelters Saves 2 Million’ which reduces the damage inflicted. The Nuclear Spinner Board also tables to get the same effects from rolling either two six-sided or two ten-sided dice as an alternative, or if the spinner is broken! Lastly, the rules sheet both explains the rules, answers various questions, and gives some suggestions as to tactics when playing the game.

Game set-up is simple. Each player receives a Player Board, a number of Population cards (the number determined by the number of players), and nine cards from the Nuclear War deck. On a round each player takes it in turn to play all the cards marked Secret or Top Secret in his hand, draw back up to nine cards, play any cards marked Secret or Top Secret in his hand so added, draw again, and so on until he no cards marked either Secret or Top Secret in his hands. The fun of these is a player using the text on the cards to build a story about his country, taking it through the Cold War to the point where Nuclear confrontation turns hot…

Then each player places two cards face down in the first two slots on his Player Board. They will be revealed in subsequent turns and in doing so, will reveal a player’s strategy. A player with weak warheads or inadequate means of delivery—bombers or missiles, or who does not immediately want to turn the Cold War hot, can play Propaganda cards to reduce a rival country’s population. A player who wants to go aggressive immediately can put down a delivery system—bomber or missile—followed by a warhead, which has to be launched at a rival country once the combination has been revealed. A player can also bluff, playing a warhead, but not a delivery system—and vice versa, instead playing a Propaganda card. In some instances, a player does not have a choice as to which option he chooses, it very much depends upon the cards in his hand.  Alternatively, a player can place Anti-Missile cards or even a combination of a warhead and a delivery system onto the Deterrent spaces of his board. These are placed face up rather than face down and serve as a warning against any other player who might be thinking of launching a nuclear strike at that country. The classic combination being a Saturn missile with a hundred megaton warhead ready to launch in retaliatory fashion against an enemy. 

Once a player has put two cards into the first two slots, and sets up his initial strategy, he draws a third from the Nuclear War deck and places a third card into the third slot on his Player Board. The last thing a player does is turn over and reveal the card in the first slot on his Player Board. This will reveal the initial suggestions as what his current strategy is. On subsequent turns, a player will draw a card first and then play the rest of the turn as per normal.

If a player reveals on subsequent turns that he has a delivery system loaded with a warhead—in the order of delivery system first, followed by the warhead, he is ready to launch a nuclear strike! He designates his chosen target, spins the spinner on the Nuclear Spinner Board and applies the results to the warhead’s detonation. If the warhead is successfully detonated, the targeted player loses the indicated number of casualties from his Population. Once a nuclear strike has been launched at another player, a State of War exists not between the attacker and defender—but between all players! This State of War continues until one player, whether the attacker, defender, or another player is eliminated. An eliminated player can retaliate by combining warhead and bomber or missile cards and target not just the player who struck at him, but any player! It is entirely possible for an eliminated player to eliminate a rival with a retaliatory strike, and that rival to eliminate a rival with a retaliatory strike, and so on. Basically in one giant M.AD. conflagration!

Peace then breaks out… until another player has a warhead ready to launch. Play continues with rounds of missile and warhead build-ups punctuated by deadly strikes. Of course, during the build-up phases, there is scope for further bluff, as well as negotiation, counter bluff, and intimidation. A game of the Nuclear War Card Game continues until one player is left standing (amidst the irradiated rubble) undefeated and still with a Population of at least a million. Alternatively, everybody might have been wiped out, in which case, everybody loses.

With simple rules and direct mechanics, the blast ’em, bomb them style of play of the Nuclear War Card Game is quick. Which means that once a player is eliminated, he should not have to wait too long before either the game finishes (with a winner or not) and a new one, quickly and easily set up to start play anew or a wholly different game chosen. In this way, the Nuclear War Card Game serves as a solid filler.

Physically, the Nuclear War Card Game does not share the production values as more contemporary titles. The card stock for both the Player Boards and the Nuclear Spinner Board is adequate enough though still feels slightly cheap. The cards for the game feel slightly thin, but apart from the Propaganda cards which are rather plain and lacking in flavour, all of the cards are brightly and engagingly illustrated. The rules sheet is simple and utilitarian, but like everything else in the game, does its job.

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In 1984 Games Magazine called Nuclear War, “the quintessential beer and pretzels game” and put it on its  top 100 list. The game also won the Origins Hall of Fame Award as one of the best games of all time in 1998 and in 1999, Pyramid magazine named it as one of The Millennium's Best Card Games. Editor Scott Haring said “Back when people were well-and-truly scared of the possibility of nuclear vaporization (I guess today either the threat is lessened, or it's become old hat), Nuclear War dared to make fun the possibility of mankind's dreaded nightmare via a card game.”

Designer and publisher Steve Jackson reviewed the Nuclear War Card Game in Space Gamer Number 34 (December, 1980). He described it as, “...[N]o sense a serious simulation - and even as a game it is very, very simple. Other than that, the only drawback is that the "strategy" rules often lock you into a bad move a couple of turns ahead. Real life is like that - but this game isn't real life and shouldn't try to be.” before concluding that, “This is NOT an "introductory" wargame - it's not a wargame at all. It's a card game. Recommended for a quick social game or for when everyone is too sleepy to play anything complex.”

In Dragon Issue #200 (Vol. XVIII, No. 7, December 1993), Allen Varney included it in a list of ‘Famous & forgotten board games’, in his article, ‘Social Board Games’. He stated that, “It’s a sin for a multi-player design to throw out a player before the game is over, but in this venerable game, that’s the whole point.”, ultimately describing it as the “black-humored contemporary of Dr. Strangelove.” More recently in Scarred For Life Volume One: The 1970s (Lonely Water Books, 2017), authors Stephen Brotherstone and Dave Lawrence described the Nuclear War Card Game as “A card game about the unthinkable, featuring a Twister-style spinner containing results such as ‘RADIOACTIVE BETA RAYS KILL ANOTHER 5 MILLION’ and ‘ADDITIONAL 1 MILLION ARE ENGULFED IN THE FIREBALL’ might not seem like most people’s idea of a fun night in, but Nuclear War is a darkly comedic, even educational game. And it’s a brilliant one to boot.”

—oOo—

The Nuclear War Card Game is a game of nuclear brinkmanship, of nuclear standoffs and deterrence, one in which peace is always temporary and war always inevitable. Its subject matter—notoriously black, if not tasteless, in terms of its humour—combined with its mechanics (especially the retaliatory strike rule) make it the ultimate ‘take that’ game, often escalating into everyone having to ‘take that’ and suffer the consequences. The Nuclear War Card Game captures the foolishness and absurdity of the Cold War, pushing everyone to slam their fists on the big red button in the ultimate ‘take that’ game—whether as first strike or in revenge.

—oOo—

With thanks to Steve Dempsey for locating Allen Varney’s ‘Social Board Games’ in Dragon Issue #200 and Jon Hancock for Steve Jackson’s review in Space Gamer Number 34.

 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: Endless Light

Publisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Allan Carey

Setting: Jazz Age lighthouse island
Product: Scenario Set-up
What You Get: Twenty-three page, 30.60 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: In an unnatural confrontation between two greater foes, sometimes the only natural option is survival...
Plot Hook:  A engineer leading a work crew to clear a construction site on a lighthouse island discovers the island already a’tremor, as strange creatures roil below and the waves bring others ashore.Plot Support: Plot set-up, two Mythos entities, two maps, one handout, and five pre-generated Investigators.Production Values: Clean and tidy, gorgeous maps, and clearly done pre-generated Investigators.
Pros
# Type40 one-night, one-shot set-up
# Potential convention scenario
# Solid moral climax# Superb maps and handouts
# Pre-generated Investigators nicely fit the setting
# Easily adjustable to other periods# Possible first encounter with the Mythos?

Cons
# Potential Sanity gains potentially outweigh the losses?
# Needs a careful read for preparation# Needs some stats creating before play# Another ‘trapped on a lighthouse’ set-up?# Investigator interaction hooks and relationships could have enhanced the tension.
Conclusion
# Great production values
# Relatively low set-up time# Taut twist upon the ‘trapped on a lighthouse’ set-up

As a country, Spain is rarely visited by roleplaying games of Lovecraftian investigative horror—and when they do, it is primarily during periods of great conflict or turbulence, such as the Spanish Inquisition of fifteenth and sixteenth century or the Spanish Civil War of the nineteen thirties. Examples of the latter include ‘No Pasaran!’ from the Miskatonic University Library Association monograph Shadows of War: Four Scenarios Set In and Around the Second World War published by Chaosium, Inc. for Call of Cthulhu and Soldiers of Pen and Ink, a scenario for Pelgrane Press’ RPG of clue orientated Lovecraftian investigative horror, Trail of Cthulhu, whilst ‘Garden of Earthly Delights’ in Strange Aeons from Chaosium, Inc. and ‘Fires of Hatred Defile the Sky’ in Red Eye of Azathoth: Unspeakable Adventures Straddling a Millennium by Open Design, LLC, are examples of the former. There is not even a Call of Cthulhu campaign supplement for Spain in any period, so it was pleasing to see to see the publication of Campo De Mitos: A Campaign Setting of Lovecraftian Mythology Based in El Campo De Gibraltar, despite the fact that it is not a Call of Cthulhu campaign supplement for Spain. Rather, it is a campaign supplement for part of southern Spain, the ‘El Campo De Gibraltar’ of the subtitle, focusing in particular upon the town of Algeciras. Also pleasingly, it is written by a native, Paco García Jaén, and it is systemless, which means that its contents can be adapted for use with Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, Trail of Cthulhu, or the roleplaying game of Lovecraftian investigative of your choice. However, Campo De Mitos is also the first book from a new publisher, Mindscape Publishing, and that is not without its consequences.

Presenting a fictionalised rather than a historical version of the town and region, specifically in 1924, Campo De Mitos is designed as a sort of sandbox, the Investigators able to go anywhere and encounter anyone in the region, but particularly in the town of Algeciras. Primarily the sandbox is built around numerous NPCs and their places of work, whether that is Manolo the ‘Ice Cream Man’, a street vendor who sells ice cream, sweets, and treats all year round from his cart in the Plaza Alta in the centre of the town, or Anselmo Arrubal, the quiet and fastidious, but also misogynist owner of Santos Bookstore, who worked with Aleister Crowley to open up access to a seemly infinite library behind the counter of the bookshop. Being a systemless book, none of the NPCs have any stats, but what they do have is a set of three profiles—friendly, neutral, and antagonist, each of which sets their attitude towards not just the Investigators, but also other NPCs, who in turn will also have their own attitudes towards the Investigators and other NPCs. This is a nice, simple gauge that helps the Game Master roleplay each NPC when the Investigators interact with them.

The various locations in Algeciras are all outwardly ordinary, ranging from La Alicantina Pastry Shop to the Post and Telegraph Office. Some are, of course, inherently Spanish, such as the Convent Of San José, the Bullring La Perseverancia, and the White Cross Monastery, and their inclusion go towards emphasising the atmosphere and feel of the town and region—which are obviously different to that of locations typically seen in Lovecraftian investigative roleplaying. All of the locations and NPCs have their secrets, many of them weird or odd, or connected to the Mythos. Some of them are perhaps in terms of Lovecraftian investigative roleplaying prosaic, but others are inventive and engaging. For example, the Juan Moya Barbershop whose owner is renowned for the ointments, balms, and other concoctions he has on his shelves, many of which repulse women as much as they attract men. Juan Moya mixes them from the plants he harvests from the Dreamlands, not by going into the Dreamlands himself, but by reaching into the Dreamlands via a portal he is able to open in the basement of his shop.

Throughout the book, boxed sections add adventure seeds and little snippets of background material, typically where they relate to a location or establishment being described, such as the box discussing female bullfighters next to the description of the Bullring La Perseverancia. Beyond Algeciras, there are entries on a handful of nearby towns and villages, including the surprisingly nearby Rock of Gibraltar, which has been in British possession for over two centuries. A Bestiary also describes a number of creatures and beings. They include a Cyäegha Tick, a rare parasite which feeds on its host’s brain energy and amplifies it in psionic attacks, as well as turning the host into a tentacles ending stingers, eyes, and tweezer-like claws; the sea-dwelling, mermaid-like Gnorri which have asymmetrical arms and long tails and little regard for humanity; and Meigas, beings of the Dreamlands which appear as women when on Earth, and which come in various types. For example, the Feiticeira, or Sorceress, is ancient and lives near rivers or streams and uses its hypnotically beautiful voice to attract children, and then drown and devour them, or the Vedoira, slender and pleasant diviners, who for a price, can contact someone in the afterlife and determine whether he is enjoying eternity in Heaven or is still in Purgatory. Many of these are drawn from Spanish folklore, but others will be familiar from other roleplaying games of Lovecraftian investigative horror. It would have been nice to have seen some of these used in the supplement’s setting content, but the Game Master will have to do that herself.

Physically, Campo De Mitos is a handsome book and the publisher has put a great deal of thought into the choice of period appropriate photographs and had it illustrated with some delightful artwork that looks great in greyscale, but really makes you wish that the book was in colour. However, the book lacks any usable map of any kind, either of Spain, the region of El Campo De Gibraltar, or indeed, of Algeciras. Which hinders the supplement’s intended use as a sandbox. That though, is not the real issue with Campo De Mitos. Nor is the fact that entries in the index refer to the wrong pages. The real issue with Campo De Mitos is that it has not been professionally edited and as a consequence, it reads poorly, it is obvious that English is not the author’s first language, and it lacks the development necessary to make it an accessible, easily referenced, and easily utilised sourcebook for the region it sets out to describe. To be clear, the English is not necessarily bad English—the author’s English is infinitely superior to the reviewer’s Spanish, but to a native speaker it simply does not read sufficiently natural. Thus, Campo De Mitos needs editing, needs localising, and needs developing—and the latter would probably have solved the supplement’s other issues and pushed the supplement towards what author and publisher intended it to be.

As a supplement dealing with Spain—or at least a part of a region of Spain—in 1924, it does not pull back enough to introduce to the country as a whole. There is no idea of its politics, its religions, its culture, and so on, or how to get there during the Jazz Age. From a roleplaying point of view, it does not address what type of Investigators might be found there or ask if there are any careers that they might have which are common or native to the setting. There are mentions of historical events, but which are completely left unexplored. For example, the Rif War is mentioned, but no explanation of who, what, and why it is, is given. As a consequence, Campo De Mitos lacks context and feels disconnected from the rest of the world, let alone the rest of Spain.

In terms of its descriptions, Algeciras fluctuates in size—from village to city, and back again; numerous details are added, often suggesting mysteries, but very rarely with any explanation and simply left as unknown; and too many of the NPCs in Campo De Mitos share traits in common, such as having perfect recall as to their clients and what they purchased or reasons for coming to the region and Algeciras, and that they keep secret—from both their fellow townsfolk and the Game Master! Also, so many of them possess strange devices whose origins and workings are left up to the Game Master to determine. For example, a pair of needles which ease the creation of fine ladies’ hats, the hats when worn imparting a sense of euphoria to the wearer and the needles when inserted into the spine, travelling up into the brain to take possession of the victim’s consciousness—to unpredictable effects. The effects are left up to the reader or Game Master to decide, as are the origins of the needles, just as the secrets of too many NPCs are left to the Game Master to decide and develop.

In terms of the Mythos, Campo De Mitos again suffers from inconsistency. For example, for all that Algeciras is a port town and that the Deep Ones have played a role in the region, they are barely mentioned, whereas Ghouls have strong ties to the town’s cemeteries and authorities. However, the Ghouls themselves are left unexplored—and the same can be said of the Mi-go, who also have had a presence in the region. As to other entities and races of the Mythos, there is no mention. Of course, there are limitations upon what such elements from Lovecraft’s fiction can be used, but Campo De Mitos does not sufficiently develop the ones it does use—or at least mention. And whilst the supplement does provide an overview of the Mythos in the region, it is again underwritten and underdeveloped.

Campo De Mitos is not without its charm, which shows in its artwork, its atmosphere and feel for small town life in Southern Spain, and some of its ideas. Yet the fundamental failure to either edit or develop the supplement sufficiently leaves a prospective Game Master with too much to decide or create on her own. For the publisher, Campo De Mitos: A Campaign Setting of Lovecraftian Mythology Based in El Campo De Gibraltar can be described as a flawed, but not unworthy first effort, and definitely something to learn from. In the meantime, Lovecraftian investigative roleplaying awaits the publication of a good supplement dealing with Spain.

In the ecologically ravaged future, twelve billion people live on Earth in environmentally sealed kilometre high city blocks clustered around ‘lungs’, the colossal city-sized atmosphere processors located on the coasts. They grow and  process the algae that provides humanity with air, and eventually, food. Life is about surviving, but there is a way to make it better—work in space. Sign up to crew the service vessels maintaining stations, outposts, and mines in other star systems; the tugboats hauling the refineries back to Earth; the Arbiter ships as Colonial Marshals investigating crimes on behalf of the Interstellar Department of Trading; as military units preventing (or even conducting) civil unrest or hostile takeovers; as scientific survey teams; or as Deep Space Support Teams—DSSTs, or ‘Dusters’, effectively serving as troubleshooters for their employers. Last twenty-five years and you get to retire to a life of luxury. However, it is not that easy… 

Space travel takes time. Even with the Gravity Assisted Drive, a minimum of a week per light year. It means that trips can take months with most of that time spent in LongSleep. Fortunately, that time counts towards time served. When not in LongSleep crews work to maintain their ship, because if anything went wrong, it could be weeks before anyone responded. Starships are not luxurious, but places to work and protect you from the vacuum of space, radiation, and random asteroids. Yet despite the safety standards, there are budget considerations, especially if your employer is a corporation, and whilst your ship might protect you, it will still have been built on the cheap. The same goes for outposts and mining facilities and the few settlements on other worlds—for no one has struck it lucky and found the equivalent of an Earth as she was planet. So living and working space is rough, hard, and sometimes lonely. And that is before you consider the dangers of corporate feuds, off-the-books scientific research, the psychological stresses of working cooped up with others for long periods, and then there is always the unknown… 

This is the set-up for Those Dark Places: Industrial Science Fiction Roleplaying, a roleplaying game inspired by the Blue Collar Science Fiction of the nineteen seventies and early nineteen eighties, such as Alien, Outland, Silent Running, and Blade Runner, plus computer games like Dead Space. Published by OspreyGames—the imprint of Osprey Publishing best known for its highly illustrated military history books—Those Dark Places is its third roleplaying game after Paleomythic and Romance of the Perilous Land. Although it very much wears its influences on the hard-wearing material of its sleeves, Those Dark Places is not necessarily a Science Fiction roleplaying game in which the crew will encounter strange aliens which morph into xenomorphs that want to hunt them and turn them into incubators. This is not to say that it could not be, but that is very down to what type of game that the General Monitor—as the Game Master is known in Those Dark Places—wants to run. Instead it is a game of environmental horror and dread, of loneliness and fear, of stress and strain, at the limits of mankind’s survival. Expect encounters with crazed killers driven to madness and murder by loneliness and never being able to walk under an open sky—or poisoned by their environment or the drugs they have been taking to numb the boredom; feuds over scientific discoveries and research which have escalated from industrial espionage to open conflict between corporate militaries; scientific discoveries and research gone to devastatingly deadly effect and which a corporation will do anything to cover up or prevent from being stolen; and more… 

A Crew Member is defined by his name and description, CASE File, Crew Positions he is qualified for, and Pressure. His CASE File represents his actual attributes—Charisma-Agility-Strength-Education, which are rated between one and four. It should be noted that Strength works as the equivalent of a Crew Member’s Hit Points, as well as his physical presence. His Crew Position can be Helm Officer, Navigation Officer, Science Officer, Security Officer, Liaison Officer,  Engineering Officer, or Medical Officer. To create a Crew Member, a player assigns values of one, two, three, and four to his Crew Member’s CASE File. Then he selects his Crew Member’s primary Crew Position, which is rated at +2, and his secondary Crew Position, which is rated at +1. The process is as simple as that! 

Warrant Officer Grieg is an Engineering Officer aboard the CSV Lullaby, a commercial tug owned by Bellerophon Incorporated. He is six years into his contract and is a strong advocate of workers’ rights. He is always the Union representative on any vessel he serves aboard. 

Oran Greig
Charisma 3 Agility 1 Strength 4 Education 2
Pressure: 6
Pressure Level: 0

Crew Position: Engineering (Primary)
Crew Position: Liaison (Secondary) 

Mechanically, Those Dark Places is very simple and requires no more than a six-sided die or two per player. To have his Crew Member undertake a task, a player rolls a six-sided die and adds the values for the appropriate Attribute and Crew Position. The target difficulty is typically seven, but may be adjusted down to six if easier, or up to eight if more difficult. If the task warrants it, rolling the target number exactly counts as a partial success rather than a complete success. In that case, the player needs to roll over the target difficulty. Combat uses the same mechanics, with damage inflicted being deducted from an opponent’s Strength. A Crew Member is unconscious when his Strength is reduced to zero and dead when it drops to minus two. Sample damage is just one for a punch, three for a pistol, and four for a rifle. 

However, Those Dark Places does get more complex when dealing with stress and difficult situations, or Pressure. A Crew Member has a Pressure Bonus, equal to his Strength and Education, and a Pressure Level, which runs from one to six. A Pressure Roll is made when a Crew Member is under duress or stress, and all a player has to do is roll a six-sided die and add his Crew Member’s Pressure Bonus to beat a difficulty number of ten. Succeed and the Crew Member withstands the stress of the situation, but fail and his Pressure Level rises by one level. However, when a Crew Member’s Pressure Level rises to two, and each time it rises another level due to a failed Pressure Roll, the Crew Member’s player rolls a six-sided die and the result is under the current value of his Pressure Level, the Crew Member suffers an Episode. This requires a roll on the Episode table, the results ranging from ‘In Shock’ and losing points from a Crew Member’s Attributes , up through Rigid, Catatonia, and ‘Insane Fear and Driven to Violent Flight’. Whenever a Crew Member’s player needs to make a roll on the Episode Table, the maximum result possible is limited by the Crew Member’s Pressure Level. So at Pressure Level 3, a Crew Member can only be In Shock and suffer points lost from either his Agility or Strength, but not anything worse. 

One issue with Pressure Level and Episodes is that a Crew Member cannot immediately recover from either. It takes time in LongSleep or back on Earth to even begin to recover… Worse, once a Crew Member suffers an Episode, its effects linger, and he can suffer from it again and again until he manages to control his personal demons. 

And that is the extent of the rules to Those Dark Places. For the General Monitor, there is a more detailed discussion of how they work, the various roles or Crew Positions aboard ship, the types of campaigns that can be run—typically based around the type of ship that the Crew Members are operating. So tugboats, passenger ships, science vessels, arbiter ships, tactical vessels, and more, each suggesting ideas about what such a crew would be doing and it might be tasked with doing. These are accompanied with descriptions of the types of reports that the Crew Members will be expected to make. These include Personnel Reports, Accident Reports, Industrial Espionage Reports, and more. Essentially combine a Personnel Report and a ship type and a General Monitor has a decent selection of campaign ideas to inspire her. Rounding out Those Dark Places is The Argent III Report, a complete scenario surrounding the sudden appearance of a research vessel thought lost for decades. It is playable in a session or two. 

Physically, Those Dark Places is well presented, although untidy in one or two places. The artwork is good, definitely showcasing its inspirations. 

Although clearly inspired by films like Alien, Those Dark Places is not a roleplaying game about facing strange, horrible creatures. This is reflected in the fact that there are no rules for creating such things in the book. Indeed, the rules for creatures focus on creating pets like cats and dogs for companionship in space rather than monsters. There are though, rules for running and playing Synthetic Automatons if the General Monitor includes them. Essentially, Those Dark Places is about facing horrors human and environmental rather than actual monsters. Nor is it a roleplaying game with a set background, although one is outlined should the General Monitor want one. At two pages, even this background is short enough to allow the General Monitor room aplenty to insert content of her own, that is if she does not want to create a background of her own. 

However, all of this is not about roleplaying Blue Collar or Industrial Science Fiction and Horror in space—although Those Dark Places could be run like that. In actuality, what Those Dark Places is about is applying for a career working in deep space. The process of creating a Crew Member, of filling in a CASE File, is writing the application form. And then, the playing of Those Dark Places is not roleplaying missions out on the frontier, but simulations—run by the interviewer as part of the application process—run to test their suitability for working between Earth and the frontier of space. All of this is delivered in an game voice that is a mix of wearied tone, corporate cheeriness, and faux ‘I believe in you’ attitude of a Human Resources interviewer that manages to both capture the tiresome nature of applying for employment and make the reader/potential Crew Member want to punch the writer/speaker. It is a brilliant conceit which creeps up on the reader as he works his way through the book. 

Unfortunately, Those Dark Places is being released when there are already two roleplaying games within its genre, the Alien Roleplaying Game from Free League Publishing and Mothership Sci-Fi Horror RPG from Tuesday Knight Games, both having been released relatively recently onto the market. However, Those Dark Places is very much its own thing, a combination of simple mechanics and human and environmental horror—plus its simulation/employment application conceit rather than necessarily being a game of facing horror and horrible monsters in deep space or being based on a licence. 

Combining light mechanics and an easily familiar genre, Those Dark Places: Industrial Science Fiction Roleplaying is a pleasingly accessible treatment of Blue-Collar Science Fiction of the seventies and eighties. It enables the General Monitor to run simulations in which the horror lies not only in isolation and what we might find on the fringes of space, but also in what humanity brings with it.

There is no denying the continued and growing popularity of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, with it having appeared on the television series Stranger Things and it no longer being seen as a hobby solely the preserve of typically male, nerdy teenagers and young adults. Yet as acceptable a hobby as roleplaying and in particular, playing Dungeons & Dragons has become, getting into the hobby is still a daunting prospect. Imagine if you will, being faced with making your first character for your first game of Dungeons & Dragons? Then what monsters will face? What adventures will you have? For nearly all of us, answering these questions are not all that far from being a challenge, for all started somewhere and we all had to make that first step—making our first character, entering our first dungeon, and encountering our first monster. As well written as both Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set and the Player’s Handbook are, both still present the prospective reader and player with a lot of choices, but without really answering these questions in an easy to read and reference fashion.

Step forward the ‘Dungeons & Dragons Young Adventurer’s Guides Series’ published by Ten Speed Press. This is a series of introductory guides to Dungeons & Dragons, designed as primers to various aspects of the world’s leading roleplaying game. Each in the series is profusely illustrated, no page consisting entirely of text. The artwork is all drawn from and matches the style of Dungeon & Dragons, Fifth Edition, so as much as it provides an introduction to the different aspects of the roleplaying game covered in each book in the series, it provides an introduction to the look of the roleplaying game, so providing continuity between the other books in the ‘Dungeons & Dragons Young Adventurer’s Guides Series’ and the Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set and the core rulebooks. This use of art and the digest size of the book means that from the start, every entry in the ‘Dungeons & Dragons Young Adventurer’s Guides Series’ is an attractive little package.

The first in the series, Warriors & Weapons provided an introduction to the various Races of Dungeons & Dragons, the martial character Classes, and the equipment they use. Subsequent entries in the series have examined Monsters & Creatures and Dungeons & Tombs, culminating in the surprisingly late and seemingly out of sequence, Wizards & Spells. And there it would seem that the ‘Dungeons & Dragons Young Adventurer’s Guides Series’ had covered just about everything that the reader and potential play of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition need to know before progressing onto the roleplaying game itself. So the publication of Beasts & Behemoths, the fifth entry in the series, comes as something of a surprise, the unexpected equivalent in the series of the Monster Manual II to the Monster Manual. Of course, another book about monsters makes sense, since not only are books about monsters fun, but there are an awful lot of monsters and creatures in Dungeons & Dragons, and the earlier Monsters & Creatures cannot have been expected to cover all of them!

Where Monsters & Creatures categorised its entries by terrain, so Caverns & Dark Places, Forests, Mountains & Other Terrain, Oceans, Lakes, & Waterways, and more, Beasts & Behemoths breaks them down by size—Tiny & Small, Medium, Large & Huge, and Gargantuan. Its forty or so entries include Cranium Rats, Demilich, and Pseudodragon under Tiny & Small; Drow, Gnoll, and Sahuagin are listed as Medium creatures; Corpse Flower, Minotaur, and Umber Hulk for Large & Huge; and Purple Worm, Roc, and the dread Tarrasque for Gargantuan. The mix includes the familiar, such as the Hobgoblin, Orc, and Minotaur alongside the little known, like the Yuan-Ti and the Oni, but all are classic Dungeons & Dragons monsters and creatures. In addition, Beasts & Behemoths includes two subcategories, Lycanthropes and Metallic Dragons—or Good-aligned Dragons. So the former category has descriptions of the Wereboar, Wererat, and Weretiger as well as the Werewolf, whilst the latter ranges from the Brass Dragon to the Gold Dragon. This compliments the writeups of the Dragons of various colours in Monsters & Creatures. Every entry is given a double page spread, the left hand page showing an illustration of the creature or monster, a listing of its special powers, a description of its size, and an indication of its Danger Level, from ‘0’ or harmless to ‘5’ for really nasty. On the right-hand page there is a description of the monster or creature and its lair, accompanied by a list of things to do or not do when dealing with it.

Thus for the Medusa, the given Danger Level is ‘1’ and her Special Powers are, of course, her Petrifying Gaze. Her size is listed as being typically Human-sized—except that is, for her hair, which might be a whole bigger (and writhing, of course). Her write-up includes a description of how she comes upon the transformation into a Medusa and the price paid, plus the types of lair she prefers. The entry advises that when encountering a Medusa, an adventurer should carry a mirror with which to catch her reflection, as well as a powerful healing potion which undo the effects of her Petrifying Gaze. It also advises that an adventurer not catch her gaze nor seek out immortality.

Like Monsters & Creatures before it, Beasts & Behemoths adds legendary entries and encounters to complement its ordinary encounters. The description of the Death Knight is accompanied by a  legendary entry for Lord Soth, the fallen Knight of Solamnia from the world of Krynn who would later be plucked from Krynn by the mysterious mists of Ravenloft. It covers his history, his lair, and the fearsome skeleton army he has at his command. Again, this is a nice accompaniment to the legendary entry for Vampires, the feared Count Strahd von Zarovich, to be found in Monsters & Creatures. These legendary creatures are foes that the adventurers are unlikely to face for a very long time, but they are ones to be whispered about in hushed tones—even the ones who are not evil or chaotic. Each of encounters consists of a short piece of fiction which sets up a situation that ultimately ends the reader being asked how he might react or what he might do next. To accompany the description of Pseudodragon, the encounter describes how Florizan Blank, the bard known as the ‘Dandy Duellist’ who combines dance moves and swordsmanship, comes upon such a creature in woods whilst he is tracking down a Hobgoblin tribe which attacked a nearby village. Will he attempt to tame the creature and take it as a companion—and if so, how? Will continue on his way, hurrying after his quarry lest they launch a raid on another village? These encounters nicely illustrate the play of Dungeons & Dragons and the type of encounters and questions that players will be dealing with from session to session. In addition, the inclusion of Florizan Blank is a nice call back to the fourth book in the ‘Dungeons & Dragons Young Adventurer’s Guides Series’, Wizards & Spells.

Just as in Monsters & Creatures, the last words in Beasts & Behemoths are about using beasts to create stories and build a hero, taking the reader on his first steps to composing his adventurer’s story. It opens up a little to ask the player to wonder about the other heroes his character will adventure alongside, what and where his adventures take place, and of course, why? It explains a bit more about the play of Dungeons & Dragons, so serving as a light primer before the player gets to the table.

There are just two issues with Beasts & Behemoths. First, for a book filled with great Dungeons & Dragons artwork, it does not list or credit one single artist. This is really disappointing, not so say inexcusable, and both the publisher and Wizards of the Coast should know better. Second, Beasts & Behemoths commits the same error as Monsters & Creatures in using anachronisms when it comes to describing the size of the monsters and creatures in the book. For example, the Cranium Rat is described as being the size of a sneaker or Hobgoblin as being the size of a professional (American) football player in all of his gear. Again, the inclusion of such modernisms breaks the verisimilitude of the book, making very much a reference work out of the game when it could have been a reference work both out of the game and in the game.

Physically, Beasts & Behemoths is an attractive little hardback. It is bright, it is breezy, and it shows a prospective player what his character might face, both in the art and the writing. Further, the art shows lots of adventuring scenes which can only spur the prospective player’s imagination.

Now obviously, Beasts & Behemoths is designed to showcase Dungeons & Dragons and introduce the prospective player to what his character might encounter—especially in Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. However, much of its content would work just as well as introduction to some of the monsters of Dungeons & Dragons-style retroclones, though in its look, it is brighter and breezier than the style and tone of the typical fantasy roleplaying game from the Old School Renaissance.

Monsters & Creatures introduced the prospective player to just a tiny, but often iconic, few of the monsters and creatures in Dungeons & Dragons. Beasts & Behemoths adds to that, but also stands alone in that a player could read it rather than Monsters & Creatures to get an idea of some of the foes his character might face or encounter in the game. Similarly, Beasts & Behemoths is more of a general reference work, something suitable to have at the table during play, since its contents can serve as the legends and the folklore that a player character in a fantasy world might have learned about said monsters and creatures as he was growing up. That said, doing so adds another book to the table, and that may add unnecessary clutter during play. When it comes to clutter, are two books devoted to monsters in the ‘Dungeons & Dragons Young Adventurer’s Guides Series’ enough—or will there be a slew of them, cluttering up the series?

Beasts & Behemoths is another bright and engaging entry in the series, providing another light introduction to the monsters of Dungeons & Dragons, and the game itself. It again nicely works as a gift as much as it does a useful reference work, but as an entry in the ‘Dungeons & Dragons Young Adventurer’s Guides Series’, it feels very much like an extra in the series rather than part of the essential quartet of titles.

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 #10: The Troupe of Terror presents a band of ‘occluded’ entertainers prepared to delight and dine anywhere 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 good. It needs a slight edit.

Where is it set?
Monster of the Month #10: The Troupe of Terror can be set almost anywhere. Given suggestions include on the road or wherever the Player Characters live or are staying. 
Who do you play?No specific character types are required when encountering Monster of the Month #10: The Troupe of Terror. Having an entertainer, or a worshipper of Eurmal the Trickster or Donandar the Musician, in the group is not necessary, but may add to the fun and drama of any encounter with the ‘Troupe of Terror’.
What do you need?
Monster of the Month #10: The Troupe of Terror requires RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. HeroQuest Glorantha, the Guide to Glorantha, and The Glorantha Sourcebook may provide further illumination for the Game Master, but are not necessary to run Monster of the Month #10: The Troupe of Terror.
What do you get?
Monster of the Month #10: The Troupe of Terror provides the Game Master and his players with three things. The first is a hextet of individuals and creatures that although will outwardly appear colourful and entertaining, are more than willing to wine and dine at anyone’s expense—including the Player Characters. They make up a troupe of minstrels, mimes, and clowns each of whose consciousness was awakened by a magical performance given by the  Puppeteer Troupe. Unfortunately, ill prepared for such illuminating revelations, each has fallen into madness and been transformed in another way. Now they wander Glorantha, wining and dining on their audiences as they go…
All six members of the ‘Troupe of Terror’ are given full stats and write-up. This includes their backgrounds, their Illuminate abilities, and some interesting magical items a few of them possess. Although they still possess magic which the Player Characters will recognise, their Illuminate magic will likely confuse and confound them. In particular, the members troupe will be particularly powerful if they are allowed to perform. Both the strangeness and potency of their magic means that the Game Master will need to prepare any encounter with the ‘Troupe of Terror’ with care.
The second is a trio of adventure seeds which provide ways in which the Game Master can introduce the ‘Troupe of Terror’ to her players. Two of the adventure seeds, involving an encounter with the hextet on the road and hunting them for their bounty, are mundane and it is only the third which really explores the fullest potential of the ‘Troupe of Terror’, in which the troupe pulls the Player Characters into its performance and it very much becomes something else… This requires careful staging upon the part of the Game Master as well as a delve back into the Player Characters’ previous adventures. This has the potential to be a really entertaining encounter and performance which highlights the magical nature of Glorantha, although of course, in a slightly warped way.
Lastly, it serves as an introduction to Illumination. Especially the dark side of Illumination. It is not an extensive introduction and provides a short bibliography should the Game Master want to read further. On the other hand, an encounter with the ‘Troupe of Terror’ would also serve as a warning as the dangers of Illumination.
Is it worth your time?Yes—Monster of the Month #10: The Troupe of Terror presents an entertaining bunch of anthropophages who not only know too much, but also know how to put on horrific performances, plus staging advice for the Game Master. No—Monster of the Month #10: The Troupe of Terror is probably worth avoiding if the Game Master does not want to bring Illumination into her campaign.Maybe—Monster of the Month #10: The Troupe of Terror needs a careful read through and consideration prior to being run, especially given its magical and dining subject matters

Judge Dredd and the Worlds of 2000 AD is the fourth roleplaying game to explore the world of Judge Dredd and Mega-City One as depicted in 2000AD. Not only that, it lays the groundwork and the core rules for any number of comic strips to appear in the pages of the long running British weekly comic, including ABC Warriors, Rogue Trooper, Strontium Dog—and more. The focus of Judge Dredd and the Worlds of 2000AD though, is firmly on the post-apocalyptic, dystopic satire of the police state—or ‘Judge state’—that is the setting of Judge Dredd. Published by EN Publishing following a successful Kickstarter campaign, Judge Dredd and the Worlds of 2000 AD shares some comparisons to earlier iterations of roleplaying games based on the Judge Dredd licence. Like Judge Dredd: The Role-Playing Game from Games Workshop, it uses its own mechanics, in this case being powered by the W.O.I.N.—or ‘What’s OLD is NEW’—dice pool mechanics. Like The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game, the d20 System version from Mongoose Publishing, that it allows players to create ordinary citizens and perps, as well as Judges, and like Judge Dredd, the Traveller version also from Mongoose Publishing, it allows the creation of Psi-Judges, Tek-Judges, and Med-Judges as well as Street Judges from the start. Another difference between Judge Dredd and the Worlds of 2000AD the previous iterations is that it is set in 2099, so a few years earlier in the timeline of Mega-City One.

A Player Character in Judge Dredd and the Worlds of 2000AD is defined by a fair number of factors. At the narrative level, this factor is a descriptor, ‘A[n] [Age] [Trait] [Species] [Career] who [Hook]’ which sums up the character, for example, ‘An elderly egotistical Orangutan Fence who enjoys a real cigar’. On a mechanical level, a character has eight attributes—Strength, Agility, Endurance, Willpower, Intuition, Logic, Charisma, and Luck, as well as two secondary attributes, Reputation and Psionics. He will have any number of skills, ranging from Accounting, Light Armour, and Insight to clairsentience, boinging, and flirtation. Now all of these have a rating, typically four for the average Human and each has an associated dice pool of six-sided dice, typically two six-sided dice for the rating for four, which a player or the Referee rolls for character or NPC to undertake an action. A character will also have various Exploits, essentially talents and abilities gained from a character’s species and various careers, such as Pacification from the Applied Violence course a Cadet Judge can take at the Academy of Law which grants bonus baton damage or Art Savant from the Scrawler (graffiti artist) career which improves his Reputation with fellow Scrawlers. Lastly, a character has a Grade, which is a measure of the number of Careers a character can have. Typically, this is set at five for beginning characters, and besides limiting the number of careers a character have, it also limits the size of the dice pool a player can roll for his character.

To create a character, a player selects a species and its exploits, then three species skills. He then chooses five careers. From each he chooses two of the listed skills, either the Aim or Feint Exploit, and one more universal Exploit. Adjustments are made to Attribute and Skill rating as the player makes his choices. Each Career also adds one or more years to a character’s age. The process takes a little time and is slightly fiddley, but a player is given a lot of options to create an interesting character and a Referee to create interesting NPCs.

Our sample Player Character is Ookie Whithers, a Chimpanzee who grew up and lives in Apetown. Since he was a Juve he has been an associate of the Chimpolini crime family, but never rose high in its ranks because of his love of gambling. He has a minor record as a Juve and in more recent years has become a nark for the Department of Justice. He always has a book running on all manner of events and is never seen in the same waistcoat twice.

Ookie Whithers
A Suave Chimp Fence who can never turn down a bet
Age: 23
Grade: Five
Careers: Juve Gang, Gamer, Pongo, Fence, Nark

Strength 5 (2d6) Agility 5 (2d6) Endurance 3 (2d6) Willpower 2 (1d6) Intuition 8 (3d6) Logic 5 (2d6) Charisma 9 (3d6) Luck 7 (3d6)
Reputation 3 (2d6) Psionics 0 (0d6)

Health 11 Speed 19 Jump 10’/5’ Carry 80 lbs. Initiative 3d6
Melee Defence 11 Ranged 7 Mental Defence 11 Vital Defence 7

Skills
Accounting 1 (1d6), Appraisal 1 (1d6), Bluffing 2 (1d6), Brawling 1 (1d6), Carousing 1 (1d6), Forgery 2 (1d6), Gambling 3 (2d6), Insight 1 (1d6), Movies 1 (1d6)

Exploits
Agile, Beguiling, Feint, Great Leap, Lucky Escape, Natural Climber, Profit, Stone Cold Stare, Thrower, Weak-willed, What’s the Plan?, Where the Action is, Zero-g

Where creating a citizen or perp type character is supported by a wide range of options—though there is no equivalent of the ex-prisoner who has done time, the options for creating a Judge are more proscribed. A Judge has to be Human or a Clone, must take Cadet followed by two advanced courses, such as Basic Psionics or Citizen Manipulation, and then Rookie. The last Career is a Judge Career such as Med Judge, Psi-Judge, Street Judge, or Tek-Judge. More options are available in terms of Speciality Judge Career, which include Block Judge, Crime Scene Processor, Interrogator, Wally Squad, and more. These become available if the Referee is planning a game with more experienced Player Characters, and equally, a Referee could reduce the number of Careers to just four if she wants to start a campaign with Rookie Judges.

Our sample Judge is a clone taken from the same biological material as Judge Dredd. He wants to emulate his genetic stock and be a Judge worthy of his forebears. On the streets he relies upon his presence and his intimidating manner, and when that does not work, is a dab hand at pacification.

Judge Leonov
An Alert Street Judge who wants to be worthy of his clone source
Age: 24
Grade: Five
Careers: Cadet, Citizen Manipulation, Applied Violence, Rookie, Street Judge

Strength 7 (3d6) Agility 5 (2d6) Endurance 7 (3d6) Willpower 6 (3d6) Intuition 8 (3d6) Logic 6 (3d6) Charisma 5 (2d6) Luck 3 (2d6)
Reputation 2 (1d6) Psionics 0 (0d6)

Health 34 Speed 19 Jump 10’/7’ Carry 140 lbs. Initiative 10d6
Melee Defence 18 Ranged 7 Mental Defence 11 Vital Defence 11

Skills
Bravery 1 (1d6), Boxing 1 (1d6), Clubs 2 (1d6), Hardy 1 (1d6), Insight 1 (1d6), Interrogation 1 (1d6), Intimidate 3 (2d6), Law 3 (2d6), Light Armour 1 (1d6), Perception 1 (1d6), Pistols 1 (1d6), Riding 1 (1d6), Running 1 (1d6), Tactics 2 (1d6)

Exploits
Ingrained Skill Package, Fast Healing, Academy of Law Curriculum, Voice of the Law, Pacification, Obey the Law, Freeze!, Feint, Knockdown

Mechanically, Judge Dredd and the Worlds of 2000AD uses W.O.I.N., or ‘What’s OLD is New’. This is a dice pool system which uses six-sided dice, the size of the dice pool being determined by a character’s attribute, skill, and the quality of equipment used. This is then rolled and the results totalled to beat a Difficulty Score, which can range from Easy or seven all the way up to Mythic or forty-five. A typical Difficulty Score will be Routine or ten, Difficult or sixteen, and Demanding or twenty-one. If three or more of the dice rolled are sixes, then a critical result has been achieved. The number of dice rolled can be adjusted by Complications , such as shooting at someone behind cover, scaling the side of a building in a snowstorm, or simply not having the right equipment.

However, whatever the size of the dice pool a player or Game Master has built, the maximum number of dice rolled is determined by a Player Character or NPC’s Grade. For most Player Characters, this will be five. Further, the player or Referee can spend dice for various effects. In combat, this will typically be to increase damage, at a cost of two dice from the pool to add an extra die to the damage roll, but many Exploits also require dice to be spent. For example, Blind Shot enables a character in cover to shoot at an opponent without looking at them at a cost of two dice.

The mechanics also cover common situations like chases, engineering problems, hacking and computing, tailing, and more. Countdown situations, such as a Judge being critically injured and in danger of dying or picking a lock before a guard patrol comes in sight, are handled by dice pools. The dice pool is rolled from turn to turn, each roll of a six reducing the size of the pool, until the pool is depleted and the effect of the countdown counting down is triggered.

Each Player Character also has a Luck pool of dice equal to the number of dice derived from his Luck attribute. These dice are spent on a one for one basis to add to an attribute check or to reduce the size of an opponent’s attribute check, reduce damage dice suffered or increase damage dice inflicted, and to trigger Exploits. The expenditure of one Luck will also grant a character an extra action, buy off a Condition (typically suffered in combat, but it may also come from an environment), and so on. Luck dice do need to be of a different colour as unlike ordinary dice, they explode on a result of six or more. Luck dice can typically be replenished once per day.

Combat in Judge Dredd and the Worlds of 2000AD is designed to be a tactical skirmish system, ideally using miniatures and a combat map, although it need not be run that way. The rules cover position, overwatch, flanking and crossfire, dual-wielding, and more. As well as accounting for the environment and its effects, such as a snowy street or underwater, the rules also add Stunt Areas, like a hanging cable, a patch of ice, or a banister, which a character can take advantage of. Using a Stunt Area not only grants a bonus to a character, often a bonus to a damage roll, but also nicely captures the comic book feel action of Judge Dredd.

Psionics are covered through the Psionic attribute and its dice pool, plus skills such as Biopsionics, Clairvoyance, Telepathy, and Teleportation and their associated abilities. So Clairsentience covers Hypcognition, Necrophony, Combat Precognition, and Retrocognition, whilst Telepathy covers Empathy, Mind Control, Mindprobe, Mindread, Mindwipe, and a whole lot more. These are powered by Psionic Power Points—derived from the Willpower and Psionic dice pools, and are learned through taking a career like a Psi-Judge or a Psyker. The rules themselves are workable, but being covered in just three pages feel brief as if waiting for the full supplement on the subject.

Overall, the mechanics are workable and at their core, are easy enough to understand. Obviously, situations like combat or handling chases or psionic encounters will complicate things, but not overly so. In play, a player will need to need to pay attention to what his character’s Exploits can do to get the most out of W.O.I.N., whilst in general, W.O.I.N. does feel as if it should be more cinematic than it necessarily is, but elements of the mechanics, such as various Exploits and Stunt Zones do push Judge Dredd and the Worlds of 2000AD towards a comic book style of play. Rules are provided should the Game Master want a cinematic style of game.

The list of equipment for Judge Dredd and the Worlds of 2000AD covers everything that a Judge would use, from the Birdie lie detector to Riot Foam Cutters, as well as civilian and criminal gear, including Bat Glider Suit and Spray Paint Aerosol. It would have perhaps been useful if the equipment issued or available to Judges had been more clearly marked.

The setting of Judge Dredd and the Worlds of 2000AD—Mega-City One and beyond, is given a good overview before focusing on particular locations in the metropolis, each of which is pleasingly accompanied by suggestions as to how to use that location. However, for a roleplaying game which focuses on law enforcement, the section on crime and punishment and the list of crimes and their typical sentences is at best brusque. It does not help that this section is hidden in the book or that the list is not repeated in the appendix of tables at the back of the book.

For the Game Master, there is solid advice on running scenarios and campaigns set in Mega-City One, as well as capturing the atmosphere of the setting, types of campaign and scenario, and handling opponents and rewards. Suggested campaign types include Citizen- and Perp-based campaigns as well as Judge-based campaigns. Rules are provided for the Game Master to create her own foes, monsters, and other NPCs, as well as listing typical foes, ranging from Blitz Agents, Citizens, and members of Citi-Def to Tek-Judges, Vagrants, and Workers. Sadly, the selection of foes does not include any of the classic criminals and enemies faced by Judge Dredd himself, which is undeniably disappointing. 

Judge Dredd and the Worlds of 2000AD includes a starting scenario or ‘Crime Blotter’. This is ‘State of the Empire’ and revisits the very first Judge Dredd comic strip back in Prog #2 of 200AD when Judge Dredd went into the ruins of the Empire State Building to arrest ‘Whitey’, the vicious leader of a gang of perps who killed Judge Alvin. It can be run with a team of Judges going into apprehend the perp, but it could also be run with a group of perps doing a retrieval job for a local hoodlum or ordinary citizens who go in search of a missing child at the wrong time. It is primarily an exploration and combat scenario designed to showcase the rules more than the satire and humour of the setting. However, that aside, it works well enough.

Fortunately, Judge Dredd and the Worlds of 2000AD also provides a number of further Crime Blotters for the Game Master to develop. Whether it is investigating a break in at a Munce foodstuffs laboratory or a potential block-war, all five are nicely detailed and include guidelines on how to run them for Judges, perps, or citizens. The quintet also delve further into the setting of Mega-City One and provide some great action for all character types.

Rounding out Judge Dredd and the Worlds of 2000AD is an appendix of various tables for the game. The appendix also includes a set of pregenerated Judges ready to play ‘State of the Empire’ and the other Crime Blotters. The Lawmaster and the Lawgiver, the famous motorbike driven by all Judges and feared handgun wielded by all Judges retrospectively, are also given their character sheets of their own here. Fans of Judge Dredd as a roleplaying game will be pleased to note that the Lawmaster is designed to complement a Judge rather than outperform him.

Physically, Judge Dredd and the Worlds of 2000AD is breezily and brightly presented. It needs an edit in places, but one clever feature is that each chapter is colour-coded for easy reference and access. Another enjoyable feature of the design is that comic strips are used to illustrate aspects of the rules, including a sample of play and character creation. The use and choice of artwork taken from the Judge Dredd comic is also well done, capturing a lot of its action and tone. However, the layout of Judge Dredd and the Worlds of 2000AD is just a little too busy and fussy in places and it is difficult to find things despite the inclusion of an index.

There are a trio of omissions from Judge Dredd and the Worlds of 2000AD. One is the aforementioned menagerie of criminals, enemies, and foes faced by Judge Dredd. Another is rules for vehicle combat, which really would have complemented the guidelines for handling chases, their lack meaning that the Game Master will have to improvise in order to bring the Lawmaster into play, something that happens often in the comic strip. Lastly, there are no rules for handling arrests, which feels really, really weird given how intrinsic that is to the setting of Mega-City One and what a Judge will be doing from one shift to the next. Now, there are skills which can be used, such as Intimidate and Exploits, to handle arrests, but really, not having a discussion of it is a major omission.

Ultimately, the omissions in Judge Dredd and the Worlds of 2000AD mean that it is not the best treatment of Judge Dredd in a roleplaying game. Not all of those omissions are insurmountable, and it is likely that there will be supplements which will address them in the future, but their absence just does not feel right. However, there is a great deal to like about Judge Dredd and the Worlds of 2000AD. It presents three different campaign options—Citizen, Perp, or Judge, and supports all three with the means to create a wide range of character types and multiple scenarios which can be used in all three campaign types. The W.O.I.N. mechanics are serviceable, and the rulebook brightly and breezily captures the tone and energy of the comic strip. Judge Dredd and the Worlds of 2000AD might need more fleshing out than a core rulebook really should, but as an introduction to the setting and the first few games in the setting, it more than adequately lays the groundwork and sets everything up for roleplaying in Mega-City One of the Judge Dredd comic strip and the various roleplaying treatments of 2000AD comic strips to come.

Almost a quarter of century after Games Workshop published Judge Dredd: The Role-Playing Game, Mongoose Publishing would revisit the licence based upon the famous 2000AD titular character—the third time for the licence and the second time for the publisher. Mongoose Publishing had already released The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game in 2002 for the then system de jour—the d20 System, but by 2009, the d20 System had run its course. In response, the publisher turned to another of its licences, its first edition of its version of the venerable Science Fiction roleplaying game, Traveller, to power its other licences, the results being the Universe of Babylon 5, Strontium Dog, and of course, Judge Dredd.

Like The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game before it, Judge Dredd was published as a full colour hardback which contained the means to play in its milieu. Actually, it was published as a more colour hardback, for it does not make use of the black and white artwork which long graced the pages of 2000AD. Its setting remains a future America (and beyond) after a nuclear war which irradiated much of the Earth and forced most of the world’s population to live in a number of megalopolises—or supercities. Each is home to millions and millions living in great city-blocks, most of whom are unemployed and turn to hobbies, brand new trends or crazes, or even crime to keep themselves sane. The teeming masses are difficult to police and it takes a special dedicated individual, one who has trained for nearly all of his or her childhood to patrol and enforce the law in these great cities. These are the Judges, trained to be the best, armed with the best equipment, and ready to patrol the streets as combined policeman, judge, jury, and executioner. They enforce the law and do so fairly—and none no more fairly than Judge Dredd himself, a figure who is both authoritarian and an anti-hero, the most well-known and feared Judge in Mega-City One on the eastern seaboard of what was once the United States of America. On a daily basis, Judge Dredd has to deal with litterers and jaywalkers, slowsters and sponts, robbers and murderers, smokers and boingers, illegal comic book dealers and gangster apes, and even Judge Death from a parallel earth. Over the years, the Judge Dredd comic has presented a carnival of crazy crimes and criminals, certainly more than enough to provide a rich, bonkers background, just as it did for Judge Dredd: The Role-Playing Game when it was published in 1985 and then again for The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game when it was published in 2002. However, Judge Dredd pushes the timeline on seven years to the year 2131 with the appointment Chief Judge Dan Francisco, a former Street Judge made famous by his starring in a twenty-four-hour reality television show following his exploits, who would reinstitute the anti-mutant acts.

Besides being from the same publisher, what both The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game and Judge Dredd have in common is that they require core rules books to play. Being a d20 System supplement, Judge Dredd required the Player’s Handbook for Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition, whilst Judge Dredd requires the Traveller rulebook to run and play. However, there are a number of major differences between The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game and Judge Dredd. Notably, the former allows players to take the roles of citizens and perps (perpetrators) instead of Judges, enabling a very different, crime or resistance-driven campaign in Mega-City One, whereas the latter does not. At the beginning of the game, The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game only allows players to create Street Judges and Psi-Judges, whereas in Judge Dredd, a player can create a Street Judge, a Psi-Judge, a Tek-Judge, or a Med-Judge. Where The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game uses the spells of Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition to model the psionic abilities of the Psi-Judge and threats capable of using psionics, Judge Dredd uses the Psionics rules and abilities of Traveller. Where The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game uses the skills and Feats of Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition to model both Player Character Judges and NPCs, Judge Dredd uses the skills of Traveller—though with a few new additions, and adds Feat-like abilities called Techniques. And where The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game simply has a player roll his character’s attributes, assign skill points, and choose a Feat or two, Judge Dredd has a player roll his character’s attributes, and then take along a lifepath that tracks his time at the Academy of Law. The result is a Rookie Judge with a bit of a history and a background, rather than someone faceless and anodyne, which would result from the character creation rules in both Judge Dredd and The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game.

A Judge is defined by six attributes—Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Intelligence, Education, and Influence (see below). Of these, Influence, the measure of a Judge’s commanding presence when dealing with the innumerable criminals and perps of Mega-City One, is something that only Judges have. Normal NPCs do not have it and instead have Social Standing as they would in Traveller. A Judge does not have the Social Standing attribute. All are initially rated between two and twelve, but can go higher. To create a Judge, a player randomly generates his Judge’s attributes—except for Education and rolls on a series of tables for each of the four terms his Judge serves at the Academy of Law. Normally four years long, one of the terms is only three years long and the Judge also has to undertake the Hot Dog Run, mandatory trip into the Cursed Earth to test the cadet’s skills, tenacity and to educate him in the hellish wilderness beyond limits of the city walls, as well as Full Eagle Day, when the Rookie Judge spends a day on the streets with a seasoned Judge to see if he is suitable for graduation. A cadet enters the Academy of Law at age five and graduates at the age of twenty.

Tek-Judge Gagarin
Judge Gagarin’s technical aptitude was spotted during his second term and he was transferred into the Tek Branch during his third term, studying the Robot War in particular. He also passed the flight simulator course. However, despite passing his Hot Dog Run, Tek-Judge Gagarin returned with a case of Recurring Radiation Sickness.

Str 04 (-1) Dex 11 (+2) End 10 (+1)
Int 13 (+3) Edu 10 (+1) Inf 09 (+1)

Skills
Athletics (Co-ordination) 1, Athletics (Endurance) 1, Combat Engineering 1, Computers 2, Drive (Lawmaster) 1, Engineer (Electronics) 2, Flyer (Grav) 0, Gun Combat (Lawgiver) 1, Jack of All Trades 1, Law 2, Mega-City One 1, Geography 1, Mechanic 1, Melee (Unarmed Combat) 1, Space Sciences (Robotics) 2, Street Perception 1, Survival 1, Tactics 1

Special Techniques
Data Access, Jerry-Rig

Rules are also provided for creating more experienced Judges, but not civilians, and the Referee is advised to use the standard Traveller rules to create them—though of course, this would be without the benefit of any of the weirdness and wackiness to be found in Mega-City One. Nevertheless, the rules are creating a Judge are undeniably engaging and a whole lot more fun than in previous roleplaying games based on Judge Dredd, plus they help a player build a rapport with his Judge. The rules add a few new skills such as Combat Engineering and its Specialities of Fortifications, Camouflage, and IEDs and Mines, Gun Combat (Lawgiver)—which a Judge trains in exclusively, Law, Street Perception, and more. All of the new skill descriptions include examples of their use. Special Techniques—essentially the equivalent of Feats from the d20 System—are talents and abilities that give a Judge the edge over a perp. So Dead Halt enables a Judge to bring his Lawmaster or other vehicle to a sharp stop safely and under control, Formidable Presence grants a Judge the full weight of the law in his stance and attitude such that ordinary citizens are rooted to the spot in fear, and Rapid Aim enables a Judge to get a bead on a perp with incredible precision.

Mechanically, Judge Dredd uses the Traveller system. In general, this is a straightforward set of rules designed to handle Science Fiction settings. Which means it can handle technical aspects, like computers and vehicles as well as the action and the interpersonal. The first mechanic that Judge Dredd adds is that for making an arrest. To do this the Judge’s player makes an influence roll, aiming to  get eight or more, modified by the Judge’s Influence modifier and the arrestee’s Desperation value. This ranges from minus six to plus six, any perp with a level of minus four or below prepared to do anything to escape, whilst at plus four and above, the perp is desperate to get arrested. The rule for handling arrests is accompanied by a guide to sentencing and the types of back-up and support a Judge can expect.

In terms of background information, Judge Dredd provides quite a lot. This covers not just the history of Mega-City One and a timeline, but also its transit systems, various types of habitat from city blocks and cardboard cities to Luxy-Blocks and the Jungle—home to genetically modified primates, and notable landmarks like the Big Smelly (concreted over Hudson River), the transported White Cliffs of Dover (complete with ‘genuine’ Brit-Citters including dancing chimney sweeps, singing academics, and Pearly Kings and Queens), and Moonray Tower from which lasers beam advertisements onto the lunar surface. Sport, leisure, and fun is also covered, as crazes, organisations, and more. Judge Dredd also provides a brief introduction to places beyond the walls of Mega-City one. Extensive equipment lists detail everything that a Judge would routinely carry on him or might have access to, whilst the rest will equip potential perps. This also includes numerous vehicles, but not spaceships, the Referee being advised to check out Traveller and High Guard for more information.

Psi Division and Psi-Judges get a chapter all of their very own. As with the rest of Judge Dredd, it expands upon rules given in the core Traveller rulebook. It adds Advanced Talents particular to the setting of Judge Dredd, for example Aura Perception and Energy Kinesis, but these are the least powerful. Dimensional Manipulation and Temporal Manipulation are powerful abilities in themselves, but they are also powerful in terms of narrative, able to affect the flow and status of a story during play far more than most other powers. However, such powers are rare and are not available during Judge generation. They are accompanied by some guidance on handling the effects and consequences of temporal travel. As powerful as psionics can be, their use is not without its consequences and psionic trauma can be suffered for overusing powers and psionic strength, and being exposed to mental or emotional stress. Suffer too much psionic trauma and a Judge may fall victim to mental instability or even insanity. The rules cover the potential effects of all of these as well the means to recover from them, plus a range of psionic equipment.

The Judge Dredd comic strip is of course known for the wonderfully weird and wacky nature of its perps, from the Angel Gang to Judge Death—and back again. Judge Dredd has rules for rolling up perps, as well as aliens and mutants, but the ‘Most Wanted’ list of classic criminals faced by Judge Dredd himself over the years is here kept to just a handful or two. And so few of them are actually illustrated. This is perhaps one of the more disappointing aspects of Judge Dredd as a roleplaying game.

For the Referee there is some decent advice on running campaigns and the types of crimes and story-arcs which work together, and in addition to the general background and the timeline, Judge Dredd includes a description of Sector 13, an individual sector of Mega-City One and its features. It pays particular attention to Sector 13’s seven major city blocks, two of which follow a heavy theme of twentieth century rock music—Jon Bon Jovi Block and Bruce Springsteen Block, both of whose citizens hate each other and typically war against the other using very loud music. The contemporary references of Judge Dredd are, of course, very contemporary to 2009, but many still work today. This takes the place of a traditional scenario in any other roleplaying game, but there are lots of details and roleplaying hooks which the Referee can develop into running a campaign of her own in Sector 13.

Physically, Judge Dredd is well presented and as expected uses a full colour artwork drawn from the comic strip. It is not always the most evocative artwork and it often feels a bit dark. The other issue with the presentation is that although there is a map of the world inside the front cover, there are no other maps in the book. So no map of Mega-City One and no map of Sector 13. To some extent, the map for Sector 13 is not quite as important as that of Mega-City One, primarily because the geography of Sector 13 is not as tightly defined, and the Referee can easily create it if necessary.

If there is a disappointment to Judge Dredd, it is in its treatment of the criminals and perps that are fundamentally intrinsic to the setting, their lack of entries just feeling mean-spirited. Similarly, the lack of illustrations for the criminals and perps who are included feels the same way and is actually unhelpful for the Referee. Yet as a consequence of using the Traveller core rules, Judge Dredd feels far more competent in handling the technical aspects of the setting—vehicles and vehicle combat, psionics, and more, than the previous iterations of roleplaying games based on Judge Dredd. Similarly, whilst character generation feels technical in nature, the process is actually fun, and it produces Judges who are both competent and possess a degree of backstory that a player can bring to the roleplaying of his Judge. Judge Dredd may not have quite the charm of Games Workshop’s Judge Dredd: The Role-Playing Game, but it definitely has more character than Mongoose Publishing’s earlier The Judge Dredd Role-Playing Game, and the technical efficiency of its design makes it playable and engaging. 

Colony of Death – Weird Fantasy Roleplaying in 17th Century Maryland is a campaign setting set in the New World of the mid-seventeenth century. Designed for use with Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying, but easily adapted to the retroclone of your choice, it takes the Player Characters to the Americas, but not where you would expect. In general, when a supplement is set in early colonial America, it is set in Massachusetts, or elsewhere in New England. Examples of this includes Atlas Games’ Northern Crown and StatCom Simulations Inc.’s 1983 Witch Hunt. The setting for Colony of Death though, is further south, the rough and ready Maryland Province, which in 1650, is not even twenty years old. Although the war between King and parliament back in England led to an uprising in the province, this was put down, and the governor reinstalled, as was its policy of religious tolerance between Protestants and Catholics. Also restored was its promise of fifty acres of land to farm for each new settler—and this a potential reason for the Player Characters to come to the frontier of the empire that is the young Maryland Province.

Colony of Death starts with the history of the new province, how King Charles I of England granted its charter to Lord Baltimore to the recent war with the Susquehannock natives and their allies from nearby New Sweden; the various peoples of the colony, including Catholics, Protestants, indentured servants, Virginians who want to claim the area, natives from the various tribes of the area, and more; and details of diseases rampant in the area, such as Dysentery, Hookworm Infestation, and Yellow Fever; and encounter tables for the various terrain types in and beyond the province. A lengthier section is devoted to a bestiary of the region, detailing the varied creatures and things to be found in Maryland. These include the mundane, such as the Black Bear and the Black Widow Spider, alongside a number of monsters, for example, the Goatman, said to be the devil and to haunt the forests west of the Chesapeake; the Hexenwolf, a type of lycanthrope also found in Maryland’s woods and its arch enemy, the Schneller Geist, or Snallygaster, a dragon-like best. Stats are also included for English pirates and natives, and the monsters also veer into Mythos territory with the inclusion of the Mi-Go and the Sasquatch. However, none of these count as the oddest threat in Colony of Death, and that award goes to a Squirrel Swarm. Altogether, the range of the monsters in the book covers a number of genres—more traditional combined with folklore the Hexenwolf, for example, whilst the Mi-Go are definitely Lovecraftian.

Roughly half of Colony of Death is devoted to the supplement’s four scenarios. The first of these is ‘St. Mary’s Shoemaker’ takes place in St. Mary’s City, the capital of the province. Still suffering from the aftermath of The Plundering Times—the Protestant Uprising during the time of the English Civil War, the people of the tiny city are shocked to learn that the body of a well-dressed woman has been found in a nearby river, minus her feet! This is more of a scenario set-up and the opportunity to detail St. Mary’s City than a plotted scenario and the Referee will need to develop a good reason for the Player Characters to be visiting the city, let alone investigating a podophiliac murder.

However, if the Player Characters are successful in investigating the strange death, ‘St. Mary’s Shoemaker’ does set up the second scenario. ‘Hell’s Bell’ takes them exploring or surveying up the Potomac River, perhaps visiting a parcel of land they have been given. On their way, they pass through the village of Lebenstadt, settled by Germans and notable for the large, engraved bell hung at its centre. The people of Lebenstadt are welcoming and hospitable, but hide a supernatural secret which is revealed when the settlement is attacked by another creature. Again, this is more of a set-up than an adventure with a plot and there is the possibility that even if the secret is revealed, that the Player Characters walk away from the village with nothing really happening. Another settlement, a Swedish trading post, beset by attacks by a red-haired giant, is the location for ‘The Hand and Eye of Loki’, the third scenario. If the Player Characters have reason to visit the trading post, there is more reason for them to get involved and this scenario is stronger for that and its greater use of Europeans’ historical involvement in the New World. The last scenario in Colony of Death is ‘To Burn a Witch’ and it oddly takes the Player Characters out of Maryland and across the Delaware River and to the city of Providence. There they come across the sight of the city’s Puritans burning a young girl accused of witchcraft. This is not really even a set-up , more of an encounter in which the Player Characters can choose to get involved in or not. If they refrain, nothing happens, but even if they do, ‘To Burn a Witch’ does not explore the ramifications. Ultimately, it suffers from being based around twentieth century attitudes towards what is a horrid happening rather than the attitudes of the period.

Rounding out Colony of Death is a lengthy appendix. This gives tables of names suitable for the region, including Algonquin, English, and German, an expanded map of the region, and a guide to growing tobacco in Maryland—which turns out to be really hard work! This is all useful content and the latter guide adds depth to making a life in the province.

Physically, Colony of Death is reasonably well presented. The maps are okay and if the artwork is amateurish in style, it at least works well enough for all that.

Although Colony of Death – Weird Fantasy Roleplaying in 17th Century Maryland is to be welcomed for taking Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying (and other retroclones) to the New World and a hitherto unexplored region of the New World, as a supplement it is underdeveloped. It could have done with reasons for bringing the Player Characters to the New World—and Maryland in particular, and for involving them in the scenarios. Perhaps also some rumours that the Referee could develop into scenarios and help get the Player Characters get more involved in the region would have also been useful. As would a bibliography and perhaps a look at the folklore of the region, especially for the Referee who wants to bring it further to life.

Ultimately, Colony of Death – Weird Fantasy Roleplaying in 17th Century Maryland is not a book which can be picked up and used with any ease. As the groundwork for a setting which the Referee can research and develop further herself, Colony of Death – Weird Fantasy Roleplaying in 17th Century Maryland is not an unreasonable starting point.

The Shadow Over Providence is a short, one-shot, one-session scenario for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition. Published by Chaosium, Inc. to celebrate NecronomiCon 2019, it is mostly set within the confines of the Milton Hotel, based on Providence’s iconic Biltmore Hotel in the year 1928. In addition to a number of other events, the hotel is playing host to ‘The Kingdom of Fire – Egypt’s 18th Dynasty.’ This is a travelling exhibition showcasing some of the finest exhibits and artefacts from the British Museum, including treasures of Tutankhamun and Hatshepsut, and a prize exhibit, the mysterious canopic jar of Ibnhotep the Mad! Whether attending the Sterling-Homes Wedding Reception, the Society of Geological Sudies Annual Convention, or visiting the hotel because of the exhibition, all of the Investigators will have given tickets to see it and as the scenario begins, will be perusing its displays. However, as any good Call of Cthulhu player knows, almost nothing good can come of having Ancient Egyptian artefacts on display—and so it is with The Shadow Over Providence. Within minutes of it starting, it is lights out and away we go—a robbery, a bizarre and grizzly death, a crime to be investigated, abductions of guests and staff—and more… Just what is going on in Providence’s most famous hotel?

The opening scene of The Shadow Over Providence is actually tightly scripted, but this script sets everything up and does it with a bang—or a fusillade of bangs! Once the lights go on and the investigation, the likelihood is that the Investigators will be deputised by the local police and so will have permission to investigate the robbery and both the mundane and the outré deaths on the night. Barring a single excursion to the city’s morgue to examine one or more of the corpses that turn up during the scenario, The Shadow Over Providence is set within the confines of the Milton Hotel. There are actually just a few locations for them to investigate in the hotel and relatively few NPCs for them to interview, and the scenario will play out slightly differently and be more of a challenge if the Investigators are not deputised. So probably more like a traditional Call of Cthulhu scenario. 

Beyond the initial scenes, there are no set events in The Shadow Over Providence, meaning that at the same time as the Investigators carry out their efforts, the Keeper will be pushing events along with an expanding number of strange deaths and disappearances, including potentially, attacks upon the Investigators. There is a sense throughout that the Investigators and the hotel guests are being hunted and stalked through the halls and walls of the Milton Hotel, and despite the size of the building, there is a claustrophobic feel to The Shadow Over Providence. Ultimately, the Keeper will stage a confrontation between the Investigators and the antagonist, its nature depending upon the actions of the Investigators so far. This does mean that although the scenario is of a length and suitability to be run for inexperienced players or those new to Call of Cthulhu, the open structure of the scenarios mean that it better suited to be run by a more experienced Keeper.

One of the strengths of The Shadow Over Providence from the outset is that it can and does bring a diverse group of characters together to investigate the mystery at the heart of the scenario. The six pregenerated Investigators, for example, include a Sikh Psychiatrist from India, a New England elementary teacher, an African American journalist, a Moroccan artist, one of the hotel’s concierges, and the hotel handyman. One issue with these is that they do not have all of the skills listed in the checks throughout the scenario—Locksmith and Egyptian Hieroglyphs in particular. Neither issue is insurmountable should the Keeper allow her players some extra skills points with which to customise their Investigators. Were the players to create their own investigators, this might be less of an issue. Similarly, were the players to create their own investigators, they could also be of almost any background as long as they have a reason to be at the Milton Hotel—the scenario providing three already. That is, the wedding reception, the geology symposium, and of course, the Ancient Egyptian exhibition itself. Then, once the Investigators have successfully solved the mystery behind the horrid events that follow the opening of the exhibition, they have a reason to know each other and a reason to investigate similar mysteries. In this way, The Shadow Over Providence works  as a ‘Gateway’ scenario to further adventures and mysteries, just as much as it does a one-shot.

Should one of the Investigators die during the scenario, it is suggested that he be replaced by one of the NPCs. However, some of these NPCs have abilities more akin to those of Investigators created for Pulp Cthulhu: Two-fisted Action and Adventure Against the Mythos, so the Keeper might want to be careful in selecting which one she assigns to a player whose Investigator has been killed. Another issue is that one of the NPCs knows more about the attempted robbery than any other NPC. This probably makes that NPC unsuitable as a replacement Investigator, but the Keeper could actually develop the NPC into a full Investigator right from the off and include it amongst the starting Investigators. Doing so would add a degree of Investigator versus Investigator conflict to the play of The Shadow Over Providence, which could be entertaining if run as a convention scenario or for more veteran players.

Physically, The Shadow Over Providence is as cleanly laid out as you would expect for a Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, although it is in black and white rather than colour. It is generally well presented with suitable illustrations of Ancient Egyptian artefacts. The floorplans of the Milton Hotel are simple and clear, if small, and appropriately for the scenario, includes the air ducts. For all that the scenario is set in a real world location, it is a pity that none of the illustrations depict—if not the actual hotel the scenario’s Milton Hotel is supposed to be based upon, then of a similar hotel to help the Keeper describe the building to her players. Indicative of both the shortness of the scenario and the focus upon the diverse cast of Investigators is that half of The Shadow Over Providence is made up of the pregenerated Investigators.

After its opening action, The Shadow Over Providence settles down into a haunted house—‘haunted hotel’?—style scenario in which the Investigators are hunted as they themselves hunt for clues. This requires careful handling by the Keeper to maintain the pacing, but in the right hands The Shadow Over Providence delivers a solid balance of creepy investigation and scary action, whether as a one-shot or potential campaign starter.

It has been almost thirty years since there has been a roleplaying game set in the universe of the films Alien and Aliens, but that roleplaying game—the Aliens Adventure Game from Leading Edge Games—is primarily remembered for its complexity and emphasis upon combat over horror. That said, the publisher did produce Aliens, a highly effective treatment of the film which was also one of the earliest co-operative games. However, Free League Publishing, best known as the publisher of Mutant: Year Zero – Roleplaying at the End of Days and Tales from the Loop – Roleplaying in the ’80s That Never Was, obtained the licence and published Alien: The Roleplaying Game in 2019. Drawing from the films Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, and Prometheus, this explores the future of mankind in the late twenty-second century, where out on the frontiers of space, colonists scratch a living on barely terraformed worlds, starships towing mammoth refineries processing resources leave for the inner worlds with their crew in hibernation, corporations own and run worlds, rivalries between corporations escalate in cold wars and hot wars, and the United States Colonial Marine Corps attempts to keep the peace. Out on the frontier, in the coldness of space there are secrets too, some corporate, others unimaginably ancient, many of which will get you killed or kill you. There are rumours of old ruins, of impossible aliens, of lost colonies, and coverups—and maybe they will get a person killed too. This is the set-up for Alien: The Roleplaying Game, its future one of body horror, survival horror, corporate malfeasance, and worse…

The Alien Starter Set is designed as an introduction to the setting and the game. It comes richly appointed. Open up the deep box and you will find two sets of dice, a deck of cards, a large, double-sided poster map, two books—one a rulebook, the other a scenario, five pregenerated Player Characters, and a sheet of counters. Everything is done in a trade dress which evokes the Alien and Aliens milieu, muted blues and greens against a black star field, with superb fully painted artwork done by the same artist who illustrated Symbaroum. Essentially, the Alien Starter Set comes with everything that the Game Mother—as the Game Master is known in Alien: The Roleplaying Game—and five players need to enjoy their first experience of the horror setting and the roleplaying game’s mechanics.

The first of the books in the Alien Starter Set is the Rule Book. Now this is not the full rulebook, but the pared down version you would expect of a Starter Box. It introduces the setting and its history up until after the events of Alien 3, its themes—Space Horror and Sci-Fi Action, combined with a Sense of Wonder, and it explains the rules—skills, combat, panic and stress, and of course, xenomorphs. It also covers the types of characters that can be played and their associated campaign frameworks—Space Truckers, Colonial Marines, and Frontier Colonists. It also mentions Company Reps and Androids, both of which are playable using the full rules. Notably, it also explains the Alien: The Roleplaying Game can be played in one of two modes—Cinematic and Campaign mode. Cinematic mode is designed to emulate the drama of a film set within the Alien universe, and so emphasises high stakes, faster, more brutal play, and will be deadlier, whilst the Campaign mode is for longer play, still brutal, if not deadly, but more survivable. Of the two, the Cinematic mode is suited to one-shots, to convention play, and as introductions to the mechanics and setting of Alien: The Roleplaying Game. ‘Chariot of the Gods’, the scenario which comes in the Alien Starter Set, is written for the Cinematic mode.

Although the Rule Book in the Alien Starter Set does not include rules for creating characters, it explains what they are made of and how they work. A Player Character is defined by four attributes—Strength, Agility, Wits, and Empathy, each of which has three associated skills, for a total of twelve skills. For example, Heavy Machinery, Stamina, and Close Combat are associated with Strength, whilst Observation, Comtech, and Survival are associated with Wits. All skills also have stunts which come into play when a player rolls two or more successes in an action. A Player Character also has one or more Talents, essentially advantages that give him a benefit in addition to his skills. None are listed in the Rule Book in the Alien Starter Set, each of the pregenerated Player Characters in the Alien Starter Set has one.

In addition, a Player Character has a buddy and rival from amongst his fellow Player Characters—intended to create tensions and roleplaying opportunities; Personal Agendas—again to create tensions and roleplaying opportunities, but also to earn a player Story Points—which can be spent to gain automatic successes) for his Player Character; and both equipment and consumables. The latter consist primarily of air, food, and water, for whilst there are monsters—inhuman and human, out there on the frontier which will kill you, so will a lack of the right consumables.

Mechanically, Alien: The Roleplaying Game and the Alien Starter Set use the Year Zero engine first seen in Mutant: Year Zero – Roleplaying at the End of Days. The rules are light and fair quick, with dice rolls primarily intended for dramatic or difficult situations such as combat, hiding from a strange creature bent on doing unspeakable things to you, making repairs in a hurry, and so on. To have a Player Character undertake an action, a player rolls a number of Base dice equal to a combination of attribute and skill (or just attribute if the Player Character lacks the skill), aiming to roll one or more sixes. One result is enough to succeed, whilst extra successes can be used to purchase Stunts, like halving a task’s time or doing extra damage in combat. Although one Player Character can help another, the Alien: The Roleplaying Game—just like the films it is based upon—will involve conflicts between Player Characters as well as NPCs, especially when Personal Agendas clash, and where opposed rolls come into play from such situations, successes rolled by either side cancel each other out. If a Player Character fails, or wants to generate more successes, then his player can push the roll. Although this can only be done just the once for each roll, it can generate successes, but it also leads to the core mechanic in Alien: The Roleplaying Game—Stress (and panic)!

Stress in the Alien: The Roleplaying Game is designed to build and build over the course of a scenario, particularly in Cinematic mode. It is not gained just for pushing a roll, but also for firing a firearm in fully automatic mode, suffering damage, being attacked by a fellow crewman, when someone is revealed as an android, and so forth. For each level of Stress suffered by a Player Character, whenever that Player Character takes another action that requires dice to be rolled, his player not only rolls the Base dice as usual, he also rolls a Stress die. So, the more levels of Stress suffered by a Player Character, the more dice—Base dice and Stress dice—his player has to roll. This has both advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, it increases the chances of rolling successes, but on the downside, any ones rolled have negative effects. First, they prevent the roll from being pushed; second, they trigger a Panic Roll. This requires the roll of a six-sided die plus the Player Character’s current Stress level. Results of six and below have no effect, but results of seven and above include a nervous twitch which increases everyone’s Stress level, dropping an item, immediately seeking cover, screaming, fleeing, going berserk, and more. Although rest and recuperation can reduce Stress, for the most part, over the course of a scenario, a Player Character’s Stress is going to grow and grow...

Combat in the Alien: The Roleplaying Game is designed to be straightforward, but with one or two tweaks to fit the setting. One of these is Stealth Mode, the initial state for any combat situation. This is designed to cover hidden movement by NPCs and other unknown threats, attempts to detect hidden movement and threats, and the like before actual combat occurs. The rules also cover Initiative—handled by draw of a card, rated between one and ten; actions—a Player Character receives a Fast Action and a Slow Action or two Fast Actions per turn; ranged and close combat; damage and critical injuries—the latter suffered when a Player Character’s Health is reduced to zero, some of them deadly; and Overwatch, the ability for trained soldiers to monitor a particular area and be ready to shoot when something happens within it. Other hazards covered in the Rule Book in the Alien Starter Set include starvation and dehydration, the cold vacuum of space, fire, explosions, disease, and more. The Rule Book ends with a surprisingly extensive list of guns and other equipment, the firearms in particular being illustrated.

In all of this, the Xenomorphs do get their own section. It amounts to half a page. This might seem to be somewhat sparse, but to be fair it is enough to run ‘Chariot of the Gods’, the scenario which comes in the Alien Starter Set. Plus the scenario has more detail about the threat it thrusts in the Player Characters’ way… Written by Science Fiction author, Andrew E.C. Gaska, ‘Chariot of the Gods’ written for Alien: The Roleplaying Game’s Cinematic mode. It falls into the ‘Space Truckers’ framework and is very much a Blue Collar Sci-Fi horror scenario, covering all of the themes of the setting and the roleplaying game—space horror and Sci-Fi action with both survival and body horror along with corporate malfeasance. Its fairly heavily plotted storyline  is supported with a combination of Personal Agendas and events that get increasingly horrifying as it progresses. Unlike the Rule Book in Alien Starter Set, it includes all of the details of the Xenomorph that the Game Mother will need, but this is by design and will obvious why once the Game Mother begins preparing the scenario. It should be noted that given the importance of Personal Agendas in Alien: The Roleplaying Game, ‘Chariot of the Gods’ really only works when all five pregenerated Player Characters are in play and it can benefit from the tensions and conflicts that their Personal Agendas will promote. Overall, this is a nasty one-shot which should provide one or two sessions of play and deliver a film-like plot.

Supporting both ‘Chariot of the Gods’ and Alien Starter Set, the box also includes a number of extras. These start with the two sets of dice—the Base dice and the Stress dice. Both are six-sided dice and there are ten of each. The six face of both the black Base dice and the yellow Stress dice is marked with a ‘blip’ or ‘ping’ a la the Motion Tracker of Alien and Aliens fame. When one of these is rolled during the game, it is counted as a success.  However, the one face of each Stress die is also marked with a Facehugger symbol. When one of these is rolled, it prevents a roll from being pushed as well as triggering a Panic Roll.

The five pregenerated Player Characters make up the crew of the USCSS Montero, the small cargo ship which appears in ‘Chariot of the Gods’. They are double-sided and include an illustration and background on the one side, and a filled in character sheet on the other. They are clear and easy to read.

The deck of cards consists of fifty-six cards. They include the ten Initiative cards and twelve Weapon cards, which can be used when playing any scenario or campaign of the Alien: The Roleplaying Game, whilst the remainder are tied into the ‘Chariot of the Gods’ scenario. These include ten NPC cards for the scenario and twenty-four Personal Agenda cards to be handed out as the plot progresses in the scenario. Lastly, the large foldout map, done on heavy paper stock, is also double-sided. On the one side it depicts the limits of explored space and on the other a full set of starship deck plans. This is designed for play, making use of the sheet of cardboard counters that includes USCMC marines, ship’s crew, Xenomorphs, ship counters, and status counters. One notable feature of the starship deck plans is that they include the ship’s vents—perfect for hidden movement and hunting monsters in the dark!

Physically, Alien Starter Set is superbly presented. The look and trade dress of the box and its contents screams Alien and Aliens to anyone who looks at it. Both books could have been shorter, yet the more spacious layout makes them much easier to read and digest. The cards and the pregenerated character sheets feel a little thin, and perhaps it would have been nice if the counters had been in more then the one colour. The poster map though, is pleasingly sturdy. The writing does a slight edit in places, but it is direct and to the point, getting across the dangerous and dystopic nature of the future of the twenty-second century and presenting the rules in a simple, easy-to-read, and easy-to-grasp fashion. The standard feature of the Alien Starter Set is the artwork, which is just stunning.

The Alien Starter Set does exactly what it should. It introduces the setting and explains the rules, before providing a playing experience within that setting. It does this very well and it does a good job of supporting all three of these objectives. However, the Alien Starter Set is for a licensed property and it has high production values—and both factors are reflected in the price. The Alien Starter Set does cost more than the average starter set. Yet once the Game Mother has run ‘Chariot of the Gods’, the Rule Book can easily serve as a ready reference guide for the rules at the table where it is likely to be more accessible than the Alien: The Roleplaying Game core rulebook. Both counters and the poster map can be used again, and there is no denying the utility of having more dice at the table. Further, future adventures could be run using the rules in the Alien Starter Set alone, especially if they come with pregenerated Player Characters and written for the Cinematic mode. 

The Alien Starter Set is an impressive introduction to the Alien: The Roleplaying Game. It not only looks fantastic, it also comes with everything necessary to deliver and roleplay a frighteningly nasty experience in the cold darkness of space where the horrors faced include the feared Xenomorphs and your fellow man.

The Dare is a Call of Cthulhu scenario which very much wears its influences on its sleeve. It is a horror scenario of Cosmic Horror, so obviously H.P. Lovecraft and Call of Cthulhu. It is a haunted house scenario, so obviously any number of haunted house horror films and short stories, but also—just a little bit, ‘The Haunting’, the classic introductory scenario for Call of Cthulhu, which goes all of the way back to 1980 and Call of Cthulhu, First Edition. It is inspired by Call of Cthulhu, Third Edition, Call of Cthulhu, Fourth Edition, and Call of Cthulhu, Fifth Edition—certainly for its look. It is inspired by the horror films of the late 1970s and 1980s, including Halloween, Poltergeist, Evil Dead, The Lost Boys, and more. Above all, it is inspired by the kids’ adventure and kids in peril films of the 1980s, so The Goonies, Stand By Me, Monster Squad, E.T., and more. This rich source of inspiration has been mined in recent years by Roleplaying Games such as Free League Publishing’s Tales from the Loop – Roleplaying in the '80s That Never Was, Renegade Game Studios’ Kids on Bikes, and Bloat Games’ Dark Places & Demogorgons: The Roleplaying Game, but also most obviously on the silver screen by Stranger Things.

So The Dare is a scenario for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, in which the players take the role of preteens who are dared by a school bully to enter a haunted house on Halloween. Published by Sentinel Hill Press—best known as the publisher of the Arkham Gazette, following a successful Kickstarter campaign, The Dare is written by Call of Cthulhu veteran Kevin Ross. Designed as a one-shot, ideally for four or five kids and ideally to be played on Halloween, it began life as a tournament scenario, which has now been updated to be run for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition. As a one shot set in the eighties, The Dare works as a palette cleanser for veteran players, likely going all in on the period motifs—Sony Walkman, leg warmers, genre knowledge gleaned from video nasties, and so on, but it also works as an introduction to Call of Cthulhu for new players, made all the easier by its parred back ‘The Call of Kid-thulhu’ mechanics designed to fit the genre. It could in fact, be the defining experience with Cosmic Horror for the kid investigators, who as adults grow up to become investigators into the Mythos in the nineties, noughties, and beyond!

The set-up for The Dare is simple. School bully Roger Simmons has dared several of his victims to enter the Barnaker House, an abandoned and dilapidated home on the edge of town, and spend not just any night there, but Halloween! As the house wheezes and groans around them, their senses assaulted by the stench of mould and decay, of animal urine and faeces, the sound of scuttling in the walls and from room to room as the light from their torches skitter about them, a storm blows up and it looks like the investigators are there for the long haul… As they suffer the taunts and jibes of their bully, will the investigators find out if the house is really haunted? What horrors await them as they try to last the night?

To support this, The Dare is fully plotted out together with floor plans of the Barnaker House, stats and descriptions of all of the NPCs and the monsters. This includes suggestions as to what the NPCs will do location from location, but also gives suggestions as to how to adjust the tone of the scenario from location to location. These are set at the US film ratings of PG and R, the former minimising the violence, the gore, and the death, emphasising menace and anxiety, the latter being more visceral in its inclusion of gore, violence, and injury. Essentially, the difference between The Goonies and Evil Dead.

Mechanically, The Dare uses the Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition rules. It presents the core rules to the roleplaying  game, but it also strips them back to present what it calls ‘The Call of Kid-thulhu’, a simplified version of the rules. Notably, the rules condense the eighty or so skills of Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition down to just fifteen. So instead of Psychology, Be a Pal, Be Bossy rather than Intimidate and Persuade, Sneaky in place of Sleight of Hand and Stealth, and Spooky Stuff rather than Occult and Cthulhu Mythos. The most notable addition to these skills is Play with Matches, which covers setting things alight, building traps, using chemicals, and so on, all of which should serve as a spur for the investigators’ invention. Overall, these stripped-down rules could easily be used to run other ‘The Call of Kid-thulhu’ type scenarios, or even slotted into an anthology of ‘Gateway’-type scenarios in which the investigators are kids.

Rounding out The Dare is a short essay by Brian M. Sammons, ‘Grab the Machete or: How I Learned to Stop Going Insane and Love 80s Horror Movies’. It provides a brief overview of the genre and suggests ten films that the Keeper and her players should watch as inspiration. The Dare also comes with ten ready-to-play ‘The Call of Kid-thulhu’ investigators. These are all designed to be played as girls or boys, and come with alternative names and space for boy or girl photos. There are some thirty or illustrations included in the pages of The Dare—each based upon a photograph submitted by one of the Kickstarter backers, which can be used by the players to illustrate their kid.

In terms of its horror, The Dare really revolves around its PG and R ratings and the classic confined space of the haunted house. Played using just the PG rating and it would even work as a scare ridden one-shot suitable for a younger, even preteen audience. Switched to the R rating and The Dare becomes a more visceral affair, much in the mode of the film It—though without the coulrophobia—and so is better suited for mature players. For the Keeper there are plenty of staging notes throughout, though she will need to handle one NPC with care. One option might be for the NPC to be played as a Player Character Investigator working hand-in-hand with the Keeper, but if not, and the players work out what is going on beforehand, it really is up to them to roleplay within the genre until their Investigators know. 

Physically, The Dare stands out because although written for use with Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition, the layout for it is of Call of Cthulhu, Third Edition. It not only fits the period setting of the scenario, but it fits the scenario’s sense of nostalgia too and gives it a certain, delightful charm. The maps are perhaps a little plain and it needs a slight edit in places, but the artwork is excellent. The theme is applied to the front and back cover, which is done as the cover of a video cassette.

The Dare is a superb one-shot, one that manages the odd combination of being both nasty and charming, all infused with eighties nostalgia, from start to finish. Not just in the style of the story, its tone, and set-up, which can be creepy or horrible depending on the rating selected, but very much with its look. The Dare also suggests a style of play and provides a set of mechanics to support that, both of which deserve revisiting in future releases. Whether you are visiting the eighties for the first time or going back again for another go around, The Dare successfully double dares you with a one-shot of Halloween horror.

Cabin Risotto Fever is an investigative horror scenario set in the depths of winter in Canada, involving a missing academic or two, an Italian antiquary, and a bone warming dinner. If the scenario is run as written, then the Game Master will have prepared said dinner and actually dish up during play! As with other scenarios from Games Omnivorous, Cabin Risotto Fever is a system agnostic scenario, but unlike previous scenarios—The Feast on Titanhead and The Seed before it, it takes place in the modern world rather than a fantasy one. Specifically, northern Canada in 1949. However, just like The Feast on Titanhead and The Seed before it, Cabin Risotto Fever adheres to the Manifestus Omnivorous, the ten points of which are:

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

As we have come to expect for scenarios from Games Omnivorous, Cabin Risotto Fever adheres to all ten rules. It is an adventure, it is system agnostic, it takes place on Earth, it has one location, it has the one monster (though like the older scenarios, those others that appear are extensions of it), it includes Osteophagy—the practice of animals, usually herbivores, consuming bones, it involves a voracious eater, the word count is not high—the scenario only runs to twenty-eight pages, and it is presented in two colours—in this case, tangerine and black. Lastly, Cabin Risotto Fever does lack good taste—though that will either be ameliorated or exaggerated by the quality of the scenario’s singular handout and how the players and their characters react to it.

It is 1949, and Professor Martin D. Ernst from the Department of Anthropology at Schuylkill University has led an expedition into the wilds of northern Labrador in order to locate and explore an ancient Algonquian ritual site. The expedition is funded by Italian antiquarian, Rubicondo Bronzetti, who also accompanies the expedition, as does Professor Ernst’s researcher, Solomon Silverberg. It is three weeks since the expedition has been heard from, and a team of rescuers is being sent to check on them. The scenario suggests a Forest Ranger and his apprentice, another professor of anthropology, and a native shaman. It outlines the basics of the four Player Characters, all of whom should be easy to create using the roleplaying game of the Game Master’s choice. In fact, Cabin Risotto Fever could be run straight from these descriptions should a playing group want a very light game in terms of its mechanics.

What Cabin Risotto Fever does include mechanically, is rules for handling Sanity. These require four tokens per Player Character. When a Player Character sees, hears, or experiences something weird or unsettling, the Player Character’s player rolls a six-sided die. If the result is less than the number of tokens the Player Character has, the Player Character suffers a minor panic attack and looses a token. The Player Character may also learn a piece of random information pertinent to the situation in Cabin Risotto Fever. At two tokens, and then at one token, the Player Character suffers a worse panic attack and another effect, determined by the roll of an eight-sided die on the included table. These effects range from attacking a fellow Player Character to a case of unfortunate micturition. Of course, should a Player Character lose all of his tokens, then he becomes an NPC.

Cabin Risotto Fever requires some set-up, some of it traditional, some of it less so. It is suggested that the playing space be lit with candles for atmosphere and that a fast and light roleplaying game be used to prevent any impediment to roleplaying. That is the traditional. The non-traditional is the preparation of the risotto that is the scenario’s singular handout—or is that dishout?—or prop, that should be served during the play of the scenario. The recipe for the risotto al midollo in full is included in the scenario.

The focus for Cabin Risotto Fever is the cabin—as much as it is the risotto. Here the Player Characters will encounter the expedition, its members surprised to see them, but welcoming all the same and happy to invite them to dinner. Events will play out as the Player Characters poke around the cabin and interact with their hosts, some of them random, and of course, the horror of the situation slowly dawning upon them. The likelihood of course, is that the players will realise what has happened, but not their characters—and it is their realisation the players are roleplaying and reacting in horror to.

Physically, like The Feast on Titanhead and The Seed before it, Cabin Risotto Fever is well presented. It is darker and gloomier in tone given its choice of colours. The single location of the cabin is mapped out inside the separate cover. The map is detailed, but suffers a little from forced perspective. Some of the chosen fonts are a little difficult to read, but overall, Cabin Risotto Fever is easy to read. The illustrations have a heavy oppressive feel and many can easily be shown to the players during play. It needs a slight edit in places, but is overall quite a sturdy product, being done on heavy paper and card stock.

As with other scenarios which adhere to the Manifestus Omnivorous manifesto, Cabin Risotto Fever is nasty, brutal, and short, it being possible to play through the scenario and even survive in a single session. It is also easy to run using a wide variety of roleplaying games. The most obvious one is Lamentations of the Flame Weird Fantasy Roleplay, another is the publisher’s own 17th Century Minimalist: A Historical Low-Fantasy OSR Rulebook, but with some adjustment it would work with Cthulhu by Gaslight or a darker toned version of Leagues of Gothic Horror for use with Leagues of Adventure: A Rip-Roaring Setting of Exploration and Derring Do in the Late Victorian Age!. Take it away from its European setting and Cabin Risotto Fever would work well with Mörk Borg as they share a similar tone and sensibility.

Whether used as a one-shot, or added to a campaign, Cabin Risotto Fever is easy to prepare and set-up for a night’s single session of juicy, meaty horror. Indeed, the only thing difficult to set up is the risotto itself. 

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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Designed by the late Lenard Lakofka, as the first part of a trilogy, L1 The Secret of Bone Hill is a scenario for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition. Published in 1981, it presented something a little bit different for the world’s preeminent roleplaying game at the time—a sandbox, a town in which the adventurers could base themselves and explore from, locations to explore not just outside of town, but within its confines too, and an absence of plot. Or least an absence of a plot which would ordinarily drive or pull the Player Characters to explore the locations of keyed adventure module, for example, U1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh. In essence, L1 The Secret of Bone Hill is really a setting source book rather than a traditional roleplaying scenario, one that would lay the foundations for the two scenarios which would follow, L2 The Assassin’s Knot, and eventually, L3 Deep Dwarven Delve, and would together form the ‘L’ series or the Lendore Isle trilogy.

The full history of L1 The Secret of Bone Hill, as well as the option to purchase a reprint are available here, but of course, the original came in the classic format for TSR, Inc. scenarios for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition and Basic Dungeons & Dragons, a simple black and white booklet inside a separate card cover, inside of which were printed the scenario’s maps. The scenario introduces the town of Restenford and Isle of Lendore, part of the Spindrift Chain, far to the south in the World of Greyhawk setting. It recommends that the module is designed for novice and intermediate players, preferably between two and eight, using Second Level to Fourth Level characters. Then it begins not with a description of the town of Restenford or the Isle of Lendore, but wilderness tables and rumour tables, before going on to describe various wilderness locations around Restenford. These are located on the various around and overlooking Restenford, and include a temple where worship to the God of Chance takes the form of gambling, a den thieves, various campsites for travellers—and potential hirelings, and more.

The key location described here is the eponymous Bone Hill, atop which stands a partially ruined castle, around which there are signs of it having been under siege some time in the past. There is an odd atmosphere to place, occupied as it is during the day by a small tribe of Bugbears, and a small horde of the Undead during the night. There are some odd monsters too, such as the Ghoulstirge, a type of Stirge which not only feeds on your blood as standard Stirges do, but also paralyses its victims. Encounters above ground are relatively safe, but below ground they get nasty—more Undead, including a Wraith, a tough fight for adventurers of any Level, and they get weird, and even a little wondrous. Above ground there is a potions workshop where the concoctions are combinations of standard potions, such as a Potion of Longevity with a Potion of Speed, thus actually making use of the Potion Miscibility Table from the Dungeon Master’s Guide (!), but below there is a mirror which pulls the viewer in and forces him to fight himself, some not-Beholders (!) with treasure to guard and treasure to share, and afternoon tea with a surprisingly pleasant skeleton!

More than half of L1 The Secret of Bone Hill is devoted to detailing the town of Restenford, its keep, and their inhabitants. Besides the keep and its inhabitants, this description includes the town’s inn and tavern, homes of individuals such as Pelltar the sorcerer, Felix the mercenary, and a bait shop—Restenford being a fishing port. Notably, it includes a Burnt Guard Station, the shell of a guard station which has fallen into ruin, an actual adventuring location within the town itself. Throughout, there is a wealth of information given all of these locations, both in town and out, so if the Dungeon Master needs to know about animals, encounter probabilities, and what an NPC is equipped with, then she is well served by the module. However, what L1 The Secret of Bone Hill does not do is give support in terms of NPC motivation. Few of their descriptions include suggestions as what they want, and certainly no reason why they might hire the Player Characters. For example, there is a spy in the town from a rival duchy, a mentally ill abbot with designs on the daughter of the Baron of Restenford—though the Dungeon Master is advised to keep this a secret until she runs L2 The Assassin’s Knot, and a merchant whose nephew is interested in learning magic.

Rounding out L1 The Secret of Bone Hill is a short bestiary of new creatures in addition to several monsters given earlier, like the Ghoulstirge. These include the Spectator, a Beholder-like creature which readily guards treasure hoards, and the Stone Guardian, a new type of golem. This is followed by ten sample Player Characters, ranging from Second Level to Fourth Level. Most of them have at least one magical item.

Physically, L1 The Secret of Bone Hill is what you would expect from a TSR, Inc. module for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition. The layout is clean and tidy, it is easy to read, and the artwork varies in quality—the back cover seems particularly poorly handled. Some of it, is actually very good. Overall, the maps are very good, but perhaps could have been better organised. However, the organisation of the module—rumour and wilderness tables first, then the adventuring locations, including Bone Hill, and lastly the description of Restenford—feel almost backward, but are more higgledy-piggledy than helpful.

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Initial reviews of L1 The Secret of Bone Hill were less than positive. For Anders Swenson, writing in Different Worlds Issue 16 (November 1981), the issue was one of scale and randomness, stating that, “There are problems with the material as a scenario - a lot of the encounters seem to be random in nature, not closely related at all to any of the other groups of NPCs and monsters on the map. Given that the Baron of Restenford has a handy military force, why are these nests of monsters within a day’s march of his castle? How can the farmers gather their crops if the random outdoor encounter table is as dangerous as it is? And so forth.” In Ares Nr. 12 (January 1982), Robert Kern said, “The good news is that TSR is publishing a new module for low level characters. The bad news is that it might require a more experienced DM to overcome it omissions and shotgun method of presenting information.” Although he praised the functionality and description of the Restenford given in the module, he was far from positive in considering the motives for the players and their characters in exploring the region around the town.

Conversely, Jim Bambra, reviewing L1 The Secret of Bone Hill in Open Box in White Dwarf No. 35 (November 1982), were more positive. He wrote that the descriptions of both town and wilderness were “particularly colourful.”, such that “A good feel of the area is given and the whole module provides an excellent background for a campaign.”, before lamenting that, “Unfortuately [sic], it provides little more than this on a long term basis. L1 primarily sets a scene, with adventures along the way. Parts of L1 are not needed until the arrival of L2 and so trying to run this module on its own could prove to be a frustrating experience as the designer has given little indication of what L2 will contain or how many more modules there are likely to be.” However, he suggested that with the publication of its sequel, L2 The Assassin’s Knot, the module would be enjoyable and awarded the module a score of eight out of ten.

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L1 The Secret of Bone Hill is regarded as a classic, but as a classic, it is a problematic one and it would have been a problematic one at the time of its publication. Geographically, the compact and dangerous nature of the region around Restenford with its cluster of threats and busy encounter tables, does feel just a little too forced, but neither of these is insurmountable, and it is possible to suspend any sense of disbelief that this might give rise to. However, the real problems are that as a module, L1 The Secret of Bone Hill is not ready to play and it does not have a plot—or at least a hook to play and adventure there. Indeed, the nearest it gets to plot is the blurb on the cover: “Danger lurks in the Lendore Isles. Bands of evil creatures prowl the hills overlooking the town of Restenford, seeking unwary victims. Now you have come to this sleepy little village looking for adventure and excitement. You seek to fathom the unexplored reaches of Bone Hill and unlock the mysteries of Restenford.”

Obviously, L1 The Secret of Bone Hill is not designed as a plotted adventure, but as a sandbox, but as a consequence of the lack of plots and hooks, it needs to be taken apart and be prepared as a playing environment, rather than as a straightforward plotted adventure. Reasons need to be developed for the Player Characters to come to the Lendore Isle, let alone go exploring and adventuring there. After all, the minimum Level for the Player Characters is Second rather than First Level, so they will have had some previous adventures. The inclusion of the extensive rumour tables support this, but nevertheless, the Dungeon Master still has to pull them out and link them to locations described elsewhere in the scenario, to create hooks which will pull her Player Characters into the setting and the plots that the rumours hint at, but are left undeveloped and unexplored. This process is not really helped by the lack of motivations for the many NPCs to be found in the module—the villains in particular, and it is not helped by the scattershot organisation which presents the adventuring locations first rather than the starting point for the Player Characters that is the town of Restenford.

There is a lot of gaming potential in L1 The Secret of Bone Hill, but as one of the first sandbox adventures, its design—which is almost like a sandbox itself in its organisation—does not match its potential. It needs a lot of effort upon the part of Dungeon Master to even begin to work well, who will have to pull it apart and rebuild it around plots and hooks that she will have to develop. Fortunately, there is a wealth of detail in its pages for the Dungeon Master looking to develop L1 The Secret of Bone Hill into a more fully rounded adventuring environment. Far from being a plotted adventure, L1 The Secret of Bone Hill is more of a sourcebook and a toolkit awaiting the input of an experienced Dungeon Master.

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For further information about L1 The Secret of Bone Hill and its author, Lenard Lakfoka, the Grognardia blog posted an interview with him in 2009. The first in three part series can be found here and is well worth taking the time to read.