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—and so on, as the anniversaries come up. 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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Bushido is significant for being the very first Samurai role-playing game set in Feudal Japan. Designed by Robert N. Charrette and Paul R. Hume—who would go on to design the highly regarded Shadowrun in 1989—and originally published in 1979 by the short-lived Tyr Gamesmakers Ltd., it is best known from the 1981 boxed set published by Fantasy Games Unlimited, so it this version that is being reviewed here. Drawing upon the Japanese film genre of ‘sword fighting’ or samurai cinema known as ‘Chambara’, it is set in a semi-historical heroic, mythic, and fantastic version of Japan, in which Bushi, Budoka, Yakuza, Ninja, Shugenja, and Gakusho seek to serve their liege lords or masters, and do so with honour and loyalty. Notably, as much as there is an emphasis in Bushido on sword-fighting and magic, myth and history—almost like any other roleplaying game—the roleplaying game places a strong emphasis upon the player characters’ honour and social position.

The 1981 boxed set comes with two thick books, a map of Nippon marked with its provinces, a Game Master’s Screen, and a character sheet. The books consist of ‘Book I, The Heroes of Nippon’, which provides rules of play and the players guidebook, and ‘Book II, The Land of Nippon’, a Gamemaster’s Guidebook. Both are black and white books, lightly illustrated, but filled with dense text. ‘Book I, The Heroes of Nippon’ covers characters, skills, the core mechanics, and spells, whilst ‘Book II, The Land of Nippon’ covers NPCs, battles, treasure, places of Nippon, non-adventuring activity, and a scenario.

A character in Bushido is defined by six Attributes—Strength, Deftness, Speed, Health, Wit, and Will; Saving Throws—derived from the Attributes to determine the success of an action using a particular Attribute; Abilities—derived factors such as health and learning; Capabilities and Skills. The Classic Man in Bushido has a value of ten in each of the Attributes, which can actually range between one and forty. A character will also have a Profession and a Level—Bushido being a ‘Class and Level’ roleplaying game, although with just the six Levels of Experience. The six Professions are Bushi—honourable warriors, the classic samurai, Budoka—martial artists, Yakuza—gangsters and folk heroes, Ninja—status-less, dishonourable thieves, spies, and assassins, Shugenja—Taoist-style wizards, and Gakusho—either Buddhist or Shinto priests. Each Profession provides a character with Attribute bonuses and has its own skills as well as Ki powers, each fuelled by a character’s inner spiritual reservoir. Notably, the skills are divided into Bugei or combat skills, Fine Arts, Practical Arts, Ninja skills, and Magical and Mystical skills with a lot of attention paid to each. Lastly, a character has On, a measure of the respect that the character has for himself, gained by winning contests, battles, and duels, being heroic, going on pilgrimage, and so on, but lost for acts of cowardice or dishonesty, rashness, and the like. On is necessary—though not for Ninja—when gaining Levels in a Profession, but if too much On is lost, a character can lose Levels. Lastly, Status represents a character’s standing in society.

Now creating a character in Bushido is not an easy process, primarily because it is not presented in what would be regarded as a logical order. The actual explanation of the process does not come until half way through the eighty pages of ‘Book I, The Heroes of Nippon’. The first forty or so pages of the book are devoted to explaining the stats, skills, Ki powers, and Professions, basically everything to do with the make-up of character, but without a starting point. So it feels backward because essentially, a player has to read so far into the book in order to actually begin the creation, but then go back to the beginning of the book to continue it, plus there is a lot of flipping back and forth as part of the process.

To create a character in Bushido, a player rolls to determine his character’s caste, which determines the Professions open to him, his initial On, and starting funds. If he rolls low he will be of Samurai class, but if he rolls high, he will be of the Eta caste and can only be a Ninja. Otherwise, a player is free to choose whatever Profession he wants for his character, though there are social and other consequences, for example, a Samurai who chooses to become a Yakuza , loses half of his On. The character’s caste will provide some initial skills, whilst his Profession will add more plus Attribute modifiers, starting goods, and Hit Points. A player also needs to distribute sixty points to his character’s Attributes. Numerous factors, including skill values, are then derived from all of this.

Name: Eiichi
Caste: Heimin (Farmer, Low)
Age: 20 On: 5
Profession: Yakuza Level: 1
Status: 10

Strength 10 ST: 4 Enc. Cap: 20 lbs. Dam: 0 Unarmed: 1d3
Deftness 20 ST: 7 BAP: 10
Speed 15 ST: 6 MNA: 1 BMA: 5
Health 15 ST: 6 HPT: 20
Wit 20 ST: 7 FIS: 20 Per: 6
Will 20 ST: 7 Power: 20

Learning Rate: 2 Zanshin: 1

Capabilities
Brawling: 6 Climbing: 10 Leaping: 7 Magic: 40 (8) Swimming: 5

Skills
Commerce 40 (9), Fishing 60 (13), Gambling 60 (13), Katakana 70 (14), Massage 40 (9), Popular Dance 55 (12), Sumai 50 (11), Tantojujitsu 55 (12), Yakuza Dialect 70 (14)

Goods
Dice, aiguchi (d3), 4 silver

Mechanically, Bushido uses a twenty-sided die for its resolution system. Originally, this would have been in the days of twenty-sided dice with the numbers zero through nine marked on it twice, so players and Game Masters alike would have needed to mark their dice accordingly. To have his character undertake an action, a player rolls against the Saving Throw of an appropriate Attribute, Capability, or Skill. The Saving Throw of any Attribute is approximately a third of its value, the value of a Capability an average of three different Saving Throws, and the Base Chance of Success or BCS of a skill equal to a fifth of its value, skills being rated as percentiles. If the skill is a bonus skill for a Profession, then the character’s Level is also added. Critical successes are possible on a roll of one and failures on a roll of a twenty. The quality of any skill test can be determined how much the result is under the adjusted Base Chance of Success.

Combat uses the same mechanics with a character being able to do between one and three actions depending on his Speed Attribute and taking into account the character’s combat awareness or Zanshin. Combat takes into account various types of attack, including bash, butt stroke, disarm, strike, thrust, and more, but ultimately it involves the player rolling against the weapon or Bugei skill being used, its BCS adjusted by the opponent’s Armour Class, which ranges from zero for ordinary clothing up to ten for master heavy samurai armour. Damage is inflicted directly from a character’s Health with a critical success in combat potentially causing double or triple damage, and a high chance of a special effect which might be the loss of a limb or even death. Conversely, a critical failure might see a character might injure himself. Overall, combat in Bushido is potentially really quite deadly, especially against unarmoured combatants.

Magic in Bushido is used by two different Professions. The Shugenja knows a number of basic spells or powers, like Magic Detection and Astral Senses, but his more powerful spells come one of the five schools based on the elements—Water, Fire, Wood, Metal and Soil, plus some common spells. Every spell has a minimum in terms of the knowledge of the school required as well as the Level of the character. The other Profession is the Gakusho or priest, whose powers vary according to whether he is a Buddhist or Shintoist. Instead of the five schools of magic, the Gashuko studies the Five Yoga—each of which corresponds to one of the five elemental schools—and sacred texts, ‘Sutras’ for Buddhists or and ‘Norito’ for Shintoists. Both Shugenja and Gakusho take a degree of commitment upon the part of the player and the Game Master to play. Ninja in Bushido possess the expected mix of stealth and combat skills, but can also manufacture Gimmicks like flash grenades, blowguns, blinding powders, and so on.

Apart from the initial selection determined from a character’s caste and Profession, a player is free to choose the skills he wants for his character, that is, if he can find a school and a teacher which will accept him. Certain Professions provide bonuses to learning certain skills, but there is a certain emphasis on combat skills in Bushido, only exacerbated by the inclusion of Okuden, secret combat skills or manoeuvres such as Piercing Thrust or the Lightning Stroke. All six Professions also have their own Ki powers—focussed and unfocussed—the former requiring concentration, the latter not.  So for the Bushi, that might be Damage Focus, Distant Death for the Budoka, and Lore Master for the Shugenja, but all enable a character to do amazing feats.

To progress, a character needs to earn experience points or Budo and have a minimum level of On. On though, can go down as well as up, so what this means is that as much as it is gained by winning contests, battles, and duels, being heroic, going on pilgrimage, and so on, but is lost for acts of cowardice or dishonesty, rashness, and the like. So characters are encouraged to roleplay the positive aspects of the setting and so will be rewarded for it. Besides this, progression is not just a matter of adventuring, but studying and learning too.

In addition to the mechanics of the roleplaying game, Bushido includes background on Nippon, the structure of its society, customs, religious beliefs, the place of women in society, and details of weaponry—including a good illustration of them all together on the back cover of ‘Book I, The Heroes of Nippon’. ‘Book II, The Land of Nippon’ covers creating NPCs as well as a bestiary of creatures mythic—legendary and supernatural—and mundane, a discussion of events the player characters can get involved in, places in Nippon, jobs they can take in addition to adventuring, and the benefits and duties of being in particular groups, such fiefs, schools, ninja clans, yakuza gangs, and so on. The advanced game covers founding and running these as the player characters gain status. Lastly there is an adventure, ‘An Evening at the Inn of Restful Sleep’, a fairly simple affair in which the player characters are victims of skulduggery when they stay at an inn. It is at least a good reason to introduce the characters and get them working together. Overall, the setting of Nippon manages to be just about fantastic enough without detracting from its not too historical feel and flavour—it is not strictly speaking a completely historical treatment of feudal Japan, but then neither is it wholly fantastic either. Bushido owes this to its Chambara origins as much as it does the authors. 

Physically, Bushido is a densely presented pair of books. The layout is generally tidy, but the editing is wanting. If there is a real issue with Bushido, it is that there is no index for either book, whilst a glossary would have been useful. The roleplaying game could have done with more examples, but above all, it needed better organisation and more clearly separated sections of rules. The result is often a frustrating mess, as players and Game Master alike are forced to search for a rule or other content. There is a solid game here, the organisation is a hindrance to that aim.


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Bushido was reviewed extensively at the time of its publication—by all three of its publishers. Steven L. Lortz reviewed it in Different Worlds Issue 3 (June/July, 1979), comparing it to the leading roleplaying games of the day, “RuneQuest and Dungeons & Dragons typify two styles of role-play which are very different in mechanics and philosophy; specific expertise versus general experience levels, character specialization versus character classes, spell points versus Vancian magic, and static versus dynamic hit points. In Bushido, Hume and Charrette have produced a well-knit integration of elements from each of these styles and provided a fairly complete and playable social milieu for the characters to operate within. For these reasons, I highly recommend Bushido to people who are interested in running a fantasy campaign based primarily on the Japanese mythos and to people who are interested in the art of RPG design. However, the Basic Chance of Success mechanism is a reversal of the die rolling conventions of both RuneQuest and Dungeons & Dragons, so some work would be required before a person could adapt from Bushido into a campaign based on either of these two systems.”

In Dragon #34 (February, 1980), D. Okada noted that, “With the exception of M.A.R. Barker’s Empire of the Petal Throne, virtually every game that comes out has a common outlook. Each game is based on a view of life (whether in fantasy or science fiction) that draws its roots from Western culture. This is to be expected. The largest, if not only, market for games is found in the Western world. But now the gamer is offered a new choice.” Which of course is Bushido. He commented though, that, “...[T]he game is not perfect. There are a horrendous amount of typographical errors in the rules. While the game does not always suffer from these errors, there are times when they do hamper understanding of what is supposed to be going on.” before concluding that, “Despite these faults, the game is worth the price to the person interested in developing a more cosmopolitan outlook. After all, while it’s fun to be Conan or Gandalf in D&D, there is also a time to try and be Miyamoto Musashi seeking perfection in the use of the sword, don’t you think?”

Conversely, writing in The Space Gamer Number 29 (July, 1980), Forrest Johnson was distinctly dismissive, stating that, “Students of Japan may be irritated by such things as misspellings, the translation of “on” as face and the omission from the map of the island of Hokkaido. The metaphysics seem more Hindu than Japanese and some of the monsters (trolls, vampires, ogres) are distinctly round-eyed.” before concluding, “Karate fans and samurai fans may dig this one. Serious students will just have to wait for something better.” 

Similarly, in Ares Nr. 7 (March, 1981), Eric Goldberg was critical of the character generation method, saying that, “The mechanics for character generation represent two contradictory theories. The point distribution system is intended to promote equality among the characters. The caste and rank system randomly creates great disparities between them. There is a logical argument for both methods – even in conjunction – but one’s purpose defeats the other’s. Furthermore, restricting one profession (ninja) to those who are of that caste (a 15% chance) limits those unfortunate characters who cannot be a ninja to four professions. (Also, a character who is of the ninja caste is almost forced to be a ninja, unless he feels no qualms about throwing away an advantage.) I am surprised the designers did not extend their point assignment system to that the players could “buy” caste and rank, thus ensuring that everyone would have free choice.” It is notable that this is exactly what the designers did with Shadowrun.

Nevertheless, Eric Goldberg was slightly more positive in his conclusion, saying that “Bushido’s strong points are the inventive game mechanics (for the time), the “feel” of Japanese culture, and the tentative emphasis on playing a role. Most FRP games rely on the players to determine in which direction their characters will go, and often force them into stereotyped roles. Hume and Charette were players turned designers, and remained aware of the difficulties they had met in previously published games.” and “A quest for knowledge about Japanese culture would not begin with Bushido, partly because of the interpolation of mythic beliefs into the background. However, the players of the game do not wish to know all the ins and outs of that country, however interesting they may be. Bushido is a nice enough meld of a surrealistic and D&D-style flavor, and has a game system sturdy enough to support this impression.” 

Reviewing Bushido in White Dwarf Issue No 32 (August, 1982), Mike Polling was wholly more positive, exclaiming that, “If you’re for the ultimate Fantasy Role-Playing Game, look no further. This is it.” before awarding both Bushido and the separate adventure, Valley of the Mists, a score of ten out of ten.

Bushido has also been the subject of a number of retrospectives. In Dragon #134 (June, 1988), it was reviewed again, this time by Jim Bambra and alongside reviews of Land of Ninja, a supplement for RuneQuest III and Oriental Adventures, the supplement for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. In light of the other two supplements being reviewed, he was more guarded in his praise, stating that, “The BUSHIDO game was the first game to open up the mysterious East to roleplayers  –  but at a cost. While admirably capturing the flavor of medieval Japan, the BUSHIDO game is densely written and difficult to grasp. It is a game for dedicated gamers who, in their pursuit of Oriental action, are willing to struggle with rule books that make advanced nuclear theory texts seem like light reading by comparison.” before concluding that, “If you’re looking for a stand-alone system, then check out the BUSHIDO game. But if accessibility and ease of use are your primary requirements, stay well away.”

In ‘The Way of the Warrior, The Way of Bushido’ in The Last Province Issue 1 (October, 1992), Paz Newis said, “Ah, the early eighties when a game system said complete rule system, by jingo, it meant it... However the initial rush of joy is likely to be short lived. Upon opening one of the books the level of undertaking becomes apparent. You want to authentically simulate feudal fantasy Japan? It might be quicker to move there and join their Sealed Knot equivalent.” The reviewer was otherwise positive about the game. Similarly, Bushido was described Arcane issue 6 (May, 1996) as having, “...[C]aptured the spirit of the  Samurais’ [sic] greatest era: feudal Japan.” and that, “Politics and action went hand in hand with Bushido and the game had an innately epic scale.” Editor Steve Faragher’s obvious enthusiasm should be tempered by the fact that he had been part of the Games of Liverpool team which published the scenario, Takishido’s Debt, for Bushido in 1983.


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As the first roleplaying game set in feudal Japan, Bushido is groundbreaking, providing a lot of information about the setting, the types of characters which can be played, and what they can do. There is a lot of flavour and detail in Bushido, especially so in the descriptions of the various types of skills—Bugei or combat skills, Fine Arts, Practical Arts, Ninja skills, and Magical and Mystical skills—but also in the explanations of society and customs, and of course, in the On or personal honour rules which encourage roleplaying and immersion in the setting. Yet as much as it set a standard in terms of background for the characters, who they and what they do, Bushido got just about everything wrong in terms of how a roleplaying needs to be presented. The density of the text, the explanation of terms before they are needed, and the dreadfully poor organisation of the rules—exacerbated by a lack of index—made Bushido inaccessible. Instead of needing to be read, Bushido needed to be studied, its textbook-like layout and structure also making the game difficult to teach.

Bushido had the potential to be a good roleplaying game and a great treatment of its genre. Yet from the start, Bushido needed a second edition of the Fantasy Games Unlimited version to rip the organisation of its contents apart and put it back together to make it accessible. It is a shame that this never happened, for it let other Oriental-set roleplaying games shine in its stead.


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With thanks to Steven Ward for granting me last minute access to The Last Province #1.

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—and so on, as the anniversaries come up. 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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1959 marks the publication of two classic wargames. One is Diplomacy: A Game of International Intrigue, Trust, and Treachery, the other is Risk: The Continental Game. Although they are both set in past times, one Napoleonic, one Edwardian, they could not be more different. One is card and dice driven and has been hugely successful, probably the most successful mass market wargame ever published, but the other is entirely trust and decision driven. The former is Risk, the latter Diplomacy. Both are sixty years old in 2019.

Risk was originally invented and released in France in 1957 as La Conquête du Monde—The Conquest of the World—by French film director Albert Lamorisse. It was then bought by American publishers Parker Brothers and released as Risk: The Continental Game in 1959, later as Risk: The Game of Global Domination. Today, it is published as Risk: The Game of Strategic Conquest by Wizards of the Coast as part of its Avalon Hill brand. Although the game has seen numerous variations and alternative settings, such as the acclaimed Risk Legacy or Risk 2210 AD, the core game remains much the same as the original. Two to five players (although it comes with six armies), aged ten and up, attempt to defeat each others’ armies and conquer the world.

Risk is played on a map of the world, each of the six continents colour-coded and divided into separate territories, for a total of forty-two. Some of the continents are connected by sea routes, for example, Brazil to North Africa or Iceland to Greenland, allowing sea travel between territories, but otherwise, Risk entirely concerns itself with land battles. There is a card corresponding to each territory and these forty-two territory cards are used to determine the initial placement of the players’ troops. The cards are also marked with one of three symbols—infantry, cavalry, or artillery—and when collected in suits of three (one of each, three of the same, or two of the same and a wild card), they can be turned in to gain a player new troops. To gain new territory cards, a player will need to attack the territories of his rival players, defeat their troops, and capture them.

Game set-up is simple. Each player receives his army and is dealt a random set of territory cards. These indicate where his troops start, the player placing one or more troops in each of these starting territories. The cards are then handed back to form the deck from which a territory card is drawn when a player captures one or more territories on his turn. On his turn a player receives new troops according to the number of territories and any whole continents he holds, makes as many attacks against his rivals as he wants, and then moves any of his troops to adjacent territories as long as there is always one unit left in each territory. Each army consists of infantry, cavalry, and artillery, with the cavalry pieces being used to represent five infantry and artillery used to represent ten. Neither cavalry and artillery have any other role in the game bar to make mass troop handling easier.

Battles are handled simply enough. The attacking player makes his attack with between one and three troops, whilst the defending player defends with between one and two troops. The attacking player rolls a single red six-sided die for each of his attacking troops, whilst the defending player rolls a blue die for each of his defending troops. The highest die rolls from each side are compared with each other, the higher result of a pair defeating the other and resulting in removal of the defeated enemy troop unit. Ties are awarded to the defending player, but where the defending player can only defeat a maximum of two attacking troops in an exchange, an attacking player can defeat both defending troop units with a good roll. The attacking player can continue attacking until he runs out of troops or he captures the territory he is attacking. If the latter, then he draws a new territory card.

Play continues like this until one player has defeated his rivals and conquered the world. This then is Risk, a game about the ‘risk’ of attacking the enemy, defeating them, and capturing their territory. It is not a game about defence or withstanding your opponents’ attacks—although that will happen in the game—but a game which rewards the attacking player who is successful in capturing territories. The rewards are always more troops and come in various ways. Capture and hold more territories and a player will be rewarded with more troops at the start of his turn; capture and hold a continent and a player will be rewarded with more troops at the start of his turn; and capture more territories and a player will be rewarded with a territory card each turn, which suites of three can be turned in at the beginning of his turn for more troops. Notably, each time a player hands in three territory cards, he is rewarded with more troops than the last player who did so, whether that was himself or a rival.

Famously, Risk is more a game of luck than skill or strategy. It rewards success or luck by giving the winner more troops with which to defeat his rivals. Of course, his luck can change and go the other way, but the result either way is a fairly long game, especially the more players who are involved, with not a great deal for the players to do when it is not their turn. On the plus side, the simplicity of the rules make Risk easy to teach and learn, then set up and play.

This though is Classic Risk, a game of global domination played until one player resoundly defeats the others. In today’s version, Risk: The Game of Strategic Conquest, it is only one of game types suggested—and not even the first. ‘Game 1: Secret Mission RISK’ is the first and the default game in Risk: The Game of Strategic Conquest and sees each player assigned a secret mission card from the twelve included in the game, for example, ‘Destroy all ORANGE  troops’ or ‘Conquer the continents of EUROPE and AUSTRALIA’. Should a player meet all of the conditions of his secret mission card, then he wins the game. This can happen even if another player unintentionally helps him out, for example, if a player defeats all of the orange troops, then the player with the ‘Destroy all ORANGE  troops’ secret mission wins.

‘Game 1: Secret Mission RISK’ counters one of the criticisms of Risk, providing more focused objectives for a shorter game. ‘Game 2: Classic RISK’ is what the standard game of Risk was before the introduction of secret missions and will be the version remembered by many when they recall the game. ‘Game 3: RISK for 2 Players’ requires one player to defeat the other, but adds a neutral army which can both players can attack, yet when one player does so, the other player rolls for its defence. Otherwise, this two-player variant plays the same as the classic variant. Lastly, ‘Game 4: Capital RISK’ gives each player a headquarters located in one of their territories. This version is won by capturing all of your opponent’s headquarters.

Physically, Risk: The Game of Strategic Conquest looks, feels, but is not as cheap as it  should be, given the quality of its components. The armies included in the game—the infantry, cavalry, and artillery—are of cheap plastic, the cards of thin card, and the game board, although illustrated with an attractive map, on slightly thick card rather than being mounted. The map board does not quite sit flat and will need to be weighted down. Fortunately, the rulebook is neatly laid out, easy to read, and comes with a little playing advice, making it the best produced item in the less than sturdy box.

Many will claim that Risk: The Game of Strategic Conquest is a classic game. This is undeniably true, but not because it is a good game. It is not a good game because it takes too long to play, because it luck based, because it favours the victor and so often leaves the other players with long periods with nothing to do. All of these are acknowledged issues with the game, some of which are addressed by the different game types in the current version. Yet this does not mean it is unplayable nor inaccessible, but does often mean that other games are designed as the anti-Risk, just as some games are designed as the anti-Monopoly.

Rather Risk: The Game of Strategic Conquest is a classic game because it is the most mass-produced and most sold wargame of all time, having been on sale in toy shops, department stores, game shops, and on-line for sixty years, and thus been on our shelves for just as long. Where games like Monopoly, Cluedo, and Scrabble are the games of our childhood, acceptable to all of the family, Risk: The Game of Strategic Conquest is one step away from those, acceptable still, but not to all of the family because of its subject matter and playing time. Like those other games it benefits from simple rules that everyone can understand and quickly master, so can be played by anyone, no matter what their skill level is. Indeed, despite it being a confrontational wargame, such is the element of luck in the game, the losing players can blame invariably part of their loss down to the dice rather than their lack of skill or their opponent’s greater skill. 

Ultimately, Risk: The Game of Strategic Conquest is our first experience with wargaming, an acceptable introduction to the hobby and a childhood classic worth revisiting out of nostalgia rather than because it is a good game. Accessible, playable, but at best a stepping stone to better and more interesting games. 

The hobby seems sadly lacking without the definitive British fantasy roleplaying game being available on the shelves of your local gaming store, but the good news is that Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay returned in 2018—and from a British publisher to boot. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Fourth Edition is published by Cubicle Seven Entertainment and the good news that this new edition is a return to something akin to the original design and mechanics of the first two editions rather than the third. Inspired by the fiction of Michael Moorcock and the Lovecraftian investigative roleplaying of Call of Cthulhu, as much as by Tolkien, and all taking place in the Old World, a fantasy inspired by the Europe of the Thirty Years War and the Holy Roman Empire, it is a roleplaying game in which minor nobles, dwarf slayers, witch hunters, ex-soldiers, merchants, road wardens, petty wizards, priests to Sigmar and Ulrich, and of course, rat catchers—plus little dog, hold back incursions by the forces of Chaos, run scams, uncover cults and conspiracies, and more, all in the face of intransigence and callousness upon the part of the ruling classes and the churches. It remains still ‘A Grim World of Perilous Adventure’, with mud, blood, excrement, and worse, underfoot.

The starting point for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Fourth Edition is not necessarily the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Fourth Edition core rulebook, but the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Starter Set. Like any good starter set, this is designed to introduce the roleplaying game and its setting, and provide everything necessary to give a gaming group several hours’ worth of play. This it does in handsome fashion, right from the moment that Game Master or player open up the box. The first thing that you find is a set of percentile dice under which can be found seven portfolios—one ‘Read This First’ and six character portfolios; a double-sided map of the town and map of Ubersreik, a combat and injury reference sheet, an attributes and skills and tests reference sheet, An Introduction to Ubersreik and the Empire and a Conditions reference sheet; two books—The Adventure Book and A Guide to Ubersreik; and handouts sheets and a set of Advantage tokens. All of which is done in full colour on heavy stock—both paper and cardboard. The reference sheets are intended for both the Game Master and her players, to be accessed during play.

Having unpacked all of this, it should be noted that the production values of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Starter Set are such that the inside of the box and the lid are no mere ordinary, plain cardboard. The inside of the box is a full colour map of The Empire, whilst the inside of the lid is designed to work as a Game Master Screen. The latter is a rather nice touch, but perhaps it could have been better placed in landscape rather than portrait format for greater stability.

Each of the seven portfolios is a gatefold leaflet on stiff paper, a format which gives more space which is used well on all seven. So in the ‘Read This First’ portfolio, the main page is given over to an introduction to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, whilst the wings serve as full-length sidebars either side of the main page on which descriptions are given for each of the various items in the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Starter Set. For the character portfolios, the character sheet and illustration is on the main page, whilst an explanation of various aspects of the character sheet is given on the left and the character’s background on the right. The latter includes possible motivations, group ties, and secrets, tying the character into the setting and adventures further detailed in The Adventure Book and A Guide to Ubersreik. An explanation of who each character is and why you would play them. Notably, there is advice here not to open a character portfolio until a player has decided that it is the one that he wants to play. Each character is given a full illustration on the back of the portfolio.

The six pre-generated characters include a noble turned soldier, a witch hunter dedicated to Sigmar, a High Elf merchant, a distrusted wizard (all wizards are distrusted), a joyful Halfling thief, and an honourable Dwarf slayer. There is much that a veteran player of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay will recognise. So a familiar characteristics—Weapon Skill, Ballistic Skill, Strength, Toughness, and so on, skills like Charm and Consume Alcohol—with skills and characteristics being rated as percentages, and Talents such as Luck, Sixth Sense, and Warrior Born, which will all be familiar.  In addition, a character has a number of other attributes. Fate can be spent to have the character avoid death, Fortune to reroll or improve a Test, Resilience to set the result of a Test, and Resolve can be used to remove or negate conditions like Fear.

The mechanics themselves, essentially a qualitative percentile system, are explained in The Adventure Book, a combination scenario and rules book. So when a character wants to do something, his player rolls percentile dice and attempt to get equal to or under the characteristic or skill being used for the Test. That though is a Simple Test. When a player needs to know how well his character did, he rolls a Dramatic Test. This is slightly more complex in that the ‘tens’ value on the dice roll is subtracted from the ‘tens’ value of the skill. This determines the character’s Success Level, which can be positive or negative. The higher it is, the better the outcome, the lower—or more negative—it is, the worse the outcome. So for example, Wanda wants to distract the town watch patrol whilst her compatriots get away, so uses her Blather skill of 45. The Game rates this is as Challenging, so there is no modifier to the skill. Wanda’s player rolls 29. Deducting the tens result of the roll (2) from the skill (4), gives a Success Level value of 2, which is a successful outcome. 

Opposed rolls generally compare Success Levels, the character or NPC with more succeeding over the other. Melee combat also uses opposed rolls—Weapon Skill versus Weapon Skill if parrying or the Dodge Skill if trying to get out of the way, whereas missile attacks, rolled on Ballistic Skill are Simple Tests. Success Levels not only determine if a character manages to strike his opponent in combat, but also the amount of extra damage inflicted. If a double is rolled—eleven, twenty-two, thirty-three, and so on—then a critical hit has been made. This can be made when attacking or parrying, and it can even be made when an opponent has rolled more Success Levels than the character’s player. So a character can lose an exchange of blows, but still inflict an effect. In addition, the combat mechanics in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Fourth Edition are designed to have a character build upon success, gaining Advantage when attacking an opponent who is surprised, charging into combat, defeating an important NPC, and so on, gaining a +10 bonus to combat actions each time. This is lost if a character loses an opposed roll or suffers a wound, but is designed to give a character an edge as he gains momentum in a fight. Both players and Game Master can keep track of characters’ Advantage using the tokens which come in the box.

All of these mechanics are explained over the first ten or so pages of The Adventure Book, not in one go, but as they are needed in the first scenario. The aim here is for the Game Master to teach her players on the go and in this they are successful. There is probably slightly too much text for the Game Master to teach them unprepared, but a single read through should be enough otherwise. The adventures in The Adventure Book consist of one main scenario and ten detailed seeds. The main scenario is ‘Making the Rounds’ and consists of five parts. It starts innocently enough with a shopping trip before exploding into a big set piece which first lands the player characters in hot water and then with unexpected duties. Episodic in nature, it is solidly plotted, and there is scope for the Game Master to expand it with scenarios of her own or mixing in the ten seeds that follow ‘Making the Rounds’, many of which are written for each of the pre-generated characters. In addition to the rules, there is advice on playing all of the NPCs, when to run certain scenarios, and so on, for the Game Master throughout The Adventure Book. For the most part, ‘Making the Rounds’ is fairly straightforward, but the latter two acts will need a little more preparation than the earlier three, being more open in nature than the other parts.

The second, thicker book, is A Guide to Ubersreik. It describes Ubersreik, the fortress-town in the south of the Reikland, noted for the great Dwarf bridge across the river, which sits at the mouth of the Grey Lady Pass, the only reliable trade route south to the Bretonnnian duchy of Parravon. The town and its surrounding duchy are in turmoil after the ruling House Jungfreud was unseated by the emperor. The book gives a history of the town, reasons to visit, and the various places and districts of the town. They include the various guilds, shops, and places of the artisan’s quarter, such as the Locksmith’s Guild—with its pathological hatred of illegal locks, Satrioli’s Sausage Shop—known for its Tilean food and the gaggle of Halflings employed there, and Wandiene Rookery—the largest and worst of the town’s slums. The guide also covers Dawihafen, the Dwarf Quarter, home to the town’s many Dwarves, Ubersreik Bridge itself, temples to the various gods, Von Holzenaur’s Potion Shop, Wahlund’s Rat Catchers, and more. The sewers are also detailed, as are several cults devoted to the Chaos gods—Khorne, Nurgle, Slaanesh, and Tzeentch, and the Yellowbellies, the Faceless Ones, and the Cult of the Bog King, a number of local cults which may or may not be fronts for the other cults… Along the way, there are lots of inns and taverns described too—which seems befitting any town or city in the Old World—as well as yet more scenario hooks to bolster the adventures given in The Adventure Guide. If there is an issue with A Guide to Ubersreik, it is that only a single building is given a map. The book could certainly have done with more.

The Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Starter Set is not a good introduction to roleplaying and nor is it designed to be. It just does not start from the first principles to do that, but that is fine, because as an introduction to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Fourth Edition, it does a very good job and does so in an attractive package. In the main, the designers keep the rules to a minimum, allowing the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Starter Set to focus on the story, the setting—and importantly, room for the Game Master to expand upon its content. There are of course the extra scenarios in The Adventure Book and the hooks in A Guide to Ubersreik, but the publisher has published further material set in and around the fortress-town, including several scenarios. Ultimately, the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Starter Set and its expansions are designed to set up the classic The Enemy Within campaign for the new edition.

As written, the contents of the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Starter Set can be played straight through and should provide multiple sessions of gaming. All of which can be done without the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Fourth Edition core book, but if the Game Master and her players want their characters to progress, then they will need access to that book. The Adventure Book in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Starter Set does provide the experience point awards for playing through its scenarios, but not the means to apply them. Conversely, a group with access to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Fourth Edition core book could simply create their own characters and play through the content of the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Starter Set without any problem, although some of the nuances of the pre-generated characters and their ties to Ubersreik may be lost. 

Although not quite suited for a beginning Game Master, for the experienced roleplayer or the veteran player of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay wanting a first taste of the new edition, the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Starter Set is the perfect jumping on point. Overall, the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Starter Set is something that every Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay devotee will want, offering high production values, excellent value for money, and all that a gaming group will need for several sessions of grim and perilous adventure.

Mutant Crawl Classics 2018 Holiday Module: Home for the Holideath 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 use with player characters of First Level, which means that it is not a Character Funnel, one of the 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. Rather Blessings of the Vile Brotherhood is designed for characters of Fourth Level, so each of the player characters will have a range of powers and abilities as equipment and artefacts scavenged after two or three adventures out in Terra A.D.

As its title suggests, Mutant Crawl Classics 2018 Holiday Module: Home for the Holideath is something a little bit different, a festive, holiday-themed scenario suitable for playing at this time of year. It can easily be added to any Mutant Crawl Classics campaign, starting as it does with a problem that has befallen the player characters’ village. For generations, two tribes—the Mud-Walker tribe and the Violent Serpent tribe—have exchanged gifts at a given time each winter to renew the bonds of friendship and peace between their peoples. Unfortunately, before the ceremony at which this exchange takes place happens this year, it is discovered that all of the presents have been stolen! Without the gifts and the traditions of the ceremony, the acrimony between the two tribes from before the peace threatens to rear its ugly head and hostilities to break out once again. So it is up to the player characters—or Seekers—to track down the gifts and return before war breaks out!

Like many scenarios for Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game, the setting for Mutant Crawl Classics 2018 Holiday Module: Home for the Holideath is a dungeon of the future. In this case, it is a temple of Ancients dedicated to commerce, but also to Christmas and its cheeriness. Of course, in the time of the Ancients it was a department store, but in the centuries since the great apocalypse that brought about Terra A.D., its AI administrator, XMAS—or eXtended Mercantile Artificial Salesperson—and its facilities have degraded and been twisted by the ongoing effects of the disaster and the lack of maintenance. Thus each of the three main floors is garishly decorated in tinsel, holly wreaths, baubles, and gaudy point of sale material and all of the paraphernalia you would expect of a department store putting on a big push for Christmas sale, but now the Smartpaper wrapping station is a security station, Santa’s bio-engineered helper elves have either gone feral or woodpunk, the transport network between floors have become death traps, and what was once a winter spectacle on the top floor, is now a hardlight hell. Plus, security is provided by Miss Majorie, a grandmother robot who will not tolerate the antics of naughty boys and girls (or Manimals, Mutants, and Plantients). Which all leads to the possibility that the great disaster that struck the Ancients either took place before Christmas or that this once great temple of Christmas consumerism was actually open all year!

In amongst all of the death traps and dangerous denizens of the commercial temple of the Ancients you would expect of a module for Mutant Crawl Classics, it turns out that Mutant Crawl Classics 2018 Holiday Module: Home for the Holideath is really quite generous with its gifts. The ground floor consists of a number of merchandise stations where gifts for family and friends can still be found. Thees gifts though, are no mere gee gaws or bric-a-brac, but in many cases actually useful artefacts. Minor useful items, but useful, festively themed minor artefacts all the same. There are rechargeable sunglasses, fantastic fit-anyone skates, and holiday sweaters which light up, but are very warm and actually provide an Armour Class bonus. There are plenty of these minor artefacts to go around and certainly each of the Seekers should come away with something from the scenario (if they survive that is.) A nice touch is that if the Seekers look in the right places there whole, brightly coloured, heavily illustrated books dedicated to showcasing just what the temple has on sale and each will provide a bonus in trying to work out what each item does.

Phsyically, Mutant Crawl Classics 2018 Holiday Module: Home for the Holideath is quite short, but decently illustrated with some creepy artwork. The book is well written, although the Game Master will need to give a careful read in places to make the connections in the plot and between various locations.

As a ‘dungeon crawl’, Mutant Crawl Classics 2018 Holiday Module: Home for the Holideath is somewhat lacking when it comes to roleplaying and the Game Master really has the one NPC with which the player characters will interact. With her, the Game Master should really be hamming it up, as either a kindly, take-no-nonsense grandmother or school-ma’am-ish old lady to get the full weird effect. The ‘ho-ho horror’ of Mutant Crawl Classics 2018 Holiday Module: Home for the Holideath is nevertheless well done, twisting and changing the traditional elements of Christmas and its commercialism without being either too knowing or too twee in its own cleverness. Often there is a groan-inducing inevitability of a Christmas scenario and all its trappings, Mutant Crawl Classics 2018 Holiday Module: Home for the Holideath avoids much of that to provide a suitably horrifying and weird experience for the inhabitants of Terra A.D. and their players.

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

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

—oOo—


Refractions of Glasston: A 1920s horror scenario tempered in northern Indiana is a scenario for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition with an origins very different to those of the submissions usually submitted to the Miskatonic Repository. Instead of being submitted by an amateur or professional author, it is the result of a creative collaboration between the Professional Writing major at Taylor University, Upland IN and Chaosium, Inc. The creators are all students at Taylor University and this is their first foray into writing for the roleplaying game hobby, aided and advised by Chaosium, Inc.’s editorial team. If the result lacks a certain polish, then it should be borne in mind that the scenario was produced as a course assignment in a single semester by a group whose members were all new to Call of Cthulhu before they started. Given all that, Refractions of Glasston serves up a (mason) jarful of rural noir and body horror with a degree of transparency.
Refractions of Glasston takes place in rural Indiana, where the fortunes of a once-failing glassware manufacturer has taken an unexpected upswing and turned a small town into a boom town! Elias Taylor Winters, the CEO of TWJ Co., has discovered a means of manufacturing toughened glass and is about to launch a new line of unbreakable mason jars. Yet even as the townsfolk put all of their efforts into supporting the factory which has brought them newfound prosperity, there are hints that all is not well in Glasston. The townsfolk are reluctant to talk, if not close-lipped, there is a wariness of strangers which all but verges on paranoia, and there are rumours of sickness amongst the factory workers. Just what is Winters’ new glass-making process? Is there any truth to the rumours of sickness and who the men in black who work for TWJ Co.’s CEO?
The core of the scenario involves investigation in and around the town, trying to discern just what the townsfolk and ultimately, the factory, are hiding. There are not too many places to investigate, but they are decently detailed with several NPCs for the investigators to interact with. Eventually though, their nosiness will attract the attention of the authorities and probably the all too influential TWJ Co. The likelihood of this is tracked on a Suspicion Tracker, to the point where the company reacts and the scenario transitions onto the next act, with subsequent events likely to drive the investigators into confronting the menace behind it—a minor ancient ‘god’ who will be refreshingly new to veteran players of Call of Cthulhu.
The authors also nicely serve up a history of Indiana, coming up to date with the effects of Prohibition, as well as adding elements of the state’s local mythos and folklore, suggesting how they might be developed further. This gives the scenario some solid context and so lays the groundwork for events to come whilst the investigators in Glasston. 
The scenario comes with seven pre-generated investigators. They include a journalist, private eye, investor, nurse, moonshiner, factory worker, and pastor. They nicely reflect a range of origins, backgrounds, and ages. Some of them do have hooks which pull them into the events of Refractions of Glasston, but these hooks could have been more strongly highlighted and perhaps supported with advice for the Keeper on how the NPCs they are connected to in the town will react to them. That said, this should not be an issue for an experienced Keeper and her players. Rounding out the set of seven is advice on integrating existing investigators into the scenario. This is useful, but perhaps could have been placed at the start of the scenario rather than the end.
Physically, Refractions of Glasston is a forty-eight page, 7.68 Mb, full-colour PDF. Behind the nicely done cover, the scenario is neatly laid out with a mix of full colour artwork and rough pencils. Some of the boxed out text is difficult to identify though, and the single map is plain if serviceable. The editing could have been tighter in places, but it is fair to say that the production values are decent enough.
In terms of production values, Refractions of Glasston could have benefited from more maps, including a larger one of the town and its immediate environs and then one of the factory. That said, a Keeper should be able to draw these maps from the descriptions given if necessary. In terms of the plot, one of the NPCs is not quite as strongly used as he could have been considering what he knows, both about what is going in the factory and about the Mythos in general, and that he is a probable source of information about both for the investigators. Another issue is that one of the other NPCs feels anachronistic, though less so if the scenario is updated to the modern day (which would also have the advantage of making the local folklore easier to use).
There is no denying that Refractions of Glasston is not as smooth the substance at the heart of its horror, but it should not be forgotten that this is a first entry into the roleplaying hobby. So the members of the team behind the scenario are new to the writing, editing, and development process involved—just as they were new to Call of Cthulhu before they started. This does not and should not detract from the scenario, but what it does mean is that the Keeper will need to spend a little more time in preparing Refractions of Glasston than she might with a more polished title. In fact, it is fair to say that with more development—though not much more—Refractions of Glasston would be suitable for print in an anthology.
At its core, Refractions of Glasston is a good mix of background and plot, with some nicely creepy—and well thought out—aspects to the body horror that plagues the town. Overall, Refractions of Glasston: A 1920s horror scenario tempered in northern Indiana a solid, commendable first foray into writing for roleplaying games and for Call of Cthulhu.

What strikes you first about Liminal is not the name—that comes second—but the fact that it is a beautiful book, packed full with luminous, mysterious artwork presented on thick glossy paper. The roleplaying game is in fact a weighty, digest-sized tome that suggests heavy, even stolid game, but nothing could be further from the truth. Rather, Liminal is an urban fantasy roleplaying with light, narrative mechanics, presented in rich full colour which hints at and captures the strange place astride the familiar of the mortal and the unfamiliar of the Hidden World. Indeed, the very title suggests this, ‘liminal’ meaning ‘occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.’ Published by Worldplay Games and distributed by Modiphius Entertainment following a successful Kickstarter campaign and written by the designer of Age of Arthur, Liminal is unique amongst the urban fantasy roleplaying games published to date in being set  entirely within the United Kingdom. Thus it is inspired by the Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch, Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere and Sandman, the comic book Hellblazer, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, the television series Being Human, the film The Company of Wolves, amongst many other films and books. 

The ‘Hidden World of Liminal is one in which magic and magicians, vampires, werewolves, the fae, and many myths are real. And some in authority know. As much a rich gentleman’s club as the protector of the country from rogue magic practitioners, the conservative Council of Merlin claims origins date back to Roman times, whilst the Most Noble and Distinguished Mercury Collegium is a loose network of magicians, knowledgeable mortals, and supernatural creatures who often use magic as a means to aid their criminal endeavours. Vampires scheme and prey from behind the scenes, most belong to nests which in turn are part of the Soldality of the Crown, the parliament of vampires whose origins are as old as the Council of Merlin. Originally brought to the British Isles by the Vikings, most werewolves hunt in local packs, but the brutal Jaeger family want to unite them. The Fae vary wildly, some appear human, others lurk under bridges, but most serve one of the feuding Fae Court, typically located in a Dominion beyond this world in the Fae Realms. The most powerful Fae lords in the country are the Queen of Hyde Park, whose summer court is reached via a bridge under Serpentine, and the Winter King, whose frosty court moves anywhere between Snowdonia in Wales, the Lake District in England, and the Scottish highlands. Elsewhere, both mortals and fae worship the spirits of the rivers great and small; ghosts are the echoes of the deceased who in time may come material again or even possess the body of someone newly dead; the Aldermen protect and seek knowledge of gates into Ghost Realms, Fae Domains, and hidden crossings; and the Flowers of Expression is a community of artists—both worldly and unworldly—who accept all on artistic merit and who seek to create great art.

Two bodies of authority know something of the Hidden World and its inhabitants and secrets. One is the Order of St, Bede, a Christian order which accepts both Anglicans and Catholics and is dedicated to protecting the mundane world from magic and the supernatural and keeping it and the existence of magic a secret. Its members will use magic, but this does not stop magic from being sinful. P Division is a national agency of the British police, one that investigates inexplicable or Fortean crimes, but which never records its experiences of the Hidden World or magic lest it be revealed to press or the government. Some of its members may even know magic, but for serving officers, assignment to P Division is seen as a career dead end.

Character concepts include Academic Wizard, sponsored to Dee College at Oxford by the Council of Merlin; Changeling swapped for a human at birth by the Fae; Clued-up Criminal, aware of the Hidden World as a free agent or associate of the Mercury Collegium; Dhampir, almost a vampire, still just about human; Eldritch Scholar, perhaps sponsored by a wizard, but with an interest in the Hidden World; Face, one of the diplomats between the factions of the Hidden World; Gutter Mage who lacks the academic study wanted of the Council of Merlin, and may instead may be part of the Mercury Collegium; Investigator, perhaps members of P Division, but might also be a journalist or private detective who has stumbled across the Hidden World; Knight, the mortal servants of one of the factions, and might be lawyers or computer experts as well as soldiers; Man in Black, one of the protectors the ordinary world from the Hidden World for the Order of the St. Bede; Warden, bodyguard to a Magician for one of the factions; and Werewolf, who has undergone the initiation ritual to be able to change into wolf form. Now a player does not have to pick any one of these concepts, but can instead develop his own. What each concept does though, is suggest the possible Skills, Traits, Limitations, and Focuses that will help define a character.

A character or Liminal in Liminal is defined Concept, Drive, Focus, Skills, Traits, and Limitation. A Liminal’s Drive is what motivates him to become involved in the Hidden World, for example, ‘To find my father who was said to have run away with the fairies’ or ‘Werewolves ripped my family apart and I will seek out every werewolf and kill them’. Focus determines whether a Limininal is strong mentally or physically—Determined or Tough respectively and learn their respective Traits—or if he is a Magician and can learn different magical styles. It should be noted that although Shapechanger is listed as magical style, it only applies to magicians who can change into multiple forms, so lycanthropes such as werewolves who can only change into one, do not have to take it and so can be Determined or Tough instead. Skills represent a mix of training and natural abilities, with a skill level of two or more indicating simple professional attainment. A skill of level three or more means that it can have a speciality. Traits cover trained or innate advantages, but mundane and magical. Limitations are restrictions to or due from a Liminal’s supernatural abilities. A Liminal also has three Attributes—Endurance, Will, and Damage, the first two derived from his Athletics and Conviction skills, the latter from the means of attack used. (It should be noted though that Liminal makes clear that guns are not routinely available in the United Kingdom and that even when they are available, heavy weapons like grenades and rocket launchers simply kill their targets.) To create a Liminal, a player divides seventeen points between his skills and five points between Traits, although Limitations will add more to spend on Traits. 

Our sample Liminal is professional psychic, Neale Killough, who was orphaned at ten when his mother disappeared. She was also a psychic, but when he manifested the gift, was unable to contact her. He is convinced that she is dead and had delved further and further into the world of ghosts and the supernatural in order to find her. When not working as a psychic, he is a motivational speaker.

Neale Killough
Drive: To find out who took my mother and why?
Focus: Magician
Physical Skills: Business 1, Awareness 2
Mental Skills: Lore 2
Social Skills: Charm 2, Conviction 2, Empathy 3 (Assess Personality), Rhetoric 3 (Sincerity)
Traits: Necromancy (2), Presence (2), The Sight (1)
Endurance: 8
Will: 10
Damage: d6

Now creating a Liminal is not the only task that a player has to undertake before a game begins. In Liminal, each of the player characters, whatever their motivations or origins, is a member of a Crew which together provides them with a shared motivation, a base of operations, and some assets. So they might be a team of werewolf hunters, scientists exploring the edges of the Hidden World, a P Division team investigating crimes committed by the Mercury Collegium, and so on. Just like the Liminals themselves, the Crew will have a goal, a reason how and why it takes on cases, plus assets like a Geomantic Node, Informants, or Transport. The Crew will also have a relationship factor between itself and several of the Hidden World’s factions, either positive or negative, plus hooks which will attract the Crew’s attention. Now all of these factors are decided collectively by the players in a round-robin fashion so that everyone’s suggestions are taken into account.

Dearly Departed Consultants
Dearly Departed Consultant is a collective of psychics—some with the gift, some not—who not only perform psychic readings up and down the country, but consult on ghost hunts, hauntings, and dealings with the spirit world. It rarely performs in  major venues and does not make a huge amount of money, but it gets by.

Goal: Keep people safe from the dangerous dead
Assets: Transport, Occult Library, Informants
Relationships: The Council of Merlin (-1), The Mercury Collegium (+2), P Division (+2), The Sodality of the Crown (-2), The Order of St. Bede (-1)

Mechanically, Liminal is simple. To undertake an action, a Liminal’s player rolls two six-sided dice and adds the Liminal’s skill value and any modifiers from Traits, attempting to beat the Challenge Level, typically eight, or more to succeed. Circumstances can modify the Challenge Level, such as being increased to ten for not having an appropriate skill. Failures lead either to immediate trouble for the Liminal, success but the Liminal is hurt, takes longer, or a simple failure. Rolls of double one are critical failures and add a further complication, but rolls of five or higher above the Challenge Level is a critical success. One interesting mechanic here is that when a player character makes a successful social challenge against another player character or NPC, he does not simply persuade them to do something, he levies a penalty to all tests which contradict the action he has been persuaded not to do.

A Liminal also has Will, which can be used to boost skill tests—including avoiding a critical fumble, and use various Traits and forms of Magic. For example, the Silver Tongue Trait grants a bonus to the Charm skill when being deceptive, but the magical element of the Trait means that if a magical ability or means was used to determine if you were telling the truth, then by expending a point of Will, the Liminal could avoid detection. Will is regenerated by rest or by engaging a player character’s Drive during play.

In keeping with the rest of Liminal, the combat rules are nasty, brutal, and short. A light firearm, for example, does 1d6+3 damage. Unless the player character has a lot of points invested in the Athletics skill or it is boosted by a Trait, a gunshot will not necessarily kill a player character, but it will knock him out of the fight.

Pleasingly, experience and advancement in Liminal is story driven, the player character learning directly from his experiences conducting a case. Learn something about the Hidden World or a fellow Crew member, advance the Crew goal, conclude a case, and so on, and these enable the player to tick his character’s Experience Boxes on the character. Fill five of these and the character receives a Skill increase and fills an Advance Box, and fill three of those and the character’s skill limit can be raised, he can have a new trait, and so on. It feels similar to the mechanics of Powered by the Apocalypse, but nevertheless rewards the player character according to the story and his actions.

Magic forms a major part of the Hidden World and comes in eight types—Blessings and Curses, Divination, Geomancy, Glamour, Necromancy, Shapechanging, Ward Magic, and Weathermonger. Again, the rules are kept simple, requiring no more than a successful Lore test and the expenditure of a point of Will to use. The Challenge Level for the test will vary according to what the magician wants to do and how quickly. So a Weathermonger can change the weather for several hours by expending two points of Will and making a Lore test. The Challenge test goes up by two each for making the weather turn violent, arrive quickly, or unseasonal. In addition to this base ability, a magician can have further Traits, such as Fast Working or Call the Lightning for the Weathermonger. 

More than half of Liminal is devoted to detailing the Hidden World. This starts with the sample characters, but really delves into with the information about the factions and the location descriptions. The factions are not only detailed, but often supported with sample NPCs whom the Game Master can easily add to her game. There are some fun groups and NPCs here, such as The Queen’s Service, vampires who supply blood from Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham or the mysterious ‘Werewolf’, Shad. The chapter on ‘Liminal Britain and Northern Island’ covers both the obvious places—Glastonbury, Stonhenge, and so on, and the less obvious ones—Pertmerion, the New Forest, and so on. Working down from cities, it covers towns, villages, and locations in some detail, including Belfast, Caernarfon, Canewdon, Dartmoor, Durham, the Forest of Dean, the Giant’s Causeway, Glasgow, Glastonbury, Glen Coe, Hadrian’s Wall, Highley, Hinton St. Mary, Liverpool, Loch Lomond, London, Manchester, Mount Snowdon, Mussenden Temple, the New Forest, Oxford, Peebles, Portmeirion, Saltaire, Stonehenge, Tamworth, Winchester, and York. As well as representing a diverse range of places that will nicely take a crew on and off the beaten track, there is a richness of detail here, such as Portmeirion was designed by a geomancer to prevent the incursion of a Ghost Realm, but which has partially failed following a fire or how vampires have moved to Manchester to hunt the city’s club scene. These locations are further supported by descriptions of the various types of fae, ghosts, werewolves, vampires, and mortals to be found in the Hidden World, these in addition to those included in the faction descriptions.

Rounding out Liminal, there is some excellent advice on setting up and running investigative style games  as well as advice on running the game. The Game Master is provided with extra background—on Fae Domains and Ghost Realms as well as Liminal beyond the borders of the United Kingdom—as well as outlines for two ready-to-play cases.

Physically, Liminal is a stunningly pretty looking book. The layout is clean and simple and the editing decent enough, but the choice of artwork is excellent throughout. There is a lot of it and it really captures the otherworldliness that breathes quietly from the pages and adds so much to the look and feel of the roleplaying game. This is superb looking game, not just because the artwork is good, but because it has been well chosen.

Liminal is not a roleplaying game with an other as such. There is a sense of containment to its setting of the United Kingdom and its factions, most if not actual enemies, then at least wary of each other. These factions are the major powers in the setting against which the Crew of Liminals or player characters will be set, the likelihood being that as they investigative and bring a case or mystery to a conclusion, they antagonise one faction whilst pleasing another. As a setting, Liminal feels not dissimilar to the World of Darkness with its factions of vampires, werewolves, mages, changelings, and ghosts, but here is an emphasis in Liminal on roleplaying playing mere mortals as much as there is dhampirs, changelings, werewolves, or fae. Further, Liminal slips these and its other fantastical elements into the shadows, layering them under centuries of history and mythology within the Hidden World. Of course, involvement of werewolves, vampires, and ghosts also means that Liminal is a horror game at least in tone in places, if not mechanically, so that does mean that there is a dark, mature edge to the Hidden World described within its pages.

Lastly, it should be noted that Liminal calls for increased player involvement from the start and throughout the play. This is in deciding their characters’ goals and then again if they fulfil them as well as setting up their Crew with their choice of assets, faction relationships, and hooks. In doing so, the players will actually decide some of the direction in which they want their Liminal campaign to go in, with the mechanics providing the means for them to support this with some interesting character options.

Liminal is not just an urban fantasy roleplaying game, for its takes both players and Game Master out into the wilds of the countryside too, far from the nations’ urban centres, out into the Hidden World, even as the Hidden World has slipped into those towns and cities. This enables it to provide a stronger sense of history and mythology, drawing from the British Isles’ rich swathes of legend and folklore. Liminal combines this with simple mechanics and story-based roleplaying to provide a delightfully accessible British roleplaying game and a delightfully accessible British—grim and determined—take upon the urban fantasy genre.

If you are a board gamer, then 2019 is a good time to be alive. You are spoilt for choice and you are spoilt for choice in terms of good games and you spoilt for choice because games can be designed around a theme or an intellectual property and they can fit that theme or property. For there cannot be any other good reason why Ravensburger can get the licence for a nearly fifty-year-old blockbuster and turn that blockbuster into a game that is not models the blockbuster, but which is actually a good game. A game that could and would never have been designed or published in 1975, the year of the blockbuster’s release. A tense, desperate game of cat and mouse—or rather shark and mouse—for the blockbuster is none other than Jaws. In fact, it is the first summer blockbuster, in which a giant man-eating great white shark attacks beachgoers at a New England summer resort town, prompting the local police chief, marine biologist, and a professional shark hunter to hunt it down. The film is regarded as both a classic thriller and horror film, and has been selected by the United States Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry.


Jaws: A Boardgame of Strategy and Suspense is an asymmetrical, two to four player semi-co-operative board game for ages twelve and over, which is played in two acts and lasts about an hour. One of the players takes the role of the Shark, whilst the other players take the roles of the hunters, Police Chief Martin Brody, marine biologist Matt Hooper, and shark hunter, Quint. (If there are fewer players, then the roles of Brody, Hooper, and Quint are shared between them, so that it is possible to play a two-player game). In the first act, ‘Amity Island’, the Shark hunts the waters off Amity island, eating swimmer after holiday swimmer as the hunters try to track its location and tag it. Once the Shark’s hunger is sated or it has been tagged twice, the Shark swims out to sea and the second act, ‘Orca’, begins. In ‘Orca’, the shark attacks the hunters aboard Quint’s boat, Orca, until they manage to kill the Shark or the Shark eats them or the boat.

Act One: ‘Amity Island’ is played out on a map of the island, which depicts the island’s four beaches—North, South, East, and West, two Docks, Shop, Mayor’s Office, and Amity P.D. on the island. Each Round is divided into three phases—Event, Shark, and Crew phases, which are played out in that order. In the Event phase, an Event card is drawn which determines on which beaches new swimmers will take to the water, plus an event and its special rules. For example, ‘The Fourth of July’ opens all beaches and they cannot be closed that Round; ‘Amity Island in the News’ grants one player an extra action that Round; and ‘Ben Gardner’s Boat’ enables the Shark to knock either Hooper or Quint from their boat and into the water if it passes through the same space as the boat, forcing their players to expend actions getting back aboard.

In the Shark phase, the Shark player has three actions he can undertake. Obviously, he can Move and he can Eat swimmers. He can also use one of four special abilities, represented by Power Tokens, like being able to swim faster or avoid the detection methods that the hunters are putting in his way. Each Power Token and its special ability can only be used once per game. All of this is done in complete secrecy, the Shark player tracking his movement on a pad included with the game and noting how many swimmers he has eaten on the Shark card. At the end of the Shark phase, all his player has to do is tell the hunter players how many swimmers he has eaten, whether he swam past a motion tracker, and whether or not a Power Token was used (but of course, not which).

In the Crew phase, Brody, Hooper, and Quint get to act, but they can act in any order and each has different things they can do. All three have four actions each and can Move, Rescue a Swimmer if at a beach, and Pick Up Barrels, though what each of them does with these Barrels is slightly different. Brody is famously afraid of the water and so runs around Amity Island, collecting Barrels from the Shop and carrying them, one at a time, to the Docks, but if at the Mayor’s Office or Amity P.D., can issue an order to Close a Beach, which temporarily prevents Swimmers entering the water there when directed to do so by an Event card, and when at a beach, can use his Binoculars to scan the water for the Shark.

Hooper spends this act on his fast boat which enables him to move further, but as well as picking up swimmers, his primary task is to ferry the Barrels from the Docks where Brody has dropped them off, to Quint aboard the Orca. He also has a Fish Finder, which he can drop into the water to determine if the Shark is in the zone he is in or an adjacent zone. Lastly, once Hopper has got one or more Barrels to him, Quint can Launch a Barrel into the water, either in the zone he is in, or an adjacent zone. If it hits the Shark, it sticks, and the Shark player has to tell the hunters where he is. If the Shark is not there, then the Barrels floats in the water and acts as a motion detector which will alert the hunters whenever the Shark passes through the zone it is in.

Act One: ‘Amity Island’ ends when the Shark swims out to sea. This will either because the Shark has eaten nine Swimmers or because the hunters have attached two Barrels to the Shark and forced it to flee. The number of Swimmers that the Shark has eaten by then is important because it determines the number of Shark Ability cards the Shark will have in Act Two: ‘The Orca’ and the number of equipment cards the Hunters have. The more Swimmers that the Shark has eaten, the more Shark Ability cards the Shark player will have and the fewer extra Equipment cards the Hunters will have—and vice versa.

Act One: ‘Amity Island’ is a game of hidden movement upon the part of the Shark and deduction upon the part of the Hunters. In this, it feels like the hidden movement of Fury of Dracula where the vampire hunters try and track down the vampire count, the trail narrowing and narrowing. In Jaws: A Boardgame of Strategy and Suspense the search area is narrowed by placement of the Barrels as Motion Trackers, but at least on one occasion the Shark will be able to avoid them with a Power Token. Doing so will probably be best used by the Shark to sneak past a Motion Tracker onto a beach and grab one or two last Swimmers which will increase the number of Power cards he will have in Act Two: ‘The Orca’. Another game which Act One: ‘Amity Island’ feels like is Pandemic with its turnover of Swimmers which will appear at beaches again and again as Event cards are drawn.

Act Two: ‘The Orca’ is more focused and fraught, taking aboard Quint’s boat as it withstands attack after attack by the Shark, as seen in the finale of the film. It is played on the reverse of the game’s board, the players flipping it over after completing Act One: ‘Amity Island’ and laying out the eight tiles which depict the deck plan of the Orca. Each of these tiles is also double-sided. On one is the undamaged section of the Orca’s deck plan, on the other the section after it has been damaged by the Shark. The Shark can further damage each section of the deck plan to actually destroy it and dump any of the Crew into the water. The aim of the Shark is to chew the Orca into splinters and eat the Crew, whilst they must accurately determine where the Shark will attack again and again and kill it.

In comparison to Act One: ‘Amity Island’ in which each Round has three phases, Act Two: ‘The Orca’ each Round has six phases and is consequently more complex. These phases are Resurface Options, Shark Chooses, Crew Prepares, Shark Reveals, Crew Attacks, and Shark Attacks. In Resurface Options, the Shark player draws three Resurface cards which give him the three Resurface Zones where he can attack the Orca on that Round. In addition, each Resurface Card will determine how many dice the Shark player will roll to attack that Round, how many hits the Shark can absorb that Round before it takes damage, and whether or not it can shake free of a hook, such as that from a fishing pole or the gas canister, that one of the hunters may have attached from it. All three of these factors will influence the Shark player’s decision as to where he will attack, as will how much damage the boat may have taken in those Resurface Zones. Then in the Shark Chooses, the Shark player decides which Resurface Zone to attack from the three Resurface cards and whether or not he will play a Shark Ability card, which for example, enable to completely destroy a section of the Orca if it attacks it or even take a second attack. Both of the choice of Resurface card and Shark Ability card are kept secret.

In Crew Prepares, each Crew Member decides which of the three Resurface Zones he will move to and which weapon he will use. Melee weapons have to be used in the same Resurface Zone where the Shark attacks, whilst ranged weapons can be used at a distance. Some melee weapons can be attached to the Shark which will hinder the marauder. Accessories like Ammo enable firearms to be used again, Chum can be thrown into the water to attract the Shark to a particular Resurface Zone, and the Shark Cage will protect one of the crew members. Every Crew member has his own weapons and items of equipment and will have access to more, the amount depending on the number of Swimmers the Shark ate in Act One: ‘Amity Island’. 

In Shark Reveals, the Shark player reveals which Resurface Zone the Shark is attacking followed by the Crew Attacks phase, and lastly, the Shark Attacks phase. In the former, the players take it in turns to roll the dice and inflict as much damage on the Shark as possible, or if they can, automatically attach a weapon to the Shark. In the Shark Attacks phase, the Shark player will attack the boat and if the Shark damages or destroys a section, then it is flipped or removed and any Crew Member on that section of the Orca is knocked into the water. They will have to spend their movement on the next round getting back onto the boat. The Shark can also attack a Crew Member who is in the water  and may get a bonus attack against them as well. Play continues like this until the Shark is killed and the Crew Member players win, or the Shark either destroys all of the boat or kills all three Crew Members, in which case, the Shark player wins.

Just like Act One: ‘Amity Island’, Act Two: ‘The Orca’ feels a little like another game and that is Forbidden Island with its sinking tiles. In Jaws: A Boardgame of Strategy and Suspense it is the parts of the Orca which are being attacked and damaged and then forced to sink, reducing the size of the boat and thus the play area. That said, the use of the Resurface Cards to determine where Shark comes to the surface and attacks the boat does feel new. LikeAct One: ‘Amity Island’, this has the effect of narrowing the choices in terms of where the Shark will go next, but this is fairly fraught it also increases the likelihood of the boat and potentially the Crew Members in that area being attacked.

Act One: ‘Amity Island’ and Act Two: ‘The Orca’ do feel different to each other. The first is more strategic with more planning involved as the hunters search for the Shark and the primary way of knowing where it is, is from the number of disappearing Swimmers. The second is more immediate, more tactical, the Crew Members reacting because the Shark is all but on top of them. Which is very much like the film.

Physically, Jaws: A Boardgame of Strategy and Suspense has excellent productions. The look of the game and the graphics draw very much from the look of the film and its famous poster. Where possible, stills from the film are used on the Event Cards in Act One: ‘Amity Island’, but the artwork is excellent throughout. The Meeples for Brody, Hooper, and Quint are what you would expect, but a nice touch is that the boats for both Hooper and Quint are also of wood, as is the piece for the Shark. Lastly, it should be noted that the rule is also well presented with every effort made to make it possible to learn and play the game as the players read through the rulebook on opening the box. It is not wholly perfect, but is nevertheless, very well done.

Now if you have wide experience of playing board games, then with Jaws: A Boardgame of Strategy and Suspense it is possible to spot some of the mechanics seen in other games, but this does not mean that the game is immatitive, just as it means that the game is neither radical or groundbreaking. Indeed, the mechanics have been adjusted where necessary to match both the source material and the game play. What you have in Jaws: A Boardgame of Strategy and Suspense then, is a well oiled, well tooled, design, one that really does take the source material and build a good game around it whilst being true to the source material. In fact, as a design, it transcends any novelty factor that the game might have had for being based on as famous a thriller as Jaws. Put that all together and it should be noted that the game is surprisingly inexpensive for a design of its nature and the quality of its components.

Jaws: A Boardgame of Strategy and Suspense is not absolutely perfect. It may well be too good an emulation of its source material to play more than a few times, because it does not offer a lot of variety in terms of game play. This is not to say that game is not fun—it is, how much after a few plays is another matter. In addition, you need to have seen Jaws to get the most out of the game and since Jaws is a somewhat gruesome thriller, neither film nor game may necessarily be suitable for its younger suggested age limit of twelve. 

Yet beyond those issues, Jaws: A Boardgame of Strategy and Suspense delivers exactly what you would want in a game based on Jaws the film. It is fraught and it is frantic, you do feel desperate as more and more Swimmers are eaten in Act One: ‘Amity Island’ and then the Shark comes after you in Act Two: ‘The Orca’, but that feeling can turn around as you close in on the Shark… Plus if you are a fan, you get to play out the film and see what you would have done in their place and you get to roleplay the characters, quoting all of the famous lines, and so on. If you are a Jaws fan, then Jaws: A Boardgame of Strategy and Suspense is a game you will definitely want, and if you are a board game player, then it offers semi-co-operative, heavily themed play in well-presented, solidly designed, and inexpensive package.

Another year and another bumper crop of board games as 2019 continues the trend of seeing the release of ever more board game titles and playing board games becomes firmly cemented as a hobby that everyone can enjoy. 2019 was also a good year for books about boardgames too, including The Board Game Book: The essential guide to the best new games, a retrospective of the last two years’ worth of games and Meeples Together: How and Why Cooperative Board Games Work, a detailed examination of board games in which the players work together to defeat the game. Joining them is a much broader examination of the board game, an examination which takes in eight thousand years of playing games from the ancient world to today’s golden age of meeples, co-operation, legacy change through play, thematic play, superb production values, and fantastic designs—all of which have come about in the last three decades. That book is Board Games in 100 Moves.

Published by Dorling Kindersley—a publisher known for the quality of its illustrated reference works, so the quality of the book is certain to be good, Board Games in 100 Moves is written by two stalwarts of the British hobby games industry, James Wallis, designer of The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen and Alas Vegas and Ian Livingstone, co-founder of Games Workshop and co-creator of the Fighting Fantasy series amongst many other things. Both are avid board game players and collectors and in their time have played thousands of games. Together they take the reader through eight thousand years of games and six ages of game design, all in exactly one hundred games.

From the start, almost like the rules to every good board game should, Board Games in 100 Moves explains its set-up. Both authors introduce their love of board games and explain the book’s premise, how it is organised, preparing the reader for the grand tour that is come. It sets out what the one hundred board games of its title are—from Senet in 3100 BCE, the Royal Game of Ur in 2600 BCE, and Hounds and Jackals in 2000 BCE to Beasts of Balance and Sushi Go Party! in 2016, and The Mind in 2019. Along the way it lists classics like Chess and Backgammon, playing cards and Pachisi, surprises such as Kriegsspiel and Suffragetto, stalwarts such as Scrabble and Monopoly, children’s designs like Mouse Trap! and Connect 4, it touches upon roleplaying games such as Dungeons & Dragons, before coming up to date with modern designs like Settlers of Catan, Pandemic, and Codenames.

The first four ages of Board Games in 100 Moves are ages of materials—wood and stone, paper and print, cardboard, and plastic—and examine how those materials changed the look and feel of the games as much as it examines the games themselves. In ‘Wood and Stone’ it looks at the oldest game that we know of, Senet, noting that the Pharaohs were fans of the Egyptian game of passing and that the game had spiritual significance in that passing also referred to moving into the afterlife and then it looks at the first game that we have rules for, the Royal Game of Ur. What is fascinating here is how the rules were rediscovered. Other games examined in this period are ones that we would recognise today—Go, Pachisi (better known by its modern variants, Ludo and Parcheesi), the many variants of Men’s Morris (originally a game spread by the Romans across their empire), Backgammon, and of course, Chess.

A common feature of these games is that often being made from stone or wooden, there is a certain permanence to them, but in the age of paper and print, games became colourful and complex, yet easy to transport and teach. This is when playing cards evolved from tarot cards and the first printed board games appear, such as the Royal Game of the Goose. The nature of games changed again towards the end of this period when they set out to be instructional and educational, as with A Journey Through Europe, before the age of cardboard heralded the arrival of games about campaign, first military battles, but then political ones two. So this examines Kriegsspiel, the wargame designed to teach Prussian officers military tactics and The Game of Suffragette, published to promote the cause for female emancipation, before mentioning some of the actual games as propaganda published before and during World War 2. Here it does not shy away from some of the more reprehensible and unpleasant game designs of the period. 

Unsurprisingly, Monopoly and its origins as a game completely counter to its big business theme, is highlighted before we come to the age of plastic. This period is likely to be the one that the older board game player—and certainly the authors—will be most familiar with as it is when they first played games. So Mouse Trap!, Scrabble, Connect 4, Twister, and both Risk and Diplomacy, but as Board Games in 100 Moves into the age of imagination with publication of Dungeons & Dragons and the rise of the Eurogame, there is a sense of the foundations being laid for where we are now, in an age of imagination, of Eurogames like Ticket to Ride and Settlers of Catan, and exploring a future of co-operation, of a global hobby with board games from Japan like Machi Koro and from the Czech Republic like Codenames, and digitalisation. Although one hundred games might lie at the heart of Board Games in 100 Moves, along the way, the book looks at more than that single hundred, not necessarily in the depth and detail accorded its singular hundred, but enough to intrigue and wonder about finding out more (or in some cases, rejecting out of hand).

This being a book from Dorling Kindersley, is very nicely laid out with hundreds of illustrations which showcase the changing look and design of board games throughout history as much as the words explore their impact and design. It even comes with an excellent index and buried deep in the back of the book there is a bibliography for the reader who wants to explore the hobby a little more as well as play the many games listed within the pages of Board Games in 100 Moves.

It should be no surprise that Board Games in 100 Moves gives a somewhat Anglocentric history of its subject matter. After all, the format that it is inspired by—A History of the World in 100 Objects—and its authors are all British. This in part also explains the attention paid to Games Workshop and Warhammer, although their inclusion in this history is certainly warranted and certainly does not detract from the inclusion of games from all over the world. Where Board Games in 100 Moves differs from A History of the World in 100 Objects is that it is not a look at a hundred specific games or objects—anyone wanting that should be directed to Green Ronin Publishing’s Hobby Games: The 100 Best or Family Games: The 100 Best—for many of the games listed at the book’s start are never mentioned again. (Which possibly means that there is a scope for a book which examines each title on that list in turn.) Instead Board Games in 100 Moves is a hundred moves through history of organised play, an examination of the importance and impact, the enjoyment and effect, of board games.

Board Games in 100 Moves is an interesting and informative introduction to the history of board games, an examination a hundred—and more—board games you may or have not heard of, and might want to play. For the board game fan, this book is a must, whilst for the roleplayer, this book is still of interest because of the many ways in which the two hobbies overlap each other, but either way, Board Games in 100 Moves is an attractive and enjoyable read from start to finish. One that fans of tabletop games of all types will find interesting.

Since the publication of Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition in 2000, Goodman Games has published over one hundred adventure modules for its Dungeon Crawl Classics line and since 2012, these have been for its own Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game. Derived from the d20 System, the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game sits somewhere between Basic Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in terms of its complexity. The most radical step in the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game is the starting point. Players begin by playing not one, but several Zero Level characters, each a serf or peasant looking beyond a life tied to the fields and the seasons or the forge and the hammer to prove themselves and perhaps progress enough to become a skilled adventurer and eventually make a name for themselves. In other words, to advance from Zero Level to First Level. Unfortunately, delving into tombs and the lairs of both men and beasts is a risky venture and death is all but a certainty for the lone delver… In numbers, there is the chance that one or more will survive long enough to go onto greater things! This is what the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game terms a ‘Character Creation Funnel’.

And right from the outset, Goodman Games supported this feature with the very first scenario released for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game. This is Dungeon Crawl Classics #67: Sailors on the Starless Sea and since 2012 it has gone through six printings. Even further, Goodman Games has marked that sixth printing with a Limited Foil Edition’, a lovely hardback edition with a foil cover which not only reprints the module, but also includes new artwork, a retrospective, sketches, a discussion of the art process, and even discussion of lead artist’s—not the author’s—variant of the module, ‘Reverse Sailors on the Starless Sea’!

The adventure in Dungeon Crawl Classics #67: Sailors on the Starless Sea is designed for Zero Level characters, roughly between ten and fifteen with three characters per player. Alternatively, it can be played using characters of First Level and Second Level, but either way, it is expected that roughly half of these characters will survive. That though, is quite possibly a generous assessment as this module has the potential to kill player characters, even cause a Total Party Kill. Nevertheless, it has some great set scenes and really has a grim and perilous feel that echoes Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.

The setting for Dungeon Crawl Classics #67: Sailors on the Starless Sea takes place in and below a ruined keep that was once the lair of Molan and Felan, brothers who were great chaos lords at the head of great armies of beastial mutants before the forces of good led a campaign against them and sacked their foul castle. Ages have passed and its vile reputation is barely remembered, but now villagers have gone missing, beastmen howl in the night, and it is up to other villagers—the player characters—to go into the keep and hopefully find the missing villagers as well as put an end to the chaos that threatens to surge up and sweep over the land once again…

The adventure consists of two levels, each with just a few locations. The first of these is the courtyard of the keep itself, a bramble-filled ruin of tumble-down towers and walls. From the outset even getting into this area is dangerous, one route threatening a rock slide, another an encounter with vine-infested villagers, and a third with via sinkhole which appears to go straight to hell! Once inside there are tombs to discover, charnel chaos-infested ruins to explore, and dread Beastmen to face, and whilst these are single locations, they are big in terms of story and atmosphere. For example, in the charnel ruins, there are charred skeletons still hot to the touch, a frog fountain with red gemstone eyes and jewelled maw, and a black ichor which drips from the fountain and forms deadly pseudopods. But there is also a means to counter them in the ruins and clues to that too, waiting for the players to have their characters work out exactly how…

However fun these locations are, they cannot beat the big set piece on the shores of the starless shore. Here the player characters are faced with puzzle which looks like a combat encounter and asks them how they get past a leviathan which they have almost no chance of defeating. In some ways, the scenario’s end encounter with the Beastmen shaman and his acolytes atop the ziggurat which stands in the starless sea is almost an anticlimax, but it is nevertheless a thrilling end to the scenario.

With its fifth printing, Dungeon Crawl Classics #67: Sailors on the Starless Sea included a bonus dungeon, ‘The Summoning Pits’. This is an adjunct to the main dungeon, one that explore the origins of a particular monster which appears at the start of the scenario. It is a change of tone in comparison to the rest of the scenario, weird and creepy rather than obviously grim and perilous. 

This being a scenario for the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game, it should be no surprise that there is a pleasing degree of detail to Dungeon Crawl Classics #67: Sailors on the Starless Sea. This includes not only each and every location as you would expect, but also elements such as a table of mutations for the Beastmen—a table whose content foreshadows those for Manimals in the Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game, what to do if the player characters actually have five hundred feet of rope with which to lower themselves into the sinkhole, the list of curses which will befall the characters should one of their number take a certain magical item. One aspect of the scenario is the preponderance of magical items that the player characters can find and wield, but nearly all of them with some kind of cost—even when that magical item might actually help the player characters. Well, that should be no surprise given that the scenario takes place in the former lair of a pair of chaos lords!

Dungeon Crawl Classics #67: Sailors on the Starless Sea barely takes up twenty-four of the fifty-eight pages of the sixth printing and its ‘Limited Foil Edition’. The other thirty or so pages include ‘Sailors Retrospective’, an interview with Harley Stroh about the development and writing of the scenario along with his original map sketches. Doug Kovacs’ cover is accorded a similar treatment as well as a series of tribute covers by the stable of artists who illustrate for Goodman Games. The section highlights just how much of an influence his art and cartography has on the whole of the Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game line. Rounding the book is a look at the artist’s ‘Reverse Sailors on the Starless Sea’ in which the players take the roles of not the villagers but the Beastmen fighting their out of the complex. It is simply bonkers… Lastly, there is a photo gallery of the early years of Dungeon Crawl Classics.

Now these extras are not as extensive as that in Metamorphosis Alpha: Fantastic Role-Playing Game of Science Fiction Adventures on a Lost Starship and Original Adventures Reincarnated #1: Into the Borderlands, but then Dungeon Crawl Classics #67: Sailors on the Starless Sea is just seven years old and does not have the same history, and obviously, it is much, much shorter than either. Nevertheless, this is lovely way in which to acknowledge the success and impact of Dungeon Crawl Classics #67: Sailors on the Starless Sea.

Physically, Dungeon Crawl Classics #67: Sailors on the Starless Sea is superbly presented, The artwork is excellent, the editing solid, and the cartography atmospheric with some lovely little details, such as the nod to the cutaway dungeon that appeared in Basic Dungeons & Dragons.

Dungeon Crawl Classics #67: Sailors on the Starless Sea is never less than deadly and dangerous, but always ready to reward good play. It feels like a big scenario, rich in grim and perilous flavour and detail, not a dungeon to be attacked, but to be explored, its secrets to winkled out and perhaps put to use in saving the villagers—and possibly the world. It set a standard for the Dungeon Crawl Classics scenarios which followed and the Dungeon Crawl Classics #67: Sailors on the Starless Sea – Limited Edition Foil Cover gives us the opportunity to go back to reexamine that standard.

The year 2019 seems quite the year for the Cyberpunk genre, as we reach the year in which the genre classic film, Blade Runner, is actually set, and the classics of the genre in roleplaying see the release of either a new Starter Set and edition, for example, Shadowrun, Sixth Edition or Start Set with a new edition to come, for example, Cyberpunk Red. It is joined by Carbon 2185: A Cyberpunk RPG, a roleplaying game notable for being from a British publisher, Dragon Turtle Games, Ltd. and for its mechanics being derived from those used for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. From the outset then, the designers of Carbon 2185: A Cyberpunk RPG were faced with the challenge of adapting a set of rules strongly identified with Dungeons & Dragons and the fantasy genre to model entirely different genre. The good news is that they have succeeded and appropriately enough in 2019, have done so with a Cyberpunk roleplaying game heavily influenced by Blade Runner.

Published following successful Kickstarter campaign, the setting for Carbon 2185: A Cyberpunk RPG is the Earth of 2185, specifically San Francisco—a possible nod to the setting of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel on which Blade Runner is based. It is a future which begins literally tomorrow with climate collapse, resource depletion, and an ongoing refugee crisis as corporations begin expanding offworld, building orbital factories, searching for new resources, and supplying Earth with deuterium for the new coastal fusion plants. The discovery and manipulation of several wormholes which connected to other star systems resulted in ‘The Scramble for Stars’ in which the megacorporations raced to discover and exploit new worlds. Many were suitable for colonisation leading to a steady flow of those who could afford to pay or were prepared to work for corporations in return for their passage from Earth to “...[B]egin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure.” On these new worlds, the megacorporations were able to conduct research and development free from Earth’s oversight, which would lead to the introduction of Neurolink technology, Synths or biological androids, and power cell technology.

San Francisco is surrounded by high walls to protect it against the rising sea levels  and has been long divided into five districts from the fortified and secure corporate zone of District 1 to the gang controlled, near slums of District 5. Debt and crime are rife and many prefer to spend their lives in Virtual Reality pods than the pollution drenched streets and tenements of the city. As ‘cyberpunks’, the player characters are rebels, wanting to live independently of the megacorporations, and in the given scenario in Carbon 2185: A Cyberpunk RPG, they are connected to gang which will give them a sense of family as well as employment.

At the core then of Carbon 2185: A Cyberpunk RPG are rules and mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. This means that it is a Class and Level roleplaying game, a twenty-sided die is rolled and bonuses added to determine success on an action, there are three Saving Throw types—Fortitude, Reflex, and Mind, and characters have Skill Proficiencies. There are changes, both minor and major, as you would expect. First off, instead of Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma, a character has the Abilities of Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Technology, and People. Technology represents a character’s ability to deal with technology and People his ability to deal with people. Carbon 2185: A Cyberpunk RPG is primarily a humanocentric setting, so instead of Race it offers Origins, reflecting a character’s background. These are Badlander, who grew up in the heavily polluted regions between the Megacities where radiation has given the ability to see in the dark; the Gutter Punk, who grew up as street rats and in gangs; the Korporate Kid, orphans raised in corporate orphanages and are highly educated; and the Regular Joe. The two exceptions, are the Synth and the Wormer. The former is a cyborg manufactured offworld and indistinguishable from ordinary humans, but tougher and trained as warriors, companions, or labourers, whilst the latter is a  human born in one of the low-gravity offworld colonies, forced to come to Earth as a refugee. Some of the Origins may have Suborigins, but not all.

Carbon 2185 has six Classes. These are Daimyo, Doc, Enforcer, Hacker, Investigator, and Scoundrel. The Daimyo specialises in heavy weapons and leading teams, the Doc is a healer whose hand implant can inject healing nanobots into the injured, and the Enforcer is trained to provide military, law enforcement, or combat support. The Hacker breaks into computer systems to steal information, but can also control botnets to access the local electronic infrastructure or even mechs; the Investigator is a private eye or a journalist; and the Scoundrel is a thief, a smuggler, or a street thug. Of the six it is possible to map some of them back onto the archetypal Classes of Dungeons & Dragons, so the Daimyo with its Fury is a little like the Barbarian Class, the Enforcer like the Fighter, and the Scoundrel like the Rogue, but there are differences enough between them so that the similarities are not intrusive. All have just the ten Levels versus the twenty of standard Dungeons & Dragons, although a player character needs more Experience Points per Level and it does mean that campaigns are likely to be shorter.

To create a character, a player rolls his Abilities—on 2d6+5 rather than four six-sided dice and drop the lowest, with the effect of giving a slightly smaller range, but less deviation or by assigning the given array. Besides selecting an Origin and a Class, a player generates two further aspects of his character. The first is Vice, for example, “I am addicted to Crush. If I go more than 24 hours without it, I suffer withdrawals” or “I like to keep and look after synthetic animals.” They include beliefs, additions, fears, obsessions, and so on, and represent both a roleplaying hook for the player and a story hook for the Game Master. Between adventures they can be indulged in to gain temporary Hit Points, but exactly how that works will be up to the Game Master and player to determine. The second aspect is the character’s Background, essentially what he did between leaving education and becoming a Cyberpunk. This consists of a number of five-contracts, the player deciding how many contracts he wants his character to go through before retiring to life as a Cyberpunk. Each contract is five years long and trains the character in various skill proficiencies and languages as well as providing him with several thousand Wonlongs (the currency in 2185) and a parting gift. A character is free to stay in the same career or switch, the latter typically to gain access to a wider variety of skills. The only downside to the process is that there is a chance of injury in each contract period which will end the contract without payment and should the character take too many contracts, he will suffer the effects of aging. The contracts include Corporate Drone, Criminal, Entertainer, Explorer, Laborer, Law Enforcement, Merchant, Military Technician, and Unskilled Worker.  Overall, the Background generator feels like a simplified version of the terms used in Traveller and perhaps the only thing it could have done with, is some events to add further colour to the character’s background.

Name: PRV-1967-47 (Pierce)
Origins: Korporate Kid
Suborigins: High Flyer
Age: 38
Vice: I am careful and meticulous with my bonsai trees. Nothing distracts me when I am dealing with them.
Background: Contract Drone (4)
Languages: English, Japanese, Mandarin

Armour Class: 16 (DR/2)
Hit Points: 9

Strength 08 (-1)
Dexterity 16 (+3)
Constitution 12 (+1)
Intelligence 18 (+4)
Technology 16 (+3)
People 13 (+1)

Fortitude: 14 Reflex: 18 Mind: 20

Proficiency: +2
Skill Proficiencies: Bureaucracy, Computing, Deception, Engineering, Hacking, Persuasion, Sense Motive 
Armour Proficiencies: Helmets, Light Armour
Weapon Proficiencies: Melee Weapons, Pistols, SMGs, Shotguns
Saving Throw Proficiency: Mind
Exploits: Computer Interface, Hack Mech
Abilities: Healing

Equipment: Advanced Comms, Concealable Ballistic Vest
Augmentation: ZA Korp Enhanced Aiming MK. II

Mechanically, Carbon 2185 is basically the same as Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, but it includes a number of rules additions to make it emulate the Cyberpunk genre. For example, in combat, armour not only provides an Armour Class value, but a Damage Resistance value against ballistic damage. This protects against most firearms—there being no energy weapons in 2185—but not melee weapons like vibro knives and some ammunition types. The rules allow for major injuries to be suffered when a character is reduced to zero Hit Points by a critical hit and instead a player rolling to attack when his character fires a gun in automatic mode, the defendants in the target area make a Reflex saving throw to avoid being hit. This neatly places the emphasis on the defendants trying to not get hit and keeping their heads down rather than on the attacker having to roll for each person. 

Of course, the two signature aspects of Cyberpunk genre are Hacking and Cyberware. Both are very different to most other roleplaying games of the genre. In many of them, the Hacker character would have to play out sneaking into a network, overcoming the ICE, defeating the defending SysOp, and so on, all but a sub-game that none of the other players and their characters could participate. Further, all of that time spent in the computer network actually only took a few seconds in game time, but several minutes in real time. More contemporary approaches to the genre, as with Carbon 2185, simply have the Hacker be on the spot alongside his fellow Cyberpunks and his player making simple rolls to hack the local network, device, or mech. The one element of 2185 not discussed in Carbon 2185 is the nature of computer networks, but essentially the roleplaying game focuses on the local networks and leaves it up to the Game Master to decide that nature.

Cyberware is a bit more complex, but again different. In most other roleplaying games of the genre, installing cyberware detracts from your humanity or empathy—and in ShadowRun your capacity to cast magic—but that was never all that easy to roleplay. In Carbon 2185, cyberware, or augmentations, do not degrade your empathy; they poison you. Or rather, the power cells that power them do, leaking toxins and radioactivity into the blood. There are certain drugs which will counter both, but they are expensive and they have a limited effect, meaning that they need to be taken on a regular basis. Augmentations are arranged into tiers, the higher the tier, the greater its toxic effect, equal to its tier rating. Those on Tier 0, like Neurolink or an Enhanced HUD have no effect and the body can cope with them, but beyond that, from the Tier 1 Enhanced Aiming to the Tier 5 Supercharged Hidden Blade, and the augmentations begin poisoning the body. The base limitation or Blood Toxicity Limit is equal to twice a character’s Constitution modifier, so a character can have augmentations that add up to that before he considered to be poisoned. There are other limitations on augmentations. They can only be installed in seven locations—Neural, Eyes, Right Arm, Left Arm, Torso, Skin, and Legs—and only one augmentation can be installed per location. So they cannot be stacked in a location, but in general higher Tier augmentations are more powerful. There are also legal limitations, augmentations of Tier 3 requiring a licence, Tier 4 being reserved for the military and illegal for civilians to install, and Tier 5 being experimental. Of course, this does not mean that they are unavailable, but rather that they require certain Influence to acquire and they are expensive. The list of cyberware or augmentations is not extensive in Carbon 2185 as in other roleplaying games of the genre and some may be disappointed by the choice.

Influence represents a character’s standing and social cachet. It is measured on two tracks, Influence: Corporate and Influence: Street. Rated between one and twenty, at Influence: Corporate 1, a character gains access to the city’s auction houses or the black market for Influence: Street 1. At higher levels, a character can gain informants and access to higher augmentations. It will rise or fall depending upon the Cyberpunks’ actions, so kill an important member of a rival gang and Influence: Street will rise, but kill an important member of your own gang and it will probably fall. The Influence mechanic is fairly broad and open system with latitude for interpretation and nuance—and even expansion should the Game Master want to track the player characters’ Influence with multiple organisation.

As well as giving a timeline for its future of 2185 and describing the setting of San Francisco, Carbon 2185: A Cyberpunk RPG also includes tables of encounters district by district and a mission generator. It details the various corporations operating in the city, the many gangs—many organised along ethinic lines such as the Snakehead Tong, Aizutachi Yakuza, Diablos Eléctrico, and the Bratva, and groups of interest. The latter includes The Church of the Machine Bound God, fanatics obsessed with augmentations; The Enigma Collective, elusive hackers dedicated to toppling the corporations; The Synth Rebellion, which supports escaped Synths and protects them against the government’s ‘retirement agents’; and Villeneuve Robotics, a small, but ruthless synth design and manufacturing company. A number of NPCs are also detailed, ready for the Game Master to add to her game along with a wide range of enemies and villains, from Challenge 0 up to Challenge 11. They include civilians, gangsters, Wesleys—Crush addicts, spiderbot, mechs, synthdogs and canine mechs, retirement officers, cyberninja, liberated AI, spider tanks, and more. 

Rounding out Carbon 2185 is the scenario, ‘Chow’s Request: A Carbon 2185 Adventure for 1st Level Cyberpunks’. The cyberpunks are asked by a gang leader to retrieve some stolen property from a rival gang. Various hooks are given as to why the cyberpunks might want to get involved, including being indebted, wanting to join the gang, and being an undercover law enforcement officer. It is decent enough scenario, basically a snatch and grab and its consequences, primarily focused combat. It would have been nice to see some options for Hacker Class for example.

Physically, Carbon 2185: A Cyberpunk RPG is a stunning looking book with a great cover and plenty of full colour artwork inside—although only in the first two thirds of the book. The layout tidy and looks impressive on its stark white pages. Unfortunately, dig a little deeper and there are one or two issues with the book’s production values. It does another edit, but the main problem is one of organisation in that a lot of the rules for actually creating a cyberpunk are in the rules section in the middle of the book rather than at the beginning and then the rules section comes after the one on combat. So expect to be flipping back and forth with Carbon 2185, especially when creating cyberpunks. None of this is helped of course, by the lack of index, an absurd omission in 2019, let alone 2185.

As solid a design as Carbon 2185: A Cyberpunk RPG is, it does feel slightly lacking places. There is lack of commercialisation in its depiction of 2185, in that every item will have a brand and the brand you use matters in the Cyberpunk genre. The corporations are mentioned, but the make and model of the items they sell. The presence of the media in the San Francisco feels underdeveloped and for any Game Master wanting not to set his campaign in the Golden City, there is only limited information about the world beyond its walls. Unfortunately, there is no advice for the Game Master on running Carbon 2185: A Cyberpunk RPG or the genre, and sadly, there is no bibliography either (although it could be said that Carbon 2185 wears its influences like adverts on your neurolink display). Thus no advice on the types of games that the Game Master could run, whether that is gang warfare on the streets of San Francisco, hunting down Synths as retirement officers, attempting to bring down the corporations, and so on. Hopefully a supplement specifically aimed at the Game Master will address these issues. 

If you are looking for a Cyberpunk or Science Fiction roleplaying game after playing Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, then absolutely, Carbon 2185: A Cyberpunk RPG is a good choice. Equally, it is a good choice if you are looking for a Cyberpunk or Science Fiction roleplaying game, the core mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition likely to be familiar and easy to handle, with the new rules and changes nicely emulating aspects of the Cyberpunk genre without disrupting the core rules and mechanics. Overall, Carbon 2185: A Cyberpunk RPG does an impressive job of showcasing the adaptability of the mechanics of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition whilst being solid take upon the Cyberpunk genre.

Published by the Melsonian Arts Council, Troika! is a Science Fantasy roleplaying game of baroque weirdness that lies beyond eldritch portals that open into non-euclidean labyrinths which lie on the edge of creation under skies filled with innumerable crystal spheres and the golden-sailed barges that travel between them. It combines a simple set of mechanics with a world that is not so much described as implied in its thirty-six refulgent and empyrean character options. This is a world and roleplaying game inspired by Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun series and  M. John Harrison’ Viriconium series, with just a little feel of Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth. Further, and although the mechanics of Troika! are not compatible with the majority of roleplaying games and scenarios for the Old School Renaissance, in tone and feel, it is not dissimilar to scenarios like Slumbering Ursine Dunes and Misty Isles of the Eld from the Hydra Collective LLC, Crypts of Indormancy and The Monolith from beyond Space and Time, and roleplaying games such as Monte Cook Games’ Numenera, Pelgrane Press’ The Dying Earth, and Lost Pages’ Into the Odd.

Characters in Troika! are very simply defined with three attributes—Skill, Stamina, and Luck plus a Background. Skill represents a character’s capabilities and prowess in combat, Stamina his Hit Points—if reduced to zero, he is dead, and Luck for just about anything else. Every character also starts with the same set of possessions. It is the Background though, such as Ardent Giant of Corda, Journeyman of the Guild of Sharp Corners, and Temple Knight of Telak the Swordbringer which defines the character in terms of origins, role, and advanced skills and possessions. Some Backgrounds also provide a special rule to do with an ability specific to them. For example, the Monkeymonger has spent his life herding Edible Monkeys, but has left his former occupation after falling or stepping off The Wall. He owns a Monkey Club, a Butcher’s Knife, a pocket full of monkey treats, and a herd of small monkeys too scared to run away from him. His advanced skills are climbing, trapping, club fighting, and knife fighting. The special rule associated with this Background has the Game Master rolling on a table to determine the Mien of the monkeys.

To create a character, a player rolls several six-sided dice for his character’s Skill, Stamina, and Luck, and notes the results down along with his character’s baseline possessions. Then he rolls d66 to generate a number between one and thirty-six and his character’s Background. The values listed for the Advanced Skills and the Spells are simply added to the character’s base Skill value to determine their final value. The process is really simple and easy, and between a group of players should create some interesting characters (although lose a few characters and the choices available in terms of Backgrounds may be limited to avoid repetition). The process is also fast. A character in Troika! can be created in a couple of minutes! 

Our sample character is a Claviger, a Master of Keys, obsessed and trained with the opening of doors and locks, both mundane and mystical. Ixyll is an orphan raised by the Grand Order of the Master of Keys and is obsessed by opening the doors, locks, and portals to furthest reaches of creation.

Ixyll
Background: Claviger

Skill: 5
Stamina: 20
Luck: 9

Advanced Skills: Locks 4, Strength 3, Trapping 3, Maul Fighting 2
Spells: Open 2, See Through 1, Lock 1

Possessions: Knife, lantern & flask of oil, rucksack, six provisions, festooned with keys (counts as Modest armour), a Distinguished Sledgehammer (counts as Maul), lockpicking tools

Mechanically, Troika! is disarmingly simple, if somewhat inelegant. To undertake an action, a player rolls two six-sided dice, aiming for a result equal to, or under, the appropriate Skill value. In an opposed roll though, the Skill value is added to the result of the roll and compared with that of the opponent’s to see which result is higher. Where Skill or an Advanced Skill does not factor into a situation, but a roll is still needed, the player instead rolls against his character’s Luck. This though, comes at a cost, the character sacrificing a point of Luck to make this roll. So essentially, a character’s luck (and Luck) can run out over the course of an adventure. Thankfully, this is not a permanent loss, and both Luck and Stamina can be regained once a character has taken the time to rest.

Combat  primarily consists of opposed rolls of Skill plus Advanced Skill plus the result of two six-sided dice, the roll determining which combatant hits and inflicts damage, whether that is mêlée or missile combat. Rolls of double six are criticals and count as Mighty Blows which inflict double damage, whilst double ones are fumbles and enable an opponent to inflict an extra point of damage. Mighty Blows can inflict a lot of damage on defendants and that includes the player characters, so Troika! has the potential to be fairly deadly in play. Thankfully though, character creation is quick, so bringing replacement characters into play should not too much of an issue. Other rules cover grappling, use of multiple weapons, armour and shields—both reduce damage, and so on. So simple and fast enough, but initiative is very different.

Initiative in Troika! requires tokens—a lot of tokens. These can be dice, counters, and so on, as long as they are in a mix of colours. Each player character requires two tokens of the same colour. All of the enemies require tokens in the same colour equal to their combined total Initiative value. One last token is needed of an entirely different colour. This is the End of the Round token. This collection of tokens, known as the stack, goes into a bag or container and shaken up. Then over the course of a round, the Game Master draws tokens one by one. When a player character’s token is drawn, he can act and when an enemy’s token is drawn, one of their number can act. This continues until all of the tokens have been drawn, or the End of the Round is drawn.

These Initiative rules are very different (at least for roleplaying, something like them being used in the board game, German Railways) and have an unpredictable, organic feel and flow. One clever extension of them is the aiming rule, which by letting a player character place one less token in the stack, lets his player rolls twice and take the best result when his second is drawn. However, the unpredictable nature of the Initiative mechanism means that the enemies might act before the End of the Round token is drawn and so prevent the player characters from acting in a round; some player characters might get to act, but not others before the End of the Round token is drawn; and all of the enemies might get to act before the player characters. Now barring the last one, which could occur in a standard combat engagement anyway, some players may be dismayed by being denied the chance to act, something which flies in the face of just about every other roleplaying game. What it represents, though, is a stronger ebb and flow of combat, of combatants hesitating, seizing the initiative and losing it, and so on.

Troika! includes some seventy or so spells. Each is treated like an Advanced Skill which needs to be rolled against when cast and also has a cost to be paid from the caster’s Stamina statistic when cast. A result of double one means that the spell is successfully cast, but a roll of double six means that the spell has not only failed to be cast, but that the caster’s player must roll on the ‘OOPS!’ table, which is given on the inside back cover. This can radically change the caster, whether that is deducting twenty-five years from the caster’s life or not, such as turning everyone nearby turning into pig, except the caster. The ‘OOPS!’ table definitely has an obsession with pigs! 

Monsters or enemies are treated in as simple a fashion that is in keeping with the rest of Troika! There are some thirty or so given from Alzabo and Boggart to Ven and Zoanthrop. The first is a ghoul-bear, the second is a grumpy Pixie, the third time travellers from the End of All Things, and the fourth, fashionistas who followed a fashion too far to be in touch with the animal kingdom and gave themselves partial prefrontal lobotomies… Every enemy entry includes a Mien table to quickly determine their attitude when encountered. All have slightly lower Stamina ratings in comparison to the player characters in order to make combat quicker to run and to balance against spell casters having to expend their Stamina to fuel their spells. 

Lastly, Troika! includes ‘The Blancmange & Thistle’, an introductory adventure. It is intended to be dropped into an ongoing campaign with little rhyme or reason, and sees the player characters taking rooms at The Blancmange & Thistle hotel in the city of Troika. They are forced to share a room because there is a big party on the roof to which they are also invited, but anyone and everyone is also going to party too. All of them just as weird, if not more so, as the player characters. The adventure really consists of the player characters having a terrible time in the hotel’s lift as one weird guest gets on as another weird guest gets off at his floor. The problem with the scenario is that it will fall flat if the player characters refuse to engage with it, but should they actually engage with the weirdness around them—and they have no excuse given just how weird they all are—then this is a lively, silly trifle of an adventure which has a feel of The Dying Earth about it. Writing adventures to fit this tone or indeed the feel of the world of Troika! may be a challenge for some Game Masters and the roleplaying game does not include any advice to that end—or indeed any advice. Although to be fair, the roleplaying game is not aimed at the inexperienced roleplayer. 

Physically, Troiki! Is very nicely presented. A nice touch is that the various sections—character creation, rules, spells, and the bestiary and scenario—are each done on different coloured paper, making them stand out a little in the digest-sized hardback. The writing is good and the artwork is suitably and weird throughout.

Mechanically, Troika! is undeniably simple, looking and feeling a little like the Fighting Fantasy solo adventure novels of the nineteen eighties. The application of Backgrounds though, not only make them more competent, they also provide ways in which the player characters can each be cool. The Backgrounds also suggest aspects of the wider world—or edge of the world—whilst still leaving plenty of room for player input. Ultimately, if Troika! is missing anything, it is more of this fantastically weird and baroque world that the Backgrounds and the scenario hints at, which as ‘The Blancmange & Thistle’ demonstrates really comes out in play rather than presented as chunks of information. Thus Troika! would benefit from further weird adventures rather than sourcebooks.

Troika! is a fantastic little book, a roleplaying game, which with its simple rules and rich character Backgrounds, possesses a superb pick-up and play quality. It would be fantastic to see that supported with a book of easy to pick up and run short scenarios, but the scenario in this book, ‘The Blancmange & Thistle’, is a fine start.

Taverns are a cliché in fantasy roleplaying because that is always where adventures begin, as in, “You all meet in an inn.” They are places where the adventurers can buy a drink, pick up a few rumours, perhaps get hired for a job, and then go on their merry way to delve into some dungeon or some other adventuring site. Then when the adventure is over, they are places for such adventurers to retire to and spend their loot on wine, women, and song. The Pocket Companion: A Tavern Guide is designed to make such establishments more interesting than that and to give multiple examples of such places where food and drink, company and entertainment can all be found and enjoyed. Some seventy or so taverns detailed, spread across four types of terrain—cities and towns, on the road, villages, and wilderness—all designed for use with the fantasy roleplaying game of your choice, for the content of The Pocket Companion: A Tavern Guide is entirely systemless. Further, the supplement published by Wisdom Save Media is very simply presented in a black and buff booklet in order to make it friendly on the pocket.

Now despite saying that The Pocket Companion: A Tavern Guide is systemless—because it is—it has its own system of presenting and rating each of the taverns described within its pages. Every entry is rated in terms of casks, from one to five, taking into consideration its customer service, quality of produce, comfort, range of services offered, décor, and overall customer satisfaction. This is only a rough guide and is open to interpretation, so a one-cask tavern might give great customer service, but serve terrible beer and have cheap furniture, or the beer is great, but overpriced, served by rude staff, and patronised by aggressively surly customers. The particular services offered by each tavern are indicated by a number of icons, one each for food, stables rooms, merchant (services), blacksmith, entertainment, and bar staff and patrons. Again, these are are open to interpretation, but further information is provided in each tavern’s description and some of their customer comments.

In addition every entry includes a description, a bit o’ history, and one or two reviews. Some also give descriptions of the staff and patrons of the tavern, each of whom is accorded their likes, dislikes, wants, fears, and flaws, all of which are organised into a table of their own. There are typically three of these per entry that includes them, nicely providing a thumbnail portrait of the individuals. This increases the page count for the entries with NPCs from one page to two.

For example, The Yellow King is rated three casks and offers food, entertainment, and rooms. The sign over its door depicts a figure with its head bowed and covered in a cowl and dressed in yellow tattered robes, surrounded by shadows which suggest the figure might have wings. Inside, its many patrons sit in small clumps, staring into their greasy yankards amidst an air of desperation and menace… According to its ‘A Bit O’ History’, The Yellow King is place for its patrons to drink and forget, ignoring the city’s worst inhabitants in the tavern’s dark corners. The right connections will get an introduction to any one of them should you have need of their prowess at blackmailing and coercing others. The price though, is often more than simple coin… Surprisingly, Hildred Castaigne only gives the tavern a rating of two out of five.

Where The Yellow King is found in a city or town, The Lair is rated at four casks and is located somewhere in the wilderness, its exact location and appearance changing at the whim or need of the owner, Nox. Nox is an average bakeep, though he does have information to sell for a price. The tavern is described as being clean and well-maintained, but the decor may well be off-putting and there are shady corners where all sorts of business can be conducted. Nox is described under ‘A Bit O’ History’ as often being sarcastic or derisive towards his customers as he would rather be elsewhere, though he will help those new to the area. It is awarded five out of five in one reward, but three out of five in another, the latter pointing out that Nox is freaky, whilst his bouncer and waiter twins are always grinning….

Under ‘Staff and Patrons of The Lair’, Nox is revealed as an intelligence broker with blank, disinterested expression and a sarcastic manner. He is also a vampire! He likes decorating and colourful cocktails, dislikes cleaning and daytime, wants better servants, fears not being needed, and suffers from the flaws of being overly supportive, even to his own detriment. Both his bouncer and waiter twins are given a similar treatment as is a secretive patron known as The Alabaster Mask.

In addition to the numerous taverns, The Pocket Companion: A Tavern Guide also includes a few plot hooks, a set of tables for determining the details of cellars as well as their secrets, for creating the names of beers, wines, and liquors and how they taste, some twenty distractions to throw at the player characters, and games like Beggars Blackjack and Drinks and Daggers. All of which can be used to add colour and flavour to the player characters’ visit to any of the establishments described earlier. Then if the Game Master runs out of choices within the pages there is a quick and dirty means of generating more taverns with a set of further tables. The book itself is rounded out with space for the Game Master to record her own creations.

Physically, The Pocket Companion: A Tavern Guide is a plain and simple book. It is only lightly illustrated, but more problematically is that it does need another edit as the writing in places is not as succinct or clear as it could be. Much of this stems from the contents of the book being crowd-sourced, so the writing is variable in its quality. The fact that the contents of the book were crowd-sourced also means that there is another issue with The Pocket Companion: A Tavern Guide in the degree of repetition between its seventy or so entries. So this means that there are lots of taverns that are run by retired adventurers, taverns that are really busy despite being off the beaten track, taverns run by Dwarves, and so on. What this means is that the Game Master has to be careful when selecting the next tavern to add to her game lest it is too similar to the last one that the player characters visited.

Overall, although The Pocket Companion: A Tavern Guide is somewhat rough around the edges, it does give the Referee plenty of choice and plenty to work with. Which it does in an inexpensive and accessible fashion.

If ever there was a city ripe for subversion by the Mythos it is Jazz Age Berlin, the Berlin of the twenties, of roaring inflation, the Weimar Republic, of unfettered artistic expression, of outrageous entertainment, of political extremes and violence, of a flood of immigration from Russia and Eastern Europe, and more that led it to be called the ‘Wickedest City on Earth’. It is this period—between the end of the Great War and the Nazi party under Adolf Hitler taking power in 1933—and its subversion by the Mythos which is explored in Berlin: The Wicked City – Unveiling the Mythos in Weimar Berlin, the latest supplement for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition. Published by Chaosium, Inc., the content and subject matter of Berlin: The Wicked City—sex, drugs, and prostitution—as well as the horror, make it one of the more mature titles published for the venerable roleplaying game of Lovecraftian investigative horror to date.

Berlin: The Wicked City begins by exploring why an investigator would be in a Berlin. Well despite its reputation for political violence and the rampant inflation in the earlier part of the decade, it is a welcoming city, not just for immigrants of all sorts, but also tourists, artists, and academics as well as homosexuals, lesbians, transgendered, and others. For Berliners and Germans come to Berlin, there is the matter of asking the question, ‘How did you spend the War?’ to be answered and whilst no new Occupations are given, several new Experience Packages are provided which focus on aspects of Berlin life. These are Street Fighter, Underclass, and Former Corpsstudent (ex-member of a student fraternity). Four Investigator Organisations are given as examples for the Investigators to join, all pleasingly suitable for the Berlin of the 1920s, including as they do Hilde-Film, a struggling film company—the city being the centre of European film production—which believes it has footage of ghosts and the Landsberger Tenants’ Association, whose members have uncovered something weird in the cellar and fear that others are taking an interest in it. Further on, it looks at the possible contacts that the investigators can cultivate in the city, including political, occult, and criminal.

Berlin itself is accorded a decent history and description of each of it zones and districts. Each is given a page of detail accompanied by a list of its sites of interest—both mundane and unusual, house of worship, chief contact, gang or organisation, nightlife, ongoing problem, and prominent form of prostitution. Also covered are the city’s weather, transport network, media and communication, and penal code. Equally as useful for any Investigator are the descriptions of Berlin’s museums and libraries, whilst those for Haus Vaterland—a department store of restaurants, Romanisches Forum—the square where the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Memorial-Church and the exploitative Heaven and Hell Club both stand, the Institute of Sexology, and more, are described in more detail. The discussion of food and drink and Berlin’s nightlife, including the possibility of investigators owning their own club, move Berlin: The Wicked City onto more contentious ground.

One aspect that marks Berlin: The Wicked City as a sourcebook for more mature gamers is that the fact that it includes sex, drugs, and prositution, all prevalent in the period. These are subjects which some roleplayers may find dealing with more uncomfortable than the cosmic horror of Call of Cthulhu with its death and madness, but given that Berlin: The Wicked City is a supplement about Berlin, they are unavoidable. So yes, it does give rules for the effects of taking a variety of recreational drugs—including alcohol, it does list the types of prostitutes working in the city, and it does discuss both LGBTQI investigators and LGBTQI politics in the city. Notably though, it treats all of these subject matters in a mature fashion and a tone that is always measured, never salacious. Further, the treatment of these subject matters barely scratches the surface—Berlin during the Jazz Age deserved its reputation as the ‘Wicked City in the World’.

Before Berlin: The Wicked City delves into the weird, it gives biographies of some twenty or so famous Berliners and other inhabitants of the city, including Marlene Dietrich, Albert Einstein, Christopher Isherwood, and Vladimir Nabokov. None are given stats, but they do not really need them. What is given is the period when they are resident in Berlin, highlighting the possibility that the investigators might just meet any one of them.

More than half of the supplement is dedicated to the Mythos in Berlin. This includes the presence of Nyarlathotep as the emcee of the city’s wildest parties and cabarets, wild youth who style themselves as the ‘Lost Boys’ from J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and worship something caprine in the woods outside the city, and a dance troupe whose ‘cosmic ballets’ might just be summoning clear vision to the world, but might inadvertently be summoning something else. These short write-up are accompanied by ten scenario seeds awaiting the Keeper’s development.

Berlin: The Wicked City is rounded out with three scenarios which together form a loose campaign which takes place in 1922, 1926, 1928, and 1932. Each of the three explores a particular theme which the author discusses at the scenarios’ starts, so the theme for ‘The Devil Eats Flies’ is ‘lustmord’—‘lust death’, for ‘Dances of Vice, Horror, and Ecstacy’ it is ‘überschreitung’—‘transgression’, and for ‘Schreckfilm’ it is ‘algolagnia’—‘sexual pleasure derived from physical pain’. ‘The Devil Eats Flies’ is a noirish case of a missing person which descends into political unrest and violence on Berlin’s streets and one of the stranger tales of the twentieth century. There are some nice set pieces to this scenario, including a scene at night in the city’s zoo and at the antagonist’s home. Overall, this is a rich, meaty mystery for the investigators to get their teeth into. ‘Dances of Vice, Horror, and Ecstacy’ draws the investigators into the life of a dissolute artist when something strange happens at one of her performances and they are asked by an occultist to investigate. This is a louche and loose scenario with multiple plot strands which may not be that easy to follow and the Keeper will need to ensure that she has well prepared before running this scenario. Foreshadowing events years in the future, the scenario takes on a grandeur in its later scenes in a number of quite wicked set-pieces. Lastly, ‘Schreckfilm’ begins with a MacGuffin falling into the investigators’ possession and finds them trailed by trouble as the authorities and other organisations, both mundane and monstrous, take too much of an interest in them. Investigating the MacGuffin will furnish them with clues and an encounter with a surprisingly urbane Englishman before plunging them into the seamier side of Berlin society and an attempt to prevent the co-option of the mass media by the Mythos. Taking place before the election of the Nazi party, there is a strong sense of foreboding throughout ‘Schreckfilm’, one that stems our knowledge of events which followed. For the investigators though, this is one last chance to stop at least some of the madness. 

All three of these quite lengthy scenarios make excellent use of Berlin as a place, making them difficult to set elsewhere. They also parallel the events and moods of the decade the supplement covers. Starting with the terror and uncertainty of the political violence and economic instability of 1922 and ‘The Devil Eats Flies’, continuing with the transgressive decadence of  ‘Dances of Vice, Horror, and Ecstacy’ in 1926 and 1928, before coming face-to-face with moral decay and turpitude of ‘Schreckfilm’ in 1932. All three of these scenarios contain sexual elements, especially the second two, so any group of players roleplaying these adventures need to be aware that they contain adult content that is more obvious than in other Call of Cthulhu scenarios. 

So what is missing from Berlin: The Wicked City? There are perhaps two things which it could have included. It mentions that despite laws being enacted following the Great War which banned the private ownership of firearms, guns were easy to get hold of. What it does not do is tell the Keeper what weapons might have been readily available. It need not have given stats for them since there are plenty listed in the Call of Cthulhu Rulebook, but giving their names would have been useful at the very least. The other thing missing from Berlin: The Wicked City is a timeline for the decade or so that it covers. Obviously, much of that can be found online, but for a setting supplement for a roleplaying game of Lovecraftian investigative horror, a timeline of occult or weird happenings in Berlin would have been useful.

Physically, Berlin: The Wicked City adheres to Chaosium, Inc.’s now high standards in terms of layout and look. This is a clean and tidy hardback, illustrated with a good mix of period photographs and full-page, full colour pieces of artwork, the latter capturing the gaiety of the city as much as the horror. The cartography though, is excellent, whether it is the period maps that depict the cluttered layout of the city or the delightfully architectural floor plans. The cover is also well done, hinting at the reach that the Mythos has over the bright lights of Berlin.

Berlin: The Wicked City gets the balance between background content and playable content right. There is more than enough of the former that is both interesting and useful to help run the latter and help the Keeper develop her own material. Although the more mature, if not adult, elements of that background may put some roleplayers off, it is carefully handled and presented throughout, especially in the scenarios where the investigators are more than likely to encounter it. And should roleplayers decide to avoid the supplement on those grounds, then they will be missing out on what are three good scenarios. Although the Keeper is given several scenario seeds to develop, an anthology of scenarios set in Berlin between the three scenarios in Berlin: The Wicked City would be more than welcome. Certainly Berlin: The Wicked City sets the blueprint for what a good city or setting supplement should be like for Call of Cthulhu.

Berlin: The Wicked City – Unveiling the Mythos in Weimar Berlin is an impressive supplement. It more than does the setting of the ‘Wickedest City on Earth’ justice and it enables the investigators to explore that setting in three tales that cover the influence of the Mythos in a decade of danger, dissipation, and decay. 

One of the aspects of the Old School Renaissance is that with access to the Open Game License and System Reference Document, roleplayers, Dungeon Masters, Referees, and game designers can not only revisit particular versions of Dungeons & Dragons—whether that is the original Dungeons & Dragons, Basic Dungeons & Dragons, or Advanced Dungeons & Dragons—but specific editions of those games. So it is with Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy. Published by Necrotic Gnome—a publisher best known for the Wormskin fanzine and Dolmenwood setting—following a successful Kickstarter campaign, Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy is one such retroclone of a particular edition of Basic Dungeons & Dragons. That edition is the 1981 revision of Basic Dungeons & Dragons by Tom Moldvay and its accompanying Expert Set by Dave Cook and Steve Marsh. The core book for which is the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome.

What this means is that Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy is a Basic Dungeons & Dragons retroclone. It is a Class and Level roleplaying game, the combination of the Moldvay Basic Dungeons & Dragons and its Expert Set, providing scope for characters to go from First Level to Fourteenth Level. It does ‘Race as Class’, so the Classes are Cleric, Fighter, Magic-User, and Thief—all Humans, plus Dwarf, Elf, and Halfling. The Dwarf is a Fighter able to detect underground construction tricks and room traps, with Infravision, and good hearing; the Elf is a Fighter able to cast arcane spells, has Infravision, good sight and hearing, and is immune to Ghoul Paralysis; and the Halfling is a Fighter good at hiding, has good hearing, and is good with missile weapons. The Cleric has the Turn Undead ability, but does not get a spell until he has reached Second Level, whilst the Magic-User gets just the one spell at First Level. The attributes are still on the three to eighteen scale, but the modifier ranges from -3 to +3. The Alignments are Law, Neutral, and Chaos, rather Lawful Good, Lawful Neutral, Lawful Evil, Neutral Good, Neutral, et cetera. In combat, weapons do a six-sided die’s worth of damage with Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy uses THAC0 or ‘To Hit Armour Class 0’. Notably though, the range of Armour Class values starts at 9 and ends at -3, rather than starting at 10 and ending at -10 as in other iterations of Dungeons & Dragons.

Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy also includes the option for High-Level play, taking the player characters above the Fourteenth Level maximum of the Moldvay Basic Dungeons & Dragons and its Expert Set, right up to Thirty-Sixth Level much in the vein of the Mentzer edition of Basic Dungeons & Dragons and it subsequent expansions. Another inclusion is a list of the Level titles—so Acolyte, Adept, Priest/Priestess, and so on for the Cleric Class and Veteran, Warrior, Sword-Master, and so on, for the Fighter Class—another feature of early versions of Dungeons & Dragons. Both the rules for High-Level play and the Level titles are taken from the Moldvay Basic Dungeons & Dragons and its Expert Set rather than being new additions.

Ixyll
First level Magic-User
Alignment: Law
Armour Class: 10
Hit Points: 3
THAC0: 19

Strength 05 (-1, 1-in-6 Open Doors)
Intelligence 13 (Elvish, Literate)
Wisdom 10 
Dexterity 12 
Constitution 12 
Charisma 08 (-1, Max. Retainers: 3, Loyalty: 6)

Spells: Sleep
Equipment: Backpack, lantern, oil flask (2), tinder box, wine, iron rations, crowbar, daggers (3), 63 GP

At its core, Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy is Basic Dungeons & Dragons writ large then. Except not—and in a number of ways. To begin with, it provides options that shift it away from the original Moldvay version of Basic Dungeons & Dragons and a step or two closer to modern sensibilities. Most obviously, providing rules for ascending Armour Class as first seen in Dungeons & Dragons, Third Edition rather than the descending Armour Class of THAC0, and to be fair, it is an easier, more intuitive option. Another modernism is actually not, that of ability checks, which in Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy has a player rolling equal to or under one of his character’s six abilities for the character to succeed at a challenging task. Rather its inclusion is intended to address an ambiguity, their being included as an option in the Expert Set rules for Basic Dungeons & Dragons, but not in the Basic Dungeons & Dragons rules themselves. Other ambiguities the designer has addressed from the Moldvay edition of Basic Dungeons & Dragons includes the Encumbrance rules; how much Experience Points should be awarded to retainers—half of the Experience Points earned by the player characters is due to them; clearly distinguishing between the room traps that characters of all Classes can attempt to find, and the small or treasure traps which the Thief Class specialises in finding and disarming; clearly stating that characters cannot run in combat; changing the Morale rules so that monsters definitely check Morale the first time when one of their number is killed; and balancing the values of the various treasure types. 

In addition, Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy expands the scope of Moldvay Basic Dungeons & Dragons. For the most part these are more changes in terminology rather than scope. Thus ‘Adventure’ is no longer used to refer to a single session of an ongoing game; the term ‘Hirelings’ is introduced to cover all non-adventuring retainers; and the term ‘THAC0’ is imported from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition to help explain the combat mechanics. (Its inclusion also helps ground player and Referee in the retroclone.) It also opens up the use of the subdual rules for dragons to apply to other monsters too and applies the rules for handling watercraft to other vehicles.

So what else is in the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome? Besides the seven Classes and method of creating characters, the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome covers wealth and encumbrance; vehicles and mounts; extensive spell lists for both Arcane spellcasters—the Magic-User and the Elf, and Divine spellcasters—the Cleric; adventuring—dungeon and wilderness adventuring, encounters, pursuit and evasion, and combat; hired help—retainers, mercenaries, and specialists; strongholds and domains; a bestiary, from Acolyte, Ape (White), and Bandit to Wyvern, Yellow Mould, and Zombie; advice on Running Adventures for the Referee; and treasure lists including sentient swords. Undoubtedly, there is a lot of information here, but a very great deal of it will be familiar to the target audience for the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome. Which means that a member of that audience could grab a copy of this roleplaying game and a fantasy scenario of their choice and run using these rules.

At the sharp end of the game, the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome also covers adventuring in just a few pages, covering marching order and the ‘Caller’ and ‘Mapper’ roles, time, movement, adventuring in dungeons, the wilderness, and on the water, combat, and more. Notably here, the dungeoneering aspect of the game is played out in ten-minute turns, the Referee first rolling for wandering monsters, the party deciding its actions and the Referee describing their outcome, followed by his bookkeeping at the end of the turn. Wilderness Adventuring and Waterborne Adventuring follows a similar pattern, but adding weather and getting lost into the mix. What the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome is doing here is highlighting the procedural nature of play within the rules of not just this retroclone, but also Dungeons & Dragons in its earlier incarnations. In fact, the graphical design of Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy draws the reader’s very attention to this by placing each sequence of play in a box at the start of their relevant sections.

The Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome comes as a thick digest-sized hardback, but it never feels stodgy or like it is trying to pack too much information into its smaller page size. What is obvious about Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy is that as much thought has gone into its physical design as its mechanical design. A great deal has effort is made to fit particular sections of rules onto double page spreads, so how to create a character and an explanation of the six abilities take up a double page spread as do the rules for hazards and challenges, dungeon adventuring, wilderness adventuring, and so on and so on. The designer does this again and again, but some rules need just a page, like those for Alignment, and other content needs more, such as the spell lists and the bestiary obviously. The designer really makes good use of the space in the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome and none of it feels wasted.

The Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome is liberally illustrated using a lot of black and white pieces with full colour spreads between chapters of the book. Some of it is weird, some of it wonky, some of it wonderful, but a wide range of styles showcasing many of the artists drawing for the Old School Renaissance today. The writing and editing is also good, the former succinct in presenting and explaining the rules. A nice touch is that many of the most useful rules and tables have been reproduced inside the front and back covers of the book.

What is missing from the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome is anything in the way of examples. So there is no example of character generation, of play, of combat, and so on. True, its target audience does not need such examples, but it would have been nice to have had them included, not just to see the designer’s mind at work, but perhaps add a degree of verisimilitude from the roleplaying game that Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy is based upon. Similarly, there is no adventure in the book, or sample locales, but again, the audience for whom Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy is intended will doubtless have content of their own to use. Equally as similar is that it would have been nice to see the types of adventure that the designer had intended to use these rules for, but that said, he has published several for use with the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome. 

What the version of Basic Dungeons & Dragons that followed the Moldvay version—the Mentzer version from 1983—ultimately got, but the Moldvay version never did, was a compilation. This was the Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cyclopedia, which is now available via Print on Demand. That is no longer the case. Thanks to Necrotic Gnome, the Moldvay version of Basic Dungeons & Dragons now has its own answer to the Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cyclopedia in the form of the Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome. It is not only a lovely representation of those rules, Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy is a representation with a polish, an adjustment for inconsistencies, errors, and so on, all to make it more playable. The Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy: Rules Tome is the update that the 1981 Moldvay version of Basic Dungeons & Dragons deserved.

Published by Lost Pages, Genial Jack Vol. I is the first issue of a serialised setting that is one-part the Book of Jonah, one-part Green Ronin Publishing’s Freeport, one-part Swift’s Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of Several Ships or Gulliver’s Travels, one part Baron Munchausen's Narrative of his Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia, but all weird nautical urban fantasy that can be best described as ‘whale-punk’. This is because Genial Jack Vol. I details a levianthine Blue Whale which for centuries has been home to the teeming town of Jackburg built across his thick skin and in his stomachs and deep into his intestines, much of it made up of the ships he has swallowed and those that have sailed into his maw and permanently moored inside of him. Jackburg is home to peoples and islands that the whale—the ‘Genial Jack’ of the title—has swallowed, from the Draugr to the Fomorians, and today it serves as a roaming free port, from which merchants sell the strange and exotic goods they have acquired in distant lands as well as the ambergris constantly formed deep in his gut.

Designed for use with Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition—but very easily adapted to the retroclone of your choice—Genial Jack Vol. I focuses very much on the peoples and places of Jackburg. The former includes over thirteen new player character Races. These start with the undead Draugar, drowned corpses from the north who dwell in longships and a reputation for fell curses and trading in people, and Finfolk, sly, shapeshifting merfolk who are known for their illusions and the indentured workers they mark with their bloodsucking maws; and Formorians, giants banished from Faerie by Queen Mab who can cast an evil eye about, but are skilled crafters of magical devices and weapons and armour, to Sirens, who have reputations as malicious seductresses, but are highly charismatic and help in Jackburg’s aerial defence; Undines, water elementals who can turn into water and back again and work in Jackburg powering waterwheels, serving as living air-suits, and moving vessels and cargo; and Urchins, Jackburg’s underclass, beggars—Urchin Beggars?—who will happily eat rubbish, but who are considered to be lucky. The others do include Humans, but also the hive-mind Jellyfolk, the Karkinoi crustacean warriors, tentacular mercantile Octopoids, the sentient and artistic coral Polypoids, the bankers and thieves who make up the Ratfolk, and the often vicious shark-men raiders known as the Selachians, who include an individual casino-owner and moneylender who is called, of course, the Loan Shark. All of these Races have adapted to an amphibious life aboard Genial Jack and inside Jackburg, including being able to see in dim or low lighting, many need to be submerged at least once per day.

Genial Jack Vol. I then examines each of Jackburg’s districts in both Outer Jackburg and Inner Jackburg, the former being on the exterior of Genial Jack, the latter inside him. Each is given a full page which includes a short description and a handful of encounters and locations. So along the great whale’s flanks can be found Barnaclebank, the series of barnacles which have been hollowed out and linked via tunnels of reinforced glass and iron, then carved and reshaped, many of them into gun emplacements, harpoon launchers, and torpedo bays manned by the Whaleguard, Jackburg’s guard and security forces—unsurprisingly, Genial Jack has a decent navy to protect both himself and Jackburg. The encounters include an emergency as a porthole has cracked and is letting in water with the player characters being the nearest ones who can fix it before the Whaleguard can get there and the discovery of an enormous crimson pearl brought ashore by Jackburg’s fisherfolk, which might be anything from a mermaid lich’s phylactery to a resurrection stone. The locations given thumbnail descriptions are the Barnaclebank Fish Market which operates on the extendable docks on Genial Jack’s starboard flank, and the Sea Star Saloon, a tavern inside a single, huge barnacle-shell which is run by a man with the lower body of a starfish and which caters to Whaleguard officers and fishermen alike.

At the other end is The Gutgardens at the bottom of the whale’s main stomach. Here fish and krill is received from Genial Jack’s maw via canals and tubes and cultivated into gut bacteria and symbiotic algae which soothes his innards. They are worked by Gutgardeners in signature green and black uniforms with gas masks and heavy-duty work boots and gloves. The encounters include coming across a pair of Bloodskulls gang members about to dunk a debtor in Acid Lake; an invasion of Feral Fungoids driven into frenzy after feeding on Genial Jack’s blood; and a poisonous miasma that will leave all who breathe it in with a lung infection. The locations include an abattoir where a Jellyfolk mentalist humanely stuns livestock before their slaughter; the aforementioned Acid Lake, where enclosed and perfumed domes provide popular picnic spots for those from Inner Town; and the Digestive Reserves, areas kept entirely free of buildings and people to aid in Genial Jack’s digestion.

Some twenty or so districts are described in this fashion, along with a centre spread illustration/map of Genial Jack and Jackburg, as well as a list of city slang. So far, so good, but so far this is forty pages into Genial Jack Vol. I and the reader is left wondering how all of this works, who is in charge, and so on. At this point, Genial Jack Vol. I does cover the authorities of Jackburg, including The Captains’ Conclave held at Mysterium Tremendum, a massive ship and alehouse, where every captain and depending on the size of their constituent populations they represent, ship’s mates too, express their opinions and suggest where the Whale journeys next. Such are directions are imparted by the Navigators, the divine intercessors between the peoples of Jackburg and the ‘Godwhale’ that is Genial Jack, who are descended from those first shipwrecked inside him. Lastly, the Whaleguard is Jackburg’s navy and police force. Rounding out Genial Jack Vol. I are some details of Jackburg’s laws and criminal organisations as well as a list of some twenty interesting Jackburgers, inhabitants of Jackburg.

Physically, Genial Jack Vol. I  is more of a magazine rather than a book. Down in black and white throughout, this first issue is richly illustrated with some fantastic cross sections of Jackburg’s twenty districts. Use of the art does veer into the repetitious, but it has to be said it is good art. On the downside, the twelve new Races are only given portrait illustrations rather than full body shots, so players and Referee alike will need to use a little imagination there. The cover though is absolutely fantastically fantastic, a piece of artwork which just grabs the reader. Elsewhere, the writing is decent, as is the editing.

Genial Jack Vol. I  still feels as if it is missing one or two things. Obviously a scenario, but then it has almost forty encounters across the various districts it describes, but more problematically there is no discussion of what Classes are suitable or found in Jackburg and there are no new Classes. Yet, the one thing that is really missing is a discussion of the technology found on and in the Godwhale. Gunpowder definitely, but also an overhead tram which runs from Genial Jack’s Maw down its oesophagus, and working of iron and glass into tunnels, all of which suggests advanced technology of a kind. Exactly what though, is another matter. Hopefully, it will be covered in a later issue.

Although written for use with Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, the rules content in Genial Jack Vol. I is very light being confined to the various abilities possessed by each Race. This means that it is very easy to adapt to the retroclone of your choice and it is very much a case of Genial Jack Vol. I being imaginative enough to transcend any limitations a Referee or player should have with regards to their roleplaying game of choice. Not only could this be adapted to the retroclone of your choice, it could be adapted to the setting of your choice, whether that is Green Ronin Publishing’s Freeport: City of Adventure or the world of 50 Fathoms for use with Savage Worlds or the Referee’s own campaign world.

Although just the first issue, Genial Jack Vol. I is a satisfying appetiser for what promises to be an imaginatively weird and wonderful setting. It can absolutely be described as unique, the first ‘whalepunk’ setting. Genial Jack Vol. II is eagerly awaited.

More Than Meets The Eye: A Short Adventure with Lots of Tentacles is one of four short scenarios for use with Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay released by Lamentations of the Flame Princess at Gen Con 2019, the others being Barbarians of Orange Boiling Seas, Menagerie of Exiles, and Zak Has Nothing To Do With This Book. Written by Kelvin Green, the author of Forgive Us and Fish Fuckers – Or, a Record, Compil’d in Truth, of the Sordid Activities of the People of Innsmouth, it is like several other scenarios from the publisher, set in the early modern period of the opening decades of the seventeenth century. It is also a sequel of sorts to the author’s scenario for adult Referees and players, the aforementioned Fish Fuckers.

From the start, including the title and its vibrant cover, it is obvious that More Than Meets The Eye is a weird, fantasy homage to a certain franchise of films involving giant robots capable of transforming into everyday objects. Not only is its location called St. Michael’s Bay, but the antagonists of the bay are transforming aliens, though not robots. Instead they are squidy, squidgy, tentacled aliens—shoggoths?—capable of transforming into everyday objects. This is depicted on the front cover and in a really good illustration inside the book. This transformation theme runs throughout the scenario, whether it is objects transforming into aliens (shoggoths), or the player characters into another race or Class, or simply into goop. There is a certain sexual element to the scenario, but it is not quite as prurient as that of Fish Fuckers.

Like the aforementioned scenario, More Than Meets The Eye is set in the West Country, but Cornwall rather than Devon, begging the question, “What exactly, does the author have against the people of the West Country?”. A light has been in the sky over the coastal village of St. Michael’s Bay or there has been violence in the coastal village of St. Michael’s Bay following a light has been in the sky or nothing has been heard from the leading men of the village, Ernest and Henry Hastings, and their business associates want to ensure that they are all right. These are the reasons to bring the player characters to the village of St. Michael’s Bay, which absolutely has to be the best use of the director’s name under any circumstances and well, it is set in Cornwall, home to Saint Michael's Mount (if there was a French version, there has to be a joke in there about Le Mont-Saint-Jean-Michel-Jarre).

What is going is this. St. Michael’s Bay has been invaded—twice. First by a group of shape-changing aliens in the past, fleeing a civil war amongst their kind. This group has recently been awoken after millennia of hibernation and in the process, the second group, come to Earth to capture the first. Which leads to a confrontation and a stand-off, one which the player characters are likely to break. Depending upon the outcome, there is a chance that the player characters might end up with a—unsurprisingly, given that this scenario is for Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay—weird spaceship, which is not actually as bad as it might seem. After all, there are any number of scenarios published for the roleplaying game and other Old School Renaissance roleplaying games which are set in weird locations, for example, Barbarians of the Orange Boiling Sea, which could be reached by a spaceship.

Physically, More Than Meets The Eye: A Short Adventure with Lots of Tentacles is well presented, with some really quite entertaining artwork. The book could be better edited though.

More Than Meets The Eye: A Short Adventure with Lots of Tentacles lives up to its title. It is short, probably providing no more than a session or two of play—though if the player characters get hold of the spaceship, it opens up all sorts of possibilities. It also has a lot of tentacles and no, you do not want to get close and personal with any of them! More Than Meets The Eye: A Short Adventure with Lots of Tentacles is also bonkers, but it is the best version of Michael Bay throughout all of time and space.

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 and HeroQuest Glorantha (Questworlds). This can include original scenarios, background material, cults, mythology, details of NPCs and monsters, and so on, but none of this content should be considered to be ‘canon’, but rather fall under ‘Your Glorantha Will Vary’. This means that there is still scope for the authors to create interesting and useful content that others can bring to their Glorantha-set campaigns.

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What is it?Yozarian’s Bandit Ducks! A RuneQuest Glorantha scenario for 3-5 players is a short one-shot with pre-generated players character Ducks.
It is a thirty-six page, full colour, 7.76 MB PDF.
Yozarian’s Bandit Ducks! is well presented, nicely illustrated in a cartoonish style, and the maps are good.
Where is it set?Yossarian’s Duck Bandits! is set in Sartar in Dragon Pass. The default location is 32 km north of Apple Lane in the lands of the Dinacoli, but it can be shifted to any location on the fringes between civilised lands and the wilderness.
Who do you play?Duck bandits. Or rather, Ducks who through misfortune and circumstance have turned to a life of banditry. Five pre-generated Ducks are included ready to play. They consist of two Odayla-worshipping Hunter brothers, an Uleria-worshipping ex-courtesan, a Humakt initiate, and an Orlanth initiate.
What do you need?Yossarian’s Duck Bandits! can be run just using RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. The Glorantha Bestiary may be useful for information on Ducks and veteran Gloranthophiles may want to refer to the scenario ‘The Money Tree’ from RuneQuest, Third Edition for more information about the primary NPC in Yossarian’s Duck Bandits!
What do you get?Yossarian’s Duck Bandits! is a tragi-comic affair about five Ducks who have been forced to turn to a life of crime and are about to commit their first act of banditry. This does not go quite as well as planned—for mostly tragic, comic reasons—but the Ducks do learn the whereabouts of even greater treasure. Unfortunately that involves a trek up a mountain and down again, a tight squeeze, some hungry, hungry trolls, and a ‘river rapids ride’ with Ducks!
Yossarian’s Duck Bandits! is in part intended to be played for comedy, played out against a very big threat, but there is a lot of flavour and nuance to the scenario which stems in part from the interplay of the pre-generated Ducks and their relationships. This should drive the events of the scenario as much as its fairly simple plot, and should also provide plenty of opportunity for some good roleplaying too. Although the outcome of the scenario is not set in stone, there is a good chance that the player characters will come out of it heroes—after all, they are bandits more by circumstance rather than choice—and the authors do provide several adventure seeds should the Game Master want to continue with the further adventures of Yossarian’s Duck Bandits.
Yossarian’s Duck Bandits! is about the right length to be run as a convention scenario and so could be run in a four-hour session. No advice is given to that end, but an experienced convention Game Master should have no issues with running the scenario.
Is it worth your time?Yes. Yozarian’s Bandit Ducks! A RuneQuest Glorantha scenario for 3-5 players is a fun, exciting affair, easy to run as a one shot (or convention) scenario which demonstrates one of the odder aspects of Glorantha. Duck fans will love this, as will fans of the original ‘The Money Tree’ scenario, and they will also want a sequel,which the scenario deserves.
No. Yozarian’s Bandit Ducks! A RuneQuest Glorantha scenario for 3-5 players involves Ducks and some people find Ducks silly.
Maybe. Yozarian’s Bandit Ducks! A RuneQuest Glorantha scenario for 3-5 players involves Ducks and some people find Ducks silly, but there is plenty of tragedy in the scenario to counterpoint the silliness—and at the very least, it is just a one-shot. 

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 and HeroQuest Glorantha (Questworlds). This can include original scenarios, background material, cults, mythology, details of NPCs and monsters, and so on, but none of this content should be considered to be ‘canon’, but rather fall under ‘Your Glorantha Will Vary’. This means that there is still scope for the authors to create interesting and useful content that others can bring to their Glorantha-set campaigns.


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What is it?This Fertile Ground is a short, two-session scenario set in Beast Valley in Dragon Pass for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. It is within easy journey’s travel distance of the Colymar tribe lands and so can be run as part of the Colymar campaign begun in RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha – QuickStart Rules and Adventure and then continued in and around Apple Lane as detailed in the RuneQuest Gamemaster Screen Pack. 
It is a twenty-two page, full colour, 9.15 MB PDF.
This Fertile Ground is well presented, but is not illustrated and needs another edit. The maps are decent though.
Where is it set?This Fertile Ground takes place in Chasteberry Hollow in Beast Valley where the Man and Beast Runes vie for control of the area.
Who do you play?This Fertile Ground does not have any strict requirements in terms of the characters needed, but ideally, the player characters should include an Ernalda (or other Earth deity) worshipper or even better, an Ernalda priestess.
What do you need?This Fertile Ground can be run using just RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. If it is run as part of the Apple Lane campaign then the RuneQuest Gamemaster Screen Pack is recommended.
What do you get?This Fertile Ground takes place in Sea Season in Beast Valley where two different Beast Men cultures have clashed over access to land and that clash has escalated into conflict between the opposed Man and Beast Runes. On the one side are the Coney, peaceful, sentient rabbit-folk from Esrolia who have settled Chasteberry Hollow where they farm and harvest the chasteberries, an important ingredient in their fertility potions. On the other are Leporids, the larger hare-like nomads for whom Chasteberry Hollow is their traditional mating ground. Enter the player characters.
Several plot hooks are given to get the player characters to Chasteberry Hollow. These include being sent to acquire several vials of the Coney’s famed fertility potion—certainly it would make sense for Queen Laika at Clearwine to obtain some for the vineyards and thus send the player characters, an Ernalda priestess going to help with the birth of the local priestess, the Coneys wanting to hire mercenaries, the innkeeper at nearby Stone Cross wanting someone to find his pot boy who has gone missing, and so on. There is plenty of flexibility in the set-up although the strongest would be to link to the Colymar campaign.
When the player characters arrive in Chasteberry Hollow, there is a standoff between the Coneys and Leporids. That is likely to change with their arrival, but although there is a plot which will play out with their arrival, there is still plenty of room for player characters to undertake whatever action they want to resolve the situation. As written there are definitely villains to the piece, but neither side is totally blameless for the situation.
Besides describing the situation in Chasteberry Hollow and Chasteberry Hollow itself, This Fertile Ground details some ten or so NPCs from each side, possible outcomes for the scenario, and presents two new types of Beast Men, the Coneys and the Leporids. These can be created as NPCs or player characters.
Surprisingly, although some of the NPCs have the Jump Rune Spell, none of them have the Jump skill. This seems an odd omission since they are described as leaping in and out of combat. 
Is it worth your time?Yes. This Fertile Ground presents opportunities for both roleplaying and combat with a standoff that nicely brings two opposing Runes into conflict and gives room aplenty for the player characters to resolve that standoff. If the player characters include an Ernalda priestess, then this is a good scenario for her to be involved in. The scenario is also easy to add to the Colymar campaign.
No. If your campaign is not set anywhere near Beast Valley and perhaps you have an issue with leporine Beast Men, then This Fertile Ground is not for you.
Maybe. This Fertile Ground can be run as scenario encountered whilst the player characters are travelling, but how useful it is depends on how far they have come and where they are going, and it does not make the best use of the given plot hooks.

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 and HeroQuest Glorantha (Questworlds). This can include original scenarios, background material, cults, mythology, details of NPCs and monsters, and so on, but none of this content should be considered to be ‘canon’, but rather fall under ‘Your Glorantha Will Vary’. This means that there is still scope for the authors to create interesting and useful content that others can bring to their Glorantha-set campaigns.


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What is it?
The Throat of Winter: Terror in the Depths is a short, two-session scenario set in Dragon Pass during Dark Season easily run as part of the Colymar campaign begun in RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha – QuickStart Rules and Adventure and then continued in and around Apple Lane as detailed in the RuneQuest Gamemaster Screen Pack. 

It is a twenty-six page, full colour, 7.76 MB PDF.

The Throat of Winter: Terror in the Depths is well presented and decently written. The internal artwork is okay, but the map is decent and the front cover is excellent.

Where is it set?
The Throat of Winter: Terror in the Depths by default takes place in Apple Lane in the lands of the Colymar tribe and then on the Big Starfire Ridge. Ideally, it takes place after the events of the scenarios presented in RuneQuest Gamemaster Screen Pack when one of the player characters has been appointed the hamlet’s Thane. Alternative locations are given for the scenario in Sartar, as well as Prax, Grazelands, and Tarsh, should the Game Master decide to set it elsewhere as well as an alternative hook should one of the player characters not hold the position of Thane. 

Who do you play?
The scenario does not have any strict requirements in terms of the characters needed, but ideally, the player characters should include an Orlanthi worshipper and an Ernalda (or other Earth deity) worshipper. A Shaman may be of use as well.

What do you need?
The Throat of Winter: Terror in the Depths can be run using just 
RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. If scenario begins in Apple Lane, then the RuneQuest Gamemaster Screen Pack is recommended.

What do you get?
The Throat of Winter: Terror in the Depths is relatively straightforward scenario which begins deep into Dark Season with the villagers asking for the adventurers’ help in locating a boy who has been abducted by what might be a bogeyman or a demon out of folklore, a figure known as Krampus. Clues and legend point to a mysterious wall of ice on the Big Starfire Ridge, but getting there means venturing out into the worst weather of the year.

The main location for the adventure is the ‘Throat of Winter’ itself, a frigid cave system home to Krampus and his minions as well as one or two secrets that keep him—mostly—in the cave system. The incredibly cold caves have a dungeon-like quality, lots to explore, treasure to be found, and a trap or two as well as the monsters. Then there is the choice of the Krampus, the ‘half-goat, half-demon’ anthropomorphic figure of Central European folklore who Christmas season, punishes children who have misbehaved, as the main villain, which essentially makes The Throat of Winter: Terror in the Depths a Christmas (in Glorantha) story. That may not sit well with every Gloranthaphile, but of course, ‘Your Glorantha May Vary’, and anyway, it is easy enough to change the name.

Nevertheless, the author presents plenty of background explaining who the Krampus is and what he does as well as what exactly is going on in the ‘Throat of Winter’. He also suggests means other than combat for dealing with the situation, but since that means dealing with a demon, the player characters do have to be careful if they are to gain anything from the situation. Various possible outcomes are explored, including one or two which will have long term consequences for the player characters and the surrounding region. The most positive outcome does feel a little too similar to that of the scenario in RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha – QuickStart Rules and Adventure, so this should definitely not be run too soon after that scenario.

Is it worth your time?
Yes. If you are looking for a slightly festive scenario to run for your RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha at Christmas, or you want another scenario to run as part of the Colymar-set campaign from the RuneQuest Gamemaster Screen Pack in and around Apple Lane, then The Throat of Winter: Terror in the Depths will be a solid addition to your campaign with nicely done background lore and wintery atmosphere.

No. If are not looking for a slightly festive scenario to run for your RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha at Christmas or a village-set scenario in Dragon Pass, The Throat of Winter: Terror in the Depths is unlikely to be of use to you.

Maybe. Some groups may balk at the obvious Christmas-theming of The Throat of Winter: Terror in the Depths, but that can be changed.

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 and HeroQuest Glorantha (Questworlds). This can include original scenarios, background material, cults, mythology, details of NPCs and monsters, and so on, but none of this content should be considered to be ‘canon’, but rather fall under ‘Your Glorantha Will Vary’. This means that there is still scope for the authors to create interesting and useful content that others can bring to their Glorantha-set campaigns.


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What is it?
Tales of the Sun County Militia: Sandheart Volume 1 is the first part of campaign set in Sun County in Prax. It includes background for a remote region of Sun County and a complete scenario, ‘No Country for Cold Men’ along with six pre-generated player characters. Besides a gazetteer of the region, there is a quartet of maps for use with the background and the scenario.

It is a thirty-nine page, full colour, 3.69 MB PDF.

In general, Tales of the Sun County Militia: Sandheart Volume 1 is well presented and decently written. It does need another edit and the artwork is a little rough, but the maps are excellent.

Where is it set?
Tales of the Sun County Militia: Sandheart Volume 1 takes place in Sun County, the small, isolated province of Yelmalio-worshipping farmers and soldiers located in the fertile River of Cradles valley of Eastern Prax, south of the city of Pavis, where it is beset by hostile nomads and surrounded by dry desert. Specifically it is set in and around the remote hamlet of Sandheart, where the inhabitants are used to dealing and even trading with the nomads who in the past have fought to gain worship access to ruins inside Sandheart’s walls.

Who do you play?
The player characters are members of the Sun County militia based in Sandheart. Used to dealing with nomads and outsiders and oddities and agitators, the local militia serves as the dumping ground for any militia member who proves too difficult to deal with by the often xenophobic, misogynistic, repressive, and strict culture of both Sun County and the Sun County militia. It also accepts nomads and outsiders, foreigners and non-Yemalions, not necessarily as regular militia-men, but as ‘specials’, better capable of dealing with said foreigners and non-Yemalions.

The six pre-generated characters include a banished Yelmalion noble, a local and  ambitious farmer’s son, and a Yelmalion tomboy whose ambitions are stifled by Sun County misogyny. Plus an Impala rider and scout who has lost his clan, a Lhankor Mhy Sage from Pavis County with a hatred of the Lunar Empire, and a mercenary, would-be Humakti from Esrolia.

Guidelines are given to create ‘quirky’ members of the Sun County militia in Sandheart. It includes character concepts, equipment, and a list of starting equipment and advises using the quick-start method of creating characters rather than the Family History method in RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. (Primarily because the Family History method in RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha is not specific to Sun County.)

What do you need?
Tales of the Sun County Militia: Sandheart Volume 1 can be run using just 
RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha. 

Although not absolutely necessary, the Game Master may also find the supplements Sun County, The River Of Cradles, Pavis, and The Big Rubble to be of use in providing deeper background. Tales of the Reaching Moon Issue 14 and Tales of the Reaching Moon Issue 15 may also be of use for details about the fertility god, Ronance.

What do you get?
Tales of the Sun County Militia: Sandheart Volume 1 includes a description of Sandheart, a hamlet built around a series of plinths, remnant structures from Genert’s Garden. It details how the attitudes of the local inhabitants are different to those of the rest of Sun County and how that affects their dealings with outsiders and the rest of Sun County. Full details of the militia, its equipment, and its duties are given, along with its notable figures, the magic of the plinths, and ‘Beaky’, a highly inquisitive Wyter.

The scenario ‘No Country for Cold Men’ continues the penchant in RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha for terrible puns and pits the militia men against a well-organised band of drug runners with links all the way back up the Zola Fel River to the city of New Pavis. The drug is hazia, a highly addictive contraband euphoric herb grown along the valley of the River of Cradles and sold to traffickers who can make great profits by selling to users and addicts. The discovery of several dead riding and pack animals leads to a ragged caravan whose members seem reluctant to deal with the militia. This reluctance will probably escalate into a direct confrontation and from this the player characters will learn about the drug trafficking in the county. Following up on the clues revealed by the encounter, the militia men will track back up the traffickers’ route into the county, likely uncovering signs of corruption in the county, and giving the militia men an opportunity to strike against the criminals acting in the county. This is despite the fact that as members of the Sandheart militia, the player characters are very likely operating well outside of their jurisdiction.

Is it worth your time?
Yes. If you are looking for an interesting set-up, the opportunity to run a scenario in a more organised and civilised setting with player characters who have the authority and the duty to act in Sun County’s best interests—despite their less than upright and morally upstanding reputations. Tales of the Sun County Militia: Sandheart Volume 1 is an opportunity to run and roleplay a campaign that is very different to other RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha scenarios. Hopefully, Tales of the Sun County Militia: Sandheart Volume 2 will develop the story and the setting much further.

No. Tales of the Sun County Militia: Sandheart Volume 1 is not worth your time if you are running a campaign or scenarios set elsewhere, especially in Sartar as per ‘The Broken Tower’ from the RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha – QuickStart Rules and Adventure or in in and around Apple Lane as detailed in the RuneQuest Gamemaster Screen Pack. Tales of the Sun County Militia: Sandheart Volume 1 would be a difficult scenario to add to such a campaign.

Maybe. One of the issues with scenarios set in Sun County is that the dominant Light-worshipping culture of the Yelmalions is… “[X]enophobic, misogynistic, repressive and strict…” Some players may find this unpalatable, but that said, Tales of the Sun County Militia: Sandheart Volume 1 is about roleplaying characters who are either from outside of that culture or at odds with it to one degree or another. This sets up some interesting roleplaying challenges, as the player characters get to be noble and heroic in upholding the best values of Sun County, but still chafing against its dictats and constraints.