Although there is no denying that the preeminent roleplaying game of Lovecraftian investigative roleplaying is Call of Cthulhu, there can be no denying the kinks between the Cthulhu Mythos and the world’s preeminent roleplaying game, Dungeons & Dragons. They go all the way back to the original version of the Deities & Demigods, the pantheon guide for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, First Edition. The connection would come to the fore at the end of the millennium with Death in Freeport from Green Ronin Publishing. It moved back and forth with Realms of Crawling Chaos for Labyrinth Lord and other retroclones and with adventures like Carrion Hill for Pathfinder, before coming up to date with a supplement and set of campaigns for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition written and published by Sandy Petersen, the designer of Call of Cthulhu no less!

Ghoul Island Act 1: Voyage to Farzeen is the first part of a four-part campaign for use with Sandy Petersen’s Cthulhu Mythos. Published by Petersen Games, this Mythos-inspired campaign as a whole takes the Player Characters from First Level up to Fourteenth Level, via milestones, with Ghoul Island Act 1: Voyage to Farzeen taking them from First Level to Fourth Level. The campaign makes extensive references to Sandy Petersen’s Cthulhu Mythos, and ideally, the Game Master should run the campaign using its rules to get the fullest out of it for her players. However, it is possible to run Ghoul Island Act 1: Voyage to Farzeen without reference to Sandy Petersen’s Cthulhu Mythos, but some details and nuances representing the corrosive influence of its Yog-Sothothery will be difficult to implement, if not lost. Either way, Ghoul Island Act 1: Voyage to Farzeen and the Ghoul Island campaign is a combination of heroic fantasy with horror, rather than the other way around. That said, some players may find that the heroic fantasy is not as supported in Ghoul Island Act 1: Voyage to Farzeen as it could have been given the dearth of physical rewards or treasure to be found. There is advice to counter that though, and the downplaying of such rewards means that the Game Master and her players can instead concentrate on the adventure and the story.

Ghoul Island Act 1: Voyage to Farzeen begins with a sea voyage. The Player Characters are aboard the Hazel’s Folly, carrying a cargo for the far-off Farzeen, a city on a distant volcanic isle. This may be as investors or as crew—there are several plot hooks given, and they have plenty of opportunity to bond with the crew and potentially make friends before the action kicks off. This is with a calamitous storm which threatens to batter the ship to pieces and all but throw them ashore. The calamities continue once they are ashore as the rest of the crew turns unexpectedly nasty and potentially, the Player Characters, find themselves in trouble with the local law! Once in Farzeen, the Player Characters should be able to straighten their circumstances out and then explore the town. It is strangely clean and tidy, standing on the shore all but surrounded by jungle over which towers the volcano. The plot kicks up a notch and some of Farzeen’s secrets are revealed when the commander of the city watch requests their aid. Bodies have been disappearing—including the mutineers! As the title suggests, there are ghouls on Farzeen Island and they provide a vital mortuary service for the city. Could they be responsible for the disappearances?

Ghoul Island Act 1: Voyage to Farzeen is a fairly strongly plotted and linear first part of a campaign. Throughout there are opportunities for action and roleplaying and some investigation, with options for exploring a little of the city as well. There are suggestions also to expand the campaign in other directions and full stats for all of the crew of the Hazel’s Folly (oddly bar one) and the various other NPCs in Farzeen. The best of these is Upton, quite literally a downtown Ghoul dressed for a night out on the town! Certainly, the Game Master should have fun portraying him. As generally easy and straightforward as this opening part of the campaign is, it is very much an introduction and never gets beyond hinting at the greater plot behind it all. Also included are the stats for a magical item or two—including one fantastic weapon which will draw comparisons with Elric’s Stormbringer, which sadly, the Player Characters are unlikely to get hold of in this act of the campaign. Another issue with the campaign is that it is missing rules from Sandy Petersen’s Cthulhu Mythos which would have made it easier to run. Now this is deliberate and understandable, because obviously, the publisher wants the Game Master to buy a copy of Sandy Petersen’s Cthulhu Mythos in order to get the most out of the campaign. Arguably though, the publisher has gone too far. Options are discussed which consider the possibility that one or more of the Player Characters could be a Ghoul or have Ghoul blood, but that is an option, and absolutely not necessary in order to play and complete the campaign. Yet rules for Dread—the mechanic for handling the Player Characters’ reaction to Yog-Sothothery—are pertinent, almost intrinsic, and if it is a case of their definitely not being included, then at least some designer notes could have suggested ways of handling the horror and the fear that is very much part of the campaign if the Game Master does not have access to Sandy Petersen’s Cthulhu Mythos. Or at least discussed in terms of the rules on horror and madness in Chapter Eight of the Dungeon Master’s Guide? 

Physically, Ghoul Island Act 1: Voyage to Farzeen is slim hardback, done in full colour and very well presented in the Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition style, although with much darker, Mythos-infused artwork. It needs an edit in places, but is generally easy to read and to prepare from.

Ghoul Island Act 1: Voyage to Farzeen should provide four and eight sessions of play, it being possible to play through each of its four chapters in a single session each. It could work as a crossover between Call of Cthulhu and Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition, perhaps as a variant upon a Dreamlands-set series of adventures? Or just simply as an introduction from one game to the other? It is fairly straightforward in terms of its plotting and story, so it should be fairly easy to run. It does take a while for it to really drop any of hints as to what is going on, at least in play, and hopefully they will be more explicit in the next act. Overall, Ghoul Island Act 1: Voyage to Farzeen is a solid start to its campaign and a solid introduction to facing the Mythos in a fantasy setting.

FATE of Cthulhu added two elements to Lovecraftian investigative roleplaying—time travel and foreknowledge. Published by Evil Hat Games, the 2020 horror roleplaying game was built around campaign frameworks that cast the Player Characters as survivors in a post-apocalyptic future thirty years into the future, the apocalypse itself involving various aspects and entities of the Mythos. Not only as survivors though, because having entered into a pact with the Old One, Yog-Sothoth, they have unlocked the secret of time travel and come back to the present. They have come back aware of the steps along the way which brought about the apocalypse and they come back ready to fight it. This though is not a fight against the Cthulhu Mythos in general, but rather a single Old One and its cultists, and each thwarting of an Old One is a self-contained campaign in its own right, in which no other element of the Mythos appears.

The five campaigns, or timelines, presented in FATE of Cthulhu in turn have the Investigators facing Cthulhu, Dagon, Shub-Nigggurath, Nyarlathotep, and the King in Yellow. Each consists of  five events, the last of which is always the rise of the Old One itself. The events represent the roadmap to that last apocalyptic confrontation, and can each be further broken down into four event catalysts which can be people, places, foes, and things. The significance of these events are represented by a die face, that is either a bank, a ‘–’, or a ‘+’. These start out with two blanks and two ‘–’, the aim of the players and their investigators being to try to prevent their being too many, if any ‘–’ symbols in play and ideally to flip them from ‘–’ to blank and from blank to ‘+’. Ultimately the more ‘+’ there are, the more positive the ripple will be back down the timeline and the more of a chance the investigators have to defeat or prevent the rise of the Old One. Conversely, too many ‘–’ and the known timeline will play out as follows and the less likely the chance the investigators have in stopping the Old One.

Each of the five timelines comes with details of what a time traveller from 2050 would know about it, more detail for the Game Master with a breakdown of the events and their Aspects, Stunts, Mythos creatures, and NPCs. Most of these can serve as useful inspiration for the Game Master as well as the advice given on running FATE of Cthulhu and her creating her own timelines. After all, there are numerous Mythos entities presenting the prospective Game Master ready to create her own timeline with a variety of different aspects, purviews, and even degrees of power, but nevertheless capable of bringing about an apocalypse. However, Evil Hat Games has already begun to do that with its own series of timelines, each again dealing with a different Mythos entity and a different downfall for mankind. The first of these is The Rise of Yig.

Darkest Timeline: The Rise of Basilisk is different. Really different. To begin with, this second of the new timelines would appear to be barely connected to the Mythos at all—but it is, if that is, the Player Characters go digging deep enough into the world-side infosphere that Basilisk has planned for the whole of humanity. If not the universe. In Mythos terms, its closest parallels is with Hastur and the Yellow Sign, a memetic infection of occult nature which encourages artistic endeavour, but in Darkest Timeline: The Rise of Basilisk, that memetic infection is technological in nature, once shared often encouraging the monomaniacal exploration of fields of study and the need to understand them to their utmost. This often leads to the withdrawal of the infected from societal norms, ultimately leading to their deaths through lack of self-care and dehydration. Its origins lie in the Google Books project to digitise and make available all human knowledge. Thirty years later and Google’s Thinking Hat technologies enabled humanity to connect to digital neural networks and solve its most complex of problems—including climate change, whilst Google Physical Assistant enabled humanity to upgrade its body with cybertechnology. The combination provided a platform upon which Basilisk could survive and prosper and spread, the weakness of flesh bolstered by technology, pushing those connected to it to greater depths of understanding, for ultimately, its aim was a technological and scientific ‘Godthink’—not the idea that ‘All religions lead to the same thing’, but that the study of the universe leads to an understanding of both its and everything in it. If it had to turn the planet into the United Mind Of Humanity, a hungry, all-devouring hivemind of man and machine intertwined, it would and it did.

Where most timelines deal with known Mythos threats, or variations upon them, Darkest Timeline: The Rise of Basilisk does not. It is a fight against an idea, not a thing or an entity, but all quickly an idea given form and physicality. This timeline combines elements of The Terminator—more so than other timelines—with The Matrix, mapping them back onto current developments in information theory, digitalisation, robotics, artificial intelligence and machine learning, the Internet of Things, and other cutting-edge technologies before pushing forward into a dystopia that is definitely Science Fiction rather Occult in nature. The technological nature of the setting means that the way time travel works in this timeline is also different. There is no corruptive pact with Yog-Sothoth to facilitate the way between and thus the means to travel back from 2050 to 2020 (or earlier), rather it is technological in nature, developed by Basilisk. The Resistance has gained access to it in 2050 to travel back in time, and there is the possibility that they may able to use the time travel apparatus to jump to other pivotal points within the timeline. This gives Darkest Timeline: The Rise of Basilisk a little more fluidity in terms of campaign structure. Instead of leaping into the past to a point from which they can moving forward and acting to undermine the threat at the heart of the timeline, the Player Characters may be able to jump up and down it, with agents of the Basilisk in hot pursuit, or even aware of approximately when the Player Characters will appear. After all, the extent of Basilisk’s understanding and knowledge means that it has a very good idea of just what the Player Characters are trying to do…

As with other timelines for FATE of Cthulhu, the Player Characters are jumping back in time to locate the four events which led up to if not the apocalypse of Basilisk, then the dystopia it ushers in. As with other timelines, there is no direct confrontation with the existential threat it represents, but primarily its agents and progenitors. And unlike those other timelines, the cosmic threat to humanity is not an unknowable Elder God, but a still inhuman mind that unfortunately humanity can understand—and that is the existential threat that the Player Characters face, avoiding understanding Basilisk. Further, Basilisk has agency (and agents).

As with the timelines in the core rules, Darkest Timeline: The Rise of Basilisk details the history of its apocalypse and the four events which led up to it for the benefit of the Investigators who will be aware when they jump back from the future. It is accompanied by a more detailed timeline for Game Master along with their four event catalysts (which can be people, places, foes, or things) and their die face settings which the players and their Investigators will need to change by making enquiries and working to defeat the cult of information. There are details of threats and situations, including Thinking Hats Experts, biomechanically-altered humans, capable of temporarily enhancing particular skills to the pinnacle of understanding, Boston Dynamics-derived cyborgs, Hunter-Killer Experts, and more. 

The Basilisk’s agenda is discussed in detail, along with its mechanisms and advice for the Game Master on how to run Basilisk. This is absolutely necessary because of the complexity involved in running this timeline because of its complexity of ideas, the flexibility offered by time travel, and the greater agency possessed by Basilisk. If the previous Darkest Timeline: The Rise of Yig was more complex, not as straightforward, and involved multiple factions across the timeline, then Darkest Timeline: The Rise of Basilisk is more so—time travel, existential memetics, and deep conspiracy, all set against a contemporary world.

Physically, Darkest Timeline: The Rise of Basilisk is cleanly presented. It is easy to read and the lay out is tidy, though it needs an edit in places. The artwork is good also.

Although Darkest Timeline: The Rise of Basilisk is specially written for use with FATE of Cthulhu and very much built around the Investigators coming back from the future forearmed with knowledge of the past, there is nothing to stop a Game Master from using the timeline to run a campaign from the opposite direction and from a point of ignorance. That is, as a standard campaign a la other roleplaying games of Lovecraftian investigative horror, whether that is actually for FATE of Cthulhu or another roleplaying game. It would be different to other campaigns, presenting more of a modern conspiracy campaign, possibly hackers or activists against the rise of the machines rather than classic Lovecraftian Investigators confronting entities of cosmic horror. This way, the Investigators can encounter the threats featured in Darkest Timeline: The Rise of Basilisk without the benefit of foreknowledge.

Darkest Timeline: The Rise of Basilisk is a very different campaign framework for Lovecraftian investigative horror, a radical technological departure that in effect is a non-Mythos campaign, but ultimately one involving existential horror. However, the technological aspects of the framework mean that it is complex and will take some effort to really run right. Ultimately, by drawing upon contemporary events and technologies, Darkest Timeline: The Rise of Basilisk presents a scarily prescient timeline which showcases how FATE of Cthulhu can do more than just the traditional Mythos.

At the risk of sounding really old, I adore Camelot.  Back when I was young I ended up with a second bout of chickenpox.  My parents had a laser disc player back then and this one of the movies they had. I think I watched it a dozen times.  Not a lot of choice really, but it was still good.  I can still recall all the songs.

I have to admit I often judge my Athurs, Gueneveres, and Lancelots based on the examples set by Richard Harris, Vanessa Redgrave, and Franco Nero.  Let's be honest. Vanessa Redgrave is adorable here.  I am not 100% convinced that she did not contribute to me having so many blue-eyed, redheaded characters.

Arthur's meeting with Guenevere is one of my favorites. And I fully admit I still hum "Camelot" whenever I watch another movie about Arthur.

The story here follows, more or less, the T.H. White "Once and Future King" novel.

Arthur's conversations with "Jenny" are really fantastic. I mean the attitudes are more modern, but that is fine since the setting is more Ren Faire than post-Roman Britain. I find Richard Harris' Arthur enthusiasm infectious. 

Also if you ever wanted a better depiction of an AD&D Paladin then you can't do much better than Camelot's Lancelot. The scene where Lancelot is jousting with Sir Dinadan, accidentally mortally wounds and then heals him has stuck with me for years as the example of laying on hands.  I can't help but think this is what Gygax had in mind when he wrote the Paladin class.  

The movie does drag on a bit, it is nearly 3 hours, but I am hesitant to suggest any cuts. 

The scene where Lancelot rescues Guenevere is both profoundly heroic and profoundly sad at the same time.  Give this to Richard Harris, he makes you feel Arthur's pain. 

Arthur, "For what? Revenge. The most worthless of causes."

I might lack the historical gravitas of Excalibur and have nearly nothing in common with real history but I don't care.  

Much like reading Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur, I think this is a must-view for any fan of the myths and tales of King Arthur.

Gaming Content

Nothing directly here save what all the tales of Arthur can give us.  BUT given the musical nature of this movie, it does make me wonder if a game where everyone is a bard might work.  Lusty Month of May indeed.

This Lancelot, maybe more than any other, is a great example of a Paladin in D&D.

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Tim Knight of Hero Press and Pun Isaac of Halls of the Nephilim along with myself are getting together at the Facebook Group I'd Rather Be Killing Monsters to discuss these movies.  Follow along with the hashtag #IdRatherBeWatchingMonsters.

The traditional solo roleplaying experience has been with solo adventure books like those of the Fighting Fantasy series or for Tunnels & Trolls, but there are other formats too. For example, letter writing, whether through an exchange of missives such as the Diana Jones 2002 Award Nominated De Profundis or even solo, such as Quill: A Letter-Writing Roleplaying Game for a Single Player, the Indie RPG Awards Best Free RPG of 2016. In recent years, there has been a trend in experiencing solo roleplaying through journaling. That is, the keeping of a journal a la the gentleman or lady of the nineteenth century recording his or her daily or experiences. On one level a diary, but often a vehicle to tell a story—and perhaps emulate the style of certain authors, such as H.P. Lovecraft. A journaling roleplaying game typically involves a deck of cards or dice to generate random events which serve as prompts for the player, who will record the reactions of his character in the journal, creating and telling a story in the process—a story whose plot and events will only become clear once the dénouement has been reached and its aftermath told…

Perhaps the most well known of the format is Thousand Year Old Vampire, which explores the immortal life of a member of the undead. It also showcases a popular genre for the Journaling format, that of horror, though there are alternatives. One such alternative is English Eerie: Rural Horror Storytelling Game for One Player, published by Trollish Delver Games, also responsible for Merry Outlaws: A roleplaying game of folk ballads and justice. Inspired by the works of M.R. James, Arthur Machen, and Algernon Blackwood, as well as the English country and English folklore—such as the Black Dog and the Barghest, Boggarts and Bloody Bones, Church Grims and Jack Frost, Grindylows and Redcaps, Shug Monkeys and Sooterkins, and more. It is also inspired by a fear of the English landscape itself, with its deep history drenched in tradition, shame, and blood, the bleak emptiness of its moors and mountains, the cold and the damp of its weather, and the ruins and ritual sites where great ceremonies and great acts of bloodshed were enacted to unknown, unchristian gods… Long haunted by the past, it is a bucolic idyll hiding great evils and great secrets until some foolish visitor, scholar, or official stumbles across something best left far, far away from his urban refuge.

To emulate such tales of fear and loathing, and of creeping tension, Eerie: Rural Horror Storytelling Game for One Player employs simple mechanics and a specially prepared deck of ordinary playing cards. The player creates a simple character and draws from the deck to determine events that will beset the character, revealing rising tensions, and in turn the player will record his character’s response to each one and how he overcomes them (or not), uncovering further clues hopefully to survive to complete his recounting of events. All of this is recorded in his journal—Eerie: Rural Horror Storytelling Game for One Player is ideally played and recorded in a proper journal with a proper fountain pen—in the light of a flickering candle. Thus it might also be an exercise in penmanship and storytelling as much roleplaying. To play, in addition to the pen and journal, a player will also need a set of tokens in two colours—ten of each, and a ten-sided die.

To set up Eerie: Rural Horror Storytelling Game for One Player, a player creates his character by dividing ten points between Resolve and Spirit. Resolve is a Player Character’s determination to continue his investigations, rationalise the weirdness around him, and to keep their wits about them. It is spent to help a Player Character’s capacity overcome obstacles in scenes. Spirit is a Player Character’s thoughts, feelings, and physical well-being. Its reduction represents a Player Character’s spiral into horror, harm, and doubt. Player Character background and occupation is usually indicated by the scenario, of which there are five in the roleplaying game. The tokens are used to represent the Player Character’s Resolve and Spirit. The playing deck needs some preparation to create the Story Deck. This consists of the four, five, six, and seven cards from all four suits, plus three Queens, or ‘Grey Ladies’. The ‘Grey Ladies’ represent the ghosts of English folklore and a rise in Tension whenever one is drawn.

Game play is simple. The player draws a card, resolves the scene type it indicates, and writes an entry in his character’s journal explaining what happened, how he felt, and so on. Each of the four suits represents a different type of scene—a Hearts card indicates that a secondary NPC is hurt; Clubs that a secondary NPC acts as an obstacle for the Player Character in some way; Diamonds that the environment acts as an obstacle for the Player Character in some way; and Spades that a minor clue has been discovered. Each drawing and resolving of two cards represents a day in the life of the Player Character. If the card drawn is an obstacle—a Clubs or a Diamond—it needs to be overcome. In which case, the player rolls the die and attempts to equal to or greater than the value of the card drawn. If failed, the Player Character loses a point of Spirit, but his player can spend Resolve to reroll and each point spent is added to the subsequent roll. However, for each Grey Lady drawn, the Tension rises by one and adds one to the total value of each obstacle card the player has to roll against. 

When the third and final Grey Lady is drawn, it indicates the end of the story. At this point, the player compares his character’s remaining Spirit points with the Conclusion Table the scenario he is playing. This suggests how the player will write the last entry in his character’s journal. If the character has Spirit points left, the ending of the story will be positive, but if he has none left, the ending will be much, much darker. There is no simple bad ending.

Play of Eerie: Rural Horror Storytelling Game for One Player revolves around the play of individual scenarios. Each of the five in the roleplaying game include tables for secondary characters, minor clues, environmental and NPC obstacles, and a tension table. Each also begins with a set-up and ends with a Spirit table for determining the final outcome. The five include mysteries set in the nineteenth and twenty-first century, but most are set in the twentieth century. They take place in Derbyshire—twice, once to check on a friend, the other an inheritance, on a boating holiday in Cumbria, at a digital detox camp in the Yorkshire Dales, and into the Cotswolds in search of property! Essentially what each scenario represents is a series of prompts and spurs to the player’s imagination. How one player would approach telling a story and what exactly it involves will be entirely different for another.

A scenario can be played through in a single session, but in fact, the intent is that a player plays it day by day, drawing and resolving a pair of cards each day, then coming back to the scenario the following day to continue adding to the journal. This allows time for the player to mull over the day’s events and come back to the story afresh as if the character himself had gained a night’s rest. It adds a degree of contemplation not typically found in other roleplaying games, and played this way, it only takes a few minutes or so each day. Plus, it also extends the tension across episodes making it a marathon rather than the sprint of a single session. Eerie: Rural Horror Storytelling Game for One Player includes rules for campfire, or group play, and has the players telling the same story, taking turns to be the storyteller. This is essentially telling stories but with a few extra rules for determining aspects of the plot.

Physically, Eerie: Rural Horror Storytelling Game for One Player is a clean and tidy PDF. It is lightly illustrated using images in the public domain. It comes with an extensive example play, which is actually best not to read until after a player has completed writing his first journal lest he be influenced by the given example. 

Eerie: Rural Horror Storytelling Game for One Player and roleplaying games like it seem the perfect antidote to our times. When we cannot get out to game together face to face, whether that is with our regular group or at a convention, having other options for solo play seems like a perfect solution. The mechanics in Eerie: Rural Horror Storytelling Game for One Player not only serve to drive the story forward, they also serve to drive up the tension—not necessarily too far, but enough to make the survival of a player’s character matter and if played over days rather than the single session, to draw that tension out over and over… 

Then there is the act of the journaling, which brings a physicality to the play, and if done using a fountain pen and a journal, two further effects. One is the artfulness of penmanship, the other is actually aches and pain, because how many of us sit down and actually write in long form any more in this digital age? For many, playing or journaling Eerie: Rural Horror Storytelling Game for One Player will mark a return to a skill that has long fallen out of use and employing again may require the reworking of some very lazy muscle memory.

Eerie: Rural Horror Storytelling Game for One Player is mechanically simple, but it pushes us to be imaginative and to go back directly to the telling of stories that we drew upon for inspiration when we first began roleplaying. Of course, all good Journaling games should do that, and as well as being no exception to that, Eerie: Rural Horror Storytelling Game for One Player provides an easy way into a different, but equally imaginative way of roleplaying.

This weekend, the Porch Sales return, even if we’re moving them inside for the duration. This weekend, the gallery opens from 4:00 pm to 9:00 pm on Saturday, July 17, and we’ll be open on July 25 and 31, too. … Continue reading →

Today I am talking with Roderic Waibel the creator of Chromatic Dungeons which is in the middle of its Kickstarter. Which you can find here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1693797308/chromatic-dungeons?theotherside

Tim Brannan/The Other Side:  Let’s start at the beginning, who are you and what do you do?

Roderic Waibel:  I started gaming in 1981 with the Basic Set, and quickly fell in love and moved to AD&D.  Been involved in RPGs every day since, from the first map I drew as a kid, to my first game I wrote in 1986 (I still have a copy of that, and it’s...nothing to be proud of lol).  I’m a project manager as a day job, but have been an indie publisher officially for the past 10 years or so.

TB/TOS: You mention in your bio you have been writing RPGs since 1986.  Anything, in particular, you want to share? What are some of your past hits?

RW:  My biggest commercial success would have to be Compact Heroes.  During my time in the military, portability was a big thing.  It’s one of the reasons why MtG took off for servicepeople; you could easily take it with you while full rulebooks were hard to do that.  So I created a card game that played like a traditional role-playing game.  That won DieHard Gamefan’s Best New Game of the Year in 2011 when it came out.  There are other things I’ve created that I like, but most of those were homebrew systems that never took off.  Let’s be honest, most never do.  Why would someone who doesn’t know me want to play a homebrew system when they have so many officially supported systems out there.  They were all pretty much vanity games.  The only other product that has done pretty well is the megadungeon: Depths of Felk Mor.  I wrote that right when the 5e playtests came out, and is 5e compatible.  It’s written in an old school aesthetic, and chock full of 80s pop culture references lol. Kind of a mix between Cthulhu and 80s cartoon hour.  Yes, that’s a thing lol.

TB/TOS: What are some of your favorite games? Why?

RW:  RPGs are my all-time favorite because I’ve always been very creative and love to imagine things.  Strategy games probably come in second place.  I always have a fond soft spot for Axis&Allies in the non-RPG genre.

TB/TOS: Fantastic. Now tell everyone a little bit about your game Chromatic Dungeons.

RW:  Old school D&D was and is my favorite edition.  Not just for nostalgia (admittedly that is part of it, but a small part), but also because of the kind of experience it lends to.  Rulings over rules, speed of play, zero to hero, player creativity and strategy (you can’t assume every encounter should be winnable which is something I see a lot in modern games), etc.  However, it was a product of its time.  That is, catered and marketed to white young males.  As a young white male myself at the time, of course I never noticed anything problematic.  This isn’t a dig at any of the creators of the game, or any of the players of the game.  It was what it was at the time with what we considered socially OK.  But as we’ve grown as a community over the years, we’ve become incredibly diverse.  That diversity should be represented and included.  People other than straight white men like myself should be able to pick up the game and see themselves represented in it.  Studies have shown, over and over, how a diverse group is much more efficient and beneficial than a monocultural one.  I’ve hired a lot of diverse freelancers and editors for this, and I can tell you that the game is much better for it.  

Then you’ve got lessons learned mechanically over the past decades we can rely on that should be applied.  Things like ascending armor class that are more intuitive rules.

These two factors together were the driving force behind Chromatic Dungeons.  Currently there is a lot of drama going on regarding comments some of the folks who call themselves OSR or old school have made with the new re-branding of TSR.  But that isn’t what caused Chromatic Dungeons to come about.  Comments like those folks are making the news now because they are big names, but the fact is that for a long time, the OSR community has had to deal with a large portion of fans who have been espousing exclusionary opinions.  I firmly do NOT believe the OSR itself is like that, or that most fans are like that.  But it’s a problem that needs to be addressed because there is a reputation the OSR is getting, and it’s not good.  We can’t deny that.  And as a fan of the OSR, I will do what I can to show how the OSR can also be welcoming and inclusive.  

Thus, about six months ago, Chromatic Dungeons was born in its first iterations.  It’s basically a game that captures the best things about B/X, 1e, and 2e, while applying modern sensibilities and lessons learned since then, and being presented in an old-school aesthetic that represents how diverse our gaming hobby has become.

TB/TOS: What do you feel makes Chromatic Dungeons a step above or better than say current Clones on the market now?  What do you think makes it special?  Or bottom line, why should people want to buy this game?

RW:  Having fun is the best reason to play a game, right?  That’s the ultimate goal?  Many clones out there try to replicate the rules of those older versions extremely closely.  But as anyone who played back then will tell you, many of the rules got in the way.  We simply ignored them.  Chromatic Dungeons applies some mechanical changes to help alleviate that.  The first and most obvious is the move to ascending Armor Class.  But then you’ve also got a revision to alignment, making it much less impactful in regards to driving a PC’s behavior or moral code.  It’s a cosmic force that acts as an influence, not a strict moral code you have to follow.  Traditional racial traits have been re-done as well.  Now those choices only give a few traits, but there is a heritage system instead that anyone can choose that gives you traditional racial bonuses.  For example, you can choose to play a human with the fey heritage (let’s say they grew up in an elven city), so they can gain resistance to sleep and charm, two traits traditionally reserved only for elves.  Another change is getting rid of dead levels.  While not being a robust customized able system like feats were in 3e (that would defeat the purpose of having a streamlined system like b/x), each class does offer something other than a hit point gain at most levels.

And then of course there’s the presentation.  The game is presented to be welcoming and inclusive of everyone.  Making everyone welcome is always a good thing, as it grows our hobby and keeps it alive. 

TB/TOS: You list a few differences from older games on the Kickstarter site.  What was your driving motivation behind these?

RW: I guess I answered that above.  I tend to ramble lol.  The key goal is to capture the feel of gaming back then, but rules changes can be made as long as that goal isn’t compromised.  You should be able to pick up an old module from the 80s and play Chromatic Dungeons with very little conversion.  You should be able to do it on the fly, actually.  That’s important for me to keep.  People have a plethora of material from the old days, and they should absolutely be able to use it with Chromatic Dungeons. 

TB/TOS: The Character sheet looks fantastic and has a great old-school feel to it.  What things from the older games did you want to retain?

RW: The most important is speed of play and player skill.  Players shouldn’t feel discouraged from attempting something with their PC if they don’t have a skill for it.  The less a player references a character sheet, and the more they go to their imagination to describe what they want, the better.  Keeping players engaged is important. However, if players don’t prefer to use player skill for whatever reason, they can fall back on a skill system that is incredibly simple.  It’s a roll under ability system.  If your PC wants to jump up to the chandelier and swing across the room, they don’t need an acrobatics skill to do that.  Simply roll the d20 and if it’s under your Dexterity score, congrats!  This system also makes every point in an ability count.  A gripe of mine from the current system is that there is no difference between a 14 and 15 ability score.

TB/TOS: What sorts of games do you see others playing with these rules?

RW:  Like all old-school games, I see people taking bits and pieces of this and applying it to their own games.  Most old-school gamers are also big into homebrewing.  Back in the day, we all created our own worlds and adventures, and I don’t see that as much now.  So I can easily see someone taking an old adventure module and playing Chromatic Dungeons with it.  Or taking the heritage system out of CD and using it for their OSE game.

TB/TOS: Who would you say Chromatic Dungeons is for?

RW:  Everyone.  I know that sounds cliche, but it’s true.  It’s a big driver behind the whole project.  Everyone should feel like they can play this.  However, and there’s always a however, I fully understand that some folks might not find the appeal.  And that’s totally OK.  We all have different preferences, and there is no one-true-way to play the game.   For example, because the game is streamlined, optimizers might not be drawn to it because there isn’t the level of customization options as 3e.  If you were to force me to answer, I’d say this game is especially for those who want a classic feel of gaming with modern design sensibilities, and who were traditionally not represented in those older games.  But really, anyone who enjoys the style of old school gaming, regardless of the diversity or lack thereof, should enjoy this game.  Because the game makes a point to represent people of every demographic doesn’t mean it excludes the traditional straight white male (I would be excluding myself!).  Yes, I’ve heard that complaint as well.

I will add this:  Because no intelligent mundane humanoid has a default alignment in Chromatic Dungeons, there are several people who I’ve heard say this game excludes people who just want the old way of doing things, where all orcs are evil.  I want to be very clear that in CD, you absolutely can still do that.  I’m not showing up to anyone’s house to “cancel” them.  It’s just not the default assumption anymore.  But you as a GM can do whatever you want, and play them however your table feels like.  That’s still a perfectly valid way to play the game. 

TB/TOS: What are your future plans for this game?

RW:  The immediate plans are to put out a monthly Zine that offers new material.  Think of it like a mini-Dragon magazine from back in the day.  The first four are already done, and part of the Kickstarter as a matter of fact.  Writing the fifth one now (really expanding on orcs, their various cultures, etc).

TB/TOS: And finally, for the benefit of my audience, well and me, who is your favorite witch or magic-using character?

RW:  The second fantasy novel I read after the Book of Three was Sword of Shannara.  So Allanon has always had a soft spot in my heart.

I want to add one final note regarding this campaign.  It’s important for me to walk the talk.  It’s one reason why I made it a point to hire diverse freelancers and editors.  This isn’t mentioned on the Kickstarter page because Kickstarter cannot be used as a fundraiser for charities, but I have committed to matching 25% of net profits and donating that to The Trevor Project.  That’s a great charity that helps at-risk LGBTQ youth, and to give them the support they need.  So by supporting this project, you’re not just getting a great RPG, you’re helping at-risk youth who deserve to be treated better than our society does. 

Links

Chromatic Dungeons Kickstarter

Izegrim Creations

• Blog

DriveThruRPG

• Izegrim Creations
• Roderic Waibel, author

The classic hex crawl is an open-ended sandbox-style adventure in which the players and their characters explore a large geographical area, containing various Points of Interest, each of which can be explored individually or perhaps in a sequence determined from clues found at each location. Typically, the Player Characters will have a good reason to explore the area, such as being tasked to find a specific location or person, but instead of knowing where the location or person might be, only know that they are somewhere in that region. Armed with limited knowledge, the Player Characters will enter the area and travel from one hex to the next, perhaps merely running into a random encounter or nothing at all, but perhaps finding a Point of Interest. Such a Point of Interest might be connected to the specific location or person they are looking for, and so might contain clues as to its location, then again it might not. In which case it is just a simple Point of Interest. Initially free to explore in whatever direction they want, as the Player Characters discover more clues, their direction of travel will typically gain more focus until the point when they finally locate their objective. Classic hex crawls include X1 Isle of Dread for Expert Dungeons & Dragons and Slavers for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Second Edition, whilst more recent examples have been Barrowmaze  and What Ho, Frog Demons!.

The Undying Sands is a hex crawl—or sand crawl (sandbox?)—from Games Omnivorous dotted with crumbling ruins, antiquated temples, lost technology, and pristine natural wonders beyond the reach of most. It combines numerous influences and genres, can involve the Player Characters in the factions squabbling for control of the desert, and it leaves plenty of scope for the Game Master to add her own content.

The Undying Sands is however, a hex crawl of a different stripe. First, it is systemless; second, it is improvisational; third, it is random; and fourth, it is physical. Undying Sands consists of four elements. These are thirty hex tiles, Game Master Screen, a double-sided poster, and a cloth bag. The hexes, done in sturdy cardboard and full colour, measure six-and-a-half centimetres across. Their backs are either blank or numbered. The former show simple sand dunes on their front, whilst those have locations on their front. There are fourteen such locations. Twelve of them have three locations, for example, ‘The Eye!’, a spiral of maelstrom of coloured sand long regarded as sacred by both the living and dead, the Bottomless Pit at the heart of the Eye!, and The Dual Inns, establishments which flank the Eye!, one catering to the living, one to the undead. All of which is to be found on hex number two. The thirteenth hex is the location of the Forgotten Pyramids, a tomb and dungeon complex, and the fourteenth hex is the location of The Grand City of Sand, a former seat of civilisation which has long begun to crumble and let the sand drift along its boulevards and alleys… The style of the artwork on the hexes is busy and cartoonish, but eye-catching and gives The Undying Sands a singular look which sets it apart from both other gaming accessories and neighbouring regions.

The Game Master Screen is a horizontal, three panel affair. The front depicts an adventuring party about to flee from a sandstorm after having discovered a strange vehicle and a mechanical man. The back is the meat of the supplement. Here, from left to right, it explains what The Undying Sands is, how to use and the best way to use it; tables of rumours, loot from the body, treasure, encounters, dangers of the land, and curses; details of each the numbered hexes; and of The Grand City of Sand—its history, what the Player Characters can do within its walls, its factions and jobs available, and the Many Shops of the Grand Bazaar. The A4-sized double-sided poster shows the Forgotten Pyramids on the one side, and The Grand City of Sand on the other. Both are easy to read and refer to. Lastly, the cloth bag is big enough to hold all of the hex tiles. One issue with the strong physical presence of The Undying Sands is that there is not really a means of storage for all it, apart from cloth bag for the hex tiles. It does leave you wishing that there was a box for it and your Game Master’s notes.

So that is the physicality of The Undying Sands. What of the random nature of The Undying Sands? Simply, the hexes are placed in the cloth bag and drawn one-by-one, as the Player Characters cross or explore one hex and then move onto the next, creating the region hex-by-hex. If the hex is simple sand dunes, the Game Master might roll on the ‘Encounters in the Sands’ or ‘Dangers of the Lands’ tables to create random encounters. When the Player Characters reach a numbered location, they can explore one or more of individual places there, the Game Master improvising what will be encountered there based on the sentence or two description given for each. There is more detail for both the Forgotten Pyramids and The Grand City of Sand, especially the latter, and thus more for the Game Master to base her improvisation upon. This randomness means that playing The Undying Sands will be different from one gaming group to the next, more so than with other hex crawls or scenarios.

So that is the random nature of The Undying Sands and the improvisational nature of The Undying Sands? What of the systemless aspect of The Undying Sands? No gaming system is referenced anywhere on The Undying Sands, yet there is an assumed genre within its details. So it is weird. There are Necrocamelmancers, raising undead camels, Alligator Ghouls, the undead camel races of the city are easy money, curses are suffered under the irregular Blood Moon Eclipses, spells can be learned from studying a thrumming blacklight monolith (but curses suffered too), and more. Its obvious genre is fantasy, but it is really Science Fantasy. Ancient robots can be encountered, tech-marvels and ancient sand-buggies found, and more. Which lends itself to roleplaying games better than others. Numenera would be an obvious choice, as would Electric Bastionland: Deeper into the Odd, Hypertellurians: Fantastic Thrills Through the Ultracosm, Mutant Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game – Triumph & Technology Won by Mutants & Magic, and Troika!. It could even be run using Rifts if the Game Master wanted to! A more generic rules system would also work too, as would any number of Old School Renaissance retroclones. Whatever the choice of rules, the Game Master will need to know them very well in order to improvise.

As suggested by the range of roleplaying games which The Undying Sands would be a natural fit for, its influences are equally as diverse. These begin with the Ancient World—Egypt, Mesopotamia and the Greco-Roman world, and these are joined by Mad Max and Jodorowsky’s Dune. The resulting combination depicts a lost, even fallen technological civilisation, its once glorious past infused with a Pulp sensibility. This lends it the possibility that The Undying Sands could be shifted from a fantasy to a planetary Sci-Fi setting, playing up the fantasy elements as weird, technology sufficiently advanced to appear as magic.

In terms of play, The Undying Sands sort of traps the Player Characters within its confines. It keeps them within its limits until the last hex is drawn from the bag and they can find their way out. By that time, the Player Characters will probably have visited every hex and encountered multiple threats and dangers, and if they have engaged with any of the four factions to be found in The Grand City of Sand, they are likely to have found employment too, and that will drive them back out into The Undying Sands again. How or when that will happen all depends upon when the city location is drawn during play. What this means is that The Undying Sands is a mini-campaign in its own right.

The Undying Sands is fantastically thematic and fantastically presented. A Game Master could grab this, set-up the Game Master’s Screen, pull the first tile, and start running a mini-campaign. However, that would take a lot of improvisation and improvisational skill upon the part of the Game Master, who also has to know the game system she is running The Undying Sands with very well to run it easily. All of which is needed because the textual content of The Undying Sands really consists of prompts and hooks with little in the way of detail—if any. Perhaps a better way of approaching The Undying Sands—especially if the Game Master is not as confident about her ability to improvise—is to work through the locations, especially The Grand City of Sand, and prepare, prepare, prepare. Some Game Masters may relish the prospect, but others may wish that there had been more information given in The Undying Sands—even ‘The Undying Sands Companion’ which made the task easier for them.

Ultimately, The Undying Sands gives a Game Master the means to improvise and run a fantastically pulpy campaign in a range of genres against a weird Science Fantasy, lost worlds background. How much improvisation and how much preparation is required, will very much be down to the individual Game Master.

Been a little quiet here I know.  So I figured I'd share an update.

Work is progressing nicely again on my various Basic Bestiaries.   I am still working out the kinks of my semi-universal stat block and work on what looks like will be an obscene number of demons.

The complete column is the number that is 100% complete, ready for the last pass of edits.  Started has everything from just a name to almost everything minus one or two details. It also includes the complete. 

You can see that when I did this screenshot I was at 623 demons.  That number has jumped by three completed demons and 10 more incomplete/started.   The 10 are my Qliphoth demons I talked about way back in April.   The Qliphoth are just one of the man new demonic groups I am going to be introducing in this book.  

If you have been following my work for a while now you know I have Lilim, Eodemon, Shedim, Baalserph, and Calabim fiends among all my "demons."  This book will introduce the Qliphoth, Asura, Tarterian, Yaoguai, and Yōkai demonic lineages.I have a total of 11 lineages so far.  I just need to find a better name for the Neutral Evil Daemons. 

AD&D 2nd ed renamed them the Yugoloths, which I kind of liked to be honest, but the name is not OGC.   Even Pathfinder still calls them Daemons.  I mean it works yeah and it helps make it easier to use my books with your old AD&D ones.  But I think I can come up with something better really.   I mean I already split the devils into two separate lineages of the Calabim and the Baalseraph, so I am certainly not being tied down by tradition or nostalgia here. Not to mention my Qliphoth are quite different than Pathfinder's Qlippoth.

So why are there FOUR Basic Bestairies? Ah.  So back in April (I think) I was beginning to realize that my Basic Bestiary had grown too large.  I had already portioned off the demons (good plan) and the book was growing more and more.  Even right now I am at 387 complete non-demonic monsters.  So, I made another cut.

Basic Bestiary I, Monsters & Maleficarum, covers all the monsters that kept coming up in my research over the years on witches and witchcraft. This includes many of my Monstrous Mondays posts.

Basic Bestiary II, Books of the Dead, covers all the undead.  At least half of the book will be vampires.  

Basic Bestiary III, Demons & Devils, is pretty much what it says on the cover.

Basic Bestiary IV, covers...well, let me hold on to that one a little bit longer.

The goal was to release them all in 13-week intervals over the course of a year.  Though now I am giving thought to BBI and BBII to be released right away.  I suppose it depends on how much art I can buy and how much of BBIV I get done.

Speaking of art, I had some great art for these, but now I am planning on using that elsewhere.

I am still planning on releasing these in both hardcover and softcover formats so they can fit on your shelf next to your Advanced and Basic-era books respectively.

I am going with the Romantic period Goya and Füssli because they capture the mood of these books perfectly.  BBIV also goes with Füssli.  

I am quite excited to get these to you.  There will be some familiar faces here, but hopefully changed a bit to make them feel new.  My undead book for example takes all the undead combat rules I have used and puts them all in one place. I also universally use my new draining rules here too.  Demons get updates across the board and even what I call "the usual suspects" get a boost. 

My hope is you get as much fun out of these as I did working on them!

Six years ago this month, things changed drastically for the Triffid Ranch. That was when we signed the lease for what turned out to be the first gallery space, out at what was Valley View Center in North Dallas, and … Continue reading →

- source

I touched briefly on this with my posts on Building a Darklord, Castle Amber, and Horror Adventures, but one of the key strengths of  Ravenloft has always been its mutability.  It can go anywhere, it be what you need it to be and while some might bemoan its pastiche of horror literature stereotypes, that same familiarity allows it to work in a lot of ways with other books and games.

While I am perfectly happy, indeed happier now, that Ravenloft is more amorphous and less of a "world" there are plenty of sources out there if you want to expand it beyond what lives in between the book covers now to a larger world.

Here are some resources I am planning on using to make my Ravenloft campaign (whenever I can get that going!) a little more personalized.

Ravenloft and Cthulhu

While this seems to be a "no-brainer" just slapping Cthulhu into a game almost never works.  Sure there are some great monsters here, but the real value-add here are the sections on running a cosmic horror game.  This is a great overall resource, and a fantastic one when running an adventure in Bluetspur.

Ravenloft and Fantasy Horror

I mentioned already the utility that Pathfinder's Horror Adventures provides in setting up some details for a Dark Fantasy Horror game.  The 3.x d20 system in Pathfinder is similar enough to the 5e one in Ravenloft to provide plenty of ideas with a minimum of conversion needed.   If you must have them, the Fear, Sanity, and Corruption rules can be ported over to 5e Ravenloft.  Even some of the Feats can be used (but used sparingly).  Spells and Magic items can be ported over almost as is really. 

In fact, I have found it so useful in the last few days that I have moved it from my "Pathfinder" shelf to my "Horror" shelf.

BlackRose

Going back to some of the earliest posts on this blog are my ideas for a BlackRose game.  Now with the new 5e Blue Rose out, it is practically begging me to use it for this.  For me, the ideas behind BlackRose have changed a bit.  I think a Domain that is similar to Aldea, but maybe more of one of sadness.  Not Aldea, but using a lot of the ideas and rules.  Something more akin to my Kingdom of Rain.  Which has one foot planted squarely in Blue Rose and another in a melancholic sort of Folk Horror that would find a home in Ravenloft.  I ran an adventure under the title "Kingdom of Rain" a while back. It was a little Aldea, a little bit Innsmouth, and a little bit Alton, Illinois.  There are some solid Fey elements to it as well; I introduced my River Hags here.  A version of Kingdom of Rain is set to be published under the name "Witching Weather," so watch this space for more on that.

Ravenloft and the Runewild

Speaking of fey lands, the Runewild from Sneak Attack Press also provides a bit of a wilder fey world with tinges of Horror and Dark Fantasy.  If you ever wanted to expand on the Domain of Tepset then this is a fantastic source.  Again, as with the Horror Adventures and Blue Rose, there is material here that can be dropped into Ravenloft "as is" with very little modification.  The Runewild also help build up that "dream-like feeling" I like to use in Ravenloft before hitting characters with the Nightmares.

My Kingdom of Rain lives in the intersection of the triquetra-shaped Venn diagram of Ravenloft, Blue Rose, and Runewild.  I can also use this for expanding my new Domain with The Snow Queen as the Darklord.  Though do I REALLY want my Kingdom of Rain converted to a Dark Domain?  I'll have to suss that one out as I go through my books here.

Ravenloft and Ravenloft

Sounds odd, but most of the grief the new book is getting online is "it's not like the old Ravenloft." Ok, fine. If you must, make it like it.   Most of the Ravenloft books are fluff anyway.  Grab what you want from any of the old books and reuse it.  Want Viktor back instead of Viktra? Ok, do that.  I might create a Domain where they are both there and there is an intense rivalry between them.  I am thinking Father and Daughter.  Their creations of course are caught in this battle.  Rival evil scientists. Using their creations to get at the other.  Both wanting to capture their opponents' creations to learn their secrets. Viktor is intensely jealous of his daughter fearing her creation Else is superior, all the wile claiming she knows nothing that he did not teach her.  Viktra hates her father for never sharing his work and finds Adam to be an abomination.  

The more I type this, the more I like it.  Go all Hammer Horror for Viktor and Giallo horror for Viktra.  Set them on different sides of Lamordia where their minions search the countryside for parts for their experiments and to hopefully capture one of the more successful ones of their rival Darklords. 

It's one part Frankenstein Created Woman (1967), one part Lady Frankenstein (1971), and one part War of the Gargantuas (1966).  All set in Fantasy Gothic Horror Switzerland. Sprinkle in a little bit of Reanimator and I am good to go. 

Horror is my favorite seasoning for most games.  Ravenloft lets me do this with everything.

Ernst Fuchs was one of the first artists shared on this site way back in early 2006.

Goblins are ubiquitous in many game worlds.  In some, they are a constant threat, in others a nuisance. The goblins of Lord of the Rings are pretty far removed from the ones of Labyrinth, or even the fairy tales of Grimm.  But they are always a good foil for low-level parties.  In my games goblins tend to be more Chaotic Neutral. Not evil really, but maybe a little naughty time to time.

No one though will ever confuse the Mad Hatter Goblin for anything than what it is, pure evil.

Goblin, Mad Hatter
Small Humanoid (Fey)

Frequency: Very Rare
Number Appearing: 1 (1)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil [Chaotic]
Movement: 90' (30') [9"]
Armor Class: 7 [12]
Hit Dice: 2d8+2* (11 hp)
  Small 2d6+2* (9 hp)
Attacks: 1 weapon
Damage: 1d6
Special: Cause Fear
Size: Small
Save: Monster 2 
Morale: 8 (NA)
Treasure Hoard Class: None
XP: 35 (OSE) 47 (LL)

Str: 9 (0) Dex: 17 (+2) Con: 14 (+1) Int: 10 (0) Wis: 8 (-1) Cha: 5 (-2)

The Mad Hatter Goblin gets its name from the gruesome way it displays the remains of its kills,  by stacking the severed heads of its victims on top of its own head.   These goblins appear as do other goblins, save for maybe slightly larger.  They have a look in their eyes that speaks of desperation and maybe no small amount of madness.

Each time a Mad Hatter Goblin makes a kill they remove the head from the body.  The goblin then takes the heads of previous victims and ties them to the top of the new head and then all of these are tied to the goblin's own head.  The oldest, and most decayed, heads are at the top.  The sight of a mad hatter is such that anyone under 4 HD/level must make a saving throw vs. paralysis or be stunned in fear, unable to move or react for 1d4+1 rounds.    The mad hatter will go after these targets first.  Creatures greater than 4 HD/level are immune to this effect.

Mad hatters are both reviled and respected in a goblin community.  The number of heads one has is their level of prestige. When one mad hatter encounters another there is usually a duel of some sort.  The loser gets to contribute their head to the victorious mad hatter's collection.

The only treasure kept by a mad hatter is their collection of heads.

The gaming magazine is dead. After all, when was the last time that you were able to purchase a gaming magazine at your nearest newsagent? Games Workshop’s White Dwarf is of course the exception, but it has been over a decade since Dragon appeared in print. However, in more recent times, the hobby has found other means to bring the magazine format to the market. Digitally, of course, but publishers have also created their own in-house titles and sold them direct or through distribution. Another vehicle has been Kickststarter.com, which has allowed amateurs to write, create, fund, and publish titles of their own, much like the fanzines of Kickstarter’s ZineQuest. The resulting titles are not fanzines though, being longer, tackling broader subject matters, and more professional in terms of their layout and design.

—oOo—

Tabletops and Tentacles #1 – The Kickstarter Edition sets out to bring you a variety of content. Published by Deeply Dapper Games following a successful Kickstarter campaign, it promises to give the reader a variety of content, including reviews, RPG adventures, columns, dice tables, world building, interviews, original art, and more—and it certainly lives up to that. However, from the outset, Tabletops and Tentacles #1 looks to be and promises to be a gaming magazine, with its title of ‘Tabletops & Tentacles’ and the cover reading, “The monthly magazine of RPGs, Tabletop Games, Comic Conventions, Art Reviews, Adventures & More! In this prodigious premiere issue, you will find adventure hooks for roleplaying games, RPG dice tables, reviews, artist and game designer interviews, original art, tips, tricks, NPCs, treasure and maps.” Which is a lot, and makes it sound like a gaming magazine, which it is not, because the focus of the magazine and the issue is much broader than gaming, very much on the ‘more’, so it is less like Dragon or Dungeon magazine, and more like The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and SFX—all of which inspired the editor and publisher—with some gaming. Thus the reader should not go into it expecting a lot of gaming content or indeed to get anything in the way of gaming content until quite a few pages in. However, this does not mean that the non-gaming content is not interesting, but since it was published in 2020, some content will have something of a retrospective quality (but to be fair, that is exacerbated by this late review) and much of it has a very American focus.

After the editorial in which editor Kris McClanahan, sets out his stall—far better than the cover to be fair—Tabletops and Tentacles #1 provides a previews of a few then-forthcoming tabletop games, which would have very rapidly out of date anyway, and with that hindsight, is really of interest to see what happened to them. It is followed by a preview of the LEGO Haunted House, which feels less of a preview and more of an advert. The first real article is a travelogue, an entry in the regular ‘Tales from the Cthulhu-Haul’, this time around, ‘Tales from the Cthulhu-Haul: Keep Portland Weird’. Written by the editor, it describes a visit to the city and some of its weirder corners, including a tiki bar and curiosity shops. The travelogue has a certain colour to it, but looking back from 2021, it feels weird even to be going out and visiting places like this, so there is an even stronger sense of the other to the piece. Kris McClanahan also contributes two Star Wars-related articles to the magazine. In the regular column, ‘The Binge’ he rewatches the Star Wars Saga via The Machete Order and records his thoughts, and the response is far more entertaining than his other Star Wars article in ‘The Top Ten’ column, ‘The Top Ten: Star Wars Aliens’, which is just an uninspiring list.

In fact, editor Kris McClanahan writes several columns in Tabletops and Tentacles #1. ‘Tales from the Cthulhu-Haul’ and ‘The Top Ten’ are followed by ‘50 Films You DON’T Need To See’, with its first entry being ‘50 Films You DON’T Need To See: Toy Story’. Given more of a focus than the earlier columns, this is an enjoyable appreciation of the film, warts and all. He provides a not dissimilar treatment of H.P. Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror, which breaks down its plot, history, what he liked and disliked, along with his final thoughts, trivia, and more, and again is an enjoyable appreciation.

‘Quarter Ben’—probably written by Ben Cowell, but is not clear—expounds upon the writer’s love of the bargain bin in his childhood with ‘Quarter Ben: Hawkeye’ and a particular mini-series starring the Marvel character, Hawkeye. It is very much a nostalgia piece and a personal piece, so there is a degree of separation there between reader and writer. The identity of the author of ‘The Contrarian’ column is kept deliberately secret, but it is barely worth owning up to as said author tells why he has not seen Tiger King—and?

Kris McClanahan also writes almost all of the entries in the Reviews section, the various board games, odd RPG, books, and various television series all given thumbnail treatments bar the first series of Locke & Key, so readers wanting more depth will want to look elsewhere. The other contributor to the Reviews is Lindsay Graves-McClanahan, who also has her own column in ‘This Geek In History’, a timeline of something interesting, in this case, ‘This Geek In History: The Magazine’, which provides a thumbnail history of the printing and the magazine from the invention of the printing press in 1440 through to the last print issue of Dragon magazine in 2013 and the publication of Tabletops and Tentacles #1 in 2020. It is actually quite interesting as a bit of trivia.

Two pieces of fiction appear in Tabletops and Tentacles #1, both presented in two parts. The first is ‘Sowing Dragon Teeth’ by James Alderdice and the second, ‘Dice Eyes at the Palace of Midnight’ by Aidan Doyle. Both are enjoyable, the first is a fantasy story with pulpy tones, the second a Cyberpunk-style tale set in the remnants of a sunset online game, and there is potential for both to inspire a Game Master in developing more from their settings. Hopefully, future issues of the magazine will give scope to develop either story and then lend themselves to further inspiration?

Interviews in Tabletops and Tentacles #1 cover a range of fields of endeavour. These include comics with an interview with T.J. Daman, creator of the indie noir comic series, ENIGMA; graphic design in ‘Graphic Content’, with John J. Hill; and playing boardgames with the members of the podcast, Meeple Nation. Welcome to Artist Alley not only provides a monthly spotlight on artists and creators, it also serves as a series of mini-interviews with each of the subjects and points to the core concept behind Tabletops and Tentacles #1, that it provides a similar experience to attending a gaming convention. Which in this case, of course, includes visiting the artists’ sections. Overall, the interviews are perhaps the lengthier pieces in the issue and informative enough.

The first real nod to gaming content in Tabletops and Tentacles #1 is Devon Marcel’s ‘Neon Futures: The Road to Cyberpunk 2077’. Written before the release of the controversial roleplaying game, this charts the rise of the cyberpunk, first as a literary genre, and then out into other media—music, television, roleplaying games—Cyberpunk 2013 and Shadowrun in particular, but especially computer games. It is a good overview of the genre, ripe for further exploration in any one of the directions it covers. Introductions to gaming are provided first by Kristopher McClanahan and then Alan Bahr. Kristopher McClanahan suggests a number of gateway board games in ‘The Reformed Grognard: Gateway Board Games’, games suitable for those looking to get into board games, whilst with ‘Tiny Thoughts: OSR and Indie Roleplaying Games’, Alan Bahr suggests points of entry for the Old School Renaissance. His five suggestions in the opening entry for his column stray far from the Old School Renaissance, or at least from the classic retroclones based on Dungeons & Dragons. This makes them more interesting than they otherwise might have been, and perhaps more space might be given for the games themselves.

However, the actual gaming content does not appear until almost one hundred pages into the issue (that is, one hundred out of one-hundred-and-forty pages…). They begin with Kristopher McClanahan’s ‘Blackspittle’s Horde Fantasy Adventure’, a systemless scenario intended for fantasy games like Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. It is a classic ‘village-in-peril’ set-up coloured by the sap taken from the nearby forest which is put to a number of interesting uses. It is serviceable enough. More enjoyable is ‘Realm of the Moon Ghouls Part 1: The Starship Poe’, also by Kristopher McClanahan, again systemless, but definitely for Pulp Sci-Fi roleplaying games with a tinge of horror, particularly, Lovecraftian horror. The first part of a series which details the universe beyond the walls of the starship Poe, this is enjoyable for what it is as much as what the rest of the series promises. Hopefully, further issues will live up to the pulpy Sci-Fi promised in this issue.

‘H’AKKENSLASH! An original RPG system’ by Benjamin C. Bailey is the start of a roleplaying game which presumably will be detailed further in future issues. An experienced Game Master and her players will have no issue grasping how this works—essentially the difficulty of a task is measured by die type, a Player Character needing to succeed rolling an appropriate skill, again rated by die type, and attempting to beat the difficulty rolled by the Game Master. This is not clearly explained though, and a less experienced player or Game Master will probably need some help with this. It could have done with fewer magical items and more explanation.

Gaming dice tables include ‘In the Inn’ by Kristopher McClanahan and Lindsay McClanahan, which gives twenty things to be found in the draws of your room at an inn, and Lindsay McClanahan’s ‘The Cave’ gives six adventure seeds leading into, or deeper into, a cave. The latter tend to be more interesting than the former, but there is a decent amount of inspiration to be found here. Lastly, another column, ‘Merchants of the Realm’ begins with ‘Merchants of the Realm: Crag’s Reliable Adventuring Gear’ by Lindsay McClanahan, a likeable description of a travelling salesman and his packed bison caravan, accompanied by some fun gewgaw and doodads.

Physically, Tabletops and Tentacles #1 is generally well-presented, being bright and cheerful. In places, the editing could have been stronger, but hopefully that will get better with future issues. The nature of the layout and the relative shortness of many of the articles means that it looks busy in places though. 

The initial reaction to Tabletops and Tentacles #1 – The Kickstarter Edition is one of disappointment, because it is not a gaming magazine as the cover, or even the title, suggests—the ‘more’ mentioned on the cover making up the bulk of the issue. Yet get past that, and Tabletops and Tentacles #1 actually turns out to be a readable magazine dedicated to fandom in general. It covers a breadth of subjects, not always in any depth, but many of the articles are interesting and informative, even entertaining. Others though, are fluff and filler, even hard work. As to the gaming content, much of it is decent enough, but really needs development—to one degree or another—by the Game Master to be of use.

If you are looking for a gaming magazine, then there really is not sufficient gaming in its pages to recommend Tabletops and Tentacles #1 – The Kickstarter Edition. If you are looking for a general fandom magazine with some gaming content that can you work with and develop, Tabletops and Tentacles #1 – The Kickstarter Edition is serviceable enough. Hopefully, it will get better and more substantial in future issues.

—oOo—

A Kickstarter for Tabletops and Tentacles Magazine #3: The Cryptid Issue ends on Wednesday, July 14th, 2021

Artist and date unknown.

The starter set for any roleplaying game is always designed as an entry point into that game. It has to do three things. First, it has to introduce the game—its settings and its rules to both players and Game Master. Second, it has to showcase the setting, the rules, and how the game is played to both players and Game Master. Third, it has to intrigue and entice both players and Game Master to want to play more and explore the setting further. A good starter set, whether City of Mist: All-Seeing Eye Investigations Starter Set, the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Starter Set, or the Call of Cthulhu Starter Set will always do that, whereas a bad starter set, or even a mediocre starter set, such as the Sixth World Beginner Box for Shadowrun, Sixth Edition, will not. Whilst a starter set is always designed to introduce a roleplaying game, it has another function, depending upon when it is published. A starter set published as a roleplaying game’s first—or one of its first—releases introduces the game and setting to everyone. A starter set published later or deep into a line’s run, when there are multiple supplements and scenarios available as well as the core rulebook, is designed to introduce the game, but not to those who are already playing it. Of course, it is intended to introduce the game and setting to new players, but at the way time, it is providing a means of getting into both when the range and number of books and supplements available might be daunting and there might not be an obvious point of entry. This is exactly what Symbaroum Starter Set – Treasure Hunts in Davokar does for Symbaroum from Free League Publishing.

Symbaroum Starter Set – Treasure Hunts in Davokar includes two sixty-four-page books, a Symbaroum Bright Davokar Dice Set, two double-sided maps, and six character sheets for the starter set’s pre-generated Player Characters. Everything is presented in rich colour, the artwork in particular, standing out as being awe inspiring and absolutely fantastic in depicting the mysteries and wonders to be found in Symbaroum. The books do need a slight edit in places and yes, much of the artwork will be familiar to anyone who has looked at any of the supplements available for Symbaroum, but for anyone new to the roleplaying game and its setting, the artwork very much sells the setting.

The first book is the Starter Rules. This introduces the concept of roleplaying and both the rules for and the setting of Symbaroum—all at a brisk pace. After a quick explanation of roleplaying, it goes over the key points about the setting—that Ambria is a young kingdom, its peoples forced to flee from the south over the mountains after their original home fell to the Dark Lords, how the military of the refugee kingdom defeated the indigenous barbarian tribes, and how some began to look for signs of ancient, long-lost kingdom to the north, under the canopy of the vast Davokar Forest. In doing so, they would penetrate ever further north, and in doing so, threaten the Iron Pact between the Elves and the Barbarian tribes that kept mankind from exploring too far north… In explaining the rules, the Starter Rules booklet is very much focused on the rules as they apply to the pre-generated Player Characters. So the Man-at-Arms and Iron Fist Abilities for the Knight and the Prios’ Burning Glass Power for the Theurg, explanations of their Races and their Traits, and so on. Abilities and Powers in Symbaroum come in three levels of skill—Novice, Adept, and Master—and whilst the pre-generated Player Characters all have Novice levels in theirs, the explanations of each Ability or Power covers the Novice and Adept levels. This means that the pre-generated Player Characters in the Symbaroum Starter Set – Treasure Hunts in Davokar can learn from their experiences and get better at their Abilities and Powers in between the adventures provided in the Setting & Adventures booklet. Ultimately, the Game Master and her players are going to need the Symbaroum core rules, but these options, along with a surprisingly lengthy equipment list, do allow for a playing group to get a goodly amount of play from the starter set before doing so. 

The explanation of the mechanics and how combat works emphasises how Symbaroum is player-facing in that the Game Master never rolls dice, the players do, and a nice touch is that the guide to combat is supported with a good example of it in play, also emphasising that there is a narrative to the play rather than making them simply mechanical and procedural. One aspect of Symbaroum which sets it apart from many other fantasy roleplaying games is that the Player Characters can suffer from Corruption. Temporary Corruption comes from casting spells, but cast too much magic and the Corruption can become permanent. Other sources of Corruption include using certain artefacts and encountering certain creatures and places in and under Davokar Forest. Too much Corruption and a person’s Soul is blighted, which the Witchsight Power can reveal. These rules show how both magic and the secrets of Davokar Forest can be dangerous and so should be handled with care.

The Setting & Adventures booklet is of course, for the Game Master’s eyes only, and it starts with some advice for her, before delving into the setting of Symbaroum with some specifics. In particular, presenting the fortified town of Thistle Hold on the edge of Davokar Forest as a launching point for any treasure hunts into its depths, as well as rules for and the dangers for making such journeys. The description of Thistle Hold is nicely done, having a ‘Wild West’ feel, but with Dark Ages flavour. Again it will be familiar to veteran players of the game and perhaps the only thing that might have made it better would have been the inclusion of a few NPCs that the Player Characters could have regularly interested with. Whilst there are rewards to be found on the treasure hunts, some of them listed on the included table, not all of these rewards are entirely safe, notably the handful of artefacts which inflict corruption when their powers are invoked. These do give their owners minor, but still powerful benefits, but their use needs to be weighed against the cost of that use. Other dangers are more obvious, such as the short bestiary of monsters and adversities that might be encountered under the eaves of the Davokar Forest. Including beasts, members of various cultures, and the undead, the dozen or so entries are certainly sufficient to support the two scenarios in the Setting & Adventures booklet, and a bit more.

The two adventure locations in the Setting & Adventures booklet are designed with new players in mind, being relatively short and straightforward and intended to give them a taste of the core activity at the heart of Symbaroum, and its accompanying dangers. They are designed to be played in order, although the two are not connected, with the second being more complex than the first and with each Player Character earning sufficient Experience Points that should his player want to improve him, then he can. The first is ‘Where Darkness Dwells’ and is the simpler of the two, the Player Characters having been informed that the corrupted lake of Kal-Halaran and the nearby cemetery of Kalea Ma-Har are both sites of interest to anyone wanting to further study the Darkness, and perhaps been hired to locate a missing noble who was last seen there. The adventure veers between being a scavenger hunt and a dungeon delve, although quite a short one. This can be peppered with a series of random events, but the scenario has it events and encounters as well as the site to explore. These include encounters with some interesting NPCs whose role in the scenario is to illustrate the dangers of exploring the Davokar Forest and hunting for treasure. This includes with Elves, who in Symbaroum distrust mankind at the very least since their incursions into the forest break the Iron Pact and meddle with dangers best left alone. The one issue here is that should the players and their characters handle the situation wrong, it may end in their being executed, possibly because of the players’ lack of awareness of the dangers of treasure hunting. So the Game Master may want to really warn the players and their characters ahead of time in game, because such an outcome is likely to end their playing experience with Symbaroum, let alone with the Symbaroum Starter Set – Treasure Hunts in Davokar. Otherwise, this is a solid introductory scenario which successfully imparts much the setting elements to Symbaroum.

The second, more sophisticated scenario is ‘The Gathering Storm’. The Player Characters learn of another location, Lafarda’s Tower, from some notes that come into their possession, and that the tower might hold another artefact, this time the Rod of Light and Darkness. Either having discovered them during the events of ‘Where Darkness Dwells’ or purchased whilst back in Thistle Hold, the notes suggest the tower’s location, in the middle of the Blasted Heath, leading to a nasty trek across lightning cracked land to find the tower in the fog. However, when the Player Characters arrive, they discover that a rival band of treasure hunters has already got there, but has come up against a problem that it is not strong enough to deal with. It is a classic situation of uneasy alliances complicated by the arrival of a second rival party, a party of innocents, the weather getting very, very frightening, and something nasty below the tower… This is the better of the two scenarios, and although it does not lack the potential for a total party kill (as opposed to execution), that potential feels less arbitrary. 

Both scenarios include notes on their set-up and potential developments, depending on the outcome. Both will need thorough read throughs as they are quite busy in places and there are events which the Game Master will need to prepare as well as the various locations. Beyond the suggested developments, the Symbaroum Starter Set – Treasure Hunts in Davokar is wanting in terms of further adventures. Given how much is included in the starter set in terms of background and rules, it would have been nice if there had been a few adventure hooks or seeds which the Game Master could have developed for herself. However, both adventures should provide two sessions of gaming each, especially if the Game Master develops the set-up a little more to involve some roleplaying and investigation in Thistle Hold prior to the Player Characters setting out on their expeditions.

The six character sheets for the starter set’s pre-generated Player Characters include a Human Ambrian Knight looking for redemption, a Human Ambrian Witch Hunter who has probably seen too much Darkness, a Goblin Treasure Hunter on the make, a Human Ambrian Theurg wanting a better understanding of Darkness, and an Ogre Wizard curious about the world who accompanied by a mystical companion. All six sheets are done on glossy paper and easy to read. The backgrounds for each of the Player Characters is given in the Starter Rules booklet. These backgrounds have sufficient ties between the Player Characters to explain why they are working together. However, the Game Master will need to do a little copying and pasting to make the background readily available to their prospective players.

The double-sided maps are done in full colour on stiff paper stock. One depicts the town of Thistle Hold—the start and end point for any treasure hunt into the Davokar Forest on the one side, and a map showing Ambria and the known Davokar Forest on the other. Both of these maps have been seen before, but having them separate is always useful as is the fact that various important locations are listed on the Thistle Hold map that the Player Characters can visit. The second map depicts the adventure locations for each of the two adventures in the Setting & Adventures book. Both are unmarked.

The Symbaroum Starter Set – Treasure Hunts in Davokar takes Symbaroum back to where it started—and where many of the early adventures take the Player Characters—treasure hunting under the canopy of the Davokar Forest. In doing so, it presents a robust and surprisingly detailed introduction to the setting of Symbaroum and its mechanics. For anyone interested in getting a taste and feel of the dark fantasy Swedish roleplaying game, The Symbaroum Starter Set – Treasure Hunts in Davokar is a solid entry point.

The tale of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table has been so deeply embedded in our society that retellings are not just inevitable, they are ubiquitous.  Among those, there are going to retellings that differ from the classic, Geoffrey of Monmouth and Thomas Malory retellings.  Some might even improve on the tales.

King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017), is not one of those.  It's not that it takes so many liberties with the tale, that is expected.  It's the liberties are fairly nonsensical and some are just bad.  For starters, while Charlie Hunnam is ok as Arthur, he is really much too old for the role.  

Jude Law reunites with his Sherlock director Guy Ritchie and gives us a decent enough Vortigern, but I felt he wasn't really giving the part all he could.  

Supergirl's Katie McGrath appears as Elsa, Vortigern's wife, making this her second dip into the Arthurian legends. She had played Morganna in "Merlin" (I'll be getting to that soon).  

Djimon Hounsou appears as Sir Bedivere. Frankly, I enjoy every role he has played, but I felt he was phoning this one in. I also felt Eric Bana was miscast, but honestly, I am not entirely I have seen him in anything that I liked him in.  Even his Nero in Star Trek seemed a little off to me.   

The movie feels like it has too much "Games of Throne" or "Vikings" envy.  To that end, Aidan Gillen appears as Sir William, but all I could see was Little Finger. At least he was using his real accent here. 

Of course, there were other things I could pick on, like there being Vikings in Britain at all at this time, or even Chinese people at this point; figuring this was between 550AD and 1040AD.

There is more, but not enough to write about, to be honest.  Interestingly enough my wife, who doesn't care for the King Arthur story, really likes this one.  

What good can I grab from this?  Well, I liked Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey as the Mage, Merlin's apprentice.  I always felt Merlin needed to have a couple more apprentices.  I'll also talk about this when I discuss "Cursed."

Gaming Content

Back in Jr. High, I was playing in a D&D game (Basic/Expert) set in Medieval Britain in the time of Arthur.  Of course, as most Jr. High games in the early 80s were, this one devolved rather quickly on who was going to kill Arthur and claim Excalibur as their own.  I grew tired of that campaign rather quickly and instead wanted to play in Middle Earth.   

But ever since then I have been very, very curious about the RPG Chivalry & Sorcery.  Seeing ads in Dragon Magazine only added to the mystery of the game.  I am going to have to spend some time with that.

Another bit of content, something that I think comes for the later retellings of the Knights of Camelot, is the notion of the New Religion (Christianity) vs. The Old Ways (Paganism).  We saw this in Excalibur and it was a central focus of The Mists of Avalon (which I also hope to talk about).  This movie did not feature it all that much, but the thought was still there.  I like this sort of interaction and love putting it into my games when I can.

You can see additional Russian satirical magazine illustrations from early 20th century in this previous post.

Published by Steamforged Games, Animal Adventures is a roleplaying game setting of anthropomorphic cats and dogs adventuring in a magical world a la Dungeons & Dragons. It is designed to be compatible with Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition and notably, is supported by the Dungeons & Doggies and Cats & Catacombs line of miniatures. The entryway for the setting and the line is the Animal Adventures RPG Starter Set: A spellbinding roleplaying game for beginners. This promises to contain everything that a gaming group needs to play a thrilling roleplaying campaign. However, it does not. Instead, it does contain a single adventure, which is ably supported by simple, easy-to-follow rules, four dog miniatures, cat miniatures, seven Player Character sheets, a double-sided game map, Game Master screen, a set of illustrated tokens, and a set of polyhedral dice.

The Animal Adventures RPG Starter Set is designed for ages thirteen and up, and intended to be played with a Game Master and up to seven players. From the outset, it is impressively presented. Everything is done in vibrant colour—perhaps a little too dark for the maps—and has a pleasing physical presence on the table. The large, double-sided map depicts a forest glade and mansion cellar on the one side, and the upper floors of the mansion on the other. They are marked with squares for use with the miniatures and the tokens also included in the box. The digest-sized Rulebook and Adventure booklet is brighter and breezier than the maps, its artwork tending towards the cute rather than the darker tones of the map. The three-panel digest-sized Game Master screen is likewise lighter on the Game Master’s side and lists in turn the roleplaying game’s combat rules, tables, monster stats, and spells and abilities of the Player Characters, all for easy reference. The thirty full-colour tokens are done on sturdy cardboard and are easy to read. The Player Character sheets are also double-sided and are clean, tidy, and again easy to read. Stats, equipment, attacks, and equipment are given on the front with a portrait of the animal, with special abilities on the back, whether that is spells or Class features. All of this fits atop a plastic tray with its own lid, the tray having space for the dice and the Animal Adventures RPG Starter Set’s miniatures. The dice are decent, with the two twenty-sided dice marked with the paw symbol where their twenty would be.

The miniatures are for the seven pre-generated Player Characters found in the Animal Adventures RPG Starter Set. They include Chantilly, a female Labrador and Fighter; Solan, a male Persian cat and Warlock; Whisper, a female Sphinx cat and Sorcerer; Elvis, a male Cavalier spaniel and Bard; Molly, a female Lyoki and Rogue; Brianna, a female Boxer and Paladin; and Kai, male Shiba Inu and Cleric. The miniatures are nicely detailed and emphasis the fact that the animals and thus the Player Characters in the world of Animal Adventures run on all four legs rather than on two. For example, Chantilly, a female Labrador and Fighter, wields her sword in her mouth rather than her paws!

The Rulebook and Adventure booklet is thirty-two pages long, of which six pages are devoted to the rules. These cover an introduction to and example of roleplaying, explain what the attributes are and how they work, how Advantage and Disadvantage works, and of course, combat. It is not a cursory treatment, but rather stripped down from that found in either the Dungeons & Dragons Starter Set or the Player’s Handbook. Anyone familiar with Dungeons & Dragons, or indeed any roleplaying game, will grasp and understand the rules with ease, but anyone with less experience or new to the hobby might have more difficulty. In the general, the rules and adventure lend themselves towards being run by an experienced Game Master for new players. In addition, links are included for fuller versions of the character sheets, so that a Dungeon Master and player more familiar with Dungeons & Dragons could run the adventure in the Animal Adventures RPG Starter Set.

The adventure in the Animal Adventures RPG Starter Set is ‘The Kurse of Doktor Krankensteen’. It opens with the adventurers on the road to the village of Woofburg where they plan to attend the annual Festival of Furry Friends. Unfortunately, they are ambushed by Goblin ’Nappers who attempt to kidnap them. After the battle, the adventurers discover that a mysterious ‘Dok’ wants cats and dogs, and he wants them for his experiments. Following the trail of the Goblin ’Nappers leads to a sewer pipe that ultimately opens up in the cellar of an abandoned mansion. As the adventurers explore the dilapidated building, they will come across some of the Dok’s experiments and his experiments to be, before finally facing the bad Dok himself!

The adventure is decent enough, with a summary of the setting, the map needed overview, player aim, and enemies to be faced given at the start of each scene. GM tips in the margins also give advice and helpful suggestions throughout. However, the scenario is combat and exploration focused, and as much as the GM tip that throwing the players and their adventurers into the action gets them involved is applicable, it does not leave a lot of room for anything other than action. There is very little investigation and not a lot of roleplaying and a little more of both would have been just as involving and would have showcased the fact that roleplaying games are more than just action.

If the adventure is decent enough and should provide one or two sessions of fun, where both it and the Animal Adventures RPG Starter Set come unstuck is in delivering the next step—or that is failing to deliver it. At the end of ‘The Kurse of Doktor Krankensteen’, the author suggests that the Game Master use the rules in the Animal Adventures RPG Starter Set, plus other supplements in the Animal Adventures to create a sequel. Unless the Game Master wants to run a variant of ‘The Kurse of Doktor Krankensteen’, it does not have enough content to create a sequel, and also, which Animal Adventures supplement should the Game Master be using? Writing a sequel to Animal Adventures should be a problem if the Game Master has written adventures before, but what if he has not? There is no real advice to help her in ‘The Kurse of Doktor Krankensteen’. It would have been nice if the publisher had made available a sequel on its website, even one using the contents of the Animal Adventures RPG Starter Set, so that the life of the Animal Adventures RPG Starter Set could have been extended to beyond the one adventure.

One option here would actually be to look at another roleplaying game all together. Still involving dogs and cats, and that is the Pugmire Fantasy Tabletop Roleplaying Game. This is slightly more complex than the Animal Adventures world of the Animal Adventures RPG Starter Set, but ‘The Kurse of Doktor Krankensteen’ could easily be run set in the world of Pugmire and the miniatures for the adventure would work in Pugmire too. Plus there is plenty of readily available support for it.

There can be no denying that the Animal Adventures RPG Starter Set is a fantastic looking introduction to roleplaying and the hobby. It is one that works for a family audience too and the stripped-down mechanics and rules can also serve as an introduction to Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. Ultimately though, as attractive as the Animal Adventures RPG Starter Set is, it simply does not follow through on what to do next, and consequently, it feels constrained rather than expansive.