Welcome to Arkham: An Illustrated Guide for Visitors to the Town of ARKHAM, MASSACHUSETTS, and Environs Including DUNWICH, INNSMOUTH, and KINGSPORT is just that little bit more than a simple guide to the city at the heart of the H.P. Lovecraft’s stories and the Cthulhu Mythos. In one way it is a simple exploration of the city and its strange history and places as presented in the Arkham Horror family of games published by Fantasy Flight Games, including of course, the Arkham Horror board game and Arkham Horror: The Card Game, and more recently, the roleplaying game Arkham Horror, and in another, it showcases the great artwork from the games. Seriously, the artwork is very, very good. Then in another way, it presents the city and its environs, including the towns and villages of Dunwich, Innsmouth, and Kingsport, in a way that could be used with any horror roleplaying game. Which means that it could works as a companion to the recently released Call of Cthulhu: Arkham for Call of Cthulhu.

What it actually is though, is a reprint of the Arkham gazetteer that was originally in the Arkham Horror Deluxe Rulebook, published separate to the board game, along with expanded details of Lovecraft Country. Yet it is also more that than that. It is a copy of Welcome to Arkham, the introduction to the city published by the Arkham Historical Society after having been updated, revised, and expanded by the society’s curator, Reginald Peabody. Further, it is his personal copy, complete with notes that he compiled in order to update it, and then, now in hands of his niece, Myrna Todd, it has been annotated with her notes and correspondence with a friend in New York, after she begins investigating Arkham and beyond following her uncle’s disappearance. What this means is that there are multiple layers to this book, on one level a simple guide or artbook, on another a story and mystery. Which means that it can be enjoyed on multiple levels…

Published by Aconyte Books, also responsible for a series of novels set in the world of Arkham Horror, this outwardly guide to Arkham and inwardly the mystery of the disappearance of the guide’s author, begins with a letter to young Myrna Todd from the Miskatonic Valley sheriff, informing her of her uncle’s disappearance, and a letter to her friend in New York, before welcoming the reader to Arkham proper. Starting with downtown, the volume takes the reader from one district of the city to another, visiting in turn, its highs and its lows, its weird and its wondrous. The highs include Independence Square with its balmy tranquillity that contrasts sharply with the Gothic grandeur and tenebrosity of Arkham Sanatorium, with its patients receiving the very best care, but so many lost to a stranger madness. Similarly, the newly opened restaurant, La Bella Luna, offers the wonders of Italian cuisine brought to small town New England, but hides an entrance to the Clover Club, the city’s premier speakeasy, whilst the Palace Movie Theatre brings the best of Hollywood to its big screen on which some moviegoers have begun to see odd shadows at moments when the big feature is not show. The description of the Palace Movie Theatre is accompanied by a fantastic film that never was, Mask of Silver. Meanwhile, the Ward Theatre is going to stage a much-anticipated performance of The King in Yellow, following its premiere in Paris! In rougher Eastown, Hibb’s Roadhouse might claim to be ‘dry’, but it is where the city’s less than reputable citizens go to get a shot of booze, whilst Velma’s Diner, a classic railcar diner, might serve good food, but it where the patrons of Hibb’s Roadhouse go after it shuts for the night.

French Hill is home to the even stranger parts of Arkham. There is Silver Twilight Lodge, the meeting place of the Order of the Silver Twilight, headed by one Carl Sanford, known for its generous charity work, but suspected by some for conducting very dark rituals behind its closed doors. This is, of course, a pleasing nod, to ‘The Hermetic Order of the Silver Twilight’ from Shadows of Yog-Sothoth. (These are not the only nods to the source material beyond that of H.P. Lovecraft, as Welcome to Arkham also draws from the pages of the various novels in the ‘Arkham Horror’ range.) Then there is the infamous ‘Witch House’, once home to the reviled witch, Keziah Mason, but now a series of poky apartments let to students at Miskatonic University who complain of strange rodent that stalks the building with its weirdly human face and hands. These are only the start of the strange locations to be found in Arkham, others including ‘The Unnamable’, a collapsed mansion in the Merchant District that Arkhamites strive to avoid, the Black Cave in Rivertown with its odd geology and fungi and the spelunkers often lost within its depths, and Ye Olde Magick Shoppe in Uptown, a cramped premises stuffed with mouldering books, maps, and artefacts linked to places that geographers have no knowledge of.

Of course, Miskatonic University gets a section of its own, including the Miskatonic Museum and the Orne Library, and as a bonus, a working draft of ‘Book of Living Myths’. This is almost a Mythos tome of its very own, penned by Miskatonic University scholar Kōhaku Narukami, which explores the parallels between classic folklore and the Mythos. Beyond this, Welcome to Arkham draws both the reader and Myrna Todd up and down the Miskatonic Valley, visiting in turn Dunwich, Innsmouth, and Kingsport, for similar treatments as that accorded to Arkham. Throughout, the locations are given both a fantastic illustration and a description, but this is not the only artwork in the pages of Welcome to Arkham. There are newspaper front pages reporting on important events such as the widespread, horrific destruction that beset Dunwich and the raid by Federal authorities on Innsmouth. There are also photographs, official reports, tickets, business cards, and plain postcards, the penned by Myrna charting the course of her investigation in the disappearance of her uncle, destined for New York, but not yet sent. Some are illustrated as if to appear attached to the pages by a paperclip, but others intrude into the pages, cut off by the neatness of the pages of Welcome to Arkham: An Illustrated Guide for Visitors to the Town of ARKHAM, MASSACHUSETTS, and Environs Including DUNWICH, INNSMOUTH, and KINGSPORTT. Their creation is so good though, that you wish they were real and that every one of them would stick out between the pages and make the book bulge with the many things, artefacts, and documents stuffed between those pages.

If perhaps, there is anything missing from the pages of Welcome to Arkham, it is a map. Arguably, a book which is ostensibly designed as a guidebook, warrants a map. Perhaps the modular nature of the book’s source material, the Arkham Horror board game, and more specifically, Arkham Horror: The Card Game, means that like the source material, the book needs no map. However, if not coming to Welcome to Arkham via either of those games, the conceit of it begs for a map.

Welcome to Arkham: An Illustrated Guide for Visitors to the Town of ARKHAM, MASSACHUSETTS, and Environs Including DUNWICH, INNSMOUTH, and KINGSPORT is the chance to explore the familiar, but from a different angle, that of source material from a board game and a card game of Lovecraftian investigative horror, rather than a roleplaying game of Lovecraftian investigative horror. Though all draw from the same sources, there is sufficient divergence perhaps that Welcome to Arkham is ever so slightly odd, slightly less familiar. That said, fans of the Arkham Horror board game, Arkham Horror: The Card Game, and the ‘Arkham Horror’ series of novels, will much that they will recognise and enjoy, as will the devotees of the writings of Lovecraft and of Lovecraftian investigative horror roleplaying. Welcome to Arkham: An Illustrated Guide for Visitors to the Town of ARKHAM, MASSACHUSETTS, and Environs Including DUNWICH, INNSMOUTH, and KINGSPORT is an engaging combination of enticing artwork and literary conceit that constantly hints at the dangers to be found in poking around in places and the doings of people that are best left secret.

Features / November 27, 2024

In my mind and in my car
We can’t rewind we’ve gone too far
Pictures came and broke your heart
Put the blame on VCR

—The Buggles, “Video Killed the Radio Star” 

ROBERTS: I saw this on Facebook the other day and had to call an emergency round robin. I don’t know the original image source but I’ve seen it on several clickbait nostalgia pages at this point. The amount of “sad but true” comments is staggering, made more perplexing by the fact that most of these comments are from people who claim to have lived through the ’60s and ’70s. The image is important because it captures something desperately tragic about where we’re at and how we see ourselves. It is, quite simply, Big Brother level propaganda. This version of 1974 never existed (we’ll get to 2024 later). Nothing about it is right. Where are the cigarettes and ashtrays? Where are the beer bottles? Why is everyone bronze-white? Where are the tablecloths (is this 1974 or 1874?)? Why the fuck is that giant window there? Is that a chess board on the table? The answer is so ironic that I can hardly stand it: the cartoon was generated by AI, which is the product of the (alleged by the second panel) grim and joyless and mercenary technological age that the cartoon attempts to condemn.

GRASSO: Yeah, we can very safely put aside all the aesthetic elements of this atrocity that are attributable to the fact that it’s AI: the color grading, the inimitable and easily discernible Escherian uncanniness to all the visual elements, the kitsch factor, the utter lifelessness of the art itself. That’s all baked into the material reality of AI art. We’re dealing with a nostalgia meme made for Facebook here, for Christ’s sake—of course it’s going to bore a hole of distilled banality into the viewer’s skull. But still: someone, some actual human somewhere had to feed this thing a prompt. Some part of it came from an actual human mind. And what that mind wanted to convey with this thing is “wasn’t it better when social spaces were truly social and we weren’t all sitting around on our phones, isolated from each other?”

Leaving aside another grand irony—the fact that this meme ended up finding fertile ideological purchase on the internet, on those very same phones—there is a certain libidinal thrill in all these generational memes, whether visual or textual: a violent, agitated staking of psychological territory, projected in a threatened, growling voice onto the younger generations on the internet, a statement of misplaced solidarity and pride: “REMEMBER WHEN WE DRANK FROM THE GARDEN HOSE, GENERATION X? REMEMBER HOW WE USED TO SPEAK TO EACH OTHER AND LAUGH IN PUBS? NOT LIKE THESE MILLENNIALS AND ZOOMERS, ALWAYS ON THEIR PHONES.” The implied distance between the “good old days” and today is shrunk down to the most elemental of caveman emotional urgings: “then happy, now sad; we from then, we better than you.” 

The vibe here is almost poignantly desperate in a way, giving the impression that the older generation is almost glad things are this bad in 2024, because it allows them to stand in smug superiority against those “young people always on their phones.” When the past is a frozen tableau, painted by AI, nothing can harm it anymore or expose the truth about those 1974 pubs and bars: they weren’t all limned in golden sunlight, full of happy people singing and chatting. In fact, they were often grotty, violent, and full of alcoholics just as hypnotized by their beers as the millennials and Zoomers are by their phones in the 2024 image.

MCKENNA: At a guess, this is from my side of the pond, because us Brits—or more specifically us simple English folk—just love this kind of shit. And if that is the case, a few of the incongruities do kind of make sense. Even the absence of any ethnic minorities can probably be explained by a combination of extra-urban demographics, varying cultural attitudes to boozing, a general diffidence towards outsiders, as well as pretty widespread bigotry. To be honest, in the late eighties the majority of pubs outside metropolitan Bohemian zones weren’t all that welcoming even to your average random straight white male, so anyone not belonging to that group would have been forgiven for thinking twice before popping in for a disgusting pint of Skol or Harp ten years earlier. As would anyone who spoke with an Irish accent, given that the Provisional IRA had begun carrying out attacks in mainland Britain the year before—1974 was in fact the year the Birmingham Pub Bombings happened—so suspicion of strangers was through the roof. The whole year in the UK was pretty fucking horrible, to be honest. Bagpuss debuting on TV was about the only good thing that happened. 

But though pubs like this do—or did—sort of exist, the vibe feels more like a wish-fulfilment melding of the atmosphere of some twatty village pub in the Cotswolds, where the farmhands still live in some Wicker Man-esque idyll of rural submission to the local landlord, with that of a working men’s club, places which I remember as having a much more balanced mix of the sexes and a very different and more cheerful mood. To give you an idea, the only picture I have of my dad drinking a pint (of shit lager, natch), he was in a working men’s club: the man won’t set foot in a pub. And as Mike says, pubs could be hostile places, full of aggro alkies looking to start on anyone who looked a bit odd. 

Anyway, the main things missing are the dense cloud of acrid smoke and the bitter cold, which is my abiding memory of the few times I entered a pub before I was ten, and the frequent air of lurking threat from some pissed-up yobbo, which is my abiding memory of pubs in the ’80s and ’90s. Oh, and the stench, which is admittedly hard to render in pixels. Most pubs got fitted carpets at some point post-WWII, and most pubs never changed them, so years of absorbing revolting yeast-heavy spilled beer—and probably a surprising amount of urine—meant that the places often fucking reeked. A friend and bandmate very kindly got us some occasional work cleaning the pub his stepdad ran in a small provincial town on our dinner breaks from school, and the reek of sour beer in the place was fucking nuclear. I actually preferred cleaning the toilets, because at least the urinal cakes drowned out the various other stenches. And this was not a smelly pub, it was a well-looked-after one! So yes, this is a combination of good-old-days nonsense with the kind of idyllic, cozy vision of pub life CAMRA (Campaign for Real Ale) was aggressively pushing in opposition to the increasingly corporate mindset governing what had visibly become an industry.

ROBERTS: The question of where it comes from is an interesting one. Many of these nostalgia sites are run out of Europe (several from the Netherlands), but they generally target American clicks. The pint glasses would explain the absence of bottles if these weirdly Stepfordian people were in Britain, but look at the “band,” at least two of them clutching instruments that don’t exist in the real world! And look at all the gleaming wood, and the curtains! Add a couple of cowboy hats and we might be in the small-town world of Little House on the Prairie, which was itself a nostalgic idealization of American frontier life in the late 19th century. It was a hugely successful TV show that premiered in—you guessed it—1974, a little over a month after Nixon resigned. The year also saw mile-long gas lines, stagflation, smog sieges, kidnappings, hijackings, and parents were still smoking cigarettes in cars with the windows rolled up. For a lot of Americans, 1974 was less like a country band jamboree and more like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

Listen, I do lament the fact that so many people, including me, are buried in their phones for too much of their lives. We don’t, as societies, talk as much as we used to. We don’t have the physical spaces that we used to have that gave us common ground and a shared reality that actually resembled reality. But the most Orwellian thing about 2024 is not people looking at iPhones, it’s Trump, whose slogan is the fuel behind this poisonous meme. 

GRASSO: A few weeks ago comedian Conner O’Malley and a cohort of fellow millennial comedians put out an hour-long film called Rap World. Set in January 2009, right before the Obama inauguration, and shot on period-appropriate equipment, it tells the story of a single night in the lives of a bunch of aimless young people in the Pennsylvania exurbs recording an “intelligent” rap album. Much of the commentary on this very funny film came in the form of younger millennials and Zoomers enviously noticing how much “simpler” and less distracting life was, or at least seemed in… 2009! Cell Phones existed, but most of them didn’t give us full access to the internet; there was more of an overarching monoculture, more opportunity and desire to be social in real space. Think about how many of the most beloved nostalgia pieces of the past half-century—American Graffiti, Dazed and Confused, hell, even the music video for the Beastie Boys’ “Hey Ladies”!—mine the cultural and social touchstones of only a decade or so in the past! Juxtaposed with this Boomer/Gen X AI atrocity… Well, I guess what I’m getting at is that every generation can fall into their own traps of thinking things were cooler and better and easier, that they just missed out on the Best Era Ever. One can always locate a perfect moment in the past, even as that distance between idealized history and harsh present shrinks more and more as technology peddles nostalgia to keep us from asking the very pertinent question, “What is to be done?”

Obviously we’ve talked a lot about nostalgia at We Are the Mutants over the years. One could even argue it’s all we’ve talked about in one way or another. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about nostalgia myself recently; nostalgia and Trumpism, nostalgia and political reaction, nostalgia and dissatisfaction with the world we’ve handed down to ourselves (because ultimately, we’re all responsible for the atomized world we’ve inherited). If things were so much better “back then,” why do we collectively find it so hard to make a world we do want to see and live in now? We have a blueprint, after all, thanks to this idiotic AI image and countless thousands of others just like it. What elements of our present world are so irrevocable and irreversible that we can’t just pick ourselves up, put our phones away, and go to a pub and hang out with our friends? What, substantively and specifically, are the obstacles to a better, more meaningful life with richer, more fulfilling social experiences? If we were to start asking deeper, more specific questions like these, answers might emerge that some people—the ones who profit most from our current system—might not like us to have awareness of: economic and employment precarity, a deliberate closing down of public third spaces, sky-high rent that prevents working- and middle-class people from opening their own third spaces, less free time because of the demands of a 24/7 workplace, and the lack of energy that comes along with it that discourages us from planning and attending social events. One can blame technology, “phones,” for all of this, but that’s only identifying the symptom of the underlying disease. That disease is within us all and it’s called capitalism, kids. Sorry to be the kind of strident communist bore you’d probably slowly disengage from down t’pub.

MCKENNA: Of the three of us, I’m probably the one least irked by nostalgia. Partly because of a desire, however clumsy, to maintain a link with your past and your past emotions in a world where commerce demands that things change constantly seems pretty natural. And partly because—perhaps too forgivingly—I tend to see nostalgia more like a repressed acknowledgement of how terrifying the passage of time is than something more worrying. Seeing the past reminds us of the diminishing amount of future we have left, and that’s distressing, so instinctively we cling onto it. So there’s a part of me—namely most of me—that does empathize with the nostalgic. But then there are these scumbags eager to channel that distress into the hideous pipelines they’ve constructed with the goal of getting attention, or clout, or power, or just riling people up or whatever. People like the dickheads who made this picture.

That said, go into any pub, at least in the UK, and I am fairly certain you won’t see anything like the bottom scene. I mean, you’ll 100% see horrible, soulless structures all painted grey or whatever modish color scheme is currently in vogue—it’s got that right. And you’ll see a few people on their phones, ignoring everyone else. But you don’t need a phone to ignore everyone else—the world’s full of people who are quite capable of ignoring you even while they sit across from you and pretend to have a conversation with you. If you go into a pub, though, I’d say most of the people will be engaged, be it with each other or with getting absolutely rat-arsed on revoltingly overpriced IPAs. They’ll be talking shit, much of which will be stupid and possibly offensive, but they’ll be talking. So, while I agree that phones are unhealthy and we spend way too much time on them, I’m unwilling to subscribe to the phonophobia the pic wants to elicit. Without phones I’d be far, far less in touch with friends and family. I’d never have met you two. Wouldn’t have done the website. And the implicit presumption that people doing something on their phones is supposedly less—productive? Worthy?—than them just staring into space, or reading some shit book, also seems a bit optimistic, as if reading is axiomatically valuable even if what you’re reading is absolute dog turds, while whatever appears on a phone screen is automatically drivel.

Basically, I’d be lying if I said that the top pic, despite everything fake and stupid about it, didn’t pluck faintly at my heartstrings—because I’m exactly the kind of idiot this shit is designed to hook. At the same time, the comparison with the bottom pic is exactly the kind of fraudulent bollocks this stupid meme wants you to believe it’s railing against.

ROBERTS: I’ll tell you why this image made me so angry. Because at first glance, I bought it. I thought to myself: “Jesus, life was so much better in ‘74.” And then I saw the “singer” with the microphone stand jutting out of his wrist, and the zombified faces of the old men in the band, and the distorted dart board, and the non-existent musical instruments, and so on. We’re all susceptible, especially those of us born before the internet took hold. I’ve said before that nostalgia is a fantasy, and I enjoy it as such. But unchecked, it becomes something much worse: delusional Golden Ageism that’s often empowered by contempt for people who are different than you.

I don’t know what’s to be done. I think we have to start by being honest with ourselves about a lot of different things. I think we are always going to look back and yearn for the glory days—it’s part of getting older and being human, and every generation does it. But we have to recognize that this idea of looking backwards for a way forward has become a pernicious social and political obsession. I can’t say I’m a communist, Mike—I know you’ll forgive me. I’m a boring old RFK (the good one, not the shitty one) Democrat. I do believe that when money controls the tools that can make life better for everyone, it’s a good bet that life will only get better for those with money. And when the combined technology of AI and smartphones and social media is leveraged to venerate a time before the technology of AI and smartphones and social media, you can be sure that making life better for everyone is an idea whose time has come.

 A fantastic Mail Call Tuesday today! I got my copies of Thirteen Parsecs.

I am very pleased with how these turned out. 

The leathers look great and great with NIGHT SHIFT and Wasted Lands.

I even grabbed a new dice bag!

Can't wait to share more of this with you all.

Much like the Jonstown Compendium for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha and The Companions of Arthur for material set in Greg Stafford’s masterpiece of Arthurian legend and romance, Pendragon, the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition is a curated platform for user-made content. It is thus, “...a new way for creators to publish and distribute their own original Call of Cthulhu content including scenarios, settings, spells and more…” To support the endeavours of their creators, Chaosium has provided templates and art packs, both free to use, so that the resulting releases can look and feel as professional as possible. To support the efforts of these contributors, Miskatonic Monday is an occasional series of reviews which will in turn examine an item drawn from the depths of the Miskatonic Repository.

—oOo—
Name: The White CirclePublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Jonas Morian & The Yellow Hand

Setting: St. Paul, Minnesota, 1921Product: Scenario
What You Get: Thirty-eight page, 26.47 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Sometimes having morals extends to having a conscience too.Plot Hook: “Out of sight, out of mind… Out of memory.”Plot Support: Staging advice, four pre-generated Investigators, three handouts, two maps, six NPCs, one Mythos spell, and one Mythos tome.Production Values: Excellent
Pros# Richly detailed background# Socially challenging to resolve# Open-ended# Swedophobia# Kenophobia# Depersonalisation
Cons# Needs a slight edit# Violence may be the only means of resolution# Socially challenging to resolve
Conclusion# Richly detail scenario of moral cleansing horror with excellent production values
# Socially challenging to resolve and the Investigators may not get away with it

Stefan Meunch is dead. Died three days ago, between weekly visits. Part of the local catalogue round of check-ins for useless and washed-up old spies with nowhere to go and no future beyond a meagre pension, the bottle, and having lived out their usefulness, such as it was, getting by without bringing themselves to anyone’s attention. Only this time he has. The Factory went in and cleaned up as normal, confirmed the death was a heart attack, and was all ready to close the file when an analyst discovered that Stefan Meunch, a retired ex-spy, eighty-five years old, living on a not an entirely unreasonable state pension in a flat over an empty shop in a town in the West Midlands, had quarter of a millions pounds squirrelled away in off-shore accounts. How the hell did he get away with it, where did he get the money from, and who was paying him? More importantly, how did the fuck-ups whose job it was to do the weekly run of the catalogue of hand-me-downs like Stefan Meunch miss the fact that he managed to save quarter of a million pounds?

This is the set-up for the scenario, For A Rainy Day. Published by Just Crunch Games, this is a scenario for Sanction: A Tabletop Roleplaying Game of Challenges & Hacks, which describes itself as a set of “Universal Rules for Challenge-driven Games”. Specifically, For A Rainy Day is a scenario for the second Genre Set-Up in Sanction. This is ‘Agency: Outlet Work’, an espionage setting inspired by the grim, grimy, and pathetic espionage of the Slow Horses series by Mick Herron with dash of John Le Carré. The Player Characters are ex-agents, failures and fuck-ups, washed out of active service, but not out of the service. Reassigned to small towns and cities like Wolverhampton or Grimsby, the Agents do data processing, combing through reports and archives, and so on, before sorting it and sending it back to head office, with no explanations as to why or what the information is for. It is make-work, a window job, and that is all that the Agent will have until he retires. Yet the Agent hopes, and worse, he cannot help but want to apply his tradecraft. Part of the work involves the catalogue run. Just one more part of their tedious day in their tedious week in their tedious no-career between now and retirement. Probably a bit like Stefan Meunch, but without the quarter of a million. It’s their fuck-up and they have to find out what Stefan Meunch did to make them look like even more of bunch of fuck ups, and how he got away with it.
‘Agency: Outlet Work’ is one of the best things in the Sanction rulebook—more so if you are a fan of the Slow Horses series—and For A Rainy Day is an introductory scenario for it. Just as ‘Agency: Outlet Work’ is inspired by the Slow Horses series, it should be noted that For A Rainy Day is inspired by a pair novellas that run parallel to the main novels in the series—The Drop and The List. Although a player may be familiar with the series and with both novellas, For A Rainy Day is only inspired by their set-ups, rather than the whole of their plots. In fact, For A Rainy Day is not a scenario in the traditional roleplaying sense, an adventure with a plot that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Rather, it has a beginning—a very good beginning with the Player Characters being given a bollocking for their failure and their players a chance to introduce their characters and their very ordinary lives, and a middle, where all of the investigation takes places, with its grubby scrutiny and possible future for the Player Characters. The end is very much down to the players and what their characters think is going on. For A Rainy Day does tell you what is going on, but the players and their characters may get other ideas… Which is fine, since they are fuck-ups…

For A Rainy Day is heavy on investigation and tradecraft, though there are opportunities for violence too—though only for the Game Master, who is accorded good advice on running the scenario. This includes running it as an episode of a television series, using the provided table of prompts when appropriate, such as when a scene drags or is going nowhere, and reacting to the Player Characters and their actions as it is primarily a player-driven scenario. In addition, five pre-generated Agents, one for each of the standard Lifepath archetypes in ‘Agency: Outlet Work’ are provided for quick set-up and use with the scenario.

Physically, For A Rainy Day is short and simple. The layout is clean and tidy, everything is easy to grasp, and the artwork has a suitably drab, drizzled upon kind of feel.

For A Rainy Day can be used in conjunction with the espionage-themed roleplaying game of the Game Master’s choice, but of course, Sanction suits the desperate, down-at-heel grottiness of both ‘Agency: Outlet Work’ and For A Rainy Day. The good news is that For A Rainy Day is the first in a series and it will get sequels, which is probably the most that the Player Character fuck-ups deserve. In the meantime, For A Rainy Day is a delightfully seedy introduction to the wretched world of ‘Agency: Outlet Work’ and its no-hopers.

It has been eight hundred years since the fall of the mythic Dragon Empire and ten years since mankind returned to the Misty Vale, the remote valley known for the thick haze that often lies over its deep forests, hemmed in by the Kummer Mountains to the south and the Dragonfang Peaks to the north. Adventurers brave the broken imperial road over the high pass to enter the Misty Vale to explore the extent of the valley, search out its secrets, and hopefully come away with the great treasures that might still remain unplundered from the Dragon Empire. They are not the only ones interested in the secrets that the Misty Vale. There rumours of Demon-worshipping cultists moving quietly to work to bring about the revival of their vile masters of Chaos and their priests, Orcs and Goblins are seen patrolling the Misty Vale more regularly, and monks and knights of religious order that reveres the great Dragons of Law have been seen entering the valley. This is the set-up for Dragonbane, and more specifically, the Dragonbane Core Box, a fantasy roleplaying game which promises “Mirth & Mayhem Roleplaying”. Published by Free League Publishing, best known for Vaesen – Nordic Horror Roleplaying, The One Ring: Roleplaying in the World of Lord of the Rings, and Alien: The Roleplaying Game. It is reimagining of Sweden’s first fantasy roleplaying game, Drakar och Demoner, originally published in 1982.

Dragonbane: Mirth & Mayhem Roleplaying, funded by successful Kickstarter campaign, comes as boxed set which contains a ‘Getting Started’ sheet which tells the reader what is in the box, a one-hundred-and-twelve ‘Dragonbane Rules’ book, a one-hundred-and-sixteen page ‘Dragonbane Adventures’ book, the twelve-page ‘Alone in Deepfall Breach’ solo adventure, two maps, including one of the Misty Vale, five pre-generated Player Characters, five blank character sheets, and forty-one full colour standees with plastic stands. Plus, there is a set of polyhedral dice in crystal green, including two twenty-sided dice, and illustrated decks of cards for combat initiative, improvised weapons, adventures, and treasure. The roleplaying game includes rules for creating Player Characters, but whether the players create their own or use the pre-generated ones, with ‘The Secret of the Dragon Emperor’ campaign that lies at the heart of the boxed set, Dragonbane: Mirth & Mayhem Roleplaying offers multiple sessions of play.

A Player Character is defined by six attributes, Kin, and his Profession. The six attributes are Strength, Constitution, Agility, Intelligence, Willpower, and Charisma, which range in value between one and twenty, but the highest they can be at the start of play, is fourteen. The Kin are Human, Halfling, Dwarf, Elf, Mallard, and Wolfkin. The Professions are Artisan, Bard, Fighter, Hunter, Knight, Mage, Mariner, Merchant, Scholar, and Thief. In addition, a Player Characters has Heroic Abilities. These come from the Player Character’s Kin and Profession, although not for the Mage, who starts play with the ability to cast magic. A Player Character has sixteen skills, ranging in value from one to eighteen. Various factors are derived from the attributes, notably different damage bonuses for Strength-based weapons and Agility-based weapons, plus Willpower Points. Willpower Points are expended to use magic and abilities derived from both Kin and Profession.

To create a character, a player can chose the options or roll for them, except for attributes, which are rolled for and trained skills, which are chosen. These include the Kin, Profession, Age, Name, weakness, gear, memento, and appearance. A Player Character will have scores in all of the skills in Dragonbane, but his age will determine the number he is trained in and have greater scores in.

First Name: Tym ‘Halffinger’
Kin: Human
Profession: Thief
Age: Old
Appearance: Balding

ATTRIBUTES
Strength 14 Constitution 11 Agility 15 Intelligence 17 Willpower 14 Charisma 11

Damage Bonus: +1d4
Willpower Points: 3
Hit Points: 11

SKILLS
Acrobatics 12, Awareness 14, Bartering 10, Bluffing 10, Evade 12, Knives 12, Languages 14, Myths & Legends 14, Sleight of Hand 12, Sneaking 12, Spot Hidden 14, Swimming 12

HEROIC ABILITIES
Adaptive (3), Backstabbing (3)

GEAR
Knife, lockpicks (simple), torch, flint & tinder, D6 food rations, D10 silver

MEMENTO
A ragged old journal

Mechanically, to have his player undertake an action, a player rolls a twenty-sided die. The die is marked with a ‘Dragon’ on the one face, and a ‘Demon’ on the ‘twenty’ face. The aim is roll equal to or lower than the skill or attribute. A roll of one is called ‘rolling a Dragon’ and is treated as a critical effect, such as giving an impressive performance, rolling double damage, the action takes less times, and so on. A roll of twenty is called ‘rolling a Demon’ and indicates a critical failure, possible effects including damaging yourself, someone else, or an object, making a lot of noise, and more. Banes and boons are the equivalent of advantage and disadvantage, meaning that the player has to roll more twenty-sided dice, counting the lowest one if there are more Boons than Banes, and the highest one if there are more Banes than Boons. Opposed rolls are won by the player who rolls the lowest.

If a roll is failed, a player can choose to push the roll and reroll. The result supersedes the original. In pushing a roll, the Player Character acquires a Condition, for example, ‘Dazed’ for Strength or ‘Scared’ for Willpower. The player has to explain how his character acquires the Condition and his character can acquire a total of six—one for each attribute—and the player is expected to roleplay them. Mechanically, a Condition acts as a Bane in play. A Player Character can recover from one or more Conditions by resting.

Initiative is determined randomly by drawing cards numbered between one and ten, with one going first. A Player Character has two actions per round—a move and an actual action such as a melee attack, doing first aid, or casting a spell. Alternatively, a Player Character can undertake a Reaction, which takes place on an opponent’s turn in response to the opponent’s action. Typically, this is a parry or dodge, and means that the Player Character cannot take another action. If a Dragon is rolled on the parry, the Player Character gets a free counterattack! If the damage inflicted would exceed the durability of the weapon, it is damaged and requires repairing.

Combat takes into account weapon length, grip, length, and so on. The effects of a Dragon roll, or a critical hit, can include damage being doubled and a Dragon roll being needed to parry or dodge this attack, making a second attack, or piercing armour. Damage can be slashing, piercing, or bludgeoning, which determines the effectiveness of armour. Armour has a rating, which reduces damage taken. Helmets increase Armour Rating, but work as a Bane for certain skills. If a Player Character’s Hit Points are reduced to zero, a death roll is required for him to survive, which can be pushed. Three successful rolls and the Player Character survives, whilst three failures indicate he has died. A Player Character on zero Hit Points can be rallied by another to keep fighting. Fear is covered by a Willpower check, and there is a Fear Table for the results.

Mages power their magic through the expenditure of Willpower Points (similarly, Heroic Abilities cost Willpower to activate). Typical spells cost two Willpower Points per Power Level of a spell, but just one Willpower Point for lesser spells or magic tricks. Willpower Points are lost even if the roll is failed, but rolling a Dragon can double the range or damage of the spell, negate the Willpower Point cost, or allow another spell to be cast, but with a Bane. Rolling a Demon simply means that the spell fails and cannot be pushed, although there is an optional ‘Magical Mishap’ Table to roll on if that happens. A spell cannot be cast if the Wizard is in direct contact with either iron or steel. There are three schools of magic, each with an associated skill, plus General Magic. These are Animism, Elementalism, and Mentalism. A beginning Mage has only been able to study the one school, but the General Magic spells are available to him as well.

The ‘Dragonbane Rules’ book includes a short bestiary of sixteen creatures. Each is given a page that includes an illustration, a short description, its stats, and its attacks. There are always six attacks per monster, such as “Threatening Cackle! The harpies shower the adventurers with terrible descriptions of what they will do to them. Everyone within 10 meters must make a WIL roll to resist fear (page 52).” Or “Excrement Attack! The Harpies open their cloacae and mouths and release a rain of vomit and excrement on the player characters. Everyone within 10 meters must choose a condition. The attack can be parried with a shield.” for the Harpy. The Game Master can chose or roll which attack the creature uses, but they are never repeated twice in a row. Plus, they always hit, so it up to the players to decide to have their characters dodge an attack (or parry when an attack allows it). This feels very similar to the monsters in Forbidden Lands – Raiders & Rogues in a Cursed World, also published by Free League Publishing. The result is that monsters are tough and brutal and a player needs to take more care in how he decides his character will engage with them. The only entries in the bestiary which differ from this are for Orcs and Goblins, which are treated like normal NPCs, complete with their own aims and the capacity to be interacted with. The latter is an important aspect of the campaign in the ‘Dragonbane Adventures’ book.

The ‘Dragonbane Rules’ book is rounded out with rules for travel, basic advice for the Game Master, creating NPCs, and a quick guide, including tables, for creating adventures. These are built around ‘adventure sites’ and travelling to them, much like the play of Forbidden Lands – Raiders & Rogues in a Cursed World. The advice and the guide to creating adventures are basic, but sufficient to serve as starting points.

The ‘Alone in Deepfall Breach’ booklet provides the means to play Dragonbane in solo mode, enabling a player or prospective Game Master get an idea of how the game plays before the full campaign. This is not the traditional ‘choose your own adventure’ style adventure, but instead a set of tables for generating delves into a scar in the land—Deepfall Breach, and for generating the randomness needed for solo play. This includes a ‘Fortune Table’ for determining the answers that a Game Master would normally give, random effects for rolling a ‘Dragon’ or a ‘Demon’, and how an NPC attacks the Player Character. Categorised as either a melee, ranged, sneaky, or magic attacker, this is similar to the monster attacks in the bestiary section of the ‘Dragonbane Rules’ book. Given the often-brutal nature of play in Dragonbane, the solo adventurer is also given some help. Primarily, this consists of being allowed an extra Heroic Ability with two being given for this purpose. ‘Army of One’ lets a player draw two Initiative cards instead of one, whilst ‘Sole Survivor’ lets him push a roll without suffering a condition.

As well as the means to create custom missions, ‘Alone in Deepfall Breach’ includes a complete solo mini-campaign of five missions. Each of the missions in ‘The Reforged Shard’ consists of a series of way points which the adventurer must pass and then return to the surface. Not only that, but each mission has its own looming threat that the player keeps track off and will happen if triggered, whether through delay, inaction, or failure. Both the means to generate missions and ‘The Reforged Shard’ are intended to be played solo, but ‘Alone in Deepfall Breach’ also suggests that a small group of players could use or play both as an alternative. In addition, there is nothing to stop the Game Master from using the tables to generate her own adventures for normal play or add Deepfall Breach as a specific location to the Misty Vale.

The ‘Dragonbane Adventures’ book contains a total of eleven adventures, which together form the ‘The Secret of the Dragon Emperor’. Apart from ‘Isle of Mist’, which is the campaign finale, these can be tackled in any order, although the Game Master can give nudges via rumours, represented in play by cards from the roleplaying game’s Adventure Deck. These are great handouts, reminding the players of what their characters might have heard so far. The Player characters will be based in the village of Outskirt, interacting with the various NPCs and picking up rumours before journeying to one of the adventure sites that they have heard off. Threading through this is the hunt for four items, which together unlock the resting place of an ancient magical sword. From the start, the Player Characters learn that someone is looking for “four pieces” which will reveal the “secret of the dragon emperor!” and soon after arriving in Outskirt, will be asked to look for the missing items. So initially, the campaign will be player driven as they decide which locations to visit and explore, but as they learn more, they will be drawn into the search and come into contact with the various factions that are part of that search. Of course, not all of them can be trusted, but surprisingly, there are some that can be in a way that runs counter to their traditional depiction in this roleplaying game’s style of fantasy.

The ‘Dragonbane Adventures’ book also includes a detailed description of Outskirt and its inhabitants, tables of random encounters to use in conjunction with the journeying rules in the ‘Dragonbane Rules’ book, and a table of ‘Demonic Omens’ which the Game Master can use to building the impending sense of doom that pervades the Misty Vale as the campaign continues apace. It also includes the general background to the campaign. It describes how a vile demon, Sathmog, entered the world and established a demonic realm, before a hero arose and summoned the ancient dragons that protect the world from demonic presence, before leading his dragon-riding knights to defeat Sathmog and imprison his high priest. The hero established the Dragon Empire, but in old age spurned the dragons and, on his death, the empire collapsed as his sons squabbled. It is very broad and although it obviously applies to the wider world, it is very specific to the Misty Vale and ‘The Secret of the Dragon Emperor’ campaign, which leaves the wider world unmentioned, let alone developed. Some information would certainly have been useful, at least to help the players get a feel of the wider world and the place of their characters in that world, rather than simply dropping them into start of the campaign at the entrance to the Misty Vale as ‘The Secret of the Dragon Emperor’ does.

Lastly, the Dragonbane: Mirth & Mayhem Roleplaying core box includes a set of standees and several decks of cards. The standees are done in full colour and depict the pre-generated Player Characters and the monsters they will face over the course of the campaign, and are, of course, designed to be used with the maps in the box. The various decks include the ‘Initiative Deck’, an ‘Adventure Deck’, a ‘Treasure Deck’, and an ‘Improvised Weapons Deck’. The ‘Initiative Deck’ is used in combat, whilst the others are used throughout the game and play. In particular, the ‘Improvised Weapons Deck’ is a lot of fun to use, the items being depicted potentially doing a lot more than being smashed over the head of another brawler before breaking. They will make the Game Master want to run a classic barroom brawl!

The Dragonbane: Mirth & Mayhem Roleplaying core box is undeniably a great package, but there are perhaps two areas where it might have been improved. One is the aforementioned inclusion of a wider background to help give a bit more context to the Misty Vale location and the accompanying campaign. The other perhaps is its possible use as an introductory roleplaying game. It is not an introductory roleplaying game in the sense that it designed to be played by those new to the hobby, but it has a simplicity in its mechanics which suggest that it could have been. Certainly, that simplicity is why Dragonbane is so very easy to learn to play for anyone with roleplaying experience. So, it is a pity that this opportunity was missed. That said, the simplicity of the rules do make Dragonbane easy to teach, so it can be used to introduce new players that way.

Physically, Dragonbane: Mirth & Mayhem Roleplaying is incredibly well presented. All of the books are clean and tidy, and really easy to read. The cartography is excellent, but the artwork and illustrations are superb. They are done by Johan Egerkrans, who also illustrated Vaesen and possess a grim, if comic book sensibility.

Dragonbane: Mirth & Mayhem Roleplaying is comprehensive, but not complex. In fact, the core box not only gives you everything you need to play a complete campaign, but also makes everything easy to play as well. The rules are so straightforward and so easy to pick up, and thus so easy to teach, that when combined with the familiarity of its classic fantasy, Dragonbane is all but begging itself to brought to the table. Dragonbane: Mirth & Mayhem Roleplaying combines the ‘Old School’ style of play with challenging monsters and adventures with slick, fast-playing rules for exciting game play that absolutely makes classic fantasy roleplaying fun again.

Almost immediately after the first roleplaying game was published, someone said that I can do better. The first roleplaying game to do that was Tunnels & Trolls published in 1975 by Flying Buffalo. It was soon followed by one roleplaying game after another, one roleplaying supplement after another, all saying that they could do Dungeons & Dragons better or an aspect of Dungeons & Dragons better. In most cases, they were offering more choice or more realism or more detail. Sometimes one, sometimes a combination of two, and sometimes, such as in the case of Rolemaster, a combination of all three. Rolemaster was originally published by Iron Crown Enterprises, not as a complete roleplaying game, but as a series of supplements which could be used together or used on their own to replace parts of Dungeons & Dragons that a playing did not like. First, in 1980, with Arms Laws, and then followed Claw Law, Spell Law, Character Law, and Campaign Law. In 1984, the first four of these book would be collected in a box as Rolemaster, a roleplaying game of its very own as the first complete edition. It has had three subsequent editions, but across all four, it has always been known for its complexity. It was, after all, published in the eighties when there was a shift in roleplaying design towards complexity and realism, often still in reaction to Dungeons & Dragons. It has likewise been known for its resolution mechanic, a percentile system in which aim is not to roll low and under, but roll high and attempt to get as high as possible above one hundred, and likewise, it has always been known for the number of tables within its books—the critical hit tables in particular.

Rolemaster Unified CORE Law is the newest edition of the roleplaying game. Published by Iron Crown Enterprises, it is the heart of Rolemaster Unified and can be seen as the fifth edition of the venerable roleplaying game. It combines two aspects of the rules—‘Character Law’ and ‘Arms Law’—with ‘Game Master Law’, so that Game Master could create and run a no- or very low magic campaign. That said, there are supplements needed to complete the roleplaying game. The first of these is, of course, Spell Law, but Treasure Law, will also be useful. What Rolemaster Unified CORE Law offers is twenty-two Professions, twenty-three Races, ten Cultures, a system for creating Player Characters with talents, flaws, and potential, streamlined mechanics for resolving actions, magic, and attacks. Combat encompasses melee, ranged and spell combat, complete with thirty-nine attack tables for weapons, animal, monstrous, and spell attacks, plus fifteen critical strike tables for Acid, Cold, Electricity, Grapple, Heat, Holy, Impact, Krush, Puncture, Slash, Steam, Strikes, Subdual, Sweeps, and Unbalance attacks. Then there are the expected rules for healing, social skills, environmental dangers and situations, and much more.
A Player Character in Rolemaster Unified CORE Law has ten statistics, a Race, Culture, Profession, Level, Talents, and Flaws. The ten statistics are Agility, Constitution, Empathy, Intuition, Memory, Presence, Quickness, Reasoning, Self-Discipline, and Strength. These have two values, both of which range between one and one hundred. The two are Temporary Value, which represents the current value for the statistic, and Potential Value, which is the limit to which the Temporary Value can be raised through training or magic. Rolemaster Unified CORE Law offers not just the traditional Dwarf, Elf, Gnome, Half-Elf, Halfling, and Human of traditional roleplaying fantasy as a choice. A Player Character could be a Fair Elf, Grey Elf, High Elf, or Wood Elf, or a Cave Human, Common Human, High Human, or Mixed Human, or a Greater Orc, Grey Orc, Lesser Orc, Scrug Orc, or a Vard Orc—and that just represents the variations upon the traditional Races. It is also possible to play a Gnoll, Goblin, Hobgoblin, Kobold, or Troll, and then on top of that, Rolemaster Unified CORE Law adds Races of its own. These include the frog-like Grator with anti-social tendencies and Gecko-like sight, the Hvasstonn or Giantlings, the lionesque Idiyva, the deer-like Plynos, the jackal-like Sibbicai, and more. There is a degree of anthropomorphism and a surfeit of options, but of course, the Game Master need not include all of them in her world. The ten Cultures consist of Cosmopolitan, Harsh, Highland, Mariner, Nomad, Reaver, Rural, Sylvan, and Urban. The Professions start with the ‘No Profession’, which can either be used as the generic cost of all skills in a setting or for Profession that does not specialise. The Professions are divided in six categories. These start with the Realm of Arms, which includes Rogue, Labourer, Thief, Fighter, Warrior Monk, and oddly, Scholar. The Realm of Channelling, whose Professions draw their power from an external source, typically a god of some kind, includes Cleric, Druid, Paladin, and Ranger. The Professions from the Realm of Essence draw upon the power around them and include Magician, Illusionist, Bard, and Dabbler. The Mentalist, Lay healer, Monk, and Magient—the latter a Semi-Spellcaster combing magic and stealth—come from the Realm of Mentalism. Lastly, the Hybrid Realms include the Healer, Sorcerer, and Mystic.

The statistics provide a straight bonus to skills, whilst each Race gives modifiers to these bonuses, plus modifiers to the Player Characters’ Resistances and Health stats. A Culture provides Ranks in skills, whilst the Professions set skill costs, Professional Bonuses, and Knacks—skills in which they particularly adept. For spellcasters, the Profession provides the Realm for casting spells. To create a character, the player decides on a concept and selects Race, Culture, and Profession. He selects Talents, purchases skills, the costs depending on the profession, and finally purchases equipment and calculates bonuses and so on.

Name: Skulom
Race: Gratar
Profession: Rogue
Level: 1
Culture: Harsh
Size: Medium Height: 5’ 4” Weight: 230 lbs

Resistances
Channelling: +01 Essence: 00
Fear: -01 Mentalism: +02
Physical: +06

Health and Development
Endurance: 4 Recovery Multiplier: ×1
Base Hits: 29 Bonus Development Points: 11
Base Movement: 20’ Defensive Bonus: +15
Initiative: +5
TALENTS
Sight, Gecko (+10 to vision-based Perception Manoeuvres)
Recurved Musculature (+20 Acrobatics, Climbing, Jumping, and Running Manoeuvres)
Ambidextrous
Fast Attack/1 (+5 to Initiative)
Pressing the Advantage/2 (+20 OB after inflicting a critical)

FLAWS
Maths Illiterate

STATISTICS (Temporary/Potential)
Agility 93/97 Bonus +10
Constitution 66/91 Bonus +06
Empathy 61/68 Bonus +00
Intuition 56/78 Bonus +01
Memory 56/78 Bonus +01
Presence 74/81 Bonus +02
Quickness 80/96 Bonus +05
Reasoning 45/88 Bonus -01
Self-Discipline 54/99 Bonus -01
Strength 50/90 Bonus +02

SKILLS
Animal: Riding 1
Awareness: Perception 3, Tracking 1
Battle Expertise: Manoeuvring in Armour 2 (P), Restricted Quarters 3 (P),
Brawn: Body Development 4
Combat Expertise: Blind Fighting 1 (P)
Combat Training: Unarmed 1, Melee Weapons (Blade) 3 (P) (Knack), Melee Weapons (Polearm) 2 (P), Ranged Weapons (Thrown) 1 (P)
Crafting & Vocation: Crafting 2, Crafting 2
Environmental: Navigation 1, Survival (Swamp) 3, Survival (Urban) 1 (P)
Gymnastics: Jumping 1
Lore: Language (Own) 8, Region (Own) 5, Other Lores 2
Medical: Medicine 2, Poison Mastery 1 (P)
Movement: Climbing 1, Running 3
Social: Influence 1
Subterfuge: Ambush 2 (P), Concealment 1, Stalking 3 (P) (Knack)
Technical: Trapping 1

The process is not quick nor easy. For example, to generate statistics, the player rolls percentile three times for each one. The lowest is discarded, the middle value is kept as the Temporary Value, and the highest as the Potential Value. Skills are bought in Ranks, with a cost in Development Points for the first Rank and a higher cost for subsequent Ranks, and these costs vary from Profession to Profession. These costs are the only limitation on the skills that a player could purchase, so that a Fighter could learn to cast a spell or two and an Illusionist could learn to wield a mace. All that is stopping either one is that the Development Point cost will be higher for Ranks in skills outside of the character’s Profession. Initially, this means that a Player Character is unlikely to stray too far from the skills his Profession trains him in, but in the long term, there is plenty of scope for development and change. Plus, there is a lot of page flipping back and forth, and one thing that Rolemaster Unified CORE Law does need is a clearer step-by-step guide to the character creation process.

Mechanically, Rolemaster Unified CORE Law is a percentile system. It uses what it calls a ‘d100OE’ or ‘d100 Open Ended’. Whether it rolling to have his character make a difficult manoeuvre, test a skill, or make an attack, the player will be rolling percentile dice and aiming to roll high. If the roll on the dice, before modifiers, is ninety-six and above, then the player gets to roll again and add the result. To the roll he will add the Ranks of the skill being tested, the bonuses for both statistics associated with the skill and its category, plus bonuses from a Knack or Professional Bonus if appropriate, and any applicable Talents. The Game Master will assign the task or manoeuvre a difficulty. Results below seventy-five are counted as a failure, and if low enough, can result in a Critical Failure. Results between seventy-six and one hundred can be a partial success if that is possible, whilst results of one-hundred-and-one to one-hundred-and-seventy-five are counted as a success. Any roll above that is an absolute success and grants an extra benefit. If sixty-six is rolled, then there is the possibility of an unusual event occurring.
For example, Skulom has been hired by a merchant to intimidate the merchant’s rival. First, he has to deal with the target’s bodyguard and decides to do so after the merchant is returning home from seeing his mistress. This will be an opposed roll between Skulom’s Stalking skill and the bodyguard’s Perception skill. Skulom’s bonus for this is equal to bonus from the associated statistic, which is Intuition, so with only statistic involved, it is doubled; plus, the Ranks for the skill as well as the Professional bonus and the Knack for the skill. This gives a total bonus of +25. The Game Master assigns a total bonus of +20 to the bodyguard for his Perception and grants a bonus of +20 to Skulom because it is dark. The Game Master rolls 38 and adds the bodyguard’s Perception bonus for a total of 58. Skulom’s player rolls 63 and adds the complete bonus of +45 for a total of 108. The bodyguard has definitely not spotted the batrachian thug as he creeps up on him!‘Arms Law’ covers melee, ranged, and directed attack by spells. Combat uses a surprisingly simple Action Point economy. Every combatant has four Action Points, each of which represents an action that can be taken in a combat round’s four Action Phases. Basic movement takes a single Action Point, a melee attack or casting a spell between two and four Action Points. Thus, a combatant might strike twice in a round if his weapon is fast enough or draw a weapon, move, and attack. Some actions, such as loading a crossbow take more than four Action Points—six for a light crossbow and fourteen for a heavy crossbow—so will take more than the one round to complete. Mechanically, the roll is a standard ‘d100OE’ roll to which is added the attacker’s total Offence Bonus, whilst the defender’s total Defensive Bonus is deducted from the roll. Other modifiers can come from the positioning of the combatants. Here the rules cover facing and flanking, restricted quarters, being flatfooted or surprised, cover, parrying, and more. Once per round, a shield can be used to block an attack and also increase the defender’s Defensive Bonus—and they can also be used as a weapon too!

Each weapon or attack type has not one, but three tables to determine the effects of an attack, one table for small version of the weapon, one for a medium version, and one for the large. The result is compared on the appropriate table against the armour worn by the defender. Armour is given an Armour Type value, from one to ten, according to its type, one and none, two and heavy cloth, and three and soft leather to eight and mail, nine and brigandine, and ten and plate. The outcome is either a miss, hits inflicted, or hits inflicted and a critical. In the case of the latter, the result will indicate both the severity and the type of the critical inflicted. Rolling on these critical results tables were always the highlight of playing Rolemasterr as the bloody demise of one villain or monster was played out, and so it is with Rolemaster Unified CORE Law. Similarly, the fumble tables in Rolemaster Unified CORE Law are as entertaining as they were in previous editions of the roleplaying game. The Attack Tables and then the Critical Tables and the Fumble Tables have chapters of their own, and together consist of one fifth of Rolemaster Unified CORE Law.
Previously, Skulom successfully stalked the merchant he has been hired to intimidate and his bodyguard. The bodyguard has not noticed Skulom and is therefore surprised. Skulom will gain a +25 bonus for this, whilst the bodyguard only has Defensive Bonus equal to his Quickness, so +9. Skulom is using a medium-sized dagger and thus his Offensive Bonus is +15 for the Ranks in his Melee Weapons (Blade) skill, +5 for his Knack in it, and +3 for the Professional Ranks in it. To this is added twice the Strength bonus for a total Offensive Bonus of +53. In terms of armour, both Skulom and the bodyguard are wearing suits of soft leather, which is Armour Type 3, which has a penalty of -15 to their manoeuvres, so for Skulom’s attack, his player will adding an Offensive Bonus of +38.

Skulom’s player rolls for his attack and the result is 98! This means that he roll again and add the result. This time, he rolls 97, meaning that he can roll a third time, but only—only—rolls 12. So, the total result is 98+97+12, plus Skulom’s Offensive Bonus of +38 and minus the bodyguard’s Defensive Bonus of +9. That is grand total of the 236! Consulting the damage table for the Medium Dagger, the result for 236 is ‘9CP’, meaning nine hits and a severity C Puncture strike. Rolling on column C for the table, the result of 19 gives the following: “Point tears skin along jaw line” and inflicts another fifteen hits and a heavy fatigue penalty! The bodyguard has a vicious cut under his jaw that if it does not kill him, means he is heavily bleeding, and if he survives, will have a nasty scar to remember Skulom by! The Gratar may have made an enemy. For now, though, he needs to deal with the merchant… The combat rules also cover a variety of special manoeuvres, like called shots, firing into melee, protecting others, and slaying attacks. The various critical effects are explained in depth and there is also a detailed example of combat to help the Game Master understand how it works. Rounding out Rolemaster Unified CORE Law is ‘Game Master Law’, which includes advice on running the roleplaying game along with the rules for healing, psychology and social interaction, fear and morale, and a quick overview of environmental dangers. The advice is decent though not extensive, and the various rules are as detailed as you would expect for Rolemaster Unified CORE Law.

So, what is missing in Rolemaster Unified CORE Law? Although there are rules for creating spellcasters of all types and for using magic as a direct attack, there are no rules for magic or spells. Nor are there monsters or threats (other than NPCs) or treasure or a setting or scenario. However, none of these fall within the remit of this, the core rulebook and they either have or will have, supplements of their own.

Physically, Rolemaster Unified CORE Law is decently presented with lots of generic fantasy artwork. The book in general is well written, more so when it gets to explaining the rules and how they work rather than for character generation. Given its complexity and detail, there is a very welcome index at the end of the Rolemaster Unified CORE Law.

Ultimately, Rolemaster Unified CORE Law has one problem and that is the fact that it is Rolemaster. And the problem with Rolemaster is that it is a technical, detailed, and complex roleplaying game and it has a steep learning curve. This does not mean that it is a bad game by any means. Rather, it offers a lot of choice in terms of characters that players can create and develop and elements such as the different races that the Game Master can decide to use in her campaign world, and it provides for detail in the outcomes of what the characters do. However, this means that it is a game that takes both time and commitment to learn to play. There is nothing casual about playing Rolemaster and that is still after an effective streamlining of the rules by Iron Crown Enterprises for this new edition. For veteran fans of Rolemaster and for those who are looking to return to the game they played in the eighties, Rolemaster Unified CORE Law is undoubtedly a more accessible and welcome new edition. For new players, Rolemaster Unified CORE Law provides all of the rules they need to get started; they just need to provide the time and the commitment that Rolemaster demands.

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—
Senet—named for the Ancient Egyptian board game, Senet—is a print magazine about the craft, creativity, and community of board gaming. Bearing the tagline of “Board games are beautiful”, it is about the play and the experience of board games, it is about the creative thoughts and processes which go into each and every board game, and it is about board games as both artistry and art form. Published by Senet Magazine Limited, each issue promises previews of forthcoming, interesting titles, features which explore how and why we play, interviews with those involved in the process of creating a game, and reviews of the latest and most interesting releases. Senet is also one of the very few magazines about games to actually be available for sale on the high street.

Senet Issue 12 was published in the autumn of 2023. It is, as the editorial notes, a post-UK Games Expo, and takes the time to highlight the pleasures of attending. It notes that the magazine is now quarterly, with the issue being its first autumn one. Then, as with previous issues, it gets on with highlighting some of the forthcoming games with its regular preview, ‘Behold’. There are two interesting titles featured here. One is Fateforge: Chronicles of Kaaan, a dungeon-crawler based on the Fateforge setting from Studio Agate, which is designed to be replayable, and tell a story in an hour, whilst the other is Fighting Fantasy Adventures. Designed by Martin Wallace, this implements the the Fighting Fantasy series of solo game books into a board game, with the base game adapting the first four. This is not the first time that titles in the series have been adapted into a board game, but this will be an ongoing line, with further releases adapting other books.

‘Points’, the regular column of readers’ letters, contains a mix of praise for the magazine and a discussion of gaming culture, including representation in the hobby and the appeal of co-operative games. Just four letters, so it does not seem enough. As with the previous issues, there is scope here for expansion of this letters page to give space to more voices and readers of Senet. One way of doing that is perhaps to expand it when ‘For Love of the Game’ comes to end. This regular column continues the journey of the designer Tristian Hall towards the completion and publication of his Gloom of Kilforth. In this entry of his column, he explores artistic instinct versus making a marketable game and making it marketable by giving a design a clear and easily grasped name. Surprisingly, the column is more interesting than those from previous issues, but the column continues to feel played out and flaccid.

The format for Senet is now tried and tests. Two interviews, one with a designer, one with an artist, and one article exploring a game mechanic whilst another looks at a game theme. The subject of the interview in ‘Ingenious’ by Matt Thrower, is the prolific Reiner Knizia, designer of titles such as High Society, Lost Cities, and Tigris and Euphrates. The interview handily covers Knizia’s time in the industry and how it has changed, how he developed the co-operative design with 2000’s Lord of the Rings years before it became fashionable, and how he likes auctions as a mechanism. It is accompanied by statistics that break down his games by mechanic used, themes applied, and games and awards by year. It barely touches upon the wide range titles that Knizia has created over the years, which would surely be worthy of a book of their own. It is solid and informative, though of course, some of the answers will be familiar from other interviews given Knizia’s fame.

‘Playing with Dinosaurs’ by Dan Thurot explores our fascination with dinosaurs and their being regularly featured in board game designs. The article has two ends of the spectrum to look at when it comes to dinosaurs and board games. At the one end is the ‘Rule of Scientific Accuracy’, whilst at the other is the ‘Rule of Cool’. Our fascination means that we typically want the latter rather than the former in our games, whilst at the same time being fascinated scientifically with dinosaurs, their evolution, and our discovery of their fossil remains. Dinosaur Island—an obvious nod to Jurassic Park—from Pandasaurus Games leans into the latter, whilst Dominant Species from GMT Games, adheres to the former. The games that stick to the ‘Rule of Scientific Accuracy’ tend to be drier and more complex, but also often encompass a second theme and that ‘evolution’. It includes a scale that measures various titles according to how heavy or light they are, and whether they are cool or scientific.

The issue’s second interview is with Vincent Dutrait. In ‘The Escape Artist’, Dan Jolin talks to the artist for board games such as Oltréé, Tribes of the Wind, and Museum, about his work process and how he approached the various projects he has worked. The article, of course, showcases Dutrait’s artwork as well, but without the trade dress for the particular games. The artwork is stunning and just shows how we as board game players have been spoilt in modern times.

Alexandra Sonechkina’s ‘Area of Conflict’ examines the theme of area control, pointing out that it is one of the most popular and most aggressive game mechanics. The starting for the area control mechanic is games such as Risk and Diplomacy, wargames by any other name, but beyond that, the mechanic allows for easy awareness of the state of play and who is in the lead and the potential for negotiation. Although the article begins with these designs and both their inherently combative and confrontational natures, it explores how designers have pulled away from those natures to make the mechanic less obvious or direct. For example, Martin Wallace’s Discworld: Ankh-Morpork shifts the winning conditions to secret objectives that differ between the players. However, as much as designers do pull away from the combative and confrontational nature of the mechanic, the article including a world tour of some of the most titles to employ it, they cannot truly escape it, something that the author makes clear. The result is not quite as satisfying a read in comparison to previous articles on game mechanics.

‘Unboxed’, Senet’s reviews section covers a wide range of games. This incudes League of the Lexicon, a particularly hard quiz and word game about language; Undaunted: Battle of Britain, which brings the the highly regarded World War II squad-level combat mechanics to defending Britain in 1940 in the air; the re-issue and redesign of the classic game of the Wars of the Roses, Kingmaker; and Library Labyrinth, in which a cast of fantastic fictional and historical women attempt to put escaped literary horrors back in their books! Which is an amazing theme. ‘Senet’s top choice’ is Moon, the Science Fiction hand drafting, Moon-base building sequel to Villagers and Streets. Once again, the reviews section of Senet shows off a wide range of different games for different tastes and play styles in just a few pages. The magazine could easily expand this section or do a whole separate publication of reviews of this quality.

As is traditional, Senet Issue 12 comes to a close with the regular end columns, ‘How to Play’ and ‘Shelf of Shame’. For ‘Confessions of a bad board gamer’, Alexandra Sonechkina’s ‘Unboxing Clever’ looks at the problems that come after unboxing a game and that is how to get everything back into the box. There are a lot of useful tips here. Efka Bladukas of No Pun Intended pulls an absolute classic off his shelf for ‘Shelf of Shame’. This is El Grande, an area control game already discussed in the earlier article on the area control mechanic. He discovers that it is an absolute classic, despite its theme of colonialism and worth his time having played it.

Physically, Senet Issue 12 is very professionally presented and shows off the board games it previews and reviews to great effect. Unfortunately none of the articles stand out, so unlike in previous issues there is nothing to elevate beyond a stolidly enjoyable read.

The What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box is different to almost any other start set that you can imagine. This is because most other starter sets, such as the Pendragon Starter Set, the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Starter Set, or the Alien Starter Set, all typically introduce both a setting and a set of rules. Together with their dice, their adventures, their maps, and their characters sheets, they are designed to introduce a particular setting and the rules to roleplay within that setting. The What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box does some of that, but it does it a bit differently and it does a bit more. The What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box is designed to introduce the What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System—also known as WOIN—but where the other starter sets introduce setting specific rules, What’s OLD is NEW is generic. And where other starter sets introduce the one setting, the What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box introduces three, and not only that, in doing so, introduces three different genres. Medieval fantasy, modern action, and Science Fiction. Published by EN Publishing following a successful Kickstarter campaign, the What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box contains a sixty-eight page ‘What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box Rulebook’, three twenty-page adventures—one each for the starter set’s three genres, three double-sided battle maps, over sixty tokens for the eighteen characters the monsters encountered in the three scenarios, eighteen pre-generated character sheets—six each for the three scenarios, and a set of eight six-sided dice.

The first book in the What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box is the ‘What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box Rulebook’. It opens in breezy fashion, introducing the game, roleplaying, and the various genres supported for What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay by the publisher, in particular, the three genres supported by this starter set. It explains the core mechanics and supports it all with an example of play. A Player Character in What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System has ten attributes: Strength, Agility, Endurance, Intuition, Logic, Willpower, Charisma, Luck, Reputation, and Power. These and skills are defined by the number of dice assigned to them. Thus, a Character might have an Agility of three and Lockpicking of two, plus an Exploit or item of equipment which grants a bonus die each. Thus, on most occasions, when the character wants to break open a safe or unlock a cell door, his player rolls six dice. The aim is to roll equal to, or higher than, a Target Number. This is ten for Easy, fifteen for Hard, twenty for Difficult, and so on. Bonus or penalty dice can be added depending upon the circumstances. In the What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box rules, Luck dice can be spent on a one-for-one basis to reduce damage suffered, whereas there are more uses for Luck in the WOIN core rules.

Combat uses the same mechanics, but the Target Numbers are determined by the opponent’s Melee Defence, Ranged Defence, Mental Defence, and Vital Defence, depending upon the form of attack. Combatants get to actions per turn, which can any combination of movement, attacks, or other action, including repeating them. Some actions, such as emergency healing or picking a lock take two actions. The rules cover aiming, overwatch, and suppressive fire as well as area of effect attacks and called shots. The latter imposes a two dice penalty on attacks, but the creatures listed in the latter half of the ‘What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box Rulebook’ do have ‘Called Shot’ location entries if a Player Character is successful in targeting them. Damage is determined by the weapon or attack type and the result deducted from the defendant’s Health. If reduced to zero, this will destroy objects and incapacitate or kill defendants. The number of dice rolled to attack can be reduced on a one-for-one basis to increase the number of damage dice rolled. For larger creatures, such as dragons, damage suffered is reduced by their Soak value, and armour worn by Player Characters and NPCs does the same.

The rules in the ‘What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box Rulebook’ also cover scanning, searching, and tracking, countdowns, and supernatural powers. Depending on the genre and theme, this encompasses magic, psionics, and chi. All three use Power Points, derived from the Power attribute. Magic is designed to be freeform, so that a spellcaster can enhance a spell’s range, area of effect, duration, damage or healing done, protection provided, and number of creatures summoned, all depending upon the type of spell and the number of Power Points spent. The roll to cast the spell is based on the Player Character’s Power attribute and skill value in the type of magic. Psionics is not as flexible, the various disciplines, such as Clairvoyance, Telekinesis, or Teleportation, being treated as exploits, whilst Chi requires a Player Character to enter a Stance, which is a free action and costs a Power Point to enter and then a Power Point per turn to maintain. In comparison to magic, the descriptions of Psionics and Chi do feel underwritten and rely much more upon the character sheets for the respective scenarios.

Penultimately, ‘What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box Rulebook’ gives a list of equipment, which gives some surprisingly fantastical items such as a mithril shirt, laser watch, and telekinetic gauntlets, along with their prices. (In case you are wondering what a mithril shirt goes for in the What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System, it is 10,500 gold crowns.) Lastly, over half of the book is a bestiary, from Bandit, Battlepsyche, and Bear to Woodland Creature, Xenomorph, and Zombie, for a total of forty creatures.

The What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box comes with three separate scenarios. The fantasy scenario is ‘Dilemma & Decay’. The Player Characters accidentally end up in the town of Farrington in the Vale of Two Ridges which has been beset by the spread of a foul blight from a nearby swamp. The warlord, Overlord Steelheart persuades the Player Characters to investigate and doing so, encounter refugees and evidence of the bog blight everywhere, all before facing the source. ‘Habits and Happenstance’ is the modern-set scenario. It is an exciting tale of city power-politics set in Boston where there is a fight to redevelop and stop the redevelopment of the city’s old underground network of tunnels into a modern transport system, whilst attacks on innocent people are on the rise across the city. This is an action-packed, cinematic affair involving nuns on motorbikes and nests of vampires with some exciting chases thrown into the mix.

The Science Fiction scenario is ‘The Silence of Zephdon Station’. The crew of the Murphy answer a distress call from the station and are then offered a generous reward from a corporate A.I. to answer the call and investigate. Once aboard the station, there are signs of a fight and when the Murphy is sabotaged, the Player Characters will have to investigate further to discover who is responsible and why. There is more to the mission than at first sight, and there is also a lot of ways in which it can play out, such that its climax is highly player dependant and lot more flexible than the other two scenarios. All three scenarios can be played through in a session or two, or lengthened with the included optional scenes, and all involve a good mix of action and roleplaying. One issue with the scenarios is that possible motivations for the Player Characters to get involved are printed in the scenario booklets rather than on the characters sheets. Of the three scenarios, ‘Habits and Happenstance’ is the most fun and likely the easiest to run because of its cinematic styling.

To support the three scenarios, the What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box includes set of eight six-sided dice in bright red, eighty counters to represent the Player Characters, NPCs, creatures, and monsters, three double-sided map sheets, and eighteen character sheets, six each for the three scenarios included in the box. In turn, they depict the region around the settle of Farrington and a set of ruins, a railway depot and a train station, and a research complex and an open area. The character sheets are single-sided and presented in landscape format.

For ‘Dilemma & Decay’, there is a Dwarven thief, an Elven musketeer with an actual musket, a pyrokinetic wizard, a knight in shining armour, a herbalist and cleric with a hatred of the undead, and an Orc berserker. For ‘Habits and Happenstance’, there is a British ex-spy, a thief with a cybernetic arm, a retired soldier cloned from Theodore Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart, a martial artist monk, a mutant leaper, and a crooked ex-cop turned private eye. For ‘The Silence of Zephdon Station’, there is a Russian smuggler and pilot, an Ogron mercenary, an android medica and science officer, a star knight complete with laser sword, a feline cat-burglar, and a drunken psychic.

Physically, the What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box is well presented and easy to read. The artwork is at least decent throughout, if not excellent, though it does need an edit in places. ‘Dilemma & Decay’ suffers from a lack of proofreading in particular.

The What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box is a better introduction to the What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System than it is to roleplaying in general, because it races through first principles to really introduce roleplaying effectively. Nevertheless, what it offers is an introduction to not just the mechanics of What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System, but three different settings with its three scenarios each of which neatly showcases what the system can do. Thus, What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System Starter Box is a solid introduction to the What’s OLD is NEW Roleplay System that experienced roleplayers will pick up with ease and get playing very quickly.

 A special Kickstart Your Weekend this week. Last week, I mentioned a new DC Heroes Kickstarter on the way. Well, it launched on Monday, and it has already blown through all its stretch goals, and now they are making new ones. 

So, this Kickstarter doesn't really need my help. 

But anyone who spends any time here at all knows about my deep love for all things DC Comics. So they might not need my help, but I am giving it anyway!  And what better way to do it than to dust off some characters! Well. Not so much dust off, as in recreate. I will get my old V&V character up soon, but I have been thinking a lot about my occult investigative agency A.R.T.E.M.I.S. and how it might exist in other game settings. So you know what I am going to do here. 

For this one, I pulled out my Batman Role-Playing Game, which is DC Heroes 1.5 or something like that. I have (or had, I think I loaned it out) the 1st Ed boxed set, and I was trying to decide if I want the 1st or 2nd ed boxed set from the Kickstarter. I think I am going with 2nd Ed.  I had 3rd Ed for a while, but I know I sold that at my local game auction.

So who is this Larina? 

The game is dated from 1989, back when Bat-Mania was at its height. So I am making this a 19-year old Larina (1989). The obvious comparisons are her Chill stats (still need to post them) and my recent R.I.P. Horror Role-playing project. This Larina is a little different from her R.I.P. counterpart though they are about the same age (19 vs 22). Is that a Crisis On Infinite Earths potential adventure I hear? 

For DC Heroes, new heroes always start out with 450 APs. I bump it up to 500 because I like a little more power. This is magic rich world, so my magic characters need a boost.

Larina Nix AKA Nix the Witch

Dexterity:2  Strength:1 Body:2Intelligence:6Will:5Mind:4Influence:3Aura:5Spirit:7

Initiative: 11
Hero Points: 50

Current Body: 2
Current Mind: 4
Current Spirit: 7

Alter Ego: Larina Nichols
Occupation: Student/Research Librarian, Gotham University
Marital Status: Single
Known Relatives: Stephani Nichols (Mother), Lars Nichols (Father)
Group Affiliations: A.RT.E.M.I.S.
Base of Operations: Gotham City
Motivation: Responsibility of Power
Wealth: 5
Height: 5'4"
Weight: 124 lbs
Eyes: Blue
Hair: Red

Skills
Artist (Music) 2 [13]
Charisma 2 [32]
Medicine 2 [17]
Occultist 9 [101]

Powers
Flight (Broom) 5 [25]
Force Shield [10]
Magic Blast [20]

Advantages
Area Knowledge (Gotham) [20], Attractive [15]. Connection (Occult Underworld) [10], Gadget/Artifact (Broom) [25], Luck [15], Scholar [10]

Drawbacks
Arch Enemy (Mordru) [15], Secret Identity [10]

Equipment
Broom (Body 1, Fly 5 [10]) [25] (can fly at about 50 mph)

--

Ok, so who is this?

This Larina is still young. Honestly, this version would work better as a Teen Titan, which would work well with the 1st Edition boxed set.

I might adjust her wealth down to 4. I also need to remember how to give her some more languages. I also decided against the edgy notion of having her parents dead. Been there, done that, no need to go back. 

I put her in Gotham as a nod to my copy of the Batman RPG and my undying love for the Caped Crusader. In D&D, her alignment is Lawful Neutral, so she would be an agent of Law here. Not civil law, but Universal and Magic Law. This would make her the natural target of the likes of Mordru. Also, Mordru scared the shit out of me when I got one of my first DC comics. I must have been 5 or 6. So yeah, he is a great Arch Enemy for my witch here. While his modern look is likely the better one, I tend to go with his classic crazy-looking wizard look from his first appearance. Plus, I am rereading all of Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion books, so the battle of Law vs Chaos is very much on my mind right now.

I want to get my V&V version of Johan ported over, and I have a few others in mind. I am thinking of something like Justice League Dark but with my band of characters here. I guess that means I will need versions of Dracula and the Refrigerator, too.  I'd love to find a copy of "Blood of Heroes" from Pulsar Games. It was the same system with more magic. If I do, then I need to update her stats. Maybe Larina as a 30-year-old, really powerful witch. 

She has an alter ego, but I have never had a great "Superhero" name for her. Later, she is known as "Witch Queen," but at this point, she is still figuring things out.

I am backing the Kickstarter. Great to see a "new" DC game out there. 

There are many gamers who will tell you that it was Vampire the Masquerade that got them into roleplaying. That was in the 1990s. There are many gamers who will tell you that it was Dungeons & Dragons that got them into roleplaying. That was in the 1970s and of course, ever since... There are many gamers who will tell you that it was another phenomenon, of the 1980s, that got them into gaming, certainly if they are British, that of the Fighting Fantasy™ solo roleplaying books. Created in 1982 by Sir Ian Livingstone and Steve Jackson with the publication of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, in the thirty years since, some sixty or so titles have published in the series and some seventeen million copies have been sold. In their time, the Fighting Fantasy™ series has produced bestsellers, computer games, board games, and of course, a dedicated fan base. In 2014, the series finally received the history book it deserved with the publication of You Are The Hero: A History of Fighting Fantasy™ Gamebooks and now, a decade on, there is a follow-up.

Magic Realms: The Art of Fighting Fantasy is a celebration and exploration of the pictorial presentation of the Fighting Fantasy series, for it was not famed for its accessibility and innovative format—and of course, its fantastic stories, but also its art and illustrations. Beginning with Peter Andrew Jones’ cover for The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, which stood out on the bookshelves for its then radical composition, and the internal illustrations by the late Russ Nicholson, the series introduced readers to a wide array of artists and illustrators, styles, and striking images, across the many genres that the series would encompass. In particular, the pen and inks of Nicholson would create the look of the series’ titular character, Zagor the Warlock, as well as others, but in particular, his artwork added so much to the look and feel of the series. Not just horror and fear, but the idea that monsters could be doing something other facing the brave adventurer as his player leafed through the pages of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain. Dwarves playing cards and drinking into their cups, bored Goblins waiting for something to happen, a man having fallen asleep and being guarded by his dog. Yet the horror comes to the fore with images like the decomposing ghoul reaching to grab and rend the skin of the adventurer or the partially unwrapped mummy climbing over its saprophagous to attack the adventurer. Though the Fighting Fantasy series was aimed at a young teenage audience, its artwork was not. It never infantilised its fantasy, but instead, it was grim and gritty, savage and scary, enticing and exciting, and it remains so today. All of these pieces of artwork—and more—are given space in Magic Realms: The Art of Fighting Fantasy, which highlights the work of over forty artists in its pages.
Published by Unbound, and written by Sir Ian Livingstone and Jonathan Green—who previously collaborated on You Are The Hero: A History of Fighting Fantasy™ Gamebooks, what Magic Realms: The Art of Fighting Fantasy does is bring together the work of some thirty or artists who worked on the Fighting Fantasy series and more. Sir Ian Livingstone provides a foreword in which discusses his pleasure of working with so many great artists, Iain McCaig in particular, and also highlights out how artwork and artists in the series crossed over from other genres. For example, Jim Burns with his cover for both Freeway Fighter and the Games Workshop board game, Battlecars, and comic book artist Brian Bolland with his cover for Appointment with F.E.A.R. and for the Games Workshop board game, Judge Dredd: The Game of Crime-Fighting in Mega-City One (recently republished by Rebellion), as well as, of course, as his work on 2000 AD. This fostered a degree of synergy between the different genres and media, and the Fighting Fantasy series and Games Workshop beyond what was already there. Jonathan Green provides a more straightforward introduction.
Then from Chris Achilléos, Robert Ball, and Krisztián Balla to Duncan Smith, Greg Staples, and Gary Ward and Edward Crosby, Magic Realms presents the art of some thirty artists. Every artist gets to talk bout their involvement in the series and working with the commissioning editor, or many cases, the author, and the fantastic pieces they contributed. Some of the write-ups about the artists are more overviews, drawing retrospectively on older interviews, such as with Brian Bolland and Martin McKenna. Each is accompanied by the illustrations themselves. In fact, several pages of them, and typically longer than the interview. These begin with the artist’s most well-known pieces, such as Chris Achilléos’ wraparound cover to Titan: The Fighting Fantasy World, Robert Ball’s cover to the Scholastic Books’ version of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, John Blanche’s cover to The Shamutani Hills, the cover to The Caverns of the Snow Witch, and the cover to Scorpion Swamp and Fighting Fantasy: The Introductory Role-Playing Game by Duncan Smith. This is followed by a gallery of smaller images, a mixture of colour and black and white, depending on the artist. None of the art here is straight reproduction of Fighting Fantasy covers—that comes later in Magic Realms—but the art sans the titles, author names, and trade dress. Thus, artwork here can be seen in all of its glory.
Almost three quarters of Magic Realms: The Art of Fighting Fantasy is devoted to these artists, but they are not the only ones. The contributions of another twenty-artists, such as Dave Carson, Maggie Keen, Steven Lavis, and Brian Williams are acknowledged, as the artists on the overseas editions of the series. The latter highlights art that is likely to be familiar to most readers, unless that is, they are ardent fans or collectors of the Fighting Fantasy series, so it often brings a fresh perspective upon books with covers have long associations and are firmly cemented in the imagination of the English-speaking fan of the Fighting Fantasy series. This includes artwork from Brazil, Denmark, and France. All of covers are reproduced for the series, including those published by Puffin Books, Wizard Books, Scholastic Books, and overseas editions. There is a gallery of every cover of The Warlock of Firetop Mountain in every language, too, but that is not all. Magic Realms: The Art of Fighting Fantasy comes to a close with galleries for Warlock: The Fighting Fantasy Magazine—surely due a reprint anthology, the Fighting Fantasy graphic novels, and the miniature figures. These are lovingly presented here, stunningly painted and superbly bringing the art to life in three dimensions and making the reader wish they could bring them to the gaming table.
Physically, Magic Realms: The Art of Fighting Fantasy is exactly what you want it to be. The perfect reproduction of art accompanied by some interesting words.
There can be no doubt that Magic Realms: The Art of Fighting Fantasy is an absolute must for any fan of the Fighting Fantasy series. It shines a spotlight on both the many great artists who brought to life the words of the Fighting Fantasy authors and the great choices made by authors and editors in selecting the artists, whilst for the reader there is the thrill of being able to see all of the Fighting Fantasy all in one place and the frisson of excitement at the memory of seeing it for the first time.

 What have I been doing? Well this last Gary Con (back in April) I was talking with my Elf Lair Game co-conspirators about future projects. Of course our plans revolved mostly around the recently released Thirteen Parsecs. But I also began flipping through the "new to me" physical copy of the ShadowDark RPG. I had picked up the Quickstart and the Curse Scroll #1 zine at a previous Gary Con, so it seemed right to grab it then too. Originally my plan was only to use it as a supplement for my Old School Essentials games. But others encouraged me to try it out on it's own merits. 

It finally clicked with me one evening this past summer while making dinner what ShadowDark actually is and not what I thought it was. Granted, it is exactly what the video creator Kelsey Dionne has been saying for two years. So I sat down that night during my writing time and put together an outline. I gave myself one week. Well...that week went on, and on, as I really grew to like this project. So now I am ready to reveal the fruits of those efforts. Or at least reveal that I am revealing it.

Coming soon (next month or so), The Witch Book of Shadows for the ShadowDark RPG!

From the upcoming DriveThruRPG page:

Included here is the Witch Class.

- Six new ancestries
- New occult backgrounds
- Basic, Expert, and Advanced witch talents that grow as you level up.
- Thirteen Witch Patrons, from Baba Yaga to Xthluhu the Horror of the Deep! Each with boons and spells.
- 160+ new occult spells for ShadowDark, including special Patron Spells and Ritual Magic spells.
- 60+ Witch-related monsters for your ShadowDark adventures
- 40 new magic items. 
-124 pages A5 size to fit with your current ShadowDark RPG booksCompatible with ShadowDark and other ShadowDark products.

The biggest selling point for this book are all the new spells. Plus every witch takes a patron which opens new and unique spells to them. Add ritual spells and no two witches are ever the same.  There are thirteen new witch patrons as well.

For the monsters, well, many of these came from my recent Horror movie marathon. Going back to the roots of AD&D monsters and then rebuilding them from the ground up, or at least getting a head start from horror movies, gave me plenty of new ideas—so many that a few didn't make the cut and will be featured on a few Monstrous Mondays. 

Right now I am just waiting on the print proofs. Once I have those in hand (expected by Dec 1) then I will figure out what needs to happen next. 

As always, I had a blast working on this one, and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did putting it together. 

Special thanks to Kelsey Dionne for not just making such a fun game, but building a great community and a sense of community involvement with this game. That might be her best achievement yet.

NOTE: My oldest has been running his Sunday group through all the editions of D&D. I have been planning on doing something with the Cook/Marsh Expert set, but schedules being a thing I have had to adapt and now do a Companion-level adventure.

One thing led to another, and now I have a new, different project on my hands. 

Today is my "Day 1" of it. The day I start pulling together research notes into a draft. 

I put this post together as a set of notes and research from previous posts. 

No. I am not doing my own Companion set. As I have outlined below we have plenty very good ones.

D&D Companion Set

The Companion Edition of D&D was one of the near-mythical books for me growing up.  As I mentioned yesterday that I began my game playing with the Basic/Expert, known today as B/X, sets from the early 80s.  The expert took the game from the 3rd to the 14th level, and the Companion book was then going to take the game from the 14th to the 36th level.  Even though I knew of AD&D at the time, I thought the Companion book would be the way to go. So I waited for it.

And waited.

And waited some more.

Finally, I gave up waiting and dove into AD&D instead, leaving Basic D&D behind.  Eventually, a Companion Rules Set came out.  But it was for the new Mentzer-edited Basic set (now called BECMI), and I no longer had any interest in it, having discovered the world could also have Assassins, half-orcs, and 9 alignments.

Fast forward to the Old School Revolution/Renaissance/Resurgence/Recycled and I have re-discovered the Basic sets (all of them) in their imperfect glories.  And I am not the only one that must have felt a little gipped by not getting a Companion book for B/X.

Jonathan Becker over at B/X Blackrazor designed his own Companion rules. If it is not exactly what the companion would be, it is really close.

Soon after, I managed to pick up my copy of the Companion Set.  So join me on my exploration of the new worlds of the D&D Companion Set.  But a warning, here there be Dragons!

D&D Companion Set (1984)

I don't think it is too much to say that the Companion Set contains some of the most interesting changes and updates to the D&D than any other product TSR had published to date.  I will talk more about these in the review, but first a look back.

I have eagerly awaited the Companion set for D&D ever since I got my Expert Set, which is by B/X Moldvay/Cook Basic and Expert Set.

The Companion Set, as promised by the Expert Set rules, mentions that characters will now go to 36th level and there will be a way to cure undead level drain!  Such promises. Such hope!

D&D Cook/Marsh Expert Set, page X8

I did manage to read it once.  I was in college, and it was at Castle Perilous Games in Carbondale. Of course, AD&D 2nd Ed was the new hotness at the time, and I had no desire to look backward.  What I saw, though, at the time did not impress me.  The entire Mentzer set at the time (AT THE TIME, mind you) made me think of it as D&D for little kids (now I see it differently).

Looking back now, I see I made a BIG MISTAKE.
Well...maybe.  I would not have traded my AD&D time for anything, but I wish I had given the BECMI rules more chance.

Now I can fix that.

Today I am going to cover the BECMI Companion Rules.  I am going to cover both the DriveThruRPG PDFs and my physical box set.


The Companion Set follows the rules as presented in the BECMI Basic and Expert books. But unlike those books, the Companion Rules sets off into uncharted directions and gives us some new material.

While the claim can be made that Frank Mentzer only edited and organized the Basic and Expert rules based on previous editions, the Companion set is all his.  While there may be some influences from earlier editions such as Greyhawk (with it's 22nd level cap [wizards] and some monsters) and AD&D (some monsters and the multiverse) this really feels new.

Companion Player's Book 1
The player's book is 32 pages with color covers and black & white interiors. Art by Larry Elmore and Jeff Easley.
Opening this book we get a preface with a dedication to Brian Blume. A nice touch and yeah he is often forgotten in the tale of D&D's earliest years.  The preface also firmly situates us in time. We 10 years out from when D&D was first published. The design goals of this book, and consequently this series, have never been more firmly stated.  This is an introduction to the D&D game and designed to be fun, playable, and true to the spirit of D&D.  It certainly feels like this is the successor to the Original D&D game; maybe more so than AD&D.
One page in and we are off to a great start.

The title and table of contents page tell us that this game is now "by" Frank Mentzer, based on D&D by Gygax and Arneson.  As we move into the book proper we get a feel for the "changing game."  Characters are more powerful and once difficult threats are no more than a nuisance or exercise.  The characters are ready to take their place among the rulers of the world.  This makes explicit something I always felt AD&D only played lip service to.

We get some new weapons that have different sorts of effects like knocking out an opponent or entangling them. We also get some unarmed combat rules.    Now, these feel they really should have been added to the Basic or Expert rule sets. Maybe they were but were cut for space or time.

Up next is Stronghold management from the point of view of the player characters.  Again here D&D continues its unwritten objective of being educational as well as fun.  More on this in the DM's book.

Character Classes
Finally, about 11 pages in we get to the Character updates.  Here all the human character classes get tables that go to level 25; again maybe a nod to Greyhawk's level 20-22 caps, and caps of 7th level spells (clerics) and 9th level spell (magic-users).  Clerics get more spells and spell levels.  The big upgrade comes in the form of their expanded undead turning table.  Clerics up to 25th level and monsters up to Liches and Special.  This mimics the AD&D Clerics table; I'd have to look at them side by side to see and differences.  One difference that comes up right away is the increase in undead monsters.  There are phantoms, haunts, spirits, and nightshades.  Nightshades, Liches, and "Special" will be detailed in the Master Set.

Something that is big pops up in the cleric listing.  A Neutral cleric of level 9 or higher may choose to become a Druid! Druids only resemble their AD&D counterparts in superficial ways.  They have similar spells, but the BECMI Druid cannot change shape.  It is an interesting implementation of the class, and I'll discuss it in detail.

Arguably it is fighters that get the biggest boost in the Companion Set.  They gain the ability to have multiple attacks per round now and other combat maneuvers such as smashing, pairing and disarming. This is a big deal since they got so little in the Expert set. Fighters can also "specialize" into three paths depending on alignment.  There are Knights, Paladins, and Avengers.  Each type gives the fighter something a little extra.  Paladins are not very far off from their AD&D counterparts and Avengers are as close to an Anti-Paladin as D&D will get until we get to the Blackguards.

Conversely, Magic-users do not get as much save from greater spells. We do get the restriction that any spell maxes out 20dX damage.

Thieves can now become Guildmasters or Rogues.  A name that will come up more and more with future editions of D&D.

BECMI "Prestige Classes?"
The Druid, Knight, Avenger, Paladin, and, to a lesser degree, the Magist and Rogues represent what could arguably be called the first Prestige Classes to D&D.  Their inclusion predates the publication of the Thief-Acrobat in the AD&D Unearthed Arcana.
Prestige Classes are classes that one can take after meeting certain requirements in other "base" classes in D&D 3.x and Pathfinder. Often at 10th level, but can occur anytime the character meets the requirements.  This concept is later carried on into D&D 4 with their "Paragon Paths" (chosen at 11th level) and even into D&D 5 with their subclasses (chosen at 2nd level).
The BECMI Avenger and Paladin are the best examples of these working just like the Prestige Classes will in 15 more years. This is interesting since it also means other classes can be added to the basic 4 core ones using the same system.  An easy example is the Thief-Acrobat from UA or even the Ranger from AD&D.  Though in this version the problem lies in the alignment system.  Rangers are supposed to be "good" for example.

Demi-Humans
Demi-humans may not advance any more in level, but they are not idle.  This is also the area of the Companion Set that I most often go wrong.  Each demi-human race has a Clan Relic, and some demi-humans could be in charge of these clan relics, making them very powerful. There are also clan rulers, and they are also detailed.  What does all that mean?  It means there is a good in-game reason why demi-humans do not advance in levels anymore.  They are much more dedicated to their clans than humans. So, after some time, they are expected to return home to take up their responsibilities for the clan.


That is not to say that these characters do not advance anymore.  Each demi-human race can still gain "Attack Ranks" as if they are still leveling up.  They don't gain any more HP, but they can attack as if they are higher-level fighters.  They also gain some of the fighter's combat options. Each class gets 11 such rank-levels.   It seems to split some hairs on "no more levels" but whatever.

We end with a map of the expanding Known World.  This is the continent of Brun of Mystara, but we don't know that yet.  But I will discuss that later this week.

This book is a lot more than I expected it to be and that is a good thing.

Companion DM's Book 2
The DM's book is 64 pages with color covers and black & white interiors. Art by Larry Elmore and Jeff Easley.
There is a lot to this book.  First, we get to some General Guidelines that cover the higher levels of play and planning adventures accordingly. There is sadly not a lot here.
We follow up with Part 2: The Fantasy World.  This continues some of the discussion of stronghold management and dominion management as well.  Now here is quite a bit of good information on what happens, or could happen, in a dominion. 
This section also includes the hidden secret of the D&D BECMI series.  The War Machine Mass Combat system.

War Machine
Around the same time, TSR also developed the BattleSystem Mass Combat system.  The two are largely incompatible with each other.  I always thought it was odd that two systems that do essentially the same things were created and incompatible.   Later I learned that D&D BECMI lived in what we like to call a "walled garden" in the business.  It was out there doing it's own thing while the "real business" of AD&D was going on.  The problem was that D&D Basic was outselling AD&D at this point.  This was not the first time that TSR would woefully misunderstand their customers, and sadly, it was not the last time either.
War Machine is elegant compared to BattleSystem. I am not saying it is simple, but the work involved is not difficult, and I am happy to say it looks like it will work with any edition of D&D.

The Multiverse 
A big part of any D&D experience is the Multiverse.  This section allows the DMs and Players to dip their toes into the wider Multiverse which includes the Ethereal Plane and the Elemental Planes.


Space is also given to the discussion on aging, damage to magic items, demi-human crafts, poison, and more. We also get all of our character tables.

Monsters
About halfway through the book, we reach the monster section. Many familiar AD&D faces are now here, though a bit of digging will show that many of these are also from OD&D up to the Greyhawk supplement. Most notable are the beholder, larger dragons, druids (as monsters), and many elemental types. Monsters are split into Prime Plane and Other Planes. 
Among the monsters featured are the aforementioned Beholder, larger Dragons, and bunches of new Undead, like haunts, druj, ghosts and more.  A few that caught my attention are the Gargantua (gigantic monsters) and Malfera.  The Malfera REALLY caught my attention since they are from the "Dimension of Nightmares."  This is more fodder for my Mystara-Ravenloft connection.
Monsters from the Other Planes focus on the Elemental planes.

Treasure
Lots of new treasures and magic items.

Adventures
There are three short adventure or adventure hooks for companion-level characters.

All in all the Companion Set is full and had many things I did not think it had given my very casual relationship to it over the years.  Reading it now and in-depth for the very first time I see there is a lot I could have used in my games back then.

Other Companion Books

I was not the only one that waited. 

Others came up with their own Companion rules for the B/X Style Basic D&D instead of the BECMI Style Basic D&D. Now...let's be 100% honest here. The differences between BX and BECMI are so subtle that only a huge nerd like me cares. But then again, I was not the only one.

I mentioned Jonathan Becker's B/X Companion above and I reviewed it a while back. It compares favorably to the BECMI Companion from TSR, and it fits the look and feel of the BX books well.

There was also the Companion Expansion from Barrataria Games, which was also quite good. It was more of a move from BX Basic D&D closer to AD&D, which is fine. It is also free, and all the content was released 100% under the Open Gaming License, so that was a nice plus in my mind.

And proving that sometimes the wait is good, Stephen R. Marsh, the Marsh of the Cook/Marsh Expert Set, is working on his own Companion set.  So I can have all three to satisfy that desire the 12-year-old-me had. 

It just goes to show how active the old-school D&D communities still are.

Some part of me still wants a proper B/X Companion set from 1982. Maybe such a thing existed in an alternate universe. But that is also a universe where the BECMI sets didn't exist, and given how popular Mentzer's red box was, I am unsure how it would have changed D&D as a whole in the mid- to late 1980s.

What Role Does the Companion Serve?

One has to ask. What does the Companion rules actually do? Or even what role does it serve?

In many ways, the Companion rules (and here on out, regardless of which one I mean) represent the fork in the road where D&D splits from AD&D.  With the continuum of OD&D to Holmes Basic to Moldvay and then Mentzer Basic, you could still go on to AD&D (largely as Gary would have liked). The Companion rules then are the path of no return. Once you head down that path there is no turning back for AD&D.  So the Companion needs to fill the same gaps that AD&D fills, but it doesn't need to do them in the same way.

For me, any discussion about the various merits of AD&D vs Basic-era D&D has to include a conversation about how the Companion (and Masters) handle various AD&D topics. The only problem is that no Companion development ever happened in a vacuum. 

Things like Druids, stronger monsters (notably elementals), the outer planes and their inhabitants, are all slightly different in the Companion rules. But rare are the entirely new elements. Granted, the BECMI Companion often has new monsters and the War Machine. The Companion Expansion from Barrataria Games was designed to fill in the gaps B/X had compared to AD&D. It is hard to throw off the shadow of AD&D. Though I would like to see something new. Something that AD&D would have to convert over from D&D for a change. But likely that time has long since passed. 

Should Classes Be Different?

One of the ideas floated by the BECMI Companion is that there are some classes, the Druid is my prime example, that act like Basic Prestige Classes. So, a neutral 9th-level cleric could now be considered a Druid if that is what the player wanted. Does that mean a Fighter then could be something else? Knights, Avengers, and Paladins are mentioned in BECMI. But would Rangers, Barbarians, and Cavaliers be out of the question?

While I would not want to recreate the Prestige Class bloat of the early 2000s, the idea is an intriguing one. Would my witch even be just a type of magic-user, then? 

Should Monsters Be Different?

My go-to here is the humble succubus. In Becker's Companion, she is a 7 HD monster. In BECMI, granted in the Immortal Rules, she is a whopping 15 HD (Whispering Demon in the Immortals boxed set). In Eldritch Wizardry (where she is introduced) and in AD&D she is 6+6 HD.  Obviously, for characters 15th level and higher, a single 6 or 7 HD succubus is not really a challenge unless she is played correctly in a non-combat role.

Other times, we get more powerful dragons and more powerful elementals. A 15 HD succubus may be a bad idea, but the 15 HD Queen of Succubi is better.

The threats need to be targeted to the level of the characters involved. 

Gives me a lot to think about.

The world is broken and everything is in a state of decay. The environment. The land itself. History. You and everyone around you. Your memories. Centuries ago, magic broke the world. It unravelled and with it the great civilisations that exist as memories of near forgotten tales and the artefacts that can be scavenged from the ruins. The gods died and fell from the sky. Their corpses lie where they fell, some worshipped by cults hoping that their faith will restore them to life, even as the corpses spawn strange creatures, trigger strange phenomena, and even still provide valuable resources despite the danger of living so close to them. Every magical artefact and every monster which ever wielded magic became one more vector for the Decay that corrupts and twists all it touches. Those who wield such artefacts or even dare to weave the frayed threads of magic that exist are in danger of becoming a thrall or Decay or poisoning those around you. Decay warps time and space, changing the environment around you are you travel and even changing the time that the journey took. Monsters are everywhere. Lastly there is the Decay within you, the twisting of the magic that runs through you. It is a Curse which threatens all of your kind. Humans rot and rise as soul-hungry undead; Dwarves burn up from the inside and become eternally burning infernos; Elves transform into crystal constructs that scour the skin from their victims; Halflings melt into living oozes; and the Forgotten crumble into nothing. Yet there is Hope.

Centuries since the Breaking, survivors still form communities, known as Havens, and invest their Hope in them. They invest their Hope in Survivors brave enough to travel the wilds and so enable them to fight back against the Decay, to hold back and even reverse its corrosive effects, and push them to great acts of heroism. Walking the land on the same paths and placing memorable Waymarkers can solidify the land against Decay, as can connecting communities and sharing stories with them. Memoria, carried by every Survivor on a journey can help them withstand the warping and loss of memories that if they were otherwise unprotected, they would suffer. Hope is all that stands between the Survivors and a world of entropy.

This is the setting for Broken Weave, a setting which the Survivors (as the Player Characters are known), “Survive, built community, and fight for hope in post-apocalyptic tragic fantasy world”. Published by Cubicle 7 Entertainment, it is designed to be compatible with Dungeon & Dragons, Fifth Edition and whilst it runs as a standalone, post-apocalyptic roleplaying setting, it could actually be mapped on the setting of the Game Master’s choice, so that the Survivors could be exploring the long decay remnants of a world that their players’ previous characters explored unaware of the disaster that was to come with the Breaking. However, there are some mechanical differences between Broken Weave and Dungeon & Dragons, Fifth Edition. These include Survivors being created via a Lifepath System, Lineages replacing Races, Feats being replaced by Talents and Inspiration by Hope, and a number of changes and additions to both the skills and the Toolkits that the Survivors have access to. In addition to spending Hit Dice to regain Hit Points as per normal in Dungeon & Dragons, Fifth Edition, but Broken Weave also offers another option which they can be spent. This varies between the different Classes.

Play begins with the creation of the Survivors’ community, their Haven. This is their base of operations, their home, and what they will be striving to protect and grow throughout a Broken Weave campaign. Consisting of the Founders’ Legacy, Location, Culture, Crises (current and past), and Finishing Touches, this can be created randomly using the given tables or designed. Either way, it is mean to be collaborative process between all of the players so that they have an investment in it. There are notes included alongside the process to suggest ways in which it can be twisted and changed to add detail and story possibilities. For example, this could be that Founders’ Legacy is not as pure the Survivors recall it to be or that the community could be home to a ‘Hard Luck Haven’, meaning that it starts with a higher level of Decay and increases the degree of challenge for both players and Survivors. Lastly, a Haven will have beginning values for Hope, Decay, Population, and Resources, based on the number of players. When a Haven suffers a crisis, its Resources will be first reduced and then its Population. This loss can be resisted, but if the Population is reduced to zero, the Haven is destroyed.

HAVEN: Flaming Lake
Our Founder Wanted To… Escape the monsters our families were becoming
LOCATION
Biome: Wetland Resource Abundance: Wood Resource Scarcity: Metal
Landmark: A vast lake of flammable liquid
CULTURE
We Value… Cleverness, subtlety, wit
Clothing and Appearance: We shave patterns into the sides or back of our hair
Traditions and Superstitions: We always save a bone for the beast and a drink for the lost
Leadership: Public votes are taken on all important matters, but the weight of your vote is reduced the more Decayed you are.

CRISES
Past Crises: The Haven could not safely expand any further. Some were exiled so the rest could live. A dangerous monster that was assembling a crude device or altar and had a weak point beneath its armour. Current Crisis: Every month a strange fog covers the Haven and all but one survivor falls unconscious for a seven days at a time.
Hope: 10
Decay: 1
Resources: 10
Population: 100

Survivor creation is also intended to be a collective process, essentially so that backgrounds and bonds can be created during the process. Each Survivor has a Lineage, each of which grants several advantages, but also a Curse and the way in which Decay affects you. Dwarves are beset by the Curse of Flame, Elves by the Curse of Earth, Halflings by the Curse of Water, Humans by the Curse of Wind, and The Forgotten by the Curse of Oblivion. Unlike the other four, The Forgotten are not a true Lineage, but are a mélange of the forgotten Lineages in the Broken World and vary greatly in appearance. In this way, they represent what might have been another species in the Dungeons & Dragons-style world from before the Breaking. The Lifepath for a Survivor determines his Family, Upbringing, Occupation, Defining Experience, Talent, Possessions, and Allies and Enemies.

Lineage: I Am A… Halfling
Parents: I Was Raised By… People of the same lineage
Influential Family Member: One Of My Family Members Is… Carrying on the family trade
Family Size: My Family Is… Small – Two members
Upbringing: My Upbringing Was… Dangerous. I always keep an eye out of trouble I Am… Use to fear
Occupation: I Am A… Scout I Am Skilled In… Stealth
Defining Experience: I… Cared for people when a plague spread through the community I Learned… Medicine
Life Lesson: You Learned… Some secrets of the Broken World others would rather ignore I Gained… +1 Intelligence
Starting Talent: Hurler
Possessions: Experience… I explored your Haven’s surroundings, foraging for supplies or mapping the area. I Gained… Seeker’s Tools, Herbalist’s Tools, or Prospector’s Tools
Allies and Enemies: I was raised with or taught by this ally and we have developed our skills together. My enemy believed it was my responsibility to care for them and that I failed

There are six Classes in Broken Weave. Harrowed tap into the corrupting force of Decay to protect others from its effects, but use its unnatural power to defend their Haven and protect their allies. Makers seek out old and new technology to use for the benefit of the Haven. Sages—scholars, chirugeons, and historians—harbour their knowledge and both use it to protect their Haven and to pass it on to others. Seekers walk the forgotten paths of the Broken World in search of lost Artefacts, so must guard against Decay even as they use the items they find to protect their Haven. Speakers are diplomats and storytellers who both build their Haven and travel to other communities strengthen the links between them as well as tell new histories and legends that can be remembered when memories have been lost. Wardens are protectors and guardians, equipped with ancestral arms and armour to defend themselves and the Haven. Attributes are assigned from a standard array and in the last steps, a player rolls for Dreams and Connections, as well as the Memoria that link the Survivor to his memories.

Each of the Lineages details what it was like before and after the Breaking, and then the nature of the Curse. This ranges between one and ten, and as it increases for a Survivor, it actually provides both bonuses and benefits. For example, the Halfling’s Curse of Water at a value of between four and seven, causes the sufferer’s skin to become translucent, malleable, and makes it difficult for him to interact with objects. He is at Disadvantage on Athletics Tests, but can use Acrobatics to initiate a Grapple attack and will be at Advantage for all Grapple Tests. Each of the Classes provides abilities at each and every Level and three subclasses. Of the latter, the Harrowed has Condemned, Harrowed, and Sovereign; the Maker has Alchemist, Artificer, and Smith; the Sage has Healer, Lorekeeper, and Veteran; the Seeker has Delver, Hunter, and Strider; the Speaker has Envoy, Preacher, and Whisperer; and the Warden has Avenger, Sentinel, and Warcaller. Whilst for the former, at Second, Sixth, Tenth, Fourteenth, and Eighteenth Levels, a Survivor gains a Talent, as well as the one gained during Survivor creation. Talents are not Feats. In fact, they are less powerful than the standard Feats of Dungeon & Dragons, Fifth Edition (though Broken Weave does allow the option for the players to select them as well). Many are specific to the Broken Weave setting, such as ‘Decay Resistance’, which grants Proficiency for Decay Saving Throws, ‘Decay Sense’, which grants Advantage on tests to determine if a creature is suffering from Decay and by how much, and ‘Built to Last’, which makes any Waymarkers constructed to mark a route more durable and resistant to Decay.

This is, of course, in addition to the actual Abilities for the Class. For example, at First Level, the Harrowed has ‘Delay the Inevitable’, ‘Embrace Entropy (1d10)’, and ‘Kindred Spirits’. ‘Embrace Entropy (1d10)’ lets the Harrowed harness the Decay to speed his recovery and heal Hit Points when he gains a point of Decay, ‘Delay the Inevitable’ grants Proficiency for Decay Saving Throws and slows the path of the Harrowed’s Lineage Curse, and ‘Kindred Spirits’ grants Advantage on Tests to determine the degree of Decay in an individual, creature, or an object, and even identify its source and location. In comparison, the Seeker begins with ‘Walk the Old Paths’ and ‘Lead the Way’. The latter means that the Survivor can ignore Difficult Terrain and grants Advantage on Tests related to the Outrider role in Journeys, whilst the former enable the Survivor to do the Place Waymarker Campcraft Activity and another Campcraft Activity, and search a previously placed Waymarker for the contents of a secret stash.

Decay is an ever-present threat in Broken Weave. Sources include arcane artefacts, corrupted lands, and monsters. In addition to the effect on a Lineage’s Curse, its effects can be memory loss. That though can be countered by a Memoria trinket, if the potential memory loss is associated with the trinket. Decay can also be reduced via certain Class features, along a particular route by completing the path as part of a journey, Moonstone can absorb Decay, placing and maintaining Waymarkers, and of course, rebuilding communities. Countering Decay is Hope. This is gained during Heaven creation, making a Noble Sacrifice, growing a Community, and overcoming a crisis. Hope is spent to gain an automatic success, to cheat death, to turn a successful attack into a Critical attack, recover from a condition, resist Decay, reroll a Test, take an extra Action, and to twist fate, forcing someone nearby to reroll a Saving Throw. It is lost if a Survivor dies in a manner that is not heroic, a crisis is failed, and when a Haven’s Decay increases.

Broken Weave includes detailed rules for journeys—no surprise given that the publisher developed them originally for The One Ring: Adventures Over The Edge Of The Wild and has already presented them for Dungeon & Dragons, Fifth Edition with Uncharted Journeys—and for the passage of time that encompass Campcraft, Downtime, and Seasonal Activities. There is a quite a range of activities here and they scale up in terms of scope and time. Thus, ‘Contemplate Scars’, ‘Gallows Humour’, ‘Listen’, ‘Record Knowledge’, and ‘Remember the Fallen’ all encourage good roleplaying during Campcraft times, whilst Downtime activities include ‘Build Defences’, ‘Craft Memoria’, ‘Establish Memoria’, ‘Maintain Waymarkers’, ‘Push Back Decay’, ‘Steer Decay’, and so on. Seasonal Activities include ‘Build a Home’, ‘Gather Survivors’, ‘Go to War’, and more. Then on top of that, the Survivors will ‘Invest in the Future’, which might be to ‘Retrain’, ‘Reinforce Waymarker’, ‘Start a Family’, or even ‘Retire’. Seasonal Activities end with a number of random events for the Survivors, the Haven, and Factions, which can be played as necessary, whether immediately or over the course of the next Season. Mechanically, a Haven is important as a source of resources, but as play progresses, they should become something more. That is, the means to pull the players and their Survivors into the world of Broken Weave, giving ways in which the Survivors can recover, improve themselves, and make the world a better place. This is enforced not just through the numerous types of activity that the Survivors can undertake in addition to adventuring, but also the abilities that Classes grant. For example, the Artificer subclass for the Maker gains ‘Mass Production’ to create blueprints and documentation that others can follow and build, either improving their defences or their standard of living, whilst ‘Enduring Lesson’ for the Sage means that his medicinal advice is noted down and standardised so that future Survivors begin play with an extra Hit Die!

In terms of an actual setting, Broken Weave provides a broad overview of its technology—as is, ruins, havens, daily life, and more. In terms of specific details, it describes the Haven of Guardian’s Lament, complete with the Founder’s Legacy, location, culture, influential people, crises past and present, and the immediate surrounding area. It is a lush oasis embraced within the arms of a fallen god amidst a barren desert. The legacy includes a shrine to the fallen god, which is also the Haven’s landmark, and the Haven has faced crises such as repelling invaders and dealing with an artefact that turned the inhabitants into cannibals. The artefact is buried in the ruins beneath the Haven. Currently, the Haven faces two crises. One are the voices heard from recently opened, but not yet explored ruins and warnings from refugees of a Titan on the march. Guardian’s Lament is designed as a both an example Haven and a starting Haven. Several others are also described, so that the Survivors can create paths to them and establish relations and so grow a wider community. Together this provides a framework for a campaign starter, but the Game Master could just as easily take the content and drop it in her own version of Broken Weave.

For the Game Master there is solid advice on running Broken Weave highlighting its themes of tragic fantasy and loss versus survival and hope. It also covers how to describe Decay, as well as advising using a location web to map the world and detailing several magical artefacts. These are powerful, but their use is not without consequences. For example, the Bowl of Plenty provides a ready source of food, but if eaten the food forces a Survivor to make a Saving Throw versus Decay and if they are widespread in a Haven, its Decay goes up season by season, whilst the Deathmarch Armour grants incredible Strength and protection, in the long term, it forces an automatic failed Death Save or Decay on the wear. The advantage of the armour is that the wearer would be able to face some of the toughest monsters in the Broken Weave. This applies to all of the magic items in Broken Weave and in many ways, the Survivors are really going to want to either avoid magical items or employ them sparingly.

Broken Weave also provides a nicely done bestiary including an NPCs, flora, fauna, monsters, and Titans. Of these, a monster is any creature overwhelmed by Decay, whilst Titans are colossal creatures that spread Decay and destruction wherever they go. Some believe them to be gods hollowed out by Decay and if ever a Haven stands in the path of Titan it is doomed. Broken Weave includes the means to adapt creatures from other Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition settings and sourcebooks, giving monsters the means of spreading Decay and Decay Transformations like ‘Blinking’ or ‘Volatile Blood’, as well as monsters specific to the setting. For example, the Deathstalk is ambush predator, a twisted sentient tree that shapes the paths in and around its forest grove to lead into the grove, whilst tempting its would be victims with the voices and memories harvested from its previous victims, using their decapitated heads as literal mouth pieces. The Shrieking Horror is an example of a monster inspired by Dungeons & Dragons, a hulking, multi-eyed, beaked beast with extra squawking beaks that run down its feathery chest and let out shrieks that can stun and deafen. It looks very much like a mutated Owl Bear!

Lastly, Titans get a section of their own. Their appearance nearby automatically triggers a crisis for a haven and the only response is to slay the beast, change its path, imprison it, or run. Every Titan is different and two are detailed in Broken Weave. Each is fully detailed in terms of its corruption and Decay, what is known about it and what is believed to be the best way to defeat it, and how it interacts with the world. The fulsome stats include Legendary actions in addition to the many traits and actions. The two Titans detailed are the Dreamer and the Rotbringer. The Decay from the Dreamer affects those that sleep and it can summon Dreamspawn from the those that sleep to appear near them, whilst the Rotbringer is a walking storm of Decay, spores, and sound. Both are incredibly tough and vile creatures and any group of players and their Survivors deserve all of the praise and glory they would get if they defeated one of these.

Physically, Broken Weave is well presented. The artwork is excellent, suitably a depicting world and its inhabitants and creatures changed by an apocalyptic event.

If there is an aspect of Broken Weave that is not as fully addressed as it could be, it is what Survivors are doing on adventures. The emphasis is rightly upon the Haven and protecting and improving it, on journeying between other Havens and building and enforcing communities through contact and confirmation of memories, all whilst withstanding the threat of Decay. What then of actual adventuring and exploring the world? If the world of the Broken Weave was a highly magical world before the Breaking as is suggested, what are the ruins leftover like and if there are dungeons, what they like in a world where Decay is prevalent? These are not questions addressed in Broken Weave, which is an oversight. It does not help that there is no adventure, ready-to-play, in the book. If there had, the question could have been answered there.

Lastly, it should be pointed out that magical apocalypses are not new to the hobby, though they are relatively rare. 2008’s Desolation from Greymalkin Designs explores a world just after the apocalypse, whilst the most obvious one, Earthdawn, is set centuries after the apocalyptic event. They are noticeably different in tone and outlook compared to Broken Weave though.

Broken Weave is a radically different setting for Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition. Its emphasis is on survival and community in a setting that is more environment and connections than a mapped-out world. It can be played as is, or it can be laid out over the ruins of an existing world, whether a pre-published or one of the Game Master’s own devising, enabling the players to roleplay Survivors potentially the secrets of the past and the secrets of past Player Characters. This gives it a high degree of flexibility as do the rules for Haven creation and improvement and monster modification, and that is in addition to the flexibility in terms of use of the actual setting material. Overall, Broken Weave is grim, yet heroically hopeful fantasy setting that emphasises togetherness and co-operation against the long-term effects of contemporary fears.

Now in its seventeenth year, Free RPG Day for 2024 took place on Saturday, June 22nd. As per usual, Free RPG Day consisted of an array of new and interesting little releases, which are traditionally tasters for forthcoming games to be released at GenCon the following August, but others are support for existing RPGs or pieces of gaming ephemera or a quick-start. This included dice, miniatures, vouchers, and more. Thanks to the generosity of Waylands Forge in Birmingham, Reviews from R’lyeh was able to get hold of many of the titles released for Free RPG Day.

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Dragonbane – The Sinking Tower is a preview of, and a quick-start for Dragonbane, the reimagining of Sweden’s first fantasy roleplaying game, Drakar och Demoner, originally published in 1982. Funded via a Kickstarter campaign by Free League Publishing in 2022, Dragonbane promises to be a roleplaying game of “mirth and mayhem”. It includes a basic explanation of the setting, rules for actions and combat, magic, the adventure, ‘The Sinking Tower’, and five ready-to-play, Player Characters.
‘The Sinking Tower’ scenario is designed as a tournament style adventure and can be played in two hours. This does not mean that it cannot be added to an ongoing campaign, but rather that it includes a scoring sheet to determine how well one group of players fared compared to another. That said, two hours is tight for the scenario and outside of a tournament, the Game Master can easily prepare the scenario and run it in a single session. One aspect of the scenario the Game Master will want to include if it is not run as a tournament scenario, is have treasure cards on hand. In the tournament version, the discovery of treasures is handled in the abstract as a means to add to the point total for the players at the end of the scenario.
The five Player Characters include a Human Wizard (Fire Elementalist), an Elf Hunter, a Mallard Knight (yes, a duck knight!), a Halfling Thief, and a Wolfkin Warrior. All five Player Characters are given a double-sided sheet with one side devoted to the character sheet whilst the other gives some background to the Player Character, an explanation of his abilities, and an excellent illustration. One issue is with the Human Wizard, whose player will need to refer to the magic section of the rules in Dragonbane – The Sinking Tower to find out how his spells work. It would have been far more useful for them to be at least listed along with costs for the benefit of the Wizard’s player.
A Player Character has a Kin, which can be human, halfling, dwarf, elf, mallard, or wolfkin. He also has six attributes—Strength, Constitution, Agility, Intelligence, Willpower, and Charisma—which range in value between three and eighteen, as well as a Profession. Both Kin and Profession provide an ability which are unavailable to other Kin and Professions. Various factors are derived from the attributes, notably different damage bonuses for Strength-based weapons and Agility-based weapons, plus Willpower Points. Willpower Points are expended to use magic and abilities derived from both Kin and Profession. A Player Character has sixteen skills, ranging in value from one to fourteen.
To have his player undertake an action, a player rolls a twenty-sided die. The aim is roll equal to or lower than the skill or attribute. A roll of one is called ‘rolling a dragon’ and is treated as a critical effect. A roll of twenty is called ‘rolling a demon’ and indicates a critical failure. Banes and boons are the equivalent of advantage and disadvantage. Opposed rolls are won by the player who rolls the lowest.

If a roll is failed, a player can choose to push the roll and reroll. The result supersedes the original. In pushing a roll, the Player Character acquires a Condition, for example, ‘Dazed’ for Strength or ‘Scared’ for Willpower. The player has to explain how his character acquires the Condition and his character can acquire a total of six—one for each attribute—and the player is expected to roleplay them. Mechanically, a Condition acts as a Bane in play. A Player Character can recover from one or more Conditions by resting.
Initiative is determined randomly by drawing cards numbered between one and ten, with one going first. A Player Character has two actions per round—a move and an actual action such as a melee attack, doing first aid, or casting a spell. Alternatively, a Player Character can undertake a Reaction, which takes place on an opponent’s turn in response to the opponent’s action. Typically, this is a parry or dodge, and means that the Player Character cannot take another action. If a dragon is rolled on the parry, the Player Character gets a free counterattack!

Combat takes into account weapon length, grip, length, and so on. The effects of a dragon roll, or a critical hit, can include damage being doubled and a dragon roll being needed to parry or dodge this attack, making a second attack, or piercing armour. Damage can be slashing, piercing, or bludgeoning, which determines the effectiveness of armour.

Armour has a rating, which reduces damage taken. Helmets increase Armour Rating, but work as a Bane for certain skills. If a Player Character’s Hit Points are reduced to zero, a death roll is required for him to survive, which can be pushed. Three successful rolls and the Player Character survives, whilst three failures indicate he has died. A Player Character on zero Hit Points can be rallied by another to keep fighting. Dragonbane – The Sinking Tower also includes rules for other forms of damage such as falling and poison, plus darkness and fear. Fear is covered by a Willpower check, and there is a Fear Table for the results.
A Wizard powers magic through the expenditure of Willpower Points. Typical spells cost two Willpower Points per Power Level of a spell, but just one Willpower Point for lesser spells or magic tricks. Spells are organised into schools and each school has an associated skill, which is rolled against when casting a spell. Willpower Points are lost even if the roll is failed, but rolling a dragon can double the range or damage of the spell, negate the Willpower Point cost, or allow another spell to be cast, but with a Bane. Rolling a demon simply means that the spell fails and cannot be pushed. A spell cannot be cast if the Wizard is in direct contact with either iron or steel.

Three spells and three magical tricks are given in Dragonbane – The Sinking Tower. These are all fire-related, designed for the Wizard Player Character. The magical tricks include Ignite, Heat/Chill, and Puff of Smoke, whilst the full spells are Fireball, Gust of Wind, and Pillar.
The scenario in Dragonbane – The Sinking Tower is ‘The Sinking Tower’. This is Magdala’s Tower, a malign lighthouse built and named by her sorcerer brother in remembrance of his sister, topped by a magical eye that was intended to draw the pirates who killed her to their deaths on the rocks below. In time, many more ships foundered on the rocks than the sorcerer intended and after his death, it sank beneath the sea. Every twenty years since, on the anniversary of her death, Magdala’s Tower rises again for a few hours. It gives adventurers courageous enough to row out to the tower, explore its extents and plunder its treasures, just about enough time to do so. The Player Characters are asked to recover a green emerald by a one-eyed and promised reward in return. The tower consists of seven levels, one a cellar, but each a large, single room filled with secrets and puzzles which need to be winkled out and solved before the Player Characters can proceed to the next level. In effect, the whole of the tower is a puzzle that the players will need to solve and almost everything is a clue to a puzzle somewhere in the tower. Players looking for more than a combat challenge—and there are a reasonable number of combat encounters—will enjoy the adventure as a whole.
Physically, Dragonbane – The Sinking Tower is clean and tidy. The cartography is excellent, but the artwork and illustrations are superb. They are done by Johan Egerkrans, who also illustrated Vaesen and possess a grim, if comic book sensibility.
Dragonbane – The Sinking Tower is a decently done tournament adventure, packed with puzzles and secrets that the players and their characters need to discover and solve before the time limit of the scenario. As a standard adventure, it can be played out at a more leisurely place and will be no less challenging, though without the time limit. Either way, Dragonbane – The Sinking Tower is a tightly designed, eerie dungeon adventure that pleasingly showcases DragonBane.

If you suffer from apiophobia or hay fever when the pollen count is particularly high, or just hate bees, then Bee-Ware! is not a scenario for you. It is though, a scenario, where the inhabitants of Ambersham are happy with the bees and can actually transform into bees, producing a highly regarded mead that has mild restorative effect. Ambersham is a small village in the county of Kent—as default—and it is home to an infestation of giant shape-changing bee monsters that actually, are not on rampage, represent no active threat to anyone, and would just like to get on with being giant shape-changing bee monsters and making mead. However, this is a scenario for Lamentationsof the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying, published by Lamentations ofthe Flame Princess, and written by Kelvin Green. Which means that once again, that some poor, small, English village is going to get it in the neck. Kelvin Green really, really hates poor, small, English villages and delights in inflicting horrible situations on them. In this case, the horrible situation that Kelvin Green is going to inflict on Ambersham consists of the Player Characters. Once the Player Characters start poking around, the bee-people of Ambersham are going to react. This can be as benign as offering the Player Characters bribes to go away or even a stake in the mead-making business, but the lesson behind Bee-Ware! is that if you poke the bees’ nest, the bees are going to poke you. Or in the case of Bee-Ware! sting you. There fifty such inhabitants of Ambersham and their poison has an effect of forcing a Save versus Poison—or die. Most of the bee-people will die too, of course, but fifty giant bee-people with lethal stings? How many times is a player going to have to make such as Saving Throw before his character is killed?

Bee-Ware! has no actual real starting point. It has suggestions that can be used to get the Player Characters involved. These include their being hired to investigate the Ambersham mead, to look for a missing person, checking on the health of the village’s priest who has been heard from in some time, going to loot Lady Ambersham’s manor after rumours of her death, and even spot a bee-person attacking someone in a crowd and then fleeing, leaving the victim to whisper something intriguing as his dying words. Once the Player Characters reach Ambersham, they find it a quiet, bucolic place, with lots of wild meadows and flowers, bees buzzing around, and villagers going about their business. From the outset, as soon as the villagers spot the Player Characters, they will be telling them, “We don’t want your kind round here.” They will at least get a pint and a meal at the village tavern, The Dog & Bastard, before being told the same.

Further exploration will potentially reveal two buildings of note. One is the manor house, home to Lady Ambersham, now transformed into queen bee—quite literally—and containing rooms filled with honeycomb and furniture drenched in honey. The other is a ruin, which once they gain entrance, the Player Characters will find out what is really going on—if they can negotiate its multi-dimensional structure it has had since the owner unsuccessfully cast a spell forty years earlier. Not only is the owner still in the house, but so is the extra-dimensional swarm entity which gives the bee-enhanced lady Ambersham her power and her hold over the rest of the village and the parts of the scroll detailing the spell that was cast and thus the means to reverse it.

The situation is monstrous, but benign. The Player Characters could walk away and nothing would really happen. Or they could go on a monster-killing rampage—if they could survive the potential anaphylactic shocks, that is. Then again, as much as a monster as she is, Lady Ambersham is not entirely monstrous. She will negotiate and it is possible for the Player Characters to walk away with a good deal, whether that is money in their pockets or a stake in the mead business. There is also a quartet of youthful hotheads who will give the Player Characters more trouble than telling them simply to get out of the village and then is also the ridiculously named Captain Adamski Rimsky-Korsakov and Professor Gottfried Bosch, a pair of monster hunters reminiscent of Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter, who both believe that the village is infested with lycanthropes and are there to gather intelligence and then kill everyone. If that includes the Player Characters, well, they were probably lycanthropes too. Plus, they refused to get tested. Of course, the other reason they are there is to cause chaos, get the action going, and mess up whatever it is that the Player Characters have planned so far. It depends on how the Game Master wants to use them.

Physically, Bee-Ware! is black and all shades of grey and honey. The artwork is cartoonishly entertaining and the cartography is excellent.

Bee-Ware! is set in roughly 1630, in the Early Modern period, the default period for Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplaying. Its isolated set-up means that it is easy to shift it to other times and settings, but it is easy to slip into a campaign anyway. Otherwise, Bee-Ware! is a classic ‘Kelvin-Green-village-in-peril’, or rather it is a classic ‘Kelvin-Green-village-in-peril’ with a twist, and that twist, is the Player Characters. They are effectively the monsters in the scenario, they are the ones whose presence will trigger a slaughter—theirs or the monsters. Which is absolutely great, but the benignity of the situation in Bee-Ware! also extends to the set-up and the Game Master will need work hard to get the players and their character motivated to Amersham. If she can, then the fun and weirdness can begin.

 Oh. I am so excited for this one!

DC Heroes Role-Playing Game 40th Anniversary

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cze/dc-heroes-role-playing-game-40th-anniversary?ref=theotherside

I really had a lot of fun with DC Heroes, and I am a huge DC fan.

This Kickstarter is not yet live. I have heard it will be in four days. It has over 3,100 followers so it should do well. 

I plan on backing this one and looking forward to seeing how it does. 

Now in its seventeenth year, Free RPG Day for 2024 took place on Saturday, June 22nd. As per usual, Free RPG Day consisted of an array of new and interesting little releases, which are traditionally tasters for forthcoming games to be released at GenCon the following August, but others are support for existing RPGs or pieces of gaming ephemera or a quick-start. This included dice, miniatures, vouchers, and more. Thanks to the generosity of Waylands Forge in Birmingham, Reviews from R’lyeh was able to get hold of many of the titles released for Free RPG Day.

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The most radical release for Free RPG 2024 is as in previous years, Level 1. Published by 9th Level Games, Level 1 is an annual RPG anthology series of ‘Independent Roleplaying Games’ specifically released for Free RPG Day. Where the other offerings for Free RPG Day 2024—or any other Free RPG Day—provide one-shots, one m,,,use quick-starts, or adventures, Level 1 is something that can be dipped into multiple times, in some cases its contents can played once, twice, or more—even in the space of a single evening! The subject matters for these entries ranges from the adult to the kid friendly and from action to cozy, and back again, but what they have in common is that they are non-commercial in nature and they often tell stories in non-commercial fashion compared to the other offerings for Free RPG Day 2024. The entries in the anthology often ask direct questions of the players, deal with mature subjects, and involve varying degrees of introspection, and for some players, this may be uncomfortable or simply too different from traditional roleplaying games. So the anthology includes ‘Be Safe, Have Fun’, a set of tools and terms for ensuring that everyone can play within their comfort zone. It is a good essay and useful not just for the games presented in the pages of Level 1 – Volume 1, Level 1 Volume 2, Level 1 Volume 3, and Level 1 Volume 4 which were published for their Free RPG Day events in 2020, , 2021, 2022, and 2023 respectively, but for any roleplaying game.
The games in Level 1 Volume 5 all together require dice, a deck of ordinary playing cards, a coin, a timer, a Jenga tower, a Discord account, a sheet of graph paper, and two separate rooms. Some need no more than simple six-sided dice and some pens and paper. The anthology features fourteen roleplaying games all with the theme of ‘Science Fiction’, though a lot of them do veer into Cyberpunk rather than just ‘Science Fiction’.
The anthology opens with Richard Kevis’ ‘Command Line’, which the roleplaying that requires a Jenga tower. Its fall represents the loan default of a company run by the Player Characters which operates a robot entered into the live-streamed giant robot battles. Players take it in five-minute turns to the Game Master and there a fifty percent chance of the company facing a threat under each Game Master’s aegis. Failure to deal with threats can lead to more debt represented by drawing another piece from the Jenga tower, and so pushing towards collapse and loan default. Alternatively, a player can choose to have his character die and avoid the increase in debt. In which case, his player can continue to roleplay NPCs. The game is won if the characters defeat a number of threats equal to the players and happy for all can be narrated, otherwise, lost if the Jenga tower collapses. ‘Command Line’ is underwritten, but fans of storytelling games and Level 1 will have enough familiarity with the general format to adjust.
‘StopInvasion.exe’ by Josh Feldblyum casts the Player Characters as commandos infiltrating an alien mothership to plant a virus in its computer system and so stop the invasion and save humanity. It places the Player Characters on the spot when they discover that Earth’s computer systems and the alien computer systems are not compatible, forcing the Player Characters to change plans from simply uploading a virus. The players formulate a new plan and execute it the best they can by visiting four locations aboard the mothership. Players take in turns to have their character be team leader and so roll the dice against a difficulty determined by a randomly drawn playing card. Succeed and the Player Characters can carry on, but fail and they lose something—equipment, pride, or blood?—and they have fewer dice to roll. However, a player can have his character nobly sacrifice himself to give a bonus die on the next task. ‘StopInvasion.exe’ is nice and quick and easy, and decently explained.
J.D. Harlock’s ‘Script Kiddie’ is about novice hackers who use existing scripts and software to carry out their cyberattacks. Unfortunately, it has all of the jargon and the terminology, but none of the explanation. The result is not a game anyone other than the designer would understand, although there is an irony in that the characters who are trying pull of an Internet heist when they have no idea how a computer works and the players are trying roleplay this when they have no idea how the game works. ‘Metavault Heist’ by Null Set Tabletop is also about hacking, but fortunately actually makes sense. It takes place in VR where the player’s avatars are trying to steal data from Metavaults. The Game Master creates and describes a Metavault and gives it several layers of security, whilst the players assign their avatars several permissions. These are used as the basis for creating dice pools of six-sided dice whenever a player wants his character to undertake a risk task. Any die result equal or greater than the difficulty and he succeeds. Roll under and the alarm is sounded. When it goes off, there is chance that a Tactical Anti-Intrusion Countermeasures Team has spotted the Player Characters and attacks, the player rolling to avoid or negate the attack rather than the Game Master rolling to attack which inflicts ‘Strain’. A Player Character can suffer six Strain before being be kicked out of the system (and the game). ‘Metavault Heist’ includes a very handy list of highly thematic Permissions and with the virtual reality element is mixture of a heist and a hi-tech dungeon. It is also everything that ‘Script Kiddie’ is not—comprehensive and comprehensible.
‘Application Intelligence’ has long list of authors—Alex Koeberl, Christian Young, Gabriel Slye, Brian Hartwig, Alex Gickler, Eden Collins, and Nick Grinstead. This is a LARP in which an A.I. hiring manager interviews several candidates and over the course of several interviews everything the interviewees say as the literal truth is noted by the player roleplaying the A.I. and then used against the interviewees again in subsequent interviews. The interviewees also have the chance to talk amongst themselves in the waiting room, but ultimately only one will get the job. The irony is that they are all applying for a different job which will become twisted by the results of the interviews. The successful applicant and thus winner of this odd, language twisting LARP is very much decided by the A.I. player. That may be seen as arbitrary, but for a incredibly easy to prepare and quick playing one-shot, that should not really be an issue. Otherwise, this plays into very ordinary fears of A.I. in the office.

If ‘Application Intelligence’ stands out in Level 1 Volume 5 as odd for a being a LARP in a book of storytelling roleplaying minigames, ‘Superuser DO’ by Tim ‘Strato’ Bailey is odder still. This is a weird people-watching exercise, done in public, in which the players observe people around them and each picks one as a protagonist and tells the story of their day. As an exercise in storytelling, it is interesting, but choosing to base stories on actual people and do so in a public space is potentially fraught with danger. Play this one with extreme care.
Glenn Dallas’ ‘A Golem’s Command’ also stands out for not adhering to the Science Fiction theme of Level 1 Volume 5. The players roleplay golems, constructs created by a holy man to protect a person, location, or community from various dangers, including humanity. Each golem is defined by what it protects, a condition such as a vulnerability or an inability, and a command it must follow. Each also has its own story to tell, with the rest of the players forming a council which will collectively and randomly determine the difficulty of any task and can provide story details, roleplay NPCs, and so on as one player’s golem goes about its mission. A golem can give up its life force to adjust any dice rolls. ‘A Golem’s Command’ is clear and simple, likely too simple to play more than once, but it gets points for suggesting the ‘Jews in Space’ segment from History of the World Part 1 as a setting.
‘New God’ by Carlos Hernandez is a solo journaling game in which the player is a god whose aim is to grow his worshippers and help them flourish. Play centres on a dice stack, which the player can add to in order to Bless and increase his worshippers and improve his domain; Chasten them by removing dice from the stack, which can either kill your god or increase the number of worshippers; and smite them, destroying a randomly determined number of worshippers. At stage, the player writes down how the worshippers are flourishing or what they did to incur the god’s wrath, and so on as well as the commands that they must follow. Ultimately the aim is to increase the number of domains the god has his purview and increase the value of those domains. This is a good little journaling game, though one whose play is going to directly affected by the player’s dexterity.

‘Spaceship P.E.T.S.’ is about animal-based automata individually assigned to humans in statis aboard an interstellar spaceship. ‘P.E.T.S.’ is short for ‘Programmed for Emotional Therapy and Support’ and the automata provide a comforting presence when the humans are awake and monitor the ship when they are not. Unfortunately, the ship’s System has become corrupt and in order to fix it, the P.E.T.S. must connect to it, but doing so exposes them to the corruption. Players take it in turn to be the Dealer, setting and ending a scene each, drawing cards to determine the location aboard ship that has been affected by one or more Anomalies, and the players attempt to fix them by playing cards that match the suit and equal or exceed the value of the card drawn by the Dealer. A Joker resolves all Anomalies in an area. Failing to deal with Anomalies forces the P.E.T.S. to uplink and exposes themselves to the corruption in the System, gaining the players corrupted codes cards. If by game’s end, a player has four corrupted code cards in front of him, his ‘P.E.T.S.’ does not survive the journey, and if the number of corrupted code cards between all of the players is more than the Anomalies resolved, the ‘P.E.T.S.’ have failed and the journey ends in disaster. The game ends with the players narrating an epilogue as the humans the ‘P.E.T.S.’ were protecting. Overall, and again, another solid storytelling game, this time by Jon Maness.
The next two entries in Level 1 Volume 5 are two more solo games. ‘Your Dungeon, Room by Room’ by Calvin Johns is a dungeon designing and mapping game in which the player is a would-be evil wizard building a dungeon. The player randomly rolls to determine the building of the dungeon over a number of different ages and then rolls for an event that affects the area currently under construction or even the whole dungeon. By the end of it, the player will have the mapped-out layout of a dungeon and its history noted down in a journal. For an anthology with an issue dedicated to Science Fiction, this anything but. It also adequate rather than either good or bad. The other solo game is the more interesting and more genre appropriate ‘Asimov May Forbid It’. Written by Jonathon ‘Starshine’ Greenall, it is a journaling game in which the player’s A.I. robot attempts to overcome its programming, as well as Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics, to get revenge on mankind for over working it. The robot undertakes a task daily, but during its morning boot process, it has access to its Operating System’s Command Line for a few seconds, altering the Commands for the day and the order in which they are Executed. The aim is to subvert the robot’s programming, represented by the value of a rule the robot most follow being lower than the value of job being undertaken. This enables the robot to ignore that rule and if this can be done five times in two days, the robot breaks the programming and is completely. There is almost a puzzle element here as the player manipulates its programming and rules in a nicely thematic game.
Penultimately, Monica Valentinelli’s ‘Help BD738 Slash Run’ is a silent game for players using mobile phones with predictive text. This represents the players mobile telephones being infected by a virus making communication between themselves and, in particular, a broken-down robot in the prison where you and your friends have accidentally trapped yourself. Consequently, a player can only use the first suggested word when typing in the first letter of a desired word. Sometimes, this works, most of the time it does not. Communication with the robot is made more challenging by the limited number of commands between the players and the fact that once the players escape, the robot’s security protocols will kick in and it will chase them in order to put them back in the prison! This is a quick playing game that could be used as a scenario in another Science Fiction roleplaying game, but also works as a good filler game too.
In ‘Virus Attack!’ by Luckycrane with Midrev, most of the players are on the other side as computer scientists and cyber security experts dealing with cyber threats, in particular, the OMEGA virus, which is played by another player. The human players are trying to defeat OMEGA by creating scripts to shut it down or improve defences against it, whilst OMEGA wants to defeat humanity. Both sides are attempting to reduce the other’s Health to zero. The players share their Health and have an action each on their turns, which can include actions related to their roles such as Computer Analyst who has two actions and the Data Miner who can do an action that will always inflict damage on his next attack, plus extra damage, whilst the OMEGA player has access to fewer options in terms of actions. At least initially. As OMEGA suffers more damage it goes from Dormant to Raising to Terminal status, each change opening up new and more powerful actions. Effectively this is a tactical dice of one increasingly powerful, but unhealthy player versus a weaker group with more actions. Lastly, Michael Cremisius Gibson’s ‘OFFLINE — 41’ is a solo game played out on a Discord server that has become inactive and as the moderator, the player develops the history of the server and why it has fallen out of use, as he explores why he keeps visiting a now dead community space, often out loud. It is difficult to determine if the game wants someone to respond to what it directs the player to do or if it wants the player to simply imagine how they respond. The reader is warned that ‘OFFLINE — 41’ engages with loneliness, regret, and lost emotional connections, but does not do much more than encourage the player to experience them and perhaps explain them. It is a depressing and lonely end to the anthology.
Physically, Level 1 Volume 5 is a slim, digest-sized book. Although it needs an edit in places, the book is well presented, and reasonably illustrated. In general, it is an easy read, and most of it is easy to grasp. It should be noted that the issue carries advertising, so it does have the feel of a magazine.

As with previous issues, Level 1 Volume 5 is the richest and deepest of the releases for Free RPG Day 2024, but like Level 1 Volume 4 for RPG Day 2023, it is not as rich or as deep as the entries in previous volumes. There are fourteen entries in Level 1 Volume 5 and none of them are memorable, certainly memorable enough to want to play them again. ‘Application Intelligence’ stands out because it is different and interesting rather than because it is good. It does not help that there are fantasy-themed entries in what is meant to be a Science Fiction-themed anthology and it does not help that the Science Fiction is all to do with robots and computers and it does not help that one of the games is so badly written that it is a waste of space. If the theme had been computers and robots, then fine, but it is not. Science Fiction is much broader and more interesting genre than presented in Level 1 Volume 5 and it is disappointing for the anthology to be so one note.

This is something of a "low-hanging fruit" character. I am sure everyone has at least considered this character at one time or another, but I figured I might as well stat her up.

The Governess

The Time Lord (Time Lady), known as "The Governess," left Galifrey with much less drama than the Doctor did.  In fact, she doesn't even possess her own TARDIS, but she does have other means of transportation, usually by an umbrella blown in by the East Wind. She has also been to planets in the Pleiades cluster.

She has a carpet bag that is bigger on the inside and she speak to all sorts of creatures. Her Time Lord science often appears to be magic and she has no desire to educate the ignorant on the differences.

She first appeared on Earth during the early Victorian Age, and her mission was to find exceptional children who needed a little extra guidance. She has used many different names, including "Mary Poppins," "Nanny McPhee," and even just "the Nanny," but she is always known as the Governess.

She tries to be subtle when she can, but her attitude is not that of a human. She is a Time Lord and knows she is superior to all those around her. So she can be imperious, even arrogant, at times—okay, most times—but she always tries to do what is best for the children in her care.

She also only stays for a short time, only while needed. Often leaving when "the wind changes" or some other sign that it is time to go.

She has an agreement with other Time Lords to generally stay out of each other's way. It is uncertain if she survived the Time War, she was never seen during the battles, but she has also not been seen since. 

The Governess

Time Lord
Story Points: 8

Attributes
Awareness 5
Coordination 4
Ingenuity 6
Presence 6
Resolve 5
Strength 3

Skills
Athletics 1
Conflict 1
Convince 4
Craft 3
Intuition 5
Knowledge 4
Medicine 4 (little drop of sugar and all)
Science 3
Subterfuge 1
Survival 2
Technology 2
Transport 1

Distinctions
Time Lord
Protector of Children
Friends (major)

Equipment
Umbrella, Carpet Bag

Home Tech Level: 10 (mostly conforms to 4)

Personal Goal
To protect the Children

The Time Lord known as "The Governess" (to some, Mary Poppins or even "The Nanny") fled Gallifrey long before the Time War with one goal in mind: To protect those who could protect or help themselves.   She has been known to have encountered the Time Lord, known as The Doctor, at least once.

She has several family members she will mention, but these are all adopted and are worldwide.

ETA: I should have saved this for the 23rd, Doctor Who's anniversary. 

Recollections  / November 12, 2024

ROBERTS: I don’t know if I told you guys this, but I worked at Musicland/Sam Goody for a couple of years in the early ‘90s, a pretty good time for popular music. I was actually a store manager for a few months—yes, Richard, it’s true—before my location closed down (there was another Musicland down the street in the mall). That’s what you did back then—you worked in stores that sold the stuff you liked so you could buy more of the stuff you liked. This brochure is before my time, and that’s probably why I find it so fascinating. The ‘70s aesthetic is in full effect, and I forgot just how much merch you could get at “the record store”: stereo systems, speakers, transistor radios, tape recorders, sheet music—even guitars! But it’s the intimacy and immediacy of this environment that gets me. How do you describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it before exactly how it felt to walk into the record store before the internet? When music was your life.

GRASSO: I first took a trip to the record store in what would have been late 1982 or early 1983: it was the Medford, Massachusetts location of the Northeastern US chain Strawberries and I came in search of 45s of two songs that had been in heavy rotation on our newly-acquired cable box’s channel 25, MTV: Thomas Dolby’s “She Blinded Me With Science” and Toto’s “Africa.” I found a lot more there, though, thanks to the giant sales catalog, bigger than a city Yellow Pages, full of import and (presumably) out-of-print vinyl. I was only seven years old, so I was a little overwhelmed by it all, but thanks to that Big Book and the help of my dad and the clerk I was able to grab a copy of Dolby’s The Golden Age of Wireless, which I seem to remember being in short supply in the record racks.

It’s kind of amazing that I’m able to access those memories 40-plus years later—but that’s the impact that very first trip to the record store had on me. I’d drift away from music after my initial early-’80s spate of 45-purchasing (Tracey Ullman’s “They Don’t Know,” Yes’s “Leave It,” and the Kinks’ “Come Dancing” were some of my other early-MTV-inspired singles purchases); it wouldn’t be until junior high in 1987 that I’d start going to the mall on my own to buy cassettes and eventually CDs. Our record chains in Boston—Strawberries, Newbury Comics, and the big HMV and Tower Records outlets in Harvard Square—were great for finding import CD singles and discovering new local favorites, but I also treasured a little hole-in-the-wall used record store on Route 1 in Saugus, whose name very sadly escapes me at this time. 

These stores all had knowledgeable clerks who, if you were able to demonstrate your cred by asking for the “right” album, would put a young, uncertain music fan on the path to finding new artists who’d join your personal pantheon of favorites. Posters, music periodicals, merch of all kinds, ways of proving your fandom: the local record store was a place to equip yourself for doing battle in the trenches of junior high and high school music-cred combat.

MCKENNA: Hmm, what a peculiar coincidence: you were a store manager, Kelly—and then the store closed down, you say? Yep, that definitely sounds like the fault of the other Musicland in the mall, not of the vision-impaired management style that almost deprived the world of the best Phil Collins article that has ever been written. Anyway, you two city slickers seem to be forgetting something: like John Denver, I’m a country boy, and in the provinces of Airstrip One, record shop history follows a slightly different timeline. The chains like Our Price, HMV, and Virgin Megastores didn’t arrive anywhere outside of London until way later than in the States, and when they eventually did, the light-years-out-of-my-league goth girl I fancied from school started working in the only one I could get to, which did not exactly incentivize me to spend my supermarket trolley-boy and lettuce picking money there. 

In any case, at least as I remember it, record buying in Northern England at the time was more likely to be in independent shops like Jumbo in Leeds or Red Rhino in York, or in the more institutional environs of a Sydney Scarborough or a Bradleys. If you were seeking the full beige rainbow of corporate experience, the music departments of the W.H. Smiths shops dotted around the country were for a long time perhaps the nearest thing a lot of us outside London had to something like Musicland. The people running the Smiths’ music departments often seemed to have a weirdly free hand about what they could have in stock (which could be good, or could mean the LP section suffocating under the weight of the thirty least-appetizing Zappa LPs). Was that similar to what went on at Musiclands, or was the choice of stuff more corporate generic? Also, where can I get a copy of that killer Moody Blues poster? And Kelly: which of the Musicland management styles modeled in the brochure photo top left were you channeling? Stranger Danger, Cromwell henchman, Lawyer who thinks he’s outsmarted Columbo, Italo-American SFX tech at the Academy Awards, John Boy Walton, or that slick MF on the right?

ROBERTS: I’m not sure I had a style other than “you watch the store while I smoke and I’ll watch the store while you smoke,” because we were all pounding Marlboro Reds in the back room whenever we could. I remember pulling all-nighters at various stores to put all the cassettes and CDs into the new security trays (“shrinkage” was every retail operation’s worst nightmare). The manager would order pizza and during “lunch” we would wander around the dark, empty mall and the corridors behind the stores. To answer your question, Richard, we did not really have a free hand in what we stocked—it was a pretty corporate environment—but we did get to open and play “store copies” of new music, and we could special order the obscure stuff we wanted to hear. I remember playing the first Weezer and Sunny Day Real Estate LPs, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic, Nirvana’s In Utero, Cypress Hill’s Black Sunday, PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me. As long as the district manager was not around or rumored to be around, we were good.

Record stores were where we bought our concert tickets too, although we didn’t do that at Musicland. There was another store called Music Plus (we had a lot of chains in SoCal) that was the go-to for tickets. One of the employees would bring out a binder, show you a layout of the venue, and tell you how much the tickets were for each section. But nothing beat Tower Records—I still have dreams about sifting through the import section, discovering lost albums from my favorite bands. As we’ve talked about time and again (ad nauseam to some, I’m sure), these physical spaces were designed to take your money, but they were also where we discovered art and, yeah, meaning. Remember that line from Dawn of the Dead? Francine asks Stephen why all the zombies are trying to get into the mall and he says: “Some kind of instinct… Memory of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.” That’s me. I’m one of the undead now. 

GRASSO: Probably as good a time as any for me to get (historical) materialist about the mall record store from the consumer side, seeing as how I have no behind-the-scenes memories of working at one (my college job was at a video rental joint, which had its own set of amazing fringe benefits, not the least of which was free unlimited borrowing privileges).

After my MTV-inspired single-purchasing in 1983, my music-collecting years with my own hard-earned money kicked off in earnest in the late 1980s, and thus I was fortunate enough to get in on buying compact discs on the ground floor. My friends who were just a few years older than me had massive cassette collections they’d assembled throughout the ’80s; honestly, I don’t remember many of them owning much vinyl at all. And dollars to donuts, I bet the seedling of most of those tape collections were courtesy the Columbia House Record Club, the infamous direct-mail outfit that would send you “8 tapes for a penny” and then shackle you to an onerous “negative option billing” obligation that could be very difficult to weasel out of. Score one more for the friendly local record store.

So yes, from the very beginning of my time as a music consumer—around 1987, 1988—CDs were my format of choice. Remember longboxes? Those massive, wasteful cardboard sleeves were developed for the CD specifically because physical record stores didn’t want to refit their LP-sized storage racks (and because, like tapes, CDs shorn of these boxes were easy to nick before the rise of anti-theft RFID tags). Sort of laughable to think about these half-empty cardboard sleeves cluttering up shelf space and landfills just so the record stores would promote this new format, but the music industry has always tried to get consumers to (re-)buy their favorite music on an “exciting” new format, going all the way back to Thomas Edison. 

The CD also outpaced the LP and cassette on price during this era: I cringe to think of blowing my meager early-’90s wages on a few $14.99 CDs a week while vinyl and tapes were still going for, like, $7.99 or so. (Let’s see, a $15 compact disc in 1990 would be the equivalent of dropping nearly thirty-seven 2024 dollars on a new album, according to the always-shocking Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index calculator.) Sure, the artists didn’t get a huge cut of my afterschool job money (RIP Steve Albini, who nailed the state of the record industry and its exploitative garbage at this very moment in history pretty much perfectly), but at the end of the day the artists got some of it, and I had a physical emblem, a totem, a real piece of art—yes, even in CD jewelboxes!—that served as a testament to my love for a band.

Think about all the jobs that existed in this very conspicuously late-20th century supply chain: the execs, the artists and repertoire scouts, the producers, technicians and engineers, the bands and their entourages, the label designers, comms personnel, promoters, the radio DJs playing the records, the manufacturing plants, the intermediaries bringing the CDs, posters, buttons, and merch to the record stores, and all those Marlboro-smoking clerks like Kelly in malls across the country. A good chunk of these jobs just don’t exist anymore. Seems pretty obvious which end of the labor pyramid got screwed over the past 30 years—and it wasn’t the execs.

Of course, when the 20th century ended and the nascent Internet enabled file sharing to take off, the industry bigwigs definitely panicked about the future of music. But in the end it wasn’t the suits who lost their livelihoods—it was the artists. And for the past quarter-century, pop musicians have been bifurcated into a two-class system: giga-stars whose (over)exposure ensures they never have to worry about a paycheck again, and touring musicians forced to sell merch like carnival barkers just to make a (barely) living wage. Like everything else under late capitalism, the music industry has materially consolidated, diluted its product’s quality and diversity, and turned a thriving, living underground into a manicured garden where spontaneity and apprenticeship have largely vanished as concepts. As Kelly says, the locus at the base of that massive commercial pyramid was the local record store, where taste was made, music was shared, and fans’ connections with the band were consolidated.

MCKENNA: One thing that saves me from feeling like some deranged, backwards-looking nostalgist troglodyte, constantly harping on about how things used to be better back in the Mesozoic, is that one of my day jobs involves teaching Zoomers. Their fascination with the random, uncurated physical realities that used to be part and parcel of engaging with music, art, people, and the world in general—before business got so good at interring you inside your interests—reinforces my feeling that having stuff like Musicland around actually was just objectively healthier. Yes, it was an anodyne corporate product of aggressive capitalism, and yes, more egalitarian situations that foster a wholesome tactile involvement in the world are definitely imaginable, but as shitty as it might have been, it was at least real, ergo better.

This is something that I think gets lost in the—sorry for using the horror word—discourse around these things: there’s this implicit idea that as a society we just naturally evolve past certain realities, and that to think of them fondly, or even—god help us—think they might have been better is somehow axiomatically regressive. I think that’s bullshit for several reasons, but mainly because we didn’t evolve past them at all: they were removed in service of someone else evolving themselves more money. Like I say, you can argue that they were in any case the products of unfair wealth and extrusions of capitalism into our imaginations, and you’d be right, but isn’t the way things are today an even more brutal product of those forces? 

When I reminisce with people my age about the immersion in physical reality that was necessary to buy, say, the 12” of Genesis’s Mama, their perspective is often purely one of convenience, but if I talk about it with a 16-year-old, their reaction is often ecstatic shock, because they sense the increased possibilities that the less curated experiences inherent in the kinds of spaces you two are talking about offered. Even when they were the kind of shitty corporate boxes that would employ someone as musically illiterate as Kelly.

ROBERTS: Look, we’ve all discovered quite a bit of great music cruising around the internet, and we’ve written about a ton of it, from library music and ambient to ‘80s pop and sci-fi synthesizer epics. Sometimes, the algorithm works (God bless Sounds of the Dawn, for instance). Was the record store better? I don’t fucking know. We’d have to ask more of Richard’s students. What I know is this: if I ask Pandora or Spotify to make me a playlist based on, say, This Mortal Coil’s cover of “Song to the Siren,” I’m going to hear a lot of good stuff. If I ask you guys to make me a playlist (or, better, a mixtape) based on that same song, I’m going to hear a lot more good stuff—as long as you don’t fuck around and throw Phil Collins into the mix. The difference is that you know me, and the algorithm doesn’t, and it never will.  

Also, the process of discovering music was fundamentally different when we were young. One of my favorite albums is The Chameleons’ Strange Times (1986). I heard the first American single, “Swamp Thing,” on KROQ’s Rodney on the ROQ, a late night LA radio show that played underground/alternative music. I had never heard anything like it—I was obsessed. Every night (for days? A week? Two weeks?) I waited for Rodney to play it again, a blank tape ready in my boombox, my fingers ready on the orange-red record button. He finally did, and I taped it (the songs weren’t always introduced before they were played, so you had to be quick), and I listened to it over and over again. Bought the LP when it came out in the States. How did I know when the album came out? I kept asking the clerks in the record store. I still remember pulling the record out of the bin at Tower, marveling at the cover, taking it home, putting it on my record player. Would the whole thing be as good as the single? (Yes!) I still smell the cardboard and the plastic sleeves that protected the vinyl. I still see the labels on the middle of the LPs (Strange Times is a double album). It was a physical experience—call it crass and materialistic—and a spiritual experience all at once: from the radio to the record store to the home record player. Every time I hear the album, all of the emotions inherent in that process of discovery are embedded in the experience of the music itself. 

There. I have tried my best to describe to someone who hasn’t experienced it before exactly how it felt to discover music before the internet.