Features / August 14, 2025

Mike and Kelly believe the Dude really ties the room together. Richard’s a fuckin’ nihilist.

GRASSO: I hate Top Whatever lists.

Not the kind of Top X lists that are based on sales or airplay or objective criteria or what have you, but being asked to come up with, say, a Top 20 Personal Albums or Sports Figures or, indeed, Favorite Movies of All Time. How am I supposed to do that? My opinions on movies can sometimes change during the course of a single (re)viewing or conversation with someone! Also, there’s that whole “putting your intimate aesthetic tastes out there to be judged” thing that I’m constantly afraid of doing. Especially with respect to film, which seems to have one of the most contentious communities online these days. So, naturally, when Kelly asked each of us to come up with “20 Films for the Rest of Your Life,” I was grumblingly resistant. I still don’t know how I ended up being the one who finished his list first!

My process entailed just thinking about the movies I’ve watched most, and picking which ones I would still need to have a copy of in Kelly’s “desert island” situation. Then I filled some of the holes in with oddball personal choices and films that, as I was considering my “bubble” of movies in the low-20s, that I just couldn’t bear to see out of contention. I’m incredibly self-conscious about the aesthetic and genre elements of the movies on this list, but I’m sure I’ll get a chance to expand on and justify my choices in my next turn. Here you go, then: Mike Grasso’s Top 20 Movies of, yes, All Time.

Persona (1966)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii (1972)
Network (1976)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Apocalypse Now (1979)
UFOs Are Real (1979)
Blade Runner (1982)
Videodrome (1983)
Manhunter (1986)
Goodfellas (1990)
JFK (1991)
Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992)
Casino (1995)
Boogie Nights (1997)
The Big Lebowski (1998)
24 Hour Party People (2002)
Inherent Vice (2014)
Mandy (2018)
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

MCKENNA: Jesus Christ. While very much not the first time Kelly has demanded we do something excruciating, he definitely raised the bar with the outrageousness of this one. Once you’re over 50, what is the likelihood of having less than, say, a hundred “favorites” of anything—if you even still like it all? I probably have more than 20 ailments that I’m sort of fond of.

But this weasel-words “You Can Only Watch 20 Films for the Rest of Your Life” phrasing has allowed wily lowlife Roberts to cunningly avoid the inevitable refusal to cooperate that a request for a top 20 would have elicited while, as Mike has pointed out, making the selection even more embarrassingly revealing of the limits of and gaps in one’s own actual tastes. It feels like taking off my jumper at the third year end-of-term disco to reveal the Genesis “Shapes” tee I was wearing underneath it. 

Anyway, the older I get, the less “stories” and “plots” and “resolution” feel relevant to the experience of existing, so I’m going to go with films I love and have either seen loads of times or not enough times and which basically put me into a fugue state while also pressing the specific aesthetic buttons inside me that I like having pushed. There are films I’ve loved very much since childhood, like CE3K and Star Wars, that I’d have put in, but I’ve seen them so many times I think I’ve basically internalized them—I don’t think I need to watch them again, they’re kind of part of the architecture of my brain at this point. 

But anyway, how about we make it thirty?

This Island Earth (1955)
Jason and the Argonauts (1963)
THX 1138 (1971)
The Hourglass Sanatorium (1973)
The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974)
The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976)
Eraserhead (1977)
Stalker (1979)
Alien (1979)
The Fog (1980)
Southern Comfort (1981)
Litan (1982)
The Dead Zone (1983)
Manhunter (1986)
Sonatine (1993)
Solaris (2002)
Werckmeister Harmonies (2000)
Dredd (2012)
Evolution (2015)
Petite Maman (2021)

(Okay, great—Kelly’s just informed me that, according to his made-up rules, TV movies aren’t actually movies. Meaning presumably TV dinners aren’t dinners either? That means I can no longer include the film I was planning to include—Journey Through the Black Sun, the amazing Space: 1999 “TV movie” that was made by cobbling together a couple of episodes of the TV show. Fine, let’s just not include one of the greatest human artifacts ever just because, why not. Okay, fuck it, you know what I’m going to include? The 2012 Dredd. So stick that in your pipe and smoke it, brother Rico.)

We all have Alien, right? Right?

ROBERTS: Listen, I don’t know what you guys are complaining about: one of my movies revolves around inept dinosaur puppets. I’ve been laid bare once again. Yes, it’s basically the “desert island” experiment, but in my version you can’t bullshit and say you want Bitches Brew for that last slot when you really want Toto IV (yes, I know, they’re both great albums). As Richard says, this exercise is “embarrassingly revealing of the limits of and gaps in one’s own actual tastes.” That’s the point. You won’t find any Godard or Kurosawa or Altman films on this list not because I don’t admire those directors, but because, if I had to choose, I’d rather watch spiky-haired Kevin Bacon save a small, god-fearing town from dancelessness. If I were in my twenties, my list would look incredibly different; I might even have chosen (bravely, or rashly) 20 movies I’d never seen before. But I just turned 50-something and, you know what?—I want to watch the films that still, after a lifetime of watching films, move me, or simply make me happy. 

Think about the list strategically. It’s for the rest of your life! What will you watch when you’re sad? When you’re high? When the holidays roll around? When you’ve got the flu? When you want to believe in magic? When you need to believe that goodness prevails? When you want to visit a future that you won’t be around to see?

These are not the 20 greatest films ever made. These are the 20 films I can’t live without. 

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
The Poseidon Adventure (1972)
The Land That Time Forgot (1974)
Star Wars (1977)
Watership Down (1978)
Alien (1979)
The Black Hole (1979)
Escape from New York (1981)
Blade Runner (1982)
E.T. (1982)
Mad Max 2 (1982)
The Thing (1982)
Footloose (1984)
The Karate Kid (1984)
Aliens (1986)
Dazed and Confused (1993)
Sense and Sensibility (1995)
The Big Lebowski (1998)
Master and Commander (2003)

You thought Kelly was kidding about dinosaur puppets. Nope.

GRASSO: So first things first, before I get to picking apart both of your lists (just kidding; how could I ever, especially considering the overlap Kelly and I have!), an apologia for my picks (of course): I’m thoroughly and embarrassingly aware of how there are no women directors on my list and how “dudes rock” so many of the films are. I can’t help it. There’s no scenario where I go without watching Goodfellas and Casino for the rest of my life. I’ve watched them, along with JFK, enough times to be able to recite huge wodges of the dialogue purely from memory. If society ever plummets into a Fahrenheit 451 scenario where we need to preserve films using the oral tradition, please assign me these three movies. But yeah, there’s a lot of crime flicks here, psychological thrillers, a fair smattering of science fiction, and big political films (leaving off mid-’70s paranoid stuff like The Conversation, The Parallax View, All the President’s Men, and Three Days of the Condor hurt, but they were all definitely on my bubble). These types of movies are who I am and I can neither deny or excuse it.

So many of my movie preferences were formed in the first quarter-century of my life; as you can see, I’ve only included four films from the 21st century and most of my other picks dwell in the last quarter of last century, the 25 years that overlap with my 20th-century lifespan. These are movies that maybe I didn’t see in the theater when they came out, but definitely caught on TV, cable, or VHS as I became a film buff from childhood into adolescence (thank you again Dana Hersey and The Movie Loft). Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Network, and 2001 are three films I met at a very early age and they will live in my head and my heart forever.

Two directors—Paul Thomas Anderson and Martin Scorsese—appear twice. Ashamed to say that despite Kubrick’s and Cronenberg’s and Lynch’s and Coppola’s inviolable places in my pantheon of auteurs, I only picked one from each director that embodies what I love about their work so much. Maybe I rewatch Blue Velvet or Mulholland Dr. more frequently than I do the harrowing Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, but for my money everything “Lynch” is in the latter, and for that reason it stands alone, much like Videodrome for Cronenberg and Apocalypse Now for Coppola. 

The ones I consider “oddball choices” here are where my other interests intersect with film. Pink Floyd Live at Pompeii and Michael Winterbottom’s impressionistic postmodern tale of the Manchester music scene 24 Hour Party People are two of the best films featuring/about music I could think of, and I need some music on my desert island. I could’ve easily included stuff like Scorsese’s The Last Waltz or Led Zeppelin’s toxically self-indulgent The Song Remains the Same, but both really don’t rise to the level of “must-haves.” Low-rent UFO documentary UFOs Are Real, well, I’ve written about the hauntological impact of that movie extensively for Mutants, and it too is a film that repeated childhood viewings made part of, as Richard suggested with some of his leave-offs, my permanent matrix of obsessions. Unlike Richard, I desperately need that cinematic comfort food.

Whew. Richard, tell us a little about your picks!

Only Michael Mann could make a dude riding an elevator look like an ecstatic vision. And yet Kelly would rather “cut loose / Footloose / Kick off the Sunday Shoes”?

MCKENNA: Christ on a bike, this is torture. Why are we doing this to ourselves? Coming back to my selection is even more agonizing than choosing the bloody things in the first place. I really don’t need to be reminded that my whole personality is just a lame blend of regressive nostalgist who refuses to relinquish the psychic atmospheres he immersed himself in as a kid and the kind of try-hard insecure idiot who cares so much about the opinions of other people—even the hypothetical other people who won’t even read this—that his decisions are always shaped by trying to impress them. I already know that, I said it before! 

Looking at this list again I’d probably change half the films I put in there, but I suppose we have to commit at some point, so fuck it—let the shit film choices fall where they may. It looks like the guiding principle with my list is things that put me somewhere oneiric? I mean, I put This Island Earth, but it could just as easily have been It Came from Outer Space, or Invaders from Mars, or Forbidden Planet: anything that shunts me through the veil that separates us from the dreamworld will do. This Island Earth has a particular appeal for me, though, because it feels to me like a film where the mood is the story, and I suppose that’s kind of a theme that runs through my list. And good to see that we’re overlapping on Manhunter, Mike.

Like I said before, some films that I love I really feel like I’ve seen enough times to make watching them again a bit redundant, and then there’s other stuff that I love and haven’t seen much, or maybe only once, but don’t really have any interest in seeing again. I suppose it’s a bit like the saying “Friends for a reason, friends for a season, friends for life,” which I’ve always (perhaps idiosyncratically) interpreted as meaning that people can be important to you in different but equally valid ways. Some films are friends for a season—I love them but that season’s gone—and others are friends for a reason. Whereas Jason and the Argonauts feels like a friend for life, like I’m entering some sort of eternal mythical dream-space where each visit takes me deeper into something? Myself? The collective imagination? I appreciate that’s a bit bombastic when talking about a film whose main draw (for me) is the stop-motion skeletons, but much as I love, say, Pasolini’s Medea or Cocteau’s Orphée, just to give two examples of other films that engage with the mythical, I’m not compelled to rewatch them in the same way. Is it just nostalgia for the me that watched Harryhausen a shitload when I was a kid, or does Jason and the Argonauts genuinely access some different part of my brain? Does it even matter? Probably not.

Choosing Alien feels pretty stupid—it’s one of the most famous films in the world, and it’s been franchised into absolute shit. And yet it’s still something that affects me in a strange way every time I watch it. I have my own history with it, but it also feels fresh every time. Mythical, you might say.

Anyway, enough of the babbling, let’s get down to what’s important—Footloose, Kelly? Are you fucking kidding? I mean, I’ll give you Sense and Sensibility, I could watch Hugh Grant writhe with discomfort all day, but Footloose? Was proposing this feature just a way for you to indulge some weird public humiliation fetish that risks taking blameless Mike and me down with you? Explain yourself!

ROBERTS: Like both of you said, some of these films are here because of how much they affected me when I was young and impressionable, before my core being solidified. But then, why Footloose and not a dozen other films (WarGames, The Goonies, Legend, Tron, Red Dawn) that obsessed me when they came out in a way that Footloose didn’t? Plus, dancing is stupid! I think it’s because, underneath all the ‘80s (fun) silliness, there’s something incredibly authentic to me, a suburban only child who grew up in the shadow of Reagan, about these small-town teenagers resisting an oppressive and repressive adult regime at a time when young people were patronized, scapegoated, and exploited—punished, in a way, for the sins of the counterculture. (E.T. is on here for exactly the same reason). It still gives me chills when Ren makes his case at the town council for having the school dance, and when Lithgow gives the sermon asking everyone in the town “to guide them in their endeavors.” There’s a mythic (this word keeps popping up, doesn’t it?) or allegorical quality there, at least to me. To answer your question, Richard: I need it. In a way that I don’t need another movie I love, Over the Edge, probably the best movie about teenage rebellion ever made. 

At first I thought I didn’t need Star Wars because I’ve seen it so many times and essentially absorbed it into myself—but I can’t stand the thought of it not being there. So I do need it. But why? And why Star Wars and not the better sequel, The Empire Strikes Back? I could go on and on in this way, questioning each of my choices, trying to make sense of this list. But the word need is pretty basic, and that’s what it comes down to.  

Mike, you have to explain Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii to me. I love it and watched it religiously as a young guitar player, but wouldn’t the soundtrack suffice? Are you that big of a Floyd fan? 

And Richard, why Southern Comfort? There are much better Walter Hill movies, and this one is kind of a rip of Deliverance, no? 

Richard was the only one to honor the great Tarkovsky. Too bad he betrayed the auteur’s memory by also including… the Solaris remake?

GRASSO: Richard: Alien definitely is on my bubble and you should feel no shame about selecting it whatsoever; for Ridley Scott representation, it and Blade Runner are a tossup and, honestly, I feel like Blade Runner edges it out purely thanks to the immortal musical efforts of one Evangelos Odysseas Papathanassiou at his absolute fucking peak. I totally get what you’re saying about This Island Earth, too: it may be one of the thematically hokier entries in classic ’50s scifi, but visually, even up against the often trippy Forbidden Planet, it’s a phantasmagoria, isn’t it? Honestly, most of your films are visual tours de force: The Fog is probably the most memorably-shot Carpenter next to Halloween, and Manhunter stands head and shoulders above most 1980s thrillers and most of Michael Mann’s already formidable corpus. (I still feel like my jury is out on your abiding love of The Dead Zone, but its chilly, detached vision as you’ve described it now seems like a harbinger of Cronenberg’s late-career turn into the cold, clinical, and cerebral.) As for mythic echoes, I get what you’re saying about selections like Jason and the Argonauts and Alien—and of course you managed to expertly dovetail Manhunter with Dragonslayer in the Mutants book. Now I’m considering THX-1138 as an example of the hero’s journey long before Lucas met Joseph Campbell and, God help me, it fits!

And Kelly, the middle of your list of picks—from Star Wars to Aliens—really does constitute what I would call the late ’70s/’80s “mall movie theater core curriculum,” maybe with the addition of stuff like Fast Times at Ridgemont High or Night of the Comet. The Thing is the kind of choice I see on a list and smack my forehead as to how I left it off (probably the easiest explanation is that I’m not the world’s hugest John Carpenter fan; I know, I know). I probably saw E.T. three or four times in the mall movie theater when I was a little kid. Footloose and The Karate Kid are a pair of pop culture touchstones of my youth, although those two are more likely movies I internalized from repeated cable viewings. Underdog stories—boy, we really did love those in Reagan’s America, huh?

As for my ranking Live at Pompeii, well, I mentioned The Song Remains the Same as its chief competitor because basically I need one “heady” music film on the list that I can get stoned and zone out to on my desert island. I probably like Zeppelin’s music a fair bit more than Floyd’s, but Pompeii‘s mix of sound and trippy, ancient visuals is the winner over Zep by a nose.

The outliers on each of your lists I would love to hear more about: Richard, I love Herzog but I would never put Kaspar Hauser on my list of favorites of his. Also, I’ve never seen Werckmeister Harmonies but loads of people swear by it as superb. And Kelly, I am gonna give you shit for Sense and Sensibility just because I’ve been lassoed into watching countless British adaptations of various Regency novels of manners by my goodly spouse and have hated all of them. Also, I’m kicking myself now for leaving off Dazed and Confused, speaking of good movies to watch stoned.

MCKENNA: Kelly, why the fuck are you trolling me about Empire Strikes Back being better than Star Wars? Why? We’re better than this. We’re more mature than this. We’ve read clever books, we’ve written a book (that nobody read): we don’t need to spend our time trying to provoke each other with self-evidently foolish positions about bloody Star Wars. That said, fuck you, because Empire Strikes Back is the turd that Star Wars shat out (Hoth and Bespin sequences excepted)!

Okay, now I’ve got that off my chest, I actually love both of your lists. In the sense that I think it would probably be possible to reconstruct the pair of you bodily from them like Jeff Bridges from a hair in Starman, or Oddbod Junior from a toe in British comedy horror masterpiece Carry on Screaming, which I’m now kicking myself for not including (even just for Fenella Fielding). And why have none of us included Starman, come to think of it? I hate doing this. 

I get what you mean though, Kelly, about “needing” certain films. It’s as though they have a language built into their interiors that you need to run through your speakers now and then, the way you sometimes need to play back experience in your mind to remind yourself of how you got to be who you are. Calling it “nostalgia” is, I think, reductive (don’t worry, fans of bloviating, I have a long and tedious article on this very concept in the pipeline)—it’s more like refreshing your operating system, or sharpening a knife. 

Mike, I want to thank you for the Alien support and also for locating THX-1138 as an example of the hero’s journey—this is exactly why we need that Grasso laser insight here at WATM. Because, let’s be honest, Roberts and McKenna are not providing it: in classic Gen-X style, vibes is all we’ve got.

Anyway, to answer you two’s questions, I don’t really know why Southern Comfort as opposed to Hill’s other films. I’m kind of a one-note person, and I think it’s the same thing I’ve already said: there’s something about how sleek, reductive, even derivative, it is that takes it into the landscape of the mythical. Plus, it’s basically like four other films that I like rolled in one. And Mike, Kaspar Hauser‘s a film I saw around the same time I saw Truffaut’s The Wild Child, when I was probably eight or nine. They used to show stuff like that in the early evening on BBC2 in the ‘70s, incredibly. Both films affected me very deeply, and I didn’t know which of the two to choose, but decided on Kaspar Hauser for the soundtrack and for its pervasive mood of intense outsiderness. Come on, we all feel like we’re seeing stars in the daytime occasionally and don’t know how to behave in polite company! There’s a case to be made, I suppose, that Werckmeister Harmonies is one of Bela Tarr’s “easier” films, which I suppose in a way it might be, but despite its gloomy themes, watching it in its entirety always feels very… healthy? It feels like you’ve been through a ritual cycle of humanity that in some way is renewing? To be honest, that might be the unifying thread running through all my choices.

I feel a bit shit but apart from fucking Footloose—insert facepalm emoji—I don’t really have any questions about either of your lists. Like I say, I feel like they’re authentic representations of the pair of you. What were the films you two nearly put in but didn’t, and why?

Ridley Scott is the most represented director on our combined lists. John Carpenter is second.

ROBERTS: That’s an interesting question, Richard, so I’m going to give everyone five more selections. Now you can watch 25 films for the rest of your life. See mine below, with notes. 

You make a good point about Mike providing the insight here, because I had no idea how many of my picks are in fact about the underdog against all odds. Ripley, Max, Luke Skywalker, Snake Plisken/R.J. MacReady, Ren McCormack, Daniel LaRusso, even the rabbits in Watership Down! Jesus. It certainly says something about me. It’s Samuel Beckett, I guess—“…you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on”—but mixed with some… John Wayne? Irish pessimism meets American exceptionalism?     

Mike notes that many of Richard’s films are visually compelling, which is true, but they have something else in common: they’re about people/beings who don’t fit in, who are overwhelmed by a “reality” that is often alien, irrational, and unstable. The Man Who Fell to Earth is the obvious example, but it’s also the core theme of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, and you can make a good case for Eraserhead (the mood perfected in Lynch’s next film, The Elephant Man), Manhunter, The Dead Zone, Southern Comfort, Evolution, THX 1138, et al. 

With Mike, it’s the intersection of media, politics, and conspiracy. He’s obsessed with the screen, its ability to reflect and/or remake reality. Network and Videodrome are explicit satires on television, but screens have a profound role in many of these other films: the projector and projected images in Persona, the home videos in Manhunter, the TVs that reveal Devil’s Tower in Close Encounters, the prolific “evidence” in UFOs Are Real (mostly photographs made to appear as video), the ubiquitous Zapruder film in JFK. Another thing that’s interesting about Mike’s list: only one of his last 10 films—that is, every film from 1990 on—takes place in the present day. All others are interpretations of the past—the late ‘60s through 1990, when The Big Lebowski takes place. (You could argue that the outlier, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, actually falls into the same category, given the ambiguity of time in the film and its ironic ‘50s mood and aesthetic.) This is our area of concentration at WATM, yes, but there’s something else here. A few of these films posit or suggest an alternate history—what kind of world might we have had if Rick and Cliff had killed the Manson Family? If a government conspiracy to kill JFK had been proven?—but most are tragedies that illustrate why we can’t have that better world: big dreams momentarily fulfilled but ultimately and irrevocably corrupted, mostly by greed. 

In short: you are both far more complicated than me. 

As for Sense and Sensibility, Mike, you have to remember that I was strictly a Western Canon guy well into my thirties, and Jane Austen is a favorite. This is a faithful and beautifully acted and directed adaptation of my favorite Austen novel, and it’s got a big, fat, happy, romantic ending. Every once in a while, I need one of those. 

The Magnificent Seven (1960) (I love Westerns, and this is my favorite, although 1972’s The Cowboys and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly are extremely close. It’s about… underdogs.)
The Time Machine (1960) (George Pal’s best.)
Jason and the Argonauts (1963) (Harryhausen’s best.)
Outland (1981) (Yet another underdog story, an early sci-fi noir with one of my favorite monologues of all time.) 
Conan the Barbarian (1982) (The greatest fantasy action film ever made [sorry, Peter Jackson], and Milius’s finest hour. It’s a retelling of Apocalypse Now, believe it or not.) 

Not even Cliff can save us from our psychotic past. Also, Mike is the only one who repped Tarantino.

GRASSO: Yep, you got it in one, Kelly: paranoia, television, and nostalgia, my three great interwoven lifetime obsessions. I can’t think of one of my movies that doesn’t fit neatly into one or more of these themes. Did you design this seemingly fun and innocent critical assignment as a psychological test? Oh wait, maybe that’s my paranoia talking again. To get Mythic Outsider Richard and Paranoid Hauntological Mike to lay bare our entire psyches in a list of 25 movies… that’s pretty damn devious.

Speaking of devious, paranoid personality tests, one of my five bubble films fits that bill perfectly:

The Godfather Part II (1974)
The Parallax View (1974)
The Ninth Configuration (1980)
Slacker (1990)
Uncut Gems (2019)

I may have agonized over these five as much as the previous 20. I think you guys may have seen an earlier version of this list in our shared document that had five completely different movies! The Godfather is, we must concede, a perfect movie, but I like Part II‘s overstuffed historical sprawl (and oblique nods to CIA-Mob parapolitics in Cuba and elsewhere) a tiny bit better, not to mention that John Cazale’s performance as Fredo beats any other performance in Coppola’s trilogy—and perhaps in the entirety of the 1970s—handily. I chose The Parallax View over All the President’s Men and Three Days of the Condor primarily for its higher quotient of Weirdness and its direct invocation of the American intelligence community’s complicity in the wave of domestic political assassinations in the 1960s. On that note, I was thinking Winter Kills (1979) for a while as well, but to my mind William Peter Blatty’s The Ninth Configuration is a better parable about how all our imperialist wars blow back onto the domestic front. I pondered Dazed and Confused for a bit until I realized that Richard Linklater has an even more rewatchable film in Slacker, and one that speaks to me far more personally (and generationally). And finally, one of the two movies I saw (along with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) in a theater before COVID hit, Uncut Gems, a great gritty New York City crime yarn in the tradition of my Scorsese and Coppola selections with a killer electronic score from Daniel Lopatin that rivals the aforementioned Vangelis soundtrack for Blade Runner.

One of my favorite parts of conceiving the Mutants book was coming up with all those great double features that may not have looked like they worked on paper… at least until we went on about them for three to five thousand words. I feel the same about these lists: they each offer a curriculum in filmmaking and film critique where the constituent movies inform, illuminate, and complement each other. One thing’s for sure: there are a bunch of films on Richard’s list I’ve never seen before as opposed to Kelly’s, where I’ve seen 23 or 24 of them. And just one more snipe here as I close things out, Richard: Soderbergh’s Solaris instead of Tarkovsky’s??? I can’t believe I missed that! What?

Linklater times two.

MCKENNA: It’s a fucking rocker, Mike! Obviously takes a very different tack to the Tarkovsky version (which I do love, but have to admit that—shallow fool that I am—overfamiliarity with Italian comedy Fantozzi has put an aesthetic crimp in for me, for reasons that will become obvious if you see it), but it’s a powerful, moving film about loss, love, and the nature of existence that captures the sadness and strangeness of the book, is aesthetically genuinely beautiful, and has a great cast and great (and much ripped-off) soundtrack by Cliff Martinez. And yes, it is another oneiric, unreliable world whose nebulous laws a cipher of a person tries to come to terms with—thanks for reducing my whole personality to this, Kelly. Anyway, along with Sex, Lies and Videotape, I think it’s Soderbergh’s best film and best real shot at movie immortality—it has such a beautiful elegiac mood. I think it suffered from people thinking it was trying to be a remake of the version by Tarkovsky—around whom an unfortunate aura of secular sainthood has ossified over the decades—as opposed to just a different attempt to adapt the book. But apparently Stanisław Lem hated both versions, which is pretty much standard Stanisław Lem.

Anyway, talking of realizing you’re a caricature, here’s my five extras. Note Orson Welles’s The Trial—how’s that for on the nose?

Mon oncle (1958)
The Trial (1962)
Judex (1963)
Aliens (1986)
American Movie (1999)

Ack, that was even more grueling than choosing 20. My main takeaway from this is how frustrating it is. There are so many films I love—some of which are absolute excrement—but when you sit down to try and create a canon, it’s hard not to get a bit stuffy. Plus, my memory’s atrocious: as soon as we post this, I’ll remember the films that I should have put in. Ah well, at least this nightmare’s nearly over.

Without wishing to get all solipsistic, it’s odd seeing our tastes laid out this cleanly and realizing the kind of triple Venn diagram the three of us form, with at its central intersection… I don’t know, a UFO? Where is it that we all overlap?

ROBERTS: I think the Solaris pick is clearly the worst of the lot—the only explanation I can think of is that Richard has a thing for Clooney, who has done roughly 800 better movies (including Soderbergh’s Out of Sight, which almost made my list). On the other hand, including the great American Movie—a riveting and hilarious documentary charting the life and death of the American Dream—in your final five is a stroke of genius. I kind of thought we would have more picks in common, to be honest! Mike and I have three (2001, Blade Runner, and The Big Lebowski), Richard and I have three (Alien, Aliens, and Jason and the Argonauts), and Mike and Richard have only one (Manhunter). The three of us? Womp womp. Zero! I blame this on both of you, because how could any mutant not include, at the very least, 2001, Alien, and Blade Runner? Well, as we’ve discovered, there’s no accounting for taste.

Is there a common theme? What’s the overlap? I think a UFO is close. The Stranger? The Visitor? The Outsider? I think “not belonging” is not exclusive to Richard’s list. From my out-of-town underdogs to Richard’s unquiet wanderers to Mike’s criminals, searchers, and bums, it’s clearly a condition that we all share. And a condition that compels us. And possibly renews us? (Speaking of compulsion and renewal, I’m surprised no one chose Logan’s Run!)

The second guessing lingers on. I swapped The Time Machine for Stalker at the last minute. Should I switch them back? I’ve got so much drama and so little comedy—what can I take out to get Midnight Run in the lineup? Or The Bad News Bears? Or The Nice Guys? Or the great Sullivan’s Travels, about why movies move us in the first place? Do I really like white people dancing as much as I think I do? 

Everybody relax. There’s no need to panic. We can watch any of these movies at any time. We don’t have to choose. It was just an experiment. It doesn’t mean anything. We’ll forget it ever happened…

Much like the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition and The Companions of Arthur for material set in Greg Stafford’s masterpiece of Arthurian legend and romance, Pendragon, the Jonstown Compendium for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha is a curated platform for user-made content, but for material set in Greg Stafford’s mythic universe of Glorantha. It enables creators to sell their own original content for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, 13th Age Glorantha, and HeroQuest Glorantha (Questworlds). This can include original scenarios, background material, cults, mythology, details of NPCs and monsters, and so on, but none of this content should be considered to be ‘canon’, but rather fall under ‘Your Glorantha Will Vary’. This means that there is still scope for the authors to create interesting and useful content that others can bring to their Glorantha-set campaigns.

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What is it?The Battle of Gavren Bridge is a short, supplementary scenario designed to be run during the first season of The Company of the Dragon.

“A 5 page plot with 2 parts” for use with RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha which presents a short mystery that the Game Master can run as a single session’s worth of play or possibly longer.

It is a fourteen page, full colour 3.16 MB PDF.

The layout is clean and tidy, but the artwork does vary in quality. The cartography is decent. It needs an edit.
The scenario hook is specifically designed for use with The Company of the Dragon, but it can be adapted to any pre-Dragonrise campaign.

It can be played through in a single session, but will probably take two.
Where is it set?The Battle of Gavren Bridge is set during the events of the Siege of Whitewall, 1619 ST to 1621 ST, as the Player Characters attempt to free Gavreena, Naiad of the Gavren, the river that runs below Whitewall, from the Lunars who are holding her in chains, as well as disrupt the flow of troops to the city from the Lunar Heartlands. By default, the events of this scenario should take place sometime during Sea, Fire, or Earth season of 1621.
Who do you play?
The Battle of Gavren Bridge does not suggest any specific character type, but as written, the Player Characters should be members of the Haraborn, the sundered Clan of the Black Stag.
What do you need?
The Battle of Gavren Bridge requires RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha only. Cults of RuneQuest: The Lunar Way and Armies and Enemies of Dragon Pass may also be useful.
What do you get?The Battle of Gavren Bridge is a strike mission. The Player Characters have to rescue Gavreena, Naiad of the Gavren, from her Lunar captors and in the process will gain a powerful ally. If used wisely, she will greatly aid in any attempt to stop the Lunar counterattack led by Iada of Kostaddi, a itch of Jakaleel. The scenario discusses the possible tactics that both Iada of Kostaddi and her allies, including some vile spirits (trapped and allied), a force of light cavalry and Danfive Xaron Penitent Legion Soldiers, as well as those that the Player Characters might also deploy. The ideal plan for the Player Characters is to ambush Iada of Kostaddi and her allies, preferably at the Gavren Bridge, just below the village of Gavren.

In the main, the scenario is combat focused. There will be some roleplaying involved in dealing with the suffering villagers in Gavren, who have too longer been under the Lunar heel, but ultimately, the scenario is about freeing the river spirit and unleashing its magic and that of the Player Characters upon the Lunars.
The Battle of Gavren Bridge can be run as is intended, a scenario that can be inserted in a The Company of the Dragon campaign, and in doing so, highlights the possibility of further scenarios not being written by Andrew Logan Montgomery, and added to the campaign. Alternatively it could be adjusted to another location or it could even be run as a flashaback.
Is it worth your time?Yes—The Battle of Gavren Bridge is a straightforward, easy to prepare scenario that slots easily into The Company of the Dragon campaign.No—The Battle of Gavren Bridge is set before the Dragonwise and a Game Master’s might all be about what happens after.Maybe—The Battle of Gavren Bridge is serviceable enough and is easy to add to a campaign, perhaps as a flashback or shifted to another river altogether.

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.

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Name: The List of Historical & Fictional Figures Statted for Call of CthulhuPublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Andy Miller

Setting: All of time and spaceProduct: Supplement
What You Get: Seventy page, 9.76 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: Who (or what) appeared where and when?Plot Hook: Have I got that scenario or supplement?Plot Support: No staging advice, actual NPCs, handouts, maps, Mythos artefacts, Mythos or occult tomes, Mythos entities, or indeed, plot (in the traditional sense, otherwise lots of NPCs and Mythos entities)Production Values: Plain
Pros# Annotated list of historical and fictional figures itemised by product from Call of Cthulhu, Third Edition to Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition# Listed separately by history and fiction # Index of all individuals, great old ones, gods, and unique entities listed in The List of Historical & Fictional Figures Statted for Call of Cthulhu# Engaging foreword and afterword# There does not appear to be a phobia of lists, but there really should be
Cons# Annotated list of historical and fictional figures itemised by product from Call of Cthulhu, Third Edition to Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition# Listed separately by history and fiction # Index of all individuals, great old ones, gods, and unique entities listed in The List of Historical & Fictional Figures Statted for Call of Cthulhu# There does not appear to be a phobia of lists, but there really should be# Highlights the fact that there really should be a similar product for scenarios
Conclusion# Exhaustive reference guide to everyone and every ‘thing’ that has appeared in Call of Cthulhu# Highlights the fact that there really should be a similar product for scenarios

 These were advertised as 54mm but they are much larger.

The hunter rides the range, armed with a Sharps Model 1874 rifle in the .50-90 Sharps, a gun big enough to take down Nightcrawlers, the twenty-foot long earthworms that wear the skin of past prey and burrow out of the earth to take down their new. As the vampire-lord looms over her on the ground, the gunslinger loads her last Hellfire round that will surely send the undead monster and its soul into damnation. The inveterate gambler stands up from the table and points at Robo Doc, Joe Bones, of cheating and having a hidden card slot. At high noon, the duellists face off against each other, one ready to pull a Colt Single Action Army, but wondering how much of a threat his Kengu opponent is with its daishō, from which it will draw a katana. The Concord stagecoach rides along its regular route, the bearded veteran sitting alongside the driver, holding a shotgun in his lap, loaded with holy shot lest the vehicle lose a wheel or a horse throws a shoe and everyone be swarmed by the zombies that linger just off the trail. Secret Service agents fly the night skies in their black Zeppelin, ready to respond to descend on the latest threat to the United States. The US Marshal dukes it out with the Hex Gunner that raiding trains all along the transcontinental route, ducking and dodging as the servant of Hell snaps off one shot after another from its demonic six-shooter, the bullets smoking with necromantic energy and screaming with hellish fury when fired in search of more souls to collect and send to damnation! The Risen claws his way out of the grave, bearing a demonic brand on his chest and swearing to take vengeance upon his former comrades who put him in the ground. The frontier of the West might well have once been wild, but now it has definitely turned weird and horrifying. This is not the set-up for one game—though it could be, but a range of options, and more, presented in the pages of High Noon at Midnight.

High Noon at Midnight is a genre supplement for the Cypher System, first seen in Numenera in 2013. Published by Monte Cook Games as part of the Knights of Dust and Neon project on Backerkit, it is inspired by the films Cowboys & Aliens, Wild Wild West, and Back to the Future III, television series such as The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., West World, and Firefly, comic books like Jonah Hex and Preacher, and even roleplaying games such as Deadlands. It is interesting to see the inclusion of Deadlands mentioned in the list of inspirational reading and watching for High Noon at Midnight, since it is from a rival publisher and it is the obvious roleplaying game when anyone ever thinks of the term, ‘Weird West’. After all, Deadlands was the first to really coin the term—right in its very subtitle—and it has dominated the genre ever since it was published in 1996. So, the obvious question is, “Why even look at High Noon at Midnight when Deadlands is not only easily available, but also richly supported?” The simple answer is, ‘setting versus tools’. Deadlands is a genuinely great, genre defining, and iconic roleplaying game, it is its own thing and its own setting. High Noon at Midnight is not that, but rather offers the tools and means for the Game Master to create and run games in a weird west setting of her own devising. It can do magic, horror, advanced and even alien technology, steampunk, time travel, and so on in the way that the Game Master wants rather than is given. This is not to say that either option of tools versus setting is better or worse than the other, but rather that they offer different choices.

After some explanation of what High Noon at Midnight is, that it is a non-historical treatment of the period and the genre, combined weird, and what that Weird West could be through various other different media, the supplement really begins looking at the tools that the Game Master is going to need to create her own weird west. This includes borrowing from different sources, such as Deadwood or the James Bond films, creating a brand new series based on alternate history, and keeping a setting mostly historically accurate, whilst still being weird. It explores the classic themes of the Wild West, or Old West, genres, such as justice, vengeance, redemption, freedom, and survival, as well as weird themes like magic, magic versus technology, and horror. Throughout there are pointers and suggestions, and tables of options, and this continues throughout much of the book. For example, the ‘Weird West Game World’ table suggests ‘West Mars’, a “[S]parsley settled Martian frontier, six-shooters fire laser rounds, water is as valuable as gold, and terraforming gangs fight for primacy.” and ‘Camelot Gunslingers’ with “Law-sworn knights with long rifles pursue outlaw wizards, despot dragons, and malign fey beings.” Furter tables suggest inflection points when the West changed, how pervasive the Weird is, what the Player Characters do, and lots of plots seeds. The Game Master is free to pick or roll on these tables, or simply use them as inspiration.

The Game Master advice suggests that ‘A little Weird goes a long way’, but gives a lot of Weird for her to choose from. Instead of horses, the Player Characters might be riding water buffalo, lions, ostriches, or even stegosauruses, or ogres, griffons, or hellfire steeds, or jet packs, hover cycles, or motorcycles. There is discussion to, of other forms of travel, including train and aerial travel, and supported by lists of Intrusions—the means by which the Game Master can challenge a Player Character, make a situation more interesting, and the Player Character can earn Experience Points—that the Game Master can use. Options are suggested in terms of what groups might be operating in the weird west, including the law, outlaws, and indigenous groups. Traditional groups include US Marshals and train-robbing gangs, but added to this are weird west groups. For example, a weird version of the Secret Service might use advanced technology or magic to protect the president and other important people from assassination or harm, let alone protect the currency, whilst the Pinkerton Rail Agency which rides five rail cars to protect the railways, he Dawn Rangers, who wear grave-stone shaped badges inscribed with RIP and are known for their arrogance, hunt the undead, and the Skinless Six, outlaws who messed with the wrong treasure and now hunt and gamble for new skins! Guidance on the role of the Native Nations and including the indigenous peoples is also given. There is also a lengthy section on locations in the wild west, from uncanny saloons, alchemist’s shops, and uncanny jails to the Badlands, prairies, and mines, all also uncanny, which provides the Game Master with some great places to set her weird west campaign.

Optional rules in High Noon at Midnight enable the Game Master to run Poker games with multiple NPCs as well as the Player Characters, including handling player versus character skill (necessary since not everyone plays Poker and it is not as commonly played outside of the USA) and resolving a game with dice rather than dice. The Hands of Fate actually adds a Poker mechanic to play, each player drawing a personal Hand of Fate, consisting of two cards, at the beginning of each game day. These cards can be combined with community Hand of Fate cards for various effects. For example, a Straight Flush earns the Player Character a point of Experience, whilst a Full House replaces any roll of the twenty-sided die with a roll of twenty. This enforces the wild (or weird) west feel, but the Game Master can go even further by replacing the need to roll a twenty-sided die to determine the outcome of a situation with a deck of cards. The two do complement each other, but do make play more complex and outcomes less obvious in comparison to the standard Cypher System.

As well as curses and the benefits of telling tall tales, High Noon at Midnight adds several Paranormal Vices that the Player Characters or NPCs can suffer. These are similar to curses, but provide both benefits and banes. Every time a Player Character uses one of the abilities associated with the Paranormal Vice, a Connection roll is made. If a one is rolled, the Connection is made with the Paranormal cause behind the vice and the Player Character suffers an associated Repercussion. The range also increases from one to one to two, and so on, each time the Connection is made, until it reaches six and the Player Character is overcome with the Paranormal Vice. For example, the Drinking Paranormal Vice grants Inebriate abilities of ‘Deadeye’, ‘Hair-Trigger Reflexes’, ‘Iron Liver’, ‘Mean Drunk’, and ‘Unflinching’, which might require a Player Character to throw back a drink or two, but Repercussions might be that the Player Character goes ‘Blind in One Eye’ or suffer ‘Retching Summons’ in which he vomits up a pile of gelatinous goo that animates into a horrid thing! Other Paranormal Vices are gambling and swindling, which either case, gives advantages, but not without dangers of their own.

Threats include environmental ones alongside a bestiary of new creatures and a list of entries from the Cypher Bestiary, which are given abbreviated descriptions in this genre supplement. Old NPCs from the Cypher Bestiary include Gunfighters, whilst the new here include Alchemist, Hex Gunner, and Forgeborn golem. New creatures include the Death Binder, alchemists risen from the dead who invest their souls in the bullets in their Soul Pistols, which have devastating effects, but if the sixth and final shot is fired, so is the Death Binder, so they use their Alchemical Pistol instead; Frostwalkers—compacted snow over amalgams of bone, antlers, limbs, and heads of men and animals who died in the cold; and the Hollowed Ranger, a travelling portal to ‘elsewhere’, formed from an innocent gunned down in cold blood and dumped into a shallow grave, and returned to wreak vengeance on all and everyone!

In terms of character options High Noon at Midnight suggests ways in which classic Wild West characters can be created by adhering to the standard format that the Cypher System uses describe and encapsulate a Player Character. This is “I am a [adjective] [noun] who [verbs]”, where the noun is the character’s Type; the adjective a Descriptor, such as Clever or Swift, that defines the character and how he does things; and the verb is the Focus or what the character does that makes him unique. For example, “I am a Fast Warrior Who Needs No Weapons” or “I am a Clever Adept Who Commands Mental Powers”. Thus, a Lawman could be a Speaker with a combat flavour and a Swindler or Gambler could be an Explorer with a stealth flavour. Seven standard Descriptors and two Species Descriptors are added. The standard Descriptors are Grizzled, Laconic, Slick, Trailblazing, Trigger-Happy, Unforgiving, and Wily, whilst the Species Descriptors are Forgeborn and Risen. The Forgeborn is a figure of metal, reanimated flesh, or similar, often constructed by alchemists as guards, but since been emancipated or lost the desire to keep the alchemist safe. The Forgeborn is tough, but slow, hard to damage, but difficult to repair and knows its own kind well. The Risen has returned from the grave, bearing the sigil of a demon, tougher and able to comeback from the dead again, though not as supple and animals hate him.

Similarly, High Noon at Midnight provides new Foci as well as suggesting those suitable from the Cypher System. The new ones consist of ‘Blazes Paths’ (in the wilderness), ‘Collects Bounties’, ‘Gambles it All Away’, ‘Hits the Saloon’, ‘Rides Like the Wind’, ‘Spits Fire and Lead’, and ‘Strikes Like a Rattler’. ‘Spits Fire and Lead’ combines a love of fire (and possibly brimstone) with gunfighting, whilst with ‘Strikes Like a Rattler’, the Player Character has a supernatural connection to venomous snakes and applies that to his unarmed combat.

There is a full list of equipment in High Noon at Midnight, but more importantly it explains how Cyphers—the means by which the Cypher System awards Player Character one-time bonuses, whether potions or scrolls, software, luck, divine favour, or influence—can be brought into the Weird West genre of High Noon at Midnight. In this setting, there is no one way to handle Cyphers, but it depends how weird the Weird West that the Game Master wants to create and run actually is. Cyphers can either be Subtle, perhaps good fortune, inspiration, an occult or alien concept, a blessing, an ear worm, or the like, or Manifest, such as an alchemical potion, a clockwork device, a demonic scroll, and so on. A Weird West setting can use one or the other or a mix, and it is suggested that there is a geographical limit of Cyphers, Manifest Cyphers being harder to find in more remote locations rather than civilised ones. It also adds Power Words for one of the settings in the supplement as a memetic means of presenting Cyphers both Subtle and Manifest, and describes a range of different Cyphers, including a wide range of alchemical rounds and slugs, and Weird West Artifacts, such as the ‘Deck of Second Chances’, ‘Demon Pistol’, ‘Philosopher Gun’, and ‘Shadow Duster’. In fact, there are more Weird West Artifacts given than there are new Cyphers.

High Noon at Midnight details one setting, ‘The Ghost Range’. This is a Weird West setting, but not a historical one. Magic pervades The Ghost Range and demons, ghosts, and other supernatural creatures stalk its Badlands and beyond, whilst Dustfalls occur at night and can be predicted with some accuracy according to the almanacs owned by certain alchemists. Such Dustfalls are of Stardust, sometimes used as currency, but is mostly used by alchemists in their concoctions and designs. Where exactly Stardust originates and what it is, is the subject of much speculation, but prospectors go out of a night in search of it, knowing that its presence keeps demons away, though there is the danger of becoming mesmerised in an active Dustfall. In millennia past, two mysterious races, the Ilu and the Nihilal, warred with each other, and the Ilu left behind hollow cavities in the earth containing strange devices, weapons of war, and even prisoners still held captive. These are known as ‘Proscribed Zones’, and whilst access to them is not strictly prohibited, the indigenous peoples who on the range and beyond, even on the Moon, advise against it.

Midnight is the only city on the Ghost Range, notably home to the Trail’s End Cantina, where demons, vampires, and other supernatural creatures can be seen as long as they adhere to the Ghost Accords, which keeps them from being attacked. The city is nicely detailed as are the Outer Range and Otherlands which lie beyond its outskirts. In the latter can be found the Moon upon which can be seen a tribe of natives living there and the town of Perdition, populated by demons hiding behind a façade and which stands on Hell’s doorstep. Worse is the Tomb Moon, which rarely shares the same sky and never the same orbit, its appearance sparking off an outbreak of undead activity.

‘The Ghost Range’ setting is further supported by three full scenarios and two Cypher Shorts. They include being formed into a posse and investigating a shootout outside the premises of Midnight’s preeminent alchemist and following the trail out of the city in search of the outlaws responsible; getting involved in a poker tournament at the Trail’s End Cantina and investigating a treasure map; and even travel to the Tomb Moon to prevent a notorious warlock from bringing about the end of the world! The two Cypher Shorts are within the genre, but more generic in nature, though they could easily be used in ‘The Ghost Range’. One sees an undead outlaw return from the grave for revenge against the Player Characters, whilst the other casts the Player Characters as outlaws attempting to rob a train. Both Cypher Shorts could also be run as one-shots or even demonstration scenarios.

Overall, ‘The Ghost Range’ provides High Noon at Midnight with a detailed example of a non-historical Weird West setting. It is an intriguingly different setting that enables the exploration of the genre without of the potential controversies of a more historically based setting. Now whilst ‘The Ghost Range’ setting is well supported with plenty of detail and three decent scenarios, it does mean that there is no space given to other possible settings, so that High Noon at Midnight does not fully showcase the genre with examples as fully as it could have done. This does not mean that it does not suggest other possibilities, in fact, it suggests a lot of them through its many tables of prompts and ideas, but it does not develop them. As a consequence, High Noon at Midnight explores some of the genres associated with the Weird West genre better than others. These are horror and magic, both closely associated with the Weird West genre, whereas steampunk, Science Fiction, time travel, and so on, do not get as much attention. Although ‘The Ghost Range’ is done well, this is nevertheless disappointing and it would be interesting to see these other associated genres given their due in an anthology of settings for the Weird West.

Physically, High Noon at Midnight is very well presented. It is also well written and the artwork and cartography are both excellent.

High Noon at Midnight does showcase the potential of its genre in a well realised and supported setting in the form of ‘The Ghost Range’, but not quite as fully as it could have done. Nevertheless, High Noon at Midnight is a solid introduction to the Weird West genre and its potential with lots and lots of ideas.

It begins with an interview deep in the Rep-Detect Unit headquarters of the LAPD Tower. On one side of the table is a ‘Blade Runner’, an officer belonging to the unit dedicated to apprehending and retiring rogue replicants. On the other is suspected replicant, a service technician at the headquarters of the Wallace Corporation apprehended after breaking into the company’s Replicant Memory Vault. The suspect lacks a serial number which would indicate that he is a registered Nexus-8 or Nexus-9 model. Surely there cannot be any Nexus-6’s surviving? Unable to determine if the suspect is a Replicant, the officer has turned to an older method to detecting his status. A Voight-Kampff wheezes between the officer and the suspect. On the table is a list of questions the officer will put to the suspect. Quickly though, the suspect’s brazen refusal to engage with the emotional nature of the questions turns to violence and the interviewee turns on the interviewer. A bruising, bloody fracas ensues. The interviewer is bruised and battered, but his colleagues on the other side of the glass to the interview room were able to come to his help. The suspect is dead, his status is uncertain. Are there unregistered Replicants on the starts of LA?

This is the set-up to Blade Runner: The Roleplaying Game – Case File 02: Fiery Angels—and it is a great set-up, one that clearly echoes the begin of the film, Blade Runner, itself, when Blade Runner, Dave Holden, is seen conducting a Voight-Kampff test on Leon Kowalski. Dave Holden is, of course, by this time, the head of the Rep-Detect Unit, huffing and puffing through the replacement lungs that Kowalski shot out of him. Further, this is not the only reference to Blade Runner to be found during the course of the investigation. For example, the officers pay a visit to the Yukon Hotel on Hunterwasser Street where Leon Kowalski stayed, and both Ray McCoy and Runciter’s Live Animals appear from the 1997 Blade Runner video game from Westwood Studios. The Case File is littered with such references which the fan of Blade Runner will appreciate and which will also help to pull the players into the future of 2037. Such refences are not the only immersive elements in the Case File either, for just like ‘Case File 01: Electric Dreams’ in the Blade Runner – The Roleplaying Game Starter Set, the investigation is supported with numerous handouts that give points of reference and clues to the players and their characters. 

Blade Runner: The Roleplaying Game – Case File 02: Fiery Angels is a scenario for Blade Runner: The Roleplaying Game, published by Free League Publishing. Although it can be run on its own, it specifically designed as a sequel to ‘Case File 01: Electric Dreams’ in the Blade Runner – The Roleplaying Game Starter Set, being part of ‘The Immortal Game’ campaign arc. Even then, the Game Master may need to make some alterations to this new Case File as some NPCs who appear in ‘Case File 01: Electric Dreams’ may have died. Blade Runner: The Roleplaying Game – Case File 02: Fiery Angels comes as a boxed set which contains not only the sixty-page book for the case file, but also a set of fourteen Mugshot cards, seven maps depicting locations pertinent to the case, and a sturdy, buff envelope marked ‘RDU – LAPD REP–Detect’. This contains another eleven clues and Esper images that the Player Characters can search for clues. 

The interview and subsequent death of the service technician triggers an investigation into the possibility of there being rogue Replicants at large in LA and if so the possibility that someone else is using technology stolen from the Tyrell Corporation, technology that is now solely owned by the Wallace Corporation. The investigation is against the clock, just four days before the antagonists’ plans come to a fruition, with numerous leads to follow. As in Blade Runner: The Roleplaying Game, the investigation is carried out in shifts—four per day, with one required for Downtime—with the Player Characters, not just encouraged, but actually needing to split up to cover everything and everywhere. Information can be shared and updated between the Player Characters via their KIAs, Knowledge Integration Assistant units. The investigation is very well organised by NPCs and locations, clearly listing what the Player Characters might find should they interview the persons there and look at scenes. Some of the locations are not directly linked to the investigation, but may be places that a Player Character might go to speak to a contact.

In terms of structure, there are scenes in Blade Runner: The Roleplaying Game – Case File 02: Fiery Angels where the action and story are quite directed, even forced. This is intentional, designed to ramp up the tension and even set up events in the sequel to the scenario. One Player Character, ideally a Human, will also find himself in the spotlight for much of the scenario, his integrity and humanity much tested. Other than that, there are tables of Downtime Events for Player Characters, including a special set for the Player Character in the spotlight, plus a list of Promotion and Humanity awards. The Case File is designed to be played by between one and four Player Characters and if played by one, the single player will find his character placed in the spotlight in more ways than one. 

Blade Runner: The Roleplaying Game – Case File 02: Fiery Angels should provide two or three sessions’ worth of grim, grimy, and uncertain play. Although its Case File could be run as a standalone investigation, it works best as a continuation of  ‘Case File 01: Electric Dreams’ from the Blade Runner – The Roleplaying Game Starter Set, and as such, this is an in between scenario, which continues the overall plot, but does not finish it. The only difficulty really is making adjustments to take account of the changes between this Case File and ‘Case File 01: Electric Dreams’, primarily if certain NPCs were killed in ‘Case File 01: Electric Dreams’.

Physically, Blade Runner: The Roleplaying Game – Case File 02: Fiery Angels is superbly presented. It is a fantastic boxed with superb handouts and good maps, many of which could easily be used by the Game Master again for her own scenarios. The scenario is well written and organised and the artwork throughout is stunning, everywhere and everyone seeming to step out of the shadows in Film Noir fashion. 

The unfortunate truth is that there is not great deal of support for Blade Runner: The Roleplaying Game, but there can be no doubt that Blade Runner: The Roleplaying Game – Case File 02: Fiery Angels is a brilliant addition to what is a very short line. It explores identity and the nature of what it is to be human from start to finish, really placing one Player Character in the spotlight, and does so in an incredibly good looking package.

Now in its eighteenth year, Free RPG Day for 2025 took place on Saturday, June 21st. 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.

—oOo—

The Well of Shadows is certainly not the weirdest item released for Free RPG Day 2025. That prize goes the Emergency D20! scratch card from Foam Brain Games, an idea so bizarre and superfluous it is barely worth consideration. That does not mean that The Well of Shadows is not weird. It is. Simply, it is not as weird as the Emergency D20! scratch card. No, The Well of Shadows is weird because of its format and the way that it is written. The Well of Shadows is an adventure for Tales of the Valiant, the alternative to Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition from Kobold Press. It designed to be played by a party of four Third Level Player Characters and it comes with a quick-start guide, the adventure itself, a wraparound map that hold the two together, and a band that holds them all together.

The Well of Shadows is also weird because of the Tales of the Valiant Quick Start Guide. This is because the Tales of the Valiant Quick Start Guide is not a quick-start in the traditional sense. A quick-start will explain the different aspects of a roleplaying game and how it is played. It will explain what a Player Character and what it looks like in the roleplaying game and it will provide advice for the Game Master on how to run the game and the included scenario in the quick-start. The Tales of the Valiant Quick Start Guide does some, but not all of this, radically de-emphasising the mechanical aspects of Tales of the Valiant. To be honest, it gets little beyond having to roll a twenty-sided die and get equal to, or above, a Difficulty Class, to achieve what a player and his character might want to do, with the other dice being rolled for damage and other effects. It does also include four pre-generated Player Characters at the end—an Elven Battle Mage, Human Cleric of Solana, Human Waysmith (Ranger), and a Minotaur Trooper (Fighter)—but it does not discuss them in any real detail. So, what then, does the Tales of the Valiant Quick Start Guide actually include?

Really, the Tales of the Valiant Quick Start Guide is an introduction to roleplaying games in general, in good play, and to the idea of playing Tails of the Valiant. It starts off by stating that Tales of the Valiant is gateway to other games. This is delightfully refreshing, since it is not trying to lock the reader into the one true Tails of the Valiant from the start. Its introduction to roleplaying is multi-faceted, explain that it is a game, that it is a shared experience, that it is a conversation, and so on. Along with a lengthy example of play, it makes clear that the play is meant to be fun, and it explains the basic elements of the hobby, ones that we take for granted. It also explains the role of the Game Master and how to be good one, as well as how to be a good player. Whilst it does stress the useful nature of safety tools, telling the reader that their use can make everyone’s experience at the table both comfortable and safe, it acknowledges too, that some people might not need them and says that this is okay too. This is a nice way of handling an issue that some see as contentious when it really does not have to be and this approach supports that. Overall, the focus in the Tales of the Valiant Quick Start Guide is very much on the player rather than the Game Master, though she is given good advice and should read through the rest of the introduction as well.

However, since the Tales of the Valiant Quick Start Guide is not really a quick-start in the traditional sense, the Game Master is going to need to the full Tales of the Valiant rules to run the accompanying adventure, ‘The Well of Shadows’. This is designed as an introductory scenario for four to five Player Characters of Third Level. The ones included in the Tales of the Valiant Quick Start Guide are suitable, though a Thief type might be useful. The setting for the scenario is the Labyrinth Worldbook for Tales of the Valiant in which the Player Characters are employed by the Concord of Stars to investigate the Fane of Mot, a shrine dedicated to Mot, the ancient god of death. The Concord of Stars previously sent agents—the two-headed Dragonborn Warlock, Daarzelyn and the Human Fighter, Verric Stormheart—to investigate and shut it down, but neither of them has returned or reported back. Some are not happy with the Concord of Stars hiring outsiders and a friend of Verric will confront the Player Characters before they set out to explore the shrine. This gives the opportunity for the players see the combat system in action as Verric’s friend is likely to want satisfaction from the best fighter amongst their number and see if they are worthy of the task. The fight though, is not to the death, and however it ends, the Player Characters will walk away with a little more information and perhaps better means of healing.

At the Fane of Mot, the Player Characters can learn some more information and perhaps purchase a magical scroll or potion, from a merchant (who though benign, is not quite what he seems) before entering. The Fane of Mot consists of seven locations, placed one after another, in a u-shape. What they find inside is a shrine to death that has long been abandoned, left to spread its blight to the immediate surrounds, but which is now occupied and guarded by Shadow Orcs. Further, it is being studied and perhaps in danger of being revived and returned to its original use. Ultimately, the Player Characters will need to clear the simple complex, defeat the guards, defeat the person they are guarding, and find a way of sealing the planar portal to the Dry Lands, home to Mot himself. There is advice through on staging and even on what might happen if one or more of the Player Characters ends up in the Dry Lands!

The plot to ‘The Well of Shadows’ is quite straightforward and the players should be able to work out what is going on relatively easily. There is the option to run it with miniatures as the wraparound cover to The Well of Shadows as a whole includes a map of the Fane of Mot on its inside. The scenario should take a single or so to play through.

Physically, The Well of Shadows is decently presented and well-written. The artwork is excellent and the map clear and easy to read.

The Well of Shadows is a disappointing in the sense that it is not really a quick-start in the true sense. A Game Master and her players will need The Tales of the Valiant Player’s Guide at the least to run it. That said, ‘The Well of Shadows’ is solid scenario, suitable for a single session, whether as a demonstration or not, and the Tales of the Valiant Quick Start Guide is an engaging introduction to roleplaying in general, let alone Tales of the Valiant.

‘Trouble down mine’ is the least of the problems facing the Player Characters in The Magonium Mine Murders, a scenario which details the many plots and mysteries that have beset the settlements of the Halbeck Valley. The kingdom in which the Halbeck Valley sits is moderately wealthy with an awareness of magic that sees it put to war in the long running conflict with the neighbouring barbarian tribes. The government is notoriously corrupt, its nobles and politicians accepting bribes and when not corrupt, likely incompetent. The war is unpopular, more so since conscript was instituted. Those workers dubbed essential are not subject to the draft and wear a magical token to indicate their exemption. This includes the workers at the mine in the Halbeck Valley where magonium ore, a rare mineral with magical properties important to the war, is dug out of the ground. Prisoners captured from the barbarian tribes are also made to work in the mines. There are reports of deaths in the mines, but the money that the actual miners are making from the extra demand for magonium has made them relatively wealthy and they are spending it in the taverns and brothel that have sprung to cater for them in a nearby village, turning it into a ‘new’ town, much to the annoyance of the villagers. There are rumours too, of bandits attacking travellers in the valley, and there is very much likely to be more than this going on, but now, there is news that Reith Alba, boss of the mine, has been found dead with a crossbow bolt in her back!

The Magonium Mine Murders is a scenario published by Gonzo History Project, better known as James Holloway, the host of the Monster Man podcast. It written for use with Old School Essentials, Necrotic Gnome’s interpretation and redesign of the 1981 revision of Basic Dungeons & Dragons by Tom Moldvay and its accompanying Expert Set by Dave Cook and Stephen M. Marsh. Designed to be played by a party of Second to Third Level Player Characters—up to Fourth Level—it is what the author calls a ‘Cluebox’. What this really means is that it combines elements of a murder mystery with a sandbox, so a “sandbox-style murder-mystery scenario” according to the author. The scenario requires some set-up in terms of the setting, primarily the two warring kingdoms and the importance of a magical ore and its associated industrialisation. Beyond that, the plots—of which the scenario has a total of seven—are easily adaptable. For example, The Magonium Mine Murders could be run in a Science Fiction or a Wild West setting with some retheming and some renaming, or the scenario could just simply be adapted to the fantasy roleplaying game of the Game Master’s choice.

Part of that is due to the easy presentation of the content. Two pages labelled ‘What’s Going on’ sum up the scenario’s many, varied, and highly interconnected plots, followed by pages that provide detailed summaries of the Halbeck Valley, the two towns—the old and the new, the mining camp, the mine itself, and more. The information is really very well organised and accessible for the Game Master. The starting point for the scenario is the page actually called ‘Getting Started’, which offers several hooks to pull the Player Characters into its plots. These include investigating Magonium poisoning in the river, infiltrating a gambling ring, delving into the mine to determine the cause of a recent spate of accidents, and even do some debt collection! Any one of these can be used as the initial hook and then the others introduced as necessary when the Player Characters interact with the associated NPCs. Alternatively, the hooks could be tailored to specific character types. For example, a Druid Player Character could be asked to investigate the Magonium polluting the river, a Thief Player Character instructed to collect the debt, a Dwarf Fighter hired to investigate the mine, and so on. This would provide the players and their characters with more individual hooks and motivations. Of course, the main hook for the scenario is the murder of the head of the mine.

The murder site is the office of the head of the mine and is one of the few detailed locations in the scenario. The others include the ruined temple where the bandits stash their loot and some caverns under the under the mine, though the former is not as pertinent to the scenario’s plots as the latter is. The investigation is supported by a series of events that occur over the course of the investigation and by details of some fifteen NPCs. Their descriptions are thumbnail in nature and include details of what they know and any activities or reasons that the Player Characters might become suspicious of them. Each is also accompanied by a portrait. These vary in quality and style, but in general suggest that the scenario is set during the Industrial Revolution. This is followed by rules for Magonium poisoning, handling the prize fights being run in the New Town, a bestiary with full stats for the NPCs, and the various items, magical and otherwise, to be found in the scenario. The rules for handling prize fights do not add anything mechanical, even though Old School Essentials and similar retroclones are poor at handling unarmed combat. (As an option, the Game Master might want to look at Brancalonia – SpaghettiFantasy Setting Book for its non-lethal combat rules.) Rather, they add narrative detail and track the course of the prize fights—which are, of course, rigged.

Rounding out The Magonium Mine Murders is advice on running the scenario, necessary, as the author points out, since the scenario is not a natural fit to Dungeons & Dragons-style adventures with its heavy emphasis on investigation. The advice primarily consists of letting the players drive the investigation, relying upon their descriptions of what their characters are doing rather than on dice rolls and being generous with the clues to keep the story and their investigation going. This even extends to possible solutions to the various situations in the Halbeck Valley. Although there is a solution as to who committed the murder of the mine chief, how the other plotlines in the scenario are concluded is really up to the Player Characters and that is even if they engage with a particular plotline. With so many, the Player Characters may not encounter all of them and even if they do, not always follow up on them.

Overall, what The Magonium Mine Murders presents is a set of plots, places, and NPCs that the Game Master can present to her players and their characters and have them pull and push on them as they like. In places though, the Game Master is likely going to wish that there were more detail. The towns in particular are underwritten and feel as if they are in need of colour, especially New Town, which has the rough and tumble feel of a frontier town that has struck it rich. The Game Master is going to want to add some incidental NPCs and events to add colour and flavour and so enforce a sense of place. This is less of an issue in the Old Town. Similarly, the NPC descriptions are a bit tight and with so many of them, the Game Master, will need to work hard to make them stand out from each other. What this means is that the Game Master will need to do development work in addition to the usual preparation effort.

Physically, The Magonium Mine Murders is decently presented and organised. Both artwork and cartography are serviceable, and the writing is decent, if terse in places. The format of the adventure is fanzine style, but is not fanzine in the traditional sense.

The Magonium Mine Murders is an interesting attempt to combine a sandbox with a murder mystery—and it is an attempt that does work. The Game Master is certainly given enough information to run it and its numerous plots from the page, but the scenario is underwritten and lacks colour in places. What this means is that the Game Master is probably going to want to develop and flesh out some aspects of the scenario to enhance its roleplaying aspects and make it come alive, at the very least. Despite possessing a tendency toward succinctness, The Magonium Mine Murders packs a lot of play into its pages and is likely to be a decent, player-driven investigation.

Fantasy Friday Edition

Exploration is one of the core pillars of fantasy roleplaying.

But what does it mean to explore?

In Dungeons & Dragons, especially old-school editions, exploration often means mapping the dungeon one corridor at a time, or the world one hex at a time. Every turn is a decision, every door a threat, every torch a precious hour of light. There’s danger in the dark, but also treasure, and secrets the surface world forgot. It’s a gritty, tactile kind of exploration, and I love it.

In Pathfinder, exploration becomes more dynamic and often more epic. You’re not just crawling through ruins, you’re mapping uncharted wilderness, navigating complex cultures, and solving arcane mysteries baked into the world’s DNA. There’s a heroic scale to it. You’re not just surviving, you’re discovering your place in a mythic world.

In the Wasted Lands, the world itself is still waking up. You explore not only geography, but myth. You carve stories into the world that future ages will only dimly remember. Here, the ruins aren’t ancient, they’re being made. Exploration becomes a spiritual act. When you cross into unknown territory, you’re not following in footsteps, you’re making them.

Daggerheart invites a more emotional kind of exploration. The stories live just as much in who your character is as in where they go. The haunted forest is scary, sure, but what you fear might not be the wolves in the woods; it’s the memory of why you ran from home. Exploration here isn’t just a map; it’s a mirror. That’s no less heroic, it’s just a different kind of bravery.

Even in cozy fantasy games or weird narrative indies, exploration plays a role. Maybe you’re uncovering your grandmother’s secret recipes in a magical bakery. Maybe you’re exploring forgotten traditions in a village steeped in folklore. Discovery isn’t always tied to danger, but it always brings change.

Because that’s what exploration does in fantasy RPGs:

 It changes things.

You can’t go into the unknown and come back the same. The world shifts.  The character grows.  The player remembers.

Whether you’re following a raven into the deep woods, stepping into a glowing portal, sailing beyond the edge of the map, or just opening a door labeled “Do Not,” you’re exploring.

And that, to me, is the heart of fantasy gaming.

Not killing monsters. Not hoarding gold. But going where you haven’t gone before, and discovering what you didn’t know you were looking for.

So wherever your players are headed tonight, whether it’s a dragon’s lair, a crumbling keep, or a roadside tavern with one too many shadows, remember this:

Every great story starts with someone deciding to go a little further than they should have.

Questions

What. Proud. Lesson.

What lesson made me proud? I think it was back when I was teaching my kids to play. They both started very young and I used it as a means to teach them simple math. I think my oldest was about 3 or so, and when he finally "got it" and was doing all the addition and subtraction in his head, it was an excellent time for both of us.

https://www.autocratik.com/ • https://www.castingshadowsblog.com/

Everyone has agreed that the best way of getting off the island is to build a raft. However, nobody can agree on the best way to build a raft, or even how to build a raft. Whilst everyone has also agreed that the best way to get off the island with their treasure is the raft, the raft is so rickety that it is in danger of collapsing and dumping everyone into the sea. Fortunately, there are no sharks, but when you fall into the sea, it is everyone for themselves as they try to rescue their treasure. It is perfectly possible to rescue your own treasure, but not the treasures belonging to your fellow raft builders, and if you lose their treasure, they will get mad at you and throw you off the raft! This is the set-up for Rafter Five, a fast-playing dexterity game for one to six players, ages seven and up. Published by Oink Games—best known for the games Scout and Deep Sea Rescue—Rafter Five is a game that uses all of its components, including the box lid and base, looks great on the table, plays in twenty minutes or so (but probably faster depending on the dexterity of the players), and surprisingly for an Oink Games title, is not a squeeze to get back in the box!

Rafter Five consists of five Rafters, forty-two Treasure Chests, six Penalty Boards, one Raft Card, forty-two Lumber Cards, and the rules leaflet. The Rafters are the game’s meeples, ones that the players will move around from one turn to the next. They are much larger than standard meeples and vary in size and shape, tall, fat, thin, short, and really help to give the game much of its character. Plus, they feel good in the hand. The Treasure Chests come in six colours, so that each player has a set of seven. The Penalty Boards also come in six colours to match the Treasure Chests and have five slots marked with an ‘X’. If a player’s Penalty Board is filled up with the Treasure Chests of the other players, he loses and is out of the game. The Raft card forms the base for the players’ raft, whilst the Lumber Cards are slightly wavey lengths of card, marked with the sea on one side and wood on the other.

Set up is simple. The game’s box is turned upside down, placed in the centre of the table, and the lid to the box is placed on top, also upside down. The Raft Card is put on top of the lid, as are all five Rafters. Each player receives the Penalty Board and Treasure Chests of his colour. In two- and three-player games, each player will be given Penalty Boards and Treasure Chests of multiple colours.

The aim of Rafter Five is to build as big a raft as possible, whilst loading it up with treasure, without it collapsing. When it does collapse, the player who caused the collapse receives all of the Treasure Chests tipped into the sea. He keeps his own Treasure Chests to place again, but Treasure Chests belonging to the other players must be put onto his Penalty Board. If a player accrues five Treasure Chests belonging to other players on his Penalty Board, the game ends, and he is the loser, whilst everyone else wins! The game also ends when there are no more Lumber cards to place or all of the players have put their Treasure Chests on the raft. In either case, the player with the most Treasure Chests belonging to other players on his Penalty Board is the loser and everyone else wins.

On his turn, a player does three things. He picks up a single Rafter from the raft and then a Lumber Card. He must then place the Lumber Card on the raft and the Rafter on top of that. The Lumber Card must be placed so that part of it is on top of another Lumber Card on the raft (except on the first turn, when a player is free to place the Lumber card how he wants). Lastly, he put one of his Treasure Chests anywhere on the Lumber Card he just placed.

Rafter Five is as simple as that, but the longer a game goes on and the more that Lumber Cards and Treasure Cards are added, the more precarious the splay of the Lumber cards that make up the poorly constructed raft grows. The Rafters are the balancing factor, acting as a counterweight to lengths of Lumber Card hanging over the edge of the raft with their Treasure Chests perched precariously on their lengths. Picking the right one can the key to a tense, but safe turn, but pick the wrong one and everything goes tumbling into the sea! Placing a Treasure Chest where it is more likely to tip into the sea, such as at the end of a Lumber Card, dangling over the edge, is a legitimate move, but this highlights the key aspect to Rafter Five. Most dexterity games are about placing one thing or removing one thing to a stack. Rafter Five is about placing three—the Rafter, the Lumber Card, and the Treasure Chest!

Physically, Rafter Five is very nicely presented and packaged. The components are of good quality and the Rafter pieces are nice and sturdy in the hand, and ever so cute! The simplicity of the game means that the rules are easy to read and grasp.

Rafter Five does include a solo-mode, but it is more of a stacking puzzle than a game, so consequently less interesting. That said, the game plays well at whatever player count, with four or five being about right, and it is suited to play by the family, being very easy to teach and learn. Rafter Five is a great filler game, easy to learn, quick to play, but full of tension that grows and grows as more Lumber Cards are added to the raft.

"Not all journeys begin on roads. Some start on broomsticks, others in dreams, or through a mirror no one else sees."

 - From the Journal of Larina Nix

A few days back, I talked about the Tavern as the iconic adventuring location, maybe as famous as the dungeon itself. But that’s only one, very early stop on the Journey. Capital J.

When I think of the Journey for characters, I can’t help but go full myth-nerd and drift back to Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces and the whole Hero’s Journey structure. That moment of Departure, when the character leaves the known world behind and enters the realm of magic, danger, and transformation? That’s the real start of the story. Not the tavern. Not the rumors. Not the first goblin in a dark hallway. But that choice, that first real step.

Now, for most D&D-style characters, that might be heading off with sword and/or spellbook, saying goodbye to the family farm, or signing on for a job in a shady city.

But for witches? It’s a little different.

Their journeys often begin in the unknown. It’s not “go out and find magic.” It’s “magic came calling, and now you’re part of it whether you like it or not.” It starts when the moon speaks. When the cat stares too long. When you dream of fire and wake with cinders in your hair. When you start to understand what the crows are saying.

Larina’s journey didn’t begin on a trail or caravan road. It began the moment she heard the voice of the Goddess, when she could see ghosts, and when she stepped behind her grandmother’s mirror and realized she could see her own reflection walking away.

That moment, the crossing of the first threshold, is crucial. And in gaming terms, it’s one of the most rewarding to roleplay, even if most of the time we skip right past it with a background paragraph.

But what if we didn’t?

What if we slowed down and let that Journey take shape in play? What if we saw the moment a young hedge witch received her first vision, or a would-be warlock stood at the edge of the Standing Stones, whispering a name they don’t remember learning?

Journeys matter. Not just because they get you from Level 1 to 20, but because they reveal who your character is, and what they’re willing to become.

And for witches, that journey never truly ends. It just spirals onward, like a sigil carved in bone, leading deeper into the mystery.

For witches I replace the circle of the Monomyth with the Spiral Dance.  

I'll come back to this more. 

Questions

When. Proud. Adventure.

When was my proudest moment in an adventure? So many, really. When my kids discovered the plot concocted by the demons to kill all the gods of the sun to invade the world. When they killed Strahd. When *I* killed Strahd nearly 30 years prior to that. When running Ghosts of Albion Blight and one group REALLY embraced their roles as the Protectors of Ériu. It's why I keep dong this!

https://www.autocratik.com/ • https://www.castingshadowsblog.com/

 I hope everyone had a great Gen Con. Sadly, I was not there, but I heard it was fun. I also heard that Daggerheart had sold out of its print run and had no copies left by Saturday. That is pretty cool, really. It's also still the #1 selling PDF on DriveThruRPG, a spot it has owned since its release. 

I was on DriveThruRPG today looking to see if any of the new games I had heard about at Gen Con had been released yet. I didn't find what I was looking for, but I did see something in my Personalized Suggestions; a bunch of new-to-me titles from Art of the Genre (the Folio people) featuring my favorite party girl rogues, Duchess and Candella. Most of these were for the FAST Core RPG System, which I know nearly nothing about. But there are a lot of titles featuring them. 

I remembered I covered a lot of the Folio Black Label books when I did my feature on Duchess and Candella, and there were some new ones (again, new-to-me) that I had not seen. I grabbed some more of the Folio adventures featuring them and one of the FAST Core D\&C books, which I might review later, but I'd like to get the core rules first. 

I do have the core rules for Daggerheart.

While I tend to gravitate towards witches, spellcasters, and the odd paladin type, I do love these two. Again, I imagine them as two party girls who love a good time and don't mind getting into a little bit of trouble if it means they are going to get some gold out of it. Art of the Genre has stats and extensive backgrounds for them both in The Storyteller's Arcana. It works, I can't disagree with them really other than I see them more as thieves and rogues rather than fighter-types. But hey, they have given these characters a lot more thought than I have. Still, for Daggerheart, I think I want to keep them as thief-types. Thankfully, there are two different Rogue "subclasses" I can try, the Nightwalker and the Syndicate.

Duchess

Level 2
Class & Subclass: Rogue (Nightwalker)
Ancestry & Heritage: Highborne Human
Pronouns: She/Her

Agility: 1
Strength: -1
Finesse: 2
Instinct: 0
Presence: 1
Knowledge: 0

Evasion: 12
Armor: 3

HP: 5
Minor Damage: 8 Major Damage: 15
Stress: 6

Hope: 2

Weapons: Longsword, Agility Melee, 1d8+3
Dagger. Finesse, Melee, d8+1 phy

Armor: Leather 6/13 +3

Experience
I will live the life owed to me +2 (when dealing with people of higher social class or money)
Candella is my sister in crime +2 (when dealing with rolls that can aid Candella)
So much gold and it will be mine +2 (when trying to steal or acquire wealth)

Class Features
Cloaked, Sneak Attack, Shadow Stepper, Believable Lie

Candella

Level 2
Class & Subclass: Rogue (Syndicate)
Ancestry & Heritage: Slyborne Human
Pronouns: She/Her

Agility: 2
Strength: 2
Finesse: 2
Instinct: 0
Presence: -1
Knowledge: 0

Evasion: 12
Armor: 3

HP: 5
Minor Damage: 8 Major Damage: 15
Stress: 6

Hope: 2

Weapons: Shortsword, Agility Melee, 1d8+3
Dagger. Finesse, Melee, d8+1 phy
Paired (Tier 1) +2 to primary weapon damage to targets in Melee Range.

Armor: Leather 6/13 +3

Experience
Life is a game, and I plan to cheat +2 (when any rolls are considered cheating)
Duchess is my sister in crime +2 (when dealing with rolls that can aid Duchess)
Gold! Wine! Adventure! +2 (when trying to steal or acquire wealth, or a good time.)

Class Features
Cloaked, Sneak Attack, Well-Connected, Enrapture

--

The great thing about Daggerheart is how you can create characters that really support each other and have that baked into the rules and rolls. 

Love how these two came out!

Witchcraft Wednesday Edition

In most games, when the party gathers for the first time, there's a fairly straightforward motive: treasure, fame, glory, revenge. Maybe they’re trying to save their village. Maybe they just need to pay off a bar tab. Whatever the case, the classic adventurer is easy to motivate. Dangle gold or justice in front of them, and they’ll go down into the dungeon willingly.

But witches and warlocks?

Their motives tend to be… different.

“She didn’t go into the ruins for gold. She went looking for the name she saw in her dreams.”

 - page, recovered from the bog near Meirath’s Hollow

Witches often aren’t chasing wealth. They might live in crumbling cottages or vine-covered towers filled with tea, bones, and books. They have what they need. Their magic doesn’t come from loot, it comes from knowing. From power earned through pacts, practices, and pain.

When a witch goes on a journey, it’s usually because something has shifted in the world:

• The stars have changed their alignment.
• A long-forgotten spirit has begun to whisper again.
• A charm buried under a tree has broken.
• A name has been spoken that should not have been known.

Their motive isn’t external. It’s internal, symbolic, spiritual. Sometimes it’s not even clear to them at first. But they feel it. A pull. A path. The wind shifts through the birches in a different way, and suddenly she knows it’s time to move.

Warlocks, too, have unique motives, but theirs are often tied to obligation.

 Their power comes at a cost, after all. And sometimes that cost is paid in quests, souls, or favors. Maybe they heard their patron whisper something in their sleep. Maybe they found a rune etched into the frost on their window and knew they had to follow it. Or maybe they have no choice. Maybe the pact has come due.

That’s the thing about occult characters in fantasy RPGs: their motives aren’t lesser or greater than the standard adventurer’s, they’re just deeper. More tangled in the weird threads of fate and prophecy and intuition. Sometimes they’ll ride alongside the party for gold and steel and good company, but eventually, something will pull them off the path. And that’s when the story really begins.

So next time a witch joins your adventuring party, ask her why she’s there.

 If she tells you it’s for gold, she’s lying.

 She already knows something’s coming.

 She just doesn’t want to be the only one standing when it arrives.

Questions

How. Optimistic. Accessory.

Hmm. How does a particular accessory keep you optimistic? 

As I mentioned yesterday, I often take the point of view of the characters. A while back, I got some art done of Larina. I don't remember which one it was, but around her waist she wore chain and it was threaded with dragon teeth. I had asked for a dragon tooth charm, and that is what I got back. I like to trust the artists with their vision, and this was a good choice. In my games from that point, it was a "charm" she wore to provide protection. While mechanically it added to her saving throws, I said it was something that gave her hope. She could collect all these dragon teeth and know she helped defeat those monsters, so whatever challenge was next, she could handle. 

https://www.autocratik.com/ • https://www.castingshadowsblog.com/

 "Before the first cleric lifted a holy symbol, before the first wizard penned a scroll, they were already here, gathering in moonlight."

- From the Journal of Larina Nix

A lot of what goes into the assumptions of D&D, or really any fantasy RPG, is that there were once glorious empires (or terrible ones), long before the current age. Civilizations rose, ruled, and collapsed. Names were lost. Gods were forgotten. Ruins now dot the land like scars on old skin. And the heroes of today walk through the bones of that forgotten world, looting what little wisdom and gold remains.

It’s a familiar formula. And it works. Even the Greeks did it with the Egyptians, and that’s where some of the myth of Atlantis comes from, trying to make sense of a culture already ancient when theirs was young.

We build that same idea into our games.

Why does this dungeon have magic no wizard understands?  Why is this sword sealed behind twelve runes in a language no one speaks?  Why are there pyramids on this island when no one remembers building them?

Because something came before.

 And whatever it was, it was older, deeper, and probably stranger.

But for me, “Ancient” doesn’t always mean “a thousand years ago.” Sometimes it means before memory. Before civilization. Before the gods got organized.

When Larina speaks of “they,” she means the ones who practiced the old ways before spells had names and magic had schools. The ones who made offerings in stone circles, who brewed potions by feel, who danced naked in the moonlight, not because it was part of a ritual, but because that was the ritual.

They didn’t even call themselves witches. They didn’t call themselves anything. They were simply those who knew.

And sometimes… still do.

That’s one of the things I love about Wasted Lands: The Dreaming Age.

 It flips the paradigm. The world isn’t ancient yet, but you’re playing in the mythic past that future bards will whisper about. You are the ancients, carving out the foundations of legend. The ruined towers in your 5e game? Yeah, maybe your hero built one of those. Or destroyed it. Or died there.

There’s a strange beauty to playing in the age before the age. You’re not unearthing forgotten relics, you’re making them.

And for witches, who remember too much and live too long, every new age is just another layer of dust on a story that began long before gods had names.

Questions

How. Contemplative. Character.

I often will contemplate what a bit of writing means from the point of view of the characters, or a specific character. With the quote above, I often view my witch writing from the point of view of the witches in the game. Like Larina or Emse or Amaranth. When doing my Forgotten Realms reviews I'll often take the point of view of the characters in that. Moria, Jaromir, or Sinéad.

It helps me get immersed in what the world looks like to those in it.

https://www.autocratik.com/ • https://www.castingshadowsblog.com/

Much like the Miskatonic Repository for Call of Cthulhu, Seventh Edition and the Jonstown Compendium for RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, The Companions of Arthur is a curated platform for user-made content, but for material set in Greg Stafford’s masterpiece of Arthurian legend and romance, Pendragon. It enables creators to sell their own original content for use with Pendragon, Sixth Edition. This can be original scenarios, background material, alternate Arthurian settings, and more, but none of this content should be considered to be ‘canon’, but rather fall under ‘Your Pendragon Will Vary’. This means that there is still scope for the authors to create interesting and useful content that others can bring to their Pendragon campaigns.

—oOo—
What is the Nature of the Quest?The Love and Labours of Sir Cauline is a scenario for use with Pendragon, Sixth Edition. It is primarily designed to be played using its four pre-generated Player Characters.

It is inspired by the traditional folksong, Sir Cawline.

It is a full colour, forty-eight page, 74.89 MB PDF.

The layout is tidy, though it does need a slight edit.
Where is the Quest Set?The Love and Labours of Sir Cauline is a scenario for Pendragon, Sixth Edition. It can be set in any year, ideally after 515 CE, at Pentecost (or Whitsun), in late May. Due to the traditional activities its events celebrate, it should also ideally take place near Cooper’s Hill, at Brockworth near Gloucester, England.
Who should go on this Quest?
As written, the four pre-generated Player Characters should be used to play The Love and Labours of Sir Cauline, one of whom is Sir Cauline of the title. He can be roleplayed if there is only one player, but others include a squire, a household knight, and an ex-knight, now friar.

If the scenario is played in more traditional fashion, there is no limit upon the type of Player-knight that can be played. Knights with a strong Spiritual Trait, the skills of Religion (Christian), Religion (Pagan), and Folklore will have an advantage in certain situations. Skills associated with courtship will also be very useful for any Player-knight involved in the romance at the heart of the scenario.

What does the Quest require?
The Love and Labours of Sir Cauline requires the Pendragon, Sixth Edition Core Rulebook and the Pendragon: Gamemaster’s Handbook.

Where will the Quest take the Knights?
In The Love and Labours of Sir Cauline, the Player-knights travel to Aldric castle, home to King Aleric and Queen Gwendoline, as well as their daughter, the Lady Christabelle, in order to celebrate Pentecost. There are opportunities to worship, feast, and enjoy the peasant activities. Any Player Character who is not a knight may even join in, including even a cheese-rolling contest! However, Sir Cauline is soon not be seen, taken to his bed in deep melancholy as the Lady Christabelle is the subject of his deep adoration. This requires some directed roleplaying upon the part of Sir Cauline’s player, but he should soon perk up when the Lady Christabelle suggests some deeds of arms to prove himself worthy. This is to face the Eldrige Knight on Eldrige Hill and return with the thorn atop the hill. If he is successful, the romance between the Lady Christabelle and Sir Cawline begins to blossom, but faces several hurdles in the coming days. This includes revenge, treachery, and promises tested, plus there is scope to extend the scenario and add labours of love as well.
The scenario is very nicely detailed and shows how to play out a romance and its difficulties. The primary problem is that this means that it focuses upon Sir Cawline and his relationship with the Lady Christabelle, so that the other Player Characters are not as intrinsic to the plot and despite using pre-generated Player Characters, it does not make The Love and Labours of Sir Cauline a good demonstration scenario and it is certainly too long to be run as a convention scenario. This is also means that as strictly written, the scenario is not particularly suitable to be run as a campaign.
However, the scenario could be run as part of campaign without any of the pre-generated Player Characters if a Player-knight has developed an Adoration for an NPC whom he is not quite of sufficient station to marry, thus having to prove himself worthy of the NPC’s affection. In this way, The Love and Labours of Sir Cauline could be run to place a particular Player-knight in the spotlight or as an adventure separate to the main campaign with even just the one Player-knight involved.
Should the Knights ride out on this Quest?The Love and Labours of Sir Cauline is an engagingly detailed scenario that gives time for ardor to be proven and a romance to develop as told in the folksong that inspired it. However, as written its set-up is quite restraining given its primary focus upon the one Player-knight, limiting its usefulness. With some adjustments upon the part of the Game Master this need not be the case and it could prove to be a worthy addition to a campaign.

 Monstrous Monday Edition

It’s a quiet night in the tavern (for yesterday!)

The fire has burned low. The regulars have stumbled home. The bard’s stopped playing and is asleep in the stables. Just you, your companions, the dregs of your drinks, and a few moments of rare peace.

Then the door creaks open and a message arrives.

Not a letter. Not a scroll. Not a pigeon with a satchel. 

A thing, bone-thin, cloaked in rags that hang like wet skin, with eyes like coins held too long in the mouth. It doesn’t speak. It simply places something on the table and turns to leave.

What did it leave behind?

That’s the start of the adventure I’m working on.

See, I’ve always loved the idea that not all messengers are human, or even alive. Some messages come from older places, places where ink isn’t used and paper doesn’t burn. Where secrets aren’t written so much as bound. And sometimes, the thing carrying the message doesn’t even understand it. It’s just a vessel. A warning. A test.

This whole adventure started with that moment:

 A creature. A message. A choice.

What do you do when something too old to name brings you a letter with your name on it?

What if the wax seal bears a symbol you saw once in a dream you forgot?

What if the ink moves when no one’s looking?

What if you break the seal and something breaks back?

The message in this case? It’s not a quest hook. Not exactly.

It’s a summons.

Something ancient remembers you.

And it’s time to remember it back.

That’s the thread I’m pulling on right now, something I’m weaving into the adventure that begins at the most clichéd tavern I could dream up. I want the players to laugh at the trope… until it gets quiet… and the thing at the door isn’t part of the trope anymore.

It’s part of the world.

And now, so are they.

Questions

When. Grateful. Genre.

When was I grateful for a particular genre? Hmm. I think that would have to be when I approached Christopher Golden about collaborating on a Buffy adventure for Eden Studios, and he instead asked me if I knew Victorian/Gothic horror. I stepped up and said I was practically an expert! I wasn't, I was just an enthusiastic fan, but it worked and that is one of the reasons why we all have Ghosts of Albion now.

https://www.autocratik.com/ • https://www.castingshadowsblog.com/

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 HaunterPublisher: Chaosium, Inc.
Author: Joshua S. Vallejo

Setting: Jazz Age BaltimoreProduct: Outline
What You Get: Twenty-seven page, 2.94 MB Full Colour PDF
Elevator Pitch: What if the Investigators failed both ‘The Haunting’ and ‘Of Wrath and Blood’?Plot Hook: Walter J. Corbitt lives!Plot Support: Staging advice, six NPCs, sixteen handouts, one map, six Mythos artefacts, thirteen Mythos & occult tomes, & four Mythos entitiesProduction Values: Plain
Pros# Sequel to a sequel, Of Wrath and Blood, sequel to the classic, ‘The Haunting’# Turns the ‘The Haunting’ into a trilogy# One half-investigation, one half-bloody battle# Atychiphobia# Cloacaphobia# Coimetrophobia
Cons# Sequel to a sequel, Of Wrath and Blood, sequel to the classic, ‘The Haunting’# Turns the ‘The Haunting’ into a trilogy
# Really, really encourages the Investigators to arm up for ghouls
Conclusion# Absolutely only necessary of the Investigators failed both ‘The Haunting’ and ‘Of Wrath and Blood’# Assault on the Chapel of Contemplation

 I’ve been working on an adventure for a little while now, off and on, between other projects, late at night when inspiration strikes and I let myself go back to being just a DM for a while.

And yes, I’m going to start it in a tavern.

 Not a mysterious tower. Not a burning village. Not a cosmic rift in the sky.

 A tavern. 

(ok, to be fair, all those other things are going to show up as well.)

And not just any tavern.

 The most clichéd, wood-paneled, hearth-warmed, ale-soaked, smoke-filled tavern you’ve ever seen. There’s a fire in the hearth, a surly dwarf in the corner, a nervous man with a hood who keeps checking the door, and a barmaid named Tilly who’s much more than she seems.

Why? Because I love it.

We’ve spent the last few decades trying to subvert the tropes, and that’s good; it keeps things fresh. But sometimes, I just want to embrace the classic feel. I want it to smell like spilled beer and pipe smoke and wet cloaks. I want the players to know the adventure is starting the moment they walk through that door.

This adventure I’m writing is a bit of an homage. It draws from the games I played in high school and college, when our graph paper was full of hastily drawn rooms and our taverns were, honestly, just ways to get the party together before we threw owlbears or goblins at them. But those games mattered. And I want to recapture that feeling. Not just nostalgia, but the invitation that those early games always offered:

You are here. The world is waiting. What will you do next?

Writing this for others, though, is a whole different challenge. I’ve written plenty of adventures for my own groups, messy, notes-in-the-margins kind of things. But polishing it up for other DMs? That’s a skill I’m re-learning.

And I still need a name for the tavern itself. Something that feels like it could exist in any D&D world, just off a dirt road outside of town. The kind of place travelers mutter about and locals warn you not to drink the green stuff.

No idea what the name is yet, but I’ll figure it out.

For now, the fire’s warm, the mugs are full, and someone just walked through the door who shouldn’t be here.

Got a good name for me?

Questions

Who. Envious. Accessory. 

Back in the day, I was always envious of the guys who had lead minis AND could do a good job of painting them. Back then (1980s) gaming dollars were tight and lead minis were rare and an expense I could never justify. 

Today I am drowning in minis. Plastic minis are so much cheaper and I can get them pre-painted, printed in color, hire people to pain them, have my wife paint them (something she loves to do), or most recently, paint them myself. I am rather terrible at it to be honest, but looking to my left and my two most recent ones I can say I am getting better. Better than I ever thought I would be.

https://www.autocratik.com/ • https://www.castingshadowsblog.com/

It was always feared that avian influenza—or bird flu—would be the one to get us. Despite numerous outbreaks over the past few decades, the world has been lucky. No worldwide bird flu pandemic. Instead, it was a coronavirus—COVID-19—that did for us, killing millions between 2019 and 2022, and forcing the world into a series of lockdowns that brought societies to a halt. In the world of Chew, it was bird flu that killed one hundred millions, including twenty-three million in the USA. In response the US government banned chicken and other poultry and like the War on Terror declared war on terrorism and sponsors of terrorism, declared war on all fowl. It poured billions of dollars into the funding of both the U.S. Food and Drug Agency (FDA) and the U.S. Dairy and Agriculture Administration (USDA), weaponizing both of them, and taking the FDA’s Special Crimes Division with investigating all food-related crimes, especially those connected to the farming, smuggling, and selling of chicken. Narcotics are not so much of a problem in the world of Chew, when there is more money to be made from dealing in chicken and terrorists with other issues will farm and smuggle them to fund their activities. Tony Chu, former Philadelphia police detective, is an agent for the FDA, not just a highly dedicated agent, but also a ‘cibopath’, which means he psychically reads the history of anything he bites—where it has been, who touched it, what is in it, and so on. It helps him with his investigations, but it also means that eating is not something he and others with his gift can enjoy. Chew is a sixty-issue comic published by Image Comics between 2009 and 2016 and the winner of numerous comic book awards during its run.

Chew: The Roleplaying Game, ‘A Foodie Crime Drama Roleplaying’, is the roleplaying adaptation published by Imagining Games following a successful Kickstarter campaign. It is a police procedural in which the core concept, best described as ‘Poultry Prohibition’, so think Elliot Ness, but with chickens, is the least weird thing about it. There is also cannibal crime, gourmet grievances, DNA dereliction, cockfighting capers, and a whole lot more. And when that is not enough, there is office politics, inter-agency rivalries, and the complicated home lives of the agents to deal with. Chew: The Roleplaying Game is a ‘Forged in the dark’ roleplaying game, meaning that it uses the rules first seen in Blades in the Dark and is a narrative roleplaying game with an emphasis on investigation. Its play is intended to be built around a ‘Conspiracy Board’, complete with different coloured sticky notes, connected, of course, by string, which the players and their characters can follow and amend to track their current case, combined with the use of Progress Clocks to track time, challenges, danger, and more.

The Player Characters are built around a set of Playbooks. These are ‘The Expert’, ‘The Hotshot’, ‘The Inspector’, ‘The Lowlife’, ‘The Mascot’, ‘The Prodigy’, ‘The Veteran’, and ‘The Wronged’. These are all derived from the comic book series. A Player Character has four attributes. These are Charm, Guts, Instinct, and Training, and they are rated between one and three. He also has three ‘Approaches’, traits representing physical or personality traits. These are all food-related. For example, ‘100% Raw’ means that the Player Character cannot tell a lie, whilst ‘Sunny Side Up’ means that you are always, always positive about life. These will affect the ‘Position’ and ‘Effect’ of any action a Player Character takes. Then there is the Player Character’s Quirk, his special power, like Tony Chu’s cibopathy. Suggestions include ‘USDAnimal’, a specially-trained cybernetic animal assigned to partner a USA special agent and serve as a Wi-Fi hotspot, being an actual cyborg, being a celebrity of some kind, having undergone some special training, and so on. Some are detailed, but players are allowed to create and name their own, with a table being provided for this. Perks represent a Player Character’s skills and are provided by the Playbook, whilst his Appetite Dice, refreshed at the start of each new case, can be spent to improve the action roll of any Player Character, to make a Resistance roll, to propose a flashback, or to grab an unscheduled break. Trouble will bring the Player Character intermittent difficulties, suggested categories including Debt, Family, Secret, Rivalry, Romance, and Vice. Over the long term, a Player Character can overcome his Trouble and ‘Stick a Fork in it’, but will then acquire a new Trouble. A Trouble has three dice of its own, which can be spent to reroll a failed Action roll, but means he automatically acquires a Condition and a worse Position.

Creating a Player Character involves choosing three Approaches, a Playbook, two Perks from the Playbook, detailing the Playbook’s Gear, and picking a Job. Three Attribute points are assigned in addition to the one provided by the Playbook. A Quirk is selected and lastly, a look is defined for the Player Character. Tables of Approaches and Quirks are provided that the player can choose from or roll on.

Our sample Player Character is Zillah Murgia, a scientist renowned for her study of the industrial properties of the hyperbolic paraboloid in age of food terrorism. Her brilliance is offset by an unpleasant manner instilled in her by an equally bitter, if not more so, mother, who to this day, claims that her daughter will amount to nothing, and a know-it-all attitude. At the age of fifty-four, Zillah still lives at home with her mother after a failed marriage, and to keep her mother happy, still wears what her mother suggests and gets her hair cut the same way. This does nor make her mother happy. After graduating from Harvard, Zillah attended graduate school. Unfortunately, her arrogance and unpleasantness antagonised the faculty and they attempted to persuade her to leave, which only made her more bitter and feeling further betrayed. Zillah typically found that a bowl of soup seemed to change the mind of whatever member of the faculty was sent to inform her and if that did not quite work, the hint afterwards that Zillah would go to H.R. seemed to solve the problem for her. After getting her PH.D., Zillah was asked to leave Harvard, but was quietly given a letter of recommendation, a pattern that has seen her bounce from one Ivy League college after another. Currently, she is permanent sabbatical from Dartmouth College where she has tenure and is working for the FDA to do something other spend more time with her mother.

Zillah Murgia
PLAYBOOK: The Expert
JOB: FDA Egghead

ATTRIBUTES
Charm 0 Guts 1 Instinct 1 Training 2

APPROACHES
Lemonhead – Cynical and leaves a sour taste in people’s mouths
Egg Head – Tried and True Nerd
Bitter – Holds a grudge

PERKS
Knowledge Bomb
Think Tank

QUIRKS
Donepulmentar – Onlookers lust after you when you slurp soup

GEAR
Tools of the Trade, A Goddamn PH.D., Portable Lab, Sat-Link, Tenure

LOOK
How your mother would dress as a Federal Agent

Mechanically, to have his character undertake an action or attempt to gather information, a player rolls a number of dice equal to the appropriate attribute, plus any bonus dice from special action or perks. The Gourmet Master sets the Position and Effect—abbreviated to ‘PEE’—for the Action Roll. The Position represents the Threat Level, ranging from zero and ‘No Risk’ to three and ‘Nuts’, and determines how many consequences a Player Character will suffer if the roll is failed. Whereas, the Effect level is the reward, ranging from zero or ‘None’ to three and ‘Great’. The Effect can be narrative or it can advance a Progress Clock. Only the highest result is counted. A roll of six is a success, a roll of four or five is a mixed result or a result with Consequences, and a roll of one, two, or three is a bad outcome. A critical roll is made if more than a single six is rolled, whilst a fumble occurs on a roll of one when the Position is ‘Nuts’. Consequences can result in complications, a worse position, lost opportunity, and/or Conditions. There are four Conditions and they apply directly to a Player Character’s Attributes. These will make a Player Character’s Position for an Action Roll worse and if a Player Characters all four, he suffers a Knock Out. Consequences can be withstood by making a Resistance Roll, which requires the expenditure of Appetite Dice, and if they are all used up, a Player Character will also suffer a Knock Out and Burnout, meaning he will also permanently lose one of his Appetite Die.

All of this is player-facing, that is, the players make the rolls rather the Gourmet Master. This applies to combat too, the NPCs acting as consequence of the rolls and decisions made by the players, and then the players making Action or Resistance in response. The players are encouraged to add to the narrative as much as the Gourmet Master—and use as much food-based terminology as they can when doing so, and whilst the rules look more complex than they actually are, they are quite straightforward. It also helps that the book includes plenty of examples, including a thirty-four page example of play.

Play and investigation of a Case is structured into three phases. These consist of ‘Off Duty’, where the Player Characters’ can be explored away from an active case or their jobs; ‘Investigation’ beginning with a briefing and then continuing with the search for the case’s three key details in an attempt to crack the case; and the ‘Action Phase’ where the perpetrators are caught or identified. The three phases are followed by a ‘Debriefing’, which can be both in game and out.

For the Gourmet Master there is a breakdown of a Case File and how to create one, backed up with a table of crime names and tables to generate random crimes, as well as advice on handling and resolving the investigation, handling conspiracies, unscheduled breaks, and more. All covering the game play’s core phases. The background covers both the FDA and USDA as employers of the Player Characters, and advice on how to portray their boss. Numerous factions are detailed and categorised according to the threat they pose to the Player Characters, from Tier I and limited influence to Tier V and possessing global influence. For example, a Tier I threat might be the Crime Alley Ramblers and the Philly Goths, whilst an Amazon Necromantic Death Cult and the Chicken Colonels are Tier II. All of these factions are nicely detailed, with their typical looks, possible Clocks, assets, notable NPCs, allies and enemies, and so on. Some eighty or so factions are detailed in this fashion. Various places of interest, again drawn from the comic book, are also detailed, including their first appearance, locations, notable details and reasons to go there, possible NPCs and scenes, and these together with the earlier descriptions of the main characters from the comic book and the multiple factions, the Chew: The Roleplaying Game serves as a decent sourcebook for the comic book.

Rounding out the Chew: The Roleplaying Game are two scenarios. This is in addition to a couple of case file descriptions slotted earlier into the book which could be adapted for play by the Gourmet Master. The first scenario is ‘Over an Open Flame’ by Banana Chan’ in which the Player Characters have to solve the kidnapping of reality television chefs to make them cook over an open volcano whilst in Bridgett Jefferies’ ‘Thigh Man, Thigh Man’, the Player Characters have to identify and track down the mysterious prankster who has been breaking into the homes of FDA agents and broadcasting from there. This offers the opportunity for the Gourmet Master to play lots of tricks and pranks on the Player Characters, increasingly frustrating them. The Player Characters are ‘Rogue Agents’, recognising something of the prankster’s escapades and in investigating and potentially capturing him, perhaps proving themselves to be FDA agents once again. Both scenarios are entertaining, both are spiced with food puns aplenty, and both coming with plenty of cooking tips, as the advice for Gourmet Master is called.

Physically, Chew: The Roleplaying Game is a frenzy of vibrant colour and action, liberally illustrated with artwork from the comic book, alongside what is actually quite a lot of text. In places it does feel dense and lean towards being overwritten, the numerous examples and the extended example of play very much serve to counter this. What this means is that Chew: The Roleplaying Game is actually a lot simpler than it first looks.

Chicken is kind of an everyman kind of food, a meat whose flavour and texture lends itself to a multitude of ingredients, herbs, and recipes, giving a great flexibility, whereas Chew: The Roleplaying Game is very much not that. It is specifically designed to handle the weird zaniness and wacky action depicted in the comic, a world of taco terrorism, food fears given form, alien invasive plants, cannibal crime, but definitely, definitely not vampires. Which means unlike the ubiquity of chicken, it is not a roleplaying game that is going to appeal to everyone and it definitely pays to have read the comics. Of course, fans of the comic will definitely want to get their teeth into Chew: The Roleplaying Game, and they will find generous servings of everything they enjoyed about Chew.

Based on the classic.